Vive la France!

All this Frog-bashing is getting out of hand. Yes, French people are easy to make fun of. They like Jerry Lewis and have been known to wear striped shirts and berets. They eat croissants and smoke cigarettes with names we can’t pronounce. They can be haughty and opinionated, and a lot of them don’t like it that American popular culture threatens to dominate their own.

But listen. The French are America’s oldest and dearest friends. Without France’s help in the Revolutionary War, there would be no America. Period. France sold us the better part of our country for a song. They gave us our most famous national icon (the Statue of Liberty, duh). Our culture is inextricably linked with theirs.

So they didn’t want us to embark on a unilateral war in Iraq—big deal. Did their opposition stop us from doing just what the hell we wanted to? No. It slowed us down about as much as the Maginot line slowed down the Nazis. Now the Bush administration is trying to punish France for daring to defy its will. Why? What good does it serve?

If you had a friend who was about to get in a fight that you thought was unwarranted, and you counseled your friend not to get into it but he did anyway, would you expect that friend to stop speaking to you? Of course not.

All this stuff about the French being anti-American is just nonsense. Go to France and find out for yourself. They might not like our president, they for sure don’t like our belligerent foreign policy, but they love America. They can’t help it. They respect our culture even if they fear its motives.

We should stop acting like brats and embrace our old friends, stinky cheese and all.