Et ben…
A group of French schoolchildren has been forced to cancel a summer exchange trip to America after being told that the students were no longer welcome because of anti-French sentiment following opposition to war in Iraq.
The teenagers from Carcassonne, in south-west France, were told that four of the American families who had agreed to put them up had withdrawn the offer. Other host families, meanwhile, could not guarantee that the children would not be greeted with “unpleasantness.”
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- Mailer, in one of his early works (I forget which), talked about “the wad,” – his term for the ‘silent majority’ of Americans, and their dull, thuggish minds. I liked his choice of the word ‘wad,’ because to to me it’s vaguely ugly, as in ‘a wad of spit.’
The ignorant, jingoistic anti-French wave here has been quite sickening. And depressing as hell. Your anecdote about the students doesn’t surprise me, unfortunately. God help us.
— peggy Jun 12, 9:29am # - They can come stay with me as long as they’ll kick in for beer.
— Phineas Jun 12, 10:16am # - Classy.
— Clara Jun 12, 11:10am # - Oh, Phineas, wouldn’t you rather they smuggle in a nice little Margaux?
— gail Jun 12, 11:17am # - damn us,
to let the shenanigans of that idiot fool and
his cronies affect the lives of these young people.
IF such a thing were possible
l’Marquis would enjoy being the host to all of
these kids (oh, maybe they’ll have alongside
a fetching French Spinster with nice ankles as
a chaperone) plenty of room in chez d’Monquis
and we could put a tent out on the back lawn
of the estate to make their adventure more of
one, and they’ll be welcomed and feel right
at home here on the border of the Independent
Republic of Berkeley CA.
Oh, please, let there be a fetching French
Spinster alongside!
— jaypea Jun 12, 11:27am # - i’d seriously consider relinquishing my us citizenship for just one day on the canal du midi and see Carcassonne.
— jocelyn Jun 12, 11:57am # - Disgusting.
— Beerzie Boy Jun 12, 12:25pm # - Jesus. How long can this stupidity continue?
— language hat Jun 12, 12:34pm # - If I recall correctly, at the height of the war hype during the winter months, the same thing happened to a couple of German students who were hoping to be part of an exchange program.
Now, let’s see, if “old Europe” gets together, with its some 450 million people, has a burger & soda dumping party in the English Channel … where will that leave the “old” US?
— maria Jun 12, 12:36pm # - This Bush administration is positively viral, a real pox Americana.
— Mel Jun 12, 1:16pm # - It’s so damnably frustratingly perplexing to find me and mine in the vast minority. And find the bigoted, “freedom” advocating, apparent majority thinking in such damaging (to themselves as well) ruts. What was it this country was supposed to stand for? J’ai honte….
— moose Jun 12, 1:41pm # - This is vile, of course, but one has to wonder what kind of tapioca-brained nonsense the children of Carcassonne have been spared from witnessing. These jingoistic American families couldn’t have been our best cultural ambassadors in the first place, war or no war.
— Franklin Jun 12, 4:29pm # - I think I will go memorize the Canadian National Anthem now…. Seriously, though, I have for quite some time (was it since the vial of Talcum powder at the United Nations?) been disgusted to be an American.
— Doug Jun 12, 8:46pm # - Would there a way to assure these kids that by no means do all of us Americans feel that way. Not by a long shot. I’m so sick of being an Ugly American because of what those fascist twits in high political and corporate office are doing.
— SF Jun 12, 11:16pm # - my pervy husband just said he’d be happy to host some french school girls.
— denise Jun 13, 2:29am # - Make it stop! Make it stop!
— Terry Eaton Jun 13, 8:26am # - I just went to the States for a couple of weeks and all my reading material (on 24 hours’ worth of plane flights) was in French, and noone was even slightly rude. I was very disappointed.
— des Jun 13, 12:47pm # - too bad it couldn’t be the other way around. then the French could simply pull up the drawbridge and close the gates of the old walled city in Carcassonne. That would be cool to see.
— dlt Jun 13, 1:18pm # - Golly, the USA sucks.
Meanwhile, get a load of this
— zebob Jun 13, 2:05pm # - Why do you hate.. oh, nevermind.
— Aaron Jun 14, 12:41am # - That would be the hands-down, pants-wetting, snorting-coffee-out-the-nose funniest thing I’ve heard today if it wasn’t so fucking sad and misguided and stupid.
— matt Jun 14, 5:16am # - If they’re willing to cope with three children and three cats (I’m starting to feel like a variant of the man who went to St. Ives), I’d gladly have an exchange student here.
And you wonder why Americans are considered to be rather dim…..
— Tiffany Jun 14, 11:25am # - They’re more than welcome to visit Canada. Edmonton, Alberta is gorgeous right now, they can stay in my basement, and I’ll even take them to see the biggest damn mall in the world.
— Scottie Jun 14, 8:26pm # - Well, a link to the full news story would have been nice.
Re: “Americans are retarded, Bush is evil, etc.” – how surprising to see anti-American sentiment on the Internet! Thank you for stating your highly original opinion; brilliant individuals such as you are far and few between on websites like this. Where are your Free Mumia links? Your Noam Chomsky quotes? Come on, don’t be shy; out with it, you walking, talking stereotypes! Paint all of us with the same brush, life is easier that way.
America has strengths and weaknesses like any other country. In my comparative government class we were taught that the chief characteristic of French political culture was their distrust of organization and authority (hence the political turmoil throughout its history). I read a story about how Chirac condoned the bombing of a McDonalds by Jose Bove, and how the bomber has become something of a hero. Does this give me the right to say”Oh my god, stupid French people! Go eat some cheese! Did you get SARS in your wine?” etc. No, because it looks dumb when you say dumb stuff like that.
Anti-American stupidity like replying to one isolated incident of jingoism as being just another example of how Americans are trash, etc. is no different. (Yes, I know the commenters didn’t literally say that “Americans are trash.”)
And frankly, by spreading news bits like this around the Internet, we only help to perpetuate the kind of petty drivel that is supposed to be journalism. Stories like this are crafted so as to elicit kneejerk responses like the ones made by the other commenters. Somehow I feel that if we ignored news like this, it wouldn’t be reported. Whatever.
— Warren Jun 15, 4:50am # - There is a link to the entire story in the first line.
While perhaps not overwhelmingly significant, I found the story particularly sad not only because children are paying the consequences of adults’ narrow-mindedness, once again, preventing a situation that could in fact have helped dispel so much silly misunderstanding, but especially because it’s an exchange programme that’s existed for more than 20 years, and you’d expect that perhaps the positive elements of past years would have outweighed this “knee jerk reaction” to current anti-French propaganda.
— gail Jun 15, 6:06am # - Dear French schoolchildren,
Come to Canada. You’re euros will go even further here. There is a rumour that some of the people who live here speak your language, although I’ve never met them. You will be welcome.
Bring wine and unpasteurised cheeses.
— John Hudson Jun 16, 3:32am # - How ‘pleasant’ are the French to visiting Americans? Honestly…..
— z Jun 17, 12:58pm # - Come on over and find out.
Honestly.
— a Jun 17, 3:06pm # - I spent a lot of time explaining to my French pupils that all the Americans that I have contact with are disgusted and ashamed of the anti- French attitude. Those kids must be so disappointed in losing thier holiday
— Anji Jun 20, 10:10am # - It seemed like a joke at first: A handful of restaurants changing the names of their French fries to “freedom fries,” a few bartenders pouring French wine down street drains and a chain of French-owned hotels lowering their tricolor flags. The craziest idea, appropriately enough, came from Congress, when Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, a Florida Republican, proposed exhuming the patriot graves of American soldiers buried in France and bringing them back to the U.S.
In this context, a few French schoolkids unable to visit with US families is kinda trivial.
To France, however, the current American animosity is no laughing matter. French exports to the U.S. are falling faster than guillotines during the Reign of Terror. They dropped by 17% from February through April, when French President Jacques Chirac’s intransigence over Iraq was at its height. America’s paltry presence at this week’s Paris Air Show was more like an absence (as a French deconstructionist might say). What’s more, American tourism has tumbled by a quarter, costing the French economy nearly $1 billion so far this year in money Americans haven’t spent tipping rude waiters.
This is rather impressive for a boycott that has no formal sponsor. After all, the White House isn’t calling on citizens to quit drinking Evian water or driving on Michelin tires. Somehow a word-of-mouth movement has caught on and is causing the French government to think hard about how to respond.
The French Tourist Board took a first step when it asked Woody Allen to tell Americans that it’s time to get over the recent unpleasantness. “I would hope that now the two countries could put all that behind them and start to build on what really has been a great, great friendship,” says Mr. Allen in a promotional video. “I will not have to ‘freedom kiss’ my wife when all I want to do is French kiss her.” This was a mistake. Most Americans really don’t want to think about Allen so much as giving his wife a peck on the cheek.
Yet the French have stuck with this theme of “a great, great friendship.” Last week, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin met with American politicians and business leaders in Paris and handed out a 1781 letter by Benjamin Franklin celebrating the Franco-American alliance that achieved victory at Yorktown.
But the great, great friendship is really a myth, going right back to the period Mr. Raffarin seeks to glorify. What happened at Yorktown was the result of cold-blooded diplomacy. “It was a power struggle of the Old World [against the British], not a concern with America, that brought about the French intervention,” wrote the historian Barbara Tuchman. For three centuries, French actions toward America haven’t been marked by too much warmth or kindness.
Before the Revolution, American colonists spent years fighting the French and Indian Wars—so named because the French and Indians were their enemies, capable of exactly the kind of brutality depicted by James Fenimore Cooper in “The Last of the Mohicans.” After Yorktown, the French began double-dealing as soon as they thought they would benefit from it.
At the Treaty of Paris negotiations, the French crown secretly and successfully urged Britain to deny the colonists’ claims west of the Alleghenies. Relations were no better during the early days of the American republic. One of the first ministers France sent to the U.S. was Citizen Genet, a man who did everything he could to undermine President Washington’s determination to keep his country neutral in the war France had declared on Britain in 1793. A few years later the French foreign minister Talleyrand demanded a large bribe before he would meet with American diplomats in what became known as the XYZ Affair. This flap led to a series of naval skirmishes—the first war waged by the U.S. against anybody.
Andrew Jackson nearly declared war on France in the 1830s when Paris failed to pay reparations for its assaults on American shipping. During the Civil War, Napoleon III looked for ways to aid the Confederacy and went so far as to install a puppet monarch in Mexico whose main purpose was to keep the U.S. from extending its influence into Latin America and the Caribbean.
The 20th century was little better. The real struggle at the Versailles Peace Conference ending World War I wasn’t between the Allies and the Central Powers but between the U.S. and France, which insisted on onerous punishments for Germany. Twenty-five years later a young French journalist, Hubert Beuve-Mry, wrote on the eve of D-Day: “The Americans constitute a real danger for France.” He went on to found and edit Le Monde, France’s most important newspaper and a proud bastion of anti-Americanism ever since.
The Cold War was no improvement. In 1966, France pulled out of NATO. In 1986, as a kind of dress rehearsal for its latest recalcitrance, it refused to let American jets fly over its territory on their way to attacking Libya in retaliation for Gadhafi-sponsored terrorism.
But what about the cultural side of the French “alliance”? Surely deep affinities exist, whatever the clashes of statesmen and kings. It is true that Gertrude Stein had settled in Paris in the 1920s and that Hemingway came to visit her there, along with any number of expatriate writers and intellectuals. What this “lost generation” found, unfortunately, was yet another myth—of alienated artistic “authenticity.” For years now it has drawn hordes of college students and misguided romantics to Paris, where they put on black turtlenecks, smoke Gauloise cigarettes and look for the next Picasso. Jean-Paul Sartre added to the myth a couple of decades later, making authenticity a whole philosophy of life even as he agitated for the Communist Party.
And then there is Michel Foucault, required reading these days for American students who aspire to “understand” the true “power relations” that “oppress society.” He, too, was a product of the French intellectual milieu, if milieu is the right word. Of such bogus attractions, prodded along by ponderous French films, is so much French tourism made.
The recent disagreement over Iraq is often viewed as an ugly blemish on an otherwise beautiful friendship. But it’s more accurate to see France acting in a predictable pattern of high-handed obstruction and obfuscation. As France tries to repair the damage it has done to its image in the U.S., the rest of us are left to wonder: Why didn’t somebody think of a boycott sooner?
— --JJM Jun 22, 6:56pm #
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