Miquelon.org – The Fighting French

South Park’s French Bashing Explored.

The world of cartoons is a powerful way to get out any message you could never achieve with traditional actors or more conventional means. Much like Aesop’s fables, the use of animated characters often serves as a vehicle for political and social satire that avoids serious scrutiny. After all, it’s just a cartoon right?

The Simpsons, Family Guy, King of the Hill and South Park have all achieved success through poking fun at our collective hypocrisies or our contradictions. Unfortunately, when empowered with such a potent vehicle, the creative teams behind these cartoons sometimes let their own prejudices show through.

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The year is only six days old and French Bashing still seems in vogue in certain circles. SuperFrenchie has just posted an alert over a “reality show” from ABC, which involves actors playing rude Americans in Paris. We’re not quite sure who’s bashing whom, or what the purpose of the show really is, but do check out SF’s blog for reactions and lively discussion.

On another front, this one being in the Gulf of Aden, the news of French successes against Somali pirates is being greeted with sarcasm by Jennifer Fermino – are we Italian? – of the New York Post. Harping on France’s 1940 surrender, which we remind our non-French readers, is as funny to the French as 9/11 is to Americans, Fermino plays loose with history and claims the French have not had a military success on water since 1884.

Please use the comment section of the New York Post to leave informative and thought provoking comments.

Another Google Alert cropped up in our services, but this time it wasn’t another article about “Freedom Fries”, but – alas – “French Surrender”. As soon as we investigated the link, we discovered that the TMZ Staff from Glendale California thought it would be quite humorous to write some fluffy entertainment story about Britney Spears in France and bash the French at the same time.

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During World War II, thousands of American G.I.s from Camp Twenty Grand in Normandy (near Rouen) carved messages on the bark of neighboring beech trees. A local historian, Nicolas Navarro, and a number of locals were calling for the preservation of these trees, for their classification and protection as historical monuments but to no avail. Sixty years later, the trees have grown old and were deemed unsafe by local officials : the owner of the land on which they grew decided to fell them.

This story might never have broken out of the local pages of French papers had the story not had “traction”. Thanks in part to the Times (TimesOnline.co.uk) and now Matt Drudge, the usual and predictable histrionics are coming to the forefront in the comment section of the Times Online article. Replete with the usual French Bashing Themes, legions of indignant users are wallowing in classic anti-French histrionics. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments about “freedom fries” have been showing up a lot in the background chatter, they stem from news stories about Walter B. Jones Jr, a Republican Representative who famously brought the new name to the White House Cafeteria. Read the rest of this entry »

The so-called “fair and balanced” news channel, world famous for its frequent and incessant French Bashing, is losing ground and relevancy in America. The channel has been the focus point of a number controversies lately, including Bill O’Reilly’s astonishment over the civility of the patrons of a Harlem restaurant and his comments over starting a “lynching party” against Michelle Obama. These and other controversies are for some, including Time Magazine, signs of a growing irrelevancy in today’s political post-Bush landscape.

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