Call them cheese-eating surrender monkeys if you must be a total tranche de merde–I love the French. (I also love cheese.) Long ago, I spent a couple of summers working in a massive trench full of Frenchmen, digging up Bronze Age house foundations. It may be true that Paris isn’t an overly friendly city, but to me, the French are, with few exceptions, friendly folks who love a good time and inhabit a country that shares many of the same high ideals America used to hold dear. The Right’s weird Francophobia is laughable. To be against the country that brought us “Pauvre Martin,” The Hot Club of France, and Nutella crepes is sheer madness. (Though I can barely bring myself to forgive their love of Jerry Lewis.)
It’s always pleased me greatly that the blathering morons who love to rail against the French–and even ate “freedom fries” when the French didn’t fully endorse our war–don’t seem to remember that the very symbol of liberty, that great patina-green statue in New York, well, she’s 100 percent French. From Paris, even. That gift from our French cousins was unveiled 125 years ago today, but not before being assembled in her hometown. She probably doesn’t even speak English.
Eat this, French-haters–Lady Liberty in her crib:
