As I was about to unleash mine, I thought about something the writer Philip Roth told me recently in New York. There is an idiotic way to hate this country, he said, which consists in blaming it, for example, for its injustices and its Puritanism. But Roth immediately added that he knew a more intelligent way to hate America: when you live there you understand that all you have to do to take the full measure of the profound stupidity of the country is to spend one full day in front of a television set.
Not that this judgment reconciled me to the spirit of America. And yet… despite your disdain for culture, your renunciation of a certain taste for civilization, your abdication of all values that are not dictated by profit and other detestable ways in which you insult our art of living, I have found myself recently taking to the ramparts to denounce the narrow-minded anti-Americanism that is all the rage in France. Even if we have all the reason in the world to fight for our cultural uniqueness, this demagoguery from another age will hold us back. It leaves us on the platform watching the great train of technological change roll by. In the digital revolution, you are the players and we are the spectators. We’re going to have to offer a little more than 600 types of cheeses to keep the young generation of French entrepreneurs and creative thinkers from emigrating to the United States without the slightest pang of conscience.
I had a dream: I was no longer ashamed of not hating America. From there to loving it…
