>(coming along a couple of days later) the site has been moved or deleted, >wanna summarize?
>:Dana sure - here you go! :-) ...Patrick In defense of those weenie Frenchmen By PIERRE TRISTAM ESSAYS Last updated: Feb 25, 04:10 AM I will get to French-bashing (and my defense of the French) in a moment. But first, a clarification. My name's stereotypical triggers aside, I am not French. Not even close. I am American by nationality, Lebanese by birth, which makes me somewhat of a lingering Arab if not -- in some American eyes -- a fifth, rather than a mere, columnist. That still beats being French now that France has overtaken Iraq, al-Qaida, North Korea and liberals as Bushazoids' favorite bete noire (that means "beasts worse than lawyers" for you proud monolinguists out there). But I can't entirely disavow French influence, which included, in my pre-American youth, French Jesuit schools and their attendant priests, who may or may not have taken their traditional liberties with my virtue (the repressed therapy brigades are still trying to figure that one out) and, since my early teens, an exposure to French literature that has proved fatal to my writing style, because it has lived up to what Mark Twain said of French-addled hacks: "They always tangle up everything to that degree that when you start into a sentence you never know whether you are going to come out alive or not." Hold the funeral. You've made it through the Omaha Beach of that first paragraph. The reward is some sincere French-bashing of my own. Yes, the French can be annoying (but so can Nebraskans, if you give them a chance). Yes, they whine about American culture because it's all over the place while theirs has contributed little more than freak poodles since Camus got into that car wreck in 1960. It's no coincidence that deconstruction, a philosophy that usually self-combusts in flesh-eating jargon, is the most original concept to come out of Paris since. And yes, the French are the sun kings of hypocrisy, blaming Americans for being bigots, imperialists and war-mongers, but only because the French are nostalgic over losing their market share in all three. Remarkably, while America is suppressing the art of self-criticism it once perfected, the French are busy reinventing it. The country is finally owning up to its vast collaboration in the Holocaust and its reign of terror over Algeria before 1962, and it is squarely facing up to the idiocy of its anti-Americanism. Two books on the subject by two Frenchmen, just published in Paris, are making it harder for the French intelliclass to take their own anti-Americanism seriously. Jean Francois Revel's "The Anti-American Obsession" and Philippe Roger's "The American Enemy" chronicle a habit of anti-Americanism dating back at least to 1768, when a French scientist made the strange claim that American dogs were inferior breeds and never barked. >From France's superiority complex in the 19th century to its inferiority complex under de Gaulle, anti-Americanism hasn't risen much above such superstitious stupidities, making even rational criticism of the United States difficult to take seriously. "By criticizing the Americans whatever they do, even when they are right," Revel writes, "we Europeans lead them to ignore our objections, even when they are well-founded." But for all their contempt, the French alone among the major powers of the last couple of centuries have never warred against the United States in more than words. A few symbolic raids on McDonald's joints or some rather commendable vandalism at Euro Disney aside, the hostility has been exclusively rhetorical, and almost exclusively intellectual. It thrives because it helps deflect attention from the decay of French culture and the impotence of European foreign policy. It's mostly irrational, often entertaining, never harmful, which explains why Americans generally have never paid much attention -- until this year. Why the difference? Because for once in their inglorious history of anti-Americanism, the French are right. A second Gulf war has been built up into a false necessity on false claims for the wrong reasons. It may "liberate" a people, but not before clobbering them first, then saddling them with an American mandate they won't, and shouldn't, abide, in the heart of an Arab world more ready to transition to Mohammedan medievalism than to Jeffersonian democracy. The war will be fought at the expense of a more urgent world offensive on terrorism, and in conflict with four centuries of international law: Pre-emptive war absent an immediate threat is the stuff of rogues. Regarding Iraq, the United States is the rogue and France, ludicrously, the world's conscience. Much is being made of France's chumminess with Saddam. The myth-barkers would have you believe the preposterous suggestion that France has more to lose from its $700-million-a-year trading with Saddam, or even $1 billion in gestating contracts, than from its $50 billion trading relationship with the United States. But who are Saddam's real chums? The U.S. bought $5.82 billion worth of oil from Arab Adolf in 2001 alone. Chances are, that last trip you took down I-95 was made possible by Saddam's oil. Yet Americans drunk on Bush and Limbaugh persist in peddling the myth of France's lapping at Saddam because it effectively obscures how Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, with then-special envoy Donald Rumsfeld, fed Saddam the weapons, the dollars and the chemicals to fight Iran in the 1980s -- and rain chemical hell on Iranian soldiers and Iraqi civilians. The Reagan-Bush junta built Saddam into the monster that he is. They'd rather not be reminded. Just as the French have used anti-Americanism to deflect attention from their own irrelevance over the years, French-bashing is now being used to deflect attention from the rot at the core of Bush's Iraq obsession. The French argument against war is more reasonable, more Jeffersonian, than the Bush administration's argument for war. But the French are America's bread and circuses of the moment, an entertaining device to numb and stupefy, to guard against questions and doubt, against too much prying about that skeleton in Rumsfeld's closet, glowing there since his chummy days with Saddam, and not from Day-Glo. For all the supercilious jokes about their hairy armpits and lousy hygiene, it is those Roquefort-rotting French -- those Euroweeny cowards, those weaselly wimps who've lost their moral compass, those hoary Europeans, those surrender monkeys, to quote what passes for American journalism these days -- who are sanity's last line of defense. So with American opposition gone AWOL, probably in Vichy, cue up "La Marseillaise" (or at least "La vie en rose") and thank heavens for the French. Le Monde, the French national newspaper, ran a famous headline the day after Sept. 11: "We're all Americans." It wouldn't hurt for us all to be French for a while. It will hurt if we persist in being such Bush-bogged Americans. Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?forumid=5 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?method=subscribe&forumid=5 This list and all House of Fusion resources hosted by CFHosting.com. The place for dependable ColdFusion Hosting. Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
