“We all ended up hating the French.”
This week’s New Yorker (7/23/07) also has a puff piece on billionaire real estate developer and media tycoon, Mort Zuckerman. Zuckerman apparently loves to tell stories, and here is one that appears in the article:
He lived for a time in Paris, to study law at the Sorbonne, but found the French as inhospitable as the Québecois. (French students would come to an apartment he shared with some McGill friends, and drink his wine and eat his bread and cheese. “ ‘Volontiers,’ they’d always say. ‘Volontiers’ — ‘gladly,’” Zuckerman recalled. “But they never returned the favor. We never once were invited anywhere. We all ended up hating the French.”)
It’s safe to say that Zuckerman was not the first or last exchange student to be baffled, irritated or offended by the natives’ behavior. Twenty or 30 years ago, before it became an attitudinal cliché to “hate the French,” the punch line to this anecdote might have been funny. Instead, it illustrates why Zuckerman, however brilliant a financier he might be, is not a very interesting columnist: his columns tend to serve up things that have already been expressed more vividly elsewhere.
(Please note that I’m not aware of ever having read one of Zuckerman’s columns. My evaluation of them is based on what I believe they are like, given my recollection from several years back of Zuckerman’s generally uninteresting remarks on the PBS show The McLaughlin Group. More generally, my gripe with Zuckerman is that he purchased his way into journalism. It is a classic example of money extending its influence into an area, opinion journalism, that should remain sovereign. Of course there is a long tradition of this, but it’s wrong; it is the very definition of corruption.)