AS OPPOSED TO FRANCE'S SENSIBLE HATRED OF AMERICA

America's ridiculous hatred of the French (Antoine Audouard, International Herald Tribune, January 4th, 2005)

As a Parisian who recently moved to New York, I have not personally encountered any American hostility toward me as a French citizen. But I am amazed by the proliferation of French-bashing in the media.

If you go on the Internet, you have a vast choice of anti-French Web sites, some selling products (T-shirts emblazoned with insults, for instance), others offering long lists of hilarious "French jokes."

Of course, you could argue that the excesses of bloggers do not paint an accurate picture of American sentiment. You could argue, too, against reading too much into The New York Post's references to President Jacques Chirac of France as a "weasel." It's true that the days of "freedom fries" are behind us and that any recent dent in French exports is more likely the result of a weak dollar than a boycott of French goods. (Back in the days leading up to the war in Iraq, a friend in California called to tell me about a local television commercial for rotisserie-cooked chicken that began: "Don't be a chicken like the French. Eat it.")

But the hysteria of French-bashing has given way to a more insidious form of bias. For example, it was humbling for us French to watch Democratic operatives desperately trying to hide John Kerry's French relatives - who had come to be with him at the Democratic convention - from the news media. And it was rather funny to hear the advice given by some television pundits to Kerry minutes before the first debate: "Don't speak French." (He didn't, and by the way, it made no difference.) And whether in rustic tabloid lingo or in the more refined language of broadsheets, the typical out-of-touch East Coast liberal is more often than not "French-speaking" or "Bordeaux-drinking."

Then there are the jabs delivered by all those late-night comedians. It has become fashionable - even commonplace - in the American media to associate the French with things cowardly, despicable, unfaithful, ungrateful or foul-smelling, in addition to the (more conventional) complaint about Gallic arrogance.

Here in the country of political correctness, where the mainstream media tread on eggshells when talking about race, religion, nation or ethnicity, French-bashing, it would seem, has become politically correct.

M. Audouard, stop whining and be thankful you’re not Canadian.