NEWS.com.au | Fine over plane bomb hoax (January 27, 2004)

"A FRENCH national who was charged and held in New York after he made bomb hoax claims during a flight is set to be released after paying a fine.
...
Moulet, a student from Bouches-du-Rhone in southern France, was questioned by a steward on an American Airlines flight from Santo Domingo on January 10 on concerns that he had been locked in the restroom too long."

Here's another one that you didn't hear about in the US press and another reason to worry about the image projected by the US in the world. Problem is, of course, if you never hear about it, you don't know how nasty it gets. Maybe this posting is just another tree falling in a deserted forest, but maybe that's what blogs are for.

As the story goes, Franck, a French student on a dream vacation to the US, is on an American Airlines flight from San Domingo to New York and he's spending a little too long in the toilets so the stewardess asks him why. I don't know why you would ask someone that, since the response would only have to do with one's bodily functions or disfunctions and these things are pretty personal, but the stewardess somehow felt compelled to ask him.

So Franck gives her a flippant reply. There are two stories about the text of his reply. Franck says that he told the stewardess "I wasn't placing a bomb" and the stewardess says that he told her "Merde, the bomb didn't explode".

I wonder what the difference is, really, between these two responses, given the context. After all, the stewardess shouldn't be asking you why you are in the toilet so long, at least not so indelicately. I'm given to believe, and this is only a personal conclusion, that this stewardess must have crossed the boundaries of polite, asking a question that presumes some sort of guilt. So the flippant reply is de rigueur.

The rest has been forgotten in this Australian article. Two weeks detention in the US under extremely hostile conditions: not allowed to talk to his family, court-appointed lawyer who didn't speak French, no money, little to eat, no clothes because he wasn't allowed to recover his baggage. Not allowed to have even a book to read in his little cell. No notes from his family. Two weeks of total bullshit. And to top it off, menacing him with 7 years prison for "false alert" when, really, American Airlines should be apologizing to him instead.

Surprisingly, this article appears nowhere in the US press, according to the reputable and inestimable Google news. The only two articles that I found were short, incomplete, even silly, in UK and Australian online newspapers.

In France, you can imagine that the story was treated differently. Franck's plight was described, his mother was interviewed, the mayor of his town said that calls from all over France were received to ask how people could help the family. Franck comes from a poor family and his folks don't have the money to hire a fancy lawyer, so the town managed to get together a delegation for him.

Today there is some good news: Franck is being released with a small fine (less than $1000) . Franck's French lawyer says, and this is my translation, "If efficiency requires that he kneel down and admit to a crime that he didn't commit in order to recover his dignity, so be it. Then, once he's back in our country [France], he'll be able to say what he thinks about these methods, which are the methods of another time." Think Middle Ages.

I'm happy that the charges were lowered from "false bomb alert" to "incorrect behavior" even if I'm not sure that I agree with the assessment. It seems that in an increasingly antagonistic society that we can no longer employ absurd humor. As the French Secretay of Foreign Affairs noted: "Any act of humor must be suppressed." If Lenny Bruce were alive today, he probably wouldn't find that things had changed much, at least not to the better.