DIE FROGS DIE

by Matt Taibbi

French comedian to American audience: "Tough crowd, tough crowd."

Talk about dying on stage. France has gone one step beyond that in the past few weeks. Its treatment in the U.S. media in the last twenty days or so recalls the meaty middle pages of an Amnesty International report on Filipino torture. Car batteries, cane shears, nails through the testicles... in the old Manila, if it wasn't one thing, it was another. If they let you live long enough to digest the experience, you came away amazed, thinking: "I never dreamed they could cause so much pain with an ordinary teaspoon."

The French might be thinking more or less the same thing right about now. Just when they probably thought it couldn't get any worse, 60 Minutes comes on this past week and there's Andy Rooney, of all people, pointing a finger and hissing at them like Darth Vader. "Americans have a right to protest going to war with Iraq," he said, staring angrily over his famously quirky rubbish-strewn desk into the camera. "The French do not. They owe us the independence they flaunt in our face at the U.N."

It was a bizarre thing to watch: Andy Rooney, a man most of America knows as that weird old codger who whines about paper clips and rude directory assistance operators, staring down the "enemy" and barking nationalist threats at Europe. It was a shock to the senses, like spotting Big Bird leading a Farrakhan rally. But this is the kind of thing that has become normal in recent months, when every day is like a new episode of "I Never Expected the Spanish Inquisition." You know:

You: (Lounging in chair, watching television) Gosh, I never expected Andy Rooney to turn into Joseph Goebbels.

Andy Rooney: (bursting into room in jackboots and leather overcoat) No one expects Andy Rooney to turn into Joseph Goebbels. (laughs diabolically)

The Rooney outburst was only the latest in a series of spectacular
Dunleavy: "We died for France,
but France forgot."Francophobic offensives in recent weeks. Leading the charge, to the surprise of no one, was wraithlike curmudgeon Steve Dunleavy of The New York Post. Dunleavy is an amazing figure, a demagogue's demagogue: he makes Bill O'Reilly seem like Marcel Proust. His sentences are short and pointy, appropriately like the stick a mean old man would use to whack you in the shins. He even looks horrible, a mean, decaying old creature with a helmetlike shock of vampire hair; one imagines him typing with green fingers.

Last week, Dunleavy had himself photographed dressed in black and wearing a sullen expression as he waded through a sea of white-crossed American graves at Normandy. "SACRIFICE," read the gloomy front-page headline on the Dunleavy story. A priceless sub-head followed: "They died for France, but France forgot."

Dunleavy went on the next day to coin the briefly famous term "Axis of Weasel" (in a cover showing Chirac and Schroeder's heads on the bodies of weasels), but by then he was only one of many torch-bearers in the mob. A cross-generational sample of patriotic Americans quickly lined up to bash France with both fists. Tom Friedman of The New York Times called for France to be voted off the Security Council and "replaced with India." House speaker Dennis Hastert gleefully announced a plan to hit France where it lived, through tariffs on its wine and mineral water. And John McCain compared France and Germany to an old actress who kept trying to dine out on her looks long after she'd lost them.

Extreme as all of this was, it probably seemed perfectly natural to most of us. No red-blooded American ever needs much prompting to bash the French. Next to the English, the French are probably the easiest targets in the world, a nation that since the battle of Verdun seems to have been primarily focused on lunch, buggery, and the making of movies about love triangles. Andy Rooney thinks that France forfeited its right to its own foreign policy when it surrendered to Hitler, but one can make probably just as strong a case that the French worship of Jerry Lewis as a comic genius should render it irrelevant as a world power. No matter what angle you're coming from in America, France looks like a ripe target. If you can ignore the fact that France is absolutely right to object to the invasion of Iraq, you could almost see hopping on the Dunleavy/Rooney bandwagon, just for the sheer fun of it.

That's except for one thing: France wasn't the only country in America's way last week. Germany, Russia, and China all announced their unwillingness to cast U.N. Security Council votes in favor of authorizing force in Iraq. On the very day that Dunleavy was writing his "SACRIFICE" article, in fact, Vladimir Putin was in France, announcing that Russia's position was "practically identical" to
France, Germany, Belgium:
The Axis of WeaselFrance's and that, even if France should back off of its stance, Russia would be inclined to "act alone" in using its U.N. veto.

And yet throughout all of this, the media, and Congress, focused all their anger on France. There was no Russia-bashing and no Germany-bashing on American television. Shaquille O'Neal was not dragged onto Fox News to do his Yao Ming impression. No, it was "Die Scumbag Frogs!" all the way.

There are a number of reasons for this, some obvious and some not so obvious.

One of the not-so-obvious reasons has to do with numbers. From a propaganda standpoint, it is probably not desirable, in this case, to demonize numerous political opponents. Not only would that strain the attention span of the American media consumer, intellectual giant though he is, but it would actually draw attention to the fact that there are many countries and, more importantly, many people opposing the war.

In a way, in fact, France's opposition to the war is actually a propaganda boon to the Bush administration. Despite the fact that recent surveys show that the people of virtually every nation except the United States overwhelmingly oppose a war without U.N. approval, the decision by France and Germany to threaten to use their Security Council vetoes has allowed the American media to create the illusion that opposition to the war is concentrated solely in the State Department offices of those countries that supposedly "owe us something."

Instead of hammering 71 percent of the world population for getting in the way, the media can focus on a single inviting target—France—and try to blast it, Death Star style, into a million pieces of space debris. Fortunately for the Russians and the Chinese, Americans do not know them well enough to hate them the way they hate—and always have hated—the French.

Actually, it's inaccurate to say all Americans feel this way. Some of us actually quite like the French. At worst, most of us probably just find them funny, the setup nation in a joke with a Polish punchline. But a certain segment of America genuinely hates and always has genuinely hated France, a segment that can generally be described as the conservative political establishment.

France drove Richard Nixon crazy, for instance: He equated it in his mind with the wine-and-cheese parties of the chic New York intellectual types who were a primary focus of his hatred and paranoia. Whenever he visited France, Nixon was painfully conscious of not having a mistress. It was the kind of hurt that stayed with him his whole life.

The conservative ruling class sees France as a den of queers and traitors who flee at the first sign of danger and go out of their way to maintain a refined, discriminating culture that stands as a permanent indictment of Middle American tastes. Fueling this antipathy even further is the sense Vulgar America undeniably has that, even if it wanted to win France over, it would still lack something, that proverbial je ne sais quoi, to make it happen.

If you can imagine Donald Rumsfeld secretly trying and failing to keep a souffle from falling, then you can understand where that surprising intensity comes from when Americans complain about France not being grateful enough to us for "saving their necks in double-ya double-ya two."

France is also a more convenient scapegoat than Germany and Russia for other reasons. Russia's opposition to the war can be attacked as conniving, cynical, self-interested, and even treacherous (given all the aid we've sent its way in the last decade). Germany's can be attacked on the grounds that it proves that country still has great-power ambitions. But when France opposes a war, you can call it cowardice, squeamishness and a disinclination to act decisively—not something you can say about traditional military super-aggressors such as Russia and Germany.

That all of this flies in the face of history (fuck the Alamo: in 1916, 600 Frenchmen in a fort at St. Vaux held off 60,000 Germans for five whole days) is, of course, irrelevant in a country that doesn't know or value history. The important thing is that venom is directed in one direction and one direction only, and that the target, fairly or unfairly, be weighed down under a pile of demeaning cliches. Dressed in a beret and Marcel Marceau makeup, opposition to the war makes a nice snack for monsters like Dunleavy. The missile stocks in Russia and China don't go down quite so well.