How Europe Sees Us
VIEWPOINT
by Sir Eldon Griffiths
Phoenix, Ariz. Traveling around Europe in recent weeks, I’ve been assuring officials and business leaders that the picture of America painted by the French, German, Belgian and Austrian media is unfair and lopsided. In particular, I’ve been telling them that, contrary to rumor, California, with its Italy-sized economy, still leads the world in enterprise, innovation and cultural vivacity and, as such, is a great place to visit and invest in.
Back home in Orange County and now, in Arizona, I wonder if I haven’t been pulling the wool over these European’s eyes. Why? Because the signals I’m getting from Washington and Sacramento make one wonder whether to laugh or cry!
Start with the national scene. Within a week of my telling a French audience not to worry about the U.S. rejection of the Kyoto treaty’s ban on increased carbon emissions because (I said) American technology would find other ways to tackle the problem, the U.S. Senate again caves in to Detroit. A bill requiring gas guzzlers to meet tougher fuel mileage standards by 2015(!) was voted down by our senators 65 to 32.
Likewise, only days after I told a group of Germans that America’s big corporations have learned the lesson of Enron, Global Crossing, etc., and are purging themselves of the corrupt practices that are still common, for instance, in Greece, the Air Force determined that Boeing had stolen secret government papers from its rival, Lockheed!
Turn now to California,that’s where the laughs come in. Asked to explain the recall process to friends in Budapest and London, I said that Gray Davis is a lousy governor who had deceived Californians by covering up the horrors of the state’s financial problems while previously displaying all the decisiveness of a bowl of Jell-O when tackling its energy crisis.
All this makes Gov. Davis as vulnerable to corruption charges as Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister of Italy, I added hopefully!
Berlusconi, like all other E.U. prime ministers, can be thrown out of office if he loses the support of a majority of members of his parliament. So Europeans see nothing wrong with California’s voters being able to get rid of Davis before his term is up. However, the problem remains for those of us who try to put the best face on California’s recall process for the benefit of foreigners.
What is the alternative? Darrell Issa? Arianna Huffington? The Terminator? Schwarzenegger had not yet announced his decision to run while I still was in Europe, but it’s worth recording a comment I heard about this muscle-bound ex-Austrian’s credentials: “Didn’t Americans learn anything from that wrestler Jesse Ventura’s antics in Minnesota?”
The biggest challenge I faced when expounding the virtues of California were those televised pictures of the state assemblymen, locked up like felons in their chamber, many of them fast asleep, as their political godfathers crafted a ragbag of budgetary fixes that lumber the state with inflationary charges and still fail to tackle its mountainous debt and poor credit rating. These pictures pulled the rug out from under the claim I’d made that California, with all its faults, remains a responsible democracy.
The problem, as I see it, is those nutty term limits that, like the “Three Strikes” law, impose inflexible, unrealistic prescriptions for California’s public business. A German magazine gave state Sen. John Vasconcellos (D-San Jose) the only mention he’s likely to get in Europe when it quoted his assessment, “A third of our folks have only been here (in Sacramento) for six months and they walk into a $38 billion deficit. There is no mentoring. No seasoning. No history. No loyalty.”
What is the moral of this tale?
California’s legislators are no worse than many other countries’. Did you see those pictures of Japanese parliamentarians crawling over one another as they fought a pitched battle to kill a bill sending Japanese peacekeepers to Iraq?
But here’s the difference. Unlike American politicians, very few European or Asian politicians I know engage in self-righteous preaching about the virtues of their system to the rest of the world.
Everywhere I go, I see and hear U.S. ambassadors and traveling U.S. legislators extolling the superiority of democracy, American-style. Privately, many of them agree that there’s something rotten in the state of our politics in both Washington and most state capitals; but in public, they swallow these misgivings and concentrate on the task of explaining that it’s a measure of American “freedom” that rich men can,and do,”buy” our U.S. elections, and that it is corrupt when other countries gerrymander their electoral districts to ensure their incumbents stay in power, but there’s nothing much to fuss about when Americans do the same thing!
Heading back to Europe, I’m taking with me a cartoon from the Las Vegas Sun. It shows two GIs contemplating a landscape of wrecked buildings and desolation labeled Baghdad. “A disgruntled population, economic turmoil and political chaos,” observes the senior GI. His junior buddy’s response, “Reminds me of California.”
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, lecturer, journalist and former member of the British House of Commons.
