Not An Ugly American

"I think expats and American writers alike have something verging on a national responsibility to remind Europeans that Bush didn’t win the first election, and he barely won the second one -- it was, in its own way, stolen. And that less than a third of the American population thinks he's doing a good job. That's what I would hope to do as an American writer, to try and be an example of an OK -- which is to say, self-critical -- American."

- Jonathan Franzen, in Germany