Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
NZ Herald: “One in four UK voters still undecided, poll shows”
Given the thin reporting of exit polls, perhaps the press isn’t finding all the drama it was hoping for. If they go completely silent, it would only be because the Conservatives might be doing well somewhere.
| He hasn't lost his touch | Extension du domaine de la loose |
| Houellebecq in this week's Inrockuptibles: 'You must be brief when the subject is uninteresting. If I were writing a book against Buddhism, it would require several hundred pages, because it's an interesting and complicated religion. Islam is a basic and stupid religion, and it can be written off in one sentence.' | Houellebecq, cette semaine dans Les Inrockuptibles: 'Il faut être bref quand le sujet a peu d'intérêt. Si j'écrivais un livre contre le bouddhisme, il me faudrait plusieurs centaines de pages, parce que c'est une religion intéressante et compliquée. L'islam est une religion simple et bête, on peut donc l'expédier en une phrase.' |
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| It's elementary! | C’est élémentaire! |
Then I seemed to lose her as she thought hard for a moment, finally correcting herself: "No, no, that's not what I meant to say…" Then came another couple of seconds of (deep) thought. She looked up. "No, no, it's only Bush I am against." Then she went back to her work…
… it has been a while since the American press was flooded with anguished soul-searching articles exploring whether or not the rest of the world — especially in those quarters dominated by tyrants — loves uswrites Claudia Rosett.
In keeping with the doctrine of democratization that Mr. Bush put forward three years ago, the focus has switched to what we appreciate about our own values. With that comes a degree of integrity that the silent majority of the unfree world can appreciate far more than any cloying efforts by Washington to win friends by wooing despots who claim illegitimately to speak for their people.Speaking of Ronnie, and with the European constitution in the news cnstantly, take a moment to read the following quote:
The results have been much written about in recent times, but they bear noting again. As happened when President Reagan stood fast and spoke up in the 1980s about the "evil empire," places deemed lost to the free world have been waking up. Not only are we seeing a huge movement for democracy in Lebanon, along with stirrings in Egypt and even Syria and Saudi Arabia. Last week, in Washington, a North Korean defector announced the founding in this country of a group of North Korean dissidents-in-exile, dedicated to replacing what is probably the worst tyranny on the planet with a free society. It is a small beginning, but it is one more sign of a world changing for the better.
…overall, we have entered in era in which America— more than at any time since Ronald Reagan's presidency — speaks the truth and appreciates the worth of its own system, which is what has made it both powerful and free. More tough tests lie ahead. But I think it is worth taking a moment, in spring, to note how well we have weathered those of recent years.
I had a copy of the Soviet Constitution and I read it with great interest. And I saw all kinds of terms in there that sound just exactly like our own: 'Freedom of assembly' and 'freedom of speech' and so forth. Of course, they don't allow them to have those things, but they're in there in the constitution. But I began to wonder about the other constitutions -- everyone has one -- and our own, and why so much emphasis on ours.
And then I found out, and the answer was very simple -- that's why you don't notice it at first. But it is so great that it tells the entire difference. All those other constitutions are documents that say, 'We, the government, allow the people the following rights,' and our Constitution says 'We the People, allow the government the following privileges and rights.' We give our permission to government to do the things that it does. And that's the whole story of the difference --why we're unique in the world and why no matter what our troubles may be, we're going to overcome.
«She says she has received a number of phone calls from women who claim to have had romantic links with him. She adds that Galloway has tried to smooth things over by telling her it is a plot by an unnamed intelligence service to discredit him.
The threatened divorce action will be a blow to Galloway, who is standing for election in Bethnal Green and Bow, east London.
Speaking from their home in Streatham, south London, Galloway’s wife, a Muslim, said: “I should tell you that when he told me his new party was going to be called Respect, I went upstairs and cried. How can he call it this when he doesn’t even treat his own wife with respect?”»
The content and the tone of the World Socialist Web Site’s item: “US steps up provocations against North Korea” says it all – war is always wrong unless those warheads are pointed at Japanese and South Korean Capitalists, and from the perfidiously less-communist-than-last-week Chinese.
Even Molly Ivins gets in on the act – you seem if anyone in the world does anything wrong, deadly, or aggressive, they aren’t actually responsible – somehow SOMEHOW the U.S., and specifically “Chimpy W. Hitlerburton” is. Ivins:«The problem of proliferation simply deteriorated under his guidance. Fewer weapons-grade nuclear materials were secured in the two years after 9/11 than in the two years before the attack [thanks to Jimmuh Carter]. North Korea, which then had two nuclear weapons, now has as many as eight. After dealing with Bolton, the North Korean government called him "human scum" and "a bloodsucker," and declined to recognize him as an official of the United States. No one is claiming North Korea has a rational government, but any halfway-skilled diplomat could do better than that, and many have»
So Ivins (whose head looks like it’s been attacked by woodland creatures) is taking the automaton-like invective of the North Koreans seriously because she can somehow impugn one of Bush’s nominees. Wise indeed. She will remained seared, seared, in our memories as an idiot who takes Stalinist propaganda for it’s face value. Obviously she’s been hanging out with activists.
Her comparison is meaningless, and she is, in fact by using North Korean statements, claiming that Lil' Kim runs a rational regime. What she is really doing is projecting invective against conservatives any way that she can - throwing spaghetti at the wall, and hoping some of it will stick...
When free discussion is denied, hardening of the arteries of democracy has set in, free institutions are but a lifeless form, and the death of the republic is at handonce wrote Williams Randolph Hearst, whose birthday it is today.
"The religious right now has an unprecedented influence on American politics and policy," said Ralph White, co-founder of the Open Center, a New York City institution focused on holistic learning. "It is incumbent upon all of us to understand as precisely as possible its aims, methods, beliefs, theology and psychology."Jon Ward provides the context:
The Open Center, founded 21 years ago, played host to the two-day conference at City College of New York called Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right.When I was a kid, one of the books my dad read for me when I went to bed was the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. One of the things that left the greatest impression upon me, I remember (and which I couldn't fathom), was that Ben could, and would, remain friends with his political "enemies" (or adversaries, to use a better word), even going out for drinks with them after their "duels".
By contrast, the political ammunition of today's élite basically amounts to suggesting that their adversaries ("enemies" would be a better word here) are dishonest, stupid, blinded, and/or treacherous, and that they are zealots, extremists, idiots, traitors, and/or sell-outs. What amounts, in so many words, to the reducing of everything to a personal level, accompanied by natural feelings of superiority, is also (as can be seen in many of the comments left in our comments section) the predominant feature of political (and cultural) life in the old Europe.
As the oui gathers momentum, the AFP reports that (How sad it is to hear of the extent of Sonia's suffering. Fortunately, her British colleague explains the importance of the European Constitution and, in the process, shows how more intelligent and sophisticated Europe's citizens are, as compared with the uncouth Americans.)French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel said she was "100 percent behind the treaty," adding: "I find myself confronted by the Americans, the Japanese, the Chinese. It's very important that I get Europe's support."
[Vivienne] Westwood launched a simple appeal to French voters to approve the constitution, saying: "Don't bore yourself reading all 800 pages and just vote 'yes'. It's very important."
Quoting an AFP dispatch on the latest development of Baghdad's Italian car shooting, Le Monde gives only one single, solitary, dry, matter-of-fact sentence that appears in the very final line of a boxed text.
Selon la chaîne de télévision CBS, un enregistrement satellite américain a permis de déterminer que la voiture dans laquelle avaient pris place Giuliana Sgrena et Nicola Calipari roulait à environ 100 km/h.Period. That's it. Go on to the next piece of news. (By the way, read the question in the final line from April 14.)
The International Herald Tribune hardly does better. In a two- or three-sentence post-scriptum tagged on to Maria Newman's New York Times article, the information is given no more importance than a "for the record" filler.
U.S. investigators concluded from the recording that the car was traveling at a speed of more than 95 kilometers per hour, or 60 miles per hour. Giuliana Sgrena, the freed Italian journalist in the car at the time, has said the car was traveling at about 50 kilometers an hour.Imagine the outcry that would have followed (the scandal! the deliberate decision to deceive! the liars! the loss of credibility! ) had the satellite validated the passengers' tale and proven the American military wrong.
Basically … Europe doesn't have the death penalty because its political systems are less democratic, or at least more insulated from populist impulses, than the U.S. government. And elites know it. Referring to France, a recent article in the UNESCO Courier noted that "action by courageous political leaders has been needed to overcome local public opinion that has remained mostly in favour of the death penalty." When a 1997 poll showed that 49 percent of Swedes wanted the death penalty reinstated, the country's justice minister told a reporter: "They don't really want the death penalty; they are objecting to the increasing violence. I see this as a call to politicians and the justice system to do more." An American attorney general--or any American politician, for that matter--could never get away with such condescension toward the public, at least not for attribution.Thus writes Joshua Micah Marshall in an article that gives insight on everything from Germany's and Italy's postwar constitutions to the centripetal pressure created by European integration through differences between European parliamentary government and the American separation-of-powers system (thanks to Kosmopolit).
You seldom hear conservatives note, disapprovingly, that "America is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn't have X." It's not hard to figure out why, since X usually involves European (or Canadian or Japanese) big government. But liberals sometimes imagine that America's peculiar lack of, say, nationalized health care, tough gun control, decent child care, widespread mass transport, or substantial arts funding is a sign of political underdevelopment. And so they bemoan America's uniqueness.
Particularly on the death penalty, and particularly now. The old taunt--"The only other industrialized country with the death penalty is South Africa" (recently amended to include "and now even they've abolished it")--has been hurled with particular force in recent weeks. The flood of capital punishment horror stories, combined with partial or full recantations by conservative luminaries George Will and Pat Robertson, has left anti-death-penalty liberals more convinced than ever that, on this issue at least, American political culture is inferior to its counterparts across the Atlantic.
If only it were that simple. It's true that all of America's G-7 partners, save Japan, have abolished capital punishment, but the reason isn't, as death-penalty opponents usually assume, that their populations eschew vengeance. In fact, opinion polls show that Europeans and Canadians crave executions almost as much as their American counterparts do. It's just that their politicians don't listen to them. In other words, if these countries' political cultures are morally superior to America's, it's because they're less democratic.
03-May-2005 Update -
Many thanks to Abhirup Roy for paying us a visit and leaving a comment - alluding to Ann Coulter being a racist, and his self NOT being one. Amusingly, the entire article we cited of his made a huge number of assumtions about people for nothing OTHER than their race. As for Coulter, one hears a great deal of being judgemental, but not of people skin color.
For that, you have to find one of two things: an actual racist, or what passes for your typical anti-racist activist / exploiter of others' misery and pain.
Quite frankly, they are the only two sorts left who care about anyone's skin color, and manage to blank out at what people say. The wound in the human heart may not heal - otherwise how else would they make a living?
Amazing...
In trying to read the scribbles of serial hate-speech generator Alex / Abhirup Roy, it's foggy lack of meaning and directness become obvious. One cannot read his rants, one must decode them. That's an awful way to try to make a point. Ideas don't matter. Only appearance and the symbolism of who one looks like becomes the only thing that matters. It is "identity politics" at it's worse, because the politics is nothing more than a focus on personal identity. A sample:
- One should hate transvestites.
- One should hate Ann Coulter.
- She compares conservatives to Fascist Extremists. Don't forget: conservatives are the majority of the US population, and if they were permitted to express themselves, Canada and many European states would be as well. Fascist Extremists demand the statist policies of the far left.
- Displaying the leftist obsession with skin color, but not the acceptance of others' ideas, she remains preoccupied with straw-men. In this case with "Aryans", and thinks that the Crusades still figure into European thought, even though less than 10% of Europeans practice a religion.
Do you see the way this works? He has the right kind of name and the right hue of skin to spout this sort of thing. It makes people raised in the West a special kind of elitist, the kind that know better than anyone else.«Ann Coulter, a 44 year old thinly curved blonde, is the conservative right-wing’s most strident mouthpiece. Piecing in radical interpretation of homespun values with xenophobic hypertension; her rough garment of polemic invokes the image of the moisturized skin of an ill-tempered transvestite soaking under a burlap dress after a hard night’s work.»
«It is easy and oversimplified to plainly accuse Ann Coulter and August Kreis of ignorance. They have things to say, and Democracy coerces us to listen. Democracy permits us to examine the psychology of loudness and treat its volume control apparatus, hoping the logic of good government will perform the duty of a good shrink and set things straight through its muscular legislative, judiciary, and executive tentacles, like some anthropomorphic Goddess of Eastern Mythology.»«Great Britain, a little island along the coastline of France, celebrated its short lived might, not by commemorating its history of blue-bodied Barbarism, but by exhorting to the English the image of the Roman and the Greek: an olive-skinned people that despised the backwardness of the Anglo-Saxon: as their founding father!»
Today is the NEA’s “National Teacher’s Day/Week” – in reality what they’d like it to be is “National NEA week” – one where a private political organization that promoted political causes (for your OWN GOOD dammit!,) is given a cherished place in the culture to do it unquestioned and unchallenged by anything other than their received wisdom.
If this wasn’t the case, why would more people, now more than ever be going to the effort and expense of home-schooling than ever before? Especially in the Western world where education is treated like a leftist softly-softly re-education camp. Make a note of how they “keep files” and see anyone who doesn’t agree with their position where it relates to things of a very public nature as “an attacker”.
These institutions are EVERYONE’S… they just don’t want to admit it.
Their “Teachers Count” initiative is amusing when you think about the teachers who really CAN’T count – not even their own paychecks. Amusingly, the website displays two MEN, possibly representative of the last two men teaching who haven’t been cowed out by the lefty feminism etc. etc. of the establishment.
They’ve been making the argument that they have a low median pay for years, but when you average it into the actual hours worked by the majority of them, they are quite OVERPAID. A simple google search of the string: “teachers overpaid” reveals an automatic tirade of defensiveness. I guess laying a never-ending guilt trip on parents must not only work, but keep working for decades.
Don't laugh, people - everyone needs a hobby.
«Franz Müntefering, the chairman of the Social Democratic Party, is attacking the business world by criticizing "the internationally growing power of capital and the total economization of short-winded trade for profit"1. And believe it or not: Chancellor Schröder and Wolfgang Clement minister in charge of the Economy and Labor support Müntefering´s rhetoric. And they are not alone: according to an opinion poll2 two thirds of Germans agree.
Is this the reason why our government prefers trading with countries like Russia and China? And how do big business deals being signed with Russia and China match the anti-capitalist rhetoric? Schröder in an interview last December said that going to China helping the German economy was patriotic3. Is it also patriotic calling German employers "market-radical and anti-social"4?
And where have the former leftist ideals gone? You don´t remember? I was thinking about human rights, justice and so on. All forgotten?
About a week ago Russian President Vladimir Putin came to Hanover to open the world´s largest industrial fair with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Important business deals have been signed. Chechnya? Not mentioned.
Same with China. Winning business contracts with China is patriotic. Human rights? Never heard about. And that´s not all! Our Chancellor even wants the European Union to lift it´s weapons embargo on China. Although China is threatening Taiwan. And again, if China attacked Taiwan it would be the U.S. who would guarantee freedom and human rights in the region.
I´d really wish the Left would TEST the WEST! Who knows, they might like it and that´s why the under European law obligatory warning-label is indispensable: "Warning! Testing the West might destroy your world-view!"»
«The SPD's major problems?: The Iraq war is no longer a major issue and people are slowly growing tired of America-baiting and Bush-bashing. Unemployment is at record highs and expected to rise, economic growth has slowed to virtual stagnation and the country continues to run chronic deficits above the 3% maximum set by the EU. So, what is the sputtering German left to do?
so he thinks... Public Enemy #1: Global Capitalism [what? not surprised?]
That's right ladies and gentlemen, Comrade Muentefering has boldly identified global capitalism as the new enemy of the courageous German Socialist movement.»
Or is it "Americur"...But only sometimes. Biased BBC's Ed Thomas reports, you decide.
Natalie Solent comments:
Well spotted about the placement issue - i.e. UK cutting aid to Africa is held to be more relevant to Africa but US complaining about Zimbabwe on the HRC is held to be more relevant to the US. I hadn't thought to look at it in such detail. The furthest I'd got was to ask myself whether a story was "buried" or not.
- As well as the general tendency to do whatever puts the UK/US in a bad light, I think this placement reflects (unconsciously) the mentality that sees Africa as a passive recipient or victim. This mentality overestimates the extent to which Africa's fate is determined by aid.
In a BBC Radio 4 interview, Lorin Maazel carefully dodged Carrie Gracie's pointed questions about whether or not the timeliness of this production was a comment on the UK and the US, but he did make a vociverous point of criticising stateism and especially Political "Correctness". There he took a clear position:Just the fact that we accept this term demonstrates how far we've gone.Discussing 1984, he also told the Times (UK):
Were not pointing the finger, saying: See how like today it is. But the political messages will come through, the exercise of power for its own sake that we see all around us. The love story has become the centre: this is opera, after all. I didnt set out to write an anti-opera. But love music is love music and rat music is rat music. Weve created a dreadful world in this opera. Im a pretty tough old bird but after I wrote the Room 101 scene I can tell you I didnt sleep for a couple of nights.Elsewhere on his own website he gives an example of the pervasiveness of this dumbing down of civilization:
Today I'm with Glenn Dicterow, esteemed concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. We have just finished two rehearsals of very interesting repertoire: Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto with Mr. Lang Lang, a young man who just turned 20, from mainland China, who plays the piano superbly well, and the Mussorgsky "Night on a Bare Mountain," which used to be called "Bald Mountain." I believe there is just a touch of political correctness here: people are no longer bald, they are "hair-disadvantaged"; mountains are no longer bald, they are "bare."Speaking quite personally on the 9-11 attacks, he describes a lovely day with his family which would later be shattered. Speaking finally of his children:
But the images of the September 11th tragedy are indelibly tattooed in their memory, the knowledge of man's vulnerable fragility, forever burnt into their bones.The BBC and the politically minded patrons of the New York Philharmonic may not pay much attention to you if you aired more of your feelings openly. But then again, unlike the loud leftist writers, Maestro is a man - an adult, unafraid to bear his humanity before others in a way that isn't selfish and solipsistic. In short - the man actually has a point.
September 10, 2001 was to become their Last Day of Innocence
