This week The New York Times/International Herald Tribune painted a bleak picture of modern Italy with “In a Funk, Italy Sings an Aria of Disappointment“:

“[For] all the outside adoration and all of its innate strengths, Italy seems not to love itself. The word here is “malessere,” or “malaise”; it implies a collective funk—economic, political and social—summed up in a recent poll: Italians, despite their claim to have mastered the art of living, say they are the least happy people in Western Europe. […]

The latest numbers show a nation older and poorer – to the point that Italy's top bishop has proposed a major expansion of food packages for the poor.

Worse, worry is growing that Italy's strengths are degrading into weaknesses. Small and medium-size businesses, long the nation's family-run backbone, are struggling in a globalized economy, particularly with low-wage competition from China.

Doubt clouds the family itself: 70 percent of Italians between 20 and 30 still live at home, condemning the young to an extended and underproductive adolescence. Many of the brightest, like the poorest a century ago, leave Italy.”

The word “hope”—a sacred phrase in the American political lexicon—peppers the article, although in Italy it seems noticeable only by its absence.

But Italy is not the only country in “old Europe,” apparently, that looks into the mirror and feels aghast at the shabby figure staring back. Another piece in today’s NYT notes that number of children attending Berlin’s soup kitchens is rising. Recently, Newsweek featured a slightly tired-looking Angela Merkel on its cover under the heading The Lost Leader. The accompanying feature bemoaned that fact that Merkel’s inclination to search for a consensus among her grand coalition was hampering the difficult, but necessary, work of “reforming” Germany (in other words, making Germany more like the United States).

If Germany’s stuck in the mud, France is in flames. Unfortunately, unlike in May 1968, nobody seems to care overly about what the French think or feel about the recent riots. A recent Time cover proclaimed “The Death of French Culture“–as if the Hexagon has transmogrified into Iowa overnight. (The article’s arguments are ably challenged by Bernard-Henri Lévy in a recent Guardian article.)

Meanwhile, U.S. commentators patronizingly applaud President Sarkozy’s call for his compatriots to be more like Americans.

So, the three largest societies in the Euro zone—Germany, France, and Italy—are essentially kaputt, en panne, or finito.

You would think, reading all this coverage, that it would be 1.47 euro to the dollar today, rather than being very much the other way around. Perhaps it’s because the sclerotic economies of the Eurozone Big Three won’t have to grapple with all those unemployed mortgage hucksters, financial “engineers,” real estate peddlers, construction workers–not to mention families facing home repossessions–to the same extent as the more “dynamic” economies that are ceaselessly promoted as models.