| A Clash of Cultures |
Date 2003
|
France and America -- Remembering the Revolutions
July sees the anniversaries of two 18th century revolution, the French and Americans. These two peoples have had a love-hate relationship from the beginning, and currently, there appears to be more hate than love between them. While much of this is due to the loggerheads at which the two countries' presidents stand, there is a cultural dimension that merits discussion.
For the French, American food is something of an oxymoron. There are excellent places to eat in America, and the portions are always generous to excessive, but the style is imported from elsewhere. To Americans, French food is the height of sophistication, but it would not occur to any Yank that frog legs are preferable to those from chickens.
At the cinema, the French film-lovers often have a taste in American films that is a generation and a half behind the times. Naturally, Gary Cooper is a greater hero than Arnold of Austria, but then, Mr. Cooper hasn't worked much in recent years. French films are largely inaccessible to American audiences -- not so much because so many bad French films are made (though most are lousy), but rather they are all in French, and Americans don't want to read while at the movies.
At the most fundamental level, though, the French seem to be congenital pessimists while Americans have a goofy "can-do" attitude that rarely intersects with reality. Life is never as bad as a French intellectual would have one believe, and it is never as happy as it appears in American detergent commercials.
The two are united, though, in a simple fact of history. Both revolutions, within the same human lifetime (Citizen Tom Paine and the Marquis de Lafayette were actors in both), dared to ennoble the common man. That bears consideration as an ideal, rather than the way both nations have acted of late -- making the ignoble commonplace.