Kieran Healy

Yerp

Matthew Yglesias is right to point out that the American media “when presenting “European” opinion, [has] a tendency to ignore the fact that there are a whole bunch of different countries in Europe.” This happens all the time. Conservatives love to bash Europe as decadent, weak and helpless without U.S. protection. Liberals sigh and pine for “socialized medicine” and other bits of the welfare state.

My favorite example of this comes from the blurb on the back of packets of Pepperidge Farm Milano Cookies, which begins “Imagine strolling down the cobbled streets to your favorite European bake shop…” Indeed. If only it continued “As you converse with the owner in fluent European…”

Of course, it happens the other way, too: I once had a friend tell me he “didn’t like America”, speaking as if it was about comparable in size and homogeneity to County Galway or something.

The American media even more promiscuously uses the word “Western.”

It’s not just totalizing over different countries in phrases like “Western-style democracy” and “Western-style constitution.” It’s being maddeningly ahistorical in totalizing as Western what is a product of Romanticism or the Enlightenment or the Civil Rights movement of not even fifty years ago.

Tho I still make generalizations about the US! When I talk about what I love about the US, it’s invariably all the lovely qualities of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens which are hardly shared even by Staten Island, much less New Jersey or Bushlandia.

The pleasures of exile

I’m spending the weekend in Washington DC (will be here again soon for the whole summer – my wife still lives here) and was delighted to discover that Marvellous Market, just off Dupont Circle, now stocks Kerrygold butter. This is…