My parents met each other in the Basque country, but quickly left to study in America. Nowadays, we’ve forgotten how many French graduates were drawn to American universities, especially the business schools. So my father headed off to Harvard to do his MBA (as George W. Bush would later), my mother went with him and used her time to get a master’s in history at Mount Holyoke. Nineteen fifties America: like a black-and-white documentary. The dream reached out to the rest of the Western world. Long Cadillacs with fins, extra-large ice creams, buttered popcorn at the movies, Eisenhower reelected: magical symbols of perfect happiness. This was the America that kept its promises, the country of Cockaigne described by the handsome, tanned Philippe Labro. At the time, dissent was insignificant. Nobody said McDonald’s was fascist. Dad laughed at Bob Hope’s jokes on TV. People went bowling. Middle-class kids were inventing globalization. They believed in America, to them it personified modernity, efficiency, freedom. Ten years later, this same generation voted for Giscard because he was young like JFK. Brilliant, energetic, no-bullshit guys. At last we’d be rid of the burden of our European education. Go for it. Be direct. Go straight to the point. In the United States, the first question you’re asked is: “Where are you from?” because everyone is from somewhere else. Then they say: “Nice to meet you.” Because it’s nice to meet new people. In America, when someone invites you over, you can help yourself from the fridge without asking your hostess’s permission. I remember phrases from that period I often heard at home: “put your money where your mouth is,” “big is beautiful,” “back-seat driver” (my favorite, Mom used it when we were getting on her nerves from the back of the car), “take it easy,” “relax,” “gimme a break,” “you’re overreacting,” “for God’s sake.” The capitalist Utopia was just as crazy as communist utopia, but its violence was covert. It won the Cold War because of its image: of course people were dying of starvation in America as they were in Russia, but those who were dying of starvation in America were free to do so.
All this was before 1968: the Beatles still had short hair. I remember my folks used to say that America was ten years ahead of France. Even the French Revolution happened ten years after theirs! If you wanted to know the future, all you had to do was keep your eyes glued to this idyllic country. Dad read the Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek, and kept Playboy hidden in his desk drawer. CNN didn’t exist yet, but Time magazine, with its red-framed cover, was like a four-color process CNN. My mother got a scholarship to travel round the States on a Greyhound bus. She told me about the sea breeze, the excitement of the open road, the motels, the Buicks, the drive-ins, the drugstores, the diners, all those radio stations with names that began with “W.” The whole world eyed America enviously, because you always look enviously at your own future. May ‘68 did not come from the East: there was a lot of talk about Trotsky and Engels, but the overriding influence was Western. I’m convinced that the roots of May ‘68 lay in the USA, not the USSR. It was an overpowering urge to say “fuck you” to old-fashioned bourgeois morality. The revolution of May ‘68 wasn’t anti-capitalist, in fact it definitively ushered in the consumer society; the main difference between our generation and that of our parents was that they demonstrated in favor of globalization! I grew up in the decade that followed, in the benevolent shadow of the Star-Spangled Banner floating on the moon and posters of Schulz’s Snoopy. Films were released earlier in the US than they were in France; Dad used to bring back all the spinoff toys when he went on business trips: a Muppet Show lunchbox, Star Wars merchandise, Slime, an E.T. doll…It was during those years, the years of my amnesiac childhood, that the Spectacle of America seduced the rest of the world.
I hope America will always be ten years ahead of us: that would mean the Tour Montparnasse still has ten years.