Insufferable Frenchman Tells Us About Texas

But for Lévy, Lévy is an all-consuming passion. His self-absorption is so strong that it leads him into at least one moment of unintentional hilarity, when he uses a few minutes of face time with Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry to marvel that his paranoid fantasies haven’t come true:

My impressions? A nice man, in shirtsleeves, joking with his staff, of a piece with the man I have seen looking for volunteers to toss a football around with him on the tarmac so he can stretch his legs. A European at heart. He is interested to hear that this whole story of Francophobia is just bullshit[*] made up by the Washington press corps, and that in all the months I've been traveling through the heartland of America, I've never met any ordinary citizens who are angry with me for being French.

Keep in mind that those are his impressions of someone else. We feel bad for Lévy that he didn’t come across any “ordinary citizens” who were angry with him “for being French.” He could have got another eight thousand words out of that, easy.

Also, where Tocqueville evinced a diffuse curiosity about America, Lévy’s interests, when pried from No. 1, are narrower. He has a heavy slant for the sordid. As writers ourselves, we were initially intrigued by Lévy’s ability to combine pedantry and prurience, a counterintuitive technical feat. Here he is in a brothel:

A bit lower down, just at the head of the bed and of the client, a statuette of the Statue of Liberty, in homage to the dear, suffering America honored here by screwing, as it is honored elsewhere by intelligence, business, arts, weapons. Whores are first and foremost American patriots.

What is that even intended to mean? What if they’re French whores?

Of course, our favorite part of Lévy’s piece comes when he hits Austin, where he attends a freshman seminar led by Paul Burka, a professor at UT Austin and executive editor of Texas Monthly. Perhaps Lévy, in the spirit of fidelity to de Tocqueville, simply purged himself of all knowledge of the late 19th, 20th, and 21st century:

What? This is a class? This is a professor—this amiable colossus, without rostrum or lectern, who looks like he's having a drink with a few former students, and who explains briefly that he used to be a lawyer and is now the executive editor of Texas Monthly? Yes, a class.

Incroyable!

Or perhaps Lévy’s so insufferably arrogant that he simply doesn't bother to question any of his vague notions, even though his lack of certain widely-known and well-documented demographic facts really undermines his conclusions:

Then, when I ask the question straight out, I am surprised to find that a majority of the small group is in favor of gay marriage, and that the same majority thinks Bush overdid it in flaunting his religious values, and that, indeed, a majority opposed the president's re-election. In short, in this class in Austin, the capital of Texas, a state that is supposed to be a conservative stronghold, the trend seems to be in the other direction.

In a seminar we took as freshmen—a completely astonishing scene, in which 20 callow American kids put aside their handguns and comic books in lieu of Herodotus and Sophocles—our professor (who was, if you can believe this, French, and not once did we guillotine him for it) made great hay out of the fact that our word “essay” is derived from the French essayer, to try. Every essay, that is, posits the possibility of its own failure. No kidding. Donc, Lévy: Essayez encore.

*Also, how pissed is Lévy that while he was noodling around unharrassed in hotel bars, Harry Frankfurt beat him to the “bullshit” parade?