The French, much to my dismay, are just like us. Their dogs and cars are smaller, their sidewalks are dirtier, their food is better and their breath is worse, but they are basically just as self-consumed and ridiculous as we are. They scorn our decadent society, if only a little bit, but they are no better.

The most upsetting part of my ten-day stay in France was the realization that French kids really, REALLY want to be American kids. They get their fashions from California, their software from Silicon Valley, their video games from…whatever slimy cave coders and game geeks hide in, and their shoes from Converse (ok, I’m actually pretty happy about that part). Their music and movies are all either American or unpopular. They even sing American music, but they have no bloody idea what the lyrics mean. My fifteen-year-old host brother Pierre-Marie and I were hanging out in his room playing (American) video games and listening to some sort of angry teenage (American) music. Pierre-Marie was singing along with a song about drugs and exploitative, promiscuous sex, with dark hints of suicide here and there (something like "I just want to kill myself, no big deal just take a whole lot of painkillers and wash them down with bleach and stab myself through the head with a railroad spike, I hate my life even though I love pot and having dirty sex with prostitutes.")...I was a little taken aback to hear such a young person singing such terrifying lyrics, until he stopped singing and asked me to translate it for him. Surprisingly enough, even with three years of high school French under my belt I still don't know such simple words and expressions as "black tar heroin" and " a bunch of then blow my brains out with a Howitzer". What is American language education coming to, that I could successfully enter the "intermediate" level of French class without ever learning such vitally important expressions? The failures of the American education system aside, I eventually gave up looking for the words and told him that the song was "something about strong cheese and women with hairy armpits". That seemed to satisfy him, so he went back to singing along with his addicted, abusive, misogynist, suicidal American Idol. I feel bad that I wasn't able to tell him what he was really singing, but....if he doesn't understand a word of it anyways, where's the harm? Some adult who knows some English is eventually going to hear him singing something and assume that he is a homocidal, psychopathic maniac, but that's no big deal, right? I'm sure the French mental health institutions are absolutely fantastic, what with their socialized medicine and all.

Significantly more frightening in terms of my overall hope for humanity was the first event of my time on The Continent. The first night after I had arrived, my host brothers dragged me into Paris to see a show called "La Nuit Des Publivores". They tried to describe it to me, but I didn't really understand much of it....I picked up something here and there about "beaucoup de glaces compris", so I figured that it couldn't be all bad. When we finally got to the theater, arriving at 9:30 for a midnight show, the line at the door was nearly a block long. So we stood in the light rain of a Paris evening, breathing in cigarette smoke and trying to get a glimpse of one another around the language barrier. When we finally go to the door, a very large black man muttered something in entirely-too-quick French and started groping me. When in Rome......

After the black guy had decided that I either wasn't bringing in anything dangerous or wasn't cute enough to fondle thoroughly, I slipped through the doorway, presented my ticket and was pushed out into a gauntlet of young French girls who were wearing vendor's boxes around their necks, making a lot of noise and handing me all sorts of bizarre stuff. Not really knowing what was going on, I simply took what they handed me and tried not to get separated from my brothers. When we finally got through the gauntlet and into the theatre, I took stock of what I had in my hands. It was the normal sort of thing that you would expect at a show like that, or at least I had to assume that it was since I didn't really know what sort of show it was. There were balloons and keychains and noisemakers and condoms and sample bottles of Astroglide and subscription cards to what I assumed, based on the pictures, were pornographic magazines but which turned out to be things like "Food" and "Home and Garden". In the theater, we found seats and listened to American disco music played at fifty jillion decibels (about 40 centimeters in the metric system) and watched a light and video display that could have given Hellen Keller a seizure. People blew up their balloons and their condoms and tossed them around the theater, and there were a few spontaneous conga lines that formed, circled the floor once and then dispersed. At one point we all did the "YMCA", which doesn't sound nearly as good when you call it the "ee grek em say ah"...and then, much to my surprise, the actual show began.

The show was an international advertising festival. The best television commercial spots from around the world, where by "around the world" I mean "from California and a few token Latin American countries" were played back to back....for six hours. There was an intermission every two hours, when they handed out as much free ice-cream and iced tea as you could ever want. My brothers enjoyed it, but I wasn't terribly impressed. The Night of the AdEaters was, after all, nothing more than the Superbowl without all those pesky guys in intensely homo-erotic pants to get in the way of the commercials.

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