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Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese
Vile France Fear Duplicity Cowardice and Cheese Author:Denis Boyles Nearly twelve years ago, in an effort to gather French public support for the Maastricht Treaty and the European Union, French president François Mitterrand famously said, "We are at war with America." America, along with the rest of the world, laughed it off. The country that had adopted Jerry Lewis as its comic muse was just engaging in... more » another bout of Gallic exaggeration. But more recently, weve learned that the French take this war against America seriously. So Denis Boyles thinks the time has come for an equal and opposite reaction. As he writes in the introduction to this bitingly funny and informed look at the country that loves to poke a finger in the American eye, "What we mistakenly see as a craven, anti-Semitic, insecure, hypocritical, hysterically anti-American, selfish, overtaxed, culturally exhausted country, bereft of ideas, fearful of its own capitulation to Islam, headed for a demographic cul de sac, corrupted by lame ideologies, clinging to unsupportable entitlements, crippled by a spirit-stomping social elite and up to its neck in a cheesy soufflé of multilayered bureaucracy is actually worse than all that. Its vile." Using his knowledge of history as well as his shrewd eye for current events, Boyles, who has lived in France for several years, unravels the long French hate affair with the United States. Along the way, he also examines the internal crisesa falling birthrate, an expanding Muslim minority, a lessened international prestigethat have transformed la belle France into a nation obsessed with status anxiety. His conclusion? "France looks great and seems swell, but it acts hideously. Its the Ted Bundy of European nations." Vile France will gratify Francophobes everywhere and cause even the most committed defender of the Jacques Chirac worldview to wonder about his commitmentand perhaps even crack an occasional smile.« less