Freedom Fries in the Congressional Cafeteria.
Talking with French friends, I mentioned visiting the War Memorial at the center of the town of Foix in the Pyrenees. The small town had memorial for war dead from both World Wars, Indochina (Vietnam) and Algeria. As I walked around the memorial, I remembered the Republicans who started the “Freedom Fries” campaign and poured out bottles of French wine. The draft-dodgers and never-servatives at the center of the campaign said the French were afraid to fight in Iraq.
The truth was, the French understood the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld lies behind the war and its ill-conceived plan and refused to be part of it. The French view was the correct view. Worse still French troops were on the ground in Afghanistan from the beginning of that war, because fighting the war that made sense. They fought and died in Afghanistan from the beginning of what has become America’s longest war.
I mentioned that the Republican cowards were using the stereotype common in America that French only surrender in war; my friends were surprised. They knew about the Freedom Fries foolishness but did not know that it was a stereotype with a 70-year heritage.
When their protests began: “Lafayette; Napoleon; a million dead, five million wounded of 66 million population of France in World War I…” I said this stereotype was as ubiquitous as the stereotypes of Russians, Germans and Brits that were part of their culture.
The anger I feel when I remembered Freedom Fries is both because I have trained with and respect French soldiers and because the Republicans in question were and are such manifest cowards: now led by their Draft-Dodger-in-Chief. When I hear that stereotype, I see cowards like Trump, Limbaugh, Cheney, and hundreds of other Pansy Patriots who send Americans to war and death and never served themselves, the worst letting another man take their place.
Although a few more French intellectuals now know the low esteem in which the French military and French manhood is held by Americans, most residents of our allied nation are blissfully ignorant. Which is certainly for the best.
