Posted by Dan Ewert : 6/02/2003 10:49:00 PM (Archive Link)
So France (or is it Freedom?) is trying to improve its image in the United States. All the jokes, food name changes, and vitriol has gotten to them. So who do they hire as their PR man? Woody Allen. You’re already getting the urge for some Dom Perignon, aren’t you? In one of the new ads, he says the following, “I don’t want to freedom kiss my wife, I want to French kiss her.” This would be well and good, except his wife is Soon-Yi Previn, his former step-daughter. You remember that whole fiasco, right? In this light, his pro-French joke just sounds… qu’est-ce que c’est?… icky. Was Jerry Lewis too busy?

French ambassador Jean-David Levitte also had this to say, “It's my job to remind that these funny little jokes are not so funny, because they are taken seriously on the other side of the Atlantic. We may differ on very serious issues — war and peace, pre-emptive war, international law, but is it a good reason to have this campaign of French-bashing? It goes beyond calls for French products. When you insult the French people, simply because they are French, then it's a kind of racist campaign.” So all the jokes and comments were part of a “racist campaign” against… the French. Hopefully, Levitte has already notified Jesse Jackson. He could be right but it’s hard to tell since the government doesn’t keep record of American-on-French hate crimes. Where’s the NAAFP when you need it? Really, the whole concept just invites a whole new round of jokes. Could it be that all the mocking and the boycotts are the result of American irritation at France’s pointed opposition to the United States? That it has openly declared its intention to be a “counterbalance,” i.e. opposition force, to the U.S.? That in the run-up to the Iraq war, it aggressively pursued a course intended only to thwart and embarrass the U.S.? That it may have shared intelligence with Saddam Hussein and helped leading Baathist officials escape Iraq under French visas? That for all its noble talk, it had significant financial interests in the Hussein regime? That in spite of its condemnation of unilateral action, France itself has acted unilaterally in Africa on a great number of occasions? Could any of those be possible reasons for why a lot of Americans don’t much like the French right now? Nah… this is America, after all. It’s gotta be racism! Let's get the French some reparations! Oh wait... we already did that. At the time, it was called "The Marshall Plan."