Friday, March 24, 2023

Illegitimacy in France: Macron's bossism

 


You can hear the cop cars at night. Distant booms. In the morning, there are ashes on the sidewalk and the street. Practically, the 49,3 regime has reposed its awesome littleness in the hands of the Minister of the Interior, a man named Gérald Darmanin. A man born out of time - he would certainly have flourished in the good old days, circa 1943, 1944. A rightwinger pur et dur, he has been stirring up his forces to do their utmost - illegitimately hassling demonstrators in all four corners of the Hexagon.

You can smell the illegitimacy. It smells like smoke and tear gas.
Macron always goes below the line that you have drawn in your head - surely he couldn't be that arrogant, that blind, that clueless? Yet this product of a thousand McKinsey position papers always comes out with the boss-ist position, like a vending machine always comes out with the chewing gum when you put in the dollar in change. Unless something jams. It is a bit of a mistake to look for comparisons in politics - Macron's choreography is pure business. He's a corporation type through and through. What he would like to do in France is enact a mass layoff. Alas! Certain U.N. decrees make this impossible.
Oddly, for such a business oriented guy, Macron apparently never took the class, "how to hide your evil". So he shows it again and again. However, he has cleverly figured out how to strategize the fascists. Thus, he is always looking for some future point where it is either Macron or the fascists. Hence, the many subtext in Macronie - by which I include Le Monde - where Macronist worry that the result of all the "fuss" over the very very very necessary reforms will benefit the Le Pen fascists. Very worried, worried to tears, these Macronists. And their solution to that worry is: get behind the great man!
While this goes down like a refreshing drink among the media elite who have benefitted from Macron's tax cuts for their class, out in the street people, the vulgar crowd, want to take a big dump on it. And on the chief.
One thing to note before I end this rant: the reforms are advertised as changing the age of retirement to 64. That is inaccurate, though, for millions of cases, where the protocol for full retirement will change to 67, 68. If you are one of the people who started work at 18 and stayed with the same work - well then, you might be a lucky 64! Otherwise, good luck.
France is experiencing that part of neoliberalism called shamelessness. But the shame is comin' at you from the street, all you think tankers and nudgers!

No comments:

on Cocteau and Maurice Sachs and the twenties

  « …. the fervor without which youth is hardly worth being lived….” – in this phrase, Maurice Sachs sums up what he felt for Jean Cocteau ...