Marc Zappala: Anti-Americanism

Dear Sirs:

As an American who reads your newspaper, I would find it more enjoyable if not for the occasional hallucinatory rants of anti-Americanism.  Case in point:  Ivan Nikola Guerra's letter in which he blames Europe's bizarre inability to maintain an effective fighting force on, you guessed it, Americans!  Please explain to me, or perhaps Ivan Guerra could explain to me, how and why America keeps Europeans from joining the army.  I think most Americans, myself included, would jump for joy if our young men and woman didn't have to waste their time in Germany defending a bunch of pretentious, ungrateful Krauts.

Guerra also repeats the tired axiom that Americans "have no culture".  That would come as a great surprise to all the significant artists (such as Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Sylvia Plath, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keefe, and Jackson Pollack) that my country has produced in its short lifetime.  Of
course, no one can doubt that Europe and Russia dwarf America in this regard (you all did have a 4000 year head start, after all) but the allegation that Americans don't have culture - especially when the international community can't seem to stop lapping up what Hollywood puts out!- is rubbish.

For a people who are so passionate about their cultural superiority, Europeans and Russians seem to want to do very little to actually preserve their cultures.  By how much did the population in Russia decline last year? 

And what's the present birth rate in Italy, again?  I'm just wondering. 

But hey, don't listen to some dumb hick American!  Keep right on killing those unborn children.  Keep right on refusing to procreate.  You might doom your wonderful 4,000 year old cultures to extinction, but hey, at least you won't be an American!

Marc Zappala
Mt. Laurel New Jersey
USA