* RADIO RANT: Francophobia

As an Irish-French-Indian, it pains me deeply every time some talking head on TV or radio plays the "French card," issuing some knee-jerk-thoughtless & stereotypical comment about the French—with the blithe self-assurance, obviously, that a vast majority of "Americans"{1} will laugh & scorn the "Frogs" (in just as knee-jerk & thoughtless sort of way). The immediate occasion for this blog entry is Glenn Beck's poo-poohing condescension of the French on his television show last night (4/3/07). The details of Beck's "satire" aren't worth rehearsing; but his smug tone?!—[bad pun alert:] oh, the "Gaul"! And again, it's the height of ethnocentrism that such commentators can assume a generally overwhelming positive regard from the masses for such inanity.

But the frequent francophobic utterances on ostensibly apolitical sports talk radio tells me that this is just not some specifically conservative attitude and audience at work. I'm sure that more people than Rush Limbaugh's ditto-heads laughed at the following joke that circulated a few years back: "Why don't they have fireworks at Disneyland Paris anymore? Because every time they shot them off, the French tried to surrender." In sum, besides women with hairy armpits, an untoward fascination with Jerry Lewis, and linguistic snobbery, the main francophobic stereotype is that the French are cowards. The valor of Napoleon's armies aside (and heck, the intellectual bravery of a Derrida or Foucault), I can't help but think that this is some projective/compensatory gesture on our part. We're macho, "land-of-the-brave" Americans, ready for any "righteous" fight. (And so we've become the world's "police" force, against some of our own better inclinations.) But all of "us" aren't just that, really; and so to reinforce our own militant identity, we may well have need of a shadow/scapegoat upon which we can project our more "pacifist" side. (And it's important in this geopolitical psychomachia that they be otherwise closely related to us, culturally and racially.) . . . On the most general geopolitical level, then, Western Civ. is "God's chosen," versus the "Satan" of Islamic fundamentalism. But it's interesting, too, that within "God's chosen," there is a subsidiary "us-versus-them" demonization going on.

{1} I'll try to refrain, henceforth and usually, from putting "Americans" (i.e., citizens of the U.S.) in quotation marks, however much I resent the ethnocentric/colonialist assumption implicit therein that the people of Central and South American countries are thus illogically but symptomatically excluded from the term.