Leif:
Years ago my professional reason for being (in French it is something like "raison detre," but try as I have, I cannot pronounce it properly, so I don't use it) was creative thinking and creative problem solving laced through the K-12 curriculum. I spoke about it from the platform, I wrote about it, and I demonstrated it in K-12 classrooms. But the public wasn't so much interested in whether the next generation could think as it was in whether the next generation could read pap before their Hungarian age-mates could. So, being that "public" in "public schools" means ownership, we went with early pap-reading.
Ed:
For whatever it is worth, the very useful phrase raison d'etre ("reason for existence") is pronounced--if you will buy my half-assed explanation--"raise on deytra." Most people today, of course, avoid French like the plague--fearful of being dubbed a Francophile, (which is just below Pedophile as I understand it)--which is why I try to use it often. I love to see the necks get redder.
Leif:
Many thanks. I will practice the pronunciation, and use it ruthlessly, because I also want to tweak the morons. I have another reason for that. I'm a section short of finishing Cokie Roberts' Founding Mothers, a very different history of about 1740-1790 than we get in our history books. One of the conclusions is making clear that we wouldn't have made it had it not been for the dreaded French. They saved our collective behind, with troops, certainly, but most critically, with cash when it was most needed, for example when we defaulted on Spain's loan. I had heard about that, but Roberts made the instances so human that what I took into the read became part of the story rather than chapters in history books. We may never be able to repay France for its contribution.
Ed:
I really do hate it when large groups of people decide to hate some other group (or nation)--and who then try by every possible means, subtle and unsubtle, to shove everyone else into conformity, into accepting their "party line." The current villification of the French people, and of anything "French," is just another prime example of the booboisie (Mencken's word, of course) in action. This trend is marked, of course, by a collective boycott of French wines and products, by "American fries," by a refusal to travel to France, by making fun of any use of the French language, of any reference to the art or culture of that country, and--perhaps especially--by depicting anyone who expresses any admiration for anything French in the most vile terms one can call upon (in their minds)--"queers," pansies, debauched liberals, cowards, dupes, and so on. (That is an issue Kerry--he and Teresa both being known as Francophiles for years--should have taken head-on in his campaign, but which he ducked and swerved to avoid like the plague. I'll bet now, in retrospect, he wishes he had been more forthright on that issue, as well as others.)
I say all this, by the way, despite the fact that my wife and I were often treated very shabbily by a lot of the French merchants on our visits to that country. We were treated wonderfully, however, by many others that we met. It is certainly true that a lot of the French who, through their business activities have to deal with tourists on a daily basis, have come over many years to despise Americans (and other "rich" tourists). Travellers, like ourselves, can, indeed, catch the brunt of that. There is a history to these resentments, however, that we ought to be big enough, and sophisticated enough, to understand.
In WW II, we were not bombed, economically devastated, and humiliated, as the French were, by having jack-booted Nazis running around like schoolyard bullies shoving us around and looting our country. At the end of that war, the French had a lot of rebuilding to do--but the American business class was already booming, and we, of course, were the "arrogant winners" who singlehandedly won the war, and saved their bacon. We were all over Europe and France in the next ten years reminding them of how great and rich and wonderful we were. Our language was making inroads on theirs, horrifying the traditionalists (and "dumbing down" their culture as our "awesome" language so often dumbs down our own). And we were spending money over there for years like there was no bottom to the well. It's not that we weren't generous: quite the opposite--but think of the effect on them, struggling to rebuild and going without a lot of their pre-war niceties and even essentials, when we would casually throw down on the table as a "luncheon tip" an amount equal to a half a week's French wages (for the typical French working man). That is not how to win friends and "affection."
At the same time we didn't hesitate to "plunder" the country of the things we could see were valuable--often at cut-rate prices because they so desperately needed the money. And, of course, we (especially the "nouveaux riche" Americans who had no background in how to handle themselves) took pains to carefully explain to all the poor Froggies how much better everything we had back in the states was than the awful, second-rate crap they had to deal with.
And, of course, we deplored everything that was different from what we had very recently become used to at home. Almost everything French, let's face it, was "cheap, dirty and tawdry." And let's not even mention their sculpture, art, books and movies. ("I tell you Gertrude, I couldn't take the kids anywhere with all those filthy statues and pictures just everywhere! All they think about, those people, is sex!" )
Yes, there is a long history of deplorable conduct on both sides that intelligent Americans and French citizens have to recognize, deal with, and overcome to appreciate the best that each society has to offer to the other.
A good place to start is with the long history of friendship between our countries that dates back to our very inception as a nation (as you, and Cokie, so correctly point out, Leif). It's also easy to depict an entire people as a nation of cowards because they had to surrender in WW II to a force that completely overwhelmed and outgunned them in every way. That is like depicting the surviving Americans who finally surrendered at Bataan (finally outgunned and overwhelmed by superior Japanese forces) as cowards--when, indeed, as we know, exactly the opposite was true. The fact that the French defenses collapsed so quickly was not a measure of French courage or cowardice (as so many Americans believe today): it was a measure of the total bankruptcy of the entrenched military and political thinking of the bureacracy that dominated that pre-War country and who, by the stupidity of their decisions, undermined any chance the common French soldier had of defending against the German war juggernaut that rolled over and around them.
One last personal note: when Aaron Bank, my former commanding officer in Special Forces, was a young US army officer in the OSS, he jumped behind the lines into occupied France in 1944 as part of a three-man Jedburgh team--and the other two members were both Frenchmen trained in England for the mission. For months Bank and his team, and the forces they armed and raised, fought behind the lines as part of the French resistance, carrying out a variety of covert espionage and then other open assaults on the German forces. During that time, Bank knew that to be caught meant torture of the most vicious kind (as only the Gestapo could do such things) and almost certain death--and he also knew that his daily life and security was in French hands. Any French person he had contact with could have been the instrument of his capture--but no one ever gave him up. (Interestingly, he was in his late 90s before he first learned the real identity of one of his chief guerrilla leaders in those days--so tight was the security they all worked under.)
In 1944, Aaron Bank was in French hands, and he was in good hands, and he formed some friendships there that lasted his entire life. I really think it is time we grew up as a people--really grew up--and it is more than time for us to look around and recognize who our real friends are--or could be, if we used some common sense--in a troubled world.
Barb:
Beautifully put, Ed. Unfortunately, too many Americans are politically unsophisticated, see everything as black or white/my way or the highway, and are put off by all things foreign. Would like to take all those people and sprinkle them around the world in a situation that would make them totally dependent on the locals. Might make our country grow up a bit. Maybe.
They've all traveled a lot, these three. I haven't, but I know where our Statue of Liberty came from, and I know that during the Revolutionary War, LaFayette was boots on the ground when it counted. Not only that, I'll defend our French Bakeries and those pastrys that nobody else can match for pure ecstacy in the mouth.
Take care of our libraries and, as Barb said, maybe some of our idiots can learn some history.
Wrap.
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