The Flight Attendant Who Doesn't Like Violence

Saturday, I spoke to a French flight attendant.

• Everyday Meetings with Common Europeans

Quickly, the discussion turned to traveling, and then to America. Within a couple of seconds, she had to let the following slip in:

Ah, j'adore l'Amérique, mais pas leur président.

"Oh really", I asked disarmingly. "But the Iraqis, they like le président americain." Dubious look:

Ah ça j'en doute, avec tous leurs massacres!

Because I hear so many doubts and cynicism about the average Iraqi's point of view — due to the MSM press's usage of emotionally-charged words of the superlative kind, such as les massacres, le chaos, and l'horreur (and la misère as a description of America's capitalistic society in general), it is practically impossible to touch on positive aspects of the United States (and certainly on the presence of its troops in Iraq) in the country of le débat et le dialogue, without being treated to snickers, snorts, harrumphs, and eye-rolling — I have taken to carry a handful of copies of the Le Monde piece (unfortunately, a token article) in which its Baghdad correspondant, instead of relying on his media's usual emotionally-charged words, went around instead and questioned Iraqi citizens.

In his unguarded moment, not only did Rémy Ourdan report that the pretty much unanimous response to the invasion was that it was the best thing to happen to Iraq in the past 30 years, but Iraqi voices just as overwhelmingly heaped scorn upon the French position concerning their opposition to the American decision to invade (indirectly castigating the position of all "peace camp" members, the position of Bush's opponents, the film of Michael Moore, etc, etc, etc), in the process casting doubt on the true intentions of Paris (doubts of a kind usually reserved for Dubya).

When faced with cynics, I don't even bother arguing with them anymore. Instead of wasting my time, I just fish out a photocopy of Ourdan's article and hand it to them.

That's what I did Saturday with my flight attendant. Reading the title (La politique de la France reste très vivement critiquée par les Irakiens), she immediately said:

Oui, mais il y a d'autres opinions.

There may be other opinions, I replied, but there don't seem to be too many of them. "Presque impossible", I would say that's 95% of the general consensus, or above…

She looked it over quickly, saying

Yes, but it was a war for oil.

I asked, "Wasn't the position of the Saddam supporters equally based on oil?"

Hein? she went.

The people who were against the war, didn't they do it for Iraq's oil? And what's worse, for the oil of a dictator.

Suddenly the flight attendant said she had to go.

But take the article with you, I invited.

Ah non, je ne veux rien lire sur la violence.

She doesn't want to read anything about violence, she claimed, but

1. the article is/was not about violence,
2. she was the one who brought up the (general) subject, and (ergo:)
3. apparently, violence as a subject is fine as long as it can be used to bash Bush and America and as long as it cannot, in any way, be turned against France and other humanist members of "the peace camp".

And I have not even started to address the fact that for the generous, tolerant, visionary, solidaristic bon vivants (for whom le débat et le dialogue is a matter of faith), the point of view of the Iraqis themselves — unless it happens to match that of France — does not seem to matter much…