French but not Quite a Francophile

I have an ambivalent relationship with the French. They have this bad habit of separating the Royals from their heads, and then lopping off the heads of passersby and bystanders alike, especially abundantly available courtiers and plutocrats. An estimated 18,000 suspiciously non-revolutionary types were guillotined like carrots on a cutting board and drowned with nefarious zeal during the Reign of Terror. The deChristianised French continued their zealous ways by rounding up their non-Christian citizens during WWII and shipped them off in boxcars (about 75,000 French Jews were betrayed by those Vichy bastards). To this day, some 65 years later, the French government will not allow any "anonymous" reporting or tips to be collected about their citizens (either through tip-lines or worker hot-lines or whatnot). They still have a bad association with snoops who snoop about in their snoopy ways -- and for good reason.

In post-modern France, the government bends over backwards to improve how they treat their citizens, accepting everyone and rejecting few. Many believe recent French administrations have gone too far in their precatory offerings, and the result has been the de facto capture of once quaint cities by radicalized Muslims. Today their citizenry is under fire by an idea as pernicious as any slithering worldview that's ever hopped under their collective Gallic nose. Some day they'll get it right. I mean this is the birth place of the Salon and The Enlightenment for Pierre's sake! When push comes to shove -- it already has and will again with the Islamicists -- the French will once again find inspiration in their tripartite motto of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité ou la mort. I just hope it doesn't come to the death part.

But, for all their faults, my French forebears have style ... no they have elan. I mean a mid-level bureaucrat having espresso curbside in his bespoke suit appears to the average Yank as Cary Grant. Take an American similarly situated and you have Al Bundy, replete with hand down his pants sitting on Archie Bunker's couch. As much as I love Americana (especially Pax Americana), the French have much to admire. Theirs is the cafe society with its multilinguistic sophisticates, all wearing ensembles sui generis.

They even have a calculation for le affair. Here I am not speaking about the adulterous type, but the middle-aged man courting the young coquette seemingly half his paunchy self kind. The French run the calculus amore thusly: take your average MPB male (male-pattern baldness), divide his age by half, and then add 7. Et voila, 60 yr-old Cary Grant can date Grace Kelly if she is *(60/2 = 30 + 7) 37 years-old!!!

Gotta love the French. See my ambivalence? For more French-centric entries, click here!
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