Bjorn introduced me to David Sedaris and right now, I'm reading Me Talk Pretty One Day (and you should go out and buy it right now. Why are you still here?). Anyway, this passage from his essay, "See You Again Yesterday," had me on the floor yesterday night simply because I could a) so identify with learning another language and getting syntax wrong and b) it's pretty relevant to today's attitudes towards the French.
Sedaris writes:
My fear has nothing to do with the actual French people. I didn't know any actual French people. What scared me was the idea of French people I'd gotten from movies and situation comedies.
When someone makes a spectacular ass of himself, it's always in a French restaurant, never a Japanese or Italian one. The French are the people who slap one another with gloves and wear scarves to cover their engorged hickies.
My understanding was that, no matter how hard we tried, the French would never like us, and that's confusing to an American raised to believe that the citizens of Europe should be grateful for all the wonderful things we've done. Things like movies that stereotype the people of France as boors and petty snobs, and little remarks such as "We saved your ass in World War II."
Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are "We're number two!"
The French have decided to ignore our self-proclaimed superiority and this is translated as arrogance. To my knowledge, they've never said that they're better than us; they've just never said that we're the best.
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