[First, before I forget, here are our latest photos, through March 2:
http://www1.snapfish.com/share/p=41321172842757557/l=249642553/g=14513899/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB]
I don’t know if this is normal for spouses (from what I’ve heard, it is with any siblings), but I know that as soon as I find out something gets under Sara’s skin, I waste no time in redoubling my efforts to break it out any chance I get. [Note from Josh: Sara hates the expression so much, she really didn’t want me including it verbatim in our blog, so you’ll note some edits below…]
A perfect example of this is the saying “X [poops] bigger than Y.” In other words, X is so clearly bigger/better/stronger than Y, it’s not even worth discussing. (Science has determined that in fact, virtually all species and people are bigger than their own excreta, hence the expression.)
For people too polite and/or sheltered to have had access to this expression (CM to the banquet, CM to the banquet please…), I’ll use it in a couple of sentences. The original Star Trek [poops] bigger than The Next Generation and all that crap. Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby [poops] bigger than that those little white Hood vanilla ice cream cups with the wooden spoons. Thomas Jefferson [poops] bigger than Millard Fillmore. You get the idea.
Well, go figure, Sara’s not a fan of the expression. But it’s the essence of today’s blog, so sorry Sara, I have no choice. Here it goes:
French history [poops] bigger than American history.
The first time I went to France back in 1989, my host father, a history buff and an antiques collector, made an offhand comment over dinner one night that the US was a young country with an extraordinarily short history and historical perspective. I remember sputtering, “We have a rich history, with the American Revolution, the Civil War, two World Wars, Vietnam, and the like.” He just smiled.
After three going on four years living in France, every day I understand better what he meant. Don’t get me wrong, I do think America has a fascinating and essential history. But the numbers don’t lie.
[Before I get started, let me recognize the politically correct and just plain correct reality that America was clearly home to indigenous people long before any of the European-American history I’ll discuss ever took place. And let’s just leave Leif Erickson out of the discussion for convenience sake as well.]
American history goes back roughly 400 years (as Queen Elizabeth’s upcoming visit to Virginia will soon commemorate). The history of the French (via their precursors the Gauls) goes back roughly 400 years…BC/BCE. Our country itself only goes back 230 or so years. France has stuff in the back of its fridge that’s older than that.
Admittedly, in those 230 years, we’ve only had two forms of government: the confederacy under the forgettable Articles of Confederation, and the democratic republic under the Constitution. Now, during those same years, the French had a monarchy, the First Republic, the First Empire, the Restoration of the monarchy, a bit more First Empire, the Restoration II (Electric Boogaloo), a constitutional monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire (The Empire Strikes Back), the Third Republic, semi-dictatorship under Vichy, the Fourth Republic, the Fifth Republic, and something called “Cheese-a-palooza.”
Still, despite the…excitability of the past 230 years of French government, they still have millennia of perspective on their national history. To Americans who didn’t live through that era, the Vietnam War seems like ancient history. To the French (who got in and got out before us), it’s last Thursday.
In that same first visit to France, I asked my host father how the French could have moved so quickly past the humiliation inflicted by the Germans in three recent wars (1870, 1914, 1939) to go on to form the core partnership of the European Union. He replied that France had only been at war with the Germans for 100 years, and that the Brits were the ones that really got the French’s goat (cheese), since they’d been at war on and off with the French for fully 1,000 years.
I’ve mentioned my commute in an earlier blog, and it’s useful to mention here to reinforce my point about the immensity of French history. Just a block or two short of my office, there’s an intersection that I normally just plow straight through. But I know from past trips that were I to turn left at that nondescript intersection, within two blocks I’d be face-to-face with two beautiful timbered medieval buildings that date back over 500 years. And if I had turned right, within two blocks I’d find the massive remains of one of Paris’ earliest city walls, built between 1180 and 1210. (The church which stands in the wall’s shadow dates “only” from 1796.) Similarly, on a recent walk just minutes from our apartment, Sara and I stumbled on a castle and two of the oldest buildings in Paris, all centuries older than our country. The point being that in France, around any corner, you could just stumble on something one, two, three, even nine times (the Roman baths at Cluny) as old as our country.
But we have beautiful, historical structures in the U.S. as well, you say. What about the Washington National Cathedral? Well, here’s a quiz—which president placed the final stone in the Cathedral? Teddy Roosevelt? Woodrow Wilson? No, George H.W. Bush, in 1990 (The last stone was a finial, a word which I had to look up. It means “a sculptured ornament, often in the shape of a leaf or flower, at the top of a gable, pinnacle, or similar structure.” I wonder if before he placed the stone, Bush Pere said “Let’s get finial, finial. Let me hear some body talk…”) Notre Dame was started in 1163, and finished around 1345. That makes its cornerstone nearly four times as old as the U.S. of A.
When you consider that the French national cathedral was built 800 years ago using just hard labor and the most basic of tools, while ours relied on cranes and laser tools and was finished less than twenty years ago, it is truly humbling. In retrospect, the nearly twenty years it took me to understand the comparative youth of our country is just a drop in the bucket.
http://www1.snapfish.com/share/p=41321172842757557/l=249642553/g=14513899/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB]
I don’t know if this is normal for spouses (from what I’ve heard, it is with any siblings), but I know that as soon as I find out something gets under Sara’s skin, I waste no time in redoubling my efforts to break it out any chance I get. [Note from Josh: Sara hates the expression so much, she really didn’t want me including it verbatim in our blog, so you’ll note some edits below…]
A perfect example of this is the saying “X [poops] bigger than Y.” In other words, X is so clearly bigger/better/stronger than Y, it’s not even worth discussing. (Science has determined that in fact, virtually all species and people are bigger than their own excreta, hence the expression.)
For people too polite and/or sheltered to have had access to this expression (CM to the banquet, CM to the banquet please…), I’ll use it in a couple of sentences. The original Star Trek [poops] bigger than The Next Generation and all that crap. Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby [poops] bigger than that those little white Hood vanilla ice cream cups with the wooden spoons. Thomas Jefferson [poops] bigger than Millard Fillmore. You get the idea.
Well, go figure, Sara’s not a fan of the expression. But it’s the essence of today’s blog, so sorry Sara, I have no choice. Here it goes:
French history [poops] bigger than American history.
The first time I went to France back in 1989, my host father, a history buff and an antiques collector, made an offhand comment over dinner one night that the US was a young country with an extraordinarily short history and historical perspective. I remember sputtering, “We have a rich history, with the American Revolution, the Civil War, two World Wars, Vietnam, and the like.” He just smiled.
After three going on four years living in France, every day I understand better what he meant. Don’t get me wrong, I do think America has a fascinating and essential history. But the numbers don’t lie.
[Before I get started, let me recognize the politically correct and just plain correct reality that America was clearly home to indigenous people long before any of the European-American history I’ll discuss ever took place. And let’s just leave Leif Erickson out of the discussion for convenience sake as well.]
American history goes back roughly 400 years (as Queen Elizabeth’s upcoming visit to Virginia will soon commemorate). The history of the French (via their precursors the Gauls) goes back roughly 400 years…BC/BCE. Our country itself only goes back 230 or so years. France has stuff in the back of its fridge that’s older than that.
Admittedly, in those 230 years, we’ve only had two forms of government: the confederacy under the forgettable Articles of Confederation, and the democratic republic under the Constitution. Now, during those same years, the French had a monarchy, the First Republic, the First Empire, the Restoration of the monarchy, a bit more First Empire, the Restoration II (Electric Boogaloo), a constitutional monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire (The Empire Strikes Back), the Third Republic, semi-dictatorship under Vichy, the Fourth Republic, the Fifth Republic, and something called “Cheese-a-palooza.”
Still, despite the…excitability of the past 230 years of French government, they still have millennia of perspective on their national history. To Americans who didn’t live through that era, the Vietnam War seems like ancient history. To the French (who got in and got out before us), it’s last Thursday.
In that same first visit to France, I asked my host father how the French could have moved so quickly past the humiliation inflicted by the Germans in three recent wars (1870, 1914, 1939) to go on to form the core partnership of the European Union. He replied that France had only been at war with the Germans for 100 years, and that the Brits were the ones that really got the French’s goat (cheese), since they’d been at war on and off with the French for fully 1,000 years.
I’ve mentioned my commute in an earlier blog, and it’s useful to mention here to reinforce my point about the immensity of French history. Just a block or two short of my office, there’s an intersection that I normally just plow straight through. But I know from past trips that were I to turn left at that nondescript intersection, within two blocks I’d be face-to-face with two beautiful timbered medieval buildings that date back over 500 years. And if I had turned right, within two blocks I’d find the massive remains of one of Paris’ earliest city walls, built between 1180 and 1210. (The church which stands in the wall’s shadow dates “only” from 1796.) Similarly, on a recent walk just minutes from our apartment, Sara and I stumbled on a castle and two of the oldest buildings in Paris, all centuries older than our country. The point being that in France, around any corner, you could just stumble on something one, two, three, even nine times (the Roman baths at Cluny) as old as our country.But we have beautiful, historical structures in the U.S. as well, you say. What about the Washington National Cathedral? Well, here’s a quiz—which president placed the final stone in the Cathedral? Teddy Roosevelt? Woodrow Wilson? No, George H.W. Bush, in 1990 (The last stone was a finial, a word which I had to look up. It means “a sculptured ornament, often in the shape of a leaf or flower, at the top of a gable, pinnacle, or similar structure.” I wonder if before he placed the stone, Bush Pere said “Let’s get finial, finial. Let me hear some body talk…”) Notre Dame was started in 1163, and finished around 1345. That makes its cornerstone nearly four times as old as the U.S. of A.
When you consider that the French national cathedral was built 800 years ago using just hard labor and the most basic of tools, while ours relied on cranes and laser tools and was finished less than twenty years ago, it is truly humbling. In retrospect, the nearly twenty years it took me to understand the comparative youth of our country is just a drop in the bucket.
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