I am in Paris this month, taking a respite from my crazy Los Angeles life, but here we are talking about America. I responded as best I could. We like our drive-throughs, yes, but not quite (I hope) once a day. We’re an automobile culture, I explained. To us, cars symbolize freedom and vitality. And we’re always in a hurry to see and do things. Eating in the car just seems natural.
Our chef still seemed troubled. The French often zero in on this particular American habit when trying to figure us out. It’s bewildering why anyone would choose to drive and eat at the same time, when both of those things are so pleasurable by themselves. It seems almost decadent to them, and vaguely unhygienic.
“But would it not be possible,” he said after a moment, “to stop the car, get out, eat and then get back in the car and continue driving?”
“I guess so,” I said.
He nodded. “Yes, I think that would be better. For the appetite. And for the health.”
It’s important to bear in mind, as the dollar-franc exchange rate hits summer-vacation-splurge levels, that we seem just as weird to them as they do to us. Weirder, actually. Imagine, if you can, the jarring, disconnected impression you’d get if your three sources of information about the United States came from extravagant television shows, the International Herald Tribune and overweight tourists. On television, rapacious young people with pearl-white teeth and fantastic bodies purr erotically at each other to the hoots and applause of a studio audience. The Herald Tribune, a distillation of the deep thoughts of the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post, is so reliably snooty about America that it’s hard for the French not to suspect some kind of trick. I mean, what kind of country publishes a newspaper for its citizens abroad whose sole editorial thrust is to remind those citizens that their country sucks? And to top it all off, right there at a table in the corner cafe is an actual, living American, who resembles neither the hardbodies on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” nor the simpering apologists of the Herald Tribune, but who is pointing to the andouillettes on his plate and asking the waiter, “Now what the mother-of-pearl is that?”
You can’t blame them (the French, the world) for being confused. We’re a chaotic, confusing place. And deep down, what disturbs the French the most about our country isn’t really McDonald’s or Microsoft or tourists who can’t read a map; it’s the relentless, ungoverned energy of our economy and the untempered velocity of our culture. The longstanding French assessment of the American character was that we were an “adolescent nation,” struggling to mature into a wise power, and that what we needed most was instruction and restraint. Eventually, they thought, we’d grow up and become more… well, more French. Now it’s 2001 and we’re still eating in our cars. The French are beginning to figure out that the United States is a perpetual-motion machine with an irresistible gravitational pull. We aren’t becoming more like them, they’re becoming more like us.
Especially these days, when French companies, fresh from a decade of restructuring and privatization, strut across the Atlantic looking for American companies to buy. But the French have adopted more than our brand of predatory financial transactions. The big news in Paris this week is the conviction and sentencing of Roland Dumas, one of Francois Mitterrand’s most high-ranking ministers, for accepting bribes from an oil company which were funneled through his mistress. The juiciest details didn’t come out in court. They didn’t have to. Dumas’s mistress published a tell-all book, “Whore of the Republic,” that is positively American in its whining self-justification. It was a publishing sensation. Can a Club des Livres d’Oprah be far behind?
Adding insult to injury (or is it injury to insult?) The Journal of Sex Research released a study comparing the sexual habits and attitudes of the United States and France. It turns out we’re a lot more alike than we were led to believe. In the areas of monogamy and total number of sexual partners–areas, let’s be honest, that you’d expect the French to really excel in–it turns out we’re remarkably similar.
And so to my French friends I offer this advice: lean way out of the window when you order your burger. And don’t, under any circumstances, search for the last fry in the bag. You’ll just end up in a head-on collision with someone coming in the other direction who is doing the same thing.
