The Unbearable Cheeselessness Of Nicolas Sarkozy

Tomorrow the French go to the polls to vote in the first round of their presidential elections.

The French, they vote on Sundays, because, as is well known, they are against God.

They are also against Nicolas Sarkozy, the nation’s current president. Who is seeking a second term. But who now seems less likely to serve again as president, than Tom Thumb, Wile E. Coyote, or a petri dish of scabies.

Sarkozy’s own prime minister, Francois Fillon, has decreed: “the carrots are cooked.” Fillon’s predecessor, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, moans “there is no chance of us winning.”

It is said that Sarkozy was once the most popular chief executive in the history of the Fifth Republic. But today he is less popular among the French people than the German army.

It is part of being French to occasionally embark upon an unfortunate love affair. That is what happened here. The French electorate, heady with too much cheap political wine, hallucinated that Sarkozy was the man of their dreams. But, the morning after, they awoke to discover that he is actually an animal. Somehow they had slipped between the sheets with a truly strange and unnatural creature, a sort of cross between a ferris wheel and a werewolf, a Dr. Moreau melange of an avaricious dwarf and a bad-tempered pot-bellied pig.

And this realization set in almost literally upon the morning after.

Five years ago, as the electorate prepared to engage in its usual scorn of Yahweh by trudging to the polls on Sunday, victory for Sarkozy was assured. Publicly, Sarkozy piously proclaimed that, once the voters had officially spoken, he would for a time retire from public view: he would enter a monastery, there to “rest, retreat. I must prepare myself to occupy this place. I need calm and serenity to find the necessary distance.”

Privately, however, he gloated: “I will have a palace in Paris, a castle in Rambouillet, and a fort in Bregancon. That’s the way it will be.”

And, once the votes were tallied, he threw a lavish election-night party for a small coterie of his wealthiest supporters, in the swank brassiere Fouquet’s, then flew off the next morning for a leisurely cruise off the coast of Malta, aboard a 200-foot yacht owned by his billionaire corporate-raiding pal Vincent Bollore.

As Philip Gourevitch writes in a December 2011 profile in The New Yorker:

Fouquet’s and the yacht: even now, when the French discuss their contempt for Sarkozy the conversation tends to turn quickly back to the impression he made in those first few days after the election—the ostentation, the exclusivity, the strutting, nouveau-riche vulgarity.

And it’s not like he has since changed.

Last fall, presiding over the opening of a traveling exhibition of modern art, Sarkozy could fix only on money. ”That cost millions,” he observed of a painting by Yves Klein. “Is a Klein more than a Leger? Less than a Matisse?”

Among the people, he is these days known as President Bling-Bling.

Uncomfortable with his close relationship with George II, the French took to calling him “Sarko the American.” To which Sarkozy replied: “they consider it an insult, but I take it as a compliment”—an outrage that, in an earlier era, would have sent his head rolling into a basket.

When the Obamas entered the White House, Sarkozy shoveled to the Obama daughters several editions of a French comic book. “Were there not other works to offer to them that would evoke French genius?” wailed Franck Mouchi in Le Monde, opining that a non-buffoon French president would have presented Sasha and Malia with Proust.

Because he is French, Sarkozy while in office switched wives. He entered office married to Cecilia, who had earlier warned: “I don’t see myself as First Lady; it bores me.” When she left Sarkozy to return to her lover, the president took up with Carla Bruni, a woman famously bored by monogamy, who has publicly sighed that “burning desire” lasts only about two weeks. Bruni, she Sarkozy promptly squired to Euro Disney. Which caused a member of his own government to rend his garments, as “Euro Disney is the worst image in France for someone who is already seen as uncultured.”

When, during an audience with the Pope, Sarkozy pounded away at his Blackberry, French philosopher Pascal Bruckner moaned that “he desecrates everything,” pronouncing Sarkozy “a figure from Italian comedy.” Sarkozy’s former friend Bernard-Henri Levy has stated that Sarkozy, “in morphing as he has from a questionable but imposing statesman to a quaint, Warholian character, may now interest only folklorists, or students of political curiosities.” Dominique de Villepin, who will probably be charged with salvaging the wreckage Sarkozy has made of the French center-right, describes “Sarkozyism” as “the marriage on a dissecting table of the sewing machine and the umbrella. Sarkozyism is surrealism.”

Sarkozy has even heaved cheese out of the presidential palace. He doesn’t like it, so he doesn’t want it around. He also eschews wine, in favor of Diet Coke. Guzzling Diet Coke, while tossing wheels of cheese into the garbage, is the French equivalent of Barack Obama placing a baby, a crucifix, and a legless soldier on the White House lawn, and then peeing on them.

The Flower Of Being

In Feerie pour un eautre fois Celine has taken the plunge. Instead of stopping at the gates of the spirit world he has marched in. Prose has been left far behind, so has ordinary reality. Celine is making a conscious attempt to exhaust the possibilities of language. Alongside his linguistic exuberance runs the sense that language is inadequate and must give way to music and dance. Numbers are an alternative to words. The shapes and lines which the planes trace in the sky are yet another form of expression. Celine is showing a world full of signs that the artist must decipher. He can only express it by becoming a musician. The bars of music that recur in the closing pages are proof of this. All of Celine’s linguistic innovations are an attempt to reach the other reality that those few notes contain.

In doing so he lays bare the forces that shape the universe—the cry of pain, the web of time, the dance.

Holy Mary, Mother Of Pinball

The French can differ from other humans. They are for instance known, in the immortal words of National Lampoon, as folks who “fight with their feet and fuck with their faces.”

Now it seems they have determined that a proper way to honor Mary, mother of Jesus of Nazareth, is to light up a building like a pinball machine, and play it.

For many centuries the people of Lyon have in early December paid homage to Mary, in gratitude to the god-woman for interceding with the Mean Man to spare the place from the plague, back in 1643.

In them Olden Times, said homage involved a procession culminating at the Basilica of Fourviere, where candles were lit and offerings presented.

In 1852, the sculptor Joseph Hugues Fabisch erected a Mary statue next to the Basilica. The people of Lyon planned for December 8 a mammoth Mary party. Here is what happened:

Leading up to the inauguration, everything was in place for the festivities: the statue was lit up with flares, fireworks were readied for launching from the top of Fourvière Hill and marching bands were set to play in the streets. The prominent Catholics of the time suggested lighting up the facades of their homes as was traditionally done for major events such as royal processions and military victories.

However, on the morning of the big day, a storm struck Lyon. The master of ceremonies hastily decided to cancel everything and to push back the celebrations to the following Sunday. In the end the skies cleared and the people of Lyon, who had been eagerly anticipating the event, spontaneously lit up their windows, descended into the streets and lit flares to illuminate the new statue and the Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Fourvière, later superseded by the Basilica. The people sang songs and cried “Vive Marie!” until late in the night.

In years since, Lyon humans have each December 8 placed Mary-devoted lit-candles on their windowsills. The place is alive with light. Meanwhile, in the center of town, various assorted performances and such now draw up to 4 million tourists, to what has become a four-day event.

As it is necessary on this planet that things mutate to survive, this year the Mary-fest featured some clever humans, from the French lighting company CT Light Concept, who projected with colored lights an assortment of pinball bumpers and flippers onto the side of the Celestine Theater. The display was fully playable, as can be seen in the video below.

Pretty cool.

The French: good with light.

To The Barricades

As soon as I became French (and I was already half French through my mother) I realized that my new compatriots were lazy, swindling, resentful, jealous, proud beyond all measure, to the point of thinking that anyone who is not French is a savage and incapable of accepting criticism. I have also understood that to induce a Frenchman to recognize a flaw in his own breed, it is enough to speak ill of another, like saying “we Poles have such and such a defect,” and since they do not want to be second to anyone, even in wrong, they react with “oh no, here in France we are worse,” and they start running down the French until they realize they’ve been caught out.

They do not like their own kind, even when advantage is to be gained from it. No one is as rude as a French innkeeper. He seems to hate his clients (perhaps he does) and to wish they weren’t there (and that’s certainly not so, because the Frenchman is most avaricious). Ils grognent toujours. Try asking him something. “Sais pas, moi,” he’ll respond, and pout as if he’s about to blow a raspberry.

They are vicious. They kill out of boredom. They are the only people who kept their citizens busy for several years cutting each other’s heads off, and it was a good thing that Napoleon diverted their anger onto those of another race, marching them off to destroy Europe.

They are proud to have a state they describe as powerful, but they spend their time trying to bring it down: no one is as good as the Frenchman at putting up barricades for whatever reason and every time the wind changes, often without knowing why, allowing himself to get carried into the streets by the worst kind of rabble. The Frenchman doesn’t really know what he wants, but knows perfectly well that he doesn’t want what he has. And the only way he knows of saying it is by singing songs.

—Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

Sparks

If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.

—Emma Goldman

The Occupy Wall Street people are not really occupying Wall Street. They are instead occupying Zuccotti Park. Which at least touches Wall Street.

It would be nice if Wall Street were occupied as the French would occupy it: by filling it with a million or so people, and truly shutting it down. So that no business, other than the business of the occupiers, might proceed.

First the truck drivers would arrive, to jack-knife their rigs across all intersections leading in and out of the Street; that mission accomplished, they would then lean back in their cabs, to read Liberation and smoke Gitanes. Meanwhile, a million or so people would stream in to occupy the desired space, eradicating all business-as-usual. And they would stay there. Until something resembling the desired change was attained.

However, the United States is not France. People do not behave in the US as they do across the Great Water. Governments change, in the streets, in France. For good or for ill. And have for hundreds of years.

But such a thing has never occurred in the United States. Rarely are even policies, much less governments, affected by rumbling Americans roiling about outdoors. A notable exception is the nation’s civil rights laws of the 1960s. Which were enacted less because of the black people who took to the streets, than to the extreme and finally terminal discomfort of white people repeatedly exposed via their TV screens to badged Neanderthals treating those black people like beasts.

Still: nothing is forever. It could happen there. In the US. Why not? It’s a young country. Lots left to learn. And experience.

Too, in the end, what matters most is not whether Wall Street is actually, physically occupied, but the Reality that is formed in the public mind. If there occurs an American group-agreement that Wall Street is occupied—even though the occupiers may physically be confined to Zuccotti Park, and/or behind whatever orange nets the NYPD fitfully casts upon the surrounding streets and sidewalks—then Wall Street will, in fact, be occupied.

Exiting the second week of their stay in Zuccotti Park, the various and sundries assembled combined to produce what they monikered their first “official” statement. Released upon the last day of September, it is the product of relentlessly pursued “small d” democracy, in which anyone present could suggest something for inclusion, as anyone present could press that something be excluded.

I quite like it, what they came up with. And so I reprint it, beyond the “furthur.”

A Dangerous Country

Cartoons of a certain age would occasionally feature some sunny jim happily piloting a little animated airplane through the wild blue yonder.

Then, for reasons various, the craft would begin to come apart around him. Pieces of the plane would peel off, or just plain disappear. As this proceeded, discomfort, upon the visage of the sunny jim, would be expressed.

In the end, the sunny jim would be reduced to holding but the wheel, all other portions of the craft having vanished. Momentum would carry the de-planed creature forward for a bit, until the wheel too would wink out; shortly thereafter, all forward motion stopped: a moment of stasis.

Then, the fall.

That’s pretty much what happened with the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund, once presumed the future successor to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

There they were, American prosecutors, breezily flying the friendly skies, towing a banner reading: “Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Gallic Monster: Ravenous Prevert Maid-Raper.” Until their own investigators determined that their complaining witness was a lie with feet.

The banner is gone now, and so is the plane. All that’s left is the wheel. And the prosecutors, their asses hanging out there in the air. The fall comes next. Soon.

Across the Great Water, the French, who know more about America, and American cinema, than do Americans, are now again confirmed in their belief that the United States can best be apprehended through the film roles of Richard Widmark and Jack Palance: here cackling delightedly as an old woman in a wheelchair is shoved down a flight of stairs, there shooting an unarmed man in the back; here babbling cornpone senilities around a campfire, there grabbing a rope to stretch the neck of some sadsack, mostly only because “the folks” Can, and Feel Like It.

Unlike Americans, the French are not real big on horror films. This is because they understand what horror really is. And watched it play out in real-time, with Dominique Strauss-Kahn. In what Bernard-Henri Levy aptly characterized as “the cannibalisation of justice by the sideshow.” The “perp walk.” The daily dueling press conferences. The leaked photographs. The ludicrous “security arrangements.” All designed to mock and humiliate and diminish and demean. The ham-handedly planned street-theater. The endlessly talking heads, on all manner of tubes, serving as self-appointed insta-voting judges and juries and executioners. The hooting knuckledraggers, in the tabloids and on the streets, snickering about “Chez Perv” and “Frog Legs It.”

And, further, Levy: “the Robespierrism of the sideshow,” wherein “we are compelled to observe that, regarding the Strauss-Kahn affair, America the pragmatic, that rebels against ideologies, this country of habeas corpus that de Tocqueville claimed possessed the most democratic system of justice in the world, has pushed [] French Robespierrism, unfortunately, to the extremes of its craziness.”

From Dominique Moïsi:

The case does damage to the image of America and recreates negative stereotypes that existed before. Now this feeling is reinforced—that the United States is not a fully civilized country, with a police that behaves like that, that wants to humiliate. There is a sense that it’s a dangerous country.

Gee. Ya think?

Brave New World

Reality continues to get . . . fuzzy.

Some Science Men recently devised an experiment involving popcorn. They discovered that people who had been exposed to an ad about popcorn would later “recall” having eating the popcorn, even though they hadn’t. Even though this particular brand of popcorn did not, in fact, exist.

They asked people to read a very descriptive print advertisement detailing the taste of a fictional popcorn product made by a familiar brand name, then asked a portion of the subjects to taste popcorn labeled with the fictional name. A week later, those who merely read the detailed advertisement were just as likely to report eating this popcorn as people who actually ate it.

“Humans are a lot more inaccurate than we think we are,” said Michael Nash, a professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Meanwhile, a survey of some 7000 young people in nations from Spain to China, Brazil to the US, found that a majority would prefer to lose their sense of smell than eschew information devices.

Laura Simpson, McGann’s Global IQ Director, commented on the study. “What we saw is that technology is the great global unifier,” she said. “It is the glue that binds this generation together and fuels the motivations that define them. Young people utilize technology as a kind of supersense which connects them to infinite knowledge, friends and entertainment opportunities.”

McGann believes the results of the study indicate that for the youth of today, who you are is not defined by what you own or what experiences you’ve had; instead, it’s about who you connect with and what you share. McGann noted the comment of one respondent: “If there are no pics, it didn’t happen.”

France, as ever, goes its own way. In that nation, it is now unlawful to mention the words “twitter” or “facebook” on radio or television. Emitting these words, the French have concluded, is to engage in advertising.

“Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition?” Christine Kelly of  Conseil Superieur de l’Audiovisuel asked of L’Express. “This would be a distortion of competition. If we allow Facebook and Twitter to be cited on air, it’s opening a Pandora’s Box.”

That “facebook” and “twitter” are English formations does not help them. The French have traditionally sought to stem the spread of perfidious Albionisms into their language. In 2003, for instance, the French heaved the word “email” right off of their tongues. That’s courriel to you.

Four And Twenty

Yesterday, the 20th day of April, was Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

This is a bummer for other people born on April 20. Because it’s like you’re supposed to be sort of embarrassed, being born on the same day as Hitler. You can’t really, fully celebrate. For it’s just too shameful, sharing a birthday with Hitler.

I know somebody who was born on April 20. And throughout her childhood it was a happy day indeed. Because, well, it was the day on which she was born. Then Hitler showed up. Then he got bad. Then he got worse. Then he became The Colossus Of Evil Who Bestrode All The World.

Even today, 66 years after Hitler went up in flames, she has to hear every year that she was born on the same day as Hitler. It’s like she’s expected to be ashamed. To keep it secret. Like her birthdate is some mad aunt stashed up in the attic, or a peculiar porn collection burrowed away in a disused drawer.

Similarly, I know a guy who was born on November 22. And that was a good day for him . . . until 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Now he’s expected to hang his head in sorrow, to have been born on such a day. And I know a young one born on September 11, who had that day ripped away from her before she ever entered her teens: how can she now celebrate such a day, a day when America Was Attacked?

I myself was born on a date upon which occurred an event that, when I was young, was in this nation considered a Good thing . . . but is now regarded as Shameful and Wrong. I can’t tell you what that day is, because there are Mean People out here on the intertubes, some of whom Hate me, and, if they had my birthdate, together with my name (which some of them have), they might embark then on Great Wrongness. Hack and Ruin me. Destroy, say, my credit rating. If I happened to have a credit rating.

To The Shores Of Tripoli

Muammar al-Gaddafi will not go gentle into that good night.

No one who knows anything about him, would ever have expected that he would.

Oriana Fallaci, who for years was the best journalist this world had, pretty much pronounced him, decades ago, a kook. During one of her several interviews with the Great Man, the Libyan potentate suddenly leapt to his feet and began maniacally shouting: “I am the gospel! I am the gospel! I am the gospel!”

“I had to quiet him down,” Fallaci told TV’s Charlie Rose, many years later, at around the time she was transforming into a crankified anti-Islamic jihadist.

Gaddafi is a sort of cross between a froot loop and a werewolf. He has been more or less allowed to roll like a loose cannon across the deck of this world for more than 40 years, solely because his nation is one of the most fertile petroleum-producing fields on the planet.

For decades the Soviets drank extremely heavily, and then went ahead and protected him. When there were no more Soviets, Gaddafi brooded darkly for a decade or so, then, post-9/11, bared to the Americans all the embarrassing details of his farcical “nuclear program,” which consisted of the functional equivalent of a brace of monkeys hooting over a block of uranium and some test tubes. His reward was forgiveness for his many real and perceived sins against the West—which in 1986 induced Ronald Racist Reagan to bomb unto death his four-year-old daughter—and the subsequent shoveling of vast sums of Western armaments and money his way in return for his oily crude.

When it came steam-engine time in North Africa, time for a lurch towards something approaching democracy—this time coming this month—it was inevitable that Gaddafi would be required to fall. But Gaddafi is not interested in falling. And so, he is killing his people.

This Is Human

In 1940, we know we are losing the battle. The Germans are arriving in Paris very fast. My mother is preparing luggage because he are going to leave for Brest. Her family has a cafe there. My father was in the French army. I was sixteen.

We arrived in Brest three days after we left Paris. During the trip, we had German planes machine-gunning the train, diving down. We had to go under the train. Three days after the armistice, the Italians were machine-gunning all the civilians on the road. Many people were hit. Some women were on top of the children, for the children not to be killed.

My father sees other people and talks about resistance. They invite each other home, talk around the table: what can we do to push the German out? I said I can be of use. I’m going to be seventeen. I talked to several friends in school. So we joined our fathers.

I had a bicycle and the documents were in the pump. It was dangerous. We had some Jewish friends across the street. The father had been arrested. The daughter and her husband could not get out of Paris. We put a beret on them and passed them to Toulouse, the Spanish border, and to Free French. We passed thirty-five families from ’41 to ’43.

One of my friends was arrested. Very stupid. He had an argument with a German boy. He hit him. He was arrested and they found papers on him. They took him to the Gestapo and tortured him. He told names.

I was in jail four days and four nights. I had interrogation after interrogation. I was beaten black and blue with a rubber hose, on the muscles. They put me on a train and sent me to Germany. It was a forced-labor camp in Delmenhorst. It was now ’43.

We were in a trench, trying to put back the pipes. The SS is going back and forth with their bayonets. A middle-aged man was looking in the window of a camera shop, very near. He had a big package in his hand. Without turning, he talked to us in French. He said, “Boys, I am sorry for the way you are treated. I was once a prisoner of war in France during the First World War. I was treated by the people on the farm very good. They fed me and I will always remember. I will be here every day and I will feed you.” After the SS turned their back, he threw the package in the trench. He came for three days and he fed us. We were very, very hungry. I will remember always this man.

One of my friends was asthmatic. After maybe twelve or thirteen tours around the camp, he could not breathe any more. He had to stop. The SS come by him: “Go, go.” He couldn’t. He sat in the snow and they beat him, beat him. When they decided it was too cold for them, they left, and he was in the snow to die. We heard him all night. That is always in my mind. I have the impression I hear him still. We know he is dying and we cannot do anything.

The bombs were always coming by seven. In the trench, I was on top of this Italian. He had on a very heavy coat. Each time the bomb was coming, I put my teeth in his coat. It was all chewed up, the coat. You become so powerful when you are afraid.

We were liberated on the fifth of May, 1945. I was down to eighty pounds. I was in a stretcher, almost in a coma, at the military hospital in Paris. They fed me intravenously. My mother and aunt came to visit me. They were preparing my burial. After three months, it was all right. I said, if I recover, I will do something to thank God for what he did for me. I was liberated. I was alive and I was in Lourdes. I decided to become a priest.

It’s really difficult when I think about the war. If we answer hate with hate, it will never end.

Very often, you hear some German saying, “We didn’t know.” But who allowed the Nazi to take over? They were very, very happy when Hitler took France, took Europe. At Delmenhorst, we had these guards. They were married, they had families. Don’t tell me when they went back home, they were not talking about what is going on. The people of Delmenhorst for pastime on Sunday were coming around the camp. They were looking at us like we were zoo animals.

Is this uniquely German?

This is human. It happened before. The Spanish, in the Inquisition, under God, destroyed an entire population. What about the Albigenses? It can happen again. We are all good people, but if we are led a little too far, we are going to believe everything we are told. We are ordinary people, who can also be weapons for Hitlers.

—Father Jacques Raboud, to Studs Terkel, “The Good War”

Now Means Yesterday

First, the caveat that it is always instructive, how much of what is presented as fact, in the midst of a fluid, fast-moving, upbubbling situation, is later, when the histories come to be written, understood to be not so much fact at all.

That said, the moment when I accepted that the Egyptian revolution is Real and Irrevocable, was when the New York Times reported that among those who had taken to the streets were Egypt’s wealthy.

The protesters came from every social class and included even wealthy Egyptians, who are often dismissed as apolitical, or too comfortable to mobilize. For some of them in the crowd on Friday, the brutality of the security forces was a revelation.

“Dogs!” they yelled at the riot police, as they saw bloodied protesters dragged away. “These people are Egyptians!”

This is not good news for any autocrat. When even the people who have enriched themselves under your regime, are in the streets denouncing your hirelings as dogs, you are in terminal trouble. When the bazari of Iran shifted from covert, bet-hedging support of the implacable exiled cleric Khomeini, to open endorsement of that man and his people, the Shah of Iran was finished. So too, it appears, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

The Torch And The Pitchfork Have Been Passed To A New Generation

Crusty xenophobe Jean-Marie Le Pen has ceded control of his atavistic National Front party to the less-crusty xenophobe Marine Le Pen, his 42-year-old daughter.

Le Pen and his National Front are a sort of human time warp, demanding the return of the guillotine to the public square, the erection of altars to worship fetal tissue, the marginalization of all Hebrews, and expulsion of “the Moors” from France.

They are, in a word, “populists.” Of that breed of dangerous geek that some naive know-nothings on the American left currently think is A Real Good Thing. Ignoring the warning of America’s Cassandra, Robert Stone: “American populism, notorious as a pious front for venal corruption, [is] the curse of this nation, and now, empowered by American wealth and resources, a worldwide plague.”

Ere He Catches The Recruiting Sergeant’s Eye

The United States Senate voted 65-31 Saturday to repeal the Clinton-era “don’t ask don’t tell” policy restricting the service of gay people in the United States military. Coupled with the 250-175 vote for repeal in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, this means the policy is effectively dead, the bill awaiting only the president’s signature.

That DADT would be repealed during the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency was an inevitability to anyone who both listened to, and believed, President Obama, and Massachusetts Congressmember Barney Frank.

In April of 2008, then-candidate Obama told the Advocate that he supported DADT repeal, and that he believed repeal was something he could “reasonably” accomplish during his presidency. In July of that year, still a candidate, Obama told the Military Times that repeal “is not something that I’m looking to shove down the military’s throats,” that ”I want to make sure that we are doing it in a thoughtful and principled way.”

In December of 2008, after Obama had been elected president, together with a Democratic Congress, Congressmember Frank said: ”I’m confident we’ll be able to repeal [DADT] in the first Congress, in the first two years—but I think the priority has to be to get the Iraq policy set, and then move to repeal it.” Frank repeated much the same message to the New Yorker a month later: “After the troops get home from Iraq, gays in the military. The time has come.”

Retired Rear Admiral Jamie Barnett, one of more than a hundred senior military officials who signed off on a November 2008 statement supporting DADT repeal, stated at the time that it was important for the Obama administration to first lay the groundwork for such a repeal. ”I think that they’re going to want to talk to a lot of people, including the military leaders—talk about how it can be implemented, what the ramifications and implications are, and how they can go forth on a step-by-step process,” Barnett said. “And I personally would not ask for anything more than that.”

Throughout 2009, President Obama met numerous times with senior Pentagon officials to discuss DADT repeal. In January of 2010, in his State of the Union address, he pronounced repeal a priority, and vowed to work with Congress to accomplish it by the end of the year.

Several days later, both Obama’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, and Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that they favored DADT repeal. Mullen’s support, in particular, surprised not only gay activists, but also members of Congress.

Gates shortly thereafter announced an “exhaustive” nine-month Pentagon review of the DADT policy, which ultimately concluded that repeal would not only not result in the destruction of the United States military, but was either supported by, or mattered not a whit to, some 70% of active-duty military personnel.

In October of 2010, President Obama told a group of liberal bloggers that he was pursuing a strategy that he expected to result in the repeal of DADT during the lame-duck session of the 111th Congress:

Q: Well, can I ask you just about “don’t ask, don’t tell,” just following up? I just want to follow up. Because you mentioned it—

Obama: Yes, sure. Go ahead.

Q: Is there a strategy for the lame-duck session to—

Obama: Yes.

Q: And you’re going to be involved?

Obama: Yes.

Q: Will Secretary Gates be involved?

Obama: I’m not going to tip my hand now. But there is a strategy.

Q: Okay.

Obama: And, look, as I said—

Q: Can we call it a secret plan?  (Laughter.)

Obama: I was very deliberate in working with the Pentagon so that I’ve got the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs being very clear about the need to end this policy. That is part of a strategy that I have been pursuing since I came into office. And my hope is that will culminate in getting this thing overturned before the end of the year . . . Now, as usual, I need 60 votes. So I think that, Joe, the folks that you need to be having a really good conversation with—and I had that conversation with them directly yesterday, but you may have more influence than I do—is making sure that all those Log Cabin Republicans who helped to finance this lawsuit and who feel about this issue so passionately are working the handful of Republicans that we need to get this thing done . . . [T]he only really thing you need to do is make sure that we get two to five Republican votes in the Senate . . . Because what I do anticipate is that John McCain and maybe some others will filibuster this issue, and we’re going to have to have a cloture vote. If we can get through that cloture vote, this is done.

Prior to the Senate vote to repeal, cloture on a McCain-led filibuster was achieved by a vote of 63-33.

Now that DADT repeal has indeed been accomplished, will there be a retraction of the hundreds of thousands of hot words spewed over at the shriek shack these past many months, condemning the Jim Crow homophobe Barack Obama, and his running-dog lap-dog Barney Frank?

Of course not.

The Prince And The Paupers

Western Europe is entering an interesting period.

World War I collapsed the last of the aristocratic dynasties that had dominated the region for more than a millennia; those that survived were vestigial, without real power or influence. And out of the rubble of World War II emerged democratic-socialist states that sought, for the first time, to secure “the four freedoms” for all people living within their borders. The nations of Western Europe united as a common entity, a notion that Napoleon tried to bring into the real through force of arms, and that George Orwell, in full Eeyore mode, in the late 1940s pronounced unachiev-able . . . well, it has, in fact, been achieved.

Today, however, in a world of diminishing resources, and with Western European na-tions maintaining neg-ative population growth, there is arriving an era described in varying ways as one of “austerity.” Governments are declaring that some dearly beloved social-welfare programs are no longer sustainable. These range from the truncated work week and early retirement age of France, to generous government subsidies for university students in Great Britain.

How European peoples are responding to these measures tracks roughly established national character. In France, a country known for pouring 100,000 people into the streets to disfavor the arrest of a prostitute, millions of citizens rhythmically shut down Paris over a period of months, to protest one two-year hike in the retirement age, and another to qualify for full pension benefits. In England, by contrast, opposition has been confined to bloviation, with occasional rude outbursts of boorish behavior by street yobs, a la A Clockwork Orange.

And so on Thursday, some ruffians out and about to say “no” to increased tuition fees, set upon a Rolls Royce limousine bearing Charles and Camilla of Great Britain, shouting “off with their heads,” splattering the vehicle with paint, pelting it with rubbish, and thrusting a stick through an open window to jab Camilla in the ribs.

My, my.

“Men Should Put This On For One Day”

This is a brave woman. Amal Basha, of Yemen. One of maybe 22 women in that country who does not wear the veil.

“I had to wear the full niqab when I was 8 years old,” she says of the face veil worn by women here. “I couldn’t breathe. I saw the world in dark colors. I fell down because I couldn’t see when I walked. Men should put this on for one day. They would change their thinking. They don’t know how horrible it is under sun, heat and sweat. It’s a kind of torture. I decided I wanted to see the beautiful colors of life—red, blue, green. Not black.”

Basha is a descendant of the prophet Mohammed; today she heads the Sisters’ Arab Forum For Human Rights, in the planet’s poorest Islamic nation. In the light of her mind she reaches back to Mohammed—”you know,” she says, “we’re all created from the same soul”—but in life she must contend with the darkness of a world dominated by the ossified barnacles that have attached themselves to her forebear . . . such as Yemeni cleric Shiek Abdul Majeed Zindani, who claims to possess “scientific proof that women cannot speak and remember simultaneously.”

“Yemen is the home of the Queen of Sheba,” Basha retorts. “How can you say women can’t govern? Yemen is a failed state today, and men have been the rulers.”

Basha’s work documenting torture in her country moved the United Nations to call for an official investigation. She strives to legislatively end the practice of marrying off Yemeni “women” as young as eight years old. She seeks to help Yemeni women who are victims of domestic violence, of sexual harassment, of illiteracy, of caste prejudice. She advocates for prisoners and refugees.

For her pains, Basha has been threatened with death, had the brakes cut on her car, had acid hurled at her face. She has been branded by her countrymen as “un-Islamic,” a “Zionist,” an “agent of the West,” a “temptress of Eve.” Her accusers forgetting that it was Adam who received the injunction against plucking the forbidden fruit. Not Eve. Eve was innocent.

Nobody Paid Much Attention

In the old Soviet Union, Ukrainian women were considered the most beautiful in all the Russian empire. As is often the case with such things, this caused the women themselves more problems than not. And things haven’t changed much since the Union disunited, and Ukraine set out on its own.

Ukraine is today one of the largest “exporters” of women in the international sex industry. Women who freely choose such work are one thing, but many Ukrainian women have been lured into the trade under false pretenses, or are more or less forced into it for economic survival. Many are minors; some are simply slaves. Of an estimated 500,000 Ukrainian women who migrated to Western Europe in the late 1990s, an estimated 100,000 wound up in the sex trade. Ukraine itself has become a prime destination for those involved in “sex tourism”; the sex trade in Ukraine now rakes in $700 million per year, more money than the company makes that supplies the nation with natural gas.

An activist group of Ukrainian women traveling under the rubric Femen is not happy about this. “This is insulting to us and it harms the country’s image, since we’re increasingly becoming a country of destination for tourists whose sole purpose is to have sex with our women,” says Femen’s Anna Gutsol (pictured above, on the left).

Of late, Femen activists have, counterintuitively, begun protesting against the country’s treatment of women by staging demonstrations where they appear topless. Who knows—it may work. It has already embarrassed the hell out of Vladimir Putin.

Peasant Palate: Knead Long And Prosper

The science people, they are always wondering: why don’t the French die?

The cheese they eat. The meat. The butter. The cream. The wine, and drinking it, all the live-long day. Why don’t their arteries fill with filth, causing them to keel over, gasping, ushered into death via coronary heart disease, like normal Americans?

There are many answers to this question. The first concerns the “Big Gulp.” Americans seem to believe that bigger is better. You think we would have learned by now, with our military. Though for more than 60 years the American military has been by far the biggest bully on the block, it hasn’t managed to prevail in any armed conflict since the close of World War II, with the exception of that little dustup in Grenada . . . and even there it was nearly run off the island by a handful of Cuban engineers. Oh, and Panama. Where the “bands of brothers” buzzed blithely around leveling hospitals, in pursuit of their own CIA agent, and incidentally abrogating the treaty that returned the Panama Canal to the people of the country in which it is located.

Anyway. Americans like their food, like their military, big. Big portions. Big steaks. Big drinks. But, just as our big military is killing us, so too are our big meals. When Americans eat, they eat too much. Which is bad for you. And Americans snack. All the time. Which is also bad for you.

The French do neither. The concept of the “Big Gulp” is unknown in that country, except in the hideous fast-food joints which Americans have imperialistically forced upon them, and which French patriots destroy whenever they get the opportunity. The French do not snack, and the portions they consume, when at table, are moderate.

This Wheel’s On Fire

In 2007 the French people mistakenly elected Nicolas Sarkozy president. Now, in a transparent attempt to strengthen his 2012 re-election bid, by scooping up Gallic rightists who ordinarily cast ballots for perennial presidential contender and flaming bigot Jean-Marie Le Pen, Sarkozy has decided to whomp on the Roma.

Specifically, he has publicly condemned what he claims are “the problems posed by the behaviour of some of the travelling people and Roma,” ordered the dismantling of some 300 Roma campsites his government has declared “illegal,” and apparently approved the deportation of all Roma who cannot properly produce ze papers.

The government has said that Roma and Gypsies from outside France—many, including those kicked out of the Saint Etienne camp Friday, are from Romania—that commit crimes will be expelled back to their countries of origin.

However the top French official for the region said that all Roma without proper papers were being ordered to leave France.

“It is clear what I did this morning was in line with presidential instructions,” Loire region prefect Pierre Soubelet told journalists.

“There have been recent instructions to ask Roma to return home. There is no future here for Roma whose papers are not in order.”

Sunday the Roma responded by twice blocking a major highway in Bordeaux and a bridge over the River Garonne, seriously snarling traffic at the close of a major holiday weekend.

Tying up traffic to protest government dunderheadedness is a peculiarly French institution. French truck drivers, for instance, routinely close the approaches to the city of Paris whenever they Feel The Need. In this, therefore, the Roma have proven themselves to be quintessentially French. So Sarkozy should be instructed to return to his bunker, where he can continue to fret over his lost popularity, while the Roma should be permitted to remain.

Sunday Brunch

HWR: I read in a French magazine that some of the French may have adopted or may be about to adopt our US custom of Sunday brunch.

PhR: Let them eat cake.

HWR: Wouldn’t you like to eat brunch here on Sunday instead of our normal four-course Sunday lunch?

PhR: Over my dead body. It’s a dumb concept, too big for breakfast and too small for a civilized lunch so by three in the afternoon, you’re starving and you eat a pizza.

HWR: I still don’t understand why you refuse for us to bring out paper plates and cups when we have more than ten guests.

PhR: Because you threaten to put wine or Champagne in them! And while we’re at it, why not paper food? Quelle drole d’idee!

HWR: I guess that’s why you don’t like picnics?

PhR: The history of mankind is the overcoming of cold, uncertainty, fear, and wild beasts. Those are all the ingredients of a picnic.

HWR: Why do you have to have bread with everything, even when the meal includes other starches? Isn’t one enough?

PhR: Bread is the staff of life. And your choice of the word “starches” is funny. It’s like that American guest of ours who said she’d like “protein” for breakfast. We’re not running a chemical factory.

HWR: That’s the truth. Speaking of bread, tell me again about that afternoon treat your Auvergnat grandfather would make for you—the piece of bread rubbed with garlic and pork fat. Wasn’t he worried about cholesterol?

PhR: Are you kidding? He was worried about whether he was giving me something with taste; he ate raw onion for breakfast and pork fat every day of his life and he died young at age ninety-four.

—Harriet Welty Rochefort, French Fried

French Letters

In their ceaseless quest to “prove” that Destry, a.k.a. President Barack Obama, is Wrong about Everything, the wingers flew into a flap last April when Obama gifted the Queen of England with an iPod. Mossback anglophiles on this side of the Great Water fulminated that such a gift was grossly declasse, evidence that Obama is a clueless moron.

These same people next swooned, calling for their servants to bring at once the claret, when it developed that during the iPod handover First Lady Michelle Obama “breached royal protocol” by placing her arm around the Queen—in response to the Queen placing her arm around her. Apparently commoners who dare touch the Queen are, even here in the 21st Century, supposed to have the offending member hacked off, presumably with an executioner’s axe, the bleeding arm then spiked for display at the foot of the Tower of London, for the delectation of the local ravens.

It is not known whether French President Nicolas Sarkozy laid hands on the Obama daughters during his visit this April to the White House. There has, however, occurred a dust-up similar to the Obama iPod Outrage, this time involving Sarkozy’s gift to the Obama girls of several issues of the popular French comic-book series Asterix. Writing in Le Monde, Franck Nouchi moans: “Were there not other works to offer to them that would evoke French genius?” And suggests that Malia, 11, and Sasha, 8, should have been subjected instead to Proust.

“The Crucifix Creates Discrimination”

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that displaying crucifixes in Italian public schools violates religious and educational freedoms. It has ordered the Italian government to pay a $7390 fine to an Italian mother, Soile Lautsi, who has struggled for eight years to compel her children’s schools in northern Italy to remove crucifixes from the classrooms.

The Court rejected the government’s disingenuous argument that the crucifix is not a religious totem at all, but instead “a national symbol of culture, history, identity, tolerance, and”—get this—”secularism.”

Sanely, the Court concluded that secular, state-run schools, where attendance is compulsory, must “observe confessional neutrality in the context of public education,” and that crucifix-clogged classrooms “could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign and they would feel that they were being educated in a school environment bearing the stamp of a given religion.”

Crucifixes have been compulsory in Italian classrooms since the enactment in the 1920s of two laws under the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, a personage aided and enabled by the Catholic Church, which for millennia has been the premier peddler of crucifixes.

Lautsi’s husband, Massimo Albertin, said the family was satisfied with the court’s ruling. “We believe the ruling is a positive signal from Europe to Italy, which seems to increasingly lose its secularism,” he said from their home in Albano Terme. “The crucifix creates discrimination.”

French, Germans Balk At Increasing Afghan Commitment; McGovern Warns “Military Power No Solution”

Vice President Joe Biden traveled this weekend to Munich to cajole Europeans into committing more troops to Afghanistan, while NATO Secretary General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer Saturday complained: “I’m frankly concerned when I hear the United States is planning a major commitment for Afghanistan but other allies are already ruling out doing more.”

France and Germany, however, which, pace Russia, sacrificed in the 20th Century more of their citizens’ lives to military madness than any other Western countries, do not seem much inclined to dispatch more bodies to be shot and blown to shreds in a region that challenged even Genghis Khan, and in recent decades saw the British and Russians beaten like gongs.

Operation Enduring Fiefdom “Doomed”; “We Have Assumed The Place Of The Soviets”

French officials mortified by President Nikolas Sarkozy’s suicidal embrace of Operation Enduring Fiefdom—George II’s adventure in Afghanistan—have leaked to the uppity French weekly Le Canard Enchaine a classified cable relating that the British envoy to Afghanistan has concluded that “American strategy is doomed to fail.”

Meanwhile, the former deputy chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center has admitted that a trio of Afghani “warlords,” formerly supported and supplied by the Reagan administration in the 1980s proxy war against the Soviet Union, today—again—control much of Afghanistan, and that we here in the US “have assumed the place of the Soviets.”

Guerre Mener N’est Que Dampnacion

With two-thirds of his people opposing him, French President Nicolas Sarkozy is stubbornly increasing his commitment to George II’s War on Terra, dispatching additional French troops to Afghanistan to participate in Operation Enduring Fiefdom.

In late August, France buried ten paratroopers ambushed and killed in Kabul province. The two-day battle that resulted in their deaths seems to have been something of a fiasco. One soldier told Le Monde that his unit was equipped only with assault weapons and that he and his fellows exhausted their ammunition during the attack. NATO commanders seem to have neglected to send reinforcements or provide air support. Confronted with charges that the slain French troops were too young and inexperienced, the French defense minister responded only that a professional army is “inevitably” composed of young soldiers. The Taliban commander who devised the ambush stated that but for the arrival of night, his men would have “killed every one of the [French] soldiers.” Twenty-one French soldiers were wounded; eleven of the most gravely injured have been flown back to France.

The Afghan ambush was the costliest single military loss for France since 1983 . . . which also happens to be the last time the French rashly trotted at the heels of the US into an ill-advised Middle East conflict. On that occasion, 58 French soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber who drove an explosives-laden vehicle into a parking garage beneath the French barracks in West Beirut. Nearly simultaneously, 241 American Marines were killed in a similar suicide bombing at the American barracks at Beirut airport. Over the succeeding days, bodies had to be pulled out under sniper fire. Shortly thereafter, Ronald Reagan turned tail and ran, withdrawing all US troops from Lebanon. A complete and total surrender conveniently forgotten whenever American righties commence their mendacious chants about US “retreats” in the face of “terrorism.”