In Cold Type

When I was a teenager on my first trip to Paris, I remember looking out at the Parisians from the window of a taxi as we proceeded along some splendid boulevard and thinking, But do these people take themselves seriously, really? They're not Americans, after all. Sorry. It's true, though embarrassing. I felt sorry for them because they weren't us. I needed a reality check, which the French were only too happy to provide. They soon taught me how superior to us, and to me, they were in every way, especially intellectually and in matters of literature, fashion, proper cigarette inhalation and the application of maquillage.

Well, let that pass. Now Granta has published the greater part of an issue (Spring 2002) devoted to Their perceptions of Us, called "What We Think of America." Interestingly, the writer who is possibly the most violently anti-American in the collection, or who admits to the most violently anti-American feeling, is not French, or Arab, but Latin American. Ariel Dorfman, the US-born Chilean writer, tells about the time he watched an American toddler tumble into a swimming pool at a resort in the Andes and carefully measured what his own reaction might be--after all, the kid had been behaving badly (loud, blond, white, Anglophone, whining, stupid, spoiled, exploitive, rapacious, intervening, assassinating legitimate heads of state, financing coups, training torturers... oops... but really, you catch Dorfman's drift). In the end, though, he did dive in after the brat.

There is the gentler French person, badboy Benoît Duteurtre, author most recently of the novel Le Voyage en France, which won the 2001 Médici prize. Duteurtre criticizes Europe for proclaiming a high ground in human rights from which to criticize the Americans, as if, he says, to disguise from itself that it belongs to exactly the same world and is mired in identical contradictions. He makes fun of the way the French use the word Disneyland (pronounced Deez-nee-lahhhhnd) to refer to the entire American polity. President Jacques Chirac--that unsuccessful chameleon--comes in for a smacking, too. In Chirac's speech after September 11, Duteurtre writes, "I heard the inferiority complex of a Europe deprived of its role as world leader...but still quick to judge good and evil."

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