I MOVED I moved.
I moved!!!

pictures of new apartment forthcoming!

Tony Judt, in this past week’s New York Review of Books, tells us that America and Europe are “actually quite distinct places.”

The opportunity for such wise and learned pronouncements is Judt’s review roundup of T.R. Reid’s “The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy,” Jeremy Rifkin’s “The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream,” and my personal idol, Timothy Garton Ash’s “Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West.”

This brings into collusion one of my favorite and one of my most hated critics (see Judt’s alarming “Israel, the alternative”, published back in October 2003, though occasionally he is lucid enough– see “Anti-Americanism Abroad”, NYRB, May 1, 2003).

Judt cites some statistics which I often use when defending my recent move to Europe, nost notably the difference in paid vacation days (30 a year in Sweden, 4-10 in the States). His point, though, is to underscore that Americans work more than Europeans. Our work days/weeks are longer, and unemployment rates are lower. But in return for all these hours logged in the workplace, Judt suggests, we don’t get much in return from anyone, not even Mother Nature: “As a consequence, Americans live shorter lives than West Europeans. Their children are more likely to die in infancy: the US ranks twenty-sixth among industrial nations in infant mortality, with a rate double that of Sweden, higher than Slovenia’s, and only just ahead of Lithuania’s—and this despite spending 15 percent of US gross domestic product on “health care” (much of it siphoned off in the administrative costs of for-profit private networks). Sweden, by contrast, devotes just 8 percent of its GDP to health.” This is alarming. Our children are dying at the same rate of Lithania’s? Do they even have electricity in Lithuania, the Americentric perspective is tempted to ask. My ancestors fled Lithuania for a better life in the States; apparently they might have done just as well to stay behind, according to Judt’s scenario. Except for the whole scourge of the Cossacks thing.

Judt continues his tirade against America: “The picture in education is very similar. In the aggregate the United States spends much more on education than the nations of Western Europe; and it has by far the best research universities in the world. Yet a recent study suggests that for every dollar the US spends on education it gets worse results than any other industrial nation. American children consistently underperform their European peers in both literacy and numeracy.” Well, I never thought to blame the government for the fact that I am for all intents and purposes innumerate, but neither would I credit them because of my above average level of literacy (you might even say I’m compensating for the fact that I can’t do much more than add single digits).

As to the books themselves: Reid and Rifkin argue that America had better watch its back: Europe is gaining in productivity, thriving where America is “decaying,”; part of this Judt, via Churchill and Nicholas Barr, attributes to the innate value of the welfare state. Judt, for his part, finds the unabashed Europhilia of Reid and Rifkin “absurd.” The European Union is “the largely unintended product of decades of negotiations by West European politicians seeking to uphold and advance their national and sectoral interests. That’s part of its problem: it is a compromise on a continental scale, designed by literally hundreds of committees.” But bureaucracy is to Europe what democracy is to America: more than just a way of life; an entire value system. Is anyone suprised that at the heart of the European Union there should lie nothing but a serious of committees? And should it be otherwise? We’re talking not about a collection of states bound together by one culture, but a collective of various cultures with a very long history of warring with each other. America needs its democratic values, its rhetoric of liberty and freedom, to unify its disparate peoples. The EU needs its committees “to regulate the size of condoms and the curvature of cucumbers.” A set of universal European values is thus going to take some time– it has to be approved by a hierarchy of civil servants in associated cities none of whom speak the same language. And this is perhaps all to the good; as Judt writes, “Actually this makes the EU more interesting and in some ways more impressive than if it merely incarnated some uncontentious utopian blueprint.”

He is nowhere more insightful, however, then where he is pointing out the flaws in the rhetoric that make America consistantly lose to Europe in the “who’s better” competition: “It seems silly to write, as Rifkin does, about the awfulness of American “cookie-cutter housing tracts” as yet another symptom of American mediocrity without acknowledging Europe’s own eyesores. This is a man who has never stared upon the urban brutalism of Sarcelles, a postwar dormitory town north of Paris; who has not died a little in Milton Keynes; who has avoided the outer suburbs of modern Milan. Reid is right to insist that Europe has the best roads, the fastest trains, the cheapest plane fares. And yes, the EU is indeed closer, as Rifkin notes, “to the pulse of the changes that are transforming the world into a globalized society.” But it isn’t perfect by any means.”

Europe’s real problem, Judt proposes, is figuring out how to “integrate its ethnic and religious minorities, regulate immigration, or admit Turkey on workable terms.” In this respect, Europe and America diverge greatly; American culture has traditionally evolved as it assimilates various cultures in its “melting pot” (or salad bowl, depending if you’re on a diet). Look at the progress of American letters, from the waspish Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James to the Jewish Saul Bellow and Philip Roth to Indian-American Jhumpa Lahiri. American voices, all. Europe, however, or to speak specifically of the one European country I know well, France, is fighting to defend centuries of white European culture against the onslaught of non-Europeans who, like it or not, are demographically going to be the France of the future. To continue using the champ litteraire as the site of assimilation, the Maghrebim have carved out a literary niche for themselves, with the Prix Goncourt going to Tahar Ben Jalloun in 1987 and to Amin Maalouf in 1993, post-colonial literature gaining a foothold in French universities, and–perhaps the surest sign of integration and mainstream acceptance– Francophone novels being sold in Fnac.

Garton Ash takes Judt by surprise with his optimism not only about both America and Europe, but about the fate of the Western Alliance: “what Garton Ash has in mind really is a new Atlantic Alliance and it is not by chance that Winston Churchill occupies a prominent place in his argument.”

By this point you should be jumping to read the article by yourself. Go ahead, you can do it. Nothing else to see here. I’ve overstepped my bounds far enough already. I authorize you to read tony Judt, just this once. But if he says anything else about dissolving the Jewish state, you tell him I want a word with him.

look for my name on this webpage! Do I know this person??

I know, I know, I’m on a blogging rampage today, but I’m sitting in front of my computer trying to write a paper and I don’t wanna.

and still manages to look attractive. Mr. Darcy, how do you do it? “All in the pursuit of fair trade, my dear Elizabeth.”