Adam's Apple
Senior Member
- Apr 25, 2004
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Can't wait to read this one. 
French Logic 101
By Daniel Berczik
August 2, 2005
There is a scene in "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" where Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau goes up to a hotel front desk to register. He notices a dog behind the desk and asks the clerk, "Does your dug bite?" "Non," answers the clerk. Clouseau bends down to pet the dog and of course, the dog bites the hapless inspector. "I thought you said your dug did not bite!" Clouseau cries.
The clerk stares with proper French bored disdain and answers, "Zat ees not my dug."
There are many moments like that in The Arrogance of the French: Why They Can't Stand Us and Why the Feeling Is Mutual by Richard Z. Chesnoff. Chesnoff, who has spent much of the last twenty years living in France and has forty years of French memories to back up his anecdotes and the crash history lessons he sprinkles around the book.
I had anticipated a litany of grievances, citations and intrigue and was prepared to put the book down periodically in order to adjust my blood pressure. Instead, I found myself laughing, wearily shaking my head and marveling at how a people so filled with craven self-loathing and clueless comedy could have survived a thousand years. Instead of leaving the book determined to hate the French even more than I did on the day before, I finished feeling more sorry for than disdainful at what Mr. Chesnoff describes as a pathetic archetype of a nation on the down side of cultural evolution.
René Descartes' famous dictum, cogito, ergo sum "I think, therefore I am" appears to have been coalesced in the French mind not as a basis for reasoning, but as an excuse for manipulation and buck-passing. For something to be "true" and protected from question, it must be conceived not merely clearly and distinctly, but very clearly and distinctly. The result, as Mr Chesnoff says, is "a closed system and the core of what we know as French arrogance.
This fairly explains the French attitude towards the rest of the world. We find here an insight that also explains the French attitude towards the French. All is chauvinism. Mr. Chesnoff quotes a local expression that translates to "the worst foreigners come from Paris." But what is not explained in this formulation is the greatest of French passions, far beyond wine and cheese, philosophy and La Vie En Rose: Anti-Americanism.
for full article:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/people/french_book.php3
French Logic 101
By Daniel Berczik
August 2, 2005
There is a scene in "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" where Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau goes up to a hotel front desk to register. He notices a dog behind the desk and asks the clerk, "Does your dug bite?" "Non," answers the clerk. Clouseau bends down to pet the dog and of course, the dog bites the hapless inspector. "I thought you said your dug did not bite!" Clouseau cries.
The clerk stares with proper French bored disdain and answers, "Zat ees not my dug."
There are many moments like that in The Arrogance of the French: Why They Can't Stand Us and Why the Feeling Is Mutual by Richard Z. Chesnoff. Chesnoff, who has spent much of the last twenty years living in France and has forty years of French memories to back up his anecdotes and the crash history lessons he sprinkles around the book.
I had anticipated a litany of grievances, citations and intrigue and was prepared to put the book down periodically in order to adjust my blood pressure. Instead, I found myself laughing, wearily shaking my head and marveling at how a people so filled with craven self-loathing and clueless comedy could have survived a thousand years. Instead of leaving the book determined to hate the French even more than I did on the day before, I finished feeling more sorry for than disdainful at what Mr. Chesnoff describes as a pathetic archetype of a nation on the down side of cultural evolution.
René Descartes' famous dictum, cogito, ergo sum "I think, therefore I am" appears to have been coalesced in the French mind not as a basis for reasoning, but as an excuse for manipulation and buck-passing. For something to be "true" and protected from question, it must be conceived not merely clearly and distinctly, but very clearly and distinctly. The result, as Mr Chesnoff says, is "a closed system and the core of what we know as French arrogance.
This fairly explains the French attitude towards the rest of the world. We find here an insight that also explains the French attitude towards the French. All is chauvinism. Mr. Chesnoff quotes a local expression that translates to "the worst foreigners come from Paris." But what is not explained in this formulation is the greatest of French passions, far beyond wine and cheese, philosophy and La Vie En Rose: Anti-Americanism.
for full article:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/people/french_book.php3
