Friday, July 6, 2007

Luc Sante on le jogging

Having read the recent Brainiac item on France's jogging president, Belgium-born writer and critic Luc Sante offered his own analysis. As always, he is right on the money:

The French care obsessively about semiotics. The actions undertaken by public figures are immediately subject to parsing by observers of every station, so nothing is innocent about a politician's gestures. And Sarkozy has been going out of his way to goad the electorate by proclaiming "I am an American president" at every turn. I wish I'd saved the link I got a few months back to somebody's analysis of his official portrait. They showed his predecessors: De Gaulle and Pompidou posed in the library of the Elysee Palace, Mitterand and Giscard posed before the tricolor. Alone, Sarkozy posed with a flag in the Elysee library. Then they showed you the official portraits of the last five or six American presidents, every one of them posed with a flag in front of bookshelves. Sarkozy also had his hair spotlit so that he looked bizarrely blond, and you could swear he was wearing some kind of padded butt extension. The effect was bananas, and not French. The jogging thing is similar: he's not getting healthful exercise -- he's saying "I am Bill Clinton."

As for the question posed by the left-wing newspaper Liberation, "Is jogging right-wing," I tried to steer clear of that too-easy binary formulation. As I pointed out parenthetically, just because Nerval and Baudelaire were horrified by the effect of economic liberalization on foot traffic doesn't mean they were leftists. Sante had a few enlightening things to say on this topic, as well:

Consider also that "jogging" is one of those words that is en anglais dans le texte, and I'm not sure the Academie has even bothered to formulate an alternative. You go to provincial towns and see banners proclaiming "Le grand jogging" and know the event was designed by and for people who spend their time watching American TV shows. It's neither a leftist thing nor (in French terms) a rightist thing, but "liberal" -- which there refers to someone for whom amassing personal wealth takes precedence over any ideal. Even the right wing -- still preoccupied with blood and soil -- spits on that.

Thanks very much, M. Sante. And have a good weekend, everybody.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:09 AM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss