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Dear Camille:
Having failed to learn from a century of misery, France once again
suggests capitulation to the Iraqis. Why is the nation that did so much
to advance Western culture so corrupt with moral cowardice? Why do they
seem to worry more about the danger of American movies than Iraqi
biological weapons?
J'Accuse le Vichy-Vashy Dear J'Accuse:
France, the font of the intellectual and scientific Enlightenment and the
center of the avant-garde art world for 150 years after Jacques Louis David,
slid decade by decade into tremendous cultural decline after World War II.
The French have never fully recovered from the Nazi Occupation when, as a
Jewish scholar once wrote to me, "Collaboration was not the exception but the
rule."
French solipsism and denial are everywhere in those false academic idols, the
poststructuralists, who oscillate between the choked, labyrinthine jargon of
Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan and the cold, twisted, sterile abstractions
of Michel Foucault, who managed to write about "power" for most of his life
without ever mentioning Hitler. Hypocrites, rogues and poseurs, the lot of
them.
Partly because of their increasing provincialism and distaste for
self-critique, very little that the French have produced in the last 50
years is likely to last, except for the films of the New Wave and the
literature, essays and plays of the larger circle of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Willfully cut off from the major leaps forward in mass media since the rise
of television, the French occupy a mental cul-de-sac or time warp that can be
both frustrating and comic. In my dealings with journalists from around the
world, for example, I have learned never to trust a single French
communication, private or official. By Japanese, British, German or
American standards, the French are amazingly unprofessional. They seem
incapable of thinking ahead, planning a schedule, keeping an appointment
(even after changing it five times) or apparently of holding a
thought in their heads for more than two minutes.
Your question has several parts. The French are phobic about American pop
culture because they know full well that they have permanently lost their
once-stratospheric cultural prestige and that America, for better or worse,
is now the tastemaker of the world. France has frozen into a museum, while
Hollywood is a dynamo of art and technology that has seduced the masses on
every continent.
As for the part French diplomacy has played or not played in the most recent
Iraqi crisis, I frankly understand international reluctance to snap to
attention at every whim from our wandering White House, with its evaporating
staff and ever-churning scandals. American policy in the Mideast is driven
first by naked economic interest in the oil reserves, upon which we are
pathetically dependent because of our failure to develop energy alternatives,
and second by our partisan support of Israel, into which we have poured
billions of foreign-aid dollars that undermine our credibility as regional
peacebrokers.
While I think our loyalties should indeed be with Western-style democracies
like Israel, I also think that American behavior toward the Islamic world has
been disgraceful. We ignore Arab history and aspirations, overlook major,
unresolved injustices like the arbitrary seizure of Palestinian land after
World War II and then act like self-righteous bullies when a crisis shakes
us out of our torpor. The instability of the Mideast, which began with the
breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, may increase if Islamic
fundamentalism proves the only way to stop arrogant Western interference.
Saddam Hussein considers himself the heir of ancient empires: Iraq is the
land of Babylon the Great. Saddam does not think himself bound by the
European self-scrutiny of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, formulated after the
systematic use of chemical gases on the battlefields of World War I. There
is, after all, a strange moral casuistry in our attitude toward war: It's
somehow OK to slaughter people one way but not another.
Saddam's refusal to obey relatively recently codified international law is a
good example of the kind of extremism that smaller nations or insurgent
movements resort to when they feel dominated, humiliated and dismissed by
established powers. Most American news coverage of this latest showdown with
Iraq carefully avoided mentioning that our fixation on Saddam's stockpiling
of chemical and biological weapons has little to do with us and everything to
do with Israel, isolated among hostile neighbors.
Should we defend our ally Israel by any means necessary? Yes, I'd have to
say, someday we may need to unleash Air Force and Navy warplanes to reduce
Iraq to rubble. But for heaven's sake, let's be honest about our real
motivation and stop tarting up national bias in the see-through drag of the
United Nations.
In this case, France, through its own complex web of self-interest, may be
seeing the Arab world more clearly than we are.
Dear Camille,
What do you think of the Prozac-ing of America? It seems that every other person I know is taking either anti-depressants or anti-anxiety drugs. What broader, cultural impacts do you think this will have on our population? Will we become a happier, saner nation -- or just more placid and less creative? Would you yourself, with all your Amazonian fire and neurotic energy, ever consider taking drugs like this?
Drug-free (so far) Dear Drug-free:
I would be very interested in knowing how old you are, where you live, and
what social and professional circles you frequent. It seems to be the urban
white middle class and its feeder cells on the elite college campuses who are
addicted to Prozac, which I view as the drug of choice for glum, PC
sentimentalists unable to face the spiritual deficiencies at the heart of
their own decaying liberalism.
I have continually argued that we have a national schizophrenia about drugs
and that it makes no sense at all to push synthetic Prozac while banning
organic marijuana. The government's hysterical crusade against tobacco (a
consciousness-enhancing Native American herb) is a fancy piece of tap-dancing
to avoid dealing with these irrational inconsistencies.
Though huge numbers of people seemed to be using pot or hallucinogens in the
1960s, followed by cocaine in the 1970s, I wasn't interested, mainly because
the altered states those drugs produced didn't seem attractive or useful to
me. My mind is already hallucinatory enough, and my natural Amazonian
amphetamines give me the energy, confidence and hyper-alertness that others
bankrupt themselves to achieve through coke.
As an Italian, I am loyal to Dionysian liquor, with its primeval pagan
ancestry. My grandfather grew grapes in his backyard and made wine in a tiny
shrinelike room in his cellar that reeked with the damp, fruity aroma of oak
casks. Liquor, always consumed with food in the Mediterranean manner,
stimulates engaging conversation and brings general enjoyment and hilarity in
every kind of social setting.
Unlike Prozac, which is an all-day, all-night wet blanket, liquor can be
measured out and taken at will to light up whatever hours or evenings one
chooses. Its effects, even in excess, rarely last long. But Prozac flattens
mood, robs creativity and turns you into a bourgeois clone of everyone else.
What a bore!
Check out the Manhattan magazine culture. Do you wonder why the writing is
so stale, the thought so derivative, the graphics so cluttered and clichéd?
It's Prozac, the favorite pick-me-up for whiny, passive-aggressive,
drag-ass, scribbling moles.
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