The Sarkozy Solution

From the NY Times

The Sarkozy Solution: be stupid, be american, and grunt the Sinclairian phrase "I will work harder!"


July 22, 2007
New Leaders Say Pensive French Think Too Much
By ELAINE SCIOLINO

PARIS, July 21 — France is the country that produced the Enlightenment, Descartes’s one-liner, “I think, therefore I am,” and the solemn pontifications of Jean-Paul Sartre and other celebrity philosophers.

But in the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy, thinking has lost its cachet.

In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their “old national habit.”

“France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”

Citing Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” she said the French should work harder, earn more and be rewarded with lower taxes if they get rich.

Ms. Lagarde knows well the Horatio Alger story of making money through hard work. She looked west to make her fortune, spending much of her career as a lawyer at the firm of Baker & McKenzie, based in the American city identified by its broad shoulders and work ethic: Chicago. She rose to become the first woman to head the firm’s executive committee and was named one of the world’s most powerful women by Forbes magazine.

So now, two years back in France, she is a natural to promote the program of Mr. Sarkozy, whose driving force is doing rather than musing, and whose mantra is “work more to earn more.”

Certainly, the new president himself has cultivated his image as a nonintellectual. “I am not a theoretician,” he told a television interviewer last month. “I am not an ideologue. Oh, I am not an intellectual! I am someone concrete!”

But the disdain for reflection may be going a bit too far. It certainly has set the French intellectual class on edge.

“How absurd to say we should think less!” said Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher, writer, professor and radio show host. “If you have the chance to consecrate your life to thinking, you work all the time, even in your sleep. Thinking requires setbacks, suffering, a lot of sweat.”

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the much more splashy philosopher-journalist who wrote a book retracing Tocqueville’s 19th-century travels throughout the United States, is similarly appalled by Ms. Lagarde’s comments.

“This is the sort of thing you can hear in cafe conversations from morons who drink too much,” said Mr. Lévy, who is so well-known in French that he is known simply by his initials B.H.L. “To my knowledge this is the first time in modern French history that a minister dares to utter such phrases. I’m pro-American and pro-market, so I could have voted for Nicolas Sarkozy, but this anti-intellectual tendency is one of the reasons that I did not.”

Mr. Lévy, who ultimately endorsed Mr. Sarkozy’s Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, said that Ms. Lagarde was much too selective in quoting Tocqueville and suggested that she read his complete works. In her leisure time.

The satirical weekly Le Canard Enchainé, meanwhile, mocked Ms. Lagarde for praising the sheer joy of work and quoting Confucius’s oft-cited line, “Choose a work that you love and you won’t have to work another day.”

Such “subtleties have escaped the cleaning lady or the supermarket checkout clerk,” a commentary in the newspaper said Wednesday.

The government’s call to work is crucial to its ambitious campaign to revitalize the French economy by increasing both employment and consumer buying power. Somehow Mr. Sarkozy and his team hope to persuade the French that it is in their interest to abandon what some commentators call a nationwide “laziness” and to work longer and harder, and maybe even get rich.

France’s legally mandated 35-hour work week gives workers a lot of leisure time but not necessarily the means to enjoy it. Taxes on high-wage earners are so burdensome that hordes have fled abroad. (Mr. Sarkozy cites the case of one of his stepdaughters, who works in an investment-banking firm in London.)

In her National Assembly speech, Ms. Lagarde said that there should be no shame in personal wealth and that the country needed tax breaks to lure the rich back.

“All these French bankers” working in London and “all these fiscal exiles” taking refuge from French taxes in Belgium “want one thing: to come back to France,” she said. “To them, as well as to all our compatriots who are looking for the keys to fiscal paradise, we open our doors.”

Indeed, the idea of admitting one’s wealth, once considered déclassé, is becoming more acceptable. A cover story in the popular weekly magazine VSD this month included revelations that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable: the 2006 income of leading French personalities ($18 million for soccer star Zinedine Zidane, $12.1 million for rock star Johnny Hallyday, $334,000 for Prime Minister François Fillon, $109,000 for Mr. Sarkozy).

“We are seeing an important cultural change,” said Eric Chaney, chief economist for Europe for Morgan Stanley. “Working families in France want to be richer. Wealth is no longer a taboo. There’s a strong sentiment in France that people think prices are too high and need more money. It’s not a question of thinking or not thinking.”

Still, the French seem to be divided about the best way to get rich. On Thursday, a widely reported TNS-Sofres poll of more than 1,000 people concluded that 39 percent of the French think that it is possible to get rich by winning the lottery; only 40 percent believe that getting rich can happen through work.

Certainly, the veneration of money more than ideas is new to French politics.

Other French presidents flaunted their intellectual sides. Georges Pompidou was a teacher and author of a widely read anthology of poetry still used in French schools. François Mitterrand was a literature buff who collected rare books.

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, now a member of the Académie Française, has written important political tomes. Even Jacques Chirac, who liked to drink beer and eat bratwurst, was acknowledged as an expert on Asian culture and art.

Mr. Sarkozy is by no means an intellectual dwarf. His campaign speeches were filled with allusions to weighty French thinkers. He wrote a book more than a decade ago about one of his heroes, George Mandel, a Jewish government minister before World War II who opposed the collaborationist Vichy government and was arrested and eventually executed by the Nazis.

Still, Mr. Sarkozy likes to boast that, unlike Mr. Giscard D’Estaing, Mr. Chirac and legions of ministers and senior civil servants, he did not attend France’s finishing school for the political elite, the École Nationale d’Administration. (Only one of his cabinet members is “Enarque,” as the school’s graduates are called, but nine of the 16 either practice law, like Mr. Sarkozy, or studied it.)

Some intellectuals find aspects of his man-of-the-people style a bit déclassé.

In an after-midnight round table on French television this month, Mr. Finkielkraut, the philosopher and a Sarkozy supporter, called on him to abandon what he called an “undignified” pursuit.

“Western civilization, in its best sense, was born with the promenade,” Mr. Finkielkraut said, noting that thinkers like Aristotle, Heidegger and Rimbaud all were walkers. “Walking is a sensitive, spiritual act. Jogging — it is management of the body.”

His fellow guests agreed. “It is a change of rhythm — it’s called Jimmy Carter,” said one, reminding viewers of the American president who brought jogging into the White House.

“And Bill Clinton,” said another.

Carlyle's Forth Estate

In On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), Thomas Carlyle writes:

"[T]urning now to the Government of men. Witenagemote, old Parliament, was a great thing. The affairs of the nation were there deliberated and decided; what we were to do as a nation. But does not, though the name Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, out of Parliament altogether? Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact,--very momentous to us in these times. Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing brings Printing; brings universal everyday extempore Printing, as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures. The requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually there. Add only, that whatsoever power exists will have itself, by and by, organized; working secretly under bandages, obscurations, obstructions, it will never rest till it get to work free, unencumbered, visible to all. Democracy virtually extant will insist on becoming palpably extant"

'Hometown Baghdad' makes its mark

Sitting at my desk this morning at work, I heard the a sound bite the seemed worth its decibels among what might as well be satic on one of those "entermation channels." I looked up over my shoulder to see clips of 20-something Iraqis talk to low quality cameras. The the news-- I mean entermation--casters put on the spin. "It's MTV meets the war zone." "This is real reality TV." I say to myself, "great, consumer media has even made its way to the embattled streets of Baghdad."
But, I listened a bit. Appearance, the team of producers of Hometown Baghdad, wanted to do something consumer news has not been willing to do: Tell people's story. They look into the lives of college students and recent graduates who just want to live. Small camera crews follow the subjects around to get good footage from meager equipment. The raw material is sent to the New York production firm to be edited into 2-3 min. clip, easy sizes to be digested by new media consumers.
After watching one show, you will be hooked. Or at least, I was. I have yet to see anything out there like this. Most news shows don't even feature Iragis in speaking roles, let alone really consider the content of their lives. Had they from the beginning, I don't think as many Americans would have supported the war of profit in Iraq. But, maybe that is just the naive part of me.



Do the world a favor and watch.

Power and those who preserve it

I took a sociology course last year and, of course, we talked about power, privilege, and culture. Somewhere in my readings, an author suggested that the effects of culture are the most significant when we don’t notice them, when we think that that is just what it is. Language is a culture transmitter and is a dominant medium for participants of a culture to communicate. So then, language, like culture, has the greatest impact when we do not notice it. Similarly, it is easy to come to this planet and to accept various power structures without challenge because you know nothing different. It just happens that these three things are not isolated things that have something in common; rather, they work in tandem to support each other, maintaining their grip on denizens of that group.

I hated all of my English classes in elementary school. I found it disdainful. Poetry was stupid. I often felt dumb. The teacher would chide the way I spoke, the way I wrote. It was always wrong. I always had female English teachers, some white, some black. It seemed like they all had it out for me. I made c’s and a few b’s while must of my peers could boast of all a’s every semester. It’s amazing to me now as an English major in college. I remember the first time the thought of majoring in English skittered across my mind in the ninth grade. I was talking to my literature and composition teacher, a smart and beautiful black woman. It actually frightened me. I use to hate the subject. Then I realized that I didn’t. I always liked stories and communicating. I just hated the associations that I had with English instruction.

Where did the change happen? Sixth grade rolled around like roly polies. I was smart, I guess, but I was going nowhere. I was in an accelerated program at a nearby public middle school. I clashed with my teachers, all black women. They always called me smart-alecky since elementary. Sixth grade was no different. English classes were about the same as before, prescribing to me a world that contrasted what I observed and experienced. I was getting fed up, disillusioned. I failed English that year. As everyone in my family prepared to go on vacation in Puerto Rico that summer, I had to navigate among preteens at summer school who had already done short bids in juvenile detention centers. I will not say much about this, but I will say that it is there that I really learned about the reptilian fight or flight mechanism. Teachers tried prescribing but typically ended in disciplining which isn’t all that different when you think about it. How much English do you think I learned there?

Fortunately for me, the mailman came. I received a scholarship to go to a private school. Then, I enrolled into a small, predominantly white school. Counterpane, named after a poem by Robert Louis Stevens (I think), the Montessori approach along with some distinctive features. I took English and History from a white man, Eric Marshall. In his courses, he taught me the most I ever had in any class before that and for sometime after. He didn’t mind my English. He didn’t mind my writing. He would correct me sometimes, but he did so gently, without making it a big deal. Instead, he enjoyed my discovery and joy of literature. We shared it. We read books together. He started to teach me how to ask questions and find answers. He taught grammar too. I could not even begin to count the number of sentences that we diagramed. I didn’t enjoy it but I do appreciate it which is much more than I can say for those other English courses.

When surveying a certain group, you can start to find who is dominant in that group. In America, white males are at the top of this social hierarchy that we all have learned through institutions, relationships and symbols. It doesn’t take much to teach a person what is all around her. Language, on the other hand, is a little bit different. We learn the language that we experience. The younger we are when we experience, the easier we learn and the less we question it. But, if that language does not coincide with that of the dominant group, then there is an all out assault to regularize your language usage to the point where you feel like your intelligence is inadequate. The peculiar thing, however, is that often, at least in my experience with black female English teachers, that the people who demand your compliance with the language of the dominant group are not a part of that dominant group, the ones who profit least. Conversely, it was a member of the dominant group, a white man that helped sparked my love of literature and language that help put me back in the academic and life game and not continue the unfair treatment of nonstandard English speakers which results in a partly educated and disenfranchised group that never learns to talk propa noway.

Photo of the Day - More than 1,000 Words

Michel Spingler/Associated Press





This picture was taken from the NY Times website. Without knowing any context, this is a very powerful photo. Think about why. Check back later for a deeper analysis.

Portfolio from Senegal

Beginnings

Here I am. I sit in front of my laptop at 3:59 am on Friday morning. I just had a exceptional function. No more than 30 people came the whole night but it was amazing. It served as an end of the semester kickback and birthday celebration for Shawn “zamir” Walton, my brother. I spent a lot of money, most of what I did not have. We really were not expecting anything but we got a lot, we being me and Biko. I spent a significant amount of money to make sure this was an event that people would talk about, and we only planned it in two days. I think people will remember this. But, I didn’t want to do that just for the sake of gossip material. I wanted to show people an alternative. Tonight, we started A COUNTER COULTURE. We tapped into what was there and let them know that there are other people out here like them, that they don’t have to be isolated. Tonight was about new beginnings. Today I just finish a hell of a semester. There were a lot of self revelations and new understandings that came out of the whole ordeal. I suppose it is appropriate. I start this blog as I finish a trying and interesting period. Cyclical existence. I suppose that is man’s only hope for immortality and since I am so obsessed with eternal life I guess I must partake. It’s like in The Fountain, the movie. The only thing that we hope for that can live forever is giving birth to new life. So it is with this last semester: It died and gave birth to this blog. And perhaps, this blog will give birth to much more

I decided to start a blog for a number of reasons. I knew that if I wanted to write, I would have to write. Blogs present a wonderful opportunity to write publicly about anything. So here is by courageous attempt at a brave new world; a world that is different, a world that is balanced between unfathomable opportunity and certain demise. I thank two people for motivating me to start grinding at this thing. I met Chuck D in Boston at a New Media conference sponsored by the NBPC. I talked to him about my quest for a voice and various other challenges to all artists. He told me that if I wanted to make it to the Pros, I would have to sit at the free throw line with a big basket of balls and just start shooting. He said get a blog and then just write. Then about a month later, I sent a professor some digital art work that I created, art being a new realm to me that she helped to expose me to. I told her that she may have made an artist out of this aspiring writer. She told me that no matter if you’re an artist of words or pictures success is only 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. So now I sit back and shoot. No sweat. Nothing but net. Swoosh