AMERICA'S FLAILING FRANCOPHOBES
by Thomas Fleming
Neoconservative hatemongers are stirring up the Francophobic bigotry that lies just beneath the surface of the American mind. Not content with hurling the charge of anti-Semitism against anyone who wins an argument with Bill Kristol (the line would extend around the world) or happens to have something (a foundation, a magazine, a job) they want, neoconservatives who have never fired a pellet gun or put on a pair of boxing gloves are deriding the French for cowardice and calling for boycotts against French wine. The assembled patriots and heroes of the House of Representatives, not wanting to be outdone, have even renamed the French fries and French toast served in their sumptuous, tax-subsidized restaurant. I hope they also rename French doughnuts, which used to be known as German doughnuts, before an earlier set of chauvinist cretins changed the name.
What a country.
Picking on the French is a natural reflex for Americans. Our British ancestors, after conquering France in the entirely futile and unjust Hundred Years War, demonized their victims and burned Joan of Arc, one of the greatest women in our history, at the stake as witch. The French have been fair game ever since. Although France was the boldest military nation in Europe of the past 500 years, English novelists consistently represented French characters as mincing aesthetes tradition brilliantly satirized by W.S. Gilbert in Ruddigore, in which a hearty British sailor represents a British privateer’s decision to flee a French frigate as a gallant action:
For to fight a French fal lal,
It’s like hitting of a gal.
It’s a lubberly thing for to do.
And we with all our faults,
We were sturdy British salts,
Who took pity on the poor polly-vous,
Do you see
We took pity on the poor polly-vous.
Ruddigore was written over a hundred years before Rupert Murdoch created the Weekly Standard as one of his weapons in his campaign to undermine the United States.
Anti-French hysteria reached its peak in Mark Twain’s worst book, Innocents Abroad, and old Mark—Confederate deserter turned court jester to the plutocrats—could always get a laugh by playing to the lowest qualities of the American character—our hatred of every excellence we are incapable of. If the French are the most civilized nation on earth, so much the worse for civilization. “Mankind,” he used to say, “is somewhere between the angels and the French.”
In Twain’s case, the humor is both faux-naif and two-edged, aimed as much at himself and his countrymen as at the sophisticated foreigners, and his Joan of Arc is a remarkably sympathetic depiction of the French saint. On the other hand, the neoconservatives and their pseudo-conservative allies—Messers Limbaugh and O’Reilly—are no laughing matter. They could not tell a joke to save their lives; their knowledge of the world outside the petty urban hells in which they are confined approaches zero; and their patriotism is on par with their moral conscience.
Why do I say they are not patriotic? A patriot loves his nation and his people. Neoconservatives hate the real America. At best, we represent a four-hour delay between appointments in New York and Los Angeles; at worst, we are pitchfork-wielding rednecks, fundamentalists, kukluxers, wobblies, and Coughlinites who prefer reruns of The A-Team to reruns of Friends. We buy our clothes at Marshall’s instead of Saks or Brooks Brothers. We still eat fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy for Sunday dinner, and we drink tap water, for goodness sake, not Evian (made in France!).
They want our boys and girls to die for their political schemes, but you will never find a neoconservative in combat. Norman Podhoretz was in the army, but to fathom the depth of neoconservative contempt for America, you have only to read the account of his days in the army in Making It (what, I wonder, is the “it” in question? I have never heard that Norman ever made anything—not a poem, not a house, not a model airplane—except a fool of himself.)
I succeeded in staying out of the military during the Vietnam War, and I would never assume the right to tell others to do a “duty” that I shirked. So much for patriotism—and moral conscience. Even in little matters the neoconservatives display their immorality. They are always in favor of bombing, embargoing, and boycotting anyone they disagree with. The fact that the US bombing of Yugoslavia killed as many people as Serbs and Albanians were killed in the preceding year of ethnic strife in Kosovo means nothing to them. The fact that as many as half a million Iraqi children have died as a direct result of the embargo on Iraq that they support is all the fault of Saddam Hussein. The fact that French farmers, businessmen, and workers, whose political views we know nothing of, will be hurt by any boycott of French products will not trouble the “consciences” of people who have never been to a farm, run a business, or done a day of honest work in their lives.
I love my country, knowing all the limitations and frailties of the American people, and I respect and admire the French, who have been a far greater nation than we shall ever be, that is, if greatness means anything loftier than money and bombs. Jacques Chirac, whom I have for many years regarded as the least admirable of French politicians, is now showing greater courage than Mitterand, national socialist though he was, ever mustered. He is playing a dangerous game. If he loses, France will return to the American kennel as a whipped dog, but if he wins, De Gaulle’s dream of an independent France within an independent Europe might actually be realized. Such a result would be good for France, good for Europe, and good for the United States, which would have to give up the neoconservative fantasy of global hegemony.
God bless America!
Vive la France.
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