Re: Freedom fries

Posted by Bob on July 17, 2007

In Reply to: Re: Freedom fries posted by Victoria S Dennis on July 14, 2007

: : : : The phrase I was looking up was "Tout de suite," but I found an interesting notation on that page:
: : : : "In America of course the souring of governmental relations over the disagreement in policy regarding the second Gulf War was the root cause of a virtual boycott in the USA of all things French. Many people there adopted a distaste for even speaking the word French, which resulted in the renaming of french fries (which all right-minded people in any case know are called chips) as freedom fries."

: : : : I'm an American from NY, and if anyone ever avoided things French or speaking the word French, *I* certainly never heard about it! And I'd never heard of "freedom fries" before now, either.

: : : You should have read a newspaper or watched TV in 2003, there were a few weeks back then when people talked of little else. They changed the menus in the House of Representatives cafeteria.

: : : Almost 5000 hits in Google News Archive http://news.google.com/archivesearch?hl=en&ned=&q=%22freedom+fries%22&ie=UTF-8
: : : Wikipedia
: : : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries

: : I actually ran across "freedom fries" on a menu recently. And it's 2007. Apparently, a small but small-minded percentage of Americans still resent the French for their resistance to the invasion of Iraq. The French, if I remember correctly, thought the weapons inspectors needed more time, that there may not have been weapons of mass destruction, that preemptive war was a dengerous precedent, that a hestily-planned invasion would open a can of worms, etc. How dare they question the wisdom and leadership of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the rest of the Neocon geniuses?

: : 3600 (and counting) dead soliers later, "freedom fries"? Vive la France.

:
: But did it actually happen? I'm thinking of "bra-burning", the symbolic act everybody associates with late 1960s feminism - an iconic event which never actually happened. (VSD)

Bra-burning. draft card burning, flag burning: you could count the total number of incidents on two hands. But "freedom fries" swept the country briefly in 2003, mostly in Red states, rural areas, and Congress' dining rooms. As I mentioned, I actually saw one the other day. It seemed like a time capsule.