In May of last year, I accompanied a friend to the French Consulate in New York City so she could vote. We ran into a festive, boisterous Israel Day parade, thousands of marchers on Fifth Avenue streaming past the consulate, many of whom, some with the aid of bullhorns, chanted “Shame on France, Shame on France” Others screamed insults or gave the consulate the finger. Anti-French, anti-Kofi Annan and anti-United Nations placards and banners were brandished, and a group of marchers took time away from celebrating Israel to hassle people entering and leaving the consulate. Endorsed and encouraged by opportunistic, self-serving politicians and irresponsible media, the campaign to smear France with charges of anti-Semitism was already on.
A few months ago, before the war began, I visited the consulate again for business. I watched a squad of white guys, dressed like MTV hip-hop gangstas in baggy jeans and oversize hoodies (shades of the Boston Tea Party when terrorists disguised themselves as Indians, another suspect minority) plaster the consulate’s walls with anti-French slogans and U.S. flag decals, then duct tape two large American flags to the poles of the consulate’s entrance awning.
On the threshold of war, as worldwide protests swelled, America’s indomitable congressmen fumed and grandstanded, renamed french fries “freedom fries,” declared the only good French wine is one a patriot pours in the gutter. And it ain’t over yet. On April 24, during a TV interview, when asked if France must pay consequences for opposing the United States, Secretary of State Colin Powell answered simply: “Yes.”
I’m appalled and shamed by the despicable tactic of vilifying a whole country, a whole people, to disqualify their point of view. Whatever happened to our proud tradition of protecting free speech? Are our only options bribing or crushing those who disagree with us?
Members of the Bush administration continue to attack people whose crime is being born French, and it’s clearly the administration’s duty to undo the damage before it’s too late. Responsibility for the first deadly atrocity–a possibility seemingly far-fetched until I witnessed the rapidly rising tide of irrationality drowning common sense and decency–will rest squarely on the shoulders of our leaders who unsubtlely signaled that patriotism should include animosity toward the French. A few well-chosen words from the president could halt this deplorable species of race-baiting, just as abruptly as a few well-chosen words fanned the flames.
I seriously doubt that the healing words will be said, because policy as well as pride, vindictiveness and arrogance sparked the antagonism toward the French. Ugly words won’t be retracted or revised because the public is being manipulated. Instead of winning over public opinion through informed, principled debate, our leaders are pumping up anger–unreasoning, violent, self-righteous, intoxicating anger–as addictive as oil. Anger at the French and blaming the French hid the actual reasons for waging war. Anger at the French helped justify a war the president needed so his reelection wouldn’t be squandered like his father’s. Anger at the French is much easier than honest self-examination. Anger at the French solidifies America’s complicity with the most militant, ruthless, intransigent elements of Ariel Sharon’s Israeli government. Anger legitimizes any and all aggression as a fitting response to 9-11. Finally, anger at the French is preferable to admitting the dismal failure of American diplomacy, preferable to acknowledging what seems to be the aim of our Middle East policy: transforming the region into a vast plantation where a major portion of the globe’s oil reserves can be securely harvested and profitably traded, with Israel, militarily dominant, our untouchable proxy, the overseer guarding American interests.
The list of America’s “enemies” is intentionally open-ended and ad hoc so the president can include just about anybody or everybody in the category of “terrorist.” That elasticity insures a never-ending supply of enemies and means the threat to our national security never diminishes, validating Bush and Ashcroft when they tell us they must counter the threat with more “counterterrorism,” that is, more repression, more policing of dissent, more curtailment of civil rights, more wars against ourselves, more wars against people we fear or don’t understand or understand too well.
As for Colin Powell, there are stunning ironies in the secretary of State’s role as the Bush administration spokesperson for punishing France. Ironies that recall the senior Bush’s cynical appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Like Shakespeare’s warrior-prince Othello, who had visited lands where men lived whose heads grow beneath their shoulders, a body of myth as much as his generalship in an actual war gained Powell his job. Powell’s color, or rather the political advantage generated by myths attached to his color, made him a natural choice to serve in an international arena where white representatives of America were greeted increasingly by suspicion, anger, even hate. For Europeans, as well as Africans, Asians and people of Middle Eastern extraction, Powell could embody “a great black hope,” a welcome respite from Rambo and other Ugly Americans. In this sense, you could say Powell owed his job to a Frenchman, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose concept of the noble savage has morphed into Europe’s on-again, off-again romance with the “other,” more specifically, with people of color. Unfortunately Powell’s initial credibility evaporated rapidly. It certainly was not the fault of France that Powell identified himself with an administration determined to turn back the clock–embrace gunboat diplomacy, colonialism, racial and religious profiling, Manichaeism at home and abroad.
Powell’s shoddy, transparently deceitful performance in the U.N.–“proving” the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction with a couple of grainy photos, some vials and pills–displayed his color-blind contempt for the rest of the world–black, white, yellow, whatever. His hurry to get on with war, with or without U.N. sanction, revealed his soldiers’ impatience–less the student of diplomacy than true believer in the cynical dictum of military strategist Von Clausewitz: war is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.
Perhaps Powell took too personally France’s refusal to authorize American unilateralism. Perhaps the general in him interprets disagreements as insubordination. Perhaps the U.N.’s stinging rebuke of his heavy-handed efforts to coerce by bribery and intimidating still festers. Even so, since French-baiting works exactly like race-baiting, and Powell, like me, is a member of a group that’s been buked and scorned by race-baiters for centuries, I wonder how he can lead the charge against France just as I wondered how Powell could berate Yasir Arafat for not doing enough, yet not condemn Ariel Sharon’s ruling coalition for including two parties that explicitly advocate apartheid and/or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Israel.
Rather than postulate another ponderous axis of evil, here is a more humble double-play combination that bears watching: Powell-Murdoch-Powell. In the campaign to vilify France and French people, the New York Post has been outrageously aggressive–smirking headlines deriding the AXIS OF WEASEL, French leaders at the U.N. with animal heads grafted on their shoulders. The Fox News Channel, an unconditional, often jingoistic supporter of the Bush administration’s management of the Iraqi war, has not lagged far behind the Post in the systematic vilifying of French political positions and French character.
Is it purely coincidence that Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Post and Fox News and who actively guides their editorial policies, has benefited spectacularly from the passivity of the Federal Communications Commission, a watchdog agency headed by a Bush appointee who happens to be Colin Powell’s son? While the FCC ignores the threat to democracy posed by a media conglomerate with ambitions to monopolize public access to information, Murdoch, because he’s wealthy, determined and connected, continues to acquire media outlets, building an empire to control and shape public opinion.
Are favors being shamelessly exchanged? You keep us looking good in the press, we won’t interfere with your buying up of the press. Powell to Murdoch to Powell. Slick as baseball’s fabled double-play combo: Tinkers to Evers to Chance. Two quick outs on democracy. Who do we send to the plate next?
Paris has been a city of refuge and recognition for African-American artists and arts for hundreds of years–Ira Aldridge, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Richard Wright, Valaida Snow, James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, Marian Anderson, Miles Davis, Kenny Clarke, Chester Himes, Nina Simone, etc. France, despite its terrible history of colonialism, is struggling today, as America must, to reimagine itself as a society capable of honoring the principles of its revolution–liberty, fraternity, equality. France, and the French language–Rabelais, Voltaire, Rousseau, Frantz Fanon, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Patrick Chamoiseau–is as incorrigibly, dynamically hybrid as America’s mix of languages and cultures.
When Colin Powell insists on punishing the French, is he claiming moral authority or a bully’s prerogative?
