Funmurphys: the Blog

The Triumph of Hope over Experience

Posts Tagged France

French Sophisticate

Mar 19

Posted by Kevin Murphy in International Politics | No Comments

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

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Chirac and the French

Feb 18

Posted by Kevin Murphy in International Politics | No Comments

There’s a lot of French bashing going on these days. Roy Blunt made jokes about France at the Missouri GOP convention. Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys is a common description. Well, count me out on the French bashing, for a couple of reasons. On the military side, let me say just one word – Verdun. The joke about French rifle — never fired and dropped only once — not funny. Yes, the French capitulated in WWII – after the Brits were driven from the field (without their weapons, BTW) and the Germans thoroughly whupped them with the blitzkrieg. In some ways, its not clear that the French have ever recovered from WWI with its devastating loss of people or WWII with its humbling blow to their pride. And on the personal side, I have to say my own limited experience with the French runs counter to the stereotype of the aloof snob. I found them as warm and friendly as any other group. So while I think their political classes these days are deplorable, I don’t think that warrants a general attack on the people themselves.

Jacques Chirac, however, has slimed himself: 

“These countries have been not very well behaved and rather reckless of the danger of aligning themselves too rapidly with the American position. It is not really responsible behavior. It is not well brought-up behavior. They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet. I felt they acted frivolously because entry into the European Union implies a minimum of understanding for the others,” Chirac said. 

Chirac called the letters “infantile” and “dangerous,” adding: “They missed a great opportunity to shut up. Romania and Bulgaria were particularly irresponsible. If they wanted to diminish their chances of joining Europe they could not have found a better way,” Chirac said. 

When asked why he wasn’t similarly critical of the EU nations that signed the letter, Chirac said: “When you are in the family … you have more rights than when you are asking to join and knocking on the door.” 

After that temper tantrum, Chirac has shown himself to be far worse than Bush. He clearly told the “junior” members to shut up and do as they are told by the senior, ie France and Germany, members. And it isn’t just Chirac, European Commission President Romano Prodi said he was saddened rather than angry with the candidates because their pro-Americanism was a signal they had failed to understand that the EU is more than a mere economic union. 

“I would be lying it I said I was happy,” he told reporters. “I have been very, very sad, but I am also patient by nature, so I hope they will understand that sharing the future means sharing the future.” 

When all the new members join European Union, the influence of France and Germany within it is going to be diluted. And for now, anyway, all the Central and Eastern European countries that are joining still look to the US for leadership and don’t feel the need to be a counterweight to US power and influence, which seems to be the overriding foreign policy principle of France and Germany these days. Given their much different recent political history, that attitude may last awhile.

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