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Essayist Richard Rodriguez considers the difference between America and Europe.

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RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, it used to be that Americans had to go to Europe in order to become writers, to learn about life, Europe the old country, Europe the fatherland, Europe the American obsession. You do not have to be of European ancestry to feel it. All my life my literary imagination has been focused on Europe. Only lately that I bothered to notice, for example, that the best books in English about Mexico have been written by British writers.

American writers did not write about Mexico or Canada, or Australia. Traditionally, American writers were focused only on Europe, inevitably so, oddly so, inevitably, because for most of our history we've thought of ourselves as being a country derived from Europe, but oddly because the United States was founded in rebellion against an overbearing British crown and the old aristocratic order. A century later, immigrants from Germany and Italy and Sweden fled for Ellis Island to escape European poverty. But if Europe was the old country, America the new, Americans found themselves in a place that seemed to have no history, no memory, therefore, no knowledge of life.

We Americans thought ourselves inexperienced. When Mark Twain, our most self-conscious of American writers, took his literary persona to Europe, he portrayed himself as an innocent abroad. Henry James wrote novels about young heroines, with names as fresh as Daisy Miller, who got ensnared in cynical European drawing rooms. But still they went from Chicago, from Pittsburgh--the new, rich traveled to Europe, made the grand tour to buy sophistication.

To this day Americans grow flustered by haughty French waiters, and Cary Grant's British accent sounds mighty grand to our American ears. Recently, when the story of Monica Lewinsky broke, I'd hear Americans criticizing our lack of sophistication. People said, after all, in Europe, sexual matters are of little concern. Just look at what happened when the French president died. His wife and his mistress were both at his funeral. Europe, the sophisticate; America, the yokel. In truth, the 20th century has not been a good one for European moral superiority. Twice within 40 years Europe devoured itself. Europe gave the world Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini and Franco.

DWIGHT EISENHOWER: I, Dwight D. Eisenhower, do solemnly swear--

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: After World War II, one sensed the decline of Europe in the American imagination until today we easily recognize that America is a global society, not simply Europe's invention. Since the 1950's, American pop culture has grown dominant in the world. At the other end of this century Gertrude Stein, living in Paris, described this city, Oakland, California, as having no there there.

Today I do not know any young Americans who dream of going to Paris to become writers, but I do know young Africans in Paris who take their cues from Oakland. In the last half century Americans are seen by people all over the world as too powerful to pass ourselves off as 19th century innocents. Curiously enough, as the 20th century ends, Europeans are inclined to play the innocent, and they regard America as a contaminating other.

A few months ago on British radio an interviewer kept badgering me, blaming America--our music, our movies--for the rising crime rate in London, gangs, guns, graffiti. Roles have changed. As the century ends, young and not so young Europeans head for New York and Los Angeles, especially LA, to become screenwriters and directors. German and Italian tourists, sometimes called Euro trash by jaded Americans, head for decadent San Francisco or Miami.

In truth, there is not much difference between the lurid, neon possibilities of Miami or Milan. The only difference, one German tourist told me, the only difference between San Francisco and Berlin, is that sin has a sharper tang in San Francisco, because you Americans still like to imagine yourselves morally innocent. I'm Richard Rodriguez.

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