Toasting the French

Watch any late night monologue, or talk with any bloke at the water cooler, and a diss on the french is insta-joke. As of late, I've wondered why the french dissent to our progression to war was singled out and treated differently than the german or russian dissent.
The fact is, everyone turns the joke on the french because humor relies on shared assumptions- and americans carry with them a stereotype of the french- whimphood. the rude thing is somewhat a stereotype, but i think most thinking folks realize that's centered on paris, and any big city has its rude-ites. but the whimp thing...
well this week's nytimes 'week in review' offers a fine column on this phenomenom. The whole essay, by Nina Berstein, is quite good- so read beyond my except.

And at this point in strained trans-Atlantic relations, an obvious explanation comes to mind: in the American imagination, France is a woman, and Germany is just another guy.

The French themselves depict La Belle France as a bare-breasted "Marianne" on the barricades. They export high fashion, cosmetics, fine food — delicacies traditionally linked to a woman's pleasure, if not her boudoir. And French has always been Hollywood's language of love.

Germany, meanwhile, is the Fatherland, its spike helmets retooled into the sleek insignia of cars like the Mercedes and BMW. It also exports heavy machinery and strong beer — products linked to manliness. And notwithstanding Goethe, Schiller and Franka Potente, German is Hollywood's language of war, barked to the beat of combat boots in half a century of movies.

Such images simply overpower facts that do not fit the picture — like decades of German pacifism and French militarism since World War II. So what if France was fighting in Vietnam, Algeria and Africa, and deploying a force of 36,000 troops around the world, while Germans held peace vigils and invented Berlin's Love Parade. For Americans, it seems, World War II permanently inoculated Germans against "the wimp factor" and branded the French indelibly as sissies.

Sure, both countries were dubbed members of the "Axis of Weasel" and dissed as Old Europe for opposing the war in Iraq. But no one poured schnapps down the toilet, renamed sauerkraut or made prime-time jokes denigrating German manhood. Only France can evoke that kind of frat-boy frenzy.

Neat article, go give a read.