Jerome, I'm amazed to see you persisting with this and for once I think you're just wrong. Of course there has been a lot of anti-French rhetoric in the US, but it's not universal and clearly not shared by poemless, nor is to be found in what Keillor says. The quotation (I mistakenly attributed it to poemless - it was late :-)) does NOT "say explicitly" that "the French hate us (or resent us or despise us)". The French don't usually say they want to be American, nor admire US cuisine, but that doesn't at all entail that they "hate" or "despise" Americans. Garrison Keillor is a most unlikely person to think that French in general (but cf him on BHL below) are "intellectual snobs" - he's the kind of anti-Bush liberal who Karl Rove would present as suspiciously sympathetic to the French :-)

Note that he says similar things about the Swedes and Danes - do you assume that he hates and despises them too ? !

So enjoy the afterglow of the election a while longer. We all walk taller this fall. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails -- imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes!

http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2008/11/12/obama_victory/

You say:

no, Obama's election has not miraculously solved all problems, and made America again the shining city on the hill, however much you want to believe. It does not make you superior to the French or to anyone else.

As Keillor says in another recent article:

His [Obama's] picture goes up in the kitchen shrine alongside FDR and JFK -- BHO elevated to sainthood and now expected to walk on water and turn it into wine. Meanwhile, everything he said about the national mess is utterly true and a lot more. And now it is Barack's mess. Yikes.

A good shingle for the new administration to hang out, rather than The New Covenant or A Fair Exchange or English Spoken Here, would be Keep Seat Belt Buckled. Happy days are not here and the sky above is not clear.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2008/11/05/happy_couple/

These French intellectuals - they can be SO sensitive :-)

Mind you, Keillor was a bit unkind to one of the most celebrated of them, but you might agree with him about that Jereome :-)

Any American with a big urge to write a book explaining France to the French should read this book first, to get a sense of the hazards involved. Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years
...
[BHL]" I can't manage to convince myself of the collapse, heralded in Europe, of the American model."

Thanks, pal. I don't imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? Were fat people involved?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/books/review/29keillor.html

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.