Ahh, la France
I often get peeved by the way the mainstream media covers France. The US press falls for the usual memes : France is a quaint, faded power which is desperately hanging on to its archaic quirks, such as its supposedly high marginal taxe rate, its welfare state, smoke-filled cafés and five weeks of paid vacations (not to mention the outrageous 35-hours work week). And to top it off, they're rude and they hate McDonald's (and their President, for all his many faults, was right about Iraq)! Damn!
The other narrative is also about archaic quirks, but about their good side. I call it the Julia Childs complex - because Julia truly was America's Tocqueville. It's the romance of France, the great restaurateurs, the beautiful little towns, the truffles, the cheeses, the patisseries, the Charolais beef, the remarkable wines of Saint-Chinian or Vosne-Romanée - in short, the good life. France is this mostly imaginary place where the good life can be had. A place far, far away from all the little indignities and the constant, petty decisions - Blackberry of Treo? Coke or Pepsi? Stocks or bonds? Paper or plastic? Hillary or Obama? - that shape the life of the average upwardly mobile American professional. In France, everything is believed to be more authentic and more complicated, and therefore more refined. And so it becomes an object of both fear and desire for the practical-minded, yes-or-no Yankee, who cannot but be completely befuddled by the intricate ways of the French, and feel grossly inadequate as a result. France, in a way, serves as the mirror of what is lost or went missing in modern American life.
All this is at best a cartoon. And besides, it is well-known to anyone in the news biz that American journalists on foreign assignments tend to take their cues from the US Embassy. Because of longstanding editorial practices, they're not supposed to speak the language or to be too familiar with local culture and customs (lest they would develop a bias, or go native...) Hence, just like Judy Miller with WMDs, it's up to some pompous twit (Roger Cohen, Elaine Sciolino) to have the last word on France in the newspaper of record. And while they mostly rely on fixers for flavor, the overall story is always the same. Basically: those crazy, lazy, socialist Frenchmen have it so good now, but they can't adapt to global capitalism and their day of reckoning is fast approaching. That is, unless they finally elect a neo-liberal, big-business, right-wing "reformer" in the mold of Reagan or Dick "The Vice" Cheney. (Enters Nicolas Sarkozy...)
There is of course a sociological aspect to the production of such discourse : both writers and readers, its producers and consumers, seem to share in a deep resentment towards this imagined France. After all, they make so much more money than the average French, and yet... Well, think of Orange County : so many millionaires live in Orange County, and yet everything there is just ugly, standardized, and generally unpleasant. So unpleasant in fact that on a more fundamental level, it feels utterly impoverished. Take a quick peek at what passes for cultural life in the OC and you'll see what I mean. So what gives? You have all the money in the world and you still live like a chump, your fat ass glued to the driver's seat, tucked between freeways, office parks, stucco food courts and shopping centers. That's the whole point: the good life takes more than just money. The good life takes certain social arrangements that simply do not exist in the United States.
