http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/HardRight/HardRight031303.html
March 13, 2003
AMERICA'S FLAILING FRANCOPHOBES
by Thomas Fleming
Neoconservative hatemongers are stirring up the Francophobic bigotry that
lies just beneath the surface of the American mind. Not content with
hurling the charge of anti-Semitism against anyone who wins an argument
with Bill Kristol (the line would extend around the world) or happens to
have something (a foundation, a magazine, a job) they want,
neoconservatives who have never fired a pellet gun
or put on a pair of boxing gloves are deriding the French for cowardice and
calling for boycotts against French wine. The assembled patriots and heroes
of the House of Representatives, not wanting to be outdone, have even
renamed the French fries and French toast served in their sumptuous,
tax-subsidized restaurant. I hope they also rename French doughnuts, which
used to be known as German doughnuts, before an
earlier set of chauvinist cretins changed the name.
What a country.
Picking on the French is a natural reflex for Americans. Our British
ancestors, after conquering France in the entirely futile and unjust
Hundred Years War, demonized their victims and burned Joan of Arc, one of
the greatest women in our
history, at the stake as witch. The French have been fair game ever since.
Although France was the boldest military nation in Europe of the past 500
years, English novelists consistently represented French characters as
mincing aesthetes tradition brilliantly satirized by W.S. Gilbert in
Ruddigore, in which a hearty British sailor represents a British
privateers decision to flee a French frigate as a gallant action:
For to fight a French fal lal,
Its like hitting of a gal.
Its a lubberly thing for to do.
And we with all our faults,
We were sturdy British salts,
Who took pity on the poor polly-vous,
Do you see
We took pity on the poor polly-vous.
Ruddigore was written over a hundred years before Rupert Murdoch created
the Weekly
Standard as one of his weapons in his campaign to undermine the United
States.
Anti-French hysteria reached its peak in Mark Twains worst book, Innocents
Abroad, and old MarkConfederate deserter turned court jester to the
plutocratscould always get a laugh by playing to the lowest qualities of
the American characterour hatred of every excellence we are incapable of.
If the French are the most civilized nation on earth, so much the worse for
civilization. Mankind, he used to say, is somewhere
between the angels and the French.
In Twains case, the humor is both faux-naif and two-edged, aimed as much
at himself and his countrymen as at the sophisticated foreigners,
and his Joan of Arc is a remarkably sympathetic depiction of the French
saint. On the other hand, the neoconservatives and their
pseudo-conservative alliesMessers Limbaugh and OReillyare no laughing
matter. They could not tell a joke to save their lives; their knowledge of
the world outside the petty urban hells in which they are confined
approaches zero; and their patriotism is on par with their moral
conscience.
Why do I say they are not patriotic? A patriot loves his nation and his
people. Neoconservatives hate the real America. At best, we represent a
four-hour delay between appointments in New York and Los Angeles; at worst,
we are pitchfork-wielding
rednecks, fundamentalists, kukluxers, wobblies, and Coughlinites who prefer
reruns of The A-Team to reruns of Friends. We buy our clothes at Marshalls
instead of Saks or Brooks Brothers. We still eat fried chicken with mashed
potatoes and gravy for Sunday dinner, and we drink tap water, for goodness
sake, not Evian (made in France!).
They want our boys and girls to die for their political schemes, but you
will never find a neoconservative in combat. Norman Podhoretz was in the
army, but to fathom the depth of neoconservative contempt for America, you
have only to read the account of his days in the army in Making It (what, I
wonder, is the it in question?
I have never heard that Norman ever made anythingnot a poem, not a house,
not a model airplaneexcept a fool of himself.)
I succeeded in staying out of the military during the Vietnam War, and I
would never assume the right to tell others to do a duty that I shirked.
So much for patriotismand moral conscience. Even in little matters the
neoconservatives display their immorality. They are always in favor of
bombing, embargoing, and boycotting anyone they disagree with. The fact
that the US bombing of Yugoslavia killed as many people as Serbs and
Albanians were killed in the preceding year of ethnic strife in Kosovo
means nothing to them. The fact that as many as half a million Iraqi
children have died as a direct result of the embargo on Iraq that they
support is all the fault of Saddam Hussein. The fact that French farmers,
businessmen, and workers, whose political views we know nothing of, will be
hurt by any boycott of French products will not trouble the consciences
of people who have never been to a farm, run a business, or done a day of
honest work in their lives.
I love my country, knowing all the limitations and frailties of the
American people, and I respect and admire the French, who have been a far
greater nation than we shall ever be, that is, if greatness means anything
loftier than money and bombs. Jacques Chirac,
whom I have for many years regarded as the least admirable of French
politicians, is now showing greater courage than Mitterand, national
socialist though he was, ever mustered.
He is playing a dangerous game. If he loses, France will return to the
American kennel as a whipped dog, but if he wins, De Gaulles dream of an
independent France within an independent Europe might actually be realized.
Such a result would be good for France, good for Europe, and good for the
United States, which would have to give up the neoconservative fantasy
of global hegemony.
God bless America!
Vive la France.
Copyright 2003, www.ChroniclesMagazine.org
==
http://www.centralmaine.com/view/editorials/030320thu_fran.shtml
Thursday, March 20, 2003
France-bashing reveals political shallowness
Copyright © 2003 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
Among the most disheartening aspects of the buildup to war with Iraq has
been
the dissension among Western allies, especially within the ranks of the
NATO alliance.
While one might expect Russia and China to vigorously oppose anything they
see as
American interests at the United Nations, antiwar positions taken by the
French and
Germany may have been surprising.
RECENT EDITORIALS:
That surprise and nothing more, we hope, is at the root of the
French-bashing that has
moved from late night talk shows to the halls of the Capitol. If Americans
are feeling hurt,
or a little indignant, at the French opposition to war, they'll get over it
soon enough.
Anti-French sentiments, however, sometimes have gone beyond the merely
petty. Some of it
has the distasteful flavor of jingoism, and it is distressing to see
congressmen leading
the way with derogatory statements about the French people and threats to
embargo French
goods.
The United States has a history of scapegoating ethnic groups, and
sometimes with
terrible consequences. Men and women who have been elected to the highest
offices in the
country ought to be more sensitive to the messages that they are sending
when they criticize
the French not on their politics but on their courage or their sense of
justice.
Two pieces of advice are in order. The first is that America should not
forget the long
alliance our two countries have shared.
It's one without debts the French don't owe us for helping them in World
War II anymore than we owe them for our success in the
Revolutionary War of 1776. That's what friends do.
The second is that we should demand that our friends tell us the truth and
not behave as
sycophants. If France opposes a war with Iraq right now, it is obliged to
say so and could be doing us a favor. That's also what friends do.
Let's face it renaming French fries and French toast to freedom fries and
freedom toast is silly, at best, and at worst, underscores the shallow
level that Beltway politics has reached these days. What's next the
freedom kiss?