2020, You are Exhausting

Posted on September 3, 2020 by A French American Life

I haven’t written for a long time. I’m working on entries about my language vacation, but I’m going to be honest – the state of affairs in my country has me beat down. A lot of my energy has been poured into activism and taking care of my family.

2020 sucks – I don’t think there’s any other way to look at it.

It especially sucks right now in ‘Murica.

It’s election season in the US, and in Trump’s America, that means we are being inundated with even more lies and propaganda than usual. It’s a scary time to be an American: an uncontrolled pandemic, deepening corrosion of our institutions, daily onslaughts of horrors from the White House, a leader who is showing more and clearer signs of veering towards a dictatorship, and a much-needed reckoning on the deep levels of racism and denial running through the veins of this country.

Like many of you, I have struggled for years over how to deal with the Trump supporters in my life.

This is not about politics.

That bears repeating: This is not about politics. This is not about the role of government, or taxes, or potholes and how to fix them. This is not about differing opinions.

This is about Human Decency. Morality. Ethics. Values. Character.

I’ve taken turns being furious, depressed, disgusted, hopeless, and occasionally hopeful that some of them will come around. At times, I’ve viewed them with empathy – as people who have been conned and brainwashed by Fox, Breitbart, and 45’s propaganda. Trump’s followers are rightly compared to a cult. Logic, reasoning, and an appeal to better the better angels of our nature don’t seem to reach them.

I’ve also felt resentful. Resentful that their careless, chest-beating votes have wreaked so much havoc. Resentful that so often the burden is put on those who would never vote for Trump to put in the work to understand why someone could vote for this horrible man. The number of articles that came out trying to help those of us on the political left to understand why people voted for Trump were numerous. I didn’t see the same avalanche of articles and appeals to Trump voters aimed at understanding the people who didn’t vote for him, or imploring them to reach out to us to mend fences. I just saw a whole lot of gloating over “liberal tears.”

I believe that having hard conversations is important: especially right now about systemic racism. If any of the Trump supporters I know actually wanted to have a good faith discussion about why so many of us could never, ever, ever support him, I’d have it. But that’s not what I’m seeing. Not once, in any of the people I know. They aren’t listening. They’ve surrounded themselves with an impenetrable wall of lies and hate and a sense of victimization.

There’s a statement that’s been circulating widely on many social media platforms, and I’ve seen it and it’s resonated differently with me at different moments. The idea behind it stuck with me and I’ve spent a lot of time pondering what it meant to me in my life:

lose friends over morals

As I often do when I’m trying to understand something, I wrote about it. Here’s what I wrote:

I didn’t want to go here.

I have friends and family who don’t agree with me politically. I find that to be valuable: discussions and ideas that challenge our points of view can help us see things from a different perspective, help us figure out what we believe, and even change how we perceive things. It has always bothered me that discussions on issues and politics are so taboo in this country – we should all be talking to each other. People are complex, and I’ve never wanted to reduce any person to a single moment, a single statement, a single vote, or a single characteristic. I haven’t wanted to contribute to the increasingly divisive nature of our national state of affairs.

I’ve stayed connected, mainly on social media, with some people who have said things I find deeply disturbing or offensive. I kept the connection because I thought I was honoring a relationship and not reducing it to the simplicity of what we see on social media. I also thought it would be good for me to see those different perspectives.

But here’s the thing: I’m not seeing different perspectives. I am seeing a huge difference in values, in morality, in empathy. I’m seeing hate and intolerance and racism and extremism masked as “I just see things differently.” I’m seeing lies and propaganda, parroting of the extreme right and of dubious news sources, including of course #45, masquerading as “research” and “the truth the MSM hides.” I’m seeing gleeful attacks on any ideas that don’t align with one narrow and increasingly extreme point of view. I’ve been told I should just leave the country – as if the vision and hope I and people like me hold for our country are less valid, less American, than those held by the people who believe Trump is doing great things for this country.

I am seeing the worst of the stereotypes reinforced with every post, and when I have real life conversations. I hate that this is the case – I have sincerely strived to understand why people I know and like could support a man as abhorrent as Trump, and support the increasingly extreme policies and politicians put forth by the GOP. I’m seeing ugliness in people I used to like, and I would rather remember those people fondly than to see what they say, and what they believe, today.

You know what else I’m not seeing? Reason. Kindness. Empathy. A sense of community, a belief that every person in this country, this world, is deserving of dignity. It’s often said that good people would never support Trump, and I’ve balked at that. Because people are complicated. Yet… people who choose to support a terrible human being like Trump, to place him in the highest and most influential office in the land, people who choose propaganda, lies, and conspiracy theories over reality, have revealed what is in their hearts. It pains me to see people I thought I knew enthusiastically support this, or excuse this, or rationalize and normalize this. It’s not about politics. It’s about values and basic decency.

I tend to search for, and find, the best in people. So it pains me to realize this truth: When you see what people choose to show of themselves, time and time again, it’s time to start believing that is who they are.

Et alors… quoi de neuf?

Posted on July 23, 2018 by A French American Life

My long hiatus has been unintentional.

Sort of.

Truth: What is going on in the U.S. has thrown me for a serious loop. When I began my blog years ago, I wanted to write about the often funny, always interesting, and sometimes exasperating differences between French and American culture, and to share anecdotes from my own life on what it’s like to be in a bicultural, bilingual marriage with kids. I enjoyed comparing our two cultures and poking fun at each of them.

November 2016: suddenly, those differences don’t seem so funny or cute anymore. Many of them seem pathetic and even dangerous. Even the smallest topics I consider writing about feel hypercharged. I, like so many others, feel like a stranger in a strange land in my own country. I often find myself defending the US to my foreign friends, and I’m weary of trying to defend what I don’t identify with nor agree with.

I always intended this to be a personal blog where I shared my story, my family, my experiences. While I’ve touched on politics, it was never intended to be a political blog. But isn’t the personal also political? Can any of us afford to ignore the political these days? To pretend it isn’t a part of us, a part of our culture? And of course, deeply important to the course our country and the world takes? Wouldn’t it be irresponsible to pretend otherwise?

I struggle, too, to find balance between actively doing my part to make the world a better place and still finding time to enjoy life – those little moments with my kids, the joy I find in traveling, the laughs I share with friends. I consider posting a few photos from a recent trip and I pause, feeling guilty that here I am, lucky enough to travel around the world with my kids, while others in my home country are suffering unimaginably.

So, I’ve spent much time wondering over this last year and a half how to continue this blog.

But I’ve decided to try. Rick Steves writes about Travel as a Political Act. My experiences traveling, meeting and talking with people, even the times I’ve been confronted with angry, vocal locals once they find out where I’m from, have made me a better person, of that I have no doubt. My mind has opened, my world view expanded. My ability to empathize and to see a perspective other than my own improves each time.

So, I will continue on. Some posts may be fluffy travel posts full of pictures of gorgeous locales. There will still be funny anecdotes about the culture clashes of being in a French-American family. Some posts may be political. I may lose followers. And that’s okay. C’est la vie. C’est comme ça.

My Husband is an Immigrant

Posted on March 8, 2017 by A French American Life

My husband is an immigrant.

He went to one of the best high schools in Paris, and then one of the best preparatory schools. He graduated from the top university in France (Ecole Polytechnique) for math, science, and engineering. He came to the US first as a visiting scholar, and then was invited to return for graduate school. Soon, Hewlett Packard snatched him up. That great brain of his helped create some of the first all-in-one printers and some of the first digital cameras. Now, he works for Google.

He came to the US because of the unique opportunities our country offered. Like many immigrants, he stayed because he felt welcomed, challenged, and knew he could have a career here that would surpass what was available to him in France at the time. So here he stayed, collaborating with other immigrants, working alongside American-born engineers.

Would he have followed the same path today? Would our technology industry, strong as it is, be attractive enough to great minds like my husband’s despite the current administrations’ policies and attitudes toward immigrants?

A dear friend who is also married to a French man said to me recently, “Carol, we’re one Freedom Fries incident away from our husbands being the next ‘bad hombres.’” (Mauvais mecs, if you want the French version.)

Remember Freedom Fries? After 9/11? Because I do. I remember the subtle and not so subtle comments and jabs I received about being married to one of “those French guys.” The traitors who didn’t support Bush’s Iraq invasion. The ones who should be thanking us for eternity because they aren’t speaking German right now. The ones who should be rubber-stamping all US policy, not daring to stand against us citing something like principles.

While I don’t purport to sit here in my privileged life and compare rude insults made to my husband and me during those years to the instability and terror immigrants and refugees face now, to the families being threatened and torn apart by the travel ban and ICE knocking on their doors, I will say that I got a glimpse of being the vilified “other”, and while I recognize that for us it was mild, it was still, well, awful. And it was hard not to be scared.

My husband’s father was born in Tunisia, where the overwhelming majority of the population identifies as Muslim. We wondered, during the Freedom Fries years, if we were one terrorist attack away from my husband’s nationality and his father’s birthplace marking him as a threat to the USA. We wonder, now, how many of our enemies are emboldened by #45’s recklessness. How many more of our allies he will offend. How that will play out for us, here, foreign and domestically born.

How far will this vilification of otherness go? What level of inhumane, undignified treatment will we accept as a country? How long will so many dehumanize those who are deemed not “one of us,” not deserving of “belonging”?

Like it or not, immigrants are the reason our tech industry has led the world. Many of our engineers, many of our greatest minds, came from countries now banned. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple; his parents fled Syria. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, is a Russian refugee. Immigrants founded a disproportionately high number of companies in this country.

My life with my immigrant husband and our two children is filled with more love, joy, and adventure than I ever imagined I would experience. That, and French fries. He isn’t the “other.” A nameless, faceless, maligned immigrant who shouldn’t be here. He’s a human being, a husband, a father, a hard worker, a brilliant mind, and a now a US citizen who still holds hope for the country he grew to love when he first came here more than 20 years ago. Despite it all. I hope this country doesn’t let us down.

My husband was featured in an article in our local paper. You can read that here:

http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-business/ci_30823391/boulder-countys-foreign-born-tech-workers-cast-wary

Beer and the Great American Beer Festival

Posted on November 13, 2014 by A French American Life

My husband likes to joke that they kicked him out of France because he knows nothing about wine. This is not entirely true – he knows more about wine than the average male, but perhaps not the average French male. He enjoys a glass of wine and can comment intelligently on the parfum and the subtleties of the flavors.

Truthfully, though, he’s a beer guy. He loves beer. Especially IPAs – which makes sense because San Diego, where he developed his taste for beer, has made a name for itself in the world of brew in large part through IPAs. Me – I can’t stand them. Just thinking about hops results in bitter beer face for me. But give me a good Belgian Trippel and I’m in heaven.

My Frenchie hubby loves the freedom that beer is allowed. Wine making in France follows strict rules: for example, fields cannot be irrigated – they must rely on the weather, the wines that have a “good” reputation tend to come from a single grape, and the land the grape comes from is often more important than the grape itself – it’s all about the “terroir.”

But with beer, if someone feels like throwing in banana or coriander, it’s fair game. Beer is a place where creativity is admired, sought after.

We got lucky this year – we got to go to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver. For those who don’t know, GABF is an annual, three day event that draws over 50,000 people from around the world to sample the thousands of beers offered. When tickets go on sale online, they are gone in about 30 minutes. It all started with Charlie Papazian, nuclear engineer, teacher, founder of the Brewers’ Association, writer of The Complete Joy of Home Brewing, and overall awesome guy. With an equally awesome family who we’re lucky to be friends with.

Both San Diego and Colorado are meccas for beer, which works out well for us, as beer fans. I tasted the best beer I’ve ever had at GABF, and it was in the amateur section where home brewers pair with a brewery to develop their own home brew. This one was a Trippel, aged in a barrel that had hosted port wine and bourbon. Heaven.

So – here’s a few photos:

The line around the back of the convention center to get in

So psyched to have tickets!

The crush at the entrance

Going up the stairs … so exciting…

We’re in!

Cheers!

Random…

Next year we need pretzel necklaces, like this guy!

The Culture of Taste

Posted on January 29, 2014 by A French American Life

My first experience with Vegemite was when a friend offered me a spoonful.

“Want to try it?”

“What does it taste like?”

“Kind of chocolaty.” Smirk.

So I took the proffered spoon, chomped down, and promptly gagged, spit, then went on to do my own version of Tom Hank’s scraping off his tongue à la “Big.”

Vegemite does not taste anything like chocolate. Chocolate tastes, well, heavenly, and melts in your mouth, and makes you feel like you are floating on clouds. It elevates your psyche and instills lightness where darkness once existed, benevolence where once there was stress and anxiety. Chocolate could be the answer for world peace.

Vegemite is disgusting, foul, and doesn’t belong on any food shelf anywhere.

Yet the Brits and the Australians think it’s fantastic.

Clearly, there is a cultural component to our tastes in food. I wonder how much is nature vs. nurture. Why do American kids “have” to dip vegetables in ranch dressing (I’m holding out on this one – really hoping my son will eventually eat vegetables rather than scraping his tongue with his hand à la Tom Hanks any time I feed him veggies) yet no other culture seems to have this “need”? Why do we like the things we like?

Americans, in general, adore peanut butter. Yet ask your average French person how they feel about peanut butter and they will make the same face I made when I ingested Vegemite. Root beer – we Americans love a good root beer float, right? Yet the French find it disgusting – most will say it tastes like cough medicine.

On the flip side, anchovies. The vast majority of my American friends make a sour face and stick out their tongue at the mention of anchovies. But my French friends love to put it on pizza and Caesar salads. Anchovies rarely make the ingredient list for most pizza joints in the U.S., and when I tell my French friends that I’m not a fan, I’m greeted with a surprised, “Mais, porquoi pas ?”

Then there’s pastis. A French liquor, popular in the south of France as an aperitif, especially at the end of a hot summer day. It’s flavored with anise and tastes like black licorice to me – another thing many Americans don’t tolerate well. I sat at a restaurant table full of French people one summer evening, riddled with incredulous arguments as to the merits of pastis after I took a sip from my husband’s glass and declared as politely as I could that I’d prefer to order a cool glass of rosé, thank you very much.

That was not my biggest faux pas. We took a sailboat cruise in Greece one year, led by a ½ French, ½ Greek captain. He had an intense gaze, a fiery temper, and a fabulous sense of humor. I took notes on the trip determined to write him into one of my novels as the larger than life character he was. I was both fascinated by him and a little bit scared of him. One night, while we were docked in a charming small Greek coastal village with absolutely no nightlife, he popped open a bottle of Ouzo, Greece’s anise flavored liquor, and offered it to us. Not wanting to offend, I downed my glass full as quickly as possible. He offered another round. I drank. And again. Yet again, seriously straining my constitution. Then, thank God, the bottle was emptied, but wait, no! Let’s open another! There were seven of us on deck that night, I the lone female. My stomach started to get queasy, my head woozy, and I tried to refuse the next round, but my refusal was refused. I looked to my husband for help, but he was in ouzo bliss and reeled in by male bonding.

“Vas-y ! C’est bon !”

Me, with our boat, the Anatolie

All in the name of politesse, I took my glass, closed my eyes, and downed it as quickly as I could, my seventh or eight or fifteenth glass, I’d lost count.

Another round came. I had plans for this one. When everyone tossed theirs back, I tossed mine, too. Right off the boat and into the water.

SPLASH!

“Qu-est que c’est?”

“What was what?” I tried to play innocent, but I’m a terrible liar. One of the other guys looked from me to my glass and back.

“Did you just dump your ouzo overboard?”

“What? Dump it? I… uh… yeah. I did. Sorry.”

The captain’s eyes flashed. “You dumped my ouzo overboard? My. Ouzo?”

“I’m really sorry. I, just, I couldn’t drink anymore.”

An incredulous reaming, half-serious, half-joking, ensued, and it was determined that I must go on trial. The captain grabbed the broken table leg and it became his gavel, my husband pleaded my case, and I was sentenced to singing. In front of everyone.

So, drunk and determined to give the offended captain a good show, I grabbed the gavel, turned it into my microphone, and gave the most rousing rendition of “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor” that boat had ever been privy to.

I definitely can’t stomach anything with anise now.

What other flavors have you found that are popular in one country but wouldn’t fly at all in your own? I didn’t even touch on “delicacies,” like snails, frog legs, bone marrow in France, guinea pigs in Peru, or No-Idea-What-Part-of-the-Cow that was in China (all of which I’ve eaten). I’d love to hear your stories!