What Have the French Ever Given Us?

It seems like our old ally/nemesis, France, is at it again. Having no power, influence, or military clout, the Gauls have the gall to again tell us to back off on our foreign policy.

Just how do they get away with that? Remember the French and Indian War? They wanted to thwart Manifest Destiny and we sent them back across the Atlantic. (albeit, "we" being the Colonists with considerable help from the Brits.) We invited them back to help us beat the Brits during the Revolution. We spent the better part of the 20th Century bailing them out of Two World Wars and yes, liberating their capitulating nation. So really, who are the French to tell us anything? Lafayette was sucking up to Washington at Valley Forge and France has been sucking up to Washington ever since.

But you have to look at where they’ve fallen from. Remember how great the French used to be?

They used to be a colonizing nation and a defender of other nation’s freedoms. Remember Vietnam? They pulled out and handed it to us. It might’ve been nice had they told us what they had found out; you can’t beat the Vietnamese on their turf. Maybe they did tell us and we didn’t listen. That is very possible.

Pretty much all France has left is half of Martinique and maybe some small pieces of paradise in the South Pacific. They are stuck among a bunch of European nations and struggle for their own identity as their currency is taken away in exchange for the Euro and their culture is invaded by everyone’s else’s, namely ours. They hold onto their fading culture and history like it was the best the world had ever known.

It can’t be easy to be French on the world stage. They are as proud as any nation, and yet their glory days are clearly behind them. No violent fall theirs, just a slow fading into the shadows. Perhaps they can be seen as an “elder statesman” among nations.

We look at France as “old Europe” according to Donald Rumsfeld.

“Old Europe” is a huge slap in the face to France. What Rumsfeld is saying is that we are the beautiful young sister, and really, there is no need to listen to our aging big sister who is still unmarried, not to mention fat and ugly. She has been jealous of us since puberty. She never liked that we stole her Bastille Day glory by scheduling our Revolution around the same time.

So there she sits, decrepit, lonely and bitter, shouting orders and making threats to us, as if she still had some pull with anyone. What is it about the French? Where do they get that fierce arrogance?

In the family of nations, France wrote little sister America out of her will years ago. Mainly, she didn’t like our attitude and rejected our influence. OUR Attitude?

So we told her to bite it and kept building McDonald’s in her country. We kept telling her which way to vote and how to behave. We rubbed her old aging face in our beauty and superiority and she is now retaliating as only an older sister can. She’s going to shout at us from the sidelines, whisper mean things to us on the phone, and write nasty notes and leave them on our fridge. She knows we won’t go to war against her and she thinks she can tell us what to do as a friend/foe. Sisters can be so brutal.

It’s been years since France gave us anything more than a hard time. She sees what she might’ve been in us. A world power. Not since Napoleon has France been a world power. She wishes the international language was still French. She wishes she had a good army, navy, or air force. She wishes she had better cars, beer, and television. But she doesn’t. She relies on us and she hates us for it. Without us she and all her neighboring countries would be Soviet satellites by now. Or part of Nazi Germany. Or Kaiser’s Germany.

But the Cold War is over. Big sister doesn’t need us anymore.

So maybe now that there are no obligations on either side, we can actually look at France as a real sister nation. Maybe she has something to tell us. Maybe she has learned a thing or two in her years of shame and falling. Maybe all she wants to do is be friends again, exert some long-diminished influence, and speak her mind. Then again, maybe she is only interested in protecting her own selfish oil contracts with the nation of Iraq. Quite possible, but we'll give her the benefit of the doubt.

Can she do anything to us if she doesn’t get her way, if we don’t listen to her? Will she invade us? Sanction us? Yeah, right.

So what does she have to gain by acting like she’s acting now?

Her great thinkers influenced ours. She gave us the Statue of Liberty. Her colors are red white and blue. We're really not all that different.

Maybe the French aren’t really arrogant jerks. Maybe they just get a little hotheaded when they see little sister getting too bigheaded. We didn’t listen to her about Vietnam. We knew we could handle it better than they did. Now she is are trying to tell us how to behave in Iraq. (Granted, Iraq is no Vietnam and the reasons for being in either are totally different, but as usual, Jealous Big Sister thinks she knows better.) She's just jealous. We know better, as usual.

Shut up, aged, old ugly sister. Go away.

So...if your little sister just called you ugly, told you to shut up and go away, wouldn’t you just want to smack her?

Email Diega Favete

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