Weasels, Drinking Songs, and the King is Born

Walter Agnew Moore II, Your One News Source
4 December, 2001, Amiens, France

So the Taliban are hell-of-a-guys. Or they need killing. Opinions vary, as opinions do. But I bet that whatever your opinion is, you hold onto it more or less an honest fashion, right?

Not so the news editors at the BBC. When the result was up in the air, it was all "American-led" attacks. Now that it looks like a majority of Afghanis appreciate getting attacked, they've started saying "Coalition Forces" are doing such-and-such.

You get it? Things that kill people are "American-led". Things that benefit people are done by "Coalition Forces". Never mind that it's all the same Americans, British, French, Italians, Germans, and Home-Grown Hoodlums doing all these things.

It is a weasely game of semantics, and not worthy of the BBC.

There are few things I like more than standing in an Irish bar in France roaring out German drinking songs with actual drunk Germans, so you can well imagine that last week I was quite happy. I run into my pal Tall Dude from Germany. He and his friend, Little Dude from Germany, have driven in earlier that day expressly to get blitzed. I'm well behind the curve already when I meet them. Little Dude is telling me he got so drunk once that he fell off his bicycle in front of the bar back home and could not move for an hour and a half. Finally, "the girl who worked there came out and gave me a ride home."

I believe it. Little Dude isn't an alcoholic. Alcoholics go to meetings. He is an old-fashioned stumble-drunk.

Little Dude decides I need to learn a German drinking song, and he teaches me one that more or less describes the unusual physical characteristics of a young lady, with a chorus that expresses the singer's wish that they have a child together who can soak up the Bacardi.

Little Dude, Tall Dude, and I roar it out. We howl at our cleverness. We repeat.

About the fourth time we sing it, it occurs to me that most of the French people in the bar don't speak German. For all they know, we are chanting "Deutschland Uber Alles"; I expect the entire crowd here in Rick's, cops, smugglers, prostitutes, to all suddenly leap up and sweep us away with a pulse-racing version of the Marseillaise.

Nothing happens. Everything Hollywood taught me about the Resistance is wrong.

I live close to the center of Amiens. The Campus where I work is on the southern edge of town. The main streets that lead out of town like spokes on a wheel are all heavily built-up, and even where the houses don't actually touch, you still have walls and such that give you a tunnel-vision effect.

Imagine my surprise when I found a back way to Campus between two of these spoke-roads, a back way that goes through the country.

Talk about your hidden gardens. You pass through a tunnel of trees, and BOOM you have left France and you are in Perry County, Alabama, with small communal gardens opening up to vast green fields and views of woods and hills in the distance.

An actual dirt road winds through it, and there are little shacks in the garden part where people store their tools, though I strongly suspect that some of the shacks are inhabited full-time. I am standing in the drizzle talking to a little brown goat when I notice a man watching me through the window of a shack. We wave.

Close to the entrance to the Hidden Gardens is a tavern, a wedge-shaped little building perched beside the main road called "Le Roi Nait", the king is born. I am explaining to the prematurely white-haired proprieter that Americans are not like John Wayne, in fact, John Wayne wasn't like John Wayne, that he was a nasty back-stabber who denounced all his friends as Communists during the Red Scare. I'd rather hang out with honest commies than fake cowboys any day. Then to fill the void in his stereotypes, I tell him that all Americans are actually much more like Humphrey Bogart.

He is nodding absently at my pontifications, then suddenly he stares out the window with a look on his face like a puppy hearing his master come home. If he had a tail, he'd be wagging it.

Two guys come in, stocky roundish types. One of them is a truck-driver, and the other one installs satellite dishes. The three of them are going at it in rapid-fire Picard accents, I can barely understand it so long as I don't attempt to actually speak. They say "t'chiot" instead of "petit" (little), and everything is t'chiot-this and t'chiot-that.

There was a wreck by the bridge, damn what a wait. The new truck is yellow. The old truck was yellow! What's this with you and yellow trucks?

I order a Ricard. They always like it here when you order a Ricard. You are still a furriner, but you're an OK furriner who drinks Ricard.

The goofy radio DJ's are telling jokes. Why are the Belgians afraid to come to France during the elections? Because there are two "tours" ("tour" can mean a round of an election, or it can mean "tower").

They all look at the bar and mutter "that ain't funny".

The next joke has Bin Laden on the phone to Bush:

"Yeah George, you won. The Taliban said to hell with me. So I have some good news and some bad news for you. The good news is, I'm on my way to the White House to surrender to you personally."

"What's the bad news?"

"I'm coming in an airplane."

We all bust up. White Hair tells me to finish up my Ricard. I ask him if he's closing. "No, I'm buying you another one."