Kathryn – John Kerry might also be interested in this piece in today’s WSJ (behind firewall) on the rise in monster truck rallies in France:
Some Parisians turned up their noses. “It’s a bit boring for me,” says Jean-Marie Fonbonne, a television actor. He says he was there only because his wife, who is in the classic-car business, was given free tickets. “It’s childish. It seems a bit Republican,” he says. “I like fast cars, yes. But not this.”
But Mr. Fonbonne represented a rare sour note in an event that seemed to reflect a softening of attitudes between the French and red-state America. On his Texas ranch last summer, for example, President Bush read Albert Camus’s classic French novel, “The Stranger.”
Me: I’m holding out hope that the Mssr Fonbonne was using “Republican” in some French context that eludes me. Though there is a nice symmetry between snooty euro-socialists reaching out to Dean as representing the “real America” while monster truck rallies overtake France in the name of the GOP.