Sore Winners

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Two weeks ago, there was an article in the English edition of the Helsingin Sanomat entitled Americans living in Helsinki disappointed by Kerry defeat that featured a few Americans living here who were watching the election results and weren't very enthused. Yesterday, Jarkko pointed out a section in the Finnish edition of the paper that was a short piece written by the journalist who wrote that story detailing the 30 or so crazy email she had received from Americans angry at that story and the Americans in it. Considering how much psychotic email I received in response from what little I've written here on the topic, I'm not really terribly surprised, but I am embarrassed. The journalist included bits from three of the email, presumably because they were the only ones lucid enough to take excerpts from, that are really just pitiful. One with an especially poor concept of history suggested that the EU's pacifism was responsible for everything from Hitler to the Japanese emperor. I suppose they missed that day in school where the teacher lectured on world history or maybe they got the revisionist version where America saved Europe even as far back as the crusades and Ottomans. I wonder if she was on Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segment where they find the absolute dumbest people in America and quiz them as though ignorance in the extreme might be comedy. People like these do nothing to change the collective picture of Americans as largely uneducated and ignorant.

This sort of sore winner syndrome is nothing short of bizarre. It is as though these poison pens know they've been duped and are desperately trying to reassure themselves that their willing self-deception is the one true reality. Anyone disagreeing or disdaining that reality is an affront to maintaining the illusion. Perhaps they took the "If you're not with us, you're against us." slogan far too literally. I also guessed wrong that Americans back home didn't give a damn how the EU felt about Bush since it's pretty clear that they do care enough to send hate mail. After the election, I didn't send out angry email to every Bush voter I could find on the internet as why would I bother? What's done is done and all we can do now is wait and hope that we're wrong. The sheer mass of vituperous email from the religiously fervent Bush club that no one expressing disappointment and/or fear at Bush's re-election seems to be immune from receiving in their inbox tends to suggest a massive compensatory reaction;"the lady doth protest too much, methinks." Of course, these are not the sort of people given to introspection so that which they suspect is happening, that they may have made a mistake, that they were lied to outright, yet ignore by shouting the loudest, will go unnoticed until it is impossible to avoid. Well, or until the bombing in Tehran starts and OPEC switches to the Euro.