Man feels misled, frustrated that tattoos cost him job

[thucythucy]

109. Sigh. More French bashing.

Why are so many Americans obsessed with dissing the French?

After all, they did enable us to win the revolution. Remember Lafayette? And if not for Napoleon the Brits would have creamed the USA in 1812. As it is the Brits managed to burn DC, and only agreed to a settlement because the Napoleonic wars had exhausted them. Then too, it was the French (and Brits) who held off Germany for four years during WWI, until the US decided to join in at the last moment. And even during their darkest hour, during WWII, the Free French did heroic deeds in North Africa, Italy, and then France itself after 1944. The French Resistance saved numerous Allied flyers from prison camps or worse. If the US were occupied by a foreign power, one as ruthless as Nazi Germany, you honestly think the typical American response would have been any better? At least the French government had the courage to declare war on Germany after its invasion of Poland in 1939. It took the US more than two years of head-in-the-sand denial of the threat before it joined in the effort--and then only because Germany declared war on the US. Even then, it took another two years before the US and Britain dared to confront the German military in western Europe, and only after it had been all but gutted by the Soviets.

And speaking of Vietnam, it doesn't look to me that the US had any better luck defeating the Vietnamese than did the French. So why the superior attitude? What makes the US so great that Americans feel entitled to sneer?

I've never been able to understand French-bashing, except as the immature corollary of American "exceptionalism." To me it ranks up there with any other ethnic prejudice, and always seems out of place on a progressive site.

Just my two cents.