Sibling rivalry

Like siblings who alternately envy, bicker, and then embrace, America and France need to cut it out. I can't think of a better phrase than one that my grandmother Malu (aka The Better Half, as mentioned on the June 3, 2010 entry) used to synthesize an entire play with only two characters that we saw together in the West End in the Spring of 1997. 

Of course, if I could remember the name of the play, I would have been hired as a copy-editor and I wouldn't be lazily trying to blog my way out of obscurity. All I remember is that the woman began with her hair wet and perfectly timed a dish of pasta while acting seamlessly with her male co-star puttering around and doing nothing to help. 

In any case, I only wish I could give you an .mp3 of what my grandmother's delicious accent in English sounds like, but, being temporarily and geographically handicapped, I cannot. The only reference I have is that it sounds like Robin Williams doing Mother Teresa as a hand puppet in the 1992 movie Toys, if that means anything to you. 

Anyhow, we, gaggle of grandchildren, were all trying to make something of the play we'd just seen and I, with my mere 15 years, couldn't sum it up, when she said:

"They need each other, but they do not want to need each other."

And that, dear Reader, is exactly how America and France behave towards each other. 

The examples are far too many to list but there isn't a plain love-hate relationship the way it is with the British-- you would think Robert Frost's phrase "Good fences make good neighbors" applies beautifully to their particular case since The Channel/La Manche separates them but that doesn't seem to be enough to keep them from invading, whether forcefully in the past or subtly in the present, i.e. English retirees gobbling up Norman, Breton and Aquitaine, I mean, Basque country homes and France's elite going over in hordes to make fat salaries in The City, (see this wiki article and the IHT article it's based on). 

No, there is true admiration that comes from the American's slightly beating the French to the punch with the American Revolution and then "liberating" them at the end of WWII. (I'm sure all this can be argued: historians cringeing in your chairs, please be still.) Conversely, the French threw their arms wide open to American soft power with rock'n'roll, coca-cola, and the only subject I can say I know anything about (because if not, we'd all have to say that NYU Film school is a rotten waste of money, and, at that price, it's a bit too painful): Movies.

Actually, this first morsel of information comes from a real history professor who is also the director of my current Masters program (yes, like most people who tire of freelancing and being given the run-around at interviews, I too have gone back to school) at Paris 1, La Sorbonne: a percentage of every movie ticket sold in France, that includes the millions of tickets to see American blockbusters, goes to financing French cinéma. Isn't that clever of them? Especially since the French are one of the largest consumers of American cinema in the world. So why must they criticize?

The simple answer is that it is innately French to argue and criticize, because it is part of their intimate and academic education to be able to structure an argument and to defend a point, also a mark of their rampant individualism but there we get into chicken/egg territory. The French are so deeply critical that they spend most of their time criticizing themselves, a subject which has been tempting me to write a dissertation called "L'Economie de l'Autocritique" (all rights reserved with that title) but I'm letting the fruit ripen, if you will. 

A Time Magazine article, "France scores an F in education" from early October even mentioned the phenomenon of self-criticism in a study of children who were asked to read and then rate their performance. The result is absurd but not surprising when you have lived here long enough to recognize the familiar music of the French berating themselves:

"One study, by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, tested the reading abilities of 10-year-olds from 45 countries and then asked the children how well they thought they read. The French kids performed reasonably well in the test, reading about as fluently as most of their peers in Europe. But when asked to judge their own ability, they put themselves near the bottom of the pile, only just above children from Indonesia and South Africa, where illiteracy remains widespread."

More on that later, but for now, how do the Americans return the favor? I suppose that there is no better way to show it than any given day on the ligne 1 metro in Paris, especially when it's warmer and the closer you get to the Louvre station the more American you can hear. I couldn't find a more recent number (once again, not the best copy-editor) but it seems, according to a government run website that:

"En 2006, la France a accueilli 3,150 millions de touristes américains."

So even if Americans find Parisians rude (despite improvements) and slightly nerve-wracked they'll still come over in hordes, and the French, although largely mono-lingual, will still sing in American and play the blues and drink Coke, even if they'll complain about the travesty of the loss of their identity later. From one voice in the dark confines of the web comes the cry: "Come now, US and France: Kiss and make up!" You could at least begin by learning each other's languages...

...and incorporating the ellipsis as a common punctuation in English. It's such fun!