As a resident of the Seattle area, I find this article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer particularly interesting. David Horsey is an award-winning editorial cartoonist for the P-I. Recently, he and three other cartoonists attended a cartoon festival in France. Mr. Horsey is not noted for his love of the current administration but, after reading this article, I find myself respecting him more than I did before (not that loving the administration is what you need to do to earn my respect given that there are many things about it that I don't love either). Some excerpts:
At one point, as we stood onstage getting our pictures taken with yet another student being awarded a prize for yet another anti-American image, I turned to Benson and said I felt like one of the Dixie Chicks, the all-girl country singers who got heat in the heartland for denouncing their president at a concert in Europe. We realized it was one thing for us to point out our country's flaws in our daily cartoons and quite another to see our homeland portrayed in such brutal imagery by French schoolkids echoing what they hear from their parents and teachers and see in the media.
As sharp critics who, nevertheless, love our home, we tried to point out that the America simplistically rendered in the children's drawings was a mere caricature, that our country, like theirs, is a complex society struggling to make real its founding principles of liberty, justice and equality. But it was impossible to move the conversation far from the president and his triumphalist foreign policy. Europeans are preoccupied with their disdain of Bush.
...
Bush-hating has also given Europeans a marvelous distraction from their own failures; their failure in the Balkans, their failure to come up with a constitution for the European Union, their failure to build an independent military force, their failure to put together a single, coherent European foreign policy. In so many ways, Europeans who once ran the world now feel impotent to affect international events or even get their own house in order. They float like a lovely but rudderless old yacht in the surging wake of an American aircraft carrier.
So, Europeans do the one thing that makes them feel superior: revile Bush, the lunatic cowboy, and all those gun-toting, overweight, money-obsessed, religion-crazed Americans who chose him as their president.
It's nice to see a well-known critic of the administration that knows the difference between thoughtful criticism and mindless hatred.
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