January 11, 2004

All right, everybody. It's time to separate France-fact from France-fiction. It's true that, over the years, France has gained a certain "reputation" among many Americans, and this seems to me to be a mite unfair. People seem to feel that just because a nation has known centuries of cowardice and moral sleaziness its name can be used as the punch line to every joke.

However, it seems to me that one should not judge a country without having experienced it up-close and personal, as a weekend tourist. So now, after having visited France, I am of the opinion that nobody should judge the country without first having tried their quiche lorraine.*

It's true that quiche lorraine once turned me off. I mean, come on, there's a certain feminized air to the food, especially with the italicized name and all. But then I tried it, and I can firmly say that there is nothing feminine about the mass loads of grease involved in its production. Weight gain is inevitable. People who eat quiche lorraine have been known to implode into quasars. It's that good.

Imagine, if you will, a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit from your local fast food eatery. Now imagine it before you traditionally suck the grease off of it with the industrial vacuum at the service station. Now imagine taking about forty of them, and compressing them into a small pie-like entity with the texture of cheesecake and the caloric content of trinitrotoluene. You take one bite of the stuff, and grease spills over your face and soaks your long underwear and scalds you, and you have been wearing the long underwear since the previous Saturday, but you don't care because it's that good (the quiche, not the long underwear).

There is no longer a question that quiche is no feminine food. You know how girls are, delicately dabbing their individual Pringles with a paper towel before nibbling them to bits. Well, if they tried to do that with quiche they would have to deforest Brazil . So I therefore no longer have qualms with quiche.

In fact, the wonderfulness that is quiche lorraine easily makes up for the country's slightly less than noble history (entitled: A History of France, Putting the Ig in Ignominious). Add to that the beautiful French countryside, immortalized by Monet, Seurat, and Le Pew, and the exquisite sublimity of the greeting bonjour, and I'll happily agree to not care about the complicity in the Holocaust and the inability to maintain a government for more than 30 years at any one time.

It's true that French sounds like a pleasant language. While Germans sound like they're cussing hard enough to castrate someone at 400 yards when they're wishing you a pleasant day, the French sound like they're always pleased to see you, even when they're informing you that if they catch your butt on the floor of the Louvre one more time, they're going to force feed you French cheese until you smell like a dumpster for the rest of your life. One Louvre lavatory janitor cussed me out in French for five minutes straight because I had not vacated the stall immediately when she said to, in French. I'm not sure what she expected me to do. There's a certain natural order to things when it comes to using the bathroom. I suppose I could have just stood up right then and taken my business elsewhere (so to speak), but. that would be gross. Anyway, my point is that, while she was cussing me out, she sounded very pleasant, because she was speaking French. If she had been speaking German, I might have needed therapy. But as she wasn't, I simply smiled, nodded, and walked away.

Speaking of French museums, I think it's time to complain about the silliest museum I have ever had the misfortune to visit. The museum is called, and I am not kidding, The Monument to Peace. And yes, it really was that obnoxious.

This museum is located in Caen, which is famous the world over for being impossible to pronounce, as the only vowel sound I can make out of it is a schwa, and it makes no sense to have a word with nothing but a schwa. It's like trying to bake a cake using only corn starch, or launch a sitcom starring Tony Danza. It's just baffling.

So, anyway, Caen is in Normandy, the site of the Norman Invasion, the Invasion of Normandy, the Of Invasion Norman, and Normans-o-Invasion, and bauxite. The beaches of Normandy are, of course, the heroic site of the most daring operation in 20th century history, the filming of Saving Private Ryan.

You see, the Invasion of Normandy has become the symbol of the war that spelled the end for the most odious dictatorship in the all the 1930's and 40's, behind Stalin's. It is for this reason that France built their Monument to Peace in Caen.

You should probably know, if you haven't already figured it out, that when France says "peace" what they mean is "giving evil people whatever they want because it's easier that way." The Monument to Peace was not celebrating the era of peace for Western Europe won in World War II. It was, in fact, subtly suggesting that the problem with Hitler could have been solved if only the Allied Powers had reduced greenhouse gas emissions. However, to be fair, the Monument often tried very very hard not to come across as too opinionated one way or another, and for the most part, they succeeded. They managed this by not having anything worth seeing in the museum.

We were told that we would be seeing the famous D-Day Museum. What we found instead was a vast warehouse-like building (you know, in case a tour group wants to park its zeppelin in it, or something) with very appealing architecture designed to house nothing. There were exhibits, of course, but these exhibits were more in the Continental tradition of being paragraphs of unreadable English on attractive displays, rather than the English tradition of being stuff. (The Louvre is, of course, behind the times.) They had unreadable paragraphs on many peace-related topics, including nuclear testing in New Mexico, the Stalingrad Defense, and the North African campaigns. Caen has unique access to information on these things by not being anywhere near to any of them. The D-Day area had, in stark contrast, three paragraphs.

It's possible that I am exaggerating a bit here. There were probably five or six paragraphs on D-Day. And, too, I was a bit tired and hungry. You see, in order to reach France in time to see the famous "D-Day Museum" while anybody still cared (whoops, too late), we had to leave London at the reasonable hour of 5:30 AM, and also, nobody was allowed to eat. So we had all experienced, essentially, a Day in Hell That Happened to Be in France, and what better way to cap it off than with the Monument to Peace? I mean other than leaping into a wood chipper, obviously?

So I may be a tad biased when I claim that the Monument to Peace was the most laughable piece of overpriced moral equivalence tripe without a decent cafeteria in Western Europe. But on the other hand, I might not be. After all, I saw the D-Day film. I may have been hallucinating, but I could swear the entire film consisted of floating black and white photographs, completely free of commentary of any kind, including of the French kind. It was discombobulating.

In this film, there was a big map that showed where all the military units were, chasing each other around Normandy like little computer generated football teams, occasionally knocking down an unused cathedral or two, until, arbitrarily, the Allies won. There was no sign whatsoever that the Allies were the good guys and the Nazis were the bad guys. As best as I could figure out, it was just two armies, destroying northern France for no good reason. That may strike you as odd. Heck, people who don't believe evil exists believe the Nazis were evil. Why doesn't France?

My grandparents have a theory. According to them, (and they've met people who believe this I think) the French actually preferred to live under the Third Reich. Sure, they didn't have that many civil liberties, and of course there was the whole thing where all the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and political dissidents got shipped off to death camps, but it's a small price to pay for not having your empty cathedrals destroyed during the invasion. So when Churchill, FDR, and De Gaulle (sometimes referred to as "France") had the gall (get it?) to "liberate" France, many of the French were more peeved than anything else. They probably wouldn't mind if the Nazis invaded France again just so long as it meant they wouldn't have to put up with any just wars or anything like that. Because war is always evil. And shipping your Jews to Dachau is just one of the convenient ways to avoid it.

But enough with the complaining about petty details such as moral fiber and national character. France rules, and the rivers of grease flowing from Parisian eateries resoundingly prove it.

*No, no, you're saying it wrong. Work those nasal passages! Work them, I say!