The French are becoming more Americanized every day it seems.
Despite the perception that the French are rude and scoff at American tourists, the country some Yanks love to hate apparently doesn’t return the bad feeling. Les Français continue to snap up, or at least reluctantly accept, all things américaines.So is it time for Americans to quit France-bashing? Or does that country's ongoing obstruction on international affairs warrant our continuing displeasure?"Every time I go back, I am astounded by how much more prevalent American culture is," said Roy Caldwell, a French professor at St. Lawrence University (search) in New York.
France and Germany aren't worth hating. They're firmly committed to their own self-destruction. They aren't breeding, they're taxing themselves into poverty, and their unemployment rates are sky-high.
We can't fix them from the outside, and they show no signs of wanting to fix themselves from the inside. We can't stop them from importing millions of Muslim workers without a plan to culturally assimilate them. We can't stop their rising tide of anti-semitism. We can't make them develop serious military forces, though we're pressuring them to do so by withdrawing ours from their soil.
France will need us again, in two or three decades. It's hard to say exactly what the problem will be, but it's easy to see that France is setting itself up for trouble. France was in a similar situation after WWI: They made some disastrous foreign policy mistakes (including stabbing us in the back over reparations), then they turned inward and ignored the looming danger. Then they got clobbered and we had to go help bail them out.
But perhaps I'm missing a distinction in your question, Michael: Dismissing France as politically irrelevant isn't the same as disliking individual Frenchmen. I don't really know much about the individual citizens. I get the feeling that they're badly informed via a partisan media, and that their government isn't particularly democratic.
1) No.
2) Yes.
Chirac visited Arafat today, who is at a French military hospital. Does that answer your question?