Book Review: 'Our Oldest Enemy': We'll Never Have Paris

[Kellanved]

know French anti-Americanism well, because I've fought it a thousand times -- a phobic hatred of America, conceived of as a region not of the world but of Being, almost of the soul, lodged in the heart of my country's culture.

What I wasn't aware of is that the same fantastical way of transforming another country into a magnet for all the worst elements of one's own national ideology was at work in America. As I read ''Our Oldest Enemy,'' by John J. Miller and Mark Molesky, I discovered in the United States a parodic counterpart of French anti-Americanism, a Francophobia as absurd and as systematic as the anti-Americanism of the Parisian extreme left and the extreme right.

The book takes off from the hardly shocking cliche of a French-American friendship that has endured since the days of Lafayette in a serene harmony now fractured by the war in Iraq. We're given a more or less fair re-evaluation of certain episodes in the diplomatic history of our two countries (the ambivalence of the France of Louis XVI toward the young republic recently emancipated from England) and events of early American history (the massacre of over 50 civilians, in 1704, by a column of Indian and French soldiers, in Deerfield, Mass.). It re-examines, rightly, General de Gaulle's unfortunate tendencies (his withdrawing French troops from NATO; his distressing indulgence of the Soviet regime; his obsessive mistrust of an ''American-ness'' that, under the influence of Charles Maurras, he saw as a concentration of everything he hated most in the world). Sadly, the book then gets out of hand. In their eagerness to contrast evil France with a virtuous and radiant America, Miller, a national political reporter for National Review, and Molesky, who teaches history at Seton Hall University, offer us an assortment of arguments -- extravagant at times, nauseating at others -- intended to prove the perversity of the French mind.

Consider their use of a quotation from Francois Mitterand, the most pro-American French president of our time, to establish that France is ''at war with America.'' Or their implication that Mitterrand's successor, Jacques Chirac, applauded the destruction of a McDonald's by the followers of the antiglobalization sheep farmer Jose Bove.

...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/books/review/05LEVYL.html?oref=login

[rwenos]

1. Bienvenue a L' Amerika de Bush, Mon Ami

Welcome to our world, friend. Les Droitistes Americain are livin' high on the hog right now, as we say en la Oueste. (Apologies for the grammar errors, my 12 year old hasn't proofread this -- she's studied French for 7 years.)

The Francophiles among us would only remind you that these clowns may have forgotten the gifts the French have bestowed on us -- like, that Bartholdi sculpture in New York Harbor; a place on the Champs L'Elysee for Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence; the Franco-American naval victory in the Battle of Yorktown -- but there are plenty of us who remember.

Une soupcon du patience, nous amis Francais. Like an enema, this too shall pass.

[Dear Maggie]

2. It didn't used to be so

France has been a help to the USA http://www.valdezlink.com/viva_la_france.htm

and I love their national anthem!
http://www.valdezlink.com/media-mid/france_anthem.mid

But alas, maybe there are a lot of Arabic influence now, and they are not what they used to be?

[Kellanved]

3. Maybe indeed

It is always a bad sign when people try to explain things with "changes on the other side". All too often they mean "changes in reporting", "changes in what is considered Political Correct" or just "I am the same, so they must have changed".

Bottom line: explaining racism with "change" is wrong and a bad sign indeed - regardless of what side uses that particular explanation .