The First American President of the French Republic

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The First American President of the French Republic
I am worried about the French.  I am worried because they are talking about Eliot Spitzer, talking endlessly.  It makes no sense at all.  We are told that he was sleeping with someone who was not his wife.  So?  Since when do the French care about that?  And, I wonder, how many people ever heard of Spitzer before he became tabloid cover art?  He is, or was, the governor of New York, not a position the French care about or even know about.  No doubt many businessmen had heard about him when he was putting the fear of jail into pirates on Wall Street, but that is a small part of the population. But somehow he has become as fascinating to the French as the British Royals.  How could he be so stupid?  Why didn’t he find une petite amie and stash her in a nice little apartment?  A little discretion, after all, is always appropriate, n’est-ce pas?  Why was he paying so much—$4300, plus travel expenses?  Did the girl know some kind of sex that no one has ever heard of?  And, what a hypocrite!  Didn’t he prosecute prostitution rings when he was the state’s attorney general?  And his poor wife—did he have to drag her in front of the cameras while he apologized for… well, what exactly did he apologize for? Et cetera.  Bis. The questions are bad enough, but the answers are worse.  Since poor Eliot and la fille, the implausibly named Ashley Alexandra Dupre, aren’t talking, we are getting theory—or many theories, about power, about Veblen’s economics (really), about sexual fantasies, about the evolution of the male sexual drive (it hasn’t evolved). Time was, and not long ago, that the l’homme et femme moyens sensuels in France would have shrugged, meaning more or less, Who cares?  This kind of scandal manufacturing, the French used to think, was typical of the American and British media, essentially dirty-minded but playing on the puritanical streak that is supposed to infect the Anglo-Saxon psyche and all those who assimilate to it.  But not the French.  Everyone knew François Mitterand had a mistress and nobody cared. Gossiping about their neighbors’ morals has never been beneath the French, but at least they were gossiping about people they knew, or thought they knew.  But a stranger, someone they could not have named a week earlier?  No, not likely. What has happened to the French?  I think I know.  The ghost of René Étiemble has a hand in this.  Étiemble was the man who gave us franglais, the presumed corruption of French by English words (of course he never objected to “résumé,” “croissant,”  and “parvenu” in Anglophone mouths).  But, as I see it, a new form of franglais has invaded France, the franglais of the mind. The French are beginning to think like the Yanks and the Brits.  They have gotten in touch with their inner Puritan.  They have lost the ability to shrug.  They have been Americanized. This is glum news, but raises a question that is worth thinking about: how did this happen?  Despite rumors about some dire substance being slipped into McDonalds hamburgers which has caused a kind of mad cow disease all across France, the cause is elsewhere. My theory is the culprit is the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as president.  I am not blaming Sarko himself, but his election.  Consider this: Before he was elected, everyone knew that he and Cécilia were not exactly blissful and that she was living with another man.  Everybody knew, or assumed, that he had a woman as well.  No one cared, and the shrug still held its place in French culture.  But then the French elected him. And what did they elect?  A man who believes in economic globalization.  A man who believes in working forty hours a week.  A man who vacations in America with its president, no less.  In short, the French freely and without coercion or hanky-panky at the ballot box elected the first American president of the French Republic. And, having done that, they are free to behave like Americans, to be scandalized by sex, of all things, and for weeks, possibly years, at a time.  No sooner was Sarko elected than the French were all agog that he was dating (which means sleeping with) Carla Bruni and even more shocked when he made an honest woman of her when they got married.  Did he have to marry her, they wondered. The mystery of course is why the French elected an American, but they have and the rest you know.  It is bad news for someone who has come to Paris to get away from unlovely American traits.  But, you never can tell: maybe Americans can learn to shrug.  Now, imagine Eliot Spitzer not biting his lower lip, but shrugging and saying, Who cares?  What a beautiful picture for the front page of the tabloids. © Joseph Lestrange
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