Posted on 09/30/2005 6:24:38 PM PDT by F14 Pilot
France's role it to stand up in opposition of the US.
It's like being the Minnesota Twins against the Yankees. All bark, no bite, but the masses side with the underdog.
"It has got the best ballet company in the whole world and some of the great film directors and novelists," enthuses Mr. Peskin. "The French have been fantastic."
Well that cinches it. I'm cancelling my Blockbuster card and moving to Paris.
France's role??? Bring on the Clowns.
Maybe Chirac should walk the streets of the Ivory Coast without a security contingent to show us all how beloved france is.
Start using some right guard, and I'll start eating snails.
I believe that would be, bring on the mimes.
It doesn't matter, I hate both mimes and clowns. A lot.
I thought France's role was to irradiate the peoples of the South Pacific with above ground nuclear testing.
LMAO
This article is a load of bull :)
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000017.html
We are widely criticized among Europeans for what they call our cultural and economic hegemony. They decry our pop culture as vulgar and commercial, and in fact, it often is. McDonald’s are now everywhere on the European continent, and we are reminded what horrible, fattening food it is. Agreed.
What doesn’t seem to get through their anti-populist, anti-American blinders is that basic economic principle of supply and demand. I suppose we shouldn’t be too shocked to hear this. The birthplace, intellectual home and last bastion of Marxism has always had a tough time with economic reality.
They also have a tough time with democracy, and the idea of people – you know, the masses – making their own decisions. And the thing that breaks the heart of every European elitist is the inescapable fact that McDonald’s and Cheers are huge in Europe, because their own people can’t get enough of it.
I have never been to France myself, but I would presume that daily life there does not consist of squads of heavily armed US Marines rounding up the terrified population, herding them into McDonald’s at gunpoint, and shaking their last euros out of them. When France passes laws saying that some minimal percentage of their television programming must be produced in France, then that is an admission – and it must be, if you will pardon the pun, a galling one – that huge numbers of their people prefer our culture over their own.
Fact is, dreadful or not, McDonald’s is not subsidized by the US Department of World Hegemony. They are a business concern. The day European customers stop eating at McDonald’s, the McDonald’s will go away.
But they do not. They are growing like mushrooms. American television programming has to be legally constrained. I suspect that Spider-Man out-drew more Europeans in a weekend than all of the films of Truffaut's did in the United States over forty years. This is telling them something, and what it is telling them is that our culture has a greater hold over the imaginations of their own people than theirs does.
To the Average French Citizen, I imagine Spider-Man, Cheers and McDonald’s represent more or less what they do to Americans: a fun couple of hours, a few laughs, and something quick to scarf down when you’re in a hurry. Big deal.
But to the deep-thinking elites of Europe, these trends are catastrophic, and terrifying. For it shows them, yet again, that a mob of boorish, unsophisticated, common brutes – that’d be us – is able to produce art and music and culture that cleans the clock of any nation that lets it in the door.
Spider-Man and McDonalds, and the long lines of their own countrymen waiting eagerly for a taste of them, prove to them daily that the European cultural superiority that they so deeply believe in is…how do we say this delicately?…uh, wrong.
So, are we being an hegemony? Are we using some “authority over others” to force our cultural and political will on unsuspecting, defenseless people? Or do those people, from their own free will, choose to enjoy American movies and food and music and television because it has somehow managed to tap into the human spirit, into a sense of playfulness and freedom and above all, optimism --- things that all people crave, and that their own dark, brooding, pessimistic outlets have failed to deliver? Are these common Europeans being brainwashed by the orbiting Yankee Mind-Control Ray, or is the idea of a place where everybody knows your name or a beat-up teenage kid who can fly through canyons of skyscrapers on gossamer webs something that just about everyone wants to be a part of?
I studied film in college. I sat through Jules et Jim, The Bicycle Thief, 1900, Satyricon and The Grand Illusion. Watching them was work. I enjoyed just about all of these and many other mov -- sorry, films -- and I am a better person for having seen them, but some of them – like a recent Polish entry in the Academy Awards, “Life as a Fatal, Sexually Transmitted Disease,” well, that approached prolonged oral surgery in terms of its enjoyment value.
You don’t have to have the vast intellectual reserves of a French Minister of Culture to understand why our movies and music have such appeal abroad. They are, more often than not, each small ambassadors of freedom and optimism. From James Dean to Brad Pitt, Americans are cool; cool because they don’t spend their evening sitting around bumming cigarettes and discussing global warming. They have bad guys to fight and motorcycles to ride, vast stretches of open road to get lost in and a disdain for any authority whatsoever. Where the European hero is a deeply conflicted soul lost in an existentialist nightmare, the American counterpart is a member of a rag-tag group of Rebels flying out to destroy the Death Star. Or a no-nonsense cop who plays by his own rules. Or an ordinary person, who, as the result of chance (Spider-Man), determination (Batman) or accident of birth (Superman), uses amazing personal power to aid the weak and fight evil.
These are our myths. They lack the patina of history that elevates those of the Greeks and Norse and countless other mythologies. But they are not created in a vacuum. These stories come from our common heritage and our common beliefs. Our heroes are what we make them, and for this country, the most successful have been young men and women thrust into extraordinary circumstances, who fight evils and monsters and never, ever use their powers for personal gain.
Yes, these are fantasies. No, of course real Americans are not so altruistic. But these are the standards we create for ourselves, and these American heroes represent what we represent as a nation. Action over endless discussion and moral paralysis. Rebellion against authority. Defense of the weak and helpless. And most of all, the optimism of the happy ending.
We get a lot of criticism from our betters about how shallow and mindless the Hollywood ending is. Fair enough. It does turn its back on the untidiness of reality. But it is also an expression of how we would have things turn out in a perfect world, a world where freedom and justice triumph and reign. These are the things we believe in, and these are, not surprisingly, immensely attractive to the rest of the world.
A lot of the anti Americanism we here about is manufactured by the foreign media just like it is here.
My wife and I recently took in a Russian immigrant who says that millions of Russians would come here in a hot second if it were easier for them to do so. She says that as Russia becomes more like America the numbers who wish to come here will fall due to simple nationalism but they want to become more like America. Our friend has given us a real eye opening perspective.
Profound in it's comedy and irony.
Weimar Republic anyone???
Once againg, MSM has misread the input....
The Turd World loves the French, because they're LOSERS...
Losers find comfort by being with other LOSERS....
The Turd World loves a surrender monkey like France, they know they can defeat when the need arises....
A look at nearly every previous French colony, and you will find a backward country....
The French have raped and pillaged as few other countries, in their history.....and even now their "diplomacy" is frought with deceit, deception and treachery....
Fruck the Fench
Semper Fi
A barking dog never bites. And france is the barking dog.
What happened to the Russians?
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