Anti-France Poem by gershon hepner

Frenchmen who the side that's darker see
are claiming that the US is the anti-France,
and therefore bashing Monsieur Sarkozy
as if he wore blue jeans and not smart pants,
and drank just Coca-cola, not champagne,
supported rock 'n' roll and Hollywood,
rejecting bread I'll mispronounce as pain,
not nasally as pain as French bread should,
just for the sake of rhyme, to be sarcastic,
suggesting with my anti-French panache,
that God, like me, is not enthusiastic
about the way that Frenchmen like to bash
the USA, which is God's country now,
not France, and lives there surely as He used
to do in France, His sometime sacred cow,
until the Vichy chickens came to roost.
As the anti-France, the US now
is an abstraction, incarnation of
all evil like a dar cat's night meow
or Noah's raven––that's why they play dove.


Roger Cohen writes in the International Herald Tribune that Frenchmen now regards the UnitedStates as the anti-France ('United Stated as the Anti-France, ' January 31,2007) :

Does the United States, the real country, exist in the French mind, or has America become a kind of Gallic fantasy, a dark specter to be deployed for political ends, a sort of ultimate negative against which the qualities of France shine? That question may seem outlandish. The web of connections between the two countries is intricate. In general it is easier to fantasize about the unknown than the known. But the United States seems curiously impervious to French knowledge because the French prefer to preserve the
country in the realm of the imaginary. There are deep roots to this fantasy. Some lie in the rivalry of two universalizing powers, in the Gaullist myths forged to rebuild French pride after the humiliations of World War II, and in the persistence of a left-of-center political culture that holds Yankee free market forces to be anathema. Being the anti- France, the United States, it often seems, cannot be seen for what it is. So freighted is America with meaning, it ceases to be visible. It becomes an abstraction shaped by prejudice rather than a country intelligible through experience. It serves a purpose at the price of being severed from itself. These reflections stirred on reading an eloquent example of Gallic delusion: the statement just published by Ségolène Royal's Socialist Party about Nicolas Sarkozy, her chief opponent in the French presidential election. This 87-page work amounts to a relentless exercise in Sarkozy-bashing through his depiction as that incarnation of menace: a card-carrying crypto-American. Entitled 'The Worrying 'Quiet Rupture' of Mr. Sarkozy, ' and displayed on Parti-socialiste.fr, the party's home page, the work begins by asking: 'Is France ready to vote i2007 for an American neo-conservative carrying a French passport? ' That gets the ball rolling. The party's core argument runs roughly as follows: America is bad, Sarkozy is its agent, ergo he is dangerous. The publication really has little more to say about Royal's enter-right rival. One chapter is entitled 'Nicolas Sarkozy or the Clone of Bush.' A memorable sentence, among many such gems, says: 'Yesterday Europe was importing jeans, coke, rock 'n' roll and cinema from the United States. Now Nicolas Sarkozy is proposing that we import God! ' Apart from hipping God from Galveston to Dieppe and so destroying the lay French state, Sarko is accused of heading up 'a sort of French subsidiary of Bush and company.' He's said to manipulate the suffering of French Jews to partisan ends nd to pander with equal unscrupulousness to the sensibilities of Catholics and Muslims. 'When one listens to Sarkozy, one would think one was listening to the evangelist George W. Bush addressing Hispanics of Catholic tradition in the last campaign, ' the pamphlet opines.

1/31/07