I guess Americans should be rejoicing, but if they are I must have missed it.

It seems that, using a Russian singer (singing in English) as a proxy, American producers and songwriters have won the “Eurovision” song contest. As far as I can tell, Americans couldn’t care less, and indeed don’t even know what “Eurovision” means — and they’ll have some difficulty purchasing music by the winning singer, much less recognizing his name.

Russians though, rather predictably and embarrassingly, are dancing in the streets, as they were not long ago when Russia won a European basketball title by using an American player as its star and when it won a European soccer title using a Dutch coach and a Ukrainian star.

Russian gloating at moments of this type can verge on the obscene. The AFP reports: “‘May 24, 2008 will undoubtedly go down in history. With his stunning success, Dima Bilan added to a series of sensational victories for Russia,’ declared the daily Tvoi Den against an illustration of fireworks, the first of nine pages it devoted to Eurovision.” Russian papers, you see, tended to overlook the fact that both the producer and the songerwriter were Russians. The country was seized with such paroxysms of rapture that the “president” sent an official telegram of congratulations to the “winner” of a contest that most of Western Europe views as being a comical charade.

Writing on Robert Amsterdam’s blog, Russian journalist Grigori Pasko was among the few to see things clearly: “A joke: The Russians have a saying – Какая держава - такие и победы. Which translates roughly as “What kind of country you have tells you what kind of victories you can expect from it.” In the past, we felt proud because Gagarin had flown into outer space. Nowadays – it’s because Dima Bilan [shown above] has taken first place in Eurovision.”

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Russian failure continues unabated. As I reported last week, Russia experienced two humiliating recent disasters in national elections in Serbia and Georgia, where pro-Russian parties were decisively repudiated in favor of European ties. And then yesterday Russian Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was forced to admit that his government’s recent efforts to lay claim to territory on the Arctic sea floor were nothing but a cosmic charade.

Rather than seeing minor successes with a sense of perspective and using them as motivation to work harder, Russians seem predisposed to use them as excuses to drift off into a land of make believe, as an excuse to do nothing but gloat until the next catastrophic failure plunges the nation even deeper into the abyss. This is exactly the manner in which Russians carried out their affairs during Soviet times, and the lack of reform led to the nation’s downfall. But it seems Russians are none the wiser for that experience.