French get fried on U.S. TV and in newspapers 

Janice Tibbetts (Vancouver Sun)
CanWest News Service 

Monday, February 24, 2003 


WASHINGTON -- Oh, la la. All things French are taking a beating these days in the United States. 

French wine. French people. Even the humble french fry. 

France's dovish position on Iraq has made the nation of wine connoisseurs, cheese makers and attitude the butt of wisecracks and insults on American phone-in shows and late-night television, in newspaper opinion pieces and in bars and restaurants. 

And an insult coined by the character Groundskeeper Willy on The Simpsons has seen widespread revival as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" crops up with increasing frequency in anti-French arguments. 

"You get the impression that war has already started and it's between France and the United States," said Nathalie Loiseau, press counsellor at the French embassy in Washington. 

Loiseau says France and the U.S. have a long history of competing egos and a "bad habit" of always thinking they are right. But that traditional tension has greatly intensified in recent days. 

Take, for instance, the hundreds of supportive e-mails and telephone calls that Neal Rowland has received in the last week after he posted this sign outside his restaurant in Beaufort, N.C.: "Because of Cubbie's support for our troops, we no longer serve french fries. We now serve freedom fries." 

Sales have soared, Rowland says, especially after he began adding tiny American flags to each basket of straight cuts. 

He says he got the idea to rename his fries while talking to a former history teacher who told him that anti-German sentiment during the First World War prompted Americans to change the name of frankfurters to hot dogs. 

In West Palm Beach, Fla., Ken Wagner drew a crowd last week when he poured his French and German wine in the gutter outside his popular bar. As he dumped his stock, a bagpiper played God Bless America. 

"A lot of us are frustrated because here we are trying to do the right thing, trying to get rid of this dictator [Saddam Hussein] and France and Germany, who owe their very existence to us, they decide they're going to stop us," said Wagner. 

"I was miffed and I felt I had to do something." 

Following suit, French and German wines have been wiped off the wine list at two North Carolina country clubs. 

The U.S. Congress has even jumped on the French-bashing bandwagon. 

House Speaker Dennis Hastert has suggested he would like to impose trade sanctions on French wine and Evian water. 

New York Republican Representative Peter King, declaring on the Fox television network that the U.S. should not allow "a has-been country like France to hold us back," said his family had cancelled a trip there. 

Fellow Republican Roy Blunt cracked a batch of jokes at a speech last week in Missouri. One of them: "Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." 

And there has been lots more. Jay Leno has guffawed about France. So have David Letterman and Dennis Miller. The French have been denounced in American newspapers as "wimps" and "weasels." 

Loiseau warns that the attacks against France have become so nasty they could backfire. 

"It doesn't help because you've seen public opinion in Europe nowadays," she said. 

"People oppose a war and it would be a pity if they would turn to be anti-American. When they hear about what has been written in some articles in the United States, when they hear the insults, they get very nervous." 

And not all Americans share the anti-France views being aired in public. Loiseau says she receives about 600 to 800 letters, e-mails and phone calls a day, the vast majority of which support the French position. 

David, an American living in Frankfurt, is one of those supporters. 

"This is intolerance," he said on a phone-in show on CNN. 

"You don't see people rounding up Irish in bars in Boston and accusing them of giving to the IRA. With France and Germany, they are 100 per cent behind America, they are behind Americans who are going to come home in body bags because of George Bush's stupid war."