american history

Every Thursday, I go to a junior high and high school just over the eastern edge of Paris, in the banlieue, to work as an English-teaching assistant to a professor there. I sit in on one class of sixieme (equivalent to American fifth or sixth grade, there's an age difference thing going on here that i haven't exactly worked out) and one class of terminale (last year of high school, but they're one year younger than Americans in their last year of high school). Well, I used to go -- today was my last day. I have a lot of complaints about it -- mostly having to do with the French educational system, which is nothing if not rigid and conformist -- but I don't particularly feel like going there. I just wanted to note something that happened today in the terminale class.

They're studying the American civil rights movement; segregation, Rosa Parks, the Ku Klux Klan, Martin Luther King and his "I have a dream" speech. Today they were looking at the text of that speech, and the teacher was trying to direct them to talk about the Pilgrims and how they came to North America looking for religious freedom (so she could segue from that into the religious aspects of the speech, and mentions of freedom, separately and together). She kept asking: Who founded America? Who were the first people to America? (Let's ignore mentions of, say, Jamestown, right now, and skip right to the Mayflower.)

No one was answering. The teacher was getting frustrated. Who founded America? Who were the first people? Come on, who founded America?

Some boy in the front row said, as if it had come to him in a flash of insight -- "Henry Ford!"

I laughed and the teacher smirked a little. The kid tried again: "Rockefeller?"

"Pilgrims" came eventually, but it took a while.

romney on french marriage

Wow, I missed this one. Mitt Romney apparently lives in a parallel universe.

"It seems that Europe leads Americans in this way of thinking," Romney told the crowd of more than 5,000. "In France, for instance, I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past."

I'm sorry, what?

There's speculation about where he got this. Some people think it came from an Orson Scott Card sci-fi novel. Others believe it's from a 2003 French romantic comedy. Regardless of where he came up with it, it's pretty inexcusable that the Washinton Post printed this uncritically, without noting, "Hey! Romney pulled this one out of thin air!" How many poorly-informed Americans now hate France even more?

Romney, quit pandering. Everyone thinks your religion's a cult; you have a less than zero chance of winning the nomination for what has become, essentially, an evangelical Christian party. I'd say quit while you're ahead, but I think it's too late.

(There's also no possibility of excusing this by saying, Well, he screwed up, but it was an off-the-cuff remark. It was a graduation speech. He planned it, wrote it down and gave it. The man meant to say this. I just cannot fathom his mental processes. For a moment I thought maybe he was trying to criticize the PACS system -- essentially civil unions -- but, good God, just criticize the PACS and not some mythical seven-year marriage of your own creation.)

in which visas are, or are not, acquired.

Visa received, finally. I had to check it several times in order to convince myself that it was, in fact, there, and not just something that I had temporarily made appear by the force of my wishing.

Granted, I don't have much experience with the French, and bureaucracy is uniformly irritating, but my dealings with the French bureaucracy have surpassed any frustration I've ever had the displeasure of meeting. A word of advice, if you ever need to get a visa from the French consulate: do your research approximately six months in advance. You will probably need to take a several-hundred-dollar flight to a city that you may or may not have ever visited; then you will need to stay overnight in order to make it to your appointment (remember to schedule an appointment) between 9 and 12 in the morning, because you cannot possibly request that the people whose job it is to issue visas actually issue them more than fifteen hours a week. Read every page on the consulate's website, because essential documents that you will need for your application are listed in various unassociated locations; you'll think you've found everything, but trust me, you haven't. Bring everything you have that you think might be even tangentially relevant to your application, and bring them in originals and several copies. Do not call the consulate for anything. They will not answer questions about visas over the phone (this is an actual policy). They will tell you to email them for answers, but they will not reply. They will tell you that everything you need to know is on the website. It is not. There is nothing you can do about this, except maybe pray.

I made the mistake of calling the French consulate not once, but several times (and several consulates; trying to figure out where to apply, I talked to multiple people in the New York, Atlanta, and Houston consulates). The people who work in the consulates are not, shall we say, happy people. When you call them, don't be surprised if they don't like you. In fact, they hate you. There is nothing you can do about this either. You are a) American (probably), b) speaking English (unfortunately, speaking French doesn't help much, though I tried it), and c) asking them to do their jobs by helping you. And there is nothing a French bureaucrat hates more than being reminded that they are required by their job description to help you.

The difficulty of getting a French visa, my Parisian professor tells me, is in direct proportion to the difficulty of getting an American visa. I've never had to do this, clearly, but I did make an offhand comment on this subject to a Chinese friend and, normally quiet, he flipped. Getting an American visa is a royal pain. In response, the French (in a spirit of scrupulous fairness, I suspect) have made getting a French visa an equally painful experience. When I called a professor to ask her advice on my visa predicament (namely, that I was convinced I would not get one, and was on the verge of ditching the program), she calmed me down, offered alternative tactics to try, and, in conclusion, clucked her tongue and said, "You know, I don't mean to defend them, but when I was trying to get an American visa ..."