Well, here I am back in Noo Yoik in the cafe (Starbucks) of the big Barnes and Noble bookshop - bookstore I mean - on Third avenue and 54th. There was this guy, balding but with a slim moustache, around 50, sporting a bright red T-shirt and light-coloured shorts, sitting at a table, engrossed in a book. Most people who come into the café in the bookstore do take magazines or books off the shelf and browse through them or indeed spend an hour or so reading them, before generally putting them back on the shelf, hopefully without added coffee stains.
Well, what caught my eye was the slogan on the red T-shirt: “Unapologetically American”. As I try to deconstruct it, the phrase can only refer defiantly to the USA’s relations with other countries or cultures. Now, without going back as far as, well, ... of course we can’t go back very far into history when talking about the USA, but without going back as far as ‘American relations’ with native Americans in the nineteenth century, let’s assume there is some implied general reference here to Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terror and the on-going middle-eastern question. Paradoxically, this apparently bold self-confident phrase does implicitly recall that many people do feel that America has something to apologize for in its recent international relations. Midtown Manhattan, of course, is not really red-neck territory and this is one of the better bookshops in Noo Yoik.
Furthermore, “unapologetically” is an eight-syllable word. Was this a rare sighting of a member of the lesser spotted East Coast conservative Republican patriotic intelligentsia, whether Neocon or Paleocon? My curiosity about what he was reading was stimulated. Maybe it was something like Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat’s lauded Grand New Party (2008)[1], or maybe just a biography of Pat Buchanan. But no. Not even the Sarah Palin biography for 9-12 year olds – not due until September. As I sidled past my reader with my empty paper cup in hand on a circuitous route to the trash can, I could see it was Hollywood Hellraisers by Robert Sellers (Arrow Books, 2010) , featuring the "wild lives and fast times of Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson". I now know, but didn’t we always know, that it contains “some woeful lapses in taste, [with] all the depth of a paddling pool ... but is great fun” as one reviewer has said [2]. So maybe it all made sense after all. He was up from the Mid West for a coupl’a days on a sales conference and wanted effete New York liberals to know it.
However, on return to my 33rd floor computer, I Googled one or two things and found that the slogan might make much more immediate and national political sense. The mid-term elections are coming up. I know this because I have been stopped a few times on the street by both Republican and Democrat activists trying to sign me up to register as a Republican or Democratic voter. Apparently, if I understand correctly, the only way to be able to vote is to declare yourself a supporter of this or that party beforehand, which would explain how you can vote in Primaries of course, which has always puzzled me. I assume you can buy lists of registered voters too, I mean you can even do that in Britain, although not with voters’ political colour attached. Well, I got tired of being stopped after a while. So now, when asked “Are you a registered Republican voter?”, I can say “I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien” without even breaking stride.
Anyway, with elections this fall for all the members of the House of Representatives (two-year terms), for a third of Senators (six-year terms), for some entire state legislatures and for some state governors (including New York State), electioneering has begun in earnest. Narrow majorities are at stake, affecting the President’s ability to govern. Since Obama’s trip abroad in April to Europe and the Middle East, including a meeting of the G20 and the NATO summit, the American conservative media, led by the Fox News channel, have been calling the trip an “apology tour” labelling the President “Apologizer in Chief", “running down his own country”[3]. To give you a flavour, on one Fox News programme, the presenter pours liquid from a petrol can onto an effete, long-haired young man, while claiming, that “Obama is apologizing to the Frenchy French for our arrogance.” I now assume therefore that the T-shirt was produced as part of the Republican, anti-Obama election campaign. So, the guy in the eight-syllable unapologetically American shirt may be a local activist for the Grand Ole Party. Well, we guessed he wasn’t an Obama supporter.
Nor, one might infer from the following, is he likely to be a friend of the French: you can not only buy an Unapologetically American Hoodie [by Ranger Up] at http://www.rangerup.com/uahoodie.html, but also a T-shirt featuring Liberty leading French revolutionaries over the barricades http://www.rangerup.com/vilafrmetee.html ... with a sting in the tail, or rather in the flag. Check it out [take a look]. (Thanks, David, for the links.) It all goes back to the Iraq War, I assume, when the French have never been forgiven by some for not being four-square behind Bush and Blair, and thereafter portrayed as "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys"[4].
The French are indeed, it has to be admitted, very Frenchy, and this Sunday while eating some French cheese I saw another T-shirt slogan, emblazoned this time in bleu-blanc-rouge (red-white-’n-blue): it read "La Journée de La Bastille". It was indeed on the occasion of a celebration of the French National Day in New York [5], or of Bastille Day as they refer to it here and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. It was organised mainly by the FIAF – French Institute-Alliance Française, – the two institutions having joined forces, overcoming the fact that the one is part of the French state and the Alliance a private, not-for-profit association, although far more important than the Institute in spreading the French language and culture world-wide. A number of French companies sponsor this now annual event, which involves closing East 60th Street between Lexington and Fifth Avenue and inviting the usual stalls one sees at street fairs selling fast food (but some French themed, selling French cheese, macaroons, crêpes and so on). Talking of cheese, indulge me a brief interjection: in a good, up-market food shop on the East Side the head of the cheese counter was grumbling aloud the other day about what to do with these camemberts that had no sell-by date on them and, who knows?, maybe even wondering about the state of public health legislation in France. But can you imagine a French consumer looking for a sell-by-date on a camembert? She would take the top off, smell it and feel its elasticity, but look for a sell-by-date? You can buy camembert too young, but too old?!
Well, anyway, the FIAF building was open for a cheese and wine tasting as part of Bastille Day sauce américaine. Twelve dollars for the chance to taste three half-glasses of good Bordeaux wine while eating as much cheese and bread as you can bear to stand on line for (not in line, I am reliably informed). You could also get bottled beer instead of wine, but practically nobody went for that, despite the fact that there was no one waiting on line for the beer. The air-conditioning could not cope, it was 90 degrees F. outside, so the length of queues should have been a factor, but no.
Now, I don’t remember ever hearing or reading this T-shirt phrase La Journée de La Bastille before. The French refer to their national day as la fête nationale, or le quatorze juillet; they talk about la prise de la Bastille – the taking of the Bastille prison (symbolically liberating a handful of prisoners in 1789). Practically every Google reference, even to la fête de la Bastille, is on an English language site. As for La Journée de La Bastille, trust me, that is just not French. Of course, you will say that the New York fête was not held on the 14th, but on Sunday July 11th, understandable in terms of organization. So, does it matter except for purists, like me, “more royalist than the king”?
Maybe not, but my bigger gripe is that the FIAF is not as French as one might expect. Nowhere on their website could I find a button to get to a French language version [6]. Their e-newsletter is in English too – I have just signed up to find out. They give the titles of their films in English. I also remember a few years ago, in the FIAF, the celebrated Le Monde front-page cartoonist Plantu [7] had to give a talk in English, mainly (it appeared) because his American co-speaker had no French. More significantly perhaps, for visitors, even on the doors to the FIAF restrooms, toilettes to you and me, there were Gentlemen and Men and Ladies and Women, but no Messieurs or Dames to be seen. Perhaps the French have decided they can’t be as Frenchy in America as they are at home. A pity for all concerned.
P.S. In late August I came across on TV another example of the America's curious relationship with French and the French. The New York liberal intelligentsia pay hommage to French culture, especially film, but even they, or many of them, can't cope with the language. But my jaw dropped when on the otherwise excellent Turner Classic Movie channel, during "Lawrence of Arabia", which is so long it needs an intermission, as it would have had originally in cinemas (film theaters), the following came onto the screen: "ENTER'E ACTE", which again, shows scant respect for French or its spelling conventions.
Notes
1. See “The next conservative thinkers” by Drake Bennett of the Boston Globe, on http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/07/12/the_next_conservative_thinkers/
2. Viola Fort, The Observer, Sunday 7 February 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/feb/07/hollywood-hellraisers-robert-sellers
3. See Media matters for America on http://mediamatters.org/research/200904100035, critiquing various news reports and comments on the tour with hilarious (or disturbing?) video extracts from Fox News programs and CNN.
4. See Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese-eating_surrender_monkeys; and why not Eddie Izzard's rif on French and monkeys http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1sQkEfAdfY&feature=related
5. http://www.bastilledaynyc.com/
6. http://www.fiaf.org/ By contrast see the Cervantes Institute site which has English and Spanish versions http://nuevayork.cervantes.es/es/default.shtm
7. Plantu's blog http://www.plantu.net/
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