*Ø* Blogmanac | Abolition, Menicheism and Bretzel?
Praising the President
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
La Boissière d'Ans, five hours south of Paris. The American flag billows on my monitor, as the fleeting words flash by: "Dow Jones … Cocaine … Noam Chomsky … Botox … Guantanamo." Even here in deepest France, tucked away in the green hills and hollows of historic Dordogne, I cannot escape "les mots de l'Amérique," the American words and names that the prestigious Le Monde thinks its online readers need to know.
Mouse-clicking on Old Glory, I get a fresh screen, with eleven different rubrics grouping more than 400 individual blurbs. Who and what Le Monde includes, or leaves out, and what its writers have to say opens a well-placed, if slightly left-facing, window on the French and on what they see in us.
Movies are big, this being France, where they helped invent the cinema. Clint Eastwood, Julia Roberts, and Michael Moore each get a screen. Woody Allen, a long-time French favorite, shows up under "psys, short for psychiatrists.
Sports has the fewest entries, but what do the French care about baseball, especially this week, when everyone is watching rugby?
The entries reveal a keen interest in American music, media, literature, the economy, cultural symbols, and technology.
They talk about our First Amendment and America's "absolute respect" for different religions. They explain how our separation of church and state differs from the more rigorously secular French, who would never open an official function with a prayer or allow their currency to proclaim "In God We Trust."
For a newspaper -- and country -- so often accused of being anti-American, Le Monde’s lexicon shows a fine sense of engagement. The writers seem fascinated and care enough to try to understand us.
Then I turn to politics, where the first item catches my eye -- "abolition."
Slavery?
No, "capital punishment," which links to "executions," "prisons," and "electric chair." The whole nasty business ranks as one of the biggest complaints the French and other Europeans have against us, every bit as galling to them as Iraq.
I click on George W. Bush -- "a mediocre student at Yale and Harvard," a former owner of a baseball team, a one-time alcoholic, and -- as governor of Texas -- a determined patron of the death penalty.
One link leads to "Crusades," which notes that Mr. Bush and his War on Terror have revived "the reactionary Manicheism of the Cold War." For the ecclesiastically challenged, the Manicheans were a Persian religious sect -- and later Christian heretics -- who saw the world divided into an eternal struggle between good and evil, God and the Devil.
Another links leads to "Bretzel," which is French for pretzel, on which the president choked in January 2002. Pretzels, the writer notes, had their origin in the French Alsace as well as in Germany.
Other links identify, define, and decipher a wider world of differences.
Avancer, s'il vous plez.
Praising the President
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
La Boissière d'Ans, five hours south of Paris. The American flag billows on my monitor, as the fleeting words flash by: "Dow Jones … Cocaine … Noam Chomsky … Botox … Guantanamo." Even here in deepest France, tucked away in the green hills and hollows of historic Dordogne, I cannot escape "les mots de l'Amérique," the American words and names that the prestigious Le Monde thinks its online readers need to know.
Mouse-clicking on Old Glory, I get a fresh screen, with eleven different rubrics grouping more than 400 individual blurbs. Who and what Le Monde includes, or leaves out, and what its writers have to say opens a well-placed, if slightly left-facing, window on the French and on what they see in us.
Movies are big, this being France, where they helped invent the cinema. Clint Eastwood, Julia Roberts, and Michael Moore each get a screen. Woody Allen, a long-time French favorite, shows up under "psys, short for psychiatrists.
Sports has the fewest entries, but what do the French care about baseball, especially this week, when everyone is watching rugby?
The entries reveal a keen interest in American music, media, literature, the economy, cultural symbols, and technology.
They talk about our First Amendment and America's "absolute respect" for different religions. They explain how our separation of church and state differs from the more rigorously secular French, who would never open an official function with a prayer or allow their currency to proclaim "In God We Trust."
For a newspaper -- and country -- so often accused of being anti-American, Le Monde’s lexicon shows a fine sense of engagement. The writers seem fascinated and care enough to try to understand us.
Then I turn to politics, where the first item catches my eye -- "abolition."
Slavery?
No, "capital punishment," which links to "executions," "prisons," and "electric chair." The whole nasty business ranks as one of the biggest complaints the French and other Europeans have against us, every bit as galling to them as Iraq.
I click on George W. Bush -- "a mediocre student at Yale and Harvard," a former owner of a baseball team, a one-time alcoholic, and -- as governor of Texas -- a determined patron of the death penalty.
One link leads to "Crusades," which notes that Mr. Bush and his War on Terror have revived "the reactionary Manicheism of the Cold War." For the ecclesiastically challenged, the Manicheans were a Persian religious sect -- and later Christian heretics -- who saw the world divided into an eternal struggle between good and evil, God and the Devil.
Another links leads to "Bretzel," which is French for pretzel, on which the president choked in January 2002. Pretzels, the writer notes, had their origin in the French Alsace as well as in Germany.
Other links identify, define, and decipher a wider world of differences.
Avancer, s'il vous plez.
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