Suffer the French Schoolchildren

[reprehensor]

http://tinyurl.com/2n6ru


CARQUEFOU, FRANCE--Why do they hate us? And where do they get their hatred from?


These questions haunted me and three other American visitors as we studied a huge display of cartoons drawn by local schoolchildren assigned to convey their impressions of the United States. Panel after grisly panel depicted the United States, George Bush and those ubiquitous symbols of American commercial culture--McDonald's and Coke--as murderous, predatory and gleefully vicious. Obese Uncle Sams chopping up Iraqi children with a knife, their blood gushing across construction paper. A leering Statue of Liberty holding a hamburger in one hand while firing missiles at dying Afghan civilians across the ocean. The American flag, its bars transformed into prisons for the child inmates of Guantánamo. A baseball bat painted red, white and blue poised to smash a ball--which is a globe. The juxtaposition between the artwork's ferociously angry imagery and the childish drawing styles of the third graders would disturb the most jaded reader.


I didn't see a single positive portrayal of the U.S.


Organizers of Carquefou's annual cartoon art festival had invited four American artists--Steve Benson of The Arizona Republic, David Horsey of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Kal of The Baltimore Sun and yours truly--to this industrial town in conservative western France to discuss the deteriorated state of Franco-American relations. We've all used our cartoons to convey our dim opinion of the Bush Administration's domestic and foreign policy agenda. We oppose the war in Iraq (news - web sites). We despise the French bashing ("freedom fries," wine boycotts, high schools that have stopped teaching French) that has arisen since the Chirac government threatened to veto Bush's Iraq war resolution in the U.N. I even have dual French-American citizenship. We're a pretty liberal group; that's probably why they chose us.


We don't take issue with most of the cartoons' messages. They see Bush as a vicious, thoughtless warmonger with fascist tendencies, Americans as arrogant brutes who don't give a passing thought to the innocent people who die at the hands of their government and rapacious corporations as hegemonic steamrollers that crush cultural distinctiveness and independence in their ceaseless quest for the almighty dollar. They can't believe that we feel more entitled to use military force than Luxembourg or Monaco.
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For the wingers with their spring-loaded response, 'If it wasn't for us, they'd be wearing jackboots!', save it. That was then, this is now.