If I can find one, in a show of rare Francophilia, I’m going to hang a French flag in my window. The announcement that two of our representatives have arranged to strike the word “French” from the menus in House restaurants makes me contemplate renouncing American citizenship. Give us your tired, your poor, your hungry, but only if they toe the Republican Low Protestant Xenophobic line.

All of this foolishness has happened before. In the first World War, most of the American people thought we were best advised to keep our feet out of the stormy waters. In a nation that still had plenty of mercantile and cultural ties to Germanic nations, it didn’t seem advisable to go to war against either side. When the Angloid jingoists finally yanked the United States into the fray, the government and media of the day went on a blitz, so to speak, to convince us that Germany was evil incarnate. Sheet music (all of it lousy) was cranked out by the thousands with titles like “(We’re Gonna) Bing! Bang! Bing ’Em on the Rhine” (a not-so-clever pun on the city of Bingen-am-Rhein), “To Hell with the Kaiser” and such. (I recently gave away a folio of this crap, not wanting anything so blatantly anti-German under my roof.) Stage and screen stars with German names anglicized them overnight and — best of all — sauerkraut was renamed Liberty Cabbage. Sound familiar? Only thing is, at least we were at war with Germany; France is our ally and we’re dropping its language from our vernacular??? Interestingly, during the second World War, when we had perfectly good issues with Germany, there was considerably less vitriol in the propaganda. The first time around we had to drum up public hatred when there was no reason for it; the second time around the reason provided itself in the form of National Socialism and nobody needed the crappy, vicious one-steps.

For years, I’ve been the only one that applauds during Casablanca when the band plays “Die Wacht Am Rhein.” Now it looks like I’ll also be the only one applauding “La Marseillaise.”