Thanks for the clarification.
And i love your updated location, btw. 
Wanker. 
I travel a lot. Our house in in Hemel Hempstead. Tansu has been there and can verify.
That would imply that living in Hertfordshire is a good thing (b’dum tsh)
No, no gerroff. I lived there for my first 21 years.
(So I really know what a not-good thing. Ho ho.)
pan
I don’t think Tony Parker has taken any crap…and he’s French. And one acquaintance of mine at a DC university is a Belgian on an exchange-type thing working in Congress and he hasn’t had any issues in the past 5 months.
I dunno, it’s just a few morons. The whole anti-French thing is no greater than it generally is. Meaning it’s mostly directed at this vague notion of France and doesn’t extend too much to individuals. Unless the individual is being an ass. But I hardly think hostility to assholes is specific to the US.
Why Brutus, I must apologise and retract. You have me bang to rights - I missed the point of your statement.
This is bad and all, but before we start beating ourselves up too much- I don’t think the US population has a particularly worse well-informed person:reasonable person:mass-media pawn:total dipshit ratio than anywhere else. As an American overseas I put up with a fair amount of bullshit, not generally aimed at me but still clearly there. Let’s not get so caught up in self-flagellation that we forget that there are plenty of people in France and elsewhere who would do stuff on the same level.
I’m not entirely sure what typical middle America is, but there have been no jingoistic anti-French upheavals here either. And French’s brand mustard still sells in the stores (not to mention Moutard de Meaux).
The newspaper headline (and thread title) would more accurately have been stated as “Philadelphia-area parents withdraw invitation to French students”. But that wouldn’t sell as many papers as “French schoolkids no longer welcome in U.S.”.
A couple of weeks ago I was at a drug store and the woman in front of me in line was returning something – I didn’t see what – and her reason? “It’s French,” she told the cashier.
:rolleyes:
In the Southeast I have heard no real criticism of the French either. Just a few old jokes told more for the stupid humor than as a representation of serious resentment.
A few people overreacted to Bush’s attitude about France’s stipulation that we wait two more months before going to war. That is what got the media coverage.
Next week if Bush decided that we should hate the Norwegians, a few slack-jawed half-wits would boycott ski sweaters. Why are these people so easily lead? Why are they so insistent that Chirac was wrong and Bush was right?
Was all of Europe involved in marking the monuments? Was the entire French nation involved in writing the graffiti? Or was it just a handful of bozos that are the French equivalent of America’s small but loud yahoos?
we must have a different definition of the words “interesting” and “debate”.
What I just read is classified under “drivel” in my dictionary.
Why would you even bother clicking on that link, elfje?
It’s stuff like the OP that makes me embarassed to be an American. 
That sucks. My family had a French girl live with us for 3 weeks in the summer of '97. She was great fun, and it was amazing to see how much her conversational English improved in such a short time.
And I’d like to think that my family was “typical middle America.”
My office is boycotting Bic products, because they’re French.
I cannot roll my eyes enough. Needless to say, I do not get any say in what office products we buy. Anyone who read my old Pit thread on my coworker who informed me I wasn’t an American “in heart and mind” will not be surprised.
Rainbow Warrior? Who would launch a boycott over a #2 pencil? Oh wait, that’s Black Warrior 
Anyways, I’m not sure that this anti-French-product thing is all about xenophobia. Rather it strikes me as a convenient way for social-conservative protectionists to garner support from the economic-conservative wing of the GOP who are usually for free-trade. I’m surprised this wine-boycott hasn’t been proposed in California yet, as removing French wines from the shelves would greatly assist the higher-end Napa Valley vinyards in boosting sales.
Be prepared for even more eye-rolling.
My favorite was this one:
“Some German bakeries have renamed a local cake known as “Amerikaner” - a disk-shaped pastry with icing on top - as “Peace-ies”, bearing a peace sign piped in chocolate sauce.”
This must be a very delayed form of revenge for “Liberty cabbage”. 
This French visiting student I knew in high school told me and a couple pals over coffee at the Village Inn all about her dislike for America and Americans in general. One would hope that some among the French population would be embarassed by that sort of attitude, insulting her host country and its people, just as you are embarassed by the attitude of the parents in the OP.
To be honest with you, I have never once been embarassed to be an American. It’s just not an attitude I have within me. I disagree with alot of federal gov’t policies, and find a number of our citizens’ behaviours to be outlandish and distasteful. I might be embarassed by their behaviour, but never embarassed to be an American. Citizens of any nation on earth can probably find a number of undesirable people within its borders, but we shouldn’t define our nation by what a few people do, say, or believe. We could just as easily pick out the things we like about other Americans and be proud of our country, and I’d much rather do that. I bet for every mean-spirited idiot you find in this country you can find ten heroes you’d be proud to call Americans.
I certainly agree that there’s no need for people to feel “embarrassed to be an American.” This sort of attitude simply reinforces the belief that government policy speaks for all the citizens of a country. True, government policy certainly “represents” the people of a country–that one of the reasons it’s called representative government. But only a fool draws blanket conclusions about 300 million individuals based on the actions of a government, or of a group within the population.
However, just as there is no need for donning the sackcloth and proclaiming oneself ashamed, neither is there any need for unreflective nationalism that ignores the bad things that nations do. Those who are quick to criticize people who feel “ashamed” need to ask whether such feelings are not motivated by the same sort of reductionism (albeit on the other side of the coin) as flag-waving jingoism. Both extremes are unproductive, IMO.
The Rainbow Warrior incident should be brought up more often. It does show that push come to shove, the French are actually pretty cool.