New Orleans Flood Predicted 50 Years Ago by a French University Student Named… Jacques Chirac

Two items of note in the Thomas Wieder's article:

• The report written for a Paris university occurred in 1954, writes the author, when "the future president of the Republic nourished a real admiration for the United States". The idea conveyed by the sentence is that the young idealist really made an effort to love America, suggesting that the dimming of his passion over the years and decades is nothing but the fault of the (clueless) Americans themselves.

• As would-be guard dogs towards any instances of racism, the French should perhaps be surprised when it bobs its head up amongst themselves — and that, not only unnnoticed but lauded, as Wieder describes a sentence as "a keen sense of social analysis".

[L' ]étudiant Chirac … y révèle déjà un sens aigu de l'analyse sociale, à propos de "l'état d'esprit" du "docker noir" : "Cela est frappant quand on visite le port, le docker ne paraît pas fournir un effort physique très grand, ni faire preuve de hâte dans son travail manuel (ce qui serait du reste contraire à la psychologie des Américains du Sud des Etats-Unis en général et du Noir en particulier)."

Hm. Maybe Klansmen and other Nazis can get away with their antics by referring to them with the expression "a keen sense of social analysis".