Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (38 page)

“Bonjour, monsieur,”
Madame LeBlanc, who runs the bakery, said as I walked in the door.

“Bonjour, madame,”
I said. “Tell me, Madame LeBlanc, what do you think of us Americans at this stage of history?”

Madame LeBlanc looked at me silently for a while, as if considering her response. Finally, she said,
“Comment?”

“Don’t be afraid to speak up,” I said. “It’s all for research.”

Madame LeBlanc looked blank.

“I know you Europeans think we Americans worry too much
about what other people think of us, Madame LeBlanc,” I said. “But if we need an example of the problems caused by false impressions of national traits, we need look no further than Maurice Chevalier.”

“Maurice Chevalier?” Madame LeBlanc said. Her eyes shot toward the door, and then she peered over my shoulder as if checking to see if someone was standing behind me.

“For years, the impression most Americans had of French people was based on Maurice Chevalier,” I explained. “So they expected every Frenchman they met to be a charming, debonair old gent who at any moment might start singing ‘sank Evan for leetle gerls.’ Naturally, they were disappointed when they came to France and the Frenchmen they met were sour customs officers with scratchy pens and some nasty Parisian cabdriver who pretended not to understand their French when they said
‘bonjour.’ 
”

“Ah,
bonjour, monsieur,
” Madame LeBlanc said, smiling at me in her accustomed way.

“Oh.
Bonjour, madame,
” I said. “As I was saying, American tourists were very disappointed to discover that the only Frenchman who acted like Maurice Chevalier was Maurice Chevalier—and he was in California. So they started going to Italy, where they could still run into somebody now and then who acted like Ezio Pinza, and you fellows lost a bunch of money.”

Madame LeBlanc seemed to remember suddenly that the countertop of her display case needed dusting.

“So,” I continued, “if a French magazine did a similar survey (although I realize you people don’t do that sort of thing; it would be what General de Gaulle used to call ‘uncool’), you would probably find out that the reason so many Americans think of the French as petty, mean-spirited functionaries … although, God knows, that’s not the way I think of you and Monsieur LeBlanc, Madame LeBlanc—you with your ever-present smile and your cheerful
bonjour
—”

“Bonjour, monsieur,”
Madame LeBlanc said, putting down her feather duster.

“
Bonjour, madame
. What I’m really asking is whether you include yourself among those French people who find us Americans industrious, energetic, inventive, decisive, and friendly. I don’t mean to muddy the sample here, Madame LeBlanc, but I might point out that
it’s pretty industrious and energetic for someone who’s supposed to be on vacation to present himself right here in front of your display case every morning at eight-thirty on the dot, friendly as a puppy dog, and I must say that a certain amount of inventiveness was required to discover the baker in town who used the quantity of butter we Americans associate with a week’s supply for a family of four in every one of his croissants—”

“Croissants, monsieur?”
Madame LeBlanc said, reaching for the door of the display case.

“Precisely, Madame LeBlanc,” I said. “And I would like to say, concerning
Newsweek
’s finding that the French do not associate Americans with honesty, that the little misunderstanding we had last week about whether it was a ten-franc piece or a twenty-centime piece you gave me in my change was just that—a misunderstanding. Ours is a young culture, Madame LeBlanc, and we’re still not real good with old money.”

Madame LeBlanc turned from the counter and ducked into the room where the croissants are baked by Monsieur LeBlanc—a petty, mean-spirited functionary I would rate high in industriousness, energy, and butter content.

“Madame LeBlanc!” I called after her. “Madame LeBlanc! I know
Newsweek
found that a lot of French people think having Americans around increases the chance of war, but I’d like to remind you that the question was about American
military
presence. Surely, Madame LeBlanc, a misunderstanding over small change would not lead you to confuse me with some hopped-up G.I. who might decide to lay a ground-to-ground on Leipzig just to put a little zip into a Saturday night …”

There was no sound from behind the curtain. I stood silently, wondering whether it would have been appropriate for me to explain that I had nothing whatever to do with the American pop culture that the French people surveyed by
Newsweek
considered so influential. Finally, Madame LeBlanc emerged from the back room. She stood in her accustomed place behind the counter, and looked at me as if I had just walked into the shop.

“Bonjour, monsieur,”
she said, in her usual cheerful tone.

“Bonjour, madame,”
I said.

“Qu’est-ce que vous voulez aujourd’hui, monsieur?”

“I would like to say, Madame LeBlanc, that when it comes to this Star Wars mickey mouse, not to speak of the Mickey Mouse mickey mouse, I have nothing—”

“Croissants, monsieur? Brioches? Pains au chocolat?”

“Nine
croissants, s’il vous plait,
” I said, holding up nine fingers.

“Très bien, monsieur,”
Madame LeBlanc said, with considerable enthusiasm.

“I notice that you seem to admire my decisiveness,” I said, gathering up my croissants. “It’s a national trait.”

1993

2011

Here’s what I would like to say to the Rev. Ian Gregory, who has founded the Polite Society to increase the level of courtesy in England: “Buzz off, Gregory. Get lost. Take a walk. G’wan, get out of here.”

I think that would get the good reverend’s attention. Then I would be able to tell him, without fear of being interrupted by one of his irritating interjections—you have to guard against people like Gregory
tossing in comments like “Oh, do go on” or “My, how very interesting”—that there is entirely too much courtesy in England as it is.

The author of the
New York Times
piece that brought the Rev. Gregory to my attention, William E. Schmidt, seemed quite aware that starting a Polite Society in England has a certain coals-to-Newcastle quality to it. He quotes an Italian writer named Beppe Severgnini who “reported in a recent book that Britain is the only nation he has been in where it takes four ‘thank-you’s’ to negotiate a bus ticket.”

The most irritating thank-you of the lot is the first one, which the bus conductor utters as he stands in front of the passenger, ready to collect the fare. It’s obvious that the passenger has done nothing for which he should be thanked. According to Severgnini, that first thank-you actually means “I’m here.” It could also mean that the conductor is giving warning that he means to out-thank-you the passenger in order to make the passenger feel like a mannerless clod.

I suspect the Reverend Ian Gregory would take exception to this interpretation, to which I would reply, “Mind your own business, Gregory.” Once that put him in a frame of mind to listen, I would remind him that he lives in a country where a man who did carry coal to Newcastle would, upon arriving at the place where the coal was supposed to be delivered, hand over the bill of lading and say “Thank you.”

Get this picture: A large delivery of coal has just been made to someone in Newcastle who is up to his armpits in coal. The air is heavy with coal dust. Every time the person receiving the delivery wipes his brow—which he does pretty often, since he has broken out in a cold sweat trying to imagine what he’s going to do with more coal—he leaves a thick black smudge on his head. And the ding-dong who has made the delivery is standing there saying “Thank you.”

To be fair to the Reverend Ian Gregory—and I don’t know why I should be; call me an old softie—he does distinguish between what he calls “genuinely considerate behavior” and simply littering your conversation with a lot of extraneous thank-yous. What makes the work of the Polite Society necessary, he told Schmidt, was the sort of backsliding in considerate behavior that Margaret Thatcher was referring to when she said, “Graciousness is being replaced by surliness in much of everyday life.”

What I would say to that is “In a pig’s eye, Gregory.” Having thus
given him ample notice that I might have a differing view, I would remind him that Margaret Thatcher and genuinely considerate behavior were strangers. She was known throughout the realm, for instance, for bullying and humiliating her own cabinet ministers. What she meant by graciousness was being respectful to people like her.

Genuinely considerate behavior is the sort of thing that might be practiced by an American on a London bus who realizes that answering the conductor’s thank-you with another thank-you could start a spiral into violence. Armed with that knowledge, he could actually be doing the bus conductor a favor in the long run if he answered that first absurd thank-you by saying, “Watch your mouth, buddy” or “Listen, Mac, you looking to get your face rearranged?”

The problem is the response he would almost certainly get from the bus conductor: “Thank you.”

1991

2002

I think Panama is one of the most interesting countries we’ve invaded lately. I looked up the population in the
World Almanac
—putting the lie to the notion that I never do any research—and found that it is almost exactly one-hundredth the size of the United States. So it would be like the United States being invaded by a nation of 24 billion. We might still have the edge in military hardware, but think of what they could do with human-wave attacks.

The American Army, which was sent down there to bring military dictator Manuel Noriega back for a fair trial—innocent until proven guilty—went through Noriega’s headquarters and used what they found for a report supporting its claim that Noriega was “a truly evil man,” a “narco-terrorist,” and a “corrupt, debauched thug.” The troops going through his quarters found pictures of naked women. I was sorry our boys had to see that sort of thing. And they said he wore red underwear to ward off the evil eye. This was in the report released by a four-star general of the American Army, the first flag-rank officer in American military history to pause in the campaign to discuss the opposing commander’s underwear. I might as well admit that I used to know a man in Kentucky once who wore long red underwear
to ward off the evil eye, and it seemed to work pretty well for him. The evil eye never got anywhere near him—although that could have been because he chewed a lot of garlic as a sort of second line of defense.

And the Army said that they found fifty pounds of cocaine in Noriega’s headquarters, which is a pretty serious charge. Then, a few weeks later, after they finally got around to analyzing the cocaine, they announced that what they thought was cocaine was actually flour for making tamales. You might think that the Army was embarrassed at this disclosure. Far from it. They said that this flour was going to make tamales used in voodoo binding rituals. Until then, I had walked around in full confidence that I knew just about every use you could make of a tamale—eat it, throw it at the guy at the bar who made an insulting remark about your haircut, mold it into tamale art, jam it under a door end-to-end with a lot of other tamales to keep out the draft, pile it up side to side with thousands of tamales to save decent folks’ homes from the rising waters of the Chattahoochee River—and I had never heard of using tamales in a binding ritual. Burritos, sure. But tamales!

1990

ISSUES AND OTHER IRRITATIONS

“Learning that the Defense Department may have stored away thirty billion dollars’ worth of things it doesn’t need made me feel a lot better about my basement.”