Reader Mail
Booking Title
Closing out our Hillary Memoir jamboree and book fair. PLUS: CNN’s suicide, pronouncing French, pronouncing on the French, growing hot, cooling off, San Francisco Bay blues, and much else.
(Page 14 of 14)
p>
THE GAUL OF SOME PEOPLE
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Re: A. Simmons’ letter in Reader Mail’s
Fighting
Logic
:
/p>
A. Simmons’ warning that we better not mess with the manly French shows a creative grasp of history. The Normans were descended from the Scandinavian Vikings, not the French. Charles Martel and his Islam-bashing cohorts were Franks, not French — there was no France yet and would not be for centuries. Claiming them as proof of France’s macho chops is akin to an American’s laying claim to the martial exploits of Richard the Lionheart and Brian Boru.
France’s sole brush with modern martial glory came at the behest of a Corsican thug to whom they freely handed their country twice, once at gunpoint and once at a simple display of charismatic bravado.
p>As Dennis Prager wrote, “From the Jacobins and the guillotine, to the Dreyfus trial, to the Vichy regime, to de Gaulle’s withdrawal from anti-Communist NATO, France, with rare exceptions, has done little that is moral and nothing that is courageous. So the disdain that many Americans have long felt for France has merely been reinforced.” Harking back to sword-swinging robber barons squabbling over the ruins of the Roman Empire is unlikely to change that, anymore than Saddam’s arrogating the legacy of Saladin intimidated the 3rd Infantry. br> — Richard McEnroe /p>
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