A politically independent Warsaw newspaper, Zycie Warszawy, was short of heartbroken with the passing of “Seinfeld.”
None of the show’s characters was older than 30, the paper noted, none had started a family and “none had really given thought to the future. The preferred lifestyle was egotism and snobbishness and the chosen philosophy cynicism.
“If well-received television is viewed in terms of the audience’s identification with the subject, Seinfeld’s’ popularity is a sad reflection of the state of American society.”
Whether this is deadly accurate or unduly harsh, the September issue of World Press Review finds it part and parcel of “Open Season on Uncle Sam.” The magazine, a sort of Reader’s Digest of news and commentary from around the globe, discerns that the “chronic level of sniping” at the U.S. in the global press has risen “to near-flood proportions.”
It opens with a sample from the centrist Independent newspaper in London, which berated America’s “dumb certitude; the contempt for the poor; the facile amiability; the ostentatious religiosity; the callous laws; the love of guns; the Hollywood sensibility; the all-consuming fetish for material success; the showy insubstantiality of the politics; the celebrity junk; the infantile literal-mindedness; and the faith, withal, in America’s planetary moral superiority . . .”
Get the point?
The centrist Australian Financial Review bemoans an unrelenting American insistence on “applying different standards to itself and others. When China sends its forces to put up its flag in an uninhabited South China atoll, it is denounced by Washington, but when the U.S. deems it necessary to send troops into the Caribbean, that is OK.”
Meanwhile, the liberal Guardian Weekly of London notes that we’re fat. Yes, fat. “It is part of the Jeffersonian legacy that the U.S. contains the world’s fittest as well as the fattest. It is no secret why so many Americans are obese: They eat junk food and do not exercise. Faced with bad news (a report on our obesity), they will simply resort to slimming pills and continue to pursue happiness in their own sedentary way.”
There’s more, much more. The independent weekly East African in Nairobi derides the American media’s saturation coverage of domestic news and how it has “spawned a population that is inward-looking and cannot imagine life in other parts of the world.”
Finally, the independent 24 Tchasa of Sofia relied on the six-month U.S. tour of the country by an avant-garde artist to conclude we’re all fake. The artist wonders, “How can you call it a normal country where a woman sues McDonald’s for $2 million for serving hot coffee, which she spills on her bosom?”
Mea culpa: Apologies to the revered cartoonist Bill Mauldin, referred to here last week as no longer among the living. Both he and his work are quite vibrant.
