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The last thing the world needs is a French George Bush. Newly elected president Nicholas Sarkozy’s clarion call to the French people to stop dithering like so many Talmudic scholars about how many angels dance on the head of a pin and Kick Out The Jams is itself so much intellectual posturing. He would have you believe that that nation, with just 60 million inhabitants and yet the world’s fifth largest economy, dwarfing those of many much larger countries, is composed of lotus eating flâneurs and tail-chasing poodles.
His fer-de-lance in this campaign to wean his compatriots off their navel-gazing proclivities and roll up their sleeves is finance minister Christine Lagarde, a lawyer who emigrated to the U.S and worked for many years at a top Chicago law firm. All well and good. I’m glad she was successful in this country and that she returned to France with such a high opinion of our society. If I went to work at a kangaroo preserve in New South Wales, I’d probably have a blast too, but it’s doubtful that I’d return to the States as a cheap imitation of Crocodile Dundee.
Living in Chicago, Mlle. Lagarde probably resided on Lake Shore Drive with a panoramic vista of Lake Michigan. It’s doubtful whether she ever saw the side of that town documented in Saul Bellow’s telling novel “The Dean’s December.” Bellow, incidentally, acknowledged many times that he stayed in Chicago for most of his life because he had been unable to find teaching work in his first city of choice, New York. He freely described Chicago as a philistine environment populated by third-rate minds.
Think about it. Chicago is an economic powerhouse, no question. But it is not America’s Second City, as it likes to promote itself. It’s not even the country’s third- rated city. Maybe fourth. Anybody from New York or LA who found himself exiled to living in Chicago would likely drive his car off Wacker Drive into the Chicago River like Jake and Elmore in “The Blues Brothers.”
I have intimate associations with Chicago. I spent part of my life growing there, and it was a fantastic place for a kid, with friendly girls and dynamite Lake Michigan beaches in the summer months. But I never harbored any illusions about the nature of the people there, whom I found pedestrian and provincial even at that tender age. I got the hell out and I never returned. For the Minister of Finance of France to consider the city as a model to be emulated by the civilization that engendered Louis XIV, Napoleon, Victor Hugo, André Malraux, Marivaux – I could go on and on – all I can ask is, what exactly is she thinking?
I live on New York’s Upper East Side. Every day I see the same sights: the East River bridges, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Empire State Building. On the weekends I take the subway to the beautiful, pristine beaches of Fort Tilden in Rockaway. After a while, you get blasé. Blah blah blah, same old place, same avenues, same luxury health club, same beautiful girls.
So it is with the French and Paris. Blah blah blah Avenue Foch, Boulevard St. Germain, same boring Bernard-Henri Lévy. Same stifling intellectuals and thieving captains of industry as characterized in “Topaze” by Marcel Pagnol (you think I’m slandering them by calling them thieves? I’d like to sell you some Eurotunnel shares). After a certain point the organ grinder monkeys and idiotic imbeciles who compose Chicago’s legal and financial élites start to seem fresh and attractive, the same as Paris Hilton or the GEICO cave men.
But let’s keep things in perspective. Sarkozy never had a real job in his life. While he was still in his 20’s he got himself elected mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, and his concept of work is essentially sleazy, back-stabbing politics (ask Jacques and Bernadette Chirac, no slouches either in that regard). Nothing wrong with that, but for him to badger Frenchmen that they don’t work hard enough is like Bush, who is so weak as a person that he is not even capable of manipulating his own marionette strings, exhorting people to pull themselves up by their freakin’ bootstraps.
That’s not the worst of it. Sarkozy is deluded if he thinks he is going to gain traction by denigrating the intellectual life of French society that, for all its faults, is really the blooming flower of world civilization. Let me put it to you succinctly: if you don’t speak French you don’t know shit. Not to speak French is the intellectual equivalent of a life term in solitary confinement. There, I said it! For the president of France to offhandedly dismiss as surfeit the intellectual and cultural patrimony that has been shaped by artists like Balzac, Flaubert, Hugo, Zola, thousands of brilliant painters throughout history, playwrights, filmmakers, clothing designers, is an abomination. The modern France of today is like a sculpture that has been shaped by all those hands and minds throughout 6,000 years, and for this boring Sarkozy, who was elected to be the trustee and protector of all this incalculable wealth to diminish it and say that the French should emulate a failed social system of indescribable jungle savagery, because that is what we in this country have for a system right now, is insane.
In “The Dean’s December,” published in 1981, Bellow recounts the experiences of Dean Corde of the University of Chicago as he haunts the black precincts that surround the lily-white campus enclave located in the Hyde Park section of that city.
Bellow’s gift for painting all the pastel nuances of his relationships with his wives and acquaintances did not extend to discerning any human motivations on the part of people of color, whom he more or less considered to be witless savages. The descriptions of the heinous murders and rapes described in “The Dean’s December,” far from being mitigated by any understanding of the social environment that stimulated them, as in “Black Boy” and “Native Son” by Richard Wright or “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair, all of which were also set in Chicago, betray absolutely no interest in the kind of analysis that informs the social realism of the historic novels of Émile Zola, whose oeuvre was so essential in setting the tone for the reform movements and the ascendancy of the Socialist Party in early 20th century France.
“The Dean’s December” is pure apartheid. All that is missing is the classic line from “The Godfather,” which, incidentally, is the only reference to black people in all three films of the “Godfather” series, where the New York crime families, negotiating the guidelines for heroin trafficking in the city, decide to confine it to the black neighborhoods because “They’re animals anyway. Let them lose their souls.” What did Coppola have in mind when he decided to leave that in?
The extent of Saul Bellow’s interest in Africa and Africans can be gauged in his “satirical” novel “Henderson The Rain King,” which takes the reader on a trip to an Africa populated by imbecilic, fat-lipped natives who seem to be directly lifted from the comic book adventures of Tin-Tin. They talk funny, they behave hilariously and they’re not above a little degustatory sampling of missionary stew.
(All right, in the interest of disclosure let me state here that I am a nephew of Saul Bellow, and at the time of the publication of "The Dean's December" I was operating a leather boutique on Montreal's Ste. Catherine Street called "Deans Boutique de Cuir." Furthermore, Bellow's narrative of Henderson's adventures in the African village which take place in "Henderson The Rain King" is replete with a running joke about African Amazon women running around naked from the waist down, adorned only in leather vests and carring whips. My biggest selling items in "Deans Boutique de Cuir" at that time were: leather vests and whips, and I know something about leather-clad naked women wielding whips, you better believe it! It's funny how masturbatory fantasies can be transmitted from one generation to the next by the simple process of heredity)
A cursory review of the biographical profiles of Saul Bellow and Nicholas Sarkozy reveals some superficial similarities. Both are first generation citizens of their countries of Eastern European descent who rose to the top of society like the mythic 99 44/100 percent pure white bars of Ivory Soap that used to float to the top of the bathtub in the classic television commercials. Bellow, the writer, and Sarkozy, the activist politician, are not afraid to confront malfeasance and disorder created by disruptive elements of society. Sarkozy was perfectly clear about his intentions during the riots of 2005, when he told the lady, in no uncertain terms, like a Bruce Willis action figure or Mr. Clean, “Lady, we’re here to get rid of the scum.” Later he even used the analogy of blasting out the insalubrious elements with a power washer. Sarkozy meant to demonstrate to the world that he plans to “Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out!”
Nowhere in all this frenzied activity is room left for any kind of reflective analysis. At least that seems to be the kind of image Sarkozy desires to project. Of course, a great deal of it is hyperbole, meant to distinguish Sarko from his much-disdained predecessor, Grandpa Chirac, much the same as a teenager wanting to demonstrate independence from his antecedents. Nobody really believes he is going to come out like Rambo with both guns blazing. But maybe he is going a bit far with all that anti-intellectual posturing in a country that has come to symbolize precise analysis and rationalism in its planning. French people elected Sarkozy by a wide margin, mostly, I suspect because Ségolène Royal was not able to clearly define any new ideas and relied mostly on tired moralizing. Certainly, the concept of injecting a little of the vigor inherent in the Chicago ethos, where you certainly don’t need brains to get rich so much as commercial talent and ambition, might produce some rearranging of the economic furniture.
But would the father of modern France, de Gaulle, whose minutely calibrated planning is responsible for clearing the way for so much of that nation’s present-day success, approve of the kind of mindless forward motion, like a robotic vacuum cleaner that, bumping into an obstacle, automatically reverses direction, that is suggested by Sarkozy’s temperment? De Gaulle, the intellectual, writer and man of action, would certainly have expressed disdain at any suggestion of Chicago being an example to be emulated by French society.
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Posted on 7/23/2007
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