What Would Jean Think?

To practice my French, I’ve been working ast Jean-François Revel, L’obsession anti-américaine. It’s a good learner book (whose title, I trust, does not need translation)—lots of dynamic declarative sentences on a topic you’re bound to know something about anyway. Revel is a cheerful combatant—would have been fun to see him in a cage match with, say, Stanley Fish. Revel's stock in trade is in skewering the pretensions and hypocrisies of French lefties of the hate-America stripe. Along the way, he made a career out of trying to show that American culture is (was?) more wholesome and constructive (and the European left, more sleazy and dishonest) than commonly thought.

I don’t know if he revised it later, but my copy is copyright 2002, and pretty clearly was put to bed sometime shortly after 9/11. It was a good time to have kindly thoughts about the United States, and Revel is to be commended for not just waving the bloody shirt--a lot of his text could have stood as it is had 9/11 never happened. Still, I wonder if he would feel any need to revise his analysis in the light of more recent developments..

Perhaps not. Revel stuck to his guns through fat years and lean. And he was getting old (he died last year, at 82). Still, one has to wonder whether even our closest friends feel as comfortable asserting our decency and good sense today as they might have just five years ago.