An American Patriot in Paris

Spending the Fourth of July in France is an eerie phenomenon for an American, disquieting in its silence, its indifference, its quotidian Frenchness. Absent is the cheesy but stirring spectacle: the miniature U.S. flags, the festooned Uncle Sams, the hot dogs and watermelons, the magnificent fireworks. Sitting in the Luxembourg garden (possibly the most beautiful place in the world) while reading Proust with a cheap but delicious bottle of Bordeaux, glancing up occasionally at kids kicking a soccer ball or the many menageries of pretty French girls, one wouldn’t even know the U.S. existed. Except for a group of picknickers munching on McDonalds.

But oddly enough, I don’t miss the U.S. at all today, or feel particularly patriotic as a two-month expatriate. I even feel a little guilty about my apathy towards the stars and stripes—“God Bless America” would ring hollow in my ears now, even if it provoked tears in my eyes years after 9/11.

I’ve loved my country, not in a tacky way, but profoundly and permanently as a paladin of Freedom in a world of Tyranny. Which is the problem with abstractions, even those we think we hold dear. They are cheap and fleeting, “words words words” as Hamlet says. Or Nietzsche: “That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts.” Today, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” sounds ugly to me in comparison to the eternal battlecry of the French Republic: “Liberté egalité fraternité.” The words themselves mean nothing, are even oxymoronic. But the passion with which they are spoken, the ubiquity with which they are inscribed upon the most sublime of monuments and museums, that is something infinitely more meaningful to me than a mantra.

Today I feel French, surely an ersatz Frenchman but nevertheless French. I sneer at fat American tourists with their oversized maps, mispronouncing Notre Dame and screaming from their tourboats as if they were riding a rollercoaster at Walt Disney World. I have spent many hours explaining to my French friends that a lot of Americans actually hate George Bush, but my ardent desire to defend the U.S. against all slights is waning by the day. I feel embarrassed when my accent betrays me as an American, and defiantly continue to speak French even when addressed in English. If I had a girlfriend, I would make out with her unabashedly in public. And I smoke cigarettes at crowded cafés to the dire annoyance of the American family beside me, responding to their complaints with a snippety: “C’est la France!”

But all this does not make me a coldhearted nihilist without connection to home and hearth, or an American-hating liberal that only wants to get drunk in left-bank cafés and undermine Christian values. The U.S. as a country may leave me uninspired, but I think fondly and even nostalgically of my family and friends, my favorite sport teams, my suburban town, my happy childhood. It will always be the country I love, my country, because it is for better or worse entangled with me. More important than it’s being the “land of the free” is the simple, ineluctable fact that it is my home.

I did, however, by the very end of the night, find the old, gaudy patriotic spirit stirring within me, burbling about with all the cheap Heineken I had guzzled at an American bar’s Fourth of July extravaganza. I was disconcerted at first with all the loud, brutish American men in their polo shirts that could barely contain their oversized muscles, and the unelegant, embarrassingly drunk and skankily dressed American girls who squealed in a language I definitely could not understand. But as I got drunk, I came around to it all, and by the time the national anthem started playing I was in an orgasmic pitch of inebriated patriotism. Everyone embracing and swaying to the music, we screamed, howled, shrieked the lyrics; a medley of monkeys that hardly knew the words, or even the tune really. A drunken girl from Arkansas (who had told me seven times she was applying for the Rhodes scholarship before falling unceremoniously to the floor) rushed up to us demanding to know what song this was.

At that moment, I really loved the U.S., regardless of Enlightenment platitudes. We may be fat, loutish, and drunk, but more than anyone we know how to have fun. There is no stern Gallic conscience telling us, “One must not make fools of ourselves in public.” If anything, Americans feel a solemn duty to make fools of themselves in public. And that, in short, is what I learned this Fourth of July.


David L. Golding ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is an English and American literature and language concentrator in Dunster House. On the Fourth of July he witnessed the whole of McLean, Virginia and its surroundings, take shape and solidity, spring into being, town and gardens alike, from his bottle of Heineken.