I dont know if there is much of a debate here, but I found this article on Fox just hilarious. It’s the contention of the author (from what I could tell…sorry, the tears of mirth were literally streaming down my face) that the French as a people are a bunch of uncivilized barbarians…oh, and they screw a lot too.
From Fox web site, Julia Gorin is the author of the newly released The Buddy Chronicles, available through bruiserbooks.com
They are also, appearently cruel to animals as can be clearly shown here:
From Fox web site, Julia Gorin is the author of the newly released The Buddy Chronicles, available through bruiserbooks.com
So, I guess the debate is: ARE the French uncivilized barbarians (who like to screw and torture animals) or is that just the puritanical American view of our more cultured/civilized cousins across the sea? And, if they are or aren’t, how is this relavant at all? Oh, and what do the British think?
Such things would be a lot funnier if Faux News wasn’t the only source of information that lots of people use. Don’t they have the largerst audience for all news networks?
I guess they can get away with the sex bit because very few people who watch Faux News have ever read true-blue, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Frank Harris’ book, My Life And Loves.
And they have never visited an egg factory where hens are kept in tiny cages with their beaks clipped to avoid injury to themselves and each other. The “foie gras” goose has a bed of roses in comparison.
While I’ve never been one to love the French (and if I had been, 5 years of their language in school surely would have beaten it out of me), I have to say that I saw that article on www.foxnews.com, and I have never seen such an appaling piece of “journalism”.
I read it and kept waiting for the punch line. As I got closer and closer to the end, I started to understand that they were actually serious.
All the -isms the could be used to desribe that article could fill a damned thesaurus.
Its a very good insight into the kind of audiance that Fox is pandering too…IMO. It just seems so over the top. “My god Helen, that Frenchy is talking about letting strange men do…THINGS…to her!” “I know, and they torture geese too! Depraved!” lol.
I’m not a lover of the French either (I’ve been to Paris several times), but this stuff is just way out in left field. What I don’t get is, this is like old style Republican psudo-religious drivel. I was under the impression that Fox was considered a neo-con haven (though I’ve never see the term clearly defined).
Doesn’t anyone feel like defending the article and bashing the French some? The DO kill geese after all. Not much of a debate if no one wants to play.
At any rate, I thought the article was a riot. I haven’t laughed this hard since I read the latest creationist position paper of ‘facts’…
Americans don’t have orgies and eat animals? Is everyone in the USA a vegetarian?
Christ, what a stupid article.
Can anyone remember such government- and media-inspired hatred for a country and a people that was being encouraged for the country/people doing nothing at all? You’d think France had blown up the Twin Towers.
20% of the Germans think the U.S. Gov’t sponsored [9/11](http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/
europe/07/24/german.poll.reut/index.html),so why can’t some of us blame the French?
When visiting the South-west of France a few years back, I went to buy some foie gras and associated products (rillettes d’oie were invented by angels for God’s delectation, in my opinion). Before buying anything, I was shown around the farm, including the part where happy fat ducks and geese enter and leave as a collection of delicacies. A lab would be a term that does it justice. Well insofar as ducks and geese can be happy, the resident poultry looked fine. They were completely free range, had a pond to swim in, were clearly well-fed, and about as content as fat anatidae can be.
More importantly, they tasted absolutely gorgeous, and the skill and experience involved in making this happen is wonderful. Compared to battery farmed chickens and intensively reared cattle, these ducks were as happy as hare in a terrine (direct translation of heureux comme un lièvre dans un pâté, which is a wonderful but weird expression.
By the way, I often thought that it was great that the guy showed us the full production process beforehand. I just can’t imagine a British farmer doing the same: most people in this country are far too damned squeamish and seem to think that the countryside is a theme park.
Since they kindly included a link suggesting that reader should “Respond to the writer”, I did.
*Sir,
As a Frenchman living in the UK, I am used to a certain amount of “Frog-bashing” in the mainstream press, but I have never encountered an article this crass and insulting even in the worst British tabloids. This goes beyond standard xenophobic caricature, it is aggressive demonisation, it slanders sixty million people.
As one of the USA’s foremost news and information services, Fox has a responsability to provide balanced commentary and professional journalism to American audiences. This sort of writing promotes intolerance, and its publication by Fox furthers the cause of obscurantism, values that the admirable founders of the United States of America fought so hard to eradicate from the new nation built on Enlightenment ideas.
Whereas freedom of speech is also an essential part of this legacy, opinion pieces of this nature betray the very principles that the USA was created to defend and propagate.*
The article makes a claim that French culture connoisseurship is a cloak for depravity, that is moral corruption or degradation. That’s an interesting question to ask, and not just about the French. Another thread here looks at the question of how the very cultured Germans, with Beethoven, Goethe, Schhiller, etc., could turn to Nazism. Cultured people in many countries embraced Stalinism.
Whether sexual libertines are more likely to take an amoral view of cruelties is a worthwhile debate. From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life
by Jacques Barzun takes the position that modern western culture has declined to a stated of decadence. Note that Decadence was “A literary movement especially of late 19th-century France and England characterized by refined aestheticism, artifice, and the quest for new sensations.” It would be interesting to consider just how decadent various aspects of western culture have become.
Unfortunately, the cited article has a poorly chosen title and an uneven hodgepodge of examples. IMHO the French deserve serious criticism for supporting cruel dictators in a number of countries, but it’s just silly to ding them for inventing the Guillitine.
The French have orgies, so they are depraved enough to support evil dictators. Since the US has supported way more evil dictators, their orgies must be really wild.
