My son asked me to play catch with him the other night. I was utterly charmed. All that peanut butter I'd been applying to keep him glued to his American roots – you are what you eat, right? – is really paying off. I thought.
So I cheerfully headed towards the storeroom where we keep the expensive leather baseball mitts I'd imported in my suitcase a few summers ago.
"No Mama, we can play here inside. Look I moved the chairs."
"Honey, don't be a cuckoo head. You can't play catch inside."
"Sure we can Mama! We might hurt ourselves if we play outside," responded my son, slightly smugly, suddenly, and surprisingly, the very model of prudent and responsible comportment.
"What? But I'll tell you something right now, someone is going get hurt if I ever catch you playing catch inside."
"But everyone always plays catch inside! It's always inside on TV!" he came back, now the very model of outraged righteousness.
"What? They don't televise catch. You just play in the backyard. Why would anyone watch two people playing catch on TV?"
"Well, there's not just two people. There's lots of people in the audience."
Clearly, we needed illustrations and props to figure this out. So, I went to fetch the ball and mitt so I could mime the proper playing of catch for him.
"No, Mama, that's not catch! Catch is like this," he said. And he rushed at the couch only to jump on top of it, spin around in mid-air, bounce once and hurl his nine-year-old body at me at the speed of a, well, a hurling 60-pound thing. Which, I can tell you, is enough to knock you off your feet and shake you up enough to realize that he's just not talking about baseball.
Albeit not exactly in the way I had in mind.
It turns out that "catch" is the word for wrestling in modern French. Specifically, professional wrestling. As in Wrestlemania and the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), which, I have come to learn, have completely subjugated France. And not just the nine-year-old boys.
 Albéric d`Ericourt, AKA Le Petit Prince
No, this is a version of the sport that puts dog tags with pictures of men named things like The Undertaker in the Kinder surprise treats, which is about as jarring as finding a shiv in a box of Cracker Jacks.
I think this is just great. It means, clearly, that France has given up on even its pretensions of cultural independence, which is not a bad thing because, after all, France is the most rapidly expanding market for McDonald's in the world after the United States so just shut up about la malbouffe already, would you? Like someone is putting a gun to your head to make you feed that Happy Meal to your kid. I'm so glad they've decided to relent on the hypocrisy and just cannonball into the cultural dregs like they've really been wanting to do all along.
Shortly after this encounter with my son – who, I now realize, had been inducted into the "catch" cult by his wrestling-crazy best friend – I was brought up to speed on "Catch, le phénomène" by TV Magazine. I learned that not only are WWE events broadcast across the spectrum of French sports channels but live shows are now touring the country and selling out to French audiences full of, undoubtedly, a disproportionate number of Johnny Hallyday t-shirts.
TV Magazine quoted WWE's international president, Andrew Whitaker, saying that worldwide wrestling events will take place this year in Nice, Strasbourg, Nîmes, twice in Lyon, and then wrap up at Bercy in September.
Bercy is the Madison Square Garden of France. This is a big deal. When Madonna makes her first retirement tour and then her subsequent reunion tour, let's say in 20 years or so, she will say good-bye, and then hello again, to France at Bercy.
TV Magazine also said that sign-ups in the Fédération française de catch professionnel (FFCP) (the French federation of professional wresting) has increased 130 percent since last year. Who cares about the percentage? Just the idea that there is a French federation of professional wrestlers is enough to blow the mind.
And, get this!, it has a Catch Academy (spelled the English way) in Choisy. The French minister of health and sport, Bernard Laporte, visited the site April 14. They took pictures.
Of the seven members of the FFCP who have won titles, three are French (Marc Mercier, Driss Djaffali, and Pierre "Booster" Fontaine), two are Greek, one is Romanian and one is American. The American guy's name is Rocky. Well, of course it is.
And, just so you understand that this is really is American-style wrestling, here is a description of the French professional touring shows from the FFCP website:
"Ses spectacles sont mis en valeur par une mise en scène originale à très fort impact, accompagnés par une régie technique très performante (pont de lumière et effets spéciaux, laser, sonorisation). L’animation est à la hauteur du défi sportif, et donc le spectacle est complet pour le public toujours plus nombreux (progression de spectateurs de 27% par an entre les tournées 2006/2007)."
[The shows are made even better by original and dramatic staging accompanied by the highest quality technical standards (lighting and special effects, a laser light show and sound). The spectacle is just as good as the athletic challenge itself and that's why it's a complete entertainment for an always growing audience (the number of tickets sold grew by 27 percent between the 2006 and 2007 tours). ]
No, of course not! The French will be completely shocked and horrified when it turns out that some of these "athletes" take steroids to maintain their show-worthy physiques. "How could we have known that the walking walls of meat were desecrating their bodies like that? The Americans have dishonored the sport of wrestling…just like stinky Lance Armstrong. Our brave cyclists would never, never have polluted their bodies in that way if they hadn't been forced to keep up with him."
That's the beauty of cultural imperialism from the viewpoint of the vanquished: all of the wallowing, none of the moral responsibility.
If only I had someone to blame for the fact that time I spent actual cash on that J.Lo album. If only I could say that I'd been manipulated into my crass addiction to Desperate Housewives, which isn't even a good show anymore but for which I still maintain an iTunes slush fund in the States so that I can download it in English. If only I could find the responsible party who tricked me into indulging myselt with that Big Mac, with fries, last week. None of this can possibly be attributed to my own judgment, can it?
If left to my own devices, I'm quite sure I would read Proust and listen to Bach and eat raw, organic vegetables and only watch Buster Keaton movies while playing the organ accompaniment myself. That is my true self, the one uncorrupted by the propaganda that makes me believe that professional wrestling can be called a sport without quotation marks and that Madonna looks like that because she works out a lot and that Star Academy actually produces Stars.
All of the above imagined commentary will only be heard – if I'm imagining correctly – from the talk-show crowd, from the bobo-gentzia, from Parisians. These are the people who minted the stereotype of French people circulated in America: the snobbos, the ones that inspire epithets like "cheese-eating surrender monkeys". I'm not being unfair to them: they deserve steaming heaps of sarcasm although I've always thought the surrender money thing is going too far and completely misses the point of WWI.
But there's another France out here where popular culture has maintained a purity that has been lost in the States. Out here in this France, people don't bother to be angry at America because of Fast Food and car-chase movies. When they bother to be angry at us it's usually for stuff we deserve like black sites and destroying the First World industrial base. But they continue to appreciate the contribution of Magnum P.I. In fact, they appreciate it more than we do.
In this world, Johnny and professional wrestling are not kitsch, they're not ironic, they're not a guilty pleasure and we just don't need to know about the steroids because it would still be fun even if the wrestlers were a bit pudgy like the Petit Prince.
In this world, all of the above is just a pleasure, a simple pleasure that you enjoy with your friends and your family because it's fun.
Like playing catch.
And this is where I wanted to be all along.
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