Trust the French?
Posted on 02/10/2003 9:24:30 AM PST by kattracks
PARIS (Reuters) - It's the diplomatic equivalent of water rolling off a duck's back. Bashing the French does not beat them down -- au contraire, it only makes them more convinced they must be right.
The air has been thick with insult these days, both over the Atlantic and across the Channel, as the United States and Britain pile pressure and scorn on their reluctant ally to support an attack against Iraq.
"Cheese-eating surrender monkeys," "the rat that roared," "the petulant prima donna of realpolitik" -- the epithets flung at France by the U.S. and British media can easily make a reader forget they're talking about America's oldest ally.
U.S. officials have hardly been diplomatic either. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has written off France as part of "old Europe" and said its opposition to emergency NATO measures to boost Turkey's defenses is a disgrace.
If all this was meant to bully France into changing its mind, it's not working.
France's reaction has been to redouble its efforts against a U.S.-led war, blocking NATO war preparations in Turkey and plugging for an extension of United Nations arms inspections that an exasperated Washington insists are now useless.
Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the easy-going prime minister who rarely speaks about foreign policy, shot back last Friday at President Bush's "the game is over" statement by saying: "It's not a game, it's not over."
FRENCH LOGIC
Paris media report on the anti-French vitriol seething through U.S. and British opinion columns with an air of bemused incomprehension, as if to say: What a faux pas! How could those Anglo-Saxons be so unreasonable?
"The French don't have a very good press in the United States these days," the left-wing daily Liberation wrote with sublime understatement Monday.
The conservative daily Le Figaro echoed pride in France's long tradition of Cartesian logic when it praised Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin's plan for reinforced arms inspections in Iraq.
"Even if it worsens French-American relations, the attempt is in any event quite logical," it observed.
Pascal Boniface, a leading French world affairs analyst, said Americans suffered from a Francophobia as bad as the anti-Americanism that's politically correct in France.
"I was in the U.S. last week and couldn't turn on the television without hearing nonsense about France," he said.
Anti-Americanism has such deep roots in French thinking that no less than three serious books on the subject were published last autumn. Bashing from across the Atlantic hardly counts because the French do not take the bashers seriously.
France, as the new books show, believes it is special because the values of liberty, equality and fraternity proclaimed by the 1789 French Revolution have universal appeal.
But the United States, which declared its independence in 1776 with a similarly universal view of human rights, has long since overtaken France on the world stage.
As the Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot put it in an article echoing the anti-French mood in the United States:
"France has been in decline since, oh, about 1815, and it isn't happy about it. What particularly galls the Gauls is that their rightful place in the world has been usurped by the gauche Americans, with their hamburgers and blue jeans."
BOTH SIDES' WORST SIDES
What's worse, both states are led by men seen by the other side as caricatures of all they can't stand in their partner.
Bush's folksy talk, religious piety and unilateral stands go down in France like nails scratching on a blackboard.
"Bush crystallizes all that we hate in America," Pascal Bruckner, a usually pro-American essayist, wrote last year.
President Jacques Chirac and the flamboyant Villepin embody for Americans a haughty arrogance and spineless opportunism they say is the trademark of French diplomacy.
To rub it in, U.S. commentators recall French collaboration with Nazi Germany and the U.S. and British-led liberation of France -- a memory the Gaullist tradition prefers to play down.
In one of the most venomous articles of recent days, the Wall Street Journal ran a comment by author Christopher Hitchens denouncing Chirac as "a positive monster of conceit ... the abject procurer for Saddam ... the rat that tried to roar."
"Let's hope for Jacques Chirac's sake that he doesn't read the Wall Street Journal and the Elysee Palace forgot to include it in its press review yesterday," Liberation wrote in a short report on the broadside from the U.S. business daily.
Trust the French?
Hmm. There is a family of pre-vertebrates called Chordata I believe. Chordates dont have a spine, just a solid chord that goes where the spine ought to be that can be bent and flexed into any position or orientation depending on events and circumstances.
Some common examples are the spinless sea squirt and the lancelet which tends to bury itself in the sand whenever danger approaches.
All chordates are deuterostomes, meaning that the anus develops before the mouth (From a taxonomy website. snicker)
As one can see, there are many resemblences between the primitive chordata and the French!
Looks like a good definition of a lawyer, although Chordata don't chase ambulances nor advertise on telephone book covers.
There is no Francophobia in the U.S.
Americans have no fear of the French any more than we fear any other loathesome weasel-ly varmits.
I don't know, but the issue deserves research.
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