The Atlantic Divorce

America and Europe Need a Break

I was born at the tail end of the millennial generation. I have no living memories of the Soviet Union (USSR). When I was young Russia was a dark place; cold, unforgiving, impoverished. Images of brutalist architecture and violent Russian mafia villains populated any early cultural impressions I received from it. In the same way that the United Kingdom, France and Germany were not the same nations they were in the Cold War, The World Wars, or anytime before. These countries for better or worse were for myself and most Americans made up of Fairy Tales, Myths, Literature and Pop culture. My views of countries were made of the figments of modern mythology. BBC and Robin Hood far more than any of the current realities of Britian, France was Beauty and the Beast and Paris. Germany was Grimm’s Fairy Tales and WW2 Movies. The latter tempered only by my own German heritage from becoming some generic villain much as they did for many others. As time went on my views of the various countries grew, I became aware of others Sweden, Spain, Italy, Greece, Finland, etc. Each one populated by the mythology and stories I heard of them. But they all had something in common, whether pop culture cast them as hero or villain, they were all figments of my imagination. And in much the same way, so was my country for them. To Europeans, America is not a place but a myth. A figment of overweight Walmart shoppers, cowboys, mass shootings and the New York Fairy Tale. All in a country barely larger than their own. We were and are loved and hated by Europe just as we have our own mixed feelings towards them. As the years have gone by what was once an amicable tale of post-war unity has become a messy middle-aged marriage, and simply put, we need a divorce.

My personal preference is for it to be as mutual and peaceful as possible. While I am aware there are a nearly endless number of reasons for the current paradigm between Europe and America, ranging from cultural to political. I will not bother trying to put on the airs of an expert in geopolitics. Instead, I will present what I have observed as an average American.

The core issue is that neither side understands the other and never will. To the average American, Europe is a collection of Myths, a pastoral ancestral homeland, a sort of national park of heritage and genetics. Customs, sacred sites, family lines, cuisine and much more are thought of as “preserved” in Europe. These aren’t living cultures to Americans but living histories. Though occasionally German Engineering or the Cellphone using Swede may arise out of our fantastical aether fed stupor. Even when we mature and realize Europe is full of modern countries our concern is not with Martha’s accounting job or British Steel Exports, but with Stonehenge, Buckingham Palace, Sherwood Forest and Burial Mounds. American’s have no interest in a modern Europe save for a few who, often enamored through a curated visit to Europe, foolishly try to implement the same policies or methods in America without thought to the stark differences and underlying elements that created the separate outcomes.

On the other side of the pond Europe is doing its best to mimic what it views as the key elements of American might. Forming its own coalition of states with a central government, a central currency and an increasingly anti-nationalist view of their own nations. In trying to mimic American power they neglect the source of their own and erode the very foundations of their societies. Neither side knows what the other one is. To Europe America is a superpower because it’s big, has a lot of people and a lot of resources. To America Europe is a museum and everyone that lives there is a docent.

Of course neither side is absolute in its thoughts and there is plenty of variation therein, but the general sentiment is that America is a powerful strange country, our culture is viewed through Hollywood movies, popular music and other mass-produced media. We are as much an enigma, an esoteric arthouse film to them as much as they are a book of fairy tales to us.

And when either sides myth of the other is shattered, violence and disappointment ensue. When European’s discover rampant poverty in America, the daydream of the American paradise is shattered. When our middle-class streets with cracked pavement, gang graffiti and worn-down facades are revealed, when New York is shown not as the shining city on a hill but as the rat infested overpriced hellscape it is. The land of endless romantic comedies and buddy cop films becomes a kind of horror story. We are supposed to have the answers, the future, hidden somewhere between the Tom Hanks close ups and the lyrics of Jesus Take the Wheel. But America is not the Hollywood myth, it is something else entirely. A Celtic style band of unmarked nations hidden in the cracks between the Yellowstone wilds and the Little House on the Prairie, beyond the crumbling store fronts of Gary Indiana and far away from the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Somewhere in all of this was meant to be the key to the new world order, they just had to decipher it, mimic it as a kind of Wyrding Spell.

In turn America reached out to those old Fairy Tales in the forest of Hesse to the Streets of Paris, from Grecian Ruins to the Fairy Rings of Ireland. Somewhere there was the past we had forgotten in our rush to have food and shelter and not get scalped or shot. The flood gates had been opened following the World Wars. The beauty of European customs and spirituality was revealed to us. Christianity rose as we sought answers within the old ways Europe had preserved. Exhausted and weary America was eager to integrate their newfound Orientalism of the Occident. We reveled in our recovered heritage integrating it into what had survived intact or developed anew in this land. We had rediscovered the Mother Tree to our sapling, and we yearned to reconnect. The Atlantic was no longer a divide, in the age of telephones, speeding ships and aero planes such separation was a distant memory, or so we thought. The Old Country was no longer mentioned almost conspiratorially but now could proudly be studied. And in doing so we found… nothing. Well not nothing, but not what we were looking for at least. For the most part we are still looking for it, as many have said we’re the only country and people that endlessly bother asking who and what we are. Still haven’t quite pinned it down. But we have learned many things that we are not.

For the last century America has been the Superpower and Europe has been a post-apocalyptic land suffering or profiteering from the “Wars to End All Wars” with equal parts advanced and decrepit dystopias birthing from it. At the same time the American government became more corrupt and chauvinistic towards its people, the country that rose to prominence crumbling. Any attempts at incorporating what we learned from The Old Country had fallen flat and made us more and more unstable. In turn nothing gleaned from America has helped Europe. We are in many ways disappointed in each other, and this has only worsened as the cultures continued to shift and change. To the point when we look at each other we don’t like what we see. Because the image doesn’t fit the Myth we made of the other. And due to cultural disconnect, media manipulation and increasing hostility… well understanding each other has been rendered a near impossibility even if we wanted to.

All of this comes at the same time as the Myth of the Post-War Era is fading. Gone are the utopian visions, the multicultural paradises, the unified will of all mankind to journey to the stars. The issues that plague our societies have only grown more rampant and we have been eager to place the blame on each other. When we traded ideas and technology, we did not only send our best and brightest; we also sent our respective poisons. Animosity was inevitable. War is not, at least not with each other, not if we separate before our grievances consume us in shadow and flame.

Europeans are told we are the problem, we of course disagree. An increasingly vocal portion of Americans have started to call for separation, that Europe is leeching from us. While Europeans scream for us to get out and stay in an equal cacophony of silver-tongued slander. For longer than I’ve been alive North America and Europe have been joined at the hip. But we no longer see ourselves the same way we did in our Modern Myths. James Bond is a distant memory but so is the Soviet spy and the American GI. Increasingly no one is left alive that believed the myth or lived through its genesis. We can only see what it resulted in. A world we are ill suited for, where our inheritance is sold to the sob stories at the door. Whether or not we are truly contributing to the others’ woes is largely irrelevant, a divorce if nothing else removes that element from play and we are left looking at ourselves in the mirror and asking what must be done to fix it, without the familiar face of our ire and adoration.

Thus, severing this joint fate we have resigned ourselves too. As if we were some tired and broken married couple. Doomed to unhappy matrimony until the end of time. Or at least the end of us, whether as withered corpses or bloodied victims.

Europe must realize what Europe wants, and America must rediscover our own path. We’ve spent so long looking towards each other for answers. That we never stopped to ask if we even understood the question. Europe does not hold the answer to who America is and America doesn’t have a secret to forge the future by the will of the wielder. Our partnership was based on an El Dorado style mysticism, we were never real to each other. We were ideas, myths. Simplified standards of nuanced and conflicted lands, wherein all peoples are the same person, a personified wise one holding the answers at the end of the quest; one at the Stone Table the other at Menlo Park.

If such knowledge does exist. It is our own divergent path we must follow to find it. To continue hand in hand down our current road is to find ourselves wallowing in our own ruin. Then perhaps we can avert the worst of what is to come, especially those dooms wrought by our own hands.

The age that birthed our current relationship is long since over and the realms we are now, we no longer recognize as the compatriots we once were. The Atlantic must once more be a barrier, an impenetrable mist between the Motherland and the Homeland. Only then can we all forge our own destinies. Only then can we avert our doom.