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The American way: pro and con By Richard Reeves Note to readers: This is the first of two Richard Reeves columns on European perceptions of the American way of life at the end of the American Century. PARIS - More than a thousand years ago, Charlemagne, the greatest king of the French, or the people who became the French, issued an order in the name of God prohibiting work on Sunday. The order was repeated in 1936 by the Socialist government of Leon Blum as it created the French welfare state. Charlemagne's reasons involved God and the fact that peasants were working themselves to death, usually dying before the age of 40. Blum and the Socialists wanted to preserve or create family life that involved more than industrial drudgery at the whim of greedy capitalists - family life, they reasoned, involved time together to enjoy such luxuries as art, music, spring, and sitting down as a family at Sunday dinner. Now, more and more French are beginning to work again on Sundays - more than just a few bakers and taxi drivers. The reason, if you ask, is that Americans work on Sundays. Americans work every day, all day. Americans don't get vacations, Americans don't have health care, Americans don't get pensions anymore and die on the job. And now, a Frenchman or woman might continue, the Americans want us to eat Frankenstein food made from grains and animals put together in American genetic laboratories by mad and greedy scientists. All that is part of what we call "globalization." Many other peoples call it "Americanization" - and many of them hate it. Some hate us as the American Century ends. In Charlemagne's time, there were those - opponents of work on the Sabbath and women pulling plows - who preached that God detests anything that is against nature. Americans are against nature. The French believe that part of their role is to improve on nature, arranging flowers and trees and food in ways more pleasing to the eye. Americans believe we can master nature, substitute science and technology for God's work and make it more productive - and reward ourselves not with free time, but with more things to save time to do even more work. So it goes. Perhaps the French are just a little slow to come around. It was 40 years ago now that we began demolishing local "blue laws," the Puritan dictates against shopping on Sundays. That freedom movement - and that's what we considered it then - was part of the malling of America, and it gave us the right or privilege of not only shopping on the Sabbath but being told we had to work on the Lord's day. In the American version, all work is God's work. The point of this is to say that there is a good deal of anti-Americanism in Europe these days. It may be the usual reaction of resentment and envy to our clumsy ways of exerting power, demonstrated by our military might in Kosovo, or our insistence that foreigners eat our stimulated beef and buy bananas from Latin American countries where Americans own the fields - and the workers, too. Or is it possible that some Europeans, led by the proud and prickly French, are beginning to seriously question whether the American way of life is really better? "A lot of people feel they are victims of the American Dream," said a friend, a Frenchwoman, who knows the United States well. "It seems to me that, so far, globalization is making the Europeans more European and the Americans more American." Across the channel in England, a report in The Sunday Times on a "millennium survey" of Britons included three sections I found interesting: · "... 85 percent said they were happy in their jobs. So happy are they, in fact, that just over a fifth of those in work don't (or can't) take their full holiday entitlement." · "By 66 percent to 14 percent ... there is a widespread belief that children are adversely affected if their mothers work." · "... 38 percent say they will never eat genetically modified foods even if scientists declare that they are safe." By American standards, some of those numbers make the British sound a bit old-fashioned. But then so are the French and many other Europeans. What seems to be happening right now is that many Europeans, old-fashioned or not, are doing some questioning and soul-searching about whether things new and American fashions are always better than the old ways. Richard Reeves is a syndicated columnist NEW Click here to visit the Daily Tidings archives. Email your... Technical questions & comments to: WebMaster Daily Tidings editorial comments & questions to: Editor Visit our other Western Oregon Newspapers... | Albany Democrat-Herald | Corvallis Gazette-Times | Lebanon Express | Newport News-Times | | Ashland Daily Tidings | Gresham Outlook | Springfield News | Ashland Daily Tidings 1661 Siskiyou Blvd. Ashland, OR 97520 Telephone 541-482-3456 © Copyright 1997, 1998, 1999 Lee Northwest Publishing