France
I know
we're not supposed to like the French, but really I think they're OK. I like
their language, which I've always been careful not to learn lest it lose something.
Paris is the actual Paris of Europe. Truth be told, we're all about the same,
except that anybody who thinks France and the US are particularly different
needs to get out more.The standard criticism of the French, aside from being socialists, is that they are by nature reluctant to fight and die for abstract political reasons, that they are, in the current vernacular, "wimps". This is I think an unwarranted criticism, as the French have historically been as ready as anyone to rally round the flag, and if the lack of a convenient body of water kept them from staving off the German onslaught in WW II they in some measure made up for this blood deficit by doing the spade work for us in Vietnam, not to mention their drawn out colonial carnage in Algeria. And let's not even talk about WW I, when "bled white" became roughly synonymous with "being French". And Napoleon was squandering soldiers in Russia long before Hitler. So a little perspective here. Let's not shortchange the French just because they were too farsighted and independent to leap into the Iraq quagmire with us, and have subsequently failed to join us as the debacle unfolded.
And it's honestly occurring to me for the first time as I type this, but how could we ever imagine we were insulting the French by distancing them from french fries?
