Freedom fries

Posted by Victoria S Dennis on July 14, 2007

In Reply to: Freedom fries posted by Bob on July 14, 2007

: : : The phrase I was looking up was "Tout de suite," but I found an interesting notation on that page:
: : : "In America of course the souring of governmental relations over the disagreement in policy regarding the second Gulf War was the root cause of a virtual boycott in the USA of all things French. Many people there adopted a distaste for even speaking the word French, which resulted in the renaming of french fries (which all right-minded people in any case know are called chips) as freedom fries."

: : : I'm an American from NY, and if anyone ever avoided things French or speaking the word French, *I* certainly never heard about it! And I'd never heard of "freedom fries" before now, either.

: : You should have read a newspaper or watched TV in 2003, there were a few weeks back then when people talked of little else. They changed the menus in the House of Representatives cafeteria.

: : Almost 5000 hits in Google News Archive [Dead link removed - ed]
: : Wikipedia
: : en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Freedom_fries

: I actually ran across "freedom fries" on a menu recently. And it's 2007. Apparently, a small but small-minded percentage of Americans still resent the French for their resistance to the invasion of Iraq. The French, if I remember correctly, thought the weapons inspectors needed more time, that there may not have been weapons of mass destruction, that preemptive war was a dengerous precedent, that a hestily-planned invasion would open a can of worms, etc. How dare they question the wisdom and leadership of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the rest of the Neocon geniuses?

: 3600 (and counting) dead soliers later, "freedom fries"? Vive la France.

But did it actually happen? I'm thinking of "bra-burning", the symbolic act everybody associates with late 1960s feminism - an iconic event which never actually happened. (VSD)

• Freedom fries Bob 17/July/07