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If you can’t stand the heat, get out of France
: Mark Steyn on the incredible scandal of 10,000 dead from heat in France:
‘The US and British armies have entered the gates of hell,” thundered George Galloway last month. “Soon it will be 100 degrees at midnight in Baghdad, but there will be no respite from the need for full body armour.”
As usual, George was a little off. The gates of hell are on the p
Not to get in the way of a good rant, but the current forecasts for Paris don’t have the highs exceeding ~80 degrees Fahrenheit. The hottest temperatures you’ll find in southwest France. Toulouse, for example, has highs in the mid-90s.
>But 10,000 French can die, and even the French don’t seem to care
I really wish the French would find something more important to COMPLAIN about than local American politics. And What? Can’t call my US wine Burgundy? Or Chardonay, Chardonay? OK, fine. Let’s get rid of all French names here in the US, and then see what comes of the fracus. No more Camembert? Who cares…..Go ahead, no one in America cares about your prized French names for cheeze and crackers.
Whoa there! Everyone take a deep breath for a second. Why is everyone so mad at France these days? It makes no sense to me. Is it just because they decided not to support Bush’s war in Iraq? Hundreds of other countries didn’t support it either.
People are “mad” at France not because they didnt’ support the war (nobody’s really mad @ Germany or Russia or Canada or India, etc for the most part in case you haven’t noticed), but because they’re so damn hypocritical about it. years of anti-americanism from the French(you know it’s there) don’t help either.
We’re arrogant, but Chirac saying that eastern european countries “weren’t brought up well” & “missed an oppurtunity” to shut up (as well as saying that they’re hurting their EU membership chances) by supporting the US position on Iraq, and what’s that? That’s not arrogant? Hypocrites.
The way they claimed the moral high ground did it for me. It’s pretty obvious that it was dirty oil money that they were trying to protect.
ok, i’ll stop now. suffice it to say that if there’s any country on the planet w/ an over inflated sense of self importance, it’s not the US (can’t deny we’re important). France fits that bill rather well. (French people excepted of course, well not the whiney ones)
I don’t know about everybody else, but I was hating France long before the war. The French are a cautionary example for Americans. “This is the future, beware!” Sort of like the Eloi and Morlocks. The French are what remains of a world-striding colossus once time and hubris has had its way.
The French are the sad and crabbed remnants of a universal nationalism. Americans, as the practitioners of the current universal nationalism, fear and hate that reminder of failure.
The current conflict is an interesting tangle of universal nationalisms. The Arabic, discredited since the 13th century. The French, since the 19th. The American, aging but still strong. The transnationals, feeble and repeatedly overwhelmed: the Century of Man supplanted and co-opted by the American Century time and again. What’s truly remarkable is how completely the Soviet universal nationalism has been invalidated and obliterated, removed from the conversation entirely.