Tuesday, April 29, 2008
A commonality with the French
Editorial commentary
Recent contributions
- What Obama didn't say
- How my education and religious training failed me
- Can we be a two-trolley town?
- Striving for civility
- Commentary archive
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
Edwin Dooley, Jr.
Dooley is a retired administrator and professor at VMI.
Ah. April in Paris! I just returned from two weeks in Paris after a 13-year absence. To the casual visitor, Paris is still Paris. But the Parisians. What about them?
Like us, the French are beginning to put on weight. A change in eating habits and diet, and a reduction in exercise are taking their toll. Nevertheless, the French are eating less these days. Gone are the two- or three-hour weekday lunches and the nearly all-day dinners with family on Sundays. But more snacks between meals, more sugar, more calories, and more prepared foods are plumping up the traditionally svelte Parisians.
Despite the relatively short distances that the French must travel to get from one town to another, the energy crisis is as serious there as it is here. Gasoline has been $5 a gallon for some time and is increasing. In Paris, as a counter-measure, one sees more and more "smart" cars, motorcycles, scooters and a dramatic return of the bicycle. The city government has set up bicycle stations around Paris where people can rent bikes for the day, for a small fee, and deposit them at the station nearest their final destination. One sees young people, old people, women in high fashion, and even business men with cell phones to their ears bravely biking down the boulevards.
While I was in Paris, there were demonstrations in the boulevards of the Latin Quarter. I'm not referring to the brief but well-publicized protests against China along the route of the Olympic torch. I am speaking of thousands of high school students and teachers out of school and on strike demonstrating against proposed reductions in the nation's education budget, which like other government services in France is in deep deficit. It was a typical Parisian manifestation. It followed clearly understood rules: Demonstrators know how far they can go in their actions; the police know how far they can go in their response. Normally, no one gets hurt. In addition, the French never demonstrate on weekends.
Like us, and like the Germans and the British, the French are struggling with immigration issues. In their case it involves people from Africa, the Near East and Eastern Europe. The numbers are large, especially in and around Paris, and the consequences are serious: a threat to traditional French culture, which is based on a higher degree of integration than ours; new demands on the centralized national educational system; an increase in unemployment; incidents of racism and anti-Muslim activity; and a rise in urban crime. Some natives of Paris lament that the city today seems like a foreign country.
The French government is in deficit. Government cost-cutting is as difficult to accomplish there as it is here, mainly because the population is used to costly government services and unwilling or unable to give up what they consider a right. The housing sector, mortgage lenders and banks are struggling. This sounds a lot like the story here in the United States, and it is. Prices in Paris will take your breath away -- $5 for a cup of coffee -- and it is not just because the exchange rate is high (one Euro cost me $1.67). Inflation is high and affects Parisians as well.
The French I met -- mostly middle class and well-educated -- don't like President Bush. They have great difficulty understanding how the American people elected him in the first place. ("How could you elect a man who doesn't read books?" one asked me.) But they have even greater difficulty in understanding why we re-elected President Bush. Their main criticism centers on the war in Iraq and an apparent lack of planning for the aftermath. They recall that their government tried to warn us of the dangers of becoming deeply involved in Iraq, and we responded by boycotting French wine and changing the name of our fried potatoes. The French find this very amusing because even in France fried potatoes are not known as "French fries" but simply frites.
Despite French disappointment with the U.S. over its Iraq policies, the French still greatly admire the United States, its people, its optimistic, can-do view of life. Where in the world do many French people dream of visiting? The Grand Canyon, California, New York.
And for those who are not motivated by a fascination of or love for America, cheap prices for jeans and other goods bring them to our shores. There is, in fact, less that separates us than unites us.
