Presidentielle 2008

I just sent off my voting ballot-- Fed Ex "special election rate" cost me 17 euros, but this is a small price to pay to participate in democracy. Especially democracy in the form of voting AGAINST McCain-Palin to try to prevent 4 more years of the same catastrophic Bush policies from ruining the country. I was talking to my dad recently and he said the image of America in the world made him so sad now. Once (like in 1850 during the potato famine), it was a way of life that people in other countries might have envied and admired and even immigrated to attain.

Now we have the 700 billion dollar bank bailout and the Republican party claiming that Sarah Palin seeing Russia from her house counts as foreign policy experience.

Lately with the election only a week away, I've spent a lot of my time defending the American public to the French and assuring them Sarah Palin is a wildly underqualified psychotic fascist and that we ARE ready to have a "president noir"-- and have become very passionate and defensive... Just because it would probably never happen in France, doesn't mean it's impossible in the US, as even Spike Lee once pointed out. I'm especially fond of quoting Spike Lee on this topic. And then the common response in France (from someone French or otherwise) is to inform me that if Obama's elected, he'll just be assassinated by one of his own bodyguards. This consipracy theory seems to come from a sketch on a news parody show called Les Gignols de l'info, which features muppets, one of whom is a Sylvester Stallone-like Obama bodyguard who suggests that his job is actually to assassinate his boss, not protect him. A little cynical, insulting and reductive about ethnic relations in America, non?

Many a francais seems to think this assassination theory is God's literal truth and that the political muppet show is actually a documentary about real life in the US, despite the puppets. Or maybe they think we all really look like Jim Henson's workshop, but fatter.

If I might make a small suggestion, maybe basing political opinions on puppet shows is not the most intellectual approach to international politics.

Obviously, I'm especially sensitive to the image of the US abroad lately because of the international scrutiny that the election receives, but also it seems like the more people here consider America, the more hostility is expressed. For example, it really seemed like my hairdresser recently was trying her best to recite every single negative annecdote she'd ever heard about the US. Like that 2 of her clients had disasterous hair cuts/dye jobs in New York and "you'd think that in the US they know how to do hair, but they don't." Since there are clearly only these 2 hair salons in all 3,000 square miles of America.

She also told me about an American client who only got her hair cut in France because all salons anywhere in the hexagon were better than those in the US. Really, I asked her, passive-agressively a la parisienne, among my American friends, it's the opposite. They wait to go back to the US for their haircuts because they don't trust French hair salons since they never listen to the client and think their opinion is always the right and only one.

Having exausted the errors of American hairdressers, Claire the coiffeuse then turned to politics and in typical French bulldog fashion when ahead and gave me her opinion of all political candidates, which I couldn't help thinking, if the roles were reversed and I were coiffing a French woman in the US, I would never say anything like as insensitive to a foreign person like, "oh hello, there. Sarkozy is a shallow racist bloodthirsy capitalist wannabe celebrity destroying French social systems, culture and democracy." Even if I wanted to express that same idea, it would be phrased more like: "in the US, the image we have of Sarkozy is that he likes fame and power and isn't a fan of immigrants, how do more people see him in France?"

Claire then mentioned a radio broadcast where conservatives were quoted as calling Obama "une singe" (a monkey), which is obviously some freakish fringe opinion since he's the preferred candidate at the moment and ahead in the polls. I can say with confidence that the vast majority of the American population is aware that he is a homo sapien. The singe story sounds typical of the French media to seek the biggest weirdos imaginable (unfortunately, folks like this are always around somewhere to oblige foreign journalists) and make it seem like they are representative of the entire American population. She talked at length about how outrageous this attitude was-- "can you imagine? They don't even recognize him as a human being!" Finally, to shut her up, I said, yes, it's deplorable, sounds like the Front National in France. "Oh, but it's worse," she assured me. "Ah, bon?" I replied witheringly, "didn't they almost win the 2002 presidential election?" The phrase "ah, bon" can express many varying degrees of disbelief, disapproval and outright contempt. French has so many polite ways of saying bugger off.

The other latest Annoying Election Question that even NPR-like radio station France Inter has started debating is why Obama doesn't call himself a "metis," because that's what he is as someone half white and half Kenyan (this translates as "mixed" or "half-blood"). And then they say that this all has to do with the history of slavery and American racism. Obviously, this history does color a lot of ethnic relations in the US and no country is a perfect racism-free one. I'm still trying to find a good way to explain to them that everyone in the US has roots in different countries, some European and some not, so we're all mixed, this term doesn't mean anything and we don't talk endlessly about it because unlike France, we don't actually assume that everyone should be white. Rather than having a uniform term for mixed ethnicity, I think we tend to be more specific about ethnic heritage through strategic use of hyphens, like Asian-American, Dutch-Indonesian, etc.

Anyway, despite the dire political asssasination predictions of the muppets in their oracle-like wisdom and the inability of American hairdressers to do a dye job correctly, I have confidence that Obama will remain ahead in the polls and that the rest of the world will see a new side of America come November 4. To which most French people would probably respond with an
"ah, bon?"