Romney and the Lands Beyond the Sea

Well, you know, those filthy communistic Frogs drink [shudder] wine. Imagine the shock to a poor, innocent Mormon youth.

nobody would serve him freedom fries, no matter how often he explained to him that if it wasn’t for Americans the French would all be speaking German.

Cheese-eating claret monkeys.

if it wasn’t for Americans the French would all be speaking German

In German, to say something like “to live the life of Reilly” or “to live high on the hog,” you say “to live like God in France”: wie Gott in Frankreich leben.

No idea when it dates from. (And I guess it doesn’t quite explain the Germans’ repeated attempts to move there en masse in the late C19/early C20.)

He got sent to France? A very posh posting, that. Not that the Holy Spirit (the theoretical arbiter of LDS missionary assignments) is any respecter of persons…

Samchevre, you seem to be contradicting yourself. Remember, Romney was saying how things were different if places didn’t have the values of America? If some Americans complain about Mexicans and some French people complain about Algerians, I’m not entirely sure how those values are any different.

France may not seem like a Third World or totalitarian country on the surface, and it may even be almost as good as America in many boring, concrete, measurable ways but the fact remains that there is no freedom in France. Where it really counts – the realm of pure ideology and empty rhetoric – there is just no comparison.

What I was trying to say is that in the US, even those who complain about immigration rarely complain about immigrants individually

For whatever dueling anecdotes are worth, my experience is quite the contrary. In my exurban Ohio county there are a lot of Mexicans working in the garden-nursery industry and they are much resented and derogated by conservative whites who don’t happen to be nursery owners (in an otherwise almost lily-white country) both collectively and individually.

Nicely put, franck.

We’ve been working on the concept of a Mormon Frenchman. Smoking Gauloise, twirling his moustaches, comparing women to goddesses….. it’s hard work.

“What I was trying to say is that in the US, even those who complain about immigration rarely complain about immigrants individually…”

Those would be the ones who don’t know any?

Anyway, I ran the Romney line past my (French) wife, but I was smiling so much, she guessed it was about France.

I do think the French (generalizing here!) are probably more anti-immigrant than Americans, because in the U.S. almost everyone has an immigrant pretty close in the family tree – and people are more likely to be against a category if they don’t associate themselves with it. With that said, America isn’t exactly presently itself as a country of freedom and human rights at the moment, so perhaps Americans, who are living in a pretty fragile glass house, can show a little more humility.

The proliferation of wine, coffee and tobacco in France must have made it seem like Mormon Hell.

The missionary deferment to fighting in Vietnam was something I wasn’t previously aware of: did the LDS get many converts in the mid-60s?

(And one might note that the French would have a fairly well-developed sense of that particular conflict.)

There’s a little Mormon center-or-something in the Marais, in Paris. The Marais is a traditional Jewish part of the city, and also the gay part of the city.

So, if you can picture it, you have there Joe Moustache and Bob Leather on their merry way to some fun downstairs in that special bar, some random rollerblade Adonis showing his new pecs to an appreciative terrasse, some Jewish dude talking to another Jewish dude and quite often yours truly eating a falafel – all pretty busy to their respective tasks.

And two tall, blond, thin, pale guys, with shirts and badges, on the entrance of their center. Trying hard to look like they find all this absolutely normal, and eager to tell you about… plates?

Lately they put a pretty girl with the guys, to get attention. Treachery, I say – nearly got me last time.

So, to answer the interrogation above : no, i don’t think they have a lot of success converting people. Not in the Marais at least.

Apart of that, I’d say that a big part of the US right seems content to just fantasize the outside world, but they know I’m writing on orders of my mulsimonazis overlords.

and quite often yours truly eating a falafel

Give my regards to Chez Marianne!

De gustibus non disputandum, Yabonn. L’As is also aces, as I recall.

I was walking in the Marais one day when I was stopped by a guy holding a clipboard who asked me, in unmarked American English, “Excuse me, Sir–are you Jewish?” “No,” I replied, and went on…and then wheeled around and went back because my curiosity got the better of me. “Um, excuse me, but is there a particular reason why you assumed I was an American?” “No, not really,” was his answer.

Never did find out what that was all about.

Ah, Chez Marianne. Great food. The meanest waitstaff in Paris.

A good friend, who now teaches Anthropology at a certain small but respected Southern College, loves to recount his experiences as a Mormon missionary, as he was dropped in the heart of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district in 1968…
He lost his virginity to a sheriff’s deputy, and recently celebrated his 33 anniversary with his (male) partner…
And here is a link to the official Mormon guide to avoiding the sin of masturbation. My friend says it is authentic, and every missionary got a copy….http://www.libchrist.com/bible/mormonmasturbation.html

Not in France, though.

Those interested in the final topic raised in post 34 may want to consult the recent memoir of the late Wayne Booth concerning his experiences as a Mormon missionary in the 30’s.

I’m a little puzzled at the ignorance and disdain for the Mormon faith shown in so many posts on this and other weblogs. There’s no point in recommending a bibliography, but I note that the second (less well reviewed) half of Juanita Brooks’ memoir Quicksand and Cactus essentially represents the situation describes the same situation I’m describing in 1920’s academia but says that it is starting to change. It’s not like there aren’t reasonable committed and ambivalent Mormon scholars in most fields people should know about.

I recommend giving Mormon missionaries the courtesy of at least talking to them — my experience is that in each pair there is usually one smiling dim bulb and one guy (in certain circumstances gal) who will (a) respect your wish not to be converted and (b) carry on a very intelligent conversation and be quite willing to honestly address most criticisms of LDS faith.

For what it’s worth, I once had the dubious pleasure of walking over to a campground full of Mormon missionaries who singing and playing their guitars and ask them to keep it down so my family could sleep.

Romney’s statement about learning to appreciate what we have in America by seeing a foreign country for contrast reminds a bit of Brigham Young’s comments on his mission to England, except old Brig was in Manchester in 1842 and undoubtedly had a point.

I wasn’t there, Gene (unless the campout you’re talking about took place in South Korea; I was there from 1988-1990), but let me apologize to your family on their behalf anyway. We only get one day a week off from service and proselyting activies, and sometimes we get a little rambunctious.

Booth never ceased being a Mormon, at least on his own terms.

Is “fatherland” the best translation of “patria”? I see “pater” in there, but as “fatherland” has Nazi overtones I wonder if “homeland” or “native land” would be more neutral.

Some people seem to have the idea that Mormons are much wierder than they generally are. I currently live in SA tex and my spouse and I were discussing applying for jobs in different places. Salt Lake was one we decided to go for. Why? Well, after living here Mormons would be a welcome break. They are clean, polite, considerate, and really value things like education and hard work. Of course there are Mormons of all kinds. I was raised Mormon, so I’ve pretty much met all kinds. I left Mormonism at age 18, but in spite of the fact that I know I don’t want to be Mormon, I still have a lot of respect for the way Mormons conduct themselves. They live as a small minority (in most parts of the country) in a society that doesn’t understand them and in many cases finds it appropriate to ridicule them or worse. Mormons most times carry on with dignity and respect for others. That said, France would blow the minds of most nineteen year old Mormons. Taking a sip of wine is quite a horrible sin. Ditto tobacco. Of course we could go on for some time discussing the differences between say, Salt Lake City Mormons and the Mormons from small towns in Idaho and the rest of the West. I would imagine Salt Lake Mormons of certain type would be the ones the church would send to France, since it would be one of the harder places to be sent and they would need all of the worldliness a Mormon kid can muster.

I can state both the pro-Mormon and antiMormon cased, based on having had a Mormon mother-in-law. Mormons have several superiorities to generic American Protestantism: less stress on crucifixion masochism, no hellfire at all, dances in church, and charity within the church. Both crypto-Mormons and ex-Mormons (technically Jackmormons, e.g. the earlier poster here) have made a lot of contributions to science and other kinds of scholarship. I class them with Hasidic Jews, in the sense that training in a demanding, non-conformist, especially loony religion develops a strong ability to master difficult material whose interest is not immediately evident (e.g. organic chemistry).

For theological and geographical reasons, Mormons have left an enormous mark on genealogy, linguistics, and irrigation technology.

On the other hand, you don’t want to be a non-Mormon or an apostate Mormon in a 90% Mormon town, and you don’t want a Mormon mother-in-law.

14: Come on, you can’t beat French political discourse for windy rhetoric.

Alex: that’s not what I meant. I was trying to make a joke about the perennial tendency of nationalists to seek to make rhetorical capital by exploiting the ready accessibility of what appears to be a suspiciously malleable and perhaps essentially ideological conception of liberty in order to portray other countries in a sharply negative light, notwithstanding the scant justification in terms of verifiable facts which might be available to support such a rhetorical disparagement.

I know, I know, it’s the way I tell ’em.

The allegedly shocking nature of exposure to alcohol consumption in #1, #24, and #47 seems a bit off the mark. I served my mission in Germany 15 years after Romney was in France, but I can’t recall a single time that any of my fellow missionaries expressed shock that Germans drink beer. There was the crazy drunk who challenged me to a kung-fu fight while we were doing street contacting in the Altstadt of Düsseldorf, but for all I know he might have been crazy and belligerent when he was sober, too. As for tobacco, the main problem was figuring out how to get the stench of smoke out of our clothes when we spent much time teaching a heavy user.

What about the hot French babes?

Actually, there’s also a Hasidic group proselytizing secular Jews. I was accosted once, and a Jewish friend of mine actually went to several of their meetings. (He’s in Israel now, but he’s remained secular).

there’s also a Hasidic group proselytizing secular Jews

That’d be the Lubavitchers, I think. I was sitting in a park in NY once and a very young Hasidic kid came up to me and asked if I was Jewish. I was a bit taken aback, wondered what the hell would make him ask, but in fact there were three or four of them going round the park, mechanically asking every single person there the same thing. They’re v. active in Brooklyn and in E. Europe – didn’t know they were in France too.