The Politics Of Recreation

I went to a meeting this morning in downtown Minneapolis.

In the elevator up to the branch office, I stood next to a couple - a very well-padded late-fortysomething woman wearing a Kedwards button on her coat (which looked like it had come pretty recently from Nordstrom's) and a short, thin, stooped fiftysomething guy with the sort of short, well-trimmed gray beard that screams "longtime MPR contributor and work for a non-profit".

WOMAN: Well, I'd love to be able to go visit Europe without having to worry about people attacking me for being American.

GUY: Yeah. I think we'll have to count on vacationing in a Blue state this year!

WOMAN: (somewhat animated) But I'd really like to be able to visit Europe sometime in my life. Maybe I'll just tell them I'm a Canadian!"

(GUY and WOMAN leave elevator)

Let me tell you a story.

Back in 1983, I went to Europe. The trip started with a three week tour with the Jamestown College Choir, and ended with a few weeks of bumming around the continent and the UK.

It was, of course, at the height of the Cold War. Anti-American feeling was pretty intense in some quarters.

I remember one night at a nearly-deserted dormitory we were bunking at in Paris (at L'Ecole Centrale d'Arts et Manufactures, for those familiar with the area, in the south 'burb of Chatenay Malabry - sort of the Burnsville of Paris), just after giving a concert at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Paris was riven with riots at the time - students were up in arms over, if I recall correctly, the price of croissant in their cafeterias, and were looting and burning much of central Paris in retaliation. A few of my choirmates and I (Ron Monson, "Tuba" Moser, Rich Larson, Mark Strobel and I, if memory serves) were sitting on the stoop, comparing notes about what we'd seen in the city. Suddenly, fireworks started going off all around us. A couple of Frog college boys were dropping Chats Noirs from the third floor. We restrained ourself from running upstairs on a Search and Destroy, which was probably best for us and them (the average French man is smaller than my dog, and we were all corn-fed North Dakota guys). It was June 6th, if memory serves. Welcome to France? Glad to be here, Nozzeules Du Ass.

Later that evening, I went across the street, alone, to grab a beer. Background: If I have a big advantage over most tourists, it's that I'm completely unafraid to try other languages. You could send me to Vietnam, and within a day I'll try to order my meal in Vietnamese; I might order Bun Heo Nuong (grilled skewered porkchops on cellophane noodles), and end up with boiled dog lungs on toast (or in jail), but I'll keep trying, and eventually be able to take care of business. I was doing this in French; it was the only language my high school offered that I never took (I took a year each of Latin and Spanish, in addition to three of German, in which I also minored in college), but I'd spent the previous couple of days picking up the survival-level stuff I needed ("Deux Bier, s'il vous plait!", "A bas l'Francais!", "Les Chars Blindees! Les Chars d'Allemagne! Allez Vite! Allez!", and "Attencion, Monquiez Surrendeux aux consommez du Fromage"), and had a good enough ear to deliver my pigeon-French with a German accent.

So I walked into a bar, and ordered a Belle Strasbourgoise (sp?) beer, piling on the German accent thickly enough to cover my Americanness, but not enough to provoke panic and surrender. "Deux Franc, said the bartender - two francs, about thirty cents back then. Vive la France, I thought as I paid, and tipped one to boot, and settled back to watch the scenery.

A group of Americans came in, jabbering in English. The bartender cocked an eyebrow at Frenchman sitting two seats down (who smiled back), and went to take the order.

He addressed the Yanks in French, natch. "We'll have four BELL STRASBURG BEERS", replied a twentysomething woman in a U of Michigan sweatshirt, leaning on BEERS as if extra emphasis would make the order more clear.

"Quatre Strasboo", responded the bartender. He poured the drinks, and went back to the Americans. "Trawsomm Fronc" (I told you I wasn't good at French), he asked. The Americans paid thirty francs for the four beers.

They more than tripled the price when they heard the accent.

I'm thinking today - I'll bet those Americans would have paid the regular market price for those beers if we'd elected Jimmy Carter, instead. Right?

Right?

Simple fact: The French detest us. They almost always have, barring a couple of times where their national survival hinged on our ignoring that fact. America was their Waterloo long before Waterloo was; the Seven Years War and the Louisiana Purchase were a great turning point in French history, and not a good one; the loss of their territories in the Western Hemisphere represented the beginning of the ebb of French imperial designs. Sure, they sent us guns, troops and ships during the Revolution - because they saw our revolution as a thorn in Britain's side; when we didn't turn into a French client state (indeed, when we fought a brief, undeclared war against France in the early 1800s), the animosity returned, where except for the odd period or two where we saved their asses, it's been there ever since. (Sure, some French love us. God bless 'em. As France will be becoming a Moslem nation in the next half-century or so, good luck to 'em).

Other Euro nations and peoples think lots of things about us, from the contemptuous to the admiring. It comes from a lot of sources; historical and territorial envy, contempt for American society, art, values, faiths, occasional gratitude for the hundreds of thousands of boys we lost convincing the Europeans that mutual self-destruction was outre...

But whatever the source, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself when the subject of European (especially French) attitudes toward the US go:

• If those tourists who got screwed in that bar in Chatenay Malabry in 1983 had had the ability to do so, should they have traded victory in the Cold War in for a fair price on their beer?
• Had we been able to, should my choirmates and I have traded freedom for hundreds of millions of Eastern Europeans for our peaceful conversation?
• Is the putative tranquility of my well-padded elevator-mate's hypothetical future spree down the Champs D'Elysees a worthy swap for leaving the world's terrorist breeding grounds unmolested, and France's source of blood graft undisturbed?

  And finally,

• Do you think that if America were conquered by, say, Iranians, a single Frenchman would volunteer to storm ashore on any beach, anywhere on the Eastern seaboard, to liberate us?

Just curious.

Posted by Mitch at October 15, 2004 04:14 PM | TrackBack