A taste of French stale political debate

2012 won’t only be an important political year in the U.S, but in France as well, since a new presidential election will take place. And, because the system of primaries has been adopted by the main parties, the French political elite is starting to sharpen its knives.

For the right, things will be relatively simple, since Nicolas Sarkozy will run for president again[1] and shouldn’t face any opposition within the ranks of his party, the UMP.

But for the left, things are much more complicated; as usual, the Socialist caciques are fighting each other and their primaries will probably turn out to be pretty bloody. Unless they stop quibbling for a moment and start listening to the current polls that give a good advantage to a still undeclared candidate, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, current boss of the IMF.

Strauss-Kahn is a veteran Socialist, a Professor of Economics and a lawyer, a former minister, a former deputy mayor of Sarcelles and a former candidate to the Socialist primaries for the 2007 presidential election[2]. Since he took the IMF presidency in 2007, he has stayed away from the French political spotlight, even though he has kept well informed of its internal game.  He is not a charismatic figure neither a very popular one in the way Chirac is, for instance; you don’t picture DSK well at ease at the Salon of Agriculture, shaking hands with French peasants, patting the croup of the cows or happily toasting with Creole dancers. Last year, his image was even tarnished by some accusations of sexual harassment against IMF employees. For months, he was the dreamed target of many stand-up comedians who kept joking about his unquenchable sexual thirst… And yet, he is currently the most preferred political figure from the Left, and so far, according to some recent polls, the only candidate who could beat Nicolas Sarkozy. His IMF mandate will expire at the end of the year, and his wife, a famous French political journalist[3], has recently hinted that he wouldn’t run for a second mandate but rather go back home and maybe get one more shot at the Socialist primaries…

So the Right has taken notice and this week-end, Christian Jacob, head of the UMP deputies at the National Assembly[4], during a radio interview, was the first one to open fire when he declared that to him, [Dominique Strauss-Kahn] 

“is not the image of France, the image of the rural France, the image of the France of terroirs[5] and territories, the one we love, the one to which I’m attached to.[6]”

His words were backed up a few hours later by the current Prime minister, Francois Fillon.Listening to Christian Jacob, you would think that France still has an important rural population, and that agriculture still makes up for a large portion of the GDP.  The truth is, only 25% of the French still live in the country and agriculture only represents 1.8% of the GDP.

So, why all this fuss about DSK not picturing well a small and dwindling part of the French population?

Here’s the thing, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a Jew and, as a Jew, sociologically speaking, he doesn’t represent the rural France[7]. Does it mean that a French living in the country wouldn’t vote for him or feel that DSK wouldn’t be able to pay attention to his problems?!

That’s not Christian Jacob’s point, anyway. His point is very clear. In 2011, there are still people in France for whom the possibility of having a president who would happen to be Jewish is so upsetting that they can’t keep their mouth shut. That they spontaneously-and in itself, it is extremely depressing- use the same rhetoric as the one abundantly used under the Vichy regime and before. Here is Xavier Vallat’s declaration after Leon Blum’s election in 1936 as President du Conseil[8]:

“For the first time, this ancient Gallo-Roman country will be governed by a Jew (…) To govern this nation of peasants that France is, it is better to have someone whose origins, even very modest, root themselves in the bowels of our soil rather than having a subtle Talmudist.”[9]

Who was Xavier Vallat? Xavier Vallat was an extreme right politician who became the first Head of the General Commissary of the Jewish Affairs, created in March 1941. He actively participated in the development of the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy regime.

So, here we are, more than 60 years after Vichy, after the Vel d’Hiv, after Drancy, after the 77.320 French Jews murdered by the Nazis, 4 years after Ilan Halimi[1] and yet we can still smell it. That putrid, sickening, nauseating odor.

 And don’t tell me you can’t smell it.

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[1] A 23 year old vendor  abducted,tortured during three weeks in Paris' suburbs and finally killed because he was Jewish.

[1] He will have to make with two rivals from the right, Dominique de Villepin, former Prime Minister under Chirac’s rule who has created last winter his own party and is openly at war with Sarkozy, his longtime rival; Francois Bayrou, president of the Modem, a centrist party is also at war with Sarkozy.

[2] Segolene Royale won the primaries and was then defeated by Sarkozy.

[3] Anne Sinclair. She hosted for years a well-established political TV show, 7/7.

[4] The French John Brenner, then..

[5] Terroir: a vey loaded word, meaning the countryside, the conservative, Catholic France, traditionally referred to in opposition to a  modern, multicultural image of France.

[6] I translated ;  here it is in French: DSK “n’est pas l’image de la France, l’image de la France rurale, l’image de la France des terroirs et des territoires, celle que l’on aime bien, celle à laquelle je suis attaché”.

[7] Rural France as in : Catholic, conservative, the “true and only France” for the extreme –right, the France of the Crusades, of Jeanne d’Arc and of the Monarchy…

[8] The equivalent of the prime minister position under the third republic.

[9] Laurent Joly (2007), « Antisémites et antisémitisme à la Chambre des députés sous la III^e République », Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 3/2007 (n° 54-3), p. 63-90. Here it is in French : « Pour la premiere fois, ce vieux pays gallo-romain sera gouverne par un juif (…) Pour gouverner cette nation paysanne qu’est la France, il vaut mieux avoir quelqu’un dont les origines, si modestes soient-elles, se perdent dans les entrailles de notre sol, qu’un talmudiste subtil »

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Cheerleading, or the praise of the empty brain.

Yesterday afternoon, as every Wednesday, I took my daughter to her gymnastics class. Most of the time, I don’t stay, I go run some errands but yesterday I didn’t have anything to do but wait. So I sat there and read a novel for awhile. But after the warm-up exercises were done, some girls on the main mat started making so much noise that I couldn’t concentrate on my reading anymore.

They were part of the new cheerleading class. Girls from about 6 to 10 years old were learning to clap their hands at the same time and to scream in sync “Go, Team, go!” and “Win, Team, win!” Some of them already had that kind of ridiculously glittery and shinny skirt on.

To me, it looked pathetic and repulsive.  A “cheerleading class,” how odd and oxymoronic this expression is!  Why in the world would you teach someone to “cheer” upon command??  Apart from America, the only other nations where indeed you had/have to learn to cheer on command were/are the ones that experience(d) dictatorial regimes: Germany, former USSR, East Germany, China , Iran, North Korea, the Gaza strip were/are great places for organized cheerleading. But why on earth would someone in a free country pay $75 a month to have his daughter coerced into learning to repeat meaningless mantras, like that one: “Rah, Rah, Rah! Ski-u-mah, Hoo-Rah! Hoo-Rah! Varsity! Varsity! Varsity, Minn-e-So-Tah!”[1] ??

I had always assumed that cheering was a spontaneous, natural demonstration of approval. If  you start “teaching” it, it turns into something pretty ugly, into brainwashing, into propaganda, and to my twisted mind come immediately black and white images from the Nuremberg demonstrations and the crowd waving, cheering in sync the Nazis legions; I see North Koreans schoolchildren in their old-fashioned sports uniforms chanting and clapping for their national beloved leader. I see Palestinians kids wearing green Islamic headbands cheering the names of their “martyred”. Cheerleading is the exact opposite of critical thinking, of developing one’s unique personality.

Cheerleading is also all about learning to support a team because it is YOUR team. Why do you have to support the GREEN team rather than the RED team? Because the GREEN team is YOUR team. Don’t you get it? The players in green go to the same school as you so you have to support them. Not the red ones. This is exactly how you teach kids to develop parochial, gregarious spirit. You don’t teach them to love a sport or to respect any player and to cheer any player for a good move he just did, no, you teach them to LOVE the GREEN ones and to HATE the RED ones. You teach kids to love similar people, kids who go to the same school, to the same church, who speak the same language, who eat the same thing, who think the same way, who live in the same country. You teach them to hate people who are different. Because they wear RED jerseys instead of GREEN jerseys, because they go to a different church or they don’t go to church at all; because they speak a different language and live in a different country. And so on…

I also wonder why the feminists groups of the seventies didn’t put an end to that chauvinistic activity. Do you know a more gender discriminatory activity than cheerleading: the guys are the ones who play; they are the champions, the new heroes; the girls only get to cheer them on, to say the praise of the strong warriors before they go to war…and to comfort them when they come back, at the end of the game. On and outside the football field.  

And that is not all: cheerleading, as a respected and valued activity, comforts and perpetuates a very outdated, offensive and humiliating image of the “perfect” woman: a brainless Barbie doll[2]. The message is: better use your time learning to jump in the air, spread your legs, comb your hair, move your hips and boobs, display that stupid smile and vacant look at all times rather than using your time taking additional advance classes in whatever academic or artistic subject available in your school. It is such a wrong message to send to a young girl. It is the same old “Use your butt not your brain” again and again. 

I’m appalled by the thought that schools (by definition, places of learning) can not only waste money on cheerleading programs but also consider cheerleaders as role models, as leaders. Any female monkey would certainly be able to become an awesome cheerleader. But to teach a monkey to become a leader, even with all the chicks from the Dallas Cowboys cheering on her/him that would be almost[3] impossible.

Yes, cheerleading is such a medievalist activity.

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[1] According to Wikipedia, this is the first mantra of the cheerleading “history” : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheerleading

[2] The original one: the blond with the long legs, big boobs and that stupid cheerful smile…

[3] Hum, wasn’t Sarah Palin a cheerleader?

Color blinding Mark Twain and a few others.

Some English literature professor from Alabama just had a wonderful idea: deleting all the “Nigger” words (more than 200) from Huckleberry Finn and replacing them by “Slaves.[1]

Why didn’t we think of that before? Yeah, every time a word bothers you in a literary work just delete it and replace it by something more placating, less intrusive.

You don’t want people, the “general readers” as this “professor” calls us (by the way, who is a general reader?), to try to understand why Twain, although furiously fighting racism and bigotry in his book, used this derogative word.

You don’t want people to try to understand how White people for example, viewed others in the 1880s.

You don’t want people, when reading, to make the effort to really read. That is to say, to replace the book in its historical context, to distinguish between what the author thought and what the society in which he lived generally thought and so forth…and if the writer shared his time’s prejudices, what it tells us about that time.

No, no real (English) literature professor would want his students to do so. Please, no complications. Just delete that annoying word. Just pretend that slavery, discrimination, racism, the KKK and so forth didn’t exist. That racism today doesn't exist. That we live in such a wonderful world that we don’t need to care about how our ancestors thought and viewed the world.

In order to help that genial English literature professor, I came up with a list and a few examples of literary works that would also need a bit of trimming:

The Merchant of Venice, of course, would need a great deal of trimming: all the Jewish characters, and especially Shylock, reflect Shakespeare’s Christian society view on Jews, which is not flattering, to say the least (all the “usual” anti-Semitic stereotypes are there: greed, ruthlessness, cruelty, a taste for revenge, cunningness, hate of the Christians…). So, let’s not hesitate, let’s delete them from the drama! And let’s pretend that anti-Semitism never existed in Shakespeare’s time or in any other time. Remember, the ground rule is: Don’t force your “general readers” and “young readers” to REALLY READ.

Tintin in Congo. Yes, this one also needs a huge amount of cleaning: published in the 1930s, the “comic” book offers all the racist and ethnocentric stereotypes that were common at that time (and Hergé shared them all, without any doubt[2]): Africans are showed as idiotic (they speak “petit nègre”, a very bad French), lazy, coward, gullible and their physical traits are, of course, very caricatural (see picture).  Actually, there was a debate not so long ago about whether the original version of the book should still be published, or if it should be published but with a foreword for the readers to make them aware of the stereotypes[3] or if only the expunged version (that Hergé published way later, in the 70s) should be published. To that, I would say, let’s apply that Alabama’s professor wise rule: let’s redraw and rewrite the comic book! Let’s forget about the first version! Colonialism didn’t exist!

Madame Bovary. Yes, Flaubert’s masterpiece also needs some rewriting, as well as most of the 19^th century French literature. Look at the way women are pictured through the novel main character: selfish, ignorant, stupid, concupiscent, heretic (she commits suicide), amoral and so forth…yes, Flaubert’s portrait of a contemporary bourgeoise woman is quite offensive for the sexe faible[4]. Let’s erase that character from the book and rename it Monsieur Bovary. After all, who cares about sexism?!

Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. One of Balzac’s most intriguing characters is Vautrin, aka Jacques Collin, one of the first gay characters of the “great” literature. His homosexuality is one facets of his complex personality: Vautrin is a dark character, manipulative, very intelligent, extremely strong and persistent, a débauché, and a pederast, as gays used to be called. Not really your typical next-door overfriendly gay neighbor. Because this character could trouble and make young gay readers feel guilty about their sexual orientation, I suggest erasing the character from all Balzac’s novels.  Enough with the gay stereotypes! They have enough on their plates already!

Le Chat Botté[5].  Enough with the Ogre bashing! How come the Ogre community is always represented by dumb, stupid, vicious characters? Look at what happens to that Ogre in Perrault’s tale: although he is a powerful magician (he can change himself in any kind of animal), he gets fooled by a cat! Remember, the cat dares him to change himself into a mouse and that idiotic of an ogre does it and gets eaten by the cat! I believe it is not really mindful of the Ogre’s community feelings and that this tale is not appropriate anymore for our “young readers” and “general readers”.  They could feel really bad for the ogre and not perceive the irony and subversion of Perrault’s tale.

You see, instead of attacking that remarkable Alabama professor of English literature, we should thank him for opening a new avenue in literary studies: the rewriting of all the unpolitically correct literary works. So the “general reader” could read as he watches T.V: without thinking.

[1]  See the NYT article if you haven’t heard of it yet: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/books/05huck.html

[2] His activities and relations during the Occupation are very telling, see for example : http://www.resistances.be/tintin.html (in French)

[3] Yes, a great deal of Hergé’s readers completely miss his racism and anti-Semitism. That’s why some scholars think a kind of “warning before reading” would be useful.

[4] In English: “weak gender”…

[5] The Master Cat, by Charles Perrault.

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