Euro Trash-Talking

Why is it that conservative American pundits must use every opportunity to disparage Europeans?  Shortly after the pope’s death was made official, the following comment by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds was floating around the blogosphere:

Final score for the 20th century:

Ordinary Poles, 2.
German intellectuals, 0.

I guess I was unaware that the death of John Paul II negated modern physics.  Then conservative New York TImes columnist David Brooks uses the occasion of novelist Saul Bellow’s death to declare the end of European influence on American culture.  For Brooks, Bellow’s preoccupation with European thought was a relic of a bygone era: 

Bellow’s best America would be a Times Square version of a German
university, with intellectual rigor on one side and scrambling freedom
– sex included – on the other.

We now live in a time where American supremacy is unassailable – militarily, economically, and culturally: "It’s lonely at the top" (Brooks):

But Bellow’s death reminds us that we’re now living in a unipolar
moment, culturally as well as politically. Today’s writers and artists
are much less likely to be Americanizing European stuff, and a way of
writing and thinking is dying.
(…)
Finally there are the rest of us who don’t pay attention to what is
being written and said in Europe because it doesn’t seem that exciting,
(Quick, what book is the talk of Berlin? Who is the François Truffaut
of our moment?)

I’m not sure what planet Brooks has been living on, but are there any Hollywood directors that have as much influence today as Pedro Almodovar?  Are there any American writers today that are as interesting as Michel Houellebecq ?  What is missing is intellectual curiosity of the American political pundit class and the will to mediate European thought for a broad American readership.  Susan Sontag, we miss you.