Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [30]
More than 200 years ago, Patrick Henry voiced the battle cry of the American Revolution with “Give me liberty or give me death!” Today he could demonstrate his patriotic zeal by changing his take-out order.
A Lebanese-owned chain of stores in California’s San Joaquin Valley, French Cleaners, had one of its stores tagged with anti-French graffiti and another burned to the ground. The French-owned Sofitel Hotel in Manhattan replaced the French flag flying outside with Old Glory. Fromage.com, a French cheese distributor, received hundreds of hostile e-mails.
In Las Vegas, an armored fighting vehicle, complete with two machine guns and a 76-millimeter cannon, was used to crush French yogurt, French bread, bottles of French wine, Perrier, Grey Goose vodka, photos of Chirac, a guide to Paris, and, best of all, photocopies of the French flag. The makers of British-owned French’s Mustard didn’t wait for a backlash; they put out a press release explaining that “the only thing French about French’s Mustard is the name!”
Throughout the U.S., programs that matched visiting French students with American families were unable to find enough U.S. hosts for the first time in years.
One weasel who escaped this wrath was the White House pastry chef—a man who despite his Frenchness was entrusted with preparing our president’s meals. Mocking your longtime allies by renaming food and wasting a lot of expensive wine is all fine and good, but George W. Bush still needs his pain au chocolat—it gives him fortitude, or “Freedom Strength.”
Of course, it was easy to go after France. Too many of its citizens had been “rude” to us, and it had this history of always seeming to cave to despots. While it had brave Resistance fighters and many French citizens died during World War II, instead of fighting the Germans to the bitter end (like the Russians did), France decided to cooperate and collaborate, especially when it came to rounding up the Jews and Commies and sending them off to die in concentration camps.
Plus, the French had a history of not getting things quite right. Like the Maginot Line, a series of bunkers built along the French-German border before World War II to defend France from the invading Huns. The only problem was, they built the bunkers facing the wrong way and Germans were deep into France before you could say “garçon, more stinky cheese, please!”
Then there’s the simple jealousy factor. Most Americans know the French are more sophisticated, more intelligent, more well-read than the average American. We don’t like to admit that it was the French who invented the movies, the automobile, the stethoscope, Braille, photography, and most important of all, the Etch A Sketch. They’ve brought us the Enlightenment, and The Enlightenment paved the way for the widespread acceptance of all the ideas and principles that America was founded on. Then when we find out that the French have to work only thirty-five hours a week and everyone gets at least four weeks paid vacation, all we can do is make snide remarks about their unions and how they’re always shutting their country down.
So, France was the perfect country to pick on. And it was an entertaining distraction. If you’re a cable news company, why spend priceless reporting time on investigating whether Iraq really does have weapons of mass destruction when you can do a story about how rotten the French are?
Yet, after the lies started to unravel, a few people started to reconsider what they had been told about the French and what they really did to us.
It turns out, it was more like what the French have done for us.
Most Americans can barely remember who won last year’s Super Bowl, let alone the true story of how this country was founded.
We all know about the Tea Party and Paul Revere’s midnight ride, but we like to forget that we could never have won the war without the French. Hell, we don’t even want to think about the fact that Revere’s father was . . . French (and it wasn’t Revere—it was Rivoire!). But, it was the French and British war over Canada