Barry Farber
Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2003

If you oppose those policies, the answer is clear.

If, like me, you endorse them full-throatedly, a little explanation might be in order. Warning: This explanation involves boring age-regression and self-psychoanalysis of flimsy validity.

As a high school wrestler in North Carolina I used to have a recurring dream. I’d dream that when it came time for my bout, I’d shuck off my bathrobe, take my position in one corner of the mat, look across the mat at my opponent – and see an Asian face!

For some reason I had the idea that Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos – ALL Asians, in fact – were unbeatable in the martial arts. And, mind you, this was years before Bruce Lee or any other cinematic reinforcement of that notion. If my opponent had turned out to be Asian, I’d probably have had to be pushed out onto the mat to do combat, the way recalcitrant paratroop trainees sometimes have to be pushed out of airplanes!

An American opponent, I reasoned, might beat me on points, or even pin me to the mat. An Asian, I feared, would pick me up and throw me like a Frisbee in a high wind across the countryside.

Fortunately, the demographics of North Carolina high schools in the middle of the last century never let that dread drift beyond the dream. It was unlikely you’d meet any Asian opponent on the varsity wrestling squads of High Point, Raleigh, Durham or Jamestown, N.C. Still, the fantasy hung there and haunted.

I don’t know if there’s a scientific name for the above. I call it "10-Foot-Tall-ism." It’s the unwarranted pessimism of concluding that whoever you’re up against is "10 feet tall," so what’s the use? I decided any Asian wrestler had to be 10 feet tall.

A lot of Americans thought the Russians were 10 feet tall after they orbited the world’s first satellite in 1957. That complex was successfully dismissed late in the next decade when America beat Russia to the moon.

A lot of American businessmen decided their Japanese counterparts were 10 feet tall – perhaps the shortest 10-feet-tall people in the world – until the passage of time shrunk Japan’s economic height down to the level of most Japanese’s physical stature.

Back now to the hate-Bush mobs in Britain.

Most Americans think that not just Englishmen but ALL Europeans are 10 feet tall. And why not? Europeans are more educated, more mature, more worldly, more experienced. We inwardly feel that any debate between an American and an Englishman deserves to be forfeited to the Englishman after half a minute, on the elegance of his accent alone.

Europeans know the difference between Budapest and Bucharest. They even know the difference between Slovakia and Slovenia. Europeans know that Swedes once conquered Russia and the Turks camped on the city limits of Vienna. Europeans know all about the Czech Coup and the Sofia Intrigue. Europeans know how to pronounce words with two dots over some of the vowels

What the hell do WE know?

This inferiority complex bubbles behind the breastplate of too many Americans. Before the Bush visit to England in mid-November 2003, I could not have forseen a cure. Now, all of a sudden, we’ve got one!

If I HAD met an Asian wrestling opponent in high school and if I had tossed HIM like a Frisbee into the Carolina wind, that would have cured my case of "10-Foot-Tall-ism."

Likewise, the cosmic, breathtaking, armor-piercing stupidity of those English people in the streets railing against Bush should assuage any and all illusions of European superiority clear into another lifetime. No thinking American watching those hundreds of thousands of defective human robots and reading the signs they were carrying could continue to harbor envy or admiration for the mentality of "over there"!

You don’t quite agree? You need more? Fine. This debate need not last even half a minute. Their signs and battle cries were totally – 100 percent – anti-Bush. There wasn’t a single discernible sign against Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein or the terrorists who were blowing up Englishmen even while those Englishmen were excoriating President Bush for deposing a dictator whose difference from Adolf Hitler lay not in repression, not in torture, not in murder, not in menace, but only in the size of his ability to enact evil and the size of his moustache.

That rather contradicts the myth of European intelligence.

The decisive blow came when the British mobs toppled a mock statue of President George Bush in front of television cameras, thereby deliberately and calculatedly equating United States President George Bush with Saddam Hussein.

As Mark Twain might have commented, "Equating Saddam Hussein to George Bush is like equating lightning with the lightning bug!"

Forget anger. Anger is when the other side of an important argument makes a point that screams to be answered. No anger is necessary here. Only gratitude to the British demonstrators for demonstrating their own moral bankruptcy.

When a British reporter asked Bush how he felt about being so fiercely hated, the president replied that he loved freedom of speech and pointed out that the Iraqis have only begun to enjoy such freedom "in recent history."

Part of me (not the part you would have seen if I’d been a Bush speechwriter!) wishes Bush’s reply had gone all the way. Bush spoke of "evil in plain sight." I happen to think that’s a great concept. Who can deny that Saddam’s Iraq was, indeed, evil in plain sight?

When the British spoke of "hundreds of fatalities" because of "Bush’s war," I wish the president had pointed out that from 1933, when Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, until Sept. 1, 1939, when World War II began with the Nazi invasion of Poland, England was treated to unending Nazi "evil in plain sight."

And, because of the sloth, inertia, neglect, cowardice – call it what you will – of England and the European Western democracies, Hitler’s evil galloped forward unimpeded.

And that, I wish Bush could have pointed out, resulted NOT in "hundreds" of fatalities, but TENS OF MILLIONS of fatalities when the evil in plain sight escalated to the evil at your own throat.

Yes, hundreds have been lost in the liberation of Iraq, every one a tragedy and endlessly lamentable.

There were SIX THOUSAND Americans lost at Normandy the very first day. And that leaves out the second day. And the third. And the too many TENS OF MILLIONS of military and civilian casualties lost because people like those marching against Bush reserved their anger, not for the evil in plain sight, but for those who would set forth to eliminate that evil.

The absurdity of those British protesters brings more amusement than anger. How can I hate them when they so effectively helped us discard our totally inappropriate assumption that "the European is always right"?

Thanks, as we near the end, to those British newspapers that mounted and published polls showing that the majority British support for our coalition mission in Iraq is great and growing.

I got over my "Europe knows best" nonsense long ago and I welcome what I hope now are massive hordes of newcomers.

Maybe good fortune will allow us to return to the vastly more good-natured British-American "hostility" of World War II. When America got drawn into that conflict in 1941, tremendous numbers of American troops were sent to England to protect against a Nazi invasion, since Hitler had come into ownership of the continent of Europe.

We thought the British would be grateful, because after their disastrous evacuation of Dunkirk in June 1940, England had only a ragtag army defending its home island and fewer than a dozen tanks!

Did somebody say "gratitude"? That person didn’t understand human nature.

The British troops were bitterly resentful of the incoming Americans, even though they were coming in to save Great Britain. The British soldiers used to say, “The only thing wrong with the American troops is they’re overpaid, they’re oversexed, and they’re over here!"

After hearing about enough of this, the Americans began to respond, "The only thing wrong with the British troops is they’re underpaid, they’re under-sexed, and they’re under Eisenhower."

Editor's note:
"Deck of Weasels" exposes Sean Penn, Sen. "KKK" Byrd, Jacques Chirac, Jesse Jackson, more

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
George W. Bush
Saddam Hussein/Iraq
War on Terrorism