A French Woman Visits America

This week we meet Annette. Annette has had a lifelong love affair with America, though she has only ever viewed America from afar. From afar things can seem so tidy and perfect. Like a star through a telescope. All the beauty but none of the heat or chaos. 

Well now Annette has finally landed in the country of her dreams and fantasies. Will her love affair deepen? Or will disillusion set in? 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the ten Minute Storyteller. That's me Bill Simpson,
your host, narrator and author. We hear at the ten
Minute Storyteller endeavor to entertain you with tall tales or
rendered swiftly and with the utmost empathy. We pledge to

(00:25):
pack as much entertainment, emotion, and exploration into the human
condition as ten minutes will permit. Mini novels on steroids.
This week we meet Annette. Annette has had a lifelong

(00:46):
love affair with America, though she has only ever viewed
America from Afar. From afar, things can seem so tidy
and perfect, like a star through a telescope, all the
beauty but none of the heat or chaos. Well, now
Annette has finally landed in the country of her dreams

(01:09):
and fantasies. Will her love affair deepen or will disillusion
set in? A Frenchwoman visits America. Annette arrived from Paris
just a few days ago. She's been planning her trip

(01:31):
to America for years, a decade or longer, since her
days at university, when she read Democracy in America by
Alexis de Toauqueville. The book first published back in eighteen
thirty five, nearly two hundred years ago, when the country

(01:53):
was just fifty years young, detailed the lives of everyday
Americans and focused on why reresentative democracy had succeeded in
America despite failing in many other countries. The trajectory of
Annett's life changed profoundly after reading Detoaukville's book. Annette is

(02:17):
now an historian and an associate professor of American Studies
at the Sorbonne. Since her youth, Annette has been obsessed
with America, with its unlikely victory over the British Empire
in the eighteenth century, with the intelligence and foresight of
its founding fathers, with its expansion from the Atlantic to

(02:42):
the Pacific, and from thirteen original colonies to fifty semi
autonomous states, with its industrial might, economic growth, technological wonders,
and extraordinary standard of living for its three hundred and
fifty million citizens. Finally, arriving in America with her three

(03:05):
month visa into Annette is about to experience a dream
come true, or so she thinks. All starts out well
in New York with planned visits to NYU and Columbia,
where Annette meets thoughtful well educated people who share her

(03:25):
keen interest in the American experiment. Many do voice alarm
over Trump's authoritarian bent and his control of Congress, but
most degree the country and the Constitution have been through
much worse, and this time too, America will survive to

(03:46):
fight another day. Annette meets numerous other historians, professors, and
authors who express similar concerns and hopes as she makes
stops in Cambridge, Princeton, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and UCLA.
In Los Angeles, Annette takes possession of a rental car

(04:10):
to begin a west to east cross country adventure that
she hopes will take her through at least twenty states
and dozens of different towns and cities. She intends to
take voluminous notes in the hopes of writing a sequel
to Democracy in America. As she clears the La sprawl

(04:34):
east of Riverside and heads across the Mohave Desert, Annette
records on a small device her early impressions of America
and the Americans she has met and broken bread with. Overwhelmingly,
she uses words and phrases like intelligent and open minded,

(04:56):
progressive and articulate skeptical politicians, but hopeful of the future.
She records the educated class, the philosophers, the thinkers, the writers.
Though somewhat cynical regarding the country's political and business leaders,

(05:17):
ultimately believe the ingenuity and work ethic of the American
people will move the nation forward in a positive and
progressive way that will mean good jobs and high wages
deep in to the twenty first century. Well, just a

(05:39):
few minutes later, Annette stops for gas east of Barstow.
She has a little trouble with the pump. It's not
quite the same as the ones in France. So she
asks a man wearing a red baseball cap for help,
and he says, Yo, lady, what's that accent? Use? Some

(06:01):
kind of Arab? I thought we threw your kind out
of here. And with that he climbs into his Ford
f one fifty with the twenty four inch wheels, and
he peels out, leaving behind confusion and the smell of
burning rubber. And so it goes over the next many weeks,

(06:23):
as a net slowly weaves her way across the country
on blue highways and back roads. By no means is
everyone she encounters as blunt and horrid as the pickup
truck driver, but a net is left slack jawed over
and over by people's anger, pessimism, and ignorance whenever she

(06:48):
broaches the subject of America, which she does everywhere she
goes in coffee shops and laundromats and post offices and
parks and motel lobbies and diners. As this is the
reason she came to interview Americans about America, Annette inevitably

(07:09):
gets an earfull. Just about everyone she talks to seems
to have a pent up need to spew their venom
left leaning and right leaning, liberal and conservative, Christian and
non Christian, political and apolitical. The Americans Annette talks to

(07:29):
in California and New Mexico and Nebraska and Wisconsin and
Mississippi and Tennessee and Maryland and Maine are almost to
a person, pissed off and worked up. But maybe maybe
most of all, what they are is stupid, just plain old,

(07:50):
in your face stupid. Yep. Annette hates to think it,
and definitely she's not going to say it, but that's
what strikes her the hardest, the stupidity, the deep and
absolute lack of understanding about their country's past, present, or

(08:12):
potential future. All they spew is blatant lies and misinformation,
junk news they heard on Fox or Instagram or MSNBC
or TikTok. For God's sakes, Americans, a net records near

(08:32):
the end of her coast to coast sojourn are by
and large overweight, if not obese, with bloated stomachs and
red puffy eyes from staring at their iPhones eight and
ten hours a day and listening to podcasts recorded by
syncophats from both camps that want only to keep America

(08:57):
divided and in the dark. And over and over, I
engaged with everyday Americans who could not tell me the
capital of the state where they resided, who could not
name either of their US senators or their representative in
the House of Representatives, but who could assure me in

(09:20):
one boldly declared utterance that Trump was the greatest president
in the history of the country, or that Trump was
evil incarnate and would soon bring about the country's demise,
all in one way or the other. No middle ground,
no room for discussion, no room for debate, a nation

(09:45):
I was sad to discover of dogmatists. Annette flew home
to France, convinced America's glory days were in the past.
They're a fat, lazy, stupid nation now, she writes in
the introduction of her book, The End of Democracy in America.

(10:08):
They are ignorant of their history, oblivious to their fate,
and besotted by their riches. They rest now mostly on
their laurels, and they seem perfectly content to let the
oligarchs rob the treasury blind while they bet on football
and watch videos of the Chinese slowly and meticulously take

(10:32):
over the world without firing a shot. Annette over wine
and oysters at Dewitz confides to a friend, Honestly, I
wish well, I wish I'd never gone like that boy
that you love from Afar. It would have been far
more pleasant to live with my fantasy of America and Americans,

(10:56):
rather than immerse myself in their perverse and cynical reality.
Thanks for listening to this original audio presentation of a
Frenchwoman visits America, narrated by the author. If you enjoy

(11:21):
today's story, please take a few seconds to rate, review,
and subscribe to this podcast, and then go to Thomas
William Simpson dot com for additional information about the author
and to view his extensive canon. The Ten Minute Storyteller
is produced by Andrew Bligleisi and Josh Klani and as

(11:42):
part of the Elvis Duran podcast Network in partnership with
iHeart Productions. Until next time, this is Bill Simpson, your
ten Minute Storyteller,