Le Monde

So I've been trying my best to absorb a little media in an effort to learn more French. Can't say if it's helping much. The enlightening thing has been learning the French opinion of the U.S.

Obviously the Americans and the French have an historically long and complicated relationship. Laurens told me that many of the older folks here, like those in Holland, will go to their graves with America tattooed on their hearts because we liberated them in World War II. And we were good buddies back in the revolutionary days - where would our notions of liberty and freedom be without their French influence? And then they sold half our country to us for pennies on the acre. That was pretty cool. In return we've given them quality television programming. Besides talk shows, news and game shows, everything on TV here appears to be syndicated television from the United States. Good stuff too, like "Hunter," "Stargate" and "Falcons Crest."

I've been reading the NY Times online in the mornings and I also take a peek at Le Monde, just for kicks. Today there was a page one article about a world opinion poll concerning President Bush and the United States. I didn't see any mention of it this week in the Times. Instead I found this article today stating that the polls in the US were tied. Apparently the world poll was conceived by the Canadians and conducted by a bunch of newspapers around the globe, all using the same exact questions. The translation of the Le Monde page is a bit sketchy, but I found another reference from the Google news site.

A search on the NY Times finally revealed this article which states:

Support for President Bush was strongest in Israel and Russia, according to the polling in those countries, with 50 percent of Israelis favoring Mr. Bush's re-election and 24 percent favoring Mr. Kerry. In Russia, Mr. Bush was a 52-48 favorite.

But elsewhere, Mr. Kerry was a strong favorite, leading in percentage terms among Britons by 50-22, Mexicans by 55-20, Japanese by 51-30, South Koreans by 68-18 and among the French by 72-16.

How is it that the rest of the world has such a definite opinion on this election while we ourselves are struggling with it. Perhaps we should do as I suggested long ago and let Mexico annex us. Think about how great that would be. Flights to Cancún would be domestic. Our president would be a Fox. All these silly debates about making English our "official" language would go away. And we'd be neighbored by cool new countries like Belize and Guatemala.

Looks like I filed my absentee voter request too late so I'm not going to be able to vote this election. Guess it doesn't matter too much since California is a winner-take-all electoral state and we tend to vote Democratic Party. Besides, after seeing this, I think I'd vote Bush anyway. If that sort of thing works, why do we even have debates? We should just have made for TV movies for each candidate, or center E.R. episodes around their campaign platforms. Every election year we should just add each candidate as a regular character on Days of Our Lives and then on November 2nd, we'll vote for our favorite one online.

Blech, I need to go spit this bitter taste out of my mouth.