-Caveat Lector-
>From Slate.Com
{{<Begin>}}
international papers
More Merde
By Alexander Chancellor
The Mad Cow War between Britain and France is still the most
interesting subject in the international press. It has brought out
a Francophobia in the British newspapers that has to be read to be
believed. The Times of London, once a byword for dignity, has a
regular feature called "Centre of Attention" about the hot topic of
the day. Wednesday's column, devoted to French food, plumbed new
depths of vulgarity. Beside a photograph of a French cow, the paper
printed the words: "Pity la pauvre vache. Less succulent than her
British sister, she's been good only for cheese. Now we find she
has been fed the bodily by-products of Europe's least
soap-conscious nation. Leaving her as tasty as a draught from a
mud-wrestler's jockstrap."
Despite French denials that their cows are fed on human
excrement--"No cow in the world would eat sewage," a French
agriculture official protested Tuesday to the Independent of
London--this is the aspect of the dispute that has captured the
imagination of the British press. The symbol of the Daily Mail's
campaign for a British consumers' boycott of French food is a
drawing of a cow with a beret on its head and a roll of toilet
paper hanging on a chain from its neck. "England expects every
shopper to do their duty," the paper proclaimed Wednesday on its
front page--evoking Adm. Horatio Nelson's signal to the British
fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar, "England expects that every man
will do his duty"--but also reflecting the decline in grammatical
standards in England over the past 200 years. (Another Nelson
exhortation to his sailors--"You must hate a Frenchman as you hate
the devil"--was not quoted anywhere, but was being widely followed
in the spirit.)
The Daily Mail's front-page headline, above a picture of French
farmers halting British trucks with burning barricades at the
Channel port of Calais, was "Merde! What a flaming cheek," and
inside in an editorial it said, "A million scientists proclaiming
that beef from excrement-fed cattle is safe will only reinforce the
commonsense view that animals fed in such a disgusting way cannot
possibly be healthy." So much for scientists. The Mail also quoted
a French farmers' leader as saying, "England is an island--it is
easier to blockade than the Continent." He was presumably unaware
of a famous prewar headline in the Times: "Fog in Channel:
Continent isolated."
The Times headed its anti-French editorial Wednesday with the kind
of dreary play on words that Fleet Street currently finds
irresistible. "A reasonable beef," it said, "The French should eat
their words." The conservative Daily Telegraph said in an
editorial: "If French farmers really think they can force British
consumers to buy their produce by blockading Calais, they had
better prepare for a long and unprofitable winter on the quayside.
... [T]rying to annoy your target market lacks the flair and
subtlety for which the French traditionally pride themselves." It
also noted that the French national rugby team, currently in
England for that sport's World Cup, had ordered a meal of roast
beef from room service at their hotel in Windsor with "absolutely
no stipulations as to where it came from." The paper wished the
French team "all the best" in its semifinal on Sunday.
The mass-circulation Sun, now reportedly dumping its famous Page-3
bare-breasted pinups at the request of Rupert Murdoch's new Chinese
wife, used the small French farmers' protest at Calais as the
excuse for an attack on Prime Minister Tony Blair for his
pro-Europeanism. "Is THIS what it means to be at the heart of
Europe, Mr Blair?" it asked, beside a photograph of the burning
barricade. "Come on, Mr Blair," it said in an editorial. "Start
kicking backsides in Paris and Brussels."
The French press, by contrast, was rather restrained. Le Monde
Wednesday even seemed to support the idea of a unilateral British
ban on French food imports. It said Blair had the scientific
justification for such a gesture and that if he had decided to make
it (which he didn't), it "would without doubt have had the merit of
calming the enormous storm of Francophobia that is consuming the
British Isles at the moment." Le Monde separately reported that,
according to European officials, the United States is expected to
lift its ban on imports of French Roquefort cheese, pate de foie
gras, and mustards at the World Trade Organization conference in
Seattle at the end of next month.
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