Andy and France would like to know if they have anything else to be proud of so that we can add it to the list.
By Bad Andy, Feature Columnist and Rant Consultant
A Short List of French Accomplishments
France has long been a blight upon the face of the European continent.  They have a reputation for making good wine but having such an ego about it that foreigners take to drinking as much of it as the locals to dull the ringing in their ears as the French expound upon their inflated sense of self worth ad nauseaum.  The French also have a reputation for being able but unwilling to speak English, worshiping cheese, being rude to tourists, and surrendering often.  These are only the obvious problems with the place.  Read on and you’ll discover many, many more.

You might ask yourself, “when French people talk, why does it always sound like they’re swearing?”  It’s because they ARE swearing.  I will admit that there are days when a language made up entirely of profanity sounds like an attractive idea, but how many times can the Florida Supreme Court try to make Al Gore the president?
“Why are they swearing?” you might ask.  That’s easy.  They’re swearing about you!  It should come as no surprise that they hate you.  They didn’t even like the American GI’s who came to save them from Nazi Germany.  The French only like two things, wine and Jerry Lewis, and you’re not one of them.  Get used to it. 

It has been suggested that the French language actually contains non-profane words for use when there are no foreigners present.  This would be nearly impossible to document but it is conceivable.  We know most of them CAN speak English but refuse to most of the time so perhaps they also know non-profane French words and refuse to use them too.  I think this is because they are snobs and hate the fact that we come to their country to prop up its pathetic economy which depends mostly upon labor strikes and peddling perfume that smells like my ass.  There is another possibility, however.  Perhaps the French are uncomfortable with English’s relatively few profane words and are therefore reluctant to use it in public or in the presence of strangers.
The French have a reputation for being rude to foreigners.  Supposedly, most of this bitterness is reserved for Americans and while they are not necessarily friendly to other foreigners they are at least less openly hostile.  Why would they hate us so much when they have far more reason to turn their antagonism towards their neighbors England and Germany, both of whom they have fought with on and off since the fall of the Roman Empire?  It’s ego.  It’s all ego.  The French are a pig headed, stuffy lot and while they have contempt for everyone everywhere, they are comfortable in their superiority complex with regards to the rest of the world, except us.  With us, the gap is just too great for even a country of chain-smoking alcoholics who live in sidewalk cafes to delude themselves into overlooking.  They don’t feel like they’re better than us and that pisses them off something fierce so they take it out on us.  Let’s take a look at some of the reasons the French don’t feel superior to us:

We make more wine than they do.  We have better steaks.  We saved their bacon in TWO World Wars.  We produced Jerry Lewis AND Charles Lindbergh and we don't even dedicate temples to their worship.  We treat Lewis like an escapee from a mental hospital and condemn Lindbergh for being a communist.  We think snails are vermin, not food.  We manage to pronounce most of their words despite the fact that spelling and pronunciation are only loosely related in French (e.g. filet mignon) and three quarters of their population must be dyslexic the way they change around the order of the letters L and E (e.g. table, marble, etc.).  We can make cars.  We like mushrooms but we haven't devoted our entire civilization to searching for them.  We have more jobs than kinds of cheese.  We shoot mimes.  We don't need AA chapters in our elementary schools.
The French are the most unjustifiably proud people in the world.  Their list of accomplishments is rather short compared any other country in the western world and some of their inventions are of dubious worth.  What are they all haughty about?  We invented nuclear weapons, Teflon, mass production, and computers.
Things Invented/Discovered by the French:

Pasteurization
Mimes
Asterix the Gaul
VD
French Toast
French Fries
French Kissing
French Vanilla
French Onion Soup
Cowardice
The French think they can cook.  Don’t believe them!  I can’t deny that the fries and toast produced by their country are some of the finest in the world and my life wouldn’t be the same without them.  Their bread is also good but French bread looks suspiciously like Italian bread except that the crust can only be cut with a hacksaw so I’m not sure they deserve credit for this one, much in the same way that the Ruskies don’t really DESERVE credit for building their Tu-4 heavy bomber, a bad rip-off of our B-29 Superfortress.    Either way, I can’t survive on toast and fries alone, I need some meat and that’s where things start to go wrong, badly wrong.  In Asia, people like to eat raw fish.  In France, people like to eat raw pork.  They don’t usually pawn it off as such.  This kind of fraud shouldn’t surprise anyone.  After all, they DID steal the recipe for their famous bread and they DO try to rob and bamboozle outsiders at every turn.  Should it come as any surprise that they also try to food poison you?  Usually they run pork across a hot skillet about as fast as you might run if Napoleon were chasing you, trying to feed you some raw pork with his sword.  Even the health departments of America’s dirtiest towns would close the entire country if they came for an inspection.

At this point, it is interesting to note that Louis Pasteur, a Frenchman, invented pasteurization IN France.  Pasteurization kills germs in a number of food products, mostly dairy products, which previously claimed the lives of thousands of people every year, even outside of France.  Most of the Western World was quick to adopt pasteurization because they prefer not to have people dropping dead from easily preventable diseases all the time.  The only exception to this is France where they refuse to use pasteurization so locals and tourists alike drop dead at random because the French are idiots. 

The French have a symbiotic relationship with filth.  They don’t cook meat well enough to kill diseases.  They don’t pasteurize their milk.  Worst of all, they don’t bathe regularly AND they refuse to use deodorant.  Filth grows everywhere in their country.  On the streets, on their dank old buildings, even on the people themselves.  In turn, the French thrive on that filth.  They eat mostly vermin and fungus and they avoid clearing it from their bodies because it protects them from the Sun’s withering rays.  You thought Nosferatu was a terrible monster in the movie but if you had smoked two packs of non-filters and drank three bottles of cabernet every day since you were three and never took a shower, then at 35, you’d look like that too. 

Militarily, France is not entirely at a loss.  They do make one of the world’s best aircraft launched anti-ship missile, the Exocet.  The problem is that they sell it to every violent upstart regime who can come up with the equivalent of $50 US (94,575,000 francs).  In the US, that’s dinner for 2 in a mid-scale restaurant.  In India, that’s four hand tailored suits.  In Italy, that’s the votes of any member of parliament for a whole month.  In Algeria, well, that IS Algeria.  But in France, that $50 will buy you an Exocet missile.  Remember in the early 80’s when Argentina started a war with the UK and sank a couple of British Ships?  In part, that was the work of the Exocet.  Remember in the late 80’s when Iraq blew the shit out of the frigate USS Stark and made it look like a Geisha house in downtown Nagasaki?  That too was the work of the Exocet.  Isn’t it good of them to arm our enemies so well?  I guess that’s their prerogative.  It’s not like we’re both members of the same mutual defense pact or anything.  Wait, what about NATO?  We’re a member of NATO.  The UK is a member of NATO.  And France is a member of NATO.  What were those French fucks thinking?

Other than that, the “modern” French military is somewhat of a joke.  Their planes are marginally better than the ones the third world has but mostly they’re just the result of strapping jet engines to replicas of the plane Charles Lindbergh flew on his trans-Atlantic flight.  Charles Lindbergh was the Jerry Lewis of HIS generation and the French were ENAMORED with him.  The French navy amounts to little more than a half dozen clam boats and Jacques Custeau’s explorer ship.  They could give the Yale rowing club a run for their money but even Canada has written them off as a credible threat.   Counting by the numbers, France’s army is of appropriate strength for a country its size and their technology, while not the best in the first world, is more than adequate.  The problem is that the French are cowards.  In WWII, they fought the Kraut army for a whopping TWO DAYS before giving up.  Several countries with fewer troops and vastly inferior technology had held out for much longer by that point in the war.  Be that as it may, after two days, France rolled over and put its legs up like the whore of a nation it is.  Things haven’t always been like this.  BC France was full of Gauls and they held the Roman Empire at bay for decades before finally succumbing to Rome’s overwhelming number of troops.  Charles “The Hammer” Martel and some of his fellow Frenchmen halted the Moorish conquest of Europe, despite being hopelessly outnumbered.  During the middle ages, France was a world power and fought aptly with the Krauts for control of the land and the Brits for control of the seas.  France was a major colonial power in Africa, Asia, and the New World.  They ended up losing in the French and Indian War but they were hardly pushovers and they turned around to help us in a number of ways during our revolution.  What the Hell happened to them? 

Men seem to be more offended by the pricklike attitudes of the French than women.  Women are somewhat taken in by France’s alleged romantic appeal.  For this reason, they seldom see eye to eye on the subject.  Their different outlooks might turn things something like this:
Woman: “I’d like to visit France (with YOU).”
Man: “I’d like to visit France (as a conquering general).”

Woman: “I’d like to see the Louvre (with YOU).”
Man: “I’d like to see the Louvre (in flames).”
After a while, it will become evident that the French aren’t really scatterbrained, they’re just uncooperative.  Taxi drivers will insist they don’t know where Notre Dame is unless you tip them 190,000 francs ($0.75 US). Waiters will never translate anything on the menu for you.  Shopkeepers will direct you to the countryside to see Isle de la Cite (an ISLAND).  It would be useful to treat every conversation with a French national like a POW interrogation.  Make sure you have bolt cutters and a car battery to emphasize your point. 

After all this, you might ask yourself, “Why does anyone put up with these assholes?”  I’m still working on that one.  I have narrowed it down though.  It’s not because we’re scared of them.  It’s not because they have something important we wouldn’t want to destroy.  After all, we already got the secrets of French toast and French fries.  What else could there be?  Perhaps we keep them around as a reminder of what NOT to become.  “Billy, stop making that face or you might grow up to me a mime.”  “Yea, those old movies are funny, but one more Jerry Lewis film and I think I’ll turn into a chain-smoking alcoholic.”  My advice is just to stay at home but if you’re going to travel, either visit someplace where they speak English or visit someplace where they treat American citizens (or at least pictures of dead American presidents) like gods and kings.

(4/30/2002)
The Eiffel Tower (Right) is one of France's most "romantic" structures.  This goes to show you what you can accomplish when you don't care about being useful to society.
The Catholic Church is in panic as some French towns have deserted their tradition patron saints for a new one
Something else the French didn't invent for lack of opposable thumbs
Asterix and Obelix only wish they could carry the weight of France's accomplishments, it would be a lighter load