Word: barzini
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...more formal scholars have failed to explain: the Japanese national character, its breakdown in World War II, and the reasons why free nations can now welcome the Japanese to their company. Of the trickle of foreign books critical of the U.S., the most sensible and understanding was Italian Luigi Barzini Jr.'s Americans Are Alone in the World. The most gratuitous book from abroad was, by all odds, Briton Earl Jowitt's The Strange Case of Alger Hiss, which niggled at American jurisprudence and raised among readers questions as to the earl's competence to judge...
Poker & Politics. The essence of the "noble and somewhat sacrilegious" American Dream, writes Barzini, is that all man's problems can be solved by intelligence and industry. When things go wrong, at home or abroad, Americans are like "the man who has dropped a penny in the slot machine and did not get either his chewing gum or his money back . . . He fumes, shakes, punches and curses . . . Americans [think that] if you put the right amount of money in the right place ... if you sign carefully worded contracts . . . you must always get satisfactory results. When history does not deliver...
...Reporter Barzini wants the U.S. to buckle down harder to the everyday tasks of a great nation. He wants Americans to stop feeling contempt for "blocs," "spheres of influence," and "balances of power," because these are the "technical means by which any policy, aggressive and imperialistic, or noble and disinterested, can be promoted." He wants them to apply "to political transactions . . . the same knowledge of human nature which Americans use daily in their national card game, poker." Above all, he wants the U.S. to stop taking the initiative only in emergencies, and adjust itself to the permanent crisis, "the psychology...
...Barzini winds up in a significant self-contradiction: he tells the U.S. to be tough, fearless, self-assured and Europe's leader; at the same time, he wants the U.S. to follow Europe's advice and do things Europe's way. His ideal America would be a kind of super-Europe, the successful, functioning substance of centuries ago, but equipped with all modern conveniences, its diplomats so many Metternichs riding to peace conferences in helicopters, taking its philosophy and manners (as Rome took Greece's) from older and wiser heads, via teletypewriter. That is the sentimental...
Actually, Reporter Barzini knows that the U.S. does not fit that dream because its nature and its tasks are different from anything that ever went before. He writes: "We, in Europe, know little and decide nothing . . . They, the Americans, are alone in the world and carry war and peace on their lap, and . . . nobody can really advise, help or guide them...