How quickly others blame us for their foibles and frailties, rightly or not.

A foreign government topples, a political assassination occurs, an earthquake strikes and some other disaster, such as a school shooting, makes headlines. Guess who or what usually gets first blame. Why America and Americans, of course. No matter how “out of the loop” we might really be.

It didn’t take long for people both here and abroad to tie the recent Erfurt, Germany, massacre of 16 people at a high school to America.

Robert Steinhaeuser, the 19-year-old gunman in the Erfurt slayings, felt oppressed, we are told, and reportedly told a classmate, “One day, I want everyone to know my name and I want to be famous.” Infamous, not famous. Entertainer Madonna represents fame; people like the late Helen Keller symbolize glory. The German man didn’t come close to either.

There already are efforts to tie the German youth’s horrible crime to an attempt to copy similar events in America, such as the killings at the high school in Littleton, Colo. We’re told that while few Americans live in Erfurt, there are many U.S. influences that tend to keep Germans abreast of what we do, good and bad. So naturally a school massacre has to be our fault.

But for all the delight many people seem to take in blaming Uncle Sam for most bad things that happen, keep in mind that Germany’s record of assaults against humanity is far from spotless.

Erfurt once was a part of East Germany, where the same totalitarian philosophy prevailed. At age 19, the man who killed 16 people had some experience with that scenario and just might have developed some anti-social tendencies from it.

Pro-communist people stress that in “the old days” youngsters like Steinhaeuser would have had “chores” and would not have had as much time to “hang out,” brood and get his hands on weapons. Came the new order, and the stage was set for disaster, we are told, with so many American democratic experiments in place. Was his assault based on a longing for the old cradle-to-the-grave attitude of the communists? At age 19?

Whatever, somebody will have no trouble finding a way to spin the yarn so that America had a direct hand in it.

Amazing, isn’t it, how wonderful we seem to be when people in other lands want our help, guidance and funding and how villainous we become when something happens that is undesirable?

Would that we were truly that powerful and influential, because it would make tracking down terrorists and putting them where they belong a whale of a lot easier and less costly.