Unintended humor is often found in news reportage or lede headers, but this item in the current issue of TIME was responsible for the involuntary spitting of coffee over a perfectly good birdcage liner.
Imported From France: Wine, Truffles And Now — Leeches
Leeches, those ancient, creepy medical devices, have just been given a U.S. seal of approval. Though doctors have long used the little bloodsuckers to clear pooled blood in skin grafts and blocked veins, the French company Ricarimpex SAS is the first to have sought and received FDA clearance, under a 1976 law, to market the invertebrates for medicinal purposes. If that makes you squeamish, consider this: the FDA this year also allowed the marketing of medicinal maggots to eat away dead tissue from wounds.
However, in the same issue, Charles Krauthammer explains Why the French Act Isn't Funny Anymore
Chirac knows America's stake in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It is so great, and so obvious, that even in the midst of a bitterly fought election campaign, the opposition presidential candidate embraces the current Administration's objective of democratic reconstruction in both countries. Why then is Chirac making things as difficult as he can for the U.S.?Posted by feste at July 9, 2004 09:24 AM | TrackBackIt is not just pique. It is not just antipathy to George Bush. And it is not just France's traditional and reflexive policy of trying to rein in, cut down and domesticate the world's greatest superpower so that ultimately secondary powers like France could emerge as leaders of a multipolar world.
There is something far deeper going on here. Beyond the anti-Americanism is an attempt to court the Muslim and Arab world. For its own safety and strategic gain, France is seeking a "third way" between America and its enemies. Chirac's ultimate vision is a France that is mediator and bridge between America and Islam. During the cold war, Charles de Gaulle invented this idea of a third force, withdrawing France from the NATO military structure and courting Moscow as a counterweight to Washington. Chirac, declaring in Istanbul that "we are not servants" of America, has transposed this Gaullist policy to the struggle with radical Islam.
Explosive population growth in the Arab world coupled with Europe's unprecedented baby bust presages a radical change in the balance of power in the Mediterranean world. Chirac perhaps sees a coming Muslim future or, at least, a coming Muslim resurgence. And he does not want to be on the wrong side of that history. The result is a classic policy of appeasement: stand up to the American presumption of dictating democratic futures to Afghanistan and Iraq; ingratiate yourself with the Arab world. Thus, for example, precisely at a time when the U.S. and many Western countries are shunning Yasser Arafat for supporting terrorism and obstructing peace, Chirac sends his Foreign Minister to the ruins of Arafat's compound to shake Arafat's hand for world cameras.
This is pure pandering but with an agenda. Chirac wants not only to make France the champion of the oppressed in general against the great American hegemon but also to make it in particular the champion of Arab aspirations against American imperialism. Even the left-leaning French newspaper Le Monde criticized Chirac for acting the "killjoy" in Istanbul. But Chirac's behavior was no mere outburst. It is a strategy for a French future. Chirac is charting a course — a collision course with America. Istanbul was just one accident scene. There are many more to come.
Yes, well I said all of that a long time ago.
http://www.politicallyright.com/April2003/article7.htm
Oh, well.
Posted by: do at July 9, 2004 01:18 PM>They believe - correctly - that the last thing standing between them and an epidemic of inter-ethnic violence is the thin discourse of republican citizenship inherited from the French Revolution.
Exactly, which exposes their domination of the EU for what it is: desperation. The French find themselves in an impossible situation created by decades of xenophobic, short-sighted social policies and a declining birth rate. As you say, France is a problem with which we will have to deal one day.
On a lighter note; I find it deeply amusing that many, supposedly sophiscated, Americans seem to confuse French money-grubbing, grovelling and pandering to rich American tourists, cultural elites and film icons as admiration and respect.
In projecting French distain and visceral dislike of Americans onto their hatred of Bush, the Left are hoisted by their own petard, which has a pleasing symmetry.
"The French find themselves in an impossible situation created by decades of xenophobic, short-sighted social policies and a declining birth rate."
Neither of these claims is quite true. French policies have not been especially more xenophobic than American ones over the past 30-40 years. Indeed, that's just the problem: the French wouldn't be struggling with, for example, domestic Arab anti-semitism had they looked at the last generation of immigrants a little more realistically. As for the birth rate: in fact, the French birth rate has taken off relative to France's neighbors in recent years -- indeed, it is almost at replacement level, a rare accomplishment for a Western European nation today. The sources of this "little baby boom" are of course controversial but many (including myself) believe that it has more than a little to do with high immigrant birth rates. If so, then it is yet another parallel with the US, where the only population enjoying robust growth due to birth rates are Latinos.
French policy, it is true, does have something desperate about it (as I note in the linked piece). Yet from another perspective, the French are just doing what most state actors do -- maximizing power and influence when the costs are not prohibitive. It is for this reason that I still don't understand US appeals to the Security Council prior to the Iraq War: French interest was clearly to stand in the way of the US.