Ten days without a Victor Davis Hanson essay; I was beginning to wonder if he had been kidnapped by Javier Solano and subjected to the hideous Torture of the Comfy Chair.

Nope. He’s been talking to Europeans.

After spending the last two weeks abroad talking to a number of Europeans, I sensed that the constant criticism of the United States that we read in European newspapers and magazines are not reflections of an out-of-touch elite, but the general pulse of a complex anti-Americanism that is widely shared among much of Europe’s citizenry. At the heart of the misunderstandings are a number of paradoxes in our relationship, wounds whose thin scabs the events of September 11 have ripped open.