To Some in France, U.S. Sinking in Storm
PARIS — Like other U.S. allies, France helped after Hurricane Katrina hit.
The French government sent about 20 tons of relief supplies to the Gulf Coast as well as military divers and other emergency workers. The Total oil company donated $1 million. The U.S. Embassy reports an outpouring of public donations and condolences.
But in a sign of the continuing tension in France's 2-century-old alliance with the United States, a debate has arisen here about whether Katrina has also reopened the floodgates of anti-Americanism.
Some French commentators have been dismayed by the tone of the media coverage concerning the destruction across the Atlantic. Some prominent people in the French press and politics, they believe, have eagerly turned the catastrophe into an all-purpose symbol of American ills, real or imagined.
"If the United States didn't exist, it would have to be invented so that elsewhere we can reassure ourselves, as if to better hide our own defects and incoherencies," warned a recent editorial in Le Figaro newspaper. "It's easy to ramble on about the decline of the American empire. Some even see the difficulties encountered by the U.S. as the work of a vengeful hand from the beyond
The extensive coverage has tended to paint the picture of a superpower brought down by economic inequality, racial conflict and neglectful government. A recent Nouvel Observateur cover summed up this stark view: "America Stripped Naked: The cyclone reveals the wounds of the every-man-for-himself society."
Marianne, a left-leaning newsmagazine, declared: "The American giant folds beneath the weight of its failures and struggles to enforce an order that it wanted to impose on the world."
Marianne's take typified the profound disdain for President Bush in evidence here. A special issue titled "The Fall of the Pyromaniac Fireman" blamed Bush for a planetary flash fire of crises -- from Iraq to global warming -- that, in the magazine's view, discredit an entire free-market-driven, militaristic "Anglo-Saxon model" of governance.
In the newspaper Liberation, Gerard Dupuy accused the Bush administration of "contempt for victims who without a doubt were doubly at fault for being both poor and black." He concluded that the neoconservative "crusade," which was "already mired in the Mesopotamian marshes" of Iraq, had "foundered in the Louisiana bayou."
