This conversation about US cultural chauvinism: it's one I've had with friends from all over the world for many years now. Sometimes it's about politics, sometimes it's about literature or art. It's about what looks progressive or funny or intellectual or cultured or edgy.

Zadie Smith talks about language as containers for our ideas, "necessarily shaping and determining the form of what it is we think, or think we think," "[allowing] the emergence of certain ideas while limiting the possibilities of others."

For some time now, this is how I've felt about the language of progressivism, of dissent, of resistance, of criticism, handed down to the rest of us from the US.

But nobody was listening when we said it; maybe we said it too quietly; or MAYBE

maybe we just weren't as important, because by jove, if France saying it hasn't raised America's hackles.

And en même temps, it is very funny to watch the two most culturally chauvinist nations on the planet fight each other about who's more culturally chauvinist.

You both are! But one of you doesn't even see it. Refuses to acknowledge it. Whereas the other has always been *proudly* chauvinistic about its Culture.

And, clearly, France's opinion counts so much to America. The rest of us can complain about US cultural chauvinism till we're blue in the face, but the moment that country whose women you think never get fat; whose children you think are the best behaved on earth;

whose food you STILL think is the finest on earth, whose cities and art and architecture you worship, some of it rightfully --

the moment THAT nation stands up and says, "America, we're so sick of you only seeing yourself in everything," well, then you're terribly hurt.

Dare we hope that the next time the rest of us are pointing this out, we might be heard?