Here is a short, wise
impression of us by the French columnist Patrick Sabatier, writing in Liberation.
All of us here, too close to all this madness, prone to oscillation between doomsday paranoia and wild hopes, should try to see America as clearly as our old friends do at this moment, and with as much balance.
Sabatier sees us as we are today, struggling to emerge from a profound shock. Dazed, but functioning. He argues against the errors of demonization, idealization, and despair.
It's good to have friends like this.
Opposing Forces
In France, George W. Bush's calamitous policy produces three reactions with regard to America against which we must be on guard.
First of all, demonization: anti-Americanism contests with Islamophobia and anti-Semitism for the top spot on the Internet's Hatred Hit-parade. Some of Bush's critics easily give in to a paranoid vision of history that explains American policy through conspiracies hatched in Jerusalem or Riyadh between the CIA and plutocrats.
Then, idealization, which often extends demonization by making believe that the 43rd United States president does not personify the American people and that "Bushism" boils down to the maneuverings of a clique that came to power almost by accident. In fact, "W." was well and truly elected (however badly) and his policy has responded to the trauma of a country at war since September 11. It is anchored in recurrent aspects of the American psyche and history: imperial arrogance, religiosity, and authoritarian temptations.
Despair, the third common reaction, makes Bush the craftsman of a slide from democracy to a form of "fascism". That viewpoint ignores Congressional hearings and reports that one after the other demonstrate the administration's pre-war lies: after weapons of mass destruction, links between Saddam and bin Laden have been acknowledged to be non-existent. That also eclipses the success of the uncompromising and devastating best-sellers by men who have left power, as well as the fact that Michael Moore's anti-Bush conflagration, far from being censured, is being distributed in hundreds of theaters in the United States. These are so many proofs that the American people are not idiots, that opposing forces function, and that American democracy is far from being moribund. "The times they are a-changin," Dylan sang. There is no impunity for Bush, even if his defeat in November is not assured.
English translation
original French