French Kiss
NEW YORK -- Remember those rousing days -- amid the acrid havoc of 9/11 -- when all the world stood by us, and even the French were knocked off course enough to say, "We Are All American"? Of course you do, if only to contrast that time with the months and years that followed, when less of the world stood by us, and when the French -- coming to their exquisite senses -- rediscovered their contempt for America."In France, with the nation based on roots, on the idea of soil, on a common memory . . . the very existence of America is a mystery and a scandal." This is a particular source of pain, Mr. Lévy says, for "the right." Contrary to what is thought generally, he insists, anti-Americanism "migrated to the left, to the Communist Party, but its origins are on the extreme right." America gives the French right "nightmares," as the country is based on "a social contract. America proves that people can gather at a given moment and decide to form a nation, even if they come from different places." The "ghost that has haunted Europe for two centuries" -- and which gives fuel, to this day, to anti-Americanism there -- "is America's coming together as an act of will, of creed. It shows that there is an alternative to organic nations." Mr. Lévy regards his own criticism of America not as anti-Americanism, but as tough love. He is an assiduous believer in America's "manifest destiny," and expects this country, clearly, to uphold the highest standards -- as he sees them. Some of these standards he would prescribe to France, in particular the American approach to citizenship. He contrasts the "model of Dearborn" -- the Detroit suburb, home to significant numbers of contented Arab-Americans -- with the "model of St. Denis," the Parisian banlieu where discontented Arab immigrants (never referred to as Arab-Frenchman) ran riot late last year. "What is good about America is that in order to be a citizen, you are not asked to resign from your former identity. You cannot tell Varadarajan or Lévy, 'You have to erase from your mind the ancestors you had.' In France, we erase." America, Mr. Lévy concludes, "is a factory of citizens, which has some defects, some problems, but the country works, not too badly. Better, I think, than mine."
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