October 06, 2005

PAYBACK TIME FOR FRANCE: THEY'RE DROWNING IN THEIR OWN WINE

The French government, the French press, and the French intellectual establishment, members of the French elite all—eaters of snails and lovers of nuanced politics—love to make fun of Americans. They like to think of us as crude, simple, inarticulate, and tasteless Coke drinkin’ cowboys.

And two years ago when America—savior of France in 1944 and protector of France for fifty years of the cold war—needed a hand in ridding Saddam and his two psychotic sons from terrorizing the nations of the Middle East, the charming M. Chirac and the beautiful M. de Villepen smiled and thumbed their noses at us.

Horsefeathers is indebted to American novelist Alan Furst for supplying the description of the French character more succinctly than any other that we have encountered: Le plus on leur baise le cul, le plus ils nous chient sur la tete.
The more you kiss their ass, the more they shit on your head.

Two years ago, in response to the French betrayal, Horsefeathers decided to make a small economic war against the snail eaters. We declared an embargo on French imports, especially wine. We cancelled our flights to France, stopped buying Roquefort, replaced our cave with wines from Australia, California, even Chile, singing happily that we regretted nothing.

Sooner or later the worm turns. Payback time has arrived. In today’s New York Times we discovered that French winemakers have been forced to turn their wine into fuel for their cars and trucks because of a glut of wine on the market. French wine exporters are selling less than one tenth of the amount they used to sell to the United States. Apparently Horsefeathers’ indignation was not an isolated reaction.

America’s payback is not the only factor involved in France’s wine misery but it contributes significantly to the market collapse. The price of a bottle of wine in France is now about the same as a bottle of water.

Anyone who wants to share in the schadenfreude can click [HERE].