French Fried

Seeing the meltdown in Europe warms the cockles of my heart after being on the receiving end of all the wagging fingers and upturned noses about how deficient we "unsophisticated" Americans "cooperate" with the rest of the world. Don't mind my little "nanna-nanna-naa-naa" dance, there will be some minor substance to this post, but then again, who really cares, as I think this blog is ranked somewhere below "Billy's Fishing Lures Blog" and slightly higher than "Hector's List of Things That Can Fit Into Your Belly Button Blog."

The French rejection of the European constitution doesn't have jack squat to do with America. Jeff Jarvis makes an observation that almost gets there:

It's about trying to turn Europe in to a faux nation. It's about protectionism. It's about Europe thinking it is a world player when it is no longer. And it's about a bad constitution that made up for in bureaucracy what it lacked in vision.

History is repeating itself in France yet again; for all its historical significance, France has never been able to substantively define just what it is that they stand for other than the vague notion of being "French." Unwisely, the French have taken this unsubstantiated abstraction and turned it into an ideology, with former foreign minister Dominique de Villepin as its orator:

After the first globalization dominated by Spain at the time of the Renaissance, and after the second, launched by the Industrial Revolution and dominated by the Anglo-Saxons, cannot one wager that the third globalization, that of identities, of cultures and of symbols, will bring a new spirit to French ambition? For the values that energize our ambition are equally those to which international society aspires--the universal rights of man, faith in solidarity and fraternity, the hope of reuniting all human differences in the single human community, the need to correct the distortions of the market by means of regulation.

De Villepin embodies the French tendancy towards bluster and high hopes instead of pragmatism and vision backed by even a semblance political ability. These feeble roots go all the way back to the French Revolution, as Jacques Barzun, in his masterful book From Dawn to Decadence, pointedly identifies why the the French are unable to seize any lasting initiative:

It is not surporising that the men who filled the three successive French assemblies were not well equipped for their demanding tasks. Many were small-town layers like Robespierre, or memebers of other learned professions; some were artisans, or again small landowners or local officials. A number may have been used to politicking, but not to fashioning a constutution or resolving great national issues under the pressure of emergencies. They were certainly articulate. They wrote and delivered endless speeches and debated ad infinitum. The one statesman in their midst, Mirabeau, vainly kept urging them to take action. What is left of French revolutionary eloquence is enormous in bulk and a model of all future campaign oratory--abstract, diffuse strings of generalities, aimed at applause for vituous attitudes and vague on details except when attacking rivals or denouncing "traitors." Again, one exception to verbosity: the lucid and vigorous Danton.

Reading selected, translated pieces of de Villepin's book, The Shark and the Seagull, I found an elegant, poetic prose that succeeded in nothing but putting window dressing on a shallow and untenable ideology. For all their talk about progressive values, just as with their forefathers, today's Frenchmen remain mired in the quicksand that is their false sense of identity. Progress, to the French, is not a "the universal rights of man, faith in solidarity and fraternity, the hope of reuniting all human differences in the single human community," it is a world where all look up to the French and embrace their higher ways; it is a fantasy that defies the very "Reason" they claim to espouse.

The French, with a few exceptions, still refuse to take a pragmatic look at themselves, as that would be such an unsophisticated and unprogressive "American" thing to do. In the meantime, their unassimmilated Muslim population grows like wildfire to make up for the decreasing demographics supporting its suffocating socialism. If a significant portion of the French population continue to refuse to reject this fantasy, there may not be anything "French" left to save. Not that this would be a bad thing, however the replacement of Islamic Fascism isn't the preferred replacement I'd choose.