[The Smirking Chimp]
Suffer the French schoolchildren: The hatred Bush hath wrought
21 January 2004
  By Ted Rall

CARQUEFOU, FRANCE--Why do they hate us? And where do they get their hatred from?

These questions haunted me and three other American visitors as we studied a huge display of cartoons drawn by local schoolchildren assigned to convey their impressions of the United States. Panel after grisly panel depicted the United States, George Bush and those ubiquitous symbols of American commercial culture--McDonald's and Coke--as murderous, predatory and gleefully vicious. Obese Uncle Sams chopping up Iraqi children with a knife, their blood gushing across construction paper. A leering Statue of Liberty holding a hamburger in one hand while firing missiles at dying Afghan civilians across the ocean. The American flag, its bars transformed into prisons for the child inmates of Guantánamo. A baseball bat painted red, white and blue poised to smash a ball--which is a globe. The juxtaposition between the artwork's ferociously angry imagery and the childish drawing styles of the third graders would disturb the most jaded reader. ...

My comments: I know from personal experience that the oldtimers still thank random Americans they meet for the arrival of the American GIs on the beaches of Normandy in the midst of WWII. But they won't be alive too much longer, and if something doesn't happen soon, a whole new generation of French people and other Europeans will grow up hating everything about the US! Of course a good percentage of US residents hate these same things about the US, so one can hardly blame the Europeans and others, even if sometimes they're anger is a bit blindly megalithic--one can only blame GW Bush, his administration, those who support him, and anyone who doesn't do something to oppose him.

I'm glad these cartoonists did what they could to explain to the schoolchildren that Bush does not represent the views and beliefs of many, many US residents. But it will take more than that. It just makes me sad, it really does...

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