The French Connection and America’s Cultural Amnesia

The French Connection and America’s Cultural Amnesia

I’m the first to admit it: its fun to mock the French. Whether you are taking shots at France’s perceived arrogance or its pitiful record in recent wars, Le Republique is an easy target. Even the French language, with its abundance of silent syllables, is open to ridicule. But while I am eager to tease the French, I am also the first to admit I do it largely in jest. After all, I don’t know any French people. I’ve never been to the country, let alone lived there. Who am I to pronounce judgment with any degree of accuracy?

While my France-bashing is confined largely to crude jokes and occasional digs at policy blunders, the attitude toward France harbored by many in the American punditry borders on irrational, pathological hatred. Talking heads constantly vilify French leaders and call for boycotts of all goods produced by “the cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and then have the audacity to complain of rising anti-American sentiment in France (as if they should somehow be expected to take everything we dish out with a smile).

This inane petulance reached a boiling point with the recent civil unrest across France’s urban centers. As cars burned and chaos ensued, America’s opinion-mongers reveled in glee. Suzanne Fields, true to form, found a way to blame the riots on “multiculturalism,” claiming that France’s tolerance of radical Islam was to blame.

As per usual, Fields is grossly misinformed. France has long been a predominantly secular nation, with a legal tradition that excludes religion from state affairs. It is this secular posture that drew the country criticism from Pope Benedict and culminated in the controversial head scarf ban. That France would embrace “radical Islam” is an inherent contradiction.

Ironically, Fields also had the nerve to complain of French anti-Americanism in the same column in which she touted a book called “Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese." I suppose the moral here is that bigotry is A-OK for everyone except for America.

Appearing right beside Fields on the op-ed section of my newspaper that day was Cal Thomas, who took Fields’ erroneous “tolerance” argument one step further and basically implied that France coddled terrorists. But if the underlying message is that this was what France deserved for not participating in the invasion of Iraq, then how does he explain the vicious terrorist attacks in the UK and Spain (which, at the time, was a coalition partner)?

Furthermore, Thomas warns that “France will be America’s future” unless we start converting Muslims to Christianity, ASAP. If and when we reach that point, there would be no need to fight the terrorists. They, in causing us to destroy our fundamental religious freedoms, would have already won.

Even the paper’s own editorial had a hand in the blame game, placing fault for the riots on France’s pitiful public housing and failed welfare programs.

In all three instances, the rioting was used as an excuse to justify whatever solutions were already desired. There was no attempt made on the part of the authors to show causation. Instead, they merely offered a few shallow criticisms and hoped people would see things their way. To draw a parallel, I can blame the destruction on French cars being too easily combustible, point to the fact that many French cars did in fact explode and have as much of a substantive argument as some of these folks.

Or, I can be honest and definitively say that I do not know what caused the rioting. My guess would be that it stemmed from a variety of factors, some of them social, many of them economic. As per the solution, I can only offer this: let the French figure it out. The last thing they need is an obtrusive American “diagnosis” of all that ills them. After all, it unnerves us in the states to no end when people suggest we emulate Europe. Why, therefore, should we reciprocate?

The final point I’d like to make pertains not to the quality of the negative assessments of the French situation, but to why these assessments were made to begin with. Schadenfreude (laughing at others’ pain) was out in full effect on our side of the Atlantic recently, but it was notably absent in France when we were in crisis mode.

Just a few short months ago, Hurricane Katrina hit and unleashed a torrent of destruction. Did the French mock our response efforts and lack of preparedness? If they did, I didn’t notice. I was too busy paying attention to their relief effort, which included 600 tents, 1000 beds, three pumps, three water purification stations, rescue personnel, misc. supplies and a letter of condolence from Jacques Chirac. It is also worth noting that this generous offer was initially declined by the U.S. government.

But why stop there. Let’s go back to 9/11/2001. Did France tell us – as some on the American religious right did – that we got what we deserved? Or was the leading French newspaper, Le Monde, too busy issuing sympathetic front-page headlines that proclaimed “Today, We Are All Americans”? It would appear that the hot-headed, Francophobic American punditry experienced a case of highly selective cultural amnesia when it came time to write about the rioting.

Even given this lengthy diatribe, it’s unlikely that I’ll stop making French jokes. Nor will I suddenly pretend to understand or like those folks across the pond. But I will leave them be. And that is all I ask of anyone reading this.