The US seems to have a new enemy: France. But should Americans boycott Chanel because France has doubts about the US's 'axis of evil'? Enda O'Doherty reports on a war of words
They're lazy, dirty and cowardly. They start wars they can't finish, eat disgusting food, smell pretty bad and are more than averagely prone to immorality and sexual perversion.
And, oh yes, they hate Jews. Who are we talking about? Why the French of course. And who thinks so? Increasing numbers of our US cousins, it seems.
We are by now used to the British Sun's way with its European "enemies", be they French, German or Bruxellois, and do not on the whole take its robust and often playful polemics too seriously. The Washington Post, on the other hand, we thought was a bastion of US liberalism, more famous for its role in breaking the Nixon presidency than for witch-hunting anti-Americans at home or abroad.
Perhaps to be a proper American liberal, however, it is necessary to afford occasional houseroom to the kind of conservative rottweilers who despise everything you stand for. At any rate, regular Post columnists Michael Kelly and Charles Krauthammer are sore as hell about Europeans, and in particular about those most European of Europeans, the French.
France's main offence, in Krauthammer's view, seems to be its former foreign minister, Hubert Védrine's, outrageous rejection of "a politically unipolar world - a culturally uniform world - the unilateralism of a single hyperpower". Védrine's characterisation of President Bush's "axis of evil" notion as somewhat simplistic gets a little up his nose as well, while Michael Kelly reminds us: "Simplisme works. Against evil, it is the only thing that does".
Over at New York's Newsday, former city mayor Ed Koch wants his readers to boycott French wine, cheese, perfume and clothing over some undiplomatic, private comments allegedly made by the French ambassador to Britain about the state of Israel ("shitty little country"). For Ann Coulter, a columnist with online magazines FrontPage and Human Events and author of a book on the Clinton presidency, a boycott of Chanel is a bit on the wimpish side: there is only one way to settle that "petri-dish of ferocious anti-American hatred and terrorist activity" - military attack.
There seem to be two strong views among this clutch of thinkers who call themselves conservative - though the word scarcely does them justice. First, that the US can do whatever it goddamn likes around the world because, basically, no one else matters. Second, that Sharon's Israel can do whatever it goddamn likes to the Palestinians because anyone who argues to the contrary is an anti-Semite.
France is identified by all these columnists as the main objector to their views and - as it is also a country seen as particularly vulnerable to attack, by virtue of certain aspects of its own history - it makes an ideal enemy. Thus, armed with a few facts or half-facts, our conservatives go piling in, boots flying: the Vichy regime's second World War collaboration of course gets many mentions, as does the deportation of the Jews; also the alleged lack of any resistance to the Germans and the general uselessness or spinelessness of the French army; and finally, as ultimate proof of France's undying anti-Semitism, there is the Le Pen vote this year.
What they know about French history is not too much, and this little, it seems, must be shared by all as they sing out from the same cut-and-paste hymn sheet. There are, however, a few things they appear not to know - that at a time during the war when Britain was unequivocally backing de Gaulle and the Free French, the US was still trying to negotiate a deal with "fascist" Vichy; that the supposedly anti-Semitic nation of France had no fewer than three Jewish prime ministers in the 20th century (compare and contrast US); that support for Le Pen has next to nothing to do with anti-Semitism but is to a considerable degree linked with anti-Arab prejudice, a much more solid currency for the modern European demagogue.
What unites all our conservative columnists, beyond the specificities of their individual arguments, is the absolute exaltation of power and force.
This can be expressed with some humour as by Kelly: "Europe's ruling classes will never forgive us for constructing a world in which they no longer rule over anything but artisan cheeses". Or with petulant vulgarity as by Coulter: "little pipsqueak nations to impose their pipsqueak values on us". Either way, what you are dealing with here among the Bush presidency's media cheerleaders are sneering pride and arrogance - 'unattractive features in an ally.
More unattractive still, perhaps, is the netherworld expression of this self-satisfied national conservatism, where the school and college kids of the Bush years find an outlet on the Web for their sense of humour and hierarchy of values on such sites as FranceSucks.net and fuckfrance.com. These differ from their elders' productions, of course, in being somewhat more inarticulate, but the same attitude of contempt is certainly there, contempt for the foreign, for the different, for those perceived to be weaker. Allied to this, we find a peculiarly male adolescent fixation on "hygiene" (armpit hair in women is a particular Gallic offence), paranoid sexual puritanism, anti-smoking hysteria and rampant homophobia.
So why, we are asked, do French people suck? Five reasons: because they eat snails; because they eat horse; because they have dumb names; "because they are cheese-eating surrender monkies (sic)" and "because we can nuke them bastards, and they can't do anything about it".
Michael Kelly rhetorically feigns ignorance when he refers to Hubert Védrine as "the French foreign minister, whose name is Petain or Maginot or something". And in so doing, he demonstrates his contempt for this country which does not matter. The frightening thing is that the ignorance of his fellow countrymen, and even of his president, seems entirely unfeigned.