Citizens of America:

You make great sport in your country of criticizing the French. You indict the French because they did not have the courage of the British during World War II, and because many collaborated with the Nazis. You criticize them because they gave the world postmodernism, and because they embraced Jerry Lewis.

But these are absurd stereotypes. Many French men and women valiantly resisted the Germans during the war; many nations share the guilt of postmodernism; and while the French might have embraced Jerry Lewis, it was America that created him.

Are you perhaps like other contemporary commentators who put down the French simply because they refuse to walk lockstep with American foreign policymakers? If so, how do you justify this?

If anything, we French people are to be pitied: the walls of our civilization are falling about our ears. You know the story of Rael and the Raelians, don't you? When I first heard of it, I thought, at last: one of my countrymen has brought the atrophied French imagination back to life!

I was profoundly disappointed.

Rael's story of his contact with an alien race makes me weep because it is so under control, so Carstesian in the meanness of its imagination.

It appears that we French people are so dead above the neck that we cannot imagine an alien ship in some shape other than a saucer. It's bad enough that Rael's aliens are humanoid (and speak a fluent French!), but is it really necessary for Rael and his extraterrestrials to sit in comfortable armchairs as they speak?

I admire the aliens that land in your country: they abduct your children, impregnate your women, and perform anal probes on your men. They have character, not armchairs. They scare people. Rael's aliens inspire sadness and ennui.

We pity you Americans because you are self-important and your arrogance has exceeded all bounds. You should pity us because our souls have grown so small.

Jean Marie Cordelle
Reims, France

A September 11th remembrance

Bush's 2003 State of the Union address