El Paso has a large German-speaking population, owing to our military training. I hope that this time they get it right with the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. (Sad, isn't it, when the people that you had to whomp twice are better to you than the people you did it for. Sad but human.) This German population is served by Deutsche Welle TV, or German Wave TV, which I can't get enough of. And as always, one learns more about America through the eyes of others than through our own eyes.

A common European sneer is that of American vulgarity and cheapness, and I have to say there's a little bit to that. The self-absorption and license of Hollywood. Disney. McDonald's. I cannot defend the trashiness of Hollywood; when I watch a movie I have a sense of anomie, and surely it can't just be my age. Who are these people? Why are their "issues" important?

But the bottom line is that no one held a gun to European heads and made them buy any of it. The Europe that sneers is not (yet) a command economy. When I was in Paris in 1979 the McDonalds was popular for it was the only place that served ice in a drink, which the Parisians found worth paying for. As did I. And this year I read in an article in The Spectator that such is the declining quality of the Parisian bistrot that McDonald's is a good bet. To be sure, McDonald's in France may have duck on the menu, placing it a bit above the one in Monahans.

But McDonald's, and hot dogs, and American pizza, and tennis shoes and track suits and windbreakers and jeans, jeans, jeans, are all practical things, at a decent price, which we offered for sale and they were happy to part with money to buy them.

An American export which boggles my mind is the Kingdom of Hip Hop, which is how they would have it. (Be sure to see VH1's The White Rapper Show.) One explanation that I have heard for hip-hop performers, and notice that I do not debase the word artist, is that they rose to power in the nineties when so many of the people who would have made music were dying of an STD; no matter how these glowering, menacing, thuggish anti-artists got to be popular, and with white suburban kids yet, they are a true American embarrassment and one that I wish would have stayed in an American closet, not exported to the world.

But no such luck. Rap was popular in pre-wall-lapsarian East Germany in the cinemas but was banned on the radio. The Commies in charge then looked at the dancing and, always desirous of a fit proletariat, declaimed that the exercise was good so long as it was called acrobatic show dancing. And so they permitted it. This is the only excuse I can see for fascism--prohibiting hip-hop.

There is a German, a bald, pumpkin-headed fireplug of a man whose soubriquet is Joe Rilla, and he has dedicated his life to the Ossis, the East Germans, to let them feel "empowered" by hip hop.

On DW TV I saw a performance of his, screwing up his face and pointing and mugging and on the stage were pasty-white German youth break-dancing and making gang signs and doing it all very badly--they seemed to be on the whole rather too self-aware not to be uncomfortable doing something that silly.

Here is Joe Rilla

Let's see. The people who gave us Bach, Gauss, Beethoven, Leibnitz, Goethe, and Kant, now spinning on their heads.

Maybe we can unilaterally disarm insofar as the Germans go. Fat chance they'll be marching through Poland soon.