Tuesday, November 04, 2008

"Oui, Nous Pouvons!"

I just got an email from my friends Mélody et Laurent in Gardanne, France. I'm not actually sure how they tracked me down, but they sound overjoyed-
''vive OBAMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! congratulations comment vas-tu? big kisssssss Mélody et Laurent''

Okay, they are French, so it's highly likely that they are emailing while somewhat intoxicated!

But the French seem to be pretty excited. I've said before that the truth about 'French anti-Americanism' is just that the French are very passionate in all of their opinions. They don't dislike something- they detest it! They don't get happy- they are overjoyed!

Here are some French responses to Obama's victory from Le Monde:

''Bravo! Bravo! L'Amérique tourne la page Bush avec brio. Espérons que la France en face de même avec l'ère Sarkozy.'' [America turns the page on Bush with brio. Let's hope that France will do the same with the Sarkozy era.]

''Merci à l'Amérique d'avoir donné une leçon de maturité démocratique au monde entier.''
[Thanks to America for having given a lesson in democratic maturity to the entire world.]

...Historique: oui! Emouvant: oui! C'est la meilleure nouvelle, et le plus grand message qui nous soit venu des Etats-Unis depuis J. Kennedy et M. Luther King; oui, pour reprendre un éditorial d'un ex éditorialiste du Monde, on peut affirmer aujourd'hui: "NOUS SOMMES TOUS DES AMERICAINS"! [A reference to the famous Le Monde editorial from 9/12/2001- 'We are all Americans'. Many others repeated this quote.]

I know there are plenty of people who would have prefered to see McCain get elected. If it's any consolation, I've been to a number of places today here in Ontario, and people have given me big, goofy smiles when they realized that I'm an American. That hasn't happened in the last five years that I've been living here. Tomorrow, there is a lot to fix. Today, people around the world are looking up to the United States in admiration. Even if you didn't vote for Obama, enjoy this moment.

3 comments:

Greg von Winckel said...

I was surprised at how enthused my language class classmates have been about the election. I have a sneaking suspicion the press has been portraying McCain as "Bush Jr. Junior" and that is not a terribly popular notion.

Holly said...

Whoops, that was me. Greg and I are having some kind of identity crisis here. (We traded computers for a couple of days)

Rufus said...

You have to wonder how long the honeymoon is going to last too because Obama's not going to have the room to do much differently than McCain would have. I think it's inevitable that Europeans will be a bit disappointed. On the other hand, Bush is not that hard an act to follow.