Funmurphys: the Blog

French Sophisticate

Nidra Poller is thinking about moving. As a Jew in France, she's considering leaving her once beloved adopted country and returning home:

That is what it boils down to. Things have gone from shouting "death to the Jews" to firebombing schools and synagogues, to persecution, attacks, even murder. We have Muslim rage in schools, hospitals, and courtrooms. Police headquarters are attacked, hospital personnel beaten, judges threatened. The Republic is under siege, and what are the French doing about it? They are trashing America.

This, it seems, is their new Maginot line: the sneer of hatred. Hand in hand with the government and the intellectual classes, the French media are channeling the national dismay over lost grandeur into contempt for America. Watch these suave Europeans, snickering to themselves because American soldiers are getting killed in Iraq. Is that (they sneer) any way to risk your life? Go on a crusade to fight incurable disease, cross in front of a moving car, smoke a cigarette. But fight to defend your own country? It’s indecent!

For me, the monuments are crumbling. The glistening golden dome of Les Invalides. The châteaux and the triumphal arches, the obelisks, the bux om fountains, the wrought-iron balconies, the slightly tipsy 18th-century apartment buildings, the rivers winding through those darling towns and cities. How can so much beauty cover such deep cowardice? I lash myself to the mast and close my senses to the sirens, while my heart rings with pride for "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

We are not free in France. I know the difference. I come from a free country. A rough and ready, clumsy, slapped together, tacky country where people say wow and gosh and shop at Costco. A country so vast I haven’t the faintest idea where I would put myself. A homeland I would have liked to keep at a distance, visit with pleasure, and leave with relief. A native land I walked out on with belated adolescent insouciance. A foreign land where I was born because Europe vomited up my grandparents as it is now coughing up me and mine.

Gosh. Wow. You're always welcome here, Nidra.

Come to Saint Louis. We have only two monuments -- the Arch and Stan Musual's Statue -- and a past that, like France's, was once pretty glorious, but it sure can feel like home.

Link via J Bowen at No Watermelons Allowed