Man Up, America!

„Well, anger certainly continues to be all the rage in the corridors of American politics. Not to mention American corridors in general. Polls taken prior to the November midterm election indicated that a surprising number of Obama voters said they were going to vote Republican this time and an equally surprising number of McCain supporters said they would be backing Democratic candidates. What that is about, God knows. The general anti-Obama rage out there is palpable. But it’s no more virulent than the anti-Bush sentiment that has pervaded the country for much of the past decade—although this being America, there’s an attendant hatred for Obama that has more to do with race than anything else. What makes today’s fury more worrying is the fact that angry right-wing extremists tend to carry guns in disproportionate numbers to their liberal counterparts. (...)

This anger-fest is in no way confined to America. Indeed, in Europe it is becoming even uglier, what with anti-immigrant sentiment on the rise, especially against Muslims and Gypsies. In Britain, a growing anti-Islam group, the English Defence League, holds demonstrations almost monthly, usually in areas where there are high concentrations of Muslim immigrants. These protests are almost always accompanied by violence. In Germany, where 30 percent of the electorate believes the country is overrun by foreigners, Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech recently in which she declared that the country’s attempt to build a multicultural society has failed utterly. (And the Germans are usually so good at this.) French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi have both ordered the expulsion of Romanian Gypsies. In Sweden, a small number of Jews, having suffered at the hands of the local Muslim population, have just given up and immigrated to Israel. Even in sleepy little Holland, Geert Wilders, the far-right politician who heads the third-largest party in the country—and who holds the balance of power in the Dutch parliament—is on trial for inciting hatred against Muslims by, among other things, comparing the Koran to Mein Kampf.”