Chris Gardiner, the perfidious French, the ugly Australian, and the mote in our own eye

(Above: Bali boys, a work by Australian artist, Donald Friend, who went to Bali to get amongst the Bali boys).

Sanctimonious righteousness and cheap point scoring aren't exclusive to the perfidious cheese eating surrender monkeys sometimes casually known in polite conversation as "the French".

Here's Chris Gardiner in The frog and the tadpoles: ban this man from travel, puffing up with fury at French Culture Minister Frederick Mitterand, and his confession that he'd had sex with Asian prostitutes in his travels.

The theme of Gardiner's piece seems to be as much about the perfidious French as about Mitterand's misdeeds:

In any event, a member of the French Government has confessed to something he calls ‘offences against human dignity’.

Perhaps French Foreign Minister Kouchner can travel to Bangkok, meet with young sex workers and help them see their experience of sex tourism through this more ‘nuanced’, as the French might say, perspective.

Well it's not just France and the French that's up for a bit of cheap eel bashing with a long handled axe as Gardiner warms to his task:

After reading the stories on Mitterrand, I imagined two memos.

The first was from the head of UNESCO to diplomats, advising them to have their children dress modestly at any functions at which the French Culture Minister might be present, lest he be become overexcited and tempted to giving into any bad habits he might have.

The second was from the heads of European universities asking their psychology and ethics lecturers to include the ‘Mitterrand Case Study’ in Cognitive Dissonance and Moral Disengagement 101, and in the advanced unit on European Sexploitation of Developing Countries.

Ah yes, those vile European sexploitationers, hard at work undoing the noble work of other international organizations:

International child welfare organizations and police agencies across the world have been ramping up their campaigns against child trafficking and prostitution, and developing countries have been pleading for decades for developed countries to own the problem of sexploitation of poor boys, girls and young men and women during holiday and business visits.

If we are to credit the French State as being part of the international solution to such crimes against the vulnerable, the French Culture Minister has to go.

Now I'm no fan of Mitterand, or for that matter Polanski, or Donald Friend's sense of sexual entitlement while painting away in Bali.

But was it only in September that news came in about the role of Australians in the sex trade?

Australians are the biggest exploiters of Thailand's child sex industry, according to a study by Johns Hopkins University.

Australians make up the largest portion of foreign sex offenders against children in Thailand, according to the research that studied patterns of arrests and prosecutions between 1995 and 2006.

Our cash fuels the US$31.6 billion industry in child sex trafficking, which sees 1.8 million children as young as eight years old being sold for sex - sometimes up to ten times a day - until they're considered "worthless" before they reach their 30th birthday ....

.... All these victims suffer lifelong mental and physical damage. Some contract HIV/AIDS while most find it hard to reintegrate into society after a decade of such slavery.

Ms McMenamin says most Australians view the price of petrol as a greater concern than the welfare of foreign children.

"We have increased awareness and there have been some arrests but overall we're not putting a dent in the problem," she says. (here and here).

"We need people to try and think beyond what's going on in their lives."

Talk about a giant mote in the dinkum eye.

Well you can argue about the methodology - maybe more Australians are getting caught because of better systems in place, or maybe Australian laws are more strict - but you don't have to spend long in the sleazier parts of Asia to see the ugly Australian cruising for flesh. They make the quiet American look like moralists of the first water, except in the matter of waging war.

And it does rather put Gardiner's bashing of the French and Europeans in general in some kind of local perspective.

Could he have spent one line in his diatribe noting that the ugly Australian was a significant part of the problem? Should the international community impose a travel ban on the ugly Australian, tout de suite?

Not really. Not when you can score a couple of comments in The Punch, Australia's most incoherent conversation, joining in the French bashing. Not when grand standing and chest thumping and patriotic abuse of foreigners is a national virtue ...

(Below: and are you aware that the Scots for centuries ganged up with the French? Moral: never let a French man or a Scotsman into a joke featuring an Australian, or into a class room for that matter, och aye).