2008 Letter from Paris
posted by on November 3 at 15:10 PM
Eli —I’m an American living in Paris. Like most Europeans, the French dig Obama. For the past two school years, I taught English in a high school in heavily immigrant areas of the suburbs, and when Obama first announced his candidacy my generally pessimistic students seemed to feel like new possibilities now existed for their own lives. The next school year, when I told them about voting in the Democrats Abroad primary on Super Tuesday, the excitement was once again palpable.
Just last week, when I dropped my absentee ballot into a yellow La Poste box here in the 11th arrondissement where I live, the box was tagged with a racial slur. Perhaps silly or overemotional, but dropping a ballot marked for Obama into that tagged box made me feel like I was helping all of these kids feel like they could do anything, because Barack Hussein Obama just might become president of the United States.
Zannah
On pourrait tuer des bebes phoques.
I'm not sure if all these testimonials about how much people in France, Saudi Arabia and Canada (not to mention Homoland) support Obama are going to change the minds of Red America, but they're heartwarming nevertheless.
"generally pessimistic students seemed to feel like new possibilities now existed for their own lives."
immigrants and french people of color in france's suburbs (ghettoes) are screwed and completely locked out of the political process, the french are becoming even more anti immigrant, anti arab and anti french africans. despite all the critisism the mainstream french have of the US and despite their claim that they are progressive. their institutions are extremely racist.
minority participation in goverment in the US is light years ahead of the french whose parliament, regional goverments, judicial and executive branch is for the most part exclusively white.
the french are and have always been full of shit! france will never have a barrack obama, hell they dont even have black mayors or governors for that matter.