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LAND OF SAD
The French are a nation of depressed pessimists, wracked with self-doubt and unable to see a positive future. Who says so? The French:
This gloomy portrait of the current state of Gallic morale - or rather the lack of it - was made public yesterday in a damning report by France’s prefects, the country’s top administrators.
“The French no longer believe in anything,” the report said. “That is the reason that the situation is relatively calm, for they believe that it is not even worthwhile expressing their opinions or trying to be heard any more.”
The country’s 100 prefects went on to use the words “lifelessness”, “resignation”, “anxiety” and “pessimism” to describe the attitudes they believe prevail in France today.
Adele Horin will be shattered.
* Nation of sadness update:
A man who went missing five weeks ago in south-western France has been found alive in an underground cave system where he had got lost.
Jean-Luc Josuat-Verges, 48, told police he survived by eating wood and clay.
Mr Josuat-Verges left his home on 18 December suffering from depression and telling his wife he wanted to be alone for a time, local newspapers said.
I’ve always viewed the strain of public European opposition to American foreign policy as symptomatic of a quietly held view that this post war peace and freedom is nothing more than a happy accident, doomed inevitably to failure. Appeasement, then, (to Communists or Islamofascists) is just the price they’ll pay to keep the accident around a few years longer…
It’s time for another Jerry Lewis film festival.
Posted by Mystery Meat on 2005 01 23 at 05:03 AM • permalinkThis ‘tude is spreading. Back during the big Northeast power failure of 2001, when the media was shocked! shocked! to see mobs of people just waiting patiently for the power to come back, or, bizarrely, even helping each other, a Director of New York’s Social Services actually explained this as being because evil welfare reform had so robbed people of color of the will to live that they didn’t even have the energy to loot anymore…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 01 23 at 05:04 AM • permalinkThe operative word is “Derrida”.
a Director of New York’s Social Services actually explained this as being because evil welfare reform had so robbed people of color of the will to live that they didn’t even have the energy to loot anymore
Yow, got a link for that one?
Posted by Aaron - Free Will on 2005 01 23 at 05:37 AM • permalinkAaron — I’m trying to dig one up. As I recall, I read it originally in the NYT…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 01 23 at 05:52 AM • permalinkI love this….. “France has been anxious about its future, about its way of life, for the last 30 years, ever since the employment crisis and doubts about identity, ever since the absence of clear perspectives and collective projects.”
Hmmm. Thirty years ago was what, just a few years after the “glorious revolutionaries” of the late sixties took to the streets, forced cultural and political institutions to bend to their will, and began their “long march” through those institutions to create that grand and wonderful socialist utopia?
Hmmmm. Damn that Richard Nixon. It’s all his fault.
Aaron — I’m trying to dig one up. As I recall, I read it originally in the NYT…
They probably made it up because they believed it themselves.
Posted by Aaron - Free Will on 2005 01 23 at 06:39 AM • permalinkI’m certainly less intimately connected with the French than the prefects who put together this report, but judging solely by the amount of chest-beating which accompanied this week’s rollout of the Airbus A380, set to take the sceptre of Queen of the Skies from that perfidious American Boeing 747, I’d say rumours of French malaise are perhaps exaggerated. Or at least not universal.
But if the French population is looking for a “collective” project behind which to rally and which would give meaning to their lives (since accomplishing something individually apparently does not give them a feeling of self-worth), might I suggest implementing regime change in one of Syria, Iran or North Korea as the next project?
Just a thought.
Posted by Crispytoast on 2005 01 23 at 06:53 AM • permalinkSo they’re saying the Phrench are Democrats? ;-D
Posted by Barbara Skolaut on 2005 01 23 at 08:05 AM • permalinkhere’s what I don’t get about the AirBarge 380 — the airlines can’t fill the seats on the smaller planes they’re running now, so what are they going to do, run these ozone-destroying skywhales at a loss or cut back service?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 01 23 at 08:59 AM • permalinkIt wasn’t a Director of Social Services, but an administrative assistant, which may mean a secretary.
“In Calm Blackout, Views of Remade City,” New York Times, August 17, 2003 by Martin Gottlieb
...other reasons are offered for the peace. Among them are an overwhelming, debilitating poverty that has outlasted a near decade of prosperity, and Mr. Giuliani’s extraordinarily successful campaign to cut welfare rolls, which have fallen by more than 50 percent from their 1977 totals of close to a million.
“People are becoming accustomed to not having,” said Ms. Kuumba, an administrative assistant with the city’s Office of Children and Family Services. “They don’t have it; the city’s not giving it to them anymore; they’re not going to have it and they never will. So come what may. There’s just complacency.”
For less dishonest reporting, go to the paradoxically(?) more political:
“A Light in the Darkness” by Paul Beston, The American Spectator, 8/18/2003:
New York was transformed to a great extent through the leadership of one man. As much as politicians like to give credit to the people for hanging in there during the blackout, we all live in a completely different environment than we did a decade ago, and we live in it largely because of Rudy Giuliani. It may have been dark in New York for a day, but the city had already seen the light.
poor france!
at least it can console itself with fs charles de gaulleFor Now — Thanks! My google-fu was weak on this one…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 01 23 at 10:19 AM • permalinkBruceW — “Schadenfreude”... they were required to officially adopt it as part of the 1940 surrender treaty…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 01 23 at 10:20 AM • permalinkI dunno, the Scotsman got a little drooly over the theory that France was pressuring Thailand to buy their planes, and that story came out a little skewed. Is there any independent verification on this one?
Posted by Aaron - Free Will on 2005 01 23 at 10:55 AM • permalinkRe Airbus & Thailand, check out “Flying White Elephant” at Andrea Harris’s Victory Soap
http://victorysoap.us/archives/2005/01/flying_white_el.php#commentsAt least they look stylish while they are being glum.
Excuse my shallow analysis, but some people like being down in the dumps.
It makes you seem thoughtful and concerned, although a pain in the arse.
Posted by Major Anya on 2005 01 23 at 02:56 PM • permalinkAt least they look stylish while they are being glum.
Excuse my shallow analysis, but some people like being down in the dumps.
It makes you seem thoughtful and concerned, although a pain in the arse.
Posted by Major Anya on 2005 01 23 at 02:56 PM • permalinkYes misery and glum has long been part of the way of life of the intellectual elite of France.
Witness such philosophers as Jean Paul Sartre, Nihilism, and rejection of joy and religion as part of the mainstay of French thinking; and its a glimpse into French psychology.
Happiness is viewed as stupidity, why, anyone with any depth or common sense, according to French logic has to be miserable; because to glimpse the reality of life, which is undoubtably bleak and desparate; you cannot BUT be miserable.
Hence if you start to feel uplifted in spirit you must feel, if you are French, that you are losing your brains, hence the quick rejection of any optimism.
I guess thats why they are the opposite of some other nations.
It sounds to me, if this report is accurate, that the French people in general are ripe for being converted to Islam in the near future. A deracinated population with no hope for the future sounds vulnerable to proselytizing by a faith full of people with confidence in themselves and their own future, and arrogantly convinced they should rule. There are areas in France now where Sharia rules, in banlieus where the French police dare go only in the strenngth of army platoons, and are ruled by armed Islamist gangs who enforce Sharia there.
Perhaps in our own interest, that of not seeing France fall to an Islazmist government in the near future, the US should send Mormon, Pentecostal, and Evangelical Christian missionaries there to convert the French to a form of Protestant Christianity before the Muslims conquer them from the inside. I gather that the Pentecostals and Evangelicals have been doing a successful job at persuading the locals to convert in both Africa and South America. We’ll just leave the snake charmers at home.
Posted by Michael Lonie on 2005 01 23 at 03:56 PM • permalinkPerhaps this explains why the entire nation appears to be having an orgasm over the construction of a new airplane, for God’s sake. Talk about needing to get a life!
I’d put the song and dance down to the fact that the UK and French governments have poured 3billion pounds (sorry, I’m too lazy to convert it into $) of their taxpayers money into the project.
The orgy of self-congratulation is often required to ‘prove’ to the voters that they’re ‘solving unemployment’ (even though they’re probably making it worse)
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2005 01 23 at 04:36 PM • permalinkIn case anyone is still around to needle the pathetic frogs:
http://www.miquelon.org/images/snlfrance2003.mpg
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2005 01 24 at 07:00 AM • permalinkI’m certainly less intimately connected with the French than the prefects who put together this report, but judging solely by the amount of chest-beating which accompanied this week’s rollout of the Airbus A380, set to take the sceptre of Queen of the Skies from that perfidious American Boeing 747, I’d say rumours of French malaise are perhaps exaggerated. Or at least not universal.
I disaree. Their hysterical enthusiasm over a modest engineering achievement (as if it vindicates their whole way of life) is a typical sign of overcompensation and one-upsmanship driven by feelings of inferiority. A strong nation does not boast of making the best air vechicles in the world. It boasts of it’s armies and overall wealth and influence. Their chatter here is like Switzerland claiming superpower status and victory over Evil America because it leads the world in gourmet chocolate.
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Naturellement! When you watch the rest of the world rushing toward a prosperous, happy capitalist-cowboy future, leaving you and all your gloriously nuanced socialist beliefs in the dirt, it kind of sucks.