If Only the World Were a Little More Americanized!

U.S.-bashing has reached another high point. In the United States, however, the men are more polite, the burgers juicier, music is more revolutionary and people are more tolerant of opinions.

One of the funniest movies ever filmed in dark times is the British drama “The Mouse That Roared.” In this film, Peter Sellers plays three main roles at once: Gloriana XII, duchess of Grand Fenwick; her prime minister, Count Rupert Mountjoy; and Tully Bascomb, chief of the armed forces, which consist of a handful of men with bows and arrows because Grand Fenwick is the smallest country in the world.

Its most important export is wine — the famous Pinot Grand Fenwick — and so the duchess’s people do fine for themselves, until, one day, an American firm begins to sell a cheaper imitation of the same wine. What to do? Bascomb has a brilliant, if not ingenious, idea. Grand Fenwick will declare war on America. The U.S. will certainly win, and afterward will help to generously rebuild the defeated nation’s economy because that is its style: Take a look at Germany.

The Q-Bomb Changes Everything

With the classic sentence “I don’t want anyone hurt!” Gloriana XII sends her soldiers on their way overseas. When they arrive in New York, the city is as if dead: An air raid drill is taking place — after all, the film takes place during the Cold War; it came out in theaters in 1959.

So, the few men with their bows and arrows have little trouble breaking into the laboratory of a certain Professor Kokintz. He has just pasted together a super-weapon — the horrifying, civilization-destroying Q-Bomb — and so Bascomb’s clever plan goes astray. The armed forces of Grand Fenwick take the Q-Bomb into custody, along with the professor and his pretty daughter.

The U.S. secretary of state has no other choice than to surrender. The Duchy of Grand Fenwick forces America to its knees. There will not be any help with reconstruction. I will leave it to you to find out for yourself how things eventually work themselves out.

In times like these, when people refuse to see the tiniest scrap of good in America, I am left with this thought: I would like to put a Q-Bomb in the hand of every critic in this fatherland — a fatherland I chose. They could make the Americans surrender, leave the stage of world history and leave the planet to its own devices.

Where Would the World Be Without Rock ‘n’ Roll and Marilyn?

I do not want to skip over foreign policy, so I will write of a Syrian regime that no power in the world would declaw, an Iran that would have long had nuclear weapons now, a Putin or a Russia that could preside over Europe in whatever manner it chose, a swelling conflict over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, which would have quickly become a hot war between China and Vietnam if America had not intervened again and again. All of this is a gift.

And what would the culture of the world look like, when, thanks to the threat of the Q-Bomb, the U.S. became an overgrown version of Switzerland, full of cowboys and Indians? A country with no influence outside its own borders? You would have probably never heard of some of the biggest composers of the 20th century.

As an educated Central European, you would certainly know of Alban Berg and Karlheinz Stockhausen, but you would not be able to hum happily along to the first measures of Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.” For Christ’s sake, you would not have the smallest measure of swing in your bones. From the 1950s on, you would only have German hits — no rock ‘n’ roll. How sad! You would know The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, but neither The Beach Boys, nor Bob Dylan.

Holden Caulfield Has Become an International Hero

You would not know that E.T. is an alien with eyes as big as saucers who helps a fatherless boy through his sorrows. You would never have questioned the locomotive which whistles with joy because Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like it Hot” goes by waggling her godly hips.

You would never have seen Marlon Brando’s stuck-out chin, as he tells his godfather, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” You would not be familiar with Holden Caulfield, who finds the entire grown-up world “phony,” and with good reason.

You would never have experienced how Huckleberry Finn decides to befriend the runaway slave, Jim, even though he believes he will go to hell for it. You would not have the faintest idea which story begins with the words “Call me Ishmael.” Would that not be a shame, just a little?

Even the Vietnamese Are Now Our Best Friends

I readily admit that important aspects of American culture are unknown to the rest of the world: old-fashioned politeness, for example. America is a country where men still let women go first and people hold the doors for one another. For another thing, I have never been able to find a burger in Europe that is well-seasoned, made with good beef and not burned. If you want to try that delicacy, you have to make your way across the ocean.

And let us not speak of Americanisms, like the far-reaching freedoms of opinion and religion, which exist in no European country. I am allowed this exclamation: If only the world were a little more Americanized!

Please, even the Vietnamese are of this opinion. Once, like the Duchy Grand Fenwick, they won the war. Afterward, however, they noticed that they needed a functional economy and that their communist ideology did not work for that. Since then, they have been our best friends.

I admit that it was not in good form to tap the chancellor’s phone. The National Security Agency, like most of the world’s intelligence services, is in the hand of pubescent boys who do not know when the time has come to stop.

Ah, but will you not put down your Q-Bombs anyway?