Dear 60 Minutes,
I was astounded by Andy Rooney's spindoctoring and
selective amnesia about French and American history in his polemical
segment on "France's Unpaid Debt."
One may think what they like about France's opinions
about the United States, and about what America did or did not do in WWII
to "save France" from Nazi Germany, or even what France’s
ultimate destiny would have been had America not entered the war.
What does France's status as a nation on the brink of
destruction half a century ago have to do with the fact that they are a
nation with a voice today? Should
something that happened 50 years ago dictate that France must be so
eternally grateful to us that no matter what big-gun America decides to do
in the future (even when world opinion is against said activity) France,
because they "owe us" (presumably forever) must be a good little
vassal state and nod their approval?
Is that representative of the ideals of freedom and democracy that
we are constantly told we're fighting for today?
And as long as we're selectively walking down history
lane to assess "unpaid debt" upon those we may have helped at
one time or another, then why stop at WWII?
Why not go back to that mildly important event called the American
war of Independence and ask to whom we "owe a debt of gratitude"
for their entering the war as our ally against the British (at our
"desperate" bequest), and as a result salvaging what was
ultimately to become the United States of America? That would be France!
Indeed, up until that moment the divided (even among
the American colonists half did not want revolution and fought against
it), weak, and severely demoralized revolutionaries had had their
collective assess handed to them in every major battle, and were on the
inevitable path to being squashed like so many other rebellious children
of British imperialism had been before them. It was the entrance of France that
changed the tide, and no amount of patriotic wishful thinking or selective
amnesia will change that.
Ironically, it was also France who, as a "gift
of international friendship," gave us that symbol of freedom standing
today in New York harbor--the Statue of Liberty.
But evidently Andy Rooney thinks that because he
happened to be an American soldier present in France during WWII (and
“we” won), that that affords him a voice to project his opinions of
the American agenda in Iraq, but France is somehow out-of-line for
expressing their discontent for something they (along with the vast
majority of the collective world) see to be a reckless and unnecessary
drive to war and bloodshed by the Bush administration.
Ultimately the only question Andy Rooney should be
asking is not whether France has some "unpaid debt" obligating
them to get out of the way of American might-makes-right diplomacy, but
whether he has done his job, as a would-be journalist, in seeking out and
reporting information about the activities of his own government that may
not be comforting to him personally, but would at least be honest and
interested in the truth.
Bruce Monson
Colorado