Seeing this while going over Tumblr this evening was one of those “fucking hell” moments. I’d actually almost forgotten the whole “freedom fries” bullshit, which… I don’t know what that says about my memory and/or the world as it’s changed (?) in the years since Iraq II: Weapons of Mass Boogaloo… But it did also remind me that, somewhat less long ago, I watched this film:
That’s one of John Ford’s few surviving silent films, Four Sons from 1928. Not a film I was especially impressed by when I saw it, but I was struck by one scene… it’s set mostly during WW1, with one of the eponymous sons making his way to America before that breaks out, and when America finally enters the fray he’s fighting on the US’ side… you know, against his brothers. Anyway, there’s a bit where, once America’s joined in the war, the “German-American Delicatessen” in the small town gets rebranded as the “Liberty Delicatessen”, which has obvious resonances with the freedom fries silliness. I’ve never actually researched whether or not anything like this actually happened in reality, but I presume it must have done somewhere in the US cos that’d be a really weird detail to have invented for a film, especially when something similar did happen in reality 75 years later…
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