Because the French are such terrible hedonists and decadent beyond belief, their scandals, of course, eclipse ours. They tremble over terrible things like…Carla Bruni appearing at a State dinner wearing a dress without a bra.

Yeah. Because they’re SO effing loose over there.

If you’re not catching my sarcasm, let me hand it to you. Like I’ve said before, it’s an American myth that the French are sexually decadent. Carla Bruni not wearing a bra is considered a scandale — so shocking that it made front page news on the Yahoo! news portal, where people are speculating how this will affect politics. They’re even lamenting that the British tabloids have picked it up. Sarkozy’s marriage to her was the gossip and scandal of the country. If you ask the average French person, they’d show you something a bit less than respect for Sarko’s choice in mates given his position. The word “circus” would probably come up.

I suspect that this myth arose in conjunction with a fear that some Americans have of Socialism. It’s as if they need to manufacture moral distinctions that just aren’t there to make them feel more God-fearing and righteous compared to the “godless” Socialists. They would be hard-pressed to admit that French Catholicism played a big role in the renunciation of overly consumerist interests in the lives of French people and therefore in the development of their government. The righteous Americans have a hard time admitting the “godless” Socialists have a greater interest in helping the poor than they do. They’d rather feel that their God — the one that blesses rampant Capitalism — is better. That their economic system is therefore superior. Although, in most cases, they don’t even know what a Socialist really is, but that’s never stopped anyone from forming an opinion.

In my mind, that’s the real scandal, the lack of education around various economic systems and how they arose. But shouldn’t “No Child Left Behind” have taken care of that?

Yeah. Thought not.