I met my favorite Frenchman
on a tennis court in Texas. Mutual friends
thought we would be well-matched opponents.
Alain had arrived in the United
States only two days earlier. Always the
aggressor, he charged the net early
in our first match, and I lifted a lob
over his head. Rather than retreatingto play
it on the bounce, Alain leaped into the
air, took a mighty swing andfanned.
"Ouf," he grunted. "I sink I am Bob McAdoo."
McAdoo was a 7-foot NBA player.
What manner of Frenchman, much less
a literature professor, I wondered, knew
that? It was Alain's way of mocking
himself. An avid sportsman, he'd spent
his first afternoon in America watching
basketball on TV. Fit and muscular, he'd
competed for France in volleyball.
No Gauloise-puffing café intellectual,
he was an ardent outdoorsman, a hunter
of birds and wild boars, and a rock climber.
After we knew each
other better, Alain confided that he'd been initially
taken aback by my asking if he was a Parisian.
He feared I'd found him haughty
and arrogant. Au contraire, mon ami. His
home was Montpellier, a city roughly
the size of Little Rock on the Mediterranean
coast near Spain. He used to enjoy
siding with my wife, whose origins are
in French Louisiana, in petty disagreements.
"We Latins," Alain would announce mischievously,
had arrived at a mutual position
about who should drive or where to eat
dinner. The Latins, it appeared, always
chose the more passionate option, or the
one with most garlic.
I've been in touch
with my old friend by e-mail as the Op-Ed warriors and the
country club tough guys of the Bush administration
ridicule France in terms appropriate
to a Monty Python skit. "I have to denounce
the vacillation of the [French] Government
in the strongest terms," I wrote. "They
fiddle while Ishmaelia burns. A spark is set to
the cornerstone of civilization which will
shake its roots like a chilling breath."
It's a passage
from Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel "Scoop" I knew Alain would
recognize. (If it doesn't make you smile,
you've been reading too many editorials.)
Quite conservative--Socialists, he thinks,
are always incompetent and usually corrupt
--his first response, passionately as always,
was to assure me that France has not
forgotten WWI or WWII, nor the close friendship
between our countries. The French
have no illusions about Saddam Hussein
and would like to be rid of him. But they see
no immediate threat. If he can be de-fanged
and contained, that would be preferable to
risking WWIII.
Most French observers
see terrible danger in either of two post-Saddam scenarios:
either the U.S. leaves Iraq in chaos and
ruins, then bugs out leaving the Europeans holding
the bag, as we've basically done in Afghanistan;
or we occupy it indefinitely, turning the
region into a huge West Bank and insuring
an exponential growth of Islamic extremism
and al Qaeda terrorism.
What Alain implied
but was too polite to say was that if the swaggering puppy Bush
was in too big a hurry to seek U.N. approval,
he shouldn't have asked. Our allies are
democracies, after all, and upwards of
80 per cent of the public opposes invading Iraq.
(No doubt reacting to U.S. bullying, an
astonishing 87 per cent of the French do.)
As millions of anti-war protesters across
Europe underscored last weekend, Bush
was appointed president of the United States,
not France.
ha ha
CORRECTING THE RECORD
Having questioned the professionalism
of the New York Times Book Review,
I'm happy to report that its editors have
taken pains to repair the damage done by
Beverly Lowry's inept review of Susan McDougal's
book "The Woman Who
Wouldn't Talk." Besides printing a correction
of the false charge that she was
convicted of obstruction of justice and
criminal contempt, The Times also ran a
letter from McDougal herself last Sunday
politely correcting a couple of Lowry's
other more egregious blunders.
Equally heartening was NYTBR
editor Chip McGrath's statement to the
industry newsletter "Publisher's Lunch,"
which questioned "why the newspaper
hasn't been more forthcoming in its own
voice to correct the record." McGrath
said he had deliberately used McDougal's
letter in an effort to rectify the situation.
"As for the errors that did appear," he
explained "yes, they were sloppy and
should have been caught in the editing
process; as soon as we became aware
that we had erred--and it didn't take long
for that to happen--we took steps
to set the record straight."
"The Book Review
has a particular problem in that we use so many
freelancers," McGrath added "not all of
whom are trained journalists, and
this puts an additional burden on our over-worked
staff. I do think we've
learned from this one." Meanwhile, I'm
equally pleased to report that
"The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk," after three
weeks on the New York
Times best seller list, has cracked the
top ten. Case closed.
Sidebar:
Horseshit
You don't
hire a ditto-monkeyette to review a Clinton-related book.
The New York Whore Times is just lying
again. Lowry was hired to
discredit and destroy McDougal's book (that's
what the NYWT does)
and now they're trying to claim they were
overworked?
Remember, the NYWT is the press source for the originally fabricated
story about Whitewater. They were trying to discredit Clinton.
They knew it was a farce back in 1992, but they knew the
ditto-monkeys
salivating for Clinton's zipper would buy the story in droves,
the sons of bitches.
Lowry didn't commit "errors,"
she f-ing lied and everybody knows it.
Trust me - everybody saw the Time's review that implied
McDougal
was just another lying criminal friend of Clintons. Who read
the correction?
Lowry is a Clinton-hating whore working for a company of Clinton-hating
whores.
bartcop.com has more credibility than the New York
Whore Times.