Jupiter stumbles: the curse of Macron

 

Perhaps the most Macronist of all Macron things during the debate about the reforms – the debate in the street, the debate in the supposed Legislature – was Macron deciding that this was just the time to give Jeff Bezos the Legion d’Honneur. I missed it when it happened – I was turned on to it by the excellent, very sad article in Media Part by Nicholas Mathieu: « Savez-vous quelle réserve de rage vous venez de libérer ? »

I read the Mathieu article after reading the “what does Macron’s inner circle think” article by Le Monde, which keeps in intimate and admiring touch with the circle around the great man: “Selon plusieurs de ses proches, le président de la République n’a « aucun scrupule, aucun regret »(According to those close to him, the president of the Republic has “no scruple, no regret”). This is how Le Monde writes – a far cry from the revolutionary stylings in 1792 of Pere Duchesne, the paper whose motto was: Je suis le véritable père Duchesne, foutre!” – I am the fucking real Pere Duchesne. Who would write, for instance, of his great anger against the so called aristocrats, the Duc of this, the Prince of that. Between the fuck it and the “proches de la President de la Republique” there is an abyss set. But all your abysses and all your interior ministers won’t keep that abyss from being crossed at some point – no man or woman can say where.

In the Marianne story about the honouring of the Amazon man, one reads: “C’est une décoration qui fait grincer des dents, surtout à gauche.”  But what gauche? It is the gauche in unions. It is the gauche that realizes that Macron is honouring a union-buster. It is his riposte to the unions he refuses to talk to. The only syndicat that counts for Macron is the syndicat of bosses. The man has an upper class autism of a high order – usually, in the evolution of neolib popularism, the Tory or the Republican has figured out how to hide behind the working man. Macron has never figured out even so simple a ploy. Boris Johnson looks like a political genius next to a piker like our President. The figure he most resembles, in the neolib spectrum, is Bush – Bush the first. George H.W. Bush. A man who could never release his lips, his famous lips, from the silver spoon around which they were wrapped. The man with the same strange personality, the man with the mistress (which, as Hilary Clinton once said, everybody in D.C. knew about)  and the wife-mother.

I despise all Bushes, yet in one way Bush did more than any president since: he took seriously a global climate problem, the depletion  of ozone, and he did something decisive about it. Politicians come in all sorts of flavors. As bad as Macron is, he does have a balanced sense that it is time for negotiation in the  Ukrainian war. And he is not the foreign policy disaster that Hollande was, all the way around. One could imagine him a fairly competent foreign minister. But not Jupiter, never Jupiter.

Dethrone the king. Fuck!