Métier stupide et inutile

Comme Plantu ICI, j’ai le sentiment que le métier de sondeur politique est pour les crétins. Ça ne sert rigoureusement à rien. Croit-on qu’un citoyen consulte les derniers sondages, comme un horoscope, avant d’aller placer son bulletin dans l’urne ? Que cette hypothèse soit vraie ou fausse, on constate la plupart du temps que les sondeurs se trompent. A quoi bon donc faire survivre ce métier d’imbécile ?

Lifeboats leaving a doomed ship

No !
We’re not boat people looking for a new land.
We’re simply abandoning a sinking ship.

In this political cartoon by Plantu, which appeared in L’Express, the captain of the red vessel is François Hollande, whose regard is directed constantly towards the heavens. The big ship in the foreground is a French Navy vessel, whose sailors are recognizable because of red pompons on their caps. The red vessel is about to crash into an iceberg whose summit has the same shape as Hollande's head. In the lifeboat, a tattered flag carries the rose symbol of Hollande’s Socialist party.

France has all kinds of exotic things

Even genuine Communists. Here's a typical specimen: Pierre Laurent, 49, French journalist and politician, senator, former editor-in-chief of the newspaper L'Humanité, and national secretary of the PCF (Parti communiste français) since June 2010.

Crowds of dinosaurs are gathered together this weekend, with their friends, at the Fête de L'Humanité : a time-honored festival organized by the French Communist newspaper. I hardly need to stress the fact that all these nice folk are perfectly respectable. They wouldn't use a hammer and sickle to hurt a flea. I don't know whether they're aware of the state of Communism in other parts of the world, including Russia. They probably don't care too much about such matters. Please don't hurt their feelings by bringing up subjects like that. On the other hand, I'm sure they collect Soviet postage stamps, postcards of Moscow, and antique editions of books by Marx (Karl, not Groucho). And they surely love to sip vodka while listening nostalgically to balalaika music.

Nice French political people

Patrick Balkany and his wife Isabelle. You can see from their smiles that they’re contented. They have a son, Alexandre Balkany, who also has a childish variant of his dad's smile. God only knows why...

Alexandre has just had his passport confiscated, for an affair about helping his parents hide a luxurious villa in Morocco from taxation authorities. Smart smiling family.

Christiane Taubira resigns from the French government

The French justice minister Christiane Taubira resigned this morning, and was rapidly replaced by the Socialist Jean-Jacques Urvoas.

The newspaper Le Monde stated explicitly that she had in fact "slammed the door" on her colleagues, which merely means that she had made a personal decision to leave, as opposed to the idea of being kicked out by the president and/or the prime minister. It's common knowledge that Taubira has been strongly opposed to the government's decision to withdraw the French citizenship of certain terrorists with dual nationality. Indeed, a parliamentary debate will be starting today on that subject, and it's clear that Taubira has chosen deliberately this moment for her resignation.

Christiane Taubira is an exceptionally brilliant individual who has never been accustomed to "suffer fools gladly" (expression invented by Saint Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians).

Extreme right-wing is a flop in France

Like countless French people, I would have been immensely sad if the extreme right-wing Front National had succeeded in taking advantage of the terrorist turmoil in France. On the contrary, the extremists have not won a single region... and so much the better.

I was thrilled to see that, in Brittany, the Socialist defence chief Jean-Yves Le Drian has won a huge victory. In my Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes corner of the world (which includes quite a few big cities), we lost to the ordinary right-wing, but that's neither here nor there.

I feel wonderfully relieved, particularly after the splendid achievements of the Socialists in the climate-change arena. So, I'll go to bed early and dream sweet dreams.

Here's an image of Marine Le Pen that pleases me greatly (I'm not sure why):

She looks like a punch-drunk wrestler in the ropes.

Regardless of the outcome, I'm proud to have voted

The region in which I live is now known as Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, and today's election is a so-called triangular, involving three candidates.

Needless to say (for those who know me), I was happy to vote for the political party that gave us yesterday's marvelous climate-change hopes for the future, not to mention their determination to hunt down and destroy the Daech terrorists.

Why did they kill the founder of socialism ?

Political catastrophe

The great ship France seems to have collided with something big and nasty. On the radar screen, it looks like this:

Outside, everything appears to be eerily calm, although a thick fog hides the horizon. No shouting. No cries. No panic. Curious leaflets, washed off the vessel in distress, are floating on the still waters.

Suddenly I heard beautiful music wafting across to us. It was slow and solemn, and seemed to last forever.

The captain, appearing briefly on the bow, astonished us all by crying out, as if in a terrible nightmare: “Full steam ahead!”

Commenting upon the short and uninspiring performance of François Hollande at the start of this evening’s TV news, a journalist evoked a leader who has “run out of cartridges”, meaning that the French president has no more solutions to propose to his disillusioned citizens. I’m wondering what kind of ammunition the journalist had in mind when she decided to use this metaphor. Cartridges for an offensive firearm? Or a defensive weapon? Or rather for a harmless gun of the kind that's used to fire smoky distress signals from the deck of a sinking vessel?

She-wolf of France

Up until recently, the principal subject of discussion in France was the sad state of the nation and the apparent failure of François Hollande and his Socialist government in the economic domain. Then an amazing affair was created out of the blue by the French chief of police, Manuel Valls, seen here in a Jewish context.

Valls finally succeeded in censuring the black-skinned French anti-Zionist comedian Dieudonné, whose presentations were promptly outlawed through draconian laws and methods that would be surely unthinkable in many English-speaking nations (such as the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia).

All this agitation was taking place just a few days ago, and dominating the media in France. Then, in the space of a few hours, everything changed. Overnight (literally), a new affair eclipsed the old ones. The world learned with amazement that stealthy ScooterMan had been sighted in the middle of the night, at an out-of-bounds location not far away from the Elysées Palace, and that paperazzi photos would be appearing in a French magazine the following morning.

The next day, we were bombarded with images of a new glamor couple: the French president and a beautiful actress, Julie Gayet.

Now, I wish to make a humble and totally irrelevant personal statement concerning this lady. A few years ago, I was stunned by her portrayal of Isabella, the She-wolf of France [1295-1358], wife of the gay king Edward II of England, in the TV series entitled Les Rois maudits (The Accursed Kings).

At that time, I was unearthing genealogical links between the Skeffingtons and the Plantagenet monarchs. For a few days, my mind was filled with the crazy idea that maybe this mysterious creature named Julie Gayet—who struck me as one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen—might be an ancestor of mine. [Since those days of fanciful thinking, I've become aware that my authentic Skeffington ancestors had branched away earlier on, at the Tudor epoch, from those who would get mixed up with the Plantagenet monarchy. In any case, the real Isabella may have been less beauteous than her modern representation.]

Today, in any case, when I hear that Julie Gayet has apparently been swept off her feet by ScooterMan, I feel strangely relieved, for I see retrospectively that she was never really a make-believe creature associated with my imaginary past, but merely a modern and perfectly normal French woman, attracted by a quite normal French president. The following American cartoon provides a good summary of the situation:

Robespierre on stage

On the extreme left-hand side of the political chessboard, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a brilliant orator who has been trying to persuade us that a remake of the French Revolution of 1789 is about to unfold. At times, though, one has the impression that Mélenchon tries a little too hard. Last Sunday, for example, he tried to persuade TV-viewers that vast throngs of leftist militants had assembled on the Avenue des Gobelins in Paris, to take part in a protest march concerning tax injustice. In an interview conducted by the distinguished journalist Claire Chazal of TF1, we can see members of this supposedly huge crowd in the background behind Mélenchon.

The problem is that somebody up on the balcony of a nearby apartment building took a photo of the global scene, which actually looked like this:

Clearly, there were no throngs of militants, merely a few dozen friends of Mélenchon who were happy to behave like movie extras, grouping themselves together to form a dense background giving the visual impression that they belonged to a huge crowd of similar militants.

Needless to say, Mélenchon has lost a lot of his dwindling credibility as a consequence of this staged affair  One wonders, too, why the people at TF1 apparently condoned this unethical media behavior. Retrospectively, however, we can understand what must have happened. The people in charge of the TV crew, finding Mélenchon all alone on the empty avenue, must have said to themselves that the forthcoming interview would be somewhat ludicrous unless they could enhance the setting a little...

Bachar al-Assad must leave the scene

The writing is on the wall. France has spoken definitively through our prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. The criminal Bachar al-Assad must fuck off.

When France talks like that, the world must listen. In the face of such explicit French determination, it is no longer thinkable that the Syrian dictator can possibly survive for long. It will be good riddance to an atrocious modern-day Hitler, who has cruelly exterminated thousands of his fellow Syrians. The dictator's game is virtually over. The disposal task remains to be performed as rapidly as possible. France can do that.

Bastille blues

In his wonderful book entitled Jerusalem, City of Mirrors (1989), the late Amos Elon [1926-2009] spoke of a mysterious affliction referred to as the Jerusalem syndrome. Affecting American Protestant males, almost exclusively, this torment causes them to take off their clothes, evolve into a state of crazy ecstasy, and preach nonsensical prophecies to passers-by on street corners. After a few days in hospital, victims recover their normal behavior as calm tourists in the Holy City, and they even feel good about their traumatic experience. Psychiatrists explain that victims of this affliction arrive in Jerusalem with a preconceived but totally false vision of the place, which they've always imagined as a gentle and harmonious Holyland: a pastel-hued picture from a children's book.

When such a visitor discovers the stark present-day Jerusalem, and finds it totally unlike his vision, his convictions are shattered traumatically... and his subsequent reactions and behavior express his momentary desire to be born again (naked, of course) into a reassuring but make-believe Christian context.

Here in France, a similar kind of affliction—which I designate as the Bastille blues—affects certain local intellectuals.

Typical signs of this disturbance are a sudden obsession that we might be on the eve of a replay (with variations, naturally) of the French Revolution of 1789. Victims of the affliction start to be hallucinated by visions of rioting, smoke and flames, destruction, bayonets, gunshots, guillotines... but they generally keep their clothes on. In May 1968, the youth of France were totally intoxicated by a severe case of Bastille blues.

Fortunately, the summer holiday season arrived just in same to save the nation from descending into total anarchy. And afterwards, everybody felt so much the better for having let off so much steam... much like a patient emerging from an attack of the Jerusalem syndrome.

A few days ago, I was intrigued to discover that a prominent French journalist, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, was apparently suffering from a massive onslaught of Bastille blues.

In his role as chief of the weekly magazine Le Point, he has written an editorial suggesting that France is bogged down in a pre-revolutionary quagmire.

Click here to access the French article. Not surprisingly,  64-year-old "FOG" (the acronym has become Giesbert's nickname)—born in Washington, and impregnated with Franco-American culture—backed up his claim by evoking the works of the celebrated viscount Alexis de Tocqueville [1805-1859]: in particular, his masterly analysis of the events and climate of 1789, The Old Regime and the Revolution, which describes the French people's appalling erosion of confidence in their monarchy.

Today, it's a fact that the Cahuzac affair [click here to see my recent blog article entitled Champion liars] has had a disastrous effect upon the waning respect of French citizens for their political leaders. Has modern France truly lost hope in its destiny? Is one half of the nation ready to cut the heads off the other half? Have the French become totally pessimistic and cynical? What has gone wrong?

Basic differences between American and French attitudes to economic progress are illustrated by a humorous anecdote concerning the reaction of onlookers towards a prosperous fellow who drives by in a luxury automobile. A typical American might ask himself: "What can I do in order to buy myself a car like that?" A typical Frenchman would complain: "Why doesn't that wealthy weasel drive a worn-out jalopy like the rest of us?" In the above article, FOG evokes the metaphor of François Hollande scooting around on an antiquated Vespa, while some of his acquaintances drive Ferraris. This image of an old-fashioned president, no longer on the same wavelength as progressive citizens, is made explicit in the cover of the current issue of FOG's weekly.

The rhetorical question "Pépère, est-il à la hauteur ?" could be translated as follows: "Can Grandpa still handle things?" Many citizens are starting to consider that the answer to that disturbing question might indeed be negative. But maybe, hopefully, there are plausible remedies that would fall short of a bloody revolution.

BREAKING NEWS: The Bastille blues theme has become quite explicit in the cover of the latest issue of the weekly:

Pumping

The erotic operation that English-speaking people designate curiously as blowing is generally looked upon, in France, as sucking.

It's also referred to as pumping.

And that brings me to one of the most celebrated anecdotes in France... which I heard for the first time from a professor during a class at the Institute of Political Science in Paris, many years ago. Most French people are aware of the exceptional circumstances in which the life of the 58-year-old president Félix Faure was brought to a joyous end. He had a 30-year-old friend, Marguerite Steinheil, known as Meg, the wife of an artist. On 16 February 1899, the president phoned Meg and suggested that she might drop in at the Elysée Palace towards the end of the afternoon. Well, they were engaged in a hot pumping session on a sofa in the Blue Room of the presidential residence when Meg was alarmed to discover that her lover had suddenly gone limp. Not just his organ, but all over. Clearly, Félix Faure had suffered some kind of major attack, and Meg was convinced that her man was dying. So, she called for help, while scrambling to get her clothes back on and preparing to abandon the palace before all hell broke loose. The president's staff arrived on the scene immediately, as depicted in this stylized magazine illustration:

The anecdote that has gone down in history is a bit hard to translate into English. It concerns the arrival of a priest who asked timidly, before being ushered into the room where the president lay dying: "Has the president retained his consciousness?" A secretary, imagining that the priest was referring to the young lady who had spent the last hour pumping sublime consciousness into the president, replied: "No, Father, she took off immediately down a side staircase as soon as she realized what had happened."

In French, the words for "pump" and "pomp" (as in "pomp and circumstance") are identical. And the everyday expression for an undertaker's activity is "pompe funèbre", literally funeral pomp. So, it was inevitable that people, aware of Meg's active role in the passing of the president, would get around to giving the young Angel of Death a charming nickname: the "Funeral Pump".

Today, if I was reminded of this historical event, it was no doubt because of the news that Dominique Strauss-Kahn would be spending the night at Lille in a police station, where he is being questioned about libertine evenings in a local luxury hotel, the Carlton.

For the moment, he hasn't been charged with any offense whatsoever, but anything could emerge from the intense ongoing investigations. A perspicacious journalist made an interesting observation. Let's suppose that DSK had never become involved with Nafissatou Diallo in a Manhattan hotel, simply because he had decided to leave for France instead of staying in New York. In that case, there would never have been a DSK Affair, and it is highly likely that Strauss-Kahn would have become, as planned, the presidential candidate of the French Socialist Party. Carrying our "what if" scenario one step further, we might conclude that the Lille affair would have still blown up. So, France would have been totally shocked this morning to learn that the popular candidate DSK was being held officially for questioning in a police station in Lille. In these circumstances, it is likely that DSK would have been obliged to abandon his presidential candidacy this evening. So, from a retrospective viewpoint, it was thanks to Nafissatou Diallo in Manhattan that the French Left avoided a catastrophic waste of time, energy and enthusiasm. We lost our illusions in time, well before they caused us to lose ourselves.

Nice couples, nice tax

These days, people who hear of the Sarkozy couple would have normally imagined this duo:

There's an offspring. The extreme right-wing politician Marine Le Pen was offended by the fact that the given name of Sarko's child, Giulia, is not pure dyed-in-the-wool French. But this will surely not give rise to a revolution.

Meanwhile, the major couple in the news is the Merkozy duo:

And a little bit of the Obamazy duo:

The couple strolled together in the rain, at Cannes, in front of musicians of the French Foreign Legion.

Then, on the Friday evening TV news, Obama heaped praise upon the French president for his rôle in the current Greek crisis.

I've never been a fan of Nicolas Sarkozy, but I've admired his tenacity in dealing with this affair… even though nobody is convinced yet that all the basic problems have been solved.

Governments of progressive societies need lots of finance to improve the situation of their citizens, and it's obtained through taxation. To my mind, Sarkozy is on the right track when he advocates a Tobin tax on financial transactions. I would imagine that François Hollande, our likely next president, would also strive to install this good tax.

Brilliant French lady becomes IMF chief

This afternoon, Christine Lagarde was still in Paris, working at her everyday job as minister of Finance in the government of François Fillon. When a French TV news phoned her concerning the imminent announcement of her appointment as head of the International Monetary Fund [IMF], Lagarde replied with typical elegance that she was hoping that the announcement would be made in time for the evening TV news, so that she would be able to share her limelight with another splendid French woman: the Socialist chief Martine Aubry, who had indicated today that she would be a French presidential candidate. Lagarde's behavior was exemplary in a gentlewomen's spirit, in that Aubry is an opponent of Nicolas Sarkozy, who could be considered (up until today) as Lagarde's superior.

[Click the photo to access an Al-Jazeera video announcing Lagarde's appointment.]

I was surprised and disappointed to learn that my native country, Australia, had backed the Mexican candidate Agustin Carstens for this job. At a moment when the eyes of the world are turned towards the financial problems of Greece, in the context of the European Union, I believe that Australia's choice reflects the political naiveté and lack of economic vision of prime minister Julia Gillard and her advisors.

Torrid times in French politics

Objective methods make it possible to measure media buzz in a quantitative fashion. This statistical approach informs us, apparently, that Dominique Strauss-Kahn happens to be, at the present moment, the most well-known and asked-about celebrity personage in the universe. Jeez, you might say, this is crazy: DSK doesn't have anything like half the arse of Pippa [display]. Isn't it amazing, the way that buzz can evolve in just a few weeks…

From May 2002 to March 2004, during the presidency of Jacques Chirac, when France was governed by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the minister in charge of youth, education and research was Luc Ferry.

The surname of this 60-year-old philosopher remains mythically magic in the modern French republic.

Luc's great-uncle Jules Ferry, a former mayor of Paris, was responsible for the glorious law that promoted "free, laic and compulsory schooling" in the Troisième République. He might be thought of as the spiritual granddaddy of all the smart (and less bright) republican schoolkids who created—and are still creating—the French nation as we know it today. A fabulous heritage!

Last Monday evening, on a French TV channel, Luc Ferry stirred up shit by declaring that many people were aware of the fact that a former French minister had once been found playing around with little boys in Marrakech. Needless to say, this sort of declaration cannot possibly be ignored by legal authorities, neither in France nor in Morocco. For the moment, everybody's trying to guess the identity of the alleged wrongdoer. This anonymous ex-minister risks a lot if the allegations were to be proven… and he might well compete with DSK, as soon as he's identified, for the title of the buzziest man in the Cosmos.

Now, even if many of us were to feel that this kind of notoriety is neither genuinely deserved nor advantageous for France, we might ask rhetorically: What the hell can we do about it?