Whoops! What Not to Say in France

To continue the previous posting’s theme of blog confessions, I feel compelled to tell you about my not-so-little cultural slip this afternoon. I don’t think I did any permanent damage to U.S. – French relations, but it’s only because I was lucky enough to be obnoxious in front of someone who didn’t care. (I hope.)

Before we go into the ugly details, I have to say that I know better. I have been thoroughly battered with cross-cultural sensitivity training. I received 10-weeks of pragmatic, down-to-earth cross cultural training from the U.S. Peace Corps, that even included a demonstration on how to go to the toilet when there isn’t a toilet. (Marty, not having benefited from Peace Corps training, had a little trouble with that one when we were in Gambia.) I spent nine months on the campus of the School for International Training (SIT), where students snipe at each other to prove who is the most culturally sensitive. It is also at SIT where I was introduced into the more theoretical realm of multiculturalism. I cannot plead ignorance.

I’d like to tell you that my gaffe came after five days of forced labor, sleep deprivation and a little water torture. It didn’t. I have no history of schizophrenia. I wasn’t in a bad mood. My feminist friends would be appalled if I claimed I was suffering from PMS. I wasn’t even hungry. In other words, I have no excuses.

Okay, I’m obviously beating-around-the-bush, trying to avoid telling you the ugly truth. There’s no disguising it, however. I can’t figure out a way to put a decent spin on it. Here it is: today I declared to a French friend that the French are stupid. Ouch.

It hurts for me to share this information with you. I am grimacing as I type. It is only my psychological baggage from 16 years of weekly Catholic masses that forces me to admit this. Perhaps there will be redemption from my confession.

I know what you all are thinking. My Peace Corps friends are feeling sympathetic, remembering the gaffes they made during their years of service, and feeling grateful that they never said anything as bad as that. SIT people, if I told them about my blog, which I didn’t, would be sending emails to everyone they know and don’t know, condemning me and declaring that they were suspicious anyway given that I am from New Hampshire, and we all know that the dreaded “conservatives” live in New Hampshire. A few of them would be starting a petition to the SIT administration trying to prevent my degree conferral. My granola friends are worried that I am too stressed, and perhaps I should enroll in a yoga class, eat more organic food, consider taking up meditation, or, at a minimum, I should light a few candles. My university friends are thinking that they just read a book that addresses the epistemology of oral gaffes and are wondering if they can remember where it is. Marty’s physics-types are completely unaffected by this confession and thinking they are too busy to read this drivel. My family is simply wondering what’s so bad about saying that the French are stupid.

I don’t know if it helps my cause at all, but I blurted out the “s” word because of mittens. Yes, mittens, those wholesome, sock-like things that are more effective than gloves at keeping your fingers warm and that remind you of childhood, snowmen, snowball fights and snow days off from school. I love mittens. They are like warm chocolate chip cookies, flannel pajamas and sleeping babies. They make me happy. They are innocent. They deserve respect. Down-deep, in the profound recesses of my gut, beyond the reach of any cross-cultural sensitivity brainwashing, oops I mean training, a tiger within me roared in their defense. Yes, believe it or not, I lost my oral control in defense of mittens.

My French friend, spotting the mittens that I keep in my bike basket for cold morning bicycle rides, asked me if I knew what French people think of mittens. I immediately felt the tension spreading through my shoulders and into my neck. No, I didn’t know what French people thought of mittens, but I suspected that it wasn’t going to be good.

How can people that wear high-heeled winter boots and bare-shouldered sweaters possibly understand the goodness of mittens? They obviously don’t get it. They don’t understand winter or winter clothes. They don’t look forward to gaining winter weight (just to keep warm of course) and burying their bodies under massive amounts of winter clothes, like we New Englanders do. They think they’re supposed to look good in the winter. They don’t understand that winter is a time to forget about looking good. It is a reprieve from self-consciousness. Self-consciousness can rear its ugly head in the spring, when the clothes come off and we are left looking at our pale, pudgy flesh. Winter liberates us from all of that nonsense. It is only in the winter that we are truly free. And mittens are a part of that liberation. Perhaps we should have brought mittens, not armaments, to Iraq. (Whoops, I’m out of control...)

To get back to my story, my French friend, smirking, explained to me that French people wouldn’t be caught dead wearing mittens. She even suggested that I ask the 10 year old kid sitting in her living room if he would ever consider wearing mittens. I didn’t have to ask him, however, because she quickly assured me that he wouldn’t in a million years wear mittens because of “the look.”

That’s when I lost it, and I said that French people were stupid about “the look.” I know you mitten lovers out there are thinking that I have a point, but, while I appreciate the support, I really shouldn’t have said that the French were stupid. Part of the problem is that it’s really easy to say things like “stupid” in a foreign language. Technically, I didn’t say “French people are stupid.” I said, “Les Français sont bêtes.” Now that doesn’t really sound so bad to all you Anglophones, does it? No, of course not. In fact, “bête” is kind of a cute word to our Anglophone ears. How bad can it be? It wasn’t until I thought about it later, outside of the passion of the moment, that it occurred to me that maybe I had been a bit rash. Concerned, I looked up the translation for bête in my dictionary. It was then that I realized I had declared the entire French population to be stupid. Hmmn, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.

While most of the time I maintain at least a minimum control of my mouth, every once in a while the filter between my brain and my mouth lets go. The result is quite similar to the unfiltered sewage that enters rivers during periods of high rainfall that in EPA-speak is referred to as “combined sewer overflows,” but in normal-speak is just called “poop.” Without much success, I’m trying to explain that, on occasion, my mouth spews unfiltered poop. It’s not pretty.

Marty calls this my “Kick-The-Orange-Peel” Syndrome. This is an allusion to one of the two times during my grade school career that I got in trouble in school. For absolutely no reason and with a complete lack of consciousness, I kicked an orange peel across the cafeteria floor when I was in 7th grade. It was a movement completely unrelated to my brain. Call it what you will, a muscle spasm, a misfired neuron, an ill-fated synapse; it was a mistake. It probably wouldn’t have been a big deal except that the orange peel landed at the feet of the supervising teacher. The consequences were relatively minor, given that we are talking about the sordid world of junior high, but for a goody-goody, like myself, it was traumatizing.

The mitten episode is not the first international crisis provoked by the Orange Peel Syndrome. A few years ago, Marty and I were sitting in Paris having dinner with some German friends of his that I had just met for the first time. Those of you who have had the misfortune of talking politics with Marty know that he has occasional lapses of spewing fascist rhetoric. It’s actually a bit of a surrealistic experience when a seemingly normal, middle aged American man who has voted for Democrats his entire life starts espousing the virtues of dictatorships, among other equally distasteful things. In any case, after one of his misguided political tirades, I suggested, in front of this very nice German family, that maybe he should stop sounding like a Nazi. Recognizing from their shocked looks that this was perhaps not the most sensitive thing to have said, I tried to dig myself out by saying that Marty was like a “little Hitler.” Right, I know, that’s digging in the wrong direction. My mouth was like an explosive strapped to a suicide bomber, and I was going down in flames.

Perhaps not coincidentally, I have never met that nice German family again. The consequences of this particularly scandalous faux-pas are still not clear. The French gendarmes haven't yet showed up at our door. My degree from SIT is definitely at risk. We’ll see what happens with my French friend. Well, at least I still have my mittens. I wear them proudly.