Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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I'm surprised the author of Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France hasn't commented on latest French carping about the American tsunami response.

The always-interesting Belgravia Dispatch has the scoop:

The execrable cartoonist of Le Monde, Plantu, hitting yet another low. Over 155,000 people have died in this massive tsunami disaster. The U.S. is spearheading critical aid efforts in the region. Little matter, of course. Better to make snide commentary along the lines that, hey they destroyed Iraq — and so are well suited to handling such calamities. Sick thought process, no? ...

Rather than commend the U.S., if just for a moment in the midst of this immense tragedy, Le Monde's journalists and cartoonists prefer to insinuate that the U.S. has nefarious motives in Indonesia, or make crude fun of the difficulties in Iraq having 'prepared' us for Indonesia's blight. Such sad fare isn't just wrong, tasteless, petty and rancidly provincial. It speaks of a society, like contemporary Germany, that is ailing and so needs scapegoats. It's not politically correct to look internally for them anymore. So everyone loves to beat up that favorite bogeyman — the U.S. — out of a mixture of incomprehension, envy, fascination, stupidity and crude stereotyping. It's sad really.

The French are rapidly finding ways to exceed the ugliest portrayals of their worst critics.

UPDATE: TKS reader Philip takes me to task for writing about the monolithic "French" as if they all thought and spoke as one.

please remember that France no more a political monolith than the US. When Ted Rall publishes an obnoxious cartoon or column, do you write "the Americans are rapidly finding ways to exceed the ugliest portrayals of their worst critics"?

C'mon, Mr. G! Unless you are prepared to view the New York Times as representing "the Americans", don't view a cartoonist in Le Monde as representing "the French".

It is important to be able to maintain a trans-Atlantic dialogue on important issues of COMMON interest. But the increasingly vicious tone of the NRO (among other places) is making reasoned dialogue more and more difficult each day. While it is certainly true that the French government vigorously (and, in my judgement wrongly) opposed US policy on Iraq, I have never read or heard in French anything remotely comparable to the rising tide of vicious and indeed just plain mean comments that have apparently become perfectly acceptable discourse in the US from the pages of National Review to public speeches to water cooler jokes.

He's right on the first part — Chirac is not France, and France is not Chirac, or Le Monde. As for the second part, well... the criticism and ridicule of the French foreign policy and media elites (is that specific enough?) will probably ease up once Americans sense that the country isn't a monolithic bloc of cynical and untrustworthy anti-American snobbery.

[Posted 01/05 03:38 PM]