This is the story of two ladies named Julia — one real and one
not — and of their ties to the land of France. The real Julia
found her fate and fortune among the Gauls when she discovered
French cuisine and determined to spread the word, and the recipes,
to all American cooks. For its ability to inspire and teach her,
the real Julia truly belonged in France; and made the most of all
it had to offer her.
The imaginary Julia lives in cyberspace on a timeline created by
the Obama reelection campaign. Imaginary Julia is depicted as a
lifelong — from ages 3 to 67 — dependent of the federal
government, and specifically of President Obama who mysteriously
seems to be in office all 64 years. For her propensity toward
public handouts and seeming lack of self-reliance, she too belongs
in France. Dependent Julia will certainly make the most of all that
the new socialist government there has to offer her.
The real Julia came of age during World War II and was too tall
for military service, and so she worked in Washington as a file
clerk and then a research assistant for the Office of Strategic
Services (predecessor to the CIA). By 1944 she was posted in Asia
with the OSS and received an “Emblem of Meritorious Civilian
Service” for her “drive and inherent cheerfulness.” In Asia she met
and married her husband and following the war, went with him to his
new posting in Paris. It was in the town of Rouen that Julia had
her first meal — oysters, sole meunière and fine wine — a meal
that “opened up the soul and spirit for me.” More than that it
opened years of hard work, failures, restarts, rejections, and
single minded drive before Julia Child finally published her famous
Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961.
The imaginary Julia, though we cannot tell about her “soul and
spirit” other than her spirited reliance on government, certainly
does not seem to show the “drive” that won real Julia that Emblem
award, or that led to the real Julia’s culinary masterpiece.
Imaginary Julia simply moves from Head Start to Pell Grants to low
interest repayments, to guaranteed birth control, to government
sponsored business loans and finally to her golden years on
Medicare and Social Security. Columnist Ross Douthat
finds in “the whole production a curiously patriarchal quality,
with Obama as a beneficent Daddy Warbucks.” And says Congressman
Paul Ryan, “it’s just the narrative that they’re trying to tell,
that for this woman to succeed, she has to have really big
government.”
Even the Left has
objected. Here is MSNBC’s Morning Joe Scarborough: “Who brushes
her teeth?” and his sidekick Willie Geist: “No one wants to think
that from the age of three they are going to need the government to
take care of them.” Plus Mike Allen of Politico: “those
young people in the [Obama] headquarters… create viral pieces of
content for the web.… This one I think may be viral in the wrong
way.”
The real Julia was what Americans should be and always have
been: entrepreneurial, determined, persevering and self-reliant.
Imaginary Julia is the ideal vision of the liberal woman: entitled,
dependent, weak and unquestioning. Worst of all, she is the
“forward” direction that Obama and the Democrats want to take us.
Let’s send them all to France.
