"That title is offensive."
Posted on 01/10/2006 1:16:19 PM PST by Brian Allen
President Bush has my total sympathy. Aside from having to spend all his vacations in Crawford, the thing I would hate the most about his job would be having to deal with France.
The French aren't all terrible. I have to keep reminding myself. After all, Voltaire, Toulouse-Lautrec and Claude Debussy, were French. "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "Les Miserables" were written by a Frenchman. A Frenchman designed and built the Statue of Liberty. Louis Pasteur was French and so was Hilaire Degas. The truth, however, is that they all lived a very long time ago. The closer one comes to recent times, the harder it is to find a good one.
What makes the French so appalling isn't that they haven't turned out a Victor Hugo in a couple of hundred years. Who has? What makes them so insufferable is their constant air of superiority. They keep posturing as if they wrote the book on ethics, values and culture, when all they've really been churning out are cream sauces, red wine and over-priced frocks.
Much has been made of the French fondness for Jerry Lewis movies. What they love about them is that they think his loud, brash, dull-witted simpletons are realistic portrayals of the typical American. We in America like to think guys like Jimmy Stewart and Tom Hanks are us, but the French know better. But, then, they always do.
Sometimes, I think the French were put on earth for no other reason than to give Germany an over-inflated sense of their military prowess. Other times, I can't come up with any reason at all.
France's idea of military leaders have been Napoleon, who, like Hitler, couldn't defeat the Russians or the English; the anti-Semitic generals who framed Capt. Dreyfus for treason; Marshal Henri Petain, who collaborated with the Nazis; and Gen. Charles de Gaulle, whose army was routed by the Huns in about a week. It's odd the way people always make fun of the Italian army, and pretend the French are born warriors. In a war between the two, the Italians would clobber them in a day and a half, and then write a very nice opera about it.
Culturally speaking, France's major contributions during the past century were a couple of asterisks named Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. They promoted a French item called Existentialism. It was less a philosophy than a fad. Think of it as EST with a side order of escargots. Its main tenet was that life is pointless. Actually, it was Existentialism that was pointless. But it provided French guys, who wore black turtlenecks and smoked cheap cigarettes in Parisian cafes, with world-weary pick-up lines to use on girls from Kansas.
Existentialism was the philosophical equivalent of auteurism -- that silly critical con game propagated by Cahiers du Cinema. Its disciples would go so far as to insist, for instance, that "The Crimson Kimono" and "The Magnificent Matador" were better movies than "It's a Wonderful Life" and "On the Waterfront" because Sam Fuller and Budd Boetticher were auteurs while Frank Capra and Elia Kazan were merely directors.
During a heat wave a while back, over 12,000 elderly people died in France. What does that tell us? For one thing, it confirms that France is a third world nation. How else to explain their lack of air conditioning in the 21st century? Believe me, a country that likes to smoke, but not to bathe, is not a country that should turn its collective back on air conditioning.
What else does the death of those 12,000 old people tell us? Well, obviously -- and as usual -- it tells us that the French can not take the heat.
As for their own reaction to the enormous tragedy, it seems that the Frogs, a notoriously unsentimental people, have chosen to look upon it as merely the thinning of le herd.
Burt Prelutsky has been a humor columnist for the L.A. Times and a movie critic for Los Angeles magazine. He is the author of Conservatives are from Mars (Liberals are from San Francisco).
Copyright © 2006 Townhall.com
HehHehHehHeh
OH MAN! That was funny. I am going to laugh for hours thinking about that one.
French Doors are the most un-secure of any door style.........That's why they call them French Doors.........
Not really. They tried it in WWII.
After it was obvious the Germans were destroying the French Army, Mussolini took the opportunity to plunge the famous dagger into his neighbor's back.
Unfortunately for Musso, the Italian Army was quickly routed by the few French soldiers on that frontier. A counter-invasion of Italy was prevented only by the French surrender to the Germans.
The Italians had essentially the same experience when they invaded Greece from Albania later in the war. Despite huge advantages in manpower and armament, they got clobbered and were pursued back into Albania by the Greeks.
You can make an excellent case that this was the turning point in WWII, as Hitler was more or less forced to invade the Balkans to save the Italians. This delayed his invasion of Russia by two months or more, leaving him with not quite enough time to capture Moscow before winter.
Not really. They tried it in WWII..."
It's worse than that, even. Back in 1935, they decided that they would take a few days and roll over Ethiopia, of all places! Six months later they were still "valiantly making headway" against resistance armed with primitive weapons!
In the 1890s they invaded Ethopia and actually managed to be defeated. Machine guns and mortars against spears, and they still lost.
The 1935 invasion was supposed to "remove the stain" on Italian honor. As you point out, it did no such thing.
Contributions of France? Worse than existentialism, far worse, they gave the world socialism. The French Revolution was the progenitor of socialism and, after it has sufficiently evolved, Communism.
On the other hand, the French have Texas-sized egos without the concommittant gentility of the latter people.
To say nothing of the fact that Cahiers du Cinema once rated "Young Mr. Lincoln" one of the ten greatest movies of all time.
Capra and Kazan both have a considerable Auterist following. It's not a con it makes perfect sense. A movie is the product of the Director more then the writer more often then not.
To do them justice, the best of them were killed off in WWI, what's left are the descendants of the dregs.
<< In a war between the two, the Italians would clobber them in a day and a half, and then write a very nice opera about it.
Not really. They tried it in WWII. >>
No "they" did not.
"He" did.
"They" had no heart for it.
And did in "him" instead.
And that was then.
And this is now.
And in a war between the two, the Italians would clobber them in a day and a half, and then write a very nice opera about it.
And perform it magnificently!
The 1935 invasion was supposed to "remove the stain" on Italian honor. As you point out, it did no such thing..."
Tremendous piece of history! I didn't know that. Thanks.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.