A Critic in the Peanut Gallery

by W.D. Ehrhart

Recently, I received an e-mail from an Austrian man I’ve known for over 40 years. Let’s call him “Adi.” Here is what he wrote:

“Greetings from Austria across the wide wild waters to my U.S. friends. Peace be with you, and strength. I shall open my heart, ventilating my anger and frustration. The U.S. was so much part of my life and my job [as a student and then professor of American literature]. Whatever shortcomings there were, my attitude was always, always positive. Even during the Vietnam War, when a whole generation—my generation—forcefully opposed it. Also, the U.S.A. has been kind to me. Not least through so many friendships I found when spending my two visiting semesters [at U.S. universities in New York and Wisconsin].

“Now when Trump has the majority support of U.S. citizens, millions of Europeans have this thought in their angry minds: how could the U.S.A. elect such a vulgar, sexist, racist, greedy lout? His vulgarity, his deceitfulness, his thieving mind, his blatant ignorance, disregard for honesty and respectful language, were all well known and yet he was elected. By U.S. women, who heard him brag he would ‘only have to grab their pussies’ and lay them after. How could U.S. women totally lose their self-respect? And those super-morally endowed evangelicals, how can they turn a blind eye to his whoring and his three marriages?

“All of that is distressing enough, but the worst of it all, for us here at least in Europe, is that he has sided with the worst war criminal since Pol Pot. One of Trump’s negotiators described Putin as a really nice guy. Putin who has killed 95,000 Ukrainians, who ordered the kidnapping of 20,000 Ukrainian children, and who threatens us weekly with nuclear war. A nice guy?

“The sad fact is that Trump hates us. He hates Europe. Europe, with its rich cultural history, he treats as worthless. He has a good chance of diminishing Europe: after Putin seizes the Ukraine, it is clear that Putin, with the tacit support of Trump, will wage a war against another neighbor.

“I have always been an admirer of the greatness, the generosity, the inventiveness of the U.S.A.. But my liking has weakened. In sorrowful friendship, Adi.”

Where and how does one begin to respond to this self-pitying attempt to… to what? What is his point, anyway? That we Americans should all be ashamed of ourselves? That we should save Europe from Vladimir Putin? Hasn’t the U.S. been saving Europe, western Europe and now also eastern Europe, from the Soviet Union and Russia for the past 80 years? Maybe it’s time for the “European Union” to defend themselves instead of relying on me and my tax dollars to defend them.

My Austrian correspondent also gets a lot of his history wrong. For starters, his and my “whole generation” did not oppose the Vietnam War. Some of us did. A lot of us didn’t—think George W. Bush, Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh. Meanwhile, most of my generation simply sidestepped the war entirely (see Class of ’66 by Paul Lyons) and got on with their lives.

He also says that Trump has “the majority support of U.S. citizens,” which does not take into account the more than 75,000,000 Americans who voted against Donald Trump, or the millions of U.S. citizens who didn’t vote at all. Nor does he acknowledge the millions and millions of people who keep coming out for No Kings Rallies and similar demonstrations.

Moreover, while scolding us Americans for electing an intolerant bigot with no redeeming qualities, he seems to be oblivious to what is happening in Europe. Perhaps he ought to take notice of Viktor Orban right next door to him in Hungary, or Giorgia Meloni right over the Alps from him in Italy, or the growing political power of the National Rally Party in France, the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and even the Freedom Party in his very own Austria.

And finally, as for “Adi’s” admiration for “the greatness, the generosity, the inventiveness of the U.S.A.,” he sounds very much like the MAGAWhitewashers who are doing their best to purge any record of the underside of American history so that nothing remains of it but “the greatness, the generosity, the inventiveness.”

Ask any African American how great and generous the U.S. has been. And as for inventiveness, well, there are all the inventive ways—legal and illegal—white bigots came up with to deprive African Americans of their political and civil liberties, and even their very lives. Ask any Chicano from South Texas. Any Cherokee or Nez Perce or Navajo.

Does my Austrian acquaintance know anything about the Chinese in America between 1882 and 1943? Or Japanese Americans through at least the first half of the 20th century? Where has he gotten this Pollyanna notion of the United States? You’d think that European educational institutions, especially for someone who has reached the doctoral level, would do a better job of teaching history than your run-of-the-mill American public school.

In any case, I do not need to be lectured at by someone who lives in another country an ocean and thousands of miles away. As we say in the 12 Step program I am associated with, he needs to take care of his own side of the street and otherwise, as the Frenchman on the castle wall in Monty Python’s “The Holy Grail” says, “Mind your own business.”

As most of you—perhaps all of you—who are reading this know, we are distressed enough by what is happening in this country without someone who doesn’t have to live in the midst of this nightmare scolding us while offering nothing but condescending criticism. The task before us is difficult enough. I’d like to believe, and indeed I think it safe to say, that each of us is doing what little we can to put a stop to this lunatic plunge into chaos and lawlessness in the hope of restoring some semblance of decency, fairness, and justice to American politics and civil society.

Whether we will succeed or not remains to be seen. But we don’t need gratuitous commentary from the Peanut Gallery.

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W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.