ALTHOUGH THE NEW de Young Museum is grotesque, Dame Fortune has shrewdly clad it in copper so it can be melted down into pennies when it is demolished. On my first walk-through, in October, I estimated that the wrecking ball would arrive about 25 years hence; for some of us, it will be rather a long wait, but people do need time to shed their delusions, and the museum is an expensive – though not unique – delusion in which many of our local worthies are deeply invested, in prestige as well as in cash. And no penny jokes, please; as our currency continues to plunge, becoming the ruble of the western hemisphere, we may soon be glad to have even the humblest coins jingling in our pockets.

The devil's advocate in me points out that mass delusion might not be an accurate, or at least complete, diagnosis of the public's apparent fondness for the new de Young. Only a naïf would suppose the structure, in its expansive (and expensive) vulgarity, represents some deviation from noble American habit, from those old American virtues of modesty, simplicity, and thrift. The truth, says the DA, is that while the new museum is crass, crassness is nothing new in American life. Our French friends have been noticing this about us for more than two centuries. According to Philippe Roger, a French historian whose The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism (Chicago, $35) proves that academic history-writing need not be boring, unfunny, or choked with horrible jargon, French observers and travel writers since the early 18th century have been regaling audiences at home with strange and often chilling tales of a country Baudelaire called "a vast cage, a great counting-house." The citizens of the new nation across the Atlantic, it was intimated, were utilitarian celebrants of size and weight, worshippers of the "the god dollar" (Stendhal's phrase), and tone-deaf ignoramuses as to matters of art, culture, beauty, and civilization. The food was lousy too: "Thirty-two religions and only one dish to eat," the visiting eminence Talleyrand complained. (The dish? Roast beef with potatoes. No golden arches as of then.)

Perhaps the most ominous note of foretelling is struck by Tocqueville, who noted, in Democracy in America, that "the majority in the United States takes over the business of supplying the individual with a quantity of ready-made opinions." From the beginning, then, it seems we were prey to the fevers of mass hysteria and suspicious of anyone who failed to think like everyone else or otherwise conform to the prevailing standard of mediocrity. As Baudelaire put it with respect to Edgar Allan Poe, an American writer he admired and whose miserable fate in America's demotic culture shocked him, "human stupidity will always be the same, in all climates, and ... critics will always wish to fasten heavy vegetables" – potatoes, perhaps? – "on rare, exotic plants."

If more American historians shared Roger's knack for the sharp phrase – "The fantasy factory," he says, apropos of literary people toiling as screenwriters in Hollywood, "was a penal colony for the mind" – it might be that the study of history would not have fallen so sharply from favor among American college students. But precious few do, and it did, and the result is a thickening fog of amnesia about who we are, where we came from, and where we might be going – other than to the mall, for some pointless though briefly joyous consumption (including a stop at the food court) before heading home to stare for hours into our wide-screen plasma windows on the world, where fact and fancy freely intermarry.

The French have long resented and feared us, and, given the evidence adduced in The American Enemy, it isn't hard to see why. You do not have to entertain an illusion of France as a riot-free paradise inhabited by a race of well-fed saints to understand that, when they look at us, they see a one-dimensional colossus sadly lacking in a sense of the past and the capacity for self-criticism and, therefore, being blind to its own nature, unable to judge or adjust its relations with others. They saw and still see wealth, power, and greed untempered by wisdom, and not much else. Who wouldn't be afraid of such a brute, thrashing about in an eternal and half-fantastic present?

Unflattering French portraits of America and Americans are useful to us, if we are willing to notice them, as clues to how we are seen by those in the world who know us firsthand. The French are not speculating nor trafficking in abstraction about us. Yet they cannot and do not see the whole truth about America. Yes, we are a land of strip malls and triple cheeseburgers, of hideously grandiose public buildings and shady celebrities whose fame turns on the sob-story life – even if made up – rather than the work; we celebrate industry, efficiency, productivity, success rather than integrity and independence of thought and deed, and so we fall much too easily into traps of falseness, which we have trouble getting out of. Our authenticity dearth is serious, and growing. Yet I cannot, somehow, give up hope that our Yankee common sense, the other face of the coin of philistinism, will reassert itself – or am I just pitching pennies into the wishful-thinking well?