Sunday, May 06, 2007

encore une fois de plus

On assiste sur les chaînes de Bouygues et de Lagardère à des tracts électoraux !» «Il nous reste deux jours, restez debout, c'est vous, le peuple français, qui allez décider. Dressez-vous contre tous les systèmes, dressez-vous pour une France juste et forte, dressez-vous pour la lumière, refusez l'esprit de revanche, refusez tous les mensonges et toutes les haines. En avant ! – Segolene Royal.

If only she’d been this tough all through. Aye. Go Royal! France is about to elect its Bush, its spirit of revenge, its gleeful little bumpkin, its smug side, its action hero flic. We know this is going to be a fucking bust. Must we watch this cycle all over again? No to thatcher, reagan, bush, aznar, and berlusconi. Don't do it, France.

4 comments:

Arkady said...

The mush mouth types sound silly when they try to get tough or inspirational. Voting in neoliberalism is all about candy-assed sticking it to people. The snotty, jumped up little cop is extra satisfying.

Roger Gathmann said...

Ah, Mr. Scruggs, if the sickness is elected, I will be sad, but it isn't the same as the sickness in the states. I don't see the French giving up all that horrible stuff from an American viewpoint, like the 35 hour work week. There will be some tough years, though. We know the tools, we know the passages of the sickness, we know the feverish consumer boom, we know the rabid attempt to destroy the manufacturing base. The moves are all expected now. The destruction of the unions. The intentional mismanagement of health care. The squeezing. The universal acclaim for it all in the press, the serious press, including the "lefty" serious press. But I think the cycle is past its peak, even if Sarko is elected. He is going to be caught in a lag. We'll see, though. Little fuck.

Arkady said...

The labor movement there is tough. There's that. There's also a gap between "sending a message" and actually agreeing to pay, once the list of recipients expands to include the snotty little cop's boosters.

I'm not optimistic, however. The equivalent liberal class the world over has taken up a narrow, procedurally correct outlook in which things that can't be proven wrong on the spot, decisively, are granted the imprimatur of procedural correctness -- to be acknowledged wrong, if ever, after a three to four year lag. It's the age of BHL and Nick Kristof, natural scabs with expensive hairdos.

Anonymous said...

« Disons-le, ce qu'il faut à la France, à l'Europe, au monde civilisé, ce qui est dès à présent réalisable, ce que nous voulons, le voici: les religions sans l'intolérance, c'est-à-dire la raison remplaçant le dogmatisme; la pénalité sans la mort, c'est-à-dire la correction remplaçant la vindicte; le travail sans l'exploitation, c'est-à-dire le bien-être remplaçant le malaise; la circulation sans la frontière, c'est-à-dire la liberté remplaçant la ligature; les nationalités sans l'antagonisme, c'est-à-dire l'arbitrage remplaçant la guerre ; en un mot, tous les désarmements, excepté le désarmement de la conscience. »

Victor Hugo, 1877

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