The Fiddler in the Subway

by Gene Weingarten

  Back at Les Deux Magots, the fox-hunting Vincent de Kerempenec had called Bush “a very large liar.” This theme has been repeated and repackaged by people of all ages and backgrounds: America, good. American leadership, bad. Americans, nice. President Bush, glass bowl.

  “Doubleyou Boosh,” Foucret calls him in a sort of curse. The socially liberal French detest Bush on almost every level, from the predictable—his adventurism in Iraq, his enthusiasm for the death penalty and handgun ownership, his aggressive malapropisms and other perceived lack of refinement—to the more surprising. Though predominantly Roman Catholic, the French demand secularism in government and find Bush’s very public trumpeting of his Christian faith to be naked sanctimony.

  Interestingly, the French prefer our previous president. His zipper weakness not only doesn’t bother them; it seems to be a humanizing point in his favor. They like Hillary, too. Foucret begins to tell of a time that the first couple was out driving, and it is only when he is halfway through that you realize it is a joke. Bill and Hill stop at a gas station, and Hillary gets out to hug the attendant. When she gets back in the car, Bill asks her who that was, and she answers that it was an old high school boyfriend. “Interesting,” Bill says. “Imagine, if things had gone differently, you would have been married to a gas station attendant instead of the president of the United States.”

  “No,” Hillary says. “If things had gone differently, he would have been president of the United States.”

  We are all laughing and having a great time, and toasting the friendship of our two countries. At precisely that moment, Laurent Bondi’s beautiful ten-year-old daughter, Analia, arrives, bounds up to each American in turn, and greets us with innocent European abandon.

  Both cheeks still wet from Analia Bondi’s kisses, I head off confidently for the Normandy beaches themselves.

  Marie Lebourg and David Chesnel are enjoying a day in Dieppe, a resort town on the English Channel. She is as lovely as any woman you or I are ever likely to see in person; he is all man. They look like Aniston and Pitt would look if Aniston and Pitt were French—which is to say, more self-possessed than Aniston and Pitt, and more intelligent and more sophisticated. They are not movie stars, though. They are just ordinary people. Ordinary French people.

  (I am feeling good and loved and magnanimous, and thus able to confront some stereotypes with openness and candor. Frank observation No. 1: The French are slimmer and sexier than we are. No, this is not a matter of different cultural norms and attitudes toward body type yadda yadda yadda. Americans are “consumers.” By and large, we buy, and are large.)

  I have chosen Dieppe for a reason. It is here, in this town, on August 19, 1942, that a dry run took place for the great Allied invasion that would eventually liberate France. Operation Jubilee, as it was grotesquely named, was a massacre. The picturesque white cliffs overlooking the harbor held Germans in machine-gun bunkers, and they picked off Canadian and American soldiers like wharf rats as they stumbled up the rocky beach that was as slick as wet marbles.

  The old German bunkers are still there, and so are the slippery and treacherous rocks. But Marie and David seem to be negotiating these imperturbably. It is as though, when one reaches a certain level of beauty and grace, one need not remain obedient to the laws of physics.

  (Frank observation No. 2: It is possible to become envious and resentful of the French. One must resist this.)

  Jérôme approaches to ask a question on my behalf, but Marie and David wave him off. How friendly of them to take a crack at it in English! I frame my question simply, and speak slowly, as if to children: What do they think of America and Americans?

  They whisper together a moment. Was the question too complicated? Finally, Marie speaks in perfect English.

  “I am afraid we do not approve of your commercial and ideological imperialism.”

  (Frank observation No. 3: While envy and resentfulness of the French is unbecoming, a small amount of indignation is, at times, unavoidable.)

  She is a student, he works for Renault. They are well traveled, of course, though they are only twenty-four. They are genuinely distressed at having to tell an American of their disappointment in his country, but he has asked, and they are being honest. David explains that hungry French people used to get a baguette and some cheese; now they are likely to visit a McDonald’s. From his expression, he may as well be describing a visit to an abattoir.

  Marie shakes out her chestnut hair over the top of her sundress. “We perceive this situation,” she says, “almost as…”

  Don’t say it.

  “. . . an invasion.”

  (Frank observation No. 4: The French are completely intolerable.)

  Where is the gratitude? Surely they can find something good to say about America, in this of all places. I actually ask this: What’s good about America? They are consulting each other in fevered whispers. They want to throw the American a bone, they really do. There must be something, I hear Marie say. David shrugs massively. She pouts, then looks at me helplessly. She holds up a finger for more time.

  Finally, Jérôme intercedes. He needs a picture. So the three of them begin walking off toward a picturesque floral backdrop, which will seem wan and wilted beside Marie’s beauty. When they are 50 feet away, I see her suddenly stop, and turn to Jérôme. She looks triumphant and says something to him. He turns and shouts back to me:

  “Pancakes!”

  I THINK THIS is the appropriate moment to address, and dispense with once and for all, an oft-repeated and particularly noxious American calumny about the French. Do the French stink?

  After many days in France, I have a solid answer to this question. And it reminds me of the old joke about the billionaire who hired a famous architect to build him a new bathroom. Cost was no object. Space was no object. All that mattered to the billionaire was that he had a bathroom designed so it would not stink.

  No problem, said the architect, and after six months, for a cool million dollars, he produced the stateliest bathroom anyone had ever seen. It had a library, a lounge, and gold-plated fixtures. The billionaire was delighted, but that night he telephoned the architect in a fury, demanding that he rush right over, which the architect did. “I said I wanted a bathroom that didn’t stink! Well, the first time I used it,” the billionaire bellowed, “the smell was terrible.”

  And the architect said, “You used it?”

  No, the French do not stink. It is only when they fail to bathe regularly—a circumstance occurring with slightly greater frequency than with Americans—that they stink.

  DAY FOUR

  WE ARE BACK in Paris, at the abattoir. If it so offends the French, I figure it must be truly terrible, but near as I can tell, it is simply a McDonald’s. Well, not simply a McDonald’s. It doesn’t offer supersizing, for some reason. But everything else is pretty much what we know and love, and what’s not to like?

  As I leave the premises, I can’t get over how silly the French are. If they don’t want a Quarter Pounder® with Cheese™ they can always walk right across the street to the restaurant at the ancient, five-star Hotel Concorde Saint-Lazare and order from the menu, which today features terrine de poulet confite et foie gras de canard à la sarriette. From the Saint-Lazare, you get a nice view of the McDonald’s. It’s been installed in an old building with an eighteenth-century Strasbourg feel. Iron Parisian balconies and a mammoth bas-relief monarch adorn the facade. Atop the building is a statue of a pelican and a handsome ancient coat of arms that is still mostly visible behind the enormous plastic Golden Arches™ that dangle above it on a chain from the roof, like a big cartoon tushie. No other object insults the majesty of the building, other than the 30-foot-high tomato-red and banana-yellow McDonald’s banner that hangs from top to bottom.

  Jérôme and I continue discussing the oversensitivity of the French, their sometimes comical resistance to what they see as cultural rape. You’ve heard of these things: The custodians of the French dictionary are thin-lipp
ed despots, banning certain English-influenced expressions. The term “e-mail” is forbidden in French government correspondence, replaced by the French courriel. French laws require that 40 percent of all playlists on the radio be French songs. Don’t they understand how preposterous this makes them look to the rest of the world? Can’t they see that times have changed? There is a new global economy, an exchange of ideas and cultures.

  It’s not all bad. Is it?

  I lose track of Jérôme for a minute, but then find him. He is bent over a car, taking a photograph of the rear windshield. I crane my neck to see. It is a yellow plastic sign that reads: “BÉBÉ À BORD!” Jérôme looks at me, and I look at him, and we keep walking in silence.

  We are almost done for the day. All that is left is a photo opportunity. We decide that because this story is about slurs and stereotype, we will seek a visual pun for the cover of this magazine. Jérôme will shoot me with the Eiffel Tower in the background, contemplating a… frog.

  We simply need to find a live frog. Two hours later, we are still looking. No frog is to be found. In Paris, France.

  Finally, we are in a market district, talking to a dealer in reptiles and amphibians. Alain Debouve shrugs. There are strict import laws. It’s been some time since you could easily get a frog in France. Even the ones in restaurants don’t come from France.

  Where do they come from?

  “Many come from the United States,” he says.

  DAY FIVE

  IT HAS BEEN quite a while since I left you dangling, my insolent question to French Agriculture Minister Hervé Gaymard as yet unanswered. Your wait is over, because he is now seated in front of me, composing his response.

  I did not spring that question out of the blue. I had first asked him about his primary ambit of responsibility, the French wine industry. Would France, I asked, be willing to reach out to the American consumer by converting its cabernets and merlots to twist-top caps?

  Gaymard’s English is pretty good, but he needed the scroogie concept explained. It was. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. A flicker of a smile. “In a word,” he said placidly, “no.”

  Excellent! He is defying stereotype. To the French politician, stereotypically, nothing is monosyllabic, and nothing is simple: Whereas American politicians are said to be ignorant of history and inclined to regard all situations as having been birthed fully formed the day before, the French are said to be chained to a thousand-year past, turning every issue into a complex geopolitical morass, nursing grudges and flogging old causes.

  Now we are ready for the big question: The one about the French being insufferable, elitist, silly, effeminate, filthy-dirty pretentious snots. The one inviting the minister to reciprocate with his own stereotypes of Americans. Will he take the bait? He listens. “Well,” he offers at last with a smile, “it is said you eat tasteless food.” Good, good! And…

  He steeples his fingers. “Now, this is not really a stereotype because stereotypes are what the ordinary person believes. But what the European elite holds against Americans…”

  Remember, he is responding to a question about whether the French are pompous.

  “. . . is that your country will vacillate between virtuous hegemony and contemptuous retreat.”

  The minister follows with a lengthy historical dissertation about how American foreign policy has waffled inconsistently between isolationism and humanitarian activism. He nimbly plucks historical antecedents involving Woodrow Wilson, the League of Nations, William Howard Taft, and Charles de Gaulle, moving forward through the abandonment and fall of Dienbienphu in French Indochina in 1954. I stop taking notes midway through the twelfth minute.

  It is all extremely instructive, and I have no doubt the minister is correct on all points. I depart chastened and deflated, pretty sure my own country has behaved disgracefully, particularly during the first Eisenhower administration.

  BASTILLE DAY ON the Champs-Élysées, Paris’s grand boulevard. I’ve been told what to expect, but it still comes as a surprise. The French celebration of their day of independence is a hypermilitary display, featuring a parade of tanks and other massive armored hardware one would more expect to see in Beijing or at the central square of a consonant-oriented country with a name like Tkczjrkistan.

  Before the festivities, Jérôme and I mingle with the marchers, companies of cadets in their dress finery—with cutlasses in scabbards and swagger sticks and splendiferous, ornate multicolored uniforms of a sort that would not be worn by the American military outside of some cruel hazing ritual. Some wear aprons and carry axes. One man wears a hat featuring a dangly, red feather-tufted ball. I want to tell the guy I have seen this precise fashion accessory in a book by the distinguished American author Dr. Seuss, but there are too many cutlasses around.

  There are waves of flyovers by Mirage jets, and long columns of treaded vehicles rumbling on the cobblestones, giant amphibious tanks with rear-mounted howitzers, an endless march of businesslike war machines in camouflage green, missile launchers and troop transports. For a while it is truly impressive. Then the vehicles begin looking more and more ordinary until we are watching what seem to be military garbage trucks.

  The crowd is demonstrating an odd solemnity, at least by our standards. There are no balloons dancing or Frisbees flying—just polite, almost awed, applause. In the ensuing sweltering summer weeks, thousands of elderly French will die alone of heatstroke, victims of an inadequate public health safety net. But at the moment, surrounded by symbols of power, people just seem… reassured.

  You don’t see this sort of display in the United States, a country that in three minutes could—not to put too fine a point on it—flatten France like a crêpe suzette. We do not flaunt our might in this way. We do not need to. We do not whistle in the dark. Well, except perhaps for our continued dispatches from the War on Terrorism, which we are, needless to say, winning.

  DAY SIX

  DID I MENTION that when I am troubled I often consult the dead?

  I am negotiating once again the walkways of Montparnasse Cemetery, this time with Jérôme. Here is the grave of another great writer beloved by the French. Samuel Beckett, of course, wrote Waiting for Godot, but also a lesser-known work called Happy Days.

  No, it is not about the Fonz. You stupid American. Beckett’s Happy Days is about a woman who is trapped in a mound of sand up to her waist, but who is perfectly content and finds her life a paradise. By the end of the play, she remains equally optimistic and satisfied, even though she is now buried to her neck. Happy Days is said to be about the power of denial.

  There’s nothing wrong with denial, of course. It’s how we get through life without being consumed by the inevitability of our own death. You know, whistling in the dark. It explains a lot of human behavior, things big and small, including the elaborate, xenophobic dance we do to hold on to our pride and self-confidence—denying our own weaknesses by ridiculing others not like us. You know what I mean?

  Yesterday, I was in a close-packed, unair-conditioned Parisian bar. It was at the end of a long day, and I couldn’t help noticing that stereotypical, telltale body odor of the French. Then I realized it was coming from me.

  What’s real? What’s slander? I am telling Jérôme how confused I am by all this, how the only thing I can count on is that there is not a person walking the streets of France who likes George W. Bush.

  “I like George W. Bush,” a woman calls out to us, in English.

  “I love George W. Bush,” says her husband.

  I pull out my notebook. Why? Tell us why!

  “Well, we live only thirty miles from his ranch.”

  Allan and Arminda Lane of Whitney, Texas, are in Paris on vacation with the kids, Amy, Aaron, and Rachel. Allan is a Baptist minister. He counts himself one of George W. Bush’s most ardent supporters. Arminda, too. Their support knows few reservations. But what about those missing WMDs? Allan says he thinks they might still be there, hidden, waiting to be found. I shoot hi
m a skeptical look.

  “Well, either that,” he says, “or we had to delay so long in dealing with those U.N. resolutions that they snuck them out of the country.”

  It’s France’s fault!

  Maybe it all comes down to this: We’re going to believe what we want to believe, if it keeps us feeling good about ourselves. French people love to repeat the well-known idiocy by George W. Bush, a Bushism now famous in France: “The main problem with the French is that they have no word for ‘entrepreneur.’” It’s a wonderful quote, very revealing, if only he had actually said it. He also never said that “Gruyère cheese is stupid because it has holes.” I have heard that one in France, too.

  As we all know in the United States, the French are soft on terrorism because they haven’t felt its sting the way we have. But here in the cemetery—as well as all over the streets of Paris—you can’t help but notice the absence of garbage cans. Instead, there are translucent green plastic bags hanging from metal rings. That’s because you can see a terrorist bomb in those. The French were there, long before us.

  National prejudices aren’t attractive, but there’s one thing about them that’s hard to deny: They’re inextricable from national pride.

  You don’t have to take my word for it. That was the conclusion of an expert in human and international relations who studied democracy and aristocracy and discovered an essential difference between them:

  Men living in democracies love their country just as they love themselves, and they transfer the habits of their private vanity to their vanity as a nation… Moralists are constantly complaining that the ruling vice of the present time is pride… I would willingly exchange several of our small virtues for this one vice.