The Republic of Dissent

Loving deviant sex

I’m puzzled by this:

So I put it to Glen: could he be faithful? He admitted that his escapades had begun during his marriage. Apparently, his wife wasn't into the "deviant" sex that he craved.

I raised one eyebrow. "When you say deviant sex, do you mean...?" It turned out that Glen merely wanted to experiment with bondage – I breathed a sigh of relief.

I asked him why he hadn't asked his wife to tie him up. "I couldn't do that – she's the mother of my children, for God's sake!" But he assured me that he's deleted all of the escort contacts from his phone.

Still, I knew that my relationship with Glen was doomed. He was a perfect example of what Victoria and I call the "Madonna-Whore Men", or MWMs.

According to Freudian psychology, an MWM usually goes for women who remind him of his cold, distant mother. The wife becomes the Madonna figure, and he saves his desire for "dirty" women. These guys are almost always repressed weirdos – think Norman Bates in Psycho.

I didn't want to end up as a piece of human taxidermy like Bates's mother, so on our next date I did something that I never advocate: I flipped through his phone while he was in the loo and noticed that, oddly, ALL of the stored contacts were men.

I tried three numbers at random. One was his brother, and the other two were breathy women asking when they were going to see him again.

I left before he came back, He'd blown it with a girl who would have given those escorts a run for their money in shagging him senseless. His loss.

The thing is that I don’t believe in deviant sex because once one uses that expressions s/he is making a moral point that makes the assertion timidly that whatever is happening is no longer about sex, but about something else. My point isn’t original, but I believe that it is still relevant for I have a French view of sex in the sense that I believe that it is a fruit, it can never be rich enough, but it can be dangerous when it is used as a weapon or as something other than a fruit. In other words, oranges aren’t the only fruits, but they are a fruit.

Religion and foreign policy

Globalization and French cheese

Michael Johnson has an interesting article on Globalization, modernization, and French cheese in the International Herald Tribune, which makes the point that it is difficult to mix tradition and commercialism.

Genocide denial

Arundhati Roy on Genocide denial:

Genocide Denial is a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It was probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the 19th century, when Europe was developing limited but new forms of democracy and citizens' rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies. Suddenly countries and governments began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides they had committed. "Denial is saying, in effect," says Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty Years of Denial, "that the murderers did not murder. The victims weren't killed. The direct consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide."

Of course today, when genocide politics meets the Free Market, official recognition—or denial—of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do to with historical fact or forensic evidence. Morality certainly does not enter the picture. It is an aggressive process of high-end bargaining, that belongs more to the World Trade Organisation than to the United Nations.

The currency is geopolitics, the fluctuating market for natural resources, that curious thing called futures trading and plain old economic and military might.
In other words, genocides are often denied for the same set of reasons as genocides are prosecuted. Economic determinism marinated in racial/ethnic/religious/national discrimination. Crudely, the lowering or raising of the price of a barrel of oil (or a tonne of uranium), permission granted for a military base, or the opening up of a country's economy could be the decisive factor when governments adjudicate on whether a genocide did or did not occur.

Or indeed whether genocide will or will not occur. And if it does, whether it will or will not be reported, and if it is, then what slant that reportage will take.

To be read, write economically

This scares and saddens me:

The vast majority of new writers - even the very good ones - trying to crack in to publishing with their first novel are inevitably told that times are hard for fiction right now. And indeed they are: the chance of publishers successfully launching a novel by an unknown writer on the reading public are indeed slim in an information culture where we struggle to get through 10 pages without losing focus to the buzz of media white noise. Several hundred pages can feel like too much of a commitment when there is so much information to consume.

And who could deny that the actual experience of reading a long book can feel a little arduous if it doesn't really make your heart sing? It is much like eating a delicious meal in an American restaurant - lovely, but you have to leave at least quarter of the portion behind or else you'll explode. More than once I've been making my way through an 800-page novel only to conclude around the page 600 mark that I'm perfectly satisfied with my reading experience, indeed would recommend the book to others, but feel no particular inclination to finish.

Staining the dead: Némirovsky and purity

There is yet another article on Irène Némirovsky and her so-called legend, which too many self-righteous writers are rushing to take down in the name of purity. I wrote about this last year and I’m surprise that people still find it appetizing to stain the memory of the dead by charging them with crimes against which there is no defense for the simple reason that  vindication or even absolution requires presence and the dead are absent. The article in question is Scandale Francaise - The Nasty Truth about a New Literary Heroine and it is written by Ruth Franklin. The first thing that she gets wrong is the title of her article Scandale is a masculine work in French and therefore it should Scandale Français. The title of her article is not the only that she gets wrong for she seems to  be under the impression that Némirovsky has been made an heroine by people who don’t know anything about her and believe more than a incredibly victim of the Shoah and that therefore she must be exposed for her imperfections:

The real irony of the Suite Francaise sensation is not that a great work of literature was waiting unread in a notebook for sixty years before finally being brought to light. It is that this accomplished but unexceptional novel, having acquired the dark frame of Auschwitz, posthumously capped the career of a writer who made her name by trafficking in the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes. As Weiss's important and prodigiously researched biography makes clear, Némirovsky was the very definition of a self-hating Jew. Does that sound too strong? Well, here is a Jewish writer who owed her success in France entre deux guerres in no small measure to her ability to pander to the forces of reaction, to the fascist right. Némirovsky's stories of corrupt Jews -- some of them even have hooked noses, no less! -- appeared in right-wing periodicals and won her the friendship of her editors, many of whom held positions of power in extreme-right political circles. When the racial laws in 1940 and 1941 cut off her ability to publish, she turned to those connections to seek special favors for herself, and even went so far as to write a personal plea to Marshal Pétain [Maréchal Pétain]. And after her arrest her husband, Michel Epstein, pleaded with the German ambassador for her release, arguing that "it seems...unjust and illogical to me that the Germans would imprison a woman who, though originally Jewish, has no sympathy, and all her books show this...for Judaism." About her books he was correct. But what seems even more unjust and illogical is that such a person should now be lionized as a significant writer of the Holocaust. [Emphasis added]

I agree with what Scott Esposito writes on this matter, but I must go farther. I find the above paragraph problematic for two reasons. The first is that it asserts that Irène Némirosky was a self-hating Jew, which is inflammatory and incredibly dismissive and narrow-minded. It takes away from her the status of victim to imply that she doesn’t deserve to be considered a victim of the Shoah because she agreed with the people who gazed her at Auschwitz. In other words, it is like arguing that a woman who isn’t want to be viewed as a woman and who has a troublesome view of women and sex cannot be the victim of rape. The second reason is that I think that it isn’t only wrong, but also distasteful to say that a “significant writer of the Holocaust” cannot be flawed and has to fit a certain profile because it placed back the emphasis on victims by putting them on trial for their shortcomings when they are not the accused. I would argue that Némirovsky is the perfect person to become a significant writer of the Holocaust precisely because her case isn’t simple and because she has an ambiguous and complicated relationship with her roots and identity. Irène Némirovsky was a woman and a great writer who died in the Holocaust. It is impossible to read her work and to romanticize the period within which she lived and to understand that during that time, it was possible to have made bad choices in life and to be heroic. I thought that one of the lessons of the Shoah was that victims are people not objects and that they are entitled to their individuality and to their grievances and mourning. If we start by saying that Irène Némirovsky isn’t clean enough to be admired for her talent and that she doesn’t deserve to be associated with the Shoah, where do we stop? Do we start to divide between the good and bad victims of the Holocaust and do we say to those who survived who were like Némirovsky before the start of the carnage that they should be ashamed of themselves and that they are less of a victim than the good one. Of this discussion isn’t just sterile and offensive, but silly. Qui plus que les innocents ont le droit d’avoir les mains?w Whom more than the innocent are allowed to have dirty hands?

Evil, History, and Europe

Tony Judt on Evil and Postwar Europe:

Yes, the problem of evil in the last century, to invoke Arendt once again, took the form of a German attempt to exterminate Jews. But it is not just about Germans and it is not just about Jews. It is not even just about Europe, though it happened there. The problem of evil —of totalitarian evil, or genocidal evil —is a universal problem. But if it is manipulated to local advantage, what will then happen (what is, I believe, already happening) is that those who stand at some distance from the memory of the European crime—because they are not Europeans, or because they are too young to remember why it matters—will not understand how that memory relates to them and they will stop listening when we try to explain.

In short, the Holocaust may lose its universal resonance. We must hope that this will not be the case and we need to find a way to preserve the core lesson that the Shoah really can teach: the ease with which people—a whole

There is no easy answer to this problem. What seems obvious to West Europeans today is still opaque to many East Europeans, just as it was to West Europeans themselves forty years ago. Moral admonitions from Auschwitz that loom huge on the memory screen of Europeans are quite invisible to Asians or Africans. And, perhaps above all, what seems self-evident to people of my generation is going to make diminishing sense to our children and grandchildren. Can we people—can be defamed, dehumanized, and destroyed. But we shall get nowhere unless we recognize that this lesson could indeed be questioned, or forgotten: the trouble with lessons, as the Gryphon observed, is that they really do lessen from day to day. If you do not believe me, go beyond the developed West and ask what lessons Auschwitz teaches. The responses are not very reassuring.preserve a European past that is now fading from memory into history? Are we not doomed to lose it, if only in part?

Maybe all our museums and memorials and obligatory school trips today are not a sign that we are ready to remember but an indication that we feel we have done our penance and can now begin to let go and forget, leaving the stones to remember for us. I don't know: the last time I visited Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, bored schoolchildren on an obligatory outing were playing hide-and-seek among the stones. What I do know is that if history is to do its proper job, preserving forever the evidence of past crimes and everything else, it is best left alone. When we ransack the past for political profit—selecting the bits that can serve our purposes and recruiting history to teach opportunistic moral lessons— we get bad morality and bad history.

Flashy nothingness

Another quote on the Sarkozy’s politics of flashy nothingness:

FRANCE IS another country; they do things differently there. Or do they? The enduring popular belief that the French hold the franchise on emotional intelligence when it comes to love, sex, marriage and fidelity has been very publicly - and quite untypically - put to the test by their new president, not to mention the two women who have most recently commanded his hormones and his heart: his ex-wife, Cecilia Sarkozy and his new maybe-wife, Carla Bruni, whom he married secretly in a civil ceremony in the Elysée Palace on January 10.

[…] Has President Sarkozy been "globalised"? Has he become both exploiter and victim of the celebrity culture and tabloid values which are more typical of British and American public life than that of France? If so, then he has his defenders, mainly among his political allies. "The French people will have to get used to modernity," his education minister, Xavier Darcos, has said. "There is nothing more natural than to show ourselves as we are, to be transparent, open, as you would expect a modern couple to be."

Hmm. But whose modernity does Sarkozy espouse? The personal style of one French politician and his consort may be no more than passing entertainment for the rest of the world, like the showy uxoriousness of Tony and Cherie Blair or (pre-Lewinsky) Bill and Hillary Clinton. But to the introspective French, ever jealous of their national identity, ever ready to man the barricades against its corruption by the forces of popular culture and global standardisation, the president's behaviour is worryingly aberrant.

Barack, Bill, Hillary, and I

I am sick and tired of the Democratic primaries. I have stopped enjoying the whole thing because it doesn’t fell like an election anymore, but like a titanic struggle for the soul of a party, the Democratic Party who never had one in the first place. I have decided to stop watching until the whole thing is settled. Even as spectator I feel dirty just watching and more importantly, I feel cheated because I don’t like the narrative that is developing. I support Hillary, but I don’t hate Barack, and I’m not even bother by the fact that Bill is feeling compel to play as much of role in Hillary’s campaign as she did in his by being aggressive and by putting her before himself. I have to admit that it is hard to watch the whole thing and not to think of the Democrats as wimps who can be lovable at times, but also so irritating with their obsession with purity. They, with the French Socialists, are the only party members capable of turning what was supposed to be a blockbuster election into an all or nothing contest all just because they have just realized that Barack is Barack, Hillary is Hillary, and Bill is Bill. Suddenly, the narrative is that there is something wrong or deficient within some if not all of them because they are trying to win. I don’t know what is going to happen, but I feel that something has been broken, not irreparably, but broken.  The Democratic party and an apolitical electorate wants to find love within this election instead of just finding someone that is going to first do the j.o.b of president, before thinking of big ideas that have not effects on the lives of the people. I love politics, but I don’t like when it becomes like a religion where it is necessary either to have a messiah that will change America or to defeat the Antichrist who is the cause of all the wrongs of the country. So, I am doing more than turning the volume down, I am tuning out because I don’t want to watch the crash, the two cars colliding, even though I will be there at the end to pick up the dead and help heal the wounded.

Amis's abyss

Christopher Tayler on Martin Amis’s latest The Second Plane, which focuses on 9/11:

How did Amis - who has written some good novels and used to be a sharp and funny critic - end up throwing so much effort into arguing that suicide bombers are interested in death? It's not easy to say, but his sense of himself as a novelist seems to be part of the problem, and not only because it often makes him address September 11 from the perspective of "the writer", with digressions on FR Leavis and so on. "All of us are excited by what we most deplore," he once wrote in a review of a book by Joan Didion, "'especially,' as Miss Didion says in another context, 'if we are writers'." This is certainly true of Amis, who has steeped himself in the literature of September 11, though part of him seems to disapprove of its appeal. (Hence, maybe, his otherwise mysterious emphasis on "boredom" as a key by-product of terrorism: to a Nabokovian aesthete, this is powerful dispraise.)

Judging from the stories reprinted in The Second Plane, and the pages from his abandoned novella in the newest issue of Granta, terrorism isn't a workable subject for Amis's brand of fiction. In his op-eds, on the other hand, he seems more like a novelist than a political writer, inhabiting ideas like characters, trying to bring them to life and dramatise opposing viewpoints. The arguments that stimulate his imagination aren't automatically good ones: it's less boring to picture your nine-year-old daughter's forced marriage under a global Islamist caliphate than it is to lay out a series of judicious qualifiers. It's also more novelistic to personalise things, to embody abstract arguments in resonant details, and for Amis this usually comes down to the details of radical Islam's version of "the male idea". Qutb, for example, would have been less puritanical, the novelist suggests bathetically, had he not lacked the wherewithal to get laid.

His arguments draw on various sources, with Berman exerting the strongest influence. Hitchens and Sam Harris beef up the muscular secularism, and Bernard Lewis helps with the Islamic background. But the most depressing piece in the book opens with the following sentence: "Mark Steyn is an oddity: his thoughts and themes are sane and serious - but he writes like a maniac." Steyn, a jocose Canadian columnist, is the author of a US bestseller detailing the Islamofascist takeover of Europe that's being brought about, he says, by a low non-Muslim birth rate resulting from social liberalism and profligate welfare states.

I think that Tayler takes his obvious disdain for Martin Amis a step too far and proves in fact that there is something “Amisian” within him. He, too, suffers from the same illness that plagues Amis’s work:  his imagination and logic are both wounded by solipsism and egocentrism. He is unable to imagine a world where he isn’t right, where his views aren’t representative of the “truth,” and everything that is good. The problem with Martin Amiss and Christopher Tayler is that it isn’t impossible to have a dialogue with them because since they assume that they omniscient and omnipotent, any dialogue becomes a bloody fight where the other side isn’t only wrong, but  petty and despicable. After reading Tayler’s review, I wonder why if the Second Plane was that bad, he couldn’t just focus on its shortcomings instead of reminding his readers of all of the ones of Martin Amis. Maybe his point is that it is impossible to live in Amis’s abyss and to produce good literary works; if he is right, literature is in trouble and will soon be replaced by fluffy politics.

Behind Simone de Beauvoir's derrière

Jane Shilling write this on the controversial decision by Le Nouvel Observateur to celebrate Simone de Beauvoir’s 100 birthday by publishing a naked and retouched (they made her body less fat and less old) picture of her on its cover:

In case you’d missed the point, Nouvel Obs illustrated this tribute with a photograph of the great philosopheuse starkers (to see it, go to tinyurl.com/2talsp). The picture, a naked back view, was taken in 1952 by the American photographer Art Shay, when de Beauvoir was visiting her lover, the American writer Nelson Algren. Chay, now 85, insists that he didn’t snatch the picture, that de Beauvoir heard the shutter click, turned round, laughing, and said: “Naughty boy!” “She wasn’t bothered,” recalls the aged snapper. “Like Nelson, she had very loose morals.”

[…]The reaction of de Beauvoir’s admirers to the Nouvel Obs piece and its accompanying photograph was pained. A small demonstration of the feminist group Les Chiennes de Garde assembled outside the magazine’s offices, waving placards calling for Jean Daniel, the proprietor, to publish pictures of his own bare buttocks as well as those of various male philosophers. “My first thought on seeing the magazine,” said Florence Montreynaud, an authority on the relationship between de Beauvoir and her life’s companion, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, “was that they would never have considered putting a picture of Sartre’s bottom on the front of Le Nouvel Observateur.”

This is certainly true. And anyone who has seen a picture of the front elevation of Jean-Paul Sartre, fully clothed, will instantly understand why. […] Still, it isn’t the beauty of the naked portrait that’s at issue here, but its intimacy, and specifically the question of whether putting it on the front of Le Nouvel Observateur was a kind of violation, as the Chiennes de Garde and others claim. It has been said that de Beauvoir, whose father told her that she was ugly, and who wrote at 51, “I loathe my appearance”, would have been affronted by the intimate exposure. Then again, it depends what you mean by intimate. De Beauvoir herself was a ruthless exposer of other people’s intimacies. Sixteen years after they parted, in his last interview, Nelson Algren was still hopping mad about the use she made of his love letters in The Prime of Life. “Hell, love letters should be private,” he said. “It was an appalling thing to do.” She was bitterly criticised, too, for her unsparing descriptions of Sartre’s physical and mental decline in her memoir, La Cérémonie des Adieux.

To this you might argue that the force of words is different from that of images, and in any case, a writer is entitled to make use of the material her own life throws up. So let us consider another image of de Beauvoir, which appears (as the naked picture does not), in Deirdre Bair’s elegantly candid biography. It is a picture of the philosopher as an old woman, sitting ravaged with grief by the open grave of her great love, Sartre. She looks utterly undone. And although no one now can know what she might have felt about the various pictures of herself, it seems to me that of the two photographs, the pretty bare behind and the grief-stricken old woman, the second is by far the more terribly intimate.

It is true that Le Nouvel Obs would have never dared to publish a naked and private picture of Sartre or any serious male philosopher. However, in spite of  the double standards and the wrongness and shamefulness of the decision to undress Simone de Beauvoir to reduce her emblematic status to a naked derrière who wasn’t acceptable enough to be exposed without being retouched, I can’t muster the energy to get mad about it, because none of the happenings of this scandalous affair surprise me. I wouldn’t have expected any less of a magazine which is nothing more than a merchandise for after al what is can be a better marketing ploy in our times than to undress serious women especially when they can fight back to reminder them that no matter how intelligent and iconic they become, they can still be f*cked. The truth is, to be preachy, that I’m not up and arms about the affair of the naked de Beauvoir because I don’t’ think that a stolen naked picture of her has any effect on her legacy or even touches her legend. I think that the whole thing says nothing about de Beauvoir, but more about notre époque, our times. It shows simply that since her death, not much has changed in the sense that it is impossible to point to somebody and to say that s/he is de Beauvoir’s heir. What I’m saying is that the space, which de Beauvoir left is still unoccupied and that the big picture is that people are still living in a world that she would not only recognized, but be astonished by the fact that almost 60 years after she wrote Le Deuxième Sexe, much if not all of she said is still relevant.

Critiquing Post-Colonial Thinking

Achille Mbembe gives the following definition of Post-Colonial thinking:

In postcolonial thinking, race is the wild region, the beast, of European humanism. To borrow Castoriadis's terms on racism, I'd say that the beast puts it more or less this way: "I alone possess value. But I can only be of value, as myself, if others, as themselves, are without value".
Postcolonial thinking aims to take the beast's skeleton apart, to flush out its favourite places of habitation. More radically, it seeks to know what it is to live under the beast's regime, what kind of life it offers, and what sort of death people die from. It shows that there is, in European colonial humanism, something that has to be called unconscious self-hatred. Racism in general, and colonial racism in particular, represents the transference of this self-hatred to the Other.
There is a second level in the postcolonial critique of European humanism and universalism which, if the term had not given rise to so many misunderstandings, could be called biopolitical. The face of Europe which was experienced by the colony (and before that, under slavery, by the "plantation"), and which gradually became familiar, was far from being that of liberty, equality and fraternity. The totem which colonized peoples discovered behind the mask of humanism and universalism was not only deaf and blind most of the time, it was also, above all, characterized by the desire for its own death, but insofar as this death was necessarily conveyed through that of others, it was a delegated death.
It was also a place where law had nothing to do with justice but, on the contrary, was a way of starting wars, continuing them and perpetuating them; and above all a place where wealth was but a means of exercising over others the right of life and death. As a result it could be said of postcolonial thinking that it is not a critique of power as usually understood, but of force – a force that is incapable of transformation. Once again it is Fanon who has analyzed, better than anyone else, this kind of necropolitical force which, in passing through fiction, becomes sick of life or else, in an act of permanent reversion, takes death for life and life for death. That's why the colonial relationship fluctuates constantly between the desire to exploit the other (seen as racially inferior) and the temptation to eliminate him, to exterminate him.
What – thirdly - characterises postcolonial thinking is entanglement and concatenation, unveiled chiefly through its critique of identity and subjectivity. From this viewpoint it is opposed to a particular Western illusion, that there can be no subject other than in the circular, permanent referral to oneself, to an essential and inexhaustible singularity. In countering this, postcolonial thinking stresses the fact that identity arises from multiplicity and dispersion, that self-referral is only possible in the in-between, in the gap between mark and demark, in co-constitution. In this situation colonisation no longer appears as mechanical and unilateral domination forcing the subjugated into silence and inaction. Quite the reverse – the colonized person is a living, talking, conscious, active individual whose identity arises from a three-pronged movement of violation, erasure and self-rewriting.

I don’t believe in Post-Colonial thinking. No, I shouldn’t say that because it delegitimizes the criticisms that I’m about to make to explain why I feel uncomfortable with not only the expression “Post-Colonial Thinking” but also with its premises and foundations. First, I don’t think that it is too reductive to base a way of thinking on a single negative event and thus arguing that it is the sole formative for millions to people. Colonialism was a traumatic and defining event, but it is part of whole history and cannot be separated from the vast context it belongs to.  If Arundhati Roy is right when she asserts vehemently that Colonialism is a form of rape, it cannot, it shouldn’t become the focal point of constructive way of thinking. When it does, the loudest message given becomes that not that existence determines essence, but rather that traumas are essence. In other words, the narrative starts to be that once a rape occurs, it is impossible for the rape victim to be something other than a rape victim; the past is erased; the present and the future are solely conditioned by that atrocious act.

Second, I don’t believe that colonialism was a European phenomenon, that it was a product of “western” culture or philosophy if there is such a thing. I am questioning here the presumption that what Mbembe calls “European Humanism and universalism” led to Colonialism and must therefore be criticized by Post-Colonial thinking. In short, my argument is simply that Post-Colonial Thinking is limited, restrictive, and disempowering because to say things bluntly, it divinizes, willingly or unwillingly, the status of victim and elevates it to the one of omnipotent critique who cannot be wrong and cannot be criticized. Post-Colonial thinking is freedom and judgment without responsibility and because I love Camus and Sartre too much, that bothers me. 

The meaninglessness of psychobabbling Sarkozy

It’s official, Adam Gopnik neither understands nor know much about Sarkozy and France. I'm starting to suspect that it is because he doesn't want to know them because it would change the vision of a particular country that he seems to be so much in love with.  Gopnik wrote an article this summer in which he rewrote history about the French election to make Sarkozy a new age French political hero who formed with his wife the perfect political tandem that would revolutionize France. Now, he talking to us again about the changes in Sarkozy’s exposed private life (but again people and especially journalists don’t have to look and to pretend that it is the only thing that there is) and what they mean supposedly for France. By doing so, he finds an excuse to write a piece that should have been published in page 6 of the New York Post instead of the New Yorker. Sugary excerpt:

It is possible to imagine that Sarkozy is not simply a man governed by his impulses and appetites but one trying to use a situation to make a strategic point. In the past, all French politicians were involved in an organized hypocrisy, where mistresses were known, and hidden with a wink. Just as Tony Blair used the cold body of Princess Diana to underline the need for a departure from the national habit of perpetual emotional postponement, Sarko conceivably is using the very warm body of Bruni to make the point that the French need to escape from their habit of perpetual cloaked privilege—of allowing an educated élite to have prerogatives and manners different from the great mass of the people. No more subsidized mistresses; instead, openly carnal vacations.

People in Paris who know the President well, though, think that he is a man at the mercy of his impulses and appetites, who is landing willy-nilly where they lead him—and that what is particularly pathetic is his delusion that Bruni is a notch on his belt, when he is so obviously a notch on hers. The real motivation of the affair is the one thing in life stronger than feminine scorn: the never-to-be-underrated power of masculine sexual conceit, of the kind that leads Chicago writers who can’t believe how they’ve lucked out with their French girlfriend to have her nude portrait taken in the bathroom, and French Presidents who can’t believe how they’ve lucked out with their new babe to parade her around in a swimsuit, even at the price of looking a little tubby themselves. Those who loved the dignity and the sporadic secrecy and the sudden intimacies of traditional French civilization are bound to long for the days when President Mitterrand would go on long walks alone to old bookstores, and then make love to his mistress on the way home to his wife, patting his love children on the head while making sonorous pronouncements about life and destiny. The ballad of President Bling-Bling and Carla Bruni is a reminder of a deep and permanent truth, which the French once knew better than anyone: there are worse things in this world than a little organized hypocrisy.

The only problem is that meaningless psychobabble remains what it is even when the subjects are as fascinating and chic as nouveau chic as Sarkozy. After reading Gopnik’s article in the New Yorker, the one thing that a reader who knows France and knows about French politics is left wondering is where is the fromage?

Crying, guys, and sex

AL Kennedy on crying, guys, and sex:

I can never cry when there's a guy in the room without him immediately trying to hump me […] I think it's because they can't think of anything else to do. [...] Yes. It's like, ‘This'll cheer you up.' And I'm like, 'But I was actually telling you about a complicated awful relationship that I'm still recovering from. Put it away. What's wrong with you?'

Hannah Arendt and America

I spent most of my time away from this blog reading and rereading books that I needed, wanted, and had to read. I reread many of the works of Hannah Arendt. I was struck by how relevant her work still is. I enjoyed particularly reading her letters to Karl Jaspers especially the ones in which she talks about America and Europe after the Shoah. In a letter written in January 1946, she makes acute observations about America, which I think are thought-provoking. Sugary excerpt:

The high degree of practical political understanding, the passion to straighten things out, not to tolerate unnecessary misery, to see that I the midst of often cutthroat competition, the individual is guaranteed a fair chance—all of this has a flip side, however, which is that nobody worries about what cannot be changed. The attitude of this country toward death will never cease to shock us Europeans, The basic response when someone dies or when something goes irrevocably wrong is: Forget about it. That is, of course, only another expression of the country’s fundamental anti-intellectualism, which, for certain special reasons, is at its worst in the universities (Chicago University and a few other universities are not exactly glowing exceptions to this rule, but they are exceptions nonetheless.) Every Intellectual here is a member of the opposition simply because he is an intellectual, The reasons for that are the all-pervasive social conformity., the necessity to rebel against the god of success, etc. Among themselves, however, these intellectuals maintain a remarkable solidarity, and in their discussions and debates they are unfanatical and open-minded to an astonishing degree. From your acquaintance with Lasky you will have a good idea of what these people are like.

The fundamental contradiction in this country is the coexistence of political freedom and social oppression, The latter is, as I’ve already indicated, not total, but it is dangerous because the society organizes and orients itself along “racial lines.” And that holds true without exception at all social levels, from the bourgeoisie on down to the working class. This racial issue has to do with a person’s country of origin, but it is greatly aggravated by the Negro question, that is, America has a real “race” problem and not just a racial ideology. (Emphasis added)

The return

Well, I'm back. After taking more than a month to step back, I have to admit that I needed to take break and to take a step back. I have decided that I'm going to be more relaxed in my approach to blogging this year so that I can enjoy and experiment more. Anyway, I'm back. Oh, I almost forgot: Happy new year.