Professor Bierling is prescient

Professor Bierling is prescient in sensing that the Boris/Barbara brouhaha may be the heat lightning preceding real thunderstorms in U.S./European relations. The problem is that the hubris of American Exceptionalism (we are God's gift to mankind) makes our leadership unable to see the needs and aspirations of other powers as nothing but insolent and irresponsible moves to thwart whatever happens to be our developing agenda at the moment.

Ever since the 1920's, when the then newest media of subway tabloid journalism, network radio, and sound movies competed fiercely for customers in creating a celebrity culture of sports heroes, movies stars, and conspicuous consumers, we have become a culture of inattention. And we are stuck with those bad habits of buzzing confusion in the mass electorate (Forget our Nobel laureates: they don't influence our politics). And of course these adolescent spans of attention have been further attentuated by the infantilizing pressures of 24/7 and internet news cycles.

If you really want to speculate about the ambiguous future of American leadership, ponder the hotdog pilots who sent Italian skiers to sudden deaths (and especially the absurdly disproportionate punishments they were meted), or the Disneylike submarine ride that recently killed 9 Japanese on their fishing school trawler (and the doubletalk that has followed), or think of the Darmstadt-visiting American teens who dealt with their boredom by dropping rocks onto an autobahn.

Back in the fifties, American critics of our nuclear detente policies used to anguish over those defending GI's reading comic books. Such threats still exist, whether in a barely literate President or an Admiral whose comments on Marines raping an Okinawa child was that they could have gotten more for their money from visiting a whorehouse.

Boris and Barbara represent a German variant of that increasingly rickety American social infrastructure that has been debilitating America since the 1920's What kind of a foreign policy is it that is dominated by refugees from Castro's Cuba and Jewish pressure groups? It is a foreign policy that is childish in its insistence that whatever American power wants at any given moment is what the world must adjust to.

It's the Irrealpolitik of people who fill the emptiness of their lives with the slimy antics of Boris and his latest insemination.