There are days when I think that I used to live on another planet, maybe one left over, undiscovered or ignored by the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Stories about the US in French, be it from le Canard Enchaine (satire), Liberation (left), le Figaro,(right), le Monde (somewhere in the center, leaning left), le Parisien (sports, sports, and a little bit of daily life) bare almost no resemblance to the news that I hear from the US media. I exaggerate only a little: the International Herald Tribune is owned by the Gray Lady, and so, I don't really bother to read the American press here. I like to improve my French by watching tv (the parts that aren't just dubbed-over sitcoms, anyway,) and then it's much more fun reading satire, even if I only understand about 2/3 of what is written. My friends assure me that everyone pretends to understand le Canard, but the reality is that the troisieme degre is only understood by those that write the stores. Hmmm, I don't know about - it sounds like my friends are trying to make me feel good, in the same way that they boost A's ego when they tell him that everyone flunks dictees in French class.
Soooo.
Case in point: the latest Western incursion into Africa. French news is full of wonderful stories about how the Islamic fundamentalists are on the run in Mali, having been evinced from Gao and Timbukto. Apparently this was easily done, because the only seeming tragedy is the almost total loss of the historic library (with many, many rare manuscripts from the High Middle Ages) to fires set by the Jihad army before it fled towards the Algerian border. Oh, and tonight, there were two (yes, two!!) prisoners that were shown to the tv commentator from one of the major French stations, FR2. Really? Two, only? Everyone else got away?
(Update 1/30: it seems now that only 10 percent of the library was destroyed, which is terrible enough...)
And if I take a look at a random American paper, I see this: the war is going terribly, and the US will probably have to get involved. Wait! The US is providing troop transport???? Whaaaa? Didn't see that before. And the jihadists are not on the run? Well waddya know? Or maybe more importantly, who can you trust? One thing is for sure, when I travelled around Russia during the winter of 1981-82, my Russian friends, speaking their minds only on walks in the park, assured me that they could trust Pravda, because anything that was written in that paper of record was the complete opposite of the on-the-ground reality. Solidarity, Walesa, the incursion into Poland to help out? Nothing there, nothing important, anyway. I wish we had some of that same conviction today.
http://www.liberation.fr/monde/2013/01/29/tombouctou-et-apres_877615
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/01/28/dewayne-wickham-on-mali-and-us-involvement/1868185/
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