Letters to the Editor
MacK..
Published Letters: 474 Editor's Choice: 48
-
France and the US
[Read the article: "Hillary equals France"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I spend a lot of time, indeed lived, in France and the US, the UK, Ireland, Belgium and Japan. What always strikes about the US and France is in many respects how similar both countries are. For example, France (unlike the UK) is willing to embrace "le Grand Projet," big projects and big ideas, like the A380, the Millau Viaduct, the Arianne rocket. The French have ambition and a sense that as a country and a culture, they still have a historical mission to spread values through the world (not conquest a la Wilhelm II and Hitler), and a good values at that; the US has the same sense of mission, one harnessed for good by Rooseveldt, Kennedy (the Peace Corp) and warped to its own purposes by the Bush administration. The French also have an annoying arrogance, a sense of being special, ditto Americans. The United States has New Yorkers, the French have Parisians, outside each city its archetypal indegens are roundly loathed for the rudeness and affectation.
One thing both countries also share is a bizarre view of the other. The French left and center have a really bizarre view of what the United States is like, a kind of crazed willingness to believe that the US is a hell-hole, where nothing works and blacks are daily lynched. The US in turn seems to have a very strange view of France, as a place wafting garlic, where Galloise puffing poseurs spend their time dreaming up snotty put downs for the US, and hatching conspiracies to undermine America.
There are things to know about France -- it has the best infrastructure in the world, good roads, a first rate metro in Paris that unlike the London underground is mostly air-conditioned, trains that cruise between cities at about 200 mph with cheapish tickets, and growing economic decentralisation driven by the good infrastructure, so that cities that were forgotten are now key in major technology sectors, like Toulouse (aviation), Aix-en-Provence (electronics and semiconductors), Montpellier (Pharmaceuticals), etc. And French food is very very good -- in that light my wife had to take a US consulting team to Paris; so nervous were the Americans that they wanted first to eat at McDonalds, then at a Pizzeria =, then at a Chinese restaurant. Getting them to eat French was a major struggle.
-
The Civil War, World War I and World War II
[Read the article: "Hillary equals France"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think it is hard to understand France without understanding the impact of WW I. I first went to France in the 1970s and even then there were people visible, blind mostly, that had been victims of WW I. Almost the entire French political class until recently grew up with the cripples and wounded of WW I around them, the spinster aunts who could not find husbands, the widows, etc. WW I killed an inordinately large number of Frenchmen, more proportionately than the US lost in the civil war from a broader swath of society -- and France was partially occupied and economically had to spend every dime sorry sou that it had. Every village in France has a war memorial -- look at it, 2, 3, 4, 5 people with the same surname, a tiny street of maybe 20 houses with 40 dead on the memorial.
This shock to the French psyche is now 89 years in the past, not even a century. I met WW I veterans as a child, and I am not that old. The comparative event for the United States was the Civil War, and the US experience of the Civil war rendered the US remarkably pusanilimous in 1914-17 and 1939-41. The US stayed out of WW II until forced in by Pearl Harbour -- the outlook of the US towards war post WW I is illustrated by the Veterans of Foreign Wars -- and interesting name which indicates the belief that it was foreign entanglements that sucked the United States into WW I and WW II, not morality.
By 1941, the Civil War was about 80 years in the past, and the US had still not forgotten the bloodshed. Why do the Republicans with their cheese-eating surrender monkey jibes (mostly from Chicken-Hawk members of non-service families) expect the French to be different?
-
Lafeyette we are here
[Read the article: "Hillary equals France"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Wrong war troubledgirl -- it was World War I, and it was the Lafeyette Escadril or Squadron of Americans flying for the French in the 3 years that France fought between 1914 and 1917 without US support.