Cultural Exception: The Seventh Seal Is Broken

I have been waiting for this one for close to thirty years. Patience is a virtue.

In 1993, the French, as always ever so imbued with themselves demanded that an exception to the international free trade agreement known as GATT be made for them, to accommodate their film industry largely subsidised by the state, as is the rest of their carefully selected ''culture'' ; in fact culture is shamelessly used and abused by the French state as a propaganda tool. If it is tools states need, let them use fiscal policies, proper ones if they can manage. It is rather unfortunate French protectionist zeal doesn't extend to their many jobseekers, their Joes the plumbers or their Lone Star provinces, for a change. Businesses and public services are zilch on the grounds that taxpayers' money shouldn't be used to support moribund industries. With cultural exception, domestically produced navets (turnips, straight-to-DVD bargain basement flops) have to be protected from healthy competition from the US, their fave target, the UK and the rest of the world. Other turnips than French state-sponsored ones need not apply. On their bikes. I have always wondered why the French couldn't come up with their own version of cheese burgers, open outlets and chains selling French fast-food such as filled half-baguettes worldwide, and field pure grape juice full of canned sunlight as a French super-food on international markets. Mc Donald's among others did way better with much less. Over time, when customers, who are always right, asked for healthier, traceable and even nationally produced foodstuffs to protect their struggling farmers as seen in the UK, Mc Do listened. That they could surf the Starbucks-style humongous wave with the no-nonsense Mc Caf' proves they know their job and how to keep an open mind in business, however typical, rock-solid, hard-nose Yankees they may be. Coca-Cola doesn't claim cultural exception, they make it happen, and they sell everywhere to anybody. The answer to my question about the lack of success of the French is complacency, laziness, intolerance and an ingrained culture of over-reliance on subsidies, aggravated to the extreme by the goddam EU, subsidies then monopolised by expert scroungers rather than used to encourage a culture supporting incipient go-getters, can-doers, bigger-picture seers. Result: shysters and sycophants rake up taxpayers' hard-won cash to grace them in return with the worst Fellini filth ever seen at the Cesars Awards ceremony (French answer to the Oscars) mid-March this year. The general outcry that ensued is not going to change anything.

Creation has been killed by systemised corruption, just as in the Satyricon film version (I haven't seen it, I had to translate excerpts from the original in Latin in high school). I am told that in the film a couple with four children commits suicide not to fall into the clutches of the corrupt, morally bankrupt, crumbling Roman Empire. In those Cesars' days, it translates as the French population being hungry and angry, an incredible number of under-age school kids committing suicide when they're not literally stabbing each other in the back, meanwhile ''cultural'' scroungers live off state subsidies without lifting a finger or their very tired butt; rather, they give those to the unsuspecting public in dire need of seeing their spirits lifted.

French culture is dead because it has been politicised and subsidised to the death by ambitious but not so honourable Jerry-Manderers who do not care whether respectable, age-old French vineyards are sold to the Chinese or cut in two by high-end, high-speed train tracks their impoverished nationals are now forced to live the wrong side of. Ransomed by thugs, they will end up reaching for their Browning next time they hear the word culture (as an aside, cul means @ss in the F language).

Pulla the plug: The Plot Against Americanisation - The European vacuum really sucks.

I write to plead with contemporary Europe's true liberators, Netflix, Dysney, Pinewood, and Slumdog Millionaires of the entire world. I beg you all to not finance the production of French filth as it is demanded of you, and not to pay twice the right already granted to you by international trade agreements to sell your free-market wares in that god-awful hell-hole. The French are really showing more cheek today, to say the least; accusing foreign firms of tax-avoidance through registration in tax-friendly havens, when they are themselves so keen on doing other people's pockets to perpetuate the lazy, dirty, malodorous lifestyle of talentless old farts whose only self-appointed mission in life is to talk through their backsides. Typically a male student of the once renowned political elite Paris school Sciences Po (sounds like science of the pot as in pan) has just made the headlines - two full-front pages if you please, on Women's International Day - of the national ''left-wing'' paper Liberation (in my studious days, we used to call the dinosaur Bide, e with an accent, so that you pronounce it bidet; without an accent it sounds like un bide, a flop or a belly in slang). This male student broadcasts in very lengthy, verbose, mealy-mouthed, sleazy prose he has raped his ex-girlfriend, also a student in the same worthy institution now mostly noted for its rape culture, to the point its head has had to resign not long ago, for having conveniently looked the other way. I have read that letter only with the purpose of serving my readership the best I can. What the turgid, pretentious lesson-giver writes at length could be summarised in very simple, shorter lines: I raped the ex I had tried everything I could possibly think of with because I had been raped myself by a paedo (whom he calls a criminal) in junior school, so I made things even by raping, anyway we're all rapists, you are all rapists. No we are not. You are, you are as guilty as sin. You punished your ex-girlfriend (as in X-rated?) for the crime of the paedo. We can all say politicos are raping our respective countries, and that the entire world is effed. Is this lamentable bum magnanimously giving his ex permission to go and rape somebody else now, for her to break even too? Is he saying that all rape victims male and female are potential rapists with a legitimate claim to be so? I should like to see an army of Phoolan Devis putting things to right in his effing hell of a country, beginning with himself. A rape is no reason and no excuse to rape anybody else. Why didn't Mister Justice rape his own attacker then? A majority of us are men enough (I count lads with bumps as men in such circumstances) to bring another corrective action than rape to this effed up world, day in, day out, at our own little level, with humility and without expecting stardom. Virtue is its own reward, you ***hole. I bet they didn't teach you that in that fancy-pants superior college of yours. Please somebody, cut the crap, flush it out, bring back the Hayes Code, and let us celebrate e.e. cummings who once wrote: ''A politician is an ass upon which everyone has sat except a man''.

''Cancel culture'', I humbly ask for more

A few confinements ago, I was initially reluctant about the Baby Yoda craze and the Sistine Chapel scene in The Mandalorian, whom I have heard referred to as the mandarin or the mandolin by clueless internauts, as well as Disney girlie-girlie movies such as Frozen or Mulan; I am more of a Black Stallion (the 1979 one) and a Patton fan, without speaking of Anne Sewell's Black Beauty and Kurt Vonnegut's ''dog story of the month''. After that criminal deluge of French filth during the Ides of March, I demand more of the life-giving rosewater, more of deftly acted extremely difficult scenes such as the homo-erotic one between Xavier Bardem and Daniel Craig in Skyfall; an anthology. Getting that scene that right without flirting with vulgarity, schmaltz, or the comfortably easy vacuity awarded by political correctness is an exceptional feat in itself.

I also demand more of an English language intervention in European cultural affairs, if not a full-throttle invasion, because from Cecil B. de Mille to La-La-Land, English language users are as always the only ones to be able to save the badly dramatized Continent (still too close for comfort as far as I am concerned) from total annihilation by usurping pests.