Elysian fields

In spite of their curious reputation of arrogance (akin to the ridiculous notion that they wear berets and eat frogs' legs), the French don't normally boast too much about themselves. Even though they might consider themselves the most intelligent people on Earth, the French rarely evoke nationalistic concepts such as lifestyle, pride and welfare to anywhere near the same extent, say, as Americans and Australians. If the French are indeed chauvinist, they keep this fact relatively quiet. They're a tactful people. It's not by chance that French has always been labeled the language of diplomacy. The sense of intellectual nuance has always impressed me greatly in this magnificent land of Descartes, Voltaire and Sartre. I love a subtle country...

In Greek mythology, Elysium was the homeplace of the gods. In France, TV journalists rarely resist the temptation of designating the Champs Elysées as "the most beautiful avenue in the world". In reality, it's a symbolic central axis of the French capital... like Oxford Street in London, or Martin Place in Sydney. The difference is that the Champs Elysées is not only symbolic and central; it's aesthetically splendid!

As I write these words, Nicolas Sarkozy is moving towards the "Elysian fields" of France to display himself (there's no other way of putting it) in front of the population of Paris. It's more than an image. It's a symbol.

Bye-bye, Jacquot

Tomorrow morning, the new president of France will be sworn in. So, this evening at eight o'clock, Jacques Chirac spent five minutes on TV saying Au revoir to the nation, and conveying his best wishes to Nicolas Sarkozy.

What will History retain of Chirac's twelve years as the head of the French Republic? Everybody praises Chirac for his honesty and courage in acknowledging retrospectively the criminal role played by the French government of Vichy during the Occupation. In a different domain, he remains admired for his opposition, right from the start, to the absurd war in Iraq. But there were failures in Chirac's presidency, notably the negative outcome of the French referendum on Europe.

Concerning Chirac's personal future, many news commentators have been borrowing the image of former US president Bill Clinton as a likely role model. That's to say, Chirac could well transform himself into a kind of itinerant ambassador promoting themes such as sustainable development [click here to see the Wikipedia page on this subject] and the economic evolution of Africa.

Unexpectedly, on the eve of the new presidency, there was some nearby rumbling of legal artillery concerning a dark era in Chirac's past, when he was the mayor of Paris. The National Division of Financial Investigations at Nanterre summoned Alain Juppé, Chirac's former right-hand man at the city hall of Paris, as a witness in the context of the affair concerning individuals who were paid a salary by the city hall while working in fact for Chirac's political party. Juppé was condemned for this affair in 2004, whereas Chirac himself has never been troubled up until now, because of his presidential immunity.

If ever this affair were to explode at the start of Sarkozy's presidency, it would create a delicate and embarrassing climate, to say the least. As we all know, judges throughout the world have no special respect for former presidents... even in the USA.

The winner is... a loser

The dictionary informs me that one of my favorite French adjectives, ringard, came into existence at about the same time I first arrived in France, at the beginning of the 1960s. Besides, its origin is apparently unknown. For the moment, I can't think of its exact equivalent in English, but I'll give you an idea of what it means in French, and maybe somebody might be able to suggest an appropriate English adjective. At a first approximation, it means old-fashioned, obsolete, anachronistic or kitsch. But it's a derogatory term, so its meaning is somewhat similar to the adjectives crude, tacky or trashy.

Let me give you a local example. In the village of Pont-en-Royans, the mayor decided to transform some old buildings alongside the Bourne into a museum devoted to the theme of water. He called upon a graphic artist to produce a poster for the museum. Since there are several multimedia exhibits, the artist thought it would be a good idea to combine the notions of water and electronic display screens. And this is the result:

Now, every time I drive past one of these billboards (which are scattered all around the region), the adjective ringard pops instantly into my mind. The mediocre creative thinking of the design artist reminds me of an anecdote back in a Paris software laboratory where I used to work. It was packed with computers, on every desk, in every room. An Algerian cleaning woman would turn up towards the end of the afternoon, when most of us were still staring at our computer screens. When she needed to dust a computer screen that was being used, the lady would apologize for disturbing the engineer: "Excuse me for a moment or two while I clean your TV." We were amused by the fact that she must have imagined that we had fantastic jobs. We were being paid to sit there all day and watch TV. Well, to my mind, the guy who created the poster for the museum at Pont-en-Royans was a bit like our cleaning lady. To represent visually the concept of the multimedia exhibits, he got hold of an archaic TV set and took a photo of it floating in a pool of water. Then he added fishes and the head of a female swimmer. Happily, the TV set is obviously so ancient that nobody would be silly enough to turn it on, and electrocute the underwater observer.

The reason I'm particularly interested in the adjective ringard is that I wanted to say a few words about the amazingly tacky and kitsch Eurovision song contest that takes place annually here in Europe. It's moving from atrociously bad to worse, but there are millions of TV viewers who love it. This year, France succeeded in achieving exactly the same position as last year: third-last in a field of two dozen competing countries. The French group was named Fatals Picards, and it was meant to be terribly amusing. This is what they looked like:

Their sound was worse than their appearance. Now, it would be unkind of me to suggest that this group was not elected in a valid manner to represent France. I don't doubt for a moment that there are sufficiently many musically-tasteless TV viewers in France to cast their votes for such a group. But the bush telegraph tells me that this group might have got a little help from friends who are financial administrators in the French TV world. You see, the winner of Eurovision becomes automatically a loser, because the number 1 country has to host the following contest, and this is an expensive bore, to say the least. The situation might be summed up in words often applied to great sporting events such as the Olympic Games. The important thing is participating, not necessarily winning. For France, winning Eurovision would be a costly catastrophe.

Sepulcher cult

Respect of the dead is one of the most ancient human principles that exists. In the splendid trilogy of films by Jacques Malaterre on the origins of humanity, there are reconstructions of the primeval impact of death at a personal level, that of the family and companions of the deceased. The notion of a sepulcher probably occurred in the beginning as a simple pile of rocks concealing the putrefying corpse. Much later, the concept of individual life after death was concocted, and the sepulcher cult reached an apogee in ancient Egypt. Along with the processes of embalming and mummification, and the erection of elaborate stone sepulchers, the Egyptians codified alleged happenings in their Underworld.

In this New Empire papyrus, the dog-headed god Anubis (whose head has often been described erroneously as that of a jackal) guides the deceased person to his judgment, which uses a balance.

Christians have taken over this Ancient Egyptian concept of a guide in their Saint Christopher, who is actually depicted in this image with a dog's head. Not so long ago, devout Catholic drivers used to attach a St Christopher medal above the dashboard of their vehicle, without realizing that the main role of the prototype personage consisted of guiding individuals into the afterlife! [What a pity that there don't seem to be any statistics revealing the proportion of accident deaths in which the driver was "protected" by a St Christopher medal.]

Getting back to the theme of elaborate sepulchers, I must admit, as a genealogy enthusiast, that I'm always happy to discover ancestral tombs, which are often a primary source of data. Sometimes, on the contrary, tombstones display less reliable information than what you can find in church and government records.

The raison d'être of my musings on sepulchers is to ask a rhetorical question: Should we, today, continue to employ traditional funerary rites that have come down to us from past epochs? Or should they be modernized? And the reason why this subject has arisen in my mind is the news item about a lot of folk having paid money to have a few grams of the ashes of some 200 loved ones sent into space aboard a telephone-sized rocket. The exact price: $495 dollars a gram. [Click here to see this story.] The capsule orbited Earth for two weeks, as planned, before floating back down to the surface of our planet by means of a parachute. But the hilarious aftermath of this afterlife business is that the parachute apparently touched down at a remote and rugged site in New Mexico, which means that the "ashstronauts" have not yet been found. Did the space vehicle and its dead occupants get damaged during their re-entry into the atmosphere? How long will they be able to survive in the harsh desert conditions if rescuers don't reach them soon? Will, in fact, they ever be found? These are terrible questions, which cannot yet be answered.

Personally, I'm convinced that it's high time to ditch all archaic concern for the material remains of the dead. We should realize that corpses are corpses, and ashes are ashes. No more, no less. I believe that much of the ugliness of death can be attenuated by facing up to the fact that a corpse contains no traces of the consciousness and personality of the individual we once knew. So, it's silly to think that the deceased person might, somehow or other, get a kick out of his/her posthumous ride through space.

I can imagine a far more logical spatial trip towards posterity, which could even be organized while the individual is still alive. This would consist simply of using modern technology to obtain a digital copy of his/her genome and then beaming this into outer space by means of a high-energy transmitter, which might be called a Life Ray (as opposed to the death rays of a Star Trek kind). To keep it company on its never-ending journey through space, the genome could be associated with a digitized account of the genealogy and earthly achievements of the deceased. And why not even encapsulate in the Life Ray's message a digitized illustration of Anubis or Saint Christopher? The more the merrier on this excursion throughout Eternity!

Papal samba

Talented journalists [of the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein caliber] work like successful detectives. They acquire piles of fragmentary data, of all kinds, and then they attempt to fit it all together like the elements of a jigsaw puzzle. And finally, if they're lucky, a Big Picture emerges from their synthesis.

Great scientists too, in the Richard Dawkins and Brian Greene category, work at times like journalists and detectives. I thought of that comparison last night when I was watching an excellent BBC special on the Adelaide-born fellow named Howard Walter Florey who played a major role in the invention of the pharmaceutical technology behind the production of penicillin, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (along with Alexander Fleming and Florey's Oxford colleague Ernst Chain) in 1945.

Unfortunately, devout catholics in general, and popes in particular, don't operate that way. They concentrate all their attention on a tiny number of not-very-convincing speculations, often of a fanciful nature (akin to what ordinary folk would call magic), and they elevate these sundry things to dogma.

Take sex, for example. What the bloody hell (to talk like an Aussie creator of tourism publicity) gives this silly old guy the right to drop in on Brazil and tell the local folk that they must respect fidelity between spouses and chastity "both within and outside marriage"? Benedict XVI surely knows shit all about sex, marriage, fidelity, chastity, contraception, abortion, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, HIV, etc... just as I know nothing about the concepts of the so-called "Immaculate Conception" of Mary, the alleged virgin birth of Jesus and the incredibly mysterious notion of the Holy Trinity. Benedict, my boy, it's time to pull your finger out and admit that you should stick to your personal specialties, and not start to talk about things you ignore.

Or maybe, on the other hand, the pope should get stuck into studies of all kinds about sex, both theoretical and experimental, so that he could fit all the fragments together and provide us with an expert description of the Big Fucking Picture, in the style of a great journalist, detective or scientific researcher. Who knows? Maybe the Vatican laboratories could invent a powerful pharmaceutical product like penicillin (to be known by a short name such as "penis-kill") which would cause unchaste pricks to wither up and drop off.

But I must refrain from venting my irritation. Let me remain in the domain of facts. In the same Google news that tells us about Benedict XVI in Brazil, there's a serious medical article about possible links between oral sex and throat cancer. [Click here to see how Time magazine handles this subject.] I reckon that the Pope should look into this deep question and tell us how he feels about it.

Political couples

Back in the days of Charles de Gaulle, few people would have used the word "couple" to designate the General and his wife Yvonne. I can't imagine a neighbor in the Champagne-Ardenne village of Colombey-les-Deux Eglises phoning up Madame de Gaulle at La Boisserie and saying: "My wife and I would like to invite a few couples along to our place this weekend for a barbecue and a scrabble evening. Are you interested?" In any case, while Charles and Yvonne were of course a married couple, they were certainly not what you would call a political couple. According to a legend (maybe apocryphal), while the General was attending to the affairs of France, his wife spent most of her time knitting.

During the recent presidential election, we saw an extraordinary emergence of authentic political couples, the most famous of which was Ségolène Royal and François Hollande.

In spite of their electoral defeat, and Ségolène's decision to refrain from being a candidate in next month's parliamentary elections, the Royal-Hollande couple hasn't exactly gone into hibernation. On the contrary, they're on the front page of the news because of a book on Ségolène's recent campaign, called La femme fatale, which is about to hit the bookstands. More precisely, the Royal-Hollande couple is attempting to use judicial means to block the release of this book... which is naturally a godsend in unexpected publicity for the two authors: Raphaëlle Bacqué and Ariane Chemin. The bone of contention between the political couple and the authors would appear to be an anecdote concerning the possibility that François Hollande might have preferred Lionel Jospin, rather than his wife, as the Socialist presidential candidate. [Jospin was the man who was knocked out unceremoniously in the first round, in 2002, by the extreme-rightwing candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen.] According to the anecdote related by Bacqué and Chemin, Ségolène would have yelled out at her husband: "If you call upon Jospin to block me, I swear you'll never see your kids again." Nice story, particularly for the authors of a political saga, but a little bit too dramatic to be true. The book will surely be a best-seller.

In calmer waters, Jean-Louis Borloo, a political friend of Sarkozy, happens to be the husband of an excellent TV journalist named Béatrice Schönberg (who reads out the news on France 2)... who was axed for the duration of the elections.

Another victim of a similar kind was the brilliant young TV journalist Marie Drucker [I used to know her father back in my 1972 days at the Research Service of the French Broadcasting System], who had the misfortune of being madly in love with a minister of Chirac named François Baroin, who was actually called upon to replace Sarkozy when the latter stepped officially into the electoral arena.

One of the most famous political couples in France is composed of the Socialist ex-minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his journalist wife Anne Sinclair, who was for many years one of the most popular women in France.

At the present moment, of course, the most famous couple of all is Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Cécilia.

Nobody really knows (maybe not even Nicolas) whether Cécilia is prepared to step into the role of the First Lady of France. Personally, I would bet that she won't. In other words, I don't believe that Nicolas and Cécilia constitute a political couple. I don't see Cécilia staying at home, knitting like Yvonne. Nor do I imagine her collecting small coins for charity, as Bernadette Chirac has been doing for years. Sarko has promised us that, with his election, things are going to change, no doubt in a surprising manner. I'm convinced that one of the biggest surprises that awaits us is finding out what the hell Sarko's going to do with his wife.

Beauty and the beast

Up until a few days ago, the Olympic gold-medal swimmer Laure Manaudou and her trainer Philippe Lucas were a unique tandem in top-level sport. It was impossible to imagine one without the other. Indeed, the style and the look of Lucas (long blonde hair, ear-rings, metal chains and bracelets) made him an even more fascinating telegenic personage than his illustrious protégée. French TV viewers remember with amazement the first image we saw of this couple, at the time of the Olympic Games in Athens. During a training session, Laura had done something that displeased Lucas, and he scolded her harshly as if she were a naughty child. Clearly, Lucas was an iron-handed trainer, but there was no doubt about the efficiency of his methods.

A fortnight ago, the much-admired French TV host Michel Drucker succeeded in inviting the swimmer and her trainer to a popular Sunday-afternoon talk show, and viewers had their first opportunity of seeing Laure and Philippe together in a setting other than the edge of a pool. I was struck by the fact that lovely Laure looked much taller and sturdier than what you imagine when you see her in a swimming competition. As for Lucas, he came across as an exceptionally clear-thinking individual, capable of expressing himself simply and often humorously, with firm convictions about his way of handling Laure's training for the Beijing games. Then, last Sunday (election day in France), everything seemed to go wrong between them. After six years with Lucas, Laure left in a huff for Italy, and everybody imagined that she merely wanted to be closer to her Italian fiancé, the swimmer Luca Marin.

I'm not sure that the full details of Laure's decision have emerged yet, but it appears that she's fed up with the constraints of Philippe's methods, which involve swimming huge distances, day in, day out. She says she wants to "discover a new challenge", and that it's better to change trainers now, a year and a half before Beijing, rather than at the last moment. In speaking of Lucas, she said: "I know how he operates. I know Philippe well. I want to show him I can win without him."

Today, Philippe Lucas used vehement words in criticizing Laure's decision to train in Italy. He implied that, in the Italian move to entice Laure to Turin, there was big money at stake. In referring to the fact that Laure has just lost over a month of regular training, Philippe suggested that Laure is "running away from work". And he added: "When you see her [today], you have the impression that she's just spent six months on a cruise liner." Maybe Philippe, in using this image, might have been influenced by his view of Nicolas Sarkozy returning to Paris after three days aboard the luxury yacht Paloma.

Provençal excursion

A few weeks ago, my friends Natacha and Alain in Marseilles invited me and my dog Sophia for a three-day excursion in Provence. They drove us to magnificent places such as Aix-en-Provence, Arles, Les Baux-de-Provence, Gordes and Roussillon. I think the latter place impressed me most of all. Colorado in Provence. Not only do you encounter the unique pastel images of Provence. You also come upon the geology and chemistry of these pink and ocher hues. For the visitor, it's impossible to say where the landscape ends and art takes over. You turn your head and you have the impression that you're confronted with the colors of Van Gogh and Gauguin, not to mention Cézanne. Everything at Roussillon is a magic global fusion of Nature and Humanity. While Alain was taking care of Sophia, Natacha took this photo of me in this Provençal wonderland:

Click here to find my photos of this fabulous three-day excursion.

Machina sapiens

On February 26, 2007 I wrote a blog article whose title was What's in a name? [Click here to display it.] I mentioned the fact that, in 1976, I wrote a book in French called Machina sapiens on the subject of artificial intelligence. I went on to express my mild irritation concerning the fact that many people are now using that expression without ever acknowledging that it was the title of my book.

Many years ago in Paris, at a big international computer fair, I approached the stand of a Canadian company named Machina sapiens and asked them where they had dug up their name. One of their managers was pleased to offer me explanations.

Manager: "Some time ago, there was a best-seller named Machina sapiens written by a Frenchman."

Me: "Not a Frenchman. An Australian. I wrote that book."

The guy looked embarrassed, but I'm not sure he believed me. What the hell. I've never claimed that I own that expression. I believe that the true inventor of the expression was the distinguished biophysicist Walter Rosenblith [1913-2002], who was the provost of MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] when I interviewed him in 1972 for my TV specials on artificial intelligence and brain research.

This morning, I received a friendly comment from a lady in Argentina who uses Machina sapiens as the name of her blog. At first, I didn't see why somebody would assume I knew enough Spanish to be able to read a comment in this language. Then I remembered that a translation of my book had been published in Buenos Aires in 1978.

Smell of violence

When you see the new dog basket without Sophia inside, it looks enormous. But in fact, it's just right.

I'm constantly amazed by the way in which Sophia uses her sense of smell as a source of information about places and events in the outside world. When I take her with me in the car, Sophia lies on the floor in front of the passenger seat. She rarely props herself up high enough to see out through the car windows, and yet she knows constantly the key zones in which we're located. If I drive towards the edge of the Bourne River at Pont-en-Royans, Sophia starts to bark with excitement, because she looks forward to scavenging for bits of food dropped by picknickers. On the other hand, if I park in front of the veterinarian's place, Sophia refuses to get out of the automobile, apparently because she detects the smell of some kind of canine anguish.

At Gamone, the donkeys and the billy goat are usually about a hundred meters up the hill behind the house, and they're often partly hidden by shrubs. So, Sophia and I don't normally have a clear view of them. In spite of this, Sophia knows instantly whenever a mild squabble has erupted between the two donkeys (in the form of a biting match), or when one of the donkeys is fed up with the goat trying vainly to get up its backside, and lets loose with a hefty kick (which Gavroche always succeeds in sidestepping). As soon as Sophia detects any violence of this kind, she starts to bark furiously and looks at me with an expression of alarm, as if she expected me to intervene, to calm down the animals. I can only conclude that she must be capable of detecting what I would call a "smell of violence" that is emitted on such occasions by the donkeys or the goat. Or maybe there's some other explanation...

The simple life

The morning after his election, Nicolas Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa jumped on a private Falcon jet with his wife Cécilia née Ciganer-Albeniz, their 10-year-old son Louis and a few bodyguards, and headed for the Mediterranean island of Malta, where they immediately boarded the 60-meter yacht Paloma. The aircraft and the boat belong to a French millionaire named Vincent Bolloré, who's the brother-in-law of Sarkozy's close counselor Gérard Longuet. Paparazzi had to hire an aircraft to obtain photos of the family outing.

Certain politicians in France were irritated by the ostentatious style of the start of Sarkozy's reign. Nobody actually used the expression "nouveau riche", but it seemed to be hovering on their lips. Curiously, although many wealthy French people lead lives of luxury, there's a tradition of doing so in a restrained non-glitzy manner. I have a scary feeling that, sooner or later, Nicolas Sarkozy is going to run into big problems with certain profound French conventions. Either that, or he'll explode...

Squaring the circle

Tarts and pies, like pizzas, are generally round. So, it's not surprising that the ready-made pastry you buy in supermarkets is also circular. The other two ingredients in one of my favorite easy-to-prepare dishes also happen to be round.

The excellent cow's-milk cheese is a St-Marcellin, from the nearby town of that name. Out in Australia last year, I recall a celebrated local chef saying that he thought of it as one of the finest cheeses in the world. I wouldn't go as far as that, because there are many far more exotic cheeses in France than our everyday St-Marcellin, but it's certainly what you might call excellent basic cheese. I've always got a stock of them in the refrigerator, and I often devour a St-Marcellin between meals.

How do you go about using circular-shaped ingredients to make rectangular pasties? You don't need to be a rocket scientist to discover that it can be done by cutting the pastry into eight equal sectors and arranging the ingredients as follows:

You simply fold over the four edges to obtain a square-shaped pasty. After fifteen minutes in the oven, here's the result:

This is in fact a popular recipe from the town of St-Marcellin, where they refer to these pasties as marcellines.

Today, together, everything's possible

Click here to see the victory website of Nicolas Sarkozy.

A new page opens in France

An encouraging aspect of the final round of the French presidential elections was the massive turnout of voters (in a nation where voting is not compulsory): some 84% of eligible citizens. Clearly, few people heeded the instructions of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme rightwing ex-candidate who had asked his followers to abstain from voting.

The left, behind Ségolène Royal, was soundly thrashed. Most people who voted for François Bayrou in the first round did not choose the Socialist candidate in the second round. Will the left succeed in getting its act together before the parliamentary elections in five weeks' time? This is not at all obvious, because many Socialists will be tempted to blame Ségolène Royal for the present defeat, and this will tend to destabilize the left during the forthcoming campaign.

As for Sarkozy, he'll be literally going out of circulation from now until his investiture on 16 May. His speech this evening, after the announcement of his victory, was forceful and relatively reassuring, in that he underlined the need for national reconciliation and union. In words addressed to the USA, he insisted upon the fact that humanity's major challenge is the planetary combat against global warming. He also referred to the interesting theme of a Mediterranean Union, which would be a link between Europe and Africa.

In 1983, at the age of 28, Sarkozy became the mayor of Neuilly, an upper-class residential suburb to the west of Paris. Ten years later, by which time he had become an elected parliamentarian, Sarkozy broke into the news for his courageous role in handling negotiations with a crazy armed guy, calling himself Human Bomb, who had entered a kindergarten in Neuilly and taken 21 kids as hostages. I remember listening to news on this dramatic affair on my car radio as I crossed France in the summer of 1993, to start work in Grenoble. Finally, the elite police force known as the RAID [Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion] burst into the kindergarten while Human Bomb was dozing, and filled his skull with lead. I've always imagined that this affair symbolized the start of Sarkozy's ascension in the world of politics and police.

Death of a singer, birth of a legend

Popular French singer Grégory Lemarchal was 23 years old when he died a week ago of a terrible hereditary disease, cystic fibrosis, for which there is not yet any permanent remedy. In 2004 he was the winner of a French TV talent quest called Star Academy.

The sudden death of this angel-faced youth, which could well transform his brief glory into a legend, will hopefully play a positive role in the constant quest for body-organ donors, not to mention the collection of financial donations to aid in the on-going research in the domain of cystic fibrosis. [Click here to visit the Grégory Lemarchal website.]

Clean car, dirty thoughts

I seem to recall that a political leader stated recently that small business is the backbone of Australia's prosperity. In Queensland, the proprietor of a strip-tease joint concocted the brilliant idea of a car-wash service carried out by semi-nude women.

Car owner: "I'll just hang around while you're washing my car to make sure you don't run into any problems."

Washerwoman: "Yeah, if you hang around, you might be able to give me a hand."

Car owner: "No sweat. It's so bloody hot, I wouldn't mind a wash job for myself."

Washerwoman: "Yeah, I'll see what we can do. Just hang around."

The service is ecologically correct, since it uses recycled water. Besides, since the washing operations are performed in a closed shed, there's no problem of what is referred to in Australia as "public decency".

In Victorian London, there was an unwritten law that gave citizens the freedom to do almost anything they felt like doing, even if it infringed morality, provided they didn't do their naughty stuff in public, in the streets... "where it might frighten the horses".

That backside vision of the washerwoman astride her stick horse could indeed arouse the senses of nearby beasts.

Influencing people

During my trip out to Australia last year, I was thrilled to receive an unexpected gift from my young sister Jill. In an outdoor market, probably in the vicinity of her home town of Woolgoolga, she had come upon a copy of a book that fascinated me when I was a teenager: Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was surprised that Jill, who's much younger than me, would have remembered that her brother had come in contact with Carnegie's famous book. Retrospectively, I imagine that my interest in this book stemmed from the fact that the very idea of trying deliberately to win friends and influence people was most exotic in the backwoods environment in which I had grown up, where quiet timidity, reticence and inhibition were our primary social qualities. My discovery of Carnegie's advice was akin to the parson's daughter opening stealthily a copy of Sex Manual for the Single Girl.

I've already pointed out in this blog [click here to see my Therapy post] that I'm an unconditional fan of the Dilbert comic strip, whose creator, Scott Adams, runs a marvelous blog. From time to time, Scott has alluded with enthusiasm to a book by Robert Cialdini, Influence — The Psychology of Persuasion, whose first edition appeared almost a quarter of a century ago.

Normally, these days, I'm no longer keen on this kind of psychological literature, since I've become more interested in science, computers and dogs than in people. But, based upon my assumption that anything that's good for the creator of Dilbert is good for me too, I ordered the revised edition from Amazon. It arrived yesterday, and my rapid reading confirms that this is indeed Dale Carnegie in overdrive: choice intellectual fodder, in fact a gourmet dinner, for a social critic such as Scott Adams. Cialdini's book is in the same heavyweight category as The Peter Principle. It reveals the ways in which smart individuals have unearthed rules of conduct enabling them to impose their will upon others, thereby achieving power of an economic, political or even religious kind.

If this blog were penned by an out-of-phase literary critic who waits a quarter of a century before deciding that a book deserves to be read, I would say that Cialdini's Influence is a must. In Carnegie's country, the cover says it's a National Bestseller. With a bit of time and perseverance, it could even become an international bestseller.

Time for Tzipi?

This 48-year-old woman (an Israeli lawyer, former Mossad agent, and a Likud member elected to the Knesset in 1999) has always impressed me greatly. I would describe her in Middle East parlance as a pragmatic dove. In the context of the current leadership crisis that has struck Israel abruptly (after the findings of the Winograd report on the misconduct of last year's war in Lebanon), observers suggest that Tzipi Livni is of the same mettle as the great Golda Meir [1898-1978].

Clearly, sooner or later, Ehud Olmert must leave the scene. The sooner the better (in my modest opinion). And Livni has had the courage to say so, even though it must have hurt her morally to speak out against her former political colleague.

These days, few people would be audacious enough to predict a great future (whatever that might mean) for the Israeli nation and the Palestinians, for there are so many gigantic problems that have not yet found even the beginning of a solution. But I would not hesitate in predicting a great future for this exceptional lady named Tzipi Livni.

Risk of turbulence ahead

I've already stated my opinion that the "tough guy" image of Nicolas Sarkozy could become a provocation for countless individuals in France, with nothing to win or lose, who would simply wish to stir up trouble in the streets. For many years, these people have been referred to by a vague generic term: the casseurs (literally, the "smashers"). They're well-organized. Often, they assemble on the fringe of authentic political demonstrations and go into action when everybody, including the police, is least expecting it. There's no sense in hiding the fact that these individuals exist, and that they see Nicolas Sarkozy almost as a sporting opponent, whom they're "out to get". As depicted in the following graffiti in a nearby village, Sarko is often relegated (unjustly, it must be said) to the role of a diabolical Fascist:

This morning, Ségolène Royal stated that Nicolas Sarkozy is "a risk" for France. She refers to her opponent as "the candidate of the hard right-wing", and warns that, if Sarkozy were victorious next Sunday, "there will be very strong tensions throughout the country". She added that Sarkozy's bid for power was "dangerous in terms of a concentration of power, of brutality, of lies".

The former Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin has been equally explicit on the question of Sarkozy. He denounced "the violence of some of his words, his tendency towards demagogy and clientélisme (patronage), and the impression he gives of being constantly in overdrive".

There's no guaranty, of course, that "smashers" would be more conciliatory with Ségolène Royal, if she were elected. After all, she has been quite outspoken on youthful delinquency, and has even evoked the strange idea of calling upon the army to force some civic common-sense into the behavior of offenders. The big difference between Ségo and Sarko is that the lady is not generally looked upon explicitly as a symbol of provocation.

Rebirth of a new old nation?

Tony Blair has had no more luck in his bid to achieve a political victory in Scotland than in dealing militarily with Iraq. And the Scottish Nationalist Party of Alex Salmond, committed to national independence, appears to have made a giant breakthrough.

When you think about it, if Scotland were to gain independence, there would be fabulous retirement jobs in Edinburgh for Bush, Blair and Howard: respectively US, UK and Australian ambassadors to the new nation... unless, of course, by that time, they had already accepted similar posts in Iraq.