Self-criticism is a positive trait in the American Midwest, where I spent many of my formative years. In Minnesota and Wisconsin and Iowa and all those other states that Californians can't place on a map, a well-rounded individual is one who acknowledges that he probably isn't as good a person as everyone else.

So, it was ingrained from early on that Europe is better. The message I subtly received was that Europe was so much better I probably shouldn't even go there. To do so would just make me depressed. It was far safer to stay home, limiting contact with Europe to the occasional purchase of a six-pack of Becks.

I live in Britain these days, which can feel closer to Orlando than Oslo but has allowed me the chance to spot a few chinks in the "Europe is better" suit of armor. Perhaps the biggest of these is the Eurovision Song Contest.

Having aired annually since 1956, Eurovision is a European institution. It pulls hundreds of millions of viewers, more than any other non-sporting event in the world. It is undeniably huge.

The Eurovision Song Contest is the skeleton in Europe's closet. It the continental equivalent of the time you had too much to drink and ended up using the Wal-Mart public address system to confess your love for Markie Post from "Night Court." It is the ace in the sleeve when playing the game of low culture: "I see your NASCAR and raise you Eurovision."

They never told us about it back home. In college, all the returning semester-abroad kids conveniently omitted it when telling of their adventures. In all the discussions of continental life, the word "Eurovision" was never spoken. There's a reason for this.

The contest is a televised musical competition that pits myriad countries against one another. Each puts forward a single musical act to perform live, and the winner is chosen via telephone vote from viewers.

On paper, that probably doesn't seem too bad; it's just an evening of international song and dance. But there appears to be some kind of Eurovision bylaw preventing talented people from taking part. Imagine a massive, multinational "American Idol" where no one is allowed to sing better than Sanjaya Malakar, and you're starting to get an idea of what took place in Helsinki, Finland, this past weekend.

The winner was a young Serbian woman named Marija Serfovic, who had the incredible misfortune of looking quite a lot like Saturday Night Live's Horatio Sanz. She made up for this with a power ballad and a crew of backup singers performing a routine that the BBC described as "a slow-motion lesbian porn film."

Her act was pretty straightforward compared to last year's winners, Finnish rock band Lordi, who took to the stage in ridiculous zombie-monster costumes and warned of the coming "a-rock-alypse."

The favorite to win this year had been Ukrainian performer Verka Serdyuchka, a man wearing enormous comedy breasts and a suit of aluminum foil. Driven by the sort of hard-core techno beat that Eastern Europeans can't seem to get enough of, his "song" consisted mainly of shouting "Seven! Seven! One, two! Dance!" in German. During one of the choruses, he ran in circles on the stage, swatting the rear ends of his female backup singers.

As I sat there watching, I couldn't help wondering whether this was, in fact, happening or if some terrible hallucinogen had been put in my beer. I also couldn't help but think of how many times in my life I've heard people say, "Europe is so much more sophisticated."

Indeed. Nothing says "high culture" like a shiny drag queen screaming in German.

Why the Ukrainian musical entry chose to sing in German is anybody's guess. It certainly fits with the Eurovision tradition of playing fast and loose with language. In 2003, Belgium's entry sang in a completely made-up language. But the most popular language, strangely, is English.

Unfortunately, it's often a little too obvious that English is not the songwriter's first language, as was the case for Moldova's Natalia Barbu, who sang:
"The onfall's adapting the hearts
Itch people will gnaw our wishes, no more."

She put her heart into it, though, whatever it meant. And that's the most amazing part of Eurovision -- most of the performers were really trying. Sure, Britain's entry, Scooch, appeared to have been dreamed up by Jack McFarland of "Will and Grace," and Ireland clearly had scoured the country looking for the worst singer on the island, but so many of the acts put everything they had into what they were doing.

When Armenia's Hayko stood there with fake blood pouring from his chest, surrounded by badly imagined Sioux Indians and a dancing tree, you felt that, whatever he was trying to say, he really meant it.

You've got to admire conviction, even if the reason for that conviction isn't entirely clear. And for that reason, I find that I am now a Eurovision fan. I'm actually looking forward to next year's competition.

But will I be bragging about it to all my friends back home? Will this massively popular spectacle feature even once in any "Europe is better" conversations? I think Bulgaria's Elitsa Todorova put it best when she sang: "See the young lad riding his pony. Eeeeee!"

Chris Cope lives with his wife in Cardiff, Wales. His column appears every other Tuesday.