Is France Still Good?...You Bet……

……… Yes, I will admit, since visiting France for over 20 years plus, I have gone native. 

Like the French I so admire, I do not live to work, but work to live and live well! The Protestant work ethic has been refused a work permit and they are proud of it. One of the things I love about this country is something called ‘le pont’ which means that if a national holiday fall in the middle of the week, French workers will take off enough days before and after it to extend it all the way to the nearest weekend. None of this American rubbish of two weeks vacation a year. From Bastille Day (July 14th until September), the French head off for 5 weeks of well earned eating, drinking, romancing and dozing. Sure there are the less fortunate in France who cannot afford such refined pleasures and maybe are seething about the inequalities of Gallic society – but let’s not spoil my story’. 
You say, ah! what a bunch of lazy, unproductive people, but the fact remains the French have chosen such a civilized, civilizing state over the barbarities of the US. In fact their transportation system is better than ours, their care for their citizens is far better and shall I go on? The French ( and that has been their draw for over hundreds of years to outsiders) is their pursuit of sensual pleasure. True the “pursuit of happiness’ is in our constitution, but the French don’t have to be reminded by their constitution that they have a right to do so. That cultivation of pleasure, so exotic to us and so contrary to how we live in our ill-dressed, ill-groomed, fast-food fetishising, sexually incompetent, health faddism culture is why so many foreigners are seduced by France. France is a country that has seduced me and I love it. Unlike America, where coffee is not savored at pavement tables while making sexy chit chat as it should be, NO, but sucked from drink-through lids as you race from one job to another, possibly shoving a horribly cooked burger down as you do so. I believe France exists as it does now (even with all their problems) as an inspiration for us as to how we might live better( of course to be truthful,) we are temperamentally incapable of doing so.