Dope

In a decade, the Third Way has effectually buried every left wing party that embraced it, except for Tony Blair's Labour Party -- and for Mr. Blair, the hens, or is it the vultures, are coming home to roost. Especially in the aftermath of his poodle act for Mr. Bush. The British have traditionally, and inexplicably, imagined themselves collectively as a bull-dog -- but even the British don't necessarily want to see their leader flaunt a fetch it boy attitude, which Mr. Blair displayed in his pow-wow with his master in Crawford, Texas (not exactly Yalta. More like, Y'allta).

And now Jospin. A socialist leader who couldn't find one single issue that would distinguish him from his conservative opponent. Not that the French socialist party has accrued a lot of credit since Mitterand was elected on the promise of breaking with the logic of capitalism, and was promptly broken by the logic of capitalism. Still, there is the 35 hour working week; there is the social service sector, embattled but still funtioning; and there is the rhetorical opposition to the avatar of the logic of capitalism in our time, the USA. Not that LI approves of that rhetoric very much -- in fact, its inhuman consequence in Rwanda remains to be explored. We'd like nothing better than to see the Mitterandish clique that encouraged the genocide in Rwanda marched into court in the Hague. Still, in the Middle East, and in Russia, and in Latin America, the French hesitancy about the American model has served as a hopeful corrective to those of us who think unleashing a pure market economy upon the helpless multitudes is a recipe for disaster.

The point is this, though: even as the leaders of the left were dismantling it, they were assuring us that they were merely modernizing it. The new face of the left, for the new millenium. In the film, Brazil, there is a recurring comic gag concerning older women getting their faces lifted. The face lifts involved swathing their heads in plastic sheeting for a period, and then cutting the sheeting off. The result was an ephemeral, goggly youthfulness, a grotesque contrast with their aging bodies, followed by a period in which the face would "leak." Meanwhile, the plastic surgeon would insist on the beauty of the warped faces, the drooping cheeks, the flacid noses and weird lips -- a congery of impressively hag-like features -- he'd produced.

That plastic surgeon is Jospin. He is Blair. He is Clinton. He is Schroeder. The collective direction of the lefty parties in the West has been lost not because the rank and file are suffering a crisis of faith. No, it is because the leadership longed for that respectability that comes from betraying every one of labor's ideals to Capital. In exchange, the leadership got touted by the editorialists of the world's leading newspapers. The leaders got to hang out at Davos. And they lost all credibility with their followers. It is a nightmarish situation. How can you vote for a liberal, in the United States, for instance, when your choice is between George Bush and Al Gore? Between a man owned lock stock and oil barrel by energy companies, and a man who shilled for the defense industry in the Arabian Peninsula, and never met a corporate contributor he wouldn't do a favor for. The choice is no choice. In the end, the policy of accomodation to the right serves only ... the right.

This is from Michelet's Le Peuple


Ce qu' on remarque le mieux sur une personne
qui est nue, c' est telle ou telle partie, qui sera
d�fectueuse. Le d�faut d' abord saute aux yeux.
Que serait-ce, si une main obligeante pla�ait sur
ce d�faut m�me un verre grossissant qui le rendrait
colossal, qui l' illuminerait d' un jour terrible,
impitoyable, au point que les accidents les plus
naturels de la peau ressortiraient � l' oeil
effray� !

Voil� pr�cis�ment ce qui est arriv� � la France.
Ses d�fauts incontestables, que l' activit�
croissante, le choc des int�r�ts, des id�es,
expliquent suffisamment, ont grossi sous la main de
ses puissants �crivains, et sont devenus des
monstres. Et voil� que l' Europe tout � l' heure la
voit comme un monstre elle-m�me...
Le peuple qu' on peint ainsi, n' est-ce pas l' effroi
du monde ? Y a-t-il assez d' arm�es, de forteresses,
pour le cerner, le surveiller, jusqu' � ce qu' un
moment favorable se pr�sente pour l' accabler ?

"What one sees first about a person who is nude is that such and such a part is defective. The faults leap immediately to the eye. But when over the faulty spot, someone obligingly places a magnifying glass to make it even more colossal, illuminating it with the pitiless, terrible light of day, to the point that the most natural accidents of the skin jump out at the terrified eye, how do you think you'd feel about that?

This is precisely what has happened to France. Its incontestable faults, which economic growth, the shock of interests, of ideas, sufficiently explains, have been enlarged under the hands of its most powerful writers and have become monsters. And thus, Europe soon sees it as a monster. The people that are so depicted, aren't they the horror of the world. Are there enough armies, fortresses, to surround them and watch them up to the favorable moment for destroying them?"

Michelet is employing reactionary tropes that will later come to political fruition under Stalin -- the idea of the critic as traitor, and the people as monstrously traduced. But the Le Pen vs. Chirac contest coming up is a product of Michelet's Peuple. And guess what? That series of writers -- Voltaire, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola -- they were right, they were a thousand times right: there's a monster in France, and it is stirring, stirring...