For a grating style Sarkozy must go?

One way to avoid thinking about Europe’s dire circumstances is to treat the French presidential election as a matter of style. Who is best tailored for the job? Who has the right body language to grace the ugly meetings and photo-ops ahead?

The stylish Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker devotes his column this week to these aesthetic questions and, without hesitation, asserts that Nicholas Sarkozy must go.

Sarkozy’s style is unbecoming. Sadly for Sarkozy, Gopnik’s case against France’s most pro-American president is rather un-American. Here’s his opening argument:

“The Presidency of France’s Fifth Republic is a monarchical role, shaped to the elongated scale and the grand manners first of Charles de Gaulle and then of François Mitterrand. Although Jacques Chirac more recently gave the role a distinctly sleepy, roi fainéant flavor, it remains a throne more than a mere office. So the idea of a sort of citizen king, who giggles and wears glasses and is known to be on a diet, is a little unsettling.

Read more: www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/05/07/120507taco_talk_gopnik#ixzz1tcYB0gNe

Gopnik concludes:

“People will forgive a short man with a beautiful wife if he seems sufficiently surprised; Sarkozy seemed merely showy, and his energy, over time, merely antic and self-pleasing.

“A mild-mannered, European-minded citizen king is, at least, better than a passionately convinced exceptionalist.”

Gopnik and other pundits may want the French presidency to be a sanctuary of high fashion, a place of cool, and big men who can accept failure but have no tolerance for Bling. Nevertheless, the office was consciously designed for an exceptional activist by an arrogant patriot who didn’t care greatly whether other politicians were comfortable with his leadership or not.

De Gaulle had a much slower temperament than Sarkosy by the time he returned to power in order to reshape France in 1958. However, the presidency he crafted, in the constitution he largely wrote, was designed to make big decisions, to get the country out of trouble, to change France. It was tailored to break out of consensus politics—to reach over the political elites—and, if necessary, ask for the consent of French citizens to save France from itself.

While the times again are humbling, the French presidency was not created for a humble politician.

Sarkosy also sees the office and himself in heroic terms. In 2007, he said he wanted to rally France around a new dream and that nothing and no one would stop him “going through to the end.”

Certainly, his ego is a problem. He sees himself as a problem-solver at a time when the problems are bigger than France. This is embarrassing.

His opponent, Francois Hollande, is careful to not diminish his already modest image—or France’s in the wider European context—by being too vivid about France’s unavoidable fiscal and economic problems. He speaks of the “effort” that lies ahead and insists that he’s “not dangerous.”

Hollande has the temperament of a survivor. In large measure, however, two generations of sophisticated survivors got France and Europe into its problems. These problems wouldn’t be so ugly if all Europe needed to do was put more inoffensive survivors in office.

Occupy Wall Street Movement is planning a General Strike

While the clowns and amateurs are falling away and millions of American grown-ups are returning to the world’s oldest two-party system to defeat or re-elect centrist Barack Obama, 12,000 Wall Street Occupiers are planning to go nuclear—to hold a general strike, to get in Time Magazine again, in the sunny month of May.

Natasha Lennard reprints in Salon their “painstakingly drafted” call for national paralysis:

“May Day 2012: Occupy Wall Street stands in solidarity with the calls for a day without the 99 percent, a general strike and more!! On May Day, wherever you are, we are calling for: No Work, No School, No Housework, No Shopping, No Banking. Take the Streets!”

Click on: www.salon.com/2012/02/29/can_occupy_pull_off_a_general_strike/

A general strike is a damning proposition and not something any incumbent president can abide. Lennard, of course, sees its limitations.

“There is, however, a shared desire underpinning this ambitious call to action – even among those who resist the language of general strike – to disrupt business as usual and for May Day 2012 to escalate a fiercer wave of dissent against our current socio-politico-economic context.

“Among the slogans resonating around the May Day calls is the pithy reminder that 'strike is a verb, not a noun.' The call to general strike, then, is best understood at this point as a brash and ambitious call to action. Writing in the early 20th century, French theorist Georges Sorel argued that a real general strike could only function as a myth and that the myth was all important – the idea of something unattainable, mysterious and indescribable that can drive and inspire revolution. By Sorel’s lights, there can be no successful general strike on May 1, there has never been a successful general strike and never could be one – and that is why it’s all important to call for general strike to invigorate action.”

So, finally—on May 1st—America will also experience a fierce wave of futile dissent.

How French.

Failing at being French, however, is not always an American vice. George Sorel’s fascination with violence and attraction to the radicalizing impact of futile gestures served European fascism, not the 99-percenters.

The American rallies that made positive history were made up of Americans who’d already earned national attention by personal effort and personal courage registering voters, riding buses, and various other acts of persuasive democratic law-making.

In free societies, rallies simply dramatize social change and general strikes often end up making democracies less free.