Wait – only three candidate cities? That’s right. Truly, the heyday of the Olympic movement must in some sense be already past, as Simeoni’s writing seems preoccupied with reasons not to volunteer to host Olympic games, and especially why it’s unlikely that Munich will get the opportunity to do so again, whether the German citizenry eventually decide they are up for it or not. For it’s a world of austerity now, and constructing the facilities and providing the various other guarantees (e.g. for adequate anti-doping control) necessary to stage either summer or winter games successfully costs a lot of money. (The German budget is €3 billion, but such estimates almost always undershoot the mark.) Yes, that can be viewed as an investment towards reaping the bonanza of throngs of tourists coming to visit and spend, but an equally-likely result is being left with a bunch of “white elephant” sports facilities with no real further reason for existence once the closing ceremonies have concluded.

Such considerations echo experiences with the (Football) World Cup – for example, South Africa has plenty of “white elephant” stadiums now, as likely will Qatar after 2022 – and in another aspect as well: corruption. Yes, the outrageous allegations surrounding the selection-process for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City were supposed to have resulted in the adoption of various anti-corruption measures – e.g. IOC Executive Committee members are forbidden from traveling to any of the candidate-cities until after the decision has been made. Then again, the world has just been treated to another spectacular example of questionable sports selection with the awarding by FIFA of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar respectively, so the suspicion has to linger that the money and effort expended to make the best bid one’s city is capable of might just be wasted in the end when the truly best applicant turns out to be mysteriously and unaccountably passed over.

That’s a particularly daunting prospect for the Munich bid organizers considering the particular obstacles they still face to pulling this off at all. For one thing, Germanophiles will recall that Munich itself is rather flat, nestled in a river valley, while one thing you definitely need for Winter Olympics is mountains for the skiiers and snowboarders to slide down on. There would seem to be a solution for this in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a skiing resort just to the south – and itself in fact the sole host of the 1936 Winter Games – except that there are apparently a number of property-holders there who are refusing to sell the land they hold which is needed for the new Olympic facilities. One way or another – what’s German for “eminent domain”? – they need to be brought round by the time the IOC inspectors come a-callin’. Besides that, though, Ms. Simeoni also mentions the possibility that the German national legislature – the Bundestag – might vote against Munich ’18 or at least show itself to be so hostile that Executive Committee voting members get the hint. Some members of the Green Party, in particular, are aghast at the environmental atrocities planned in connection with the construction of the Winter Games ’14 facilities at Sochi – then again, that’s Russia, they do things differently there – and don’t want to countenance any such thing happening in Southern Bavaria.

Ummm . . . Anyone Remember the Massacre?

There’s another objection to the Games specific to Munich that I’m surprised to see mentioned nowhere in Ms. Simeoni’s article. Does anyone remember 1972? The Olympic Games happened in Munich then, also – and things did not go so well. That’s what made me so surprised when I picked up on this FAZ article in the first place? “Munich?! Why not just invite President Obama to take an open-topped car ride through the streets of Dallas?” That there does nonetheless seem to be a serious application – bid-book, financial guarantees and all – submitted by Munich to hold Olympic Games once again must say something about how the city and entire country have moved on from the Olympic Massacre that I would love to see some knowledgeable essayist – Herr Schneider? – treat at greater length. Or maybe that is instead the big unmentionable motive behind what seems to be so much reluctance to really have the Olympics there again – if we can believe Ms. Simeoni’s account. (Consider, though: A national poll of Germans showed only a 60% level of support.)

Tipsters, here’s your hint: It’s not going to be Munich anyway. According to the article, it’s going to be the South Korean candidate, Pyeongchang – assuming there hasn’t been some devastating War of Korean Unification in-between, cross your fingers – mainly because Samsung stands solidly behind that bid and Samsung speaks very fluently the sort of language – i.e. money – that IOC officials must harken to just as much as those of FIFA. So get to your local betting offices and place your wagers – and just remember that, if you don’t happen to read German and regularly peruse the pages of the FAZ, you heard it here first!

                          

Isn’t that what so many of us are worrying about even as we witness, each in our own way, the inauguration delirium now playing out in America’s capital city? That Obama: as Widmann is glad to put it, “The United States has in him one of the most intelligent, alert, and communication-gifted presidents in its history.” I mean, just go read his books, and compare them to other politicians’ tired, ghost-written literary output!

But Wildmann, in his adopted role of public gadfly is happy to bring out explicitly that qualification that many of us harbor at the same time in the back of our minds: Success is not going to depend on character as much as it will on sheer circumstances. And for Barack Obama it is likely, in his view, that the “Change” that he will end up most remembered for is running for and winning the American presidency in the first place. Things are so bad, on so many fronts, that really radical change is required, yet by his very nature Obama is not the man to bring it. Rather, as Wildmann so aptly puts it, “[i]n democratic societies the difficult steps must be taken by those who came into power promising to protect us from them.”

I’d like to call this the “Nixon-in-China” syndrome, although Widmann for sure mentions neither “Nixon” nor “China” in his piece. The American rapprochement in the mid-1970s with that titanic Asian power with which it had been bitter enemies for more than twenty years was something as unthinkable then as it later turned out to seem (once the many benefits to both peoples, primarily economic in nature, began to flow) inevitable. But no one could have pulled that breakthrough off other than that ferocious, redoubtable Cold-Warrior, Richard Nixon: no one could have taken the political heat for that act and survived than someone whose anti-Red China credentials were impeccable, i.e. someone who had been the last politician you would have predicted would do such a thing. But you could also call this the De Gaulle-in-Algeria syndrome, as well: only someone so embodying France’s military glory as Charles De Gaulle – and therefore the very last politician any of the French could have imagined capitulating to the FLN Algerian insurgents, and thereby flouting the will of the French Army – could have gotten the French out of the bloody mess that was Algeria in the late 1950s/early 1960s.

Widmann, naturally, also fails to mention De Gaulle or Algeria. Instead, though, he has a couple of convincing home-brewed German examples, of rather recent vintage, to back up his extraordinary “only possible by those who promised to protect against” assertion. There are the Harz reforms of earlier this decade, a set of fundamental modifications to aspects of the German economy – e.g. unemployment insurance, worker protections against being fired – done in order to make it more competitive and job-creating. These were ultimately pushed through, against the inevitable heavy domestic opposition, by Gerhard Schröder and his SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), i.e. by the Labor Party on the left side of the German political spectrum whom people ordinarily would have expected to be the last organization to put through any such reform. Or, if that example is a bit obscure for you, consider the very fact that the Bundeswehr, the German Army, currently finds itself partly deployed outside of Germany proper. It happens to be in Afghanistan (serving NATO, of course), but just ponder that fact: the German Army, of WWI and WWII fame, let loose again in foreign lands. In fact, ever since 1945 it has been the Germans, especially those of the Left, who have refused to allow it ever to depart their borders again – yet, as Widmann points out, the fact that it is (way) outside of them now is mainly due to the agreement for the move secured from Germany’s Green Party – again, the last party you would think would give its permission – back when they were part of the governing coalition with Schröder’s SPD.

The Best Is Just About Past

Widmann’s point is that the situation that America (together with much of the rest of us) now faces is bad, really bad. Nothing less than a tearing-down of the old Establishment, both economically and politically, will do to put things right – but now the former Senator from Illinois has become even more a part of that very same Establishment. And so, he concludes, “today’s swearing-in will be, and will remain, Barack Obama’s greatest performance.”

You obviously have to hope that he is wrong, but I confess to seeing a certain logic in this “Nixon syndrome” argument. But then the question naturally arises, “All right, so what does a society have to do to get done the things that need to get done?” The train-of-thought here would seem to lead to the conclusion that, in fact, John McCain (the Maverick!) was a better bet to elect to the presidency to save America from its crises! Think about it: He’s the last one (if you remember his party platform) whom you would expect to bring about a system of national health insurance, for example, right? Or to nationalize the banks.

                          

Don’t worry: of course the L’Humanité editors do recognize a change, and they are pleased with it. “The possibility of a man from a minority to accede to the White House legitimately stirs up the pride of a people regaining confidence in their capacity to evolve. But for this pride to really influence the conditions of life, there is quite a bit of road to go.” First off, there’s a serious recession to confront, and the editors express their regret that Obama seems to have no intention “to really break with the capitalist fundamentals that have lead to this situation.”

But at least his victory is at the same time a defeat for American neo-conservatism, a defeat which “was just as much awaited, if not even more, on the international scene as in the USA itself.” Now the question is, in the international realm, whether Obama will be able to succeed in leveraging the new spirit of goodwill towards the United States to disarm the reluctance shown, especially within Europe, to what the editors call “the American will to hegemony.”

Credibility is All

So far, so doctrinaire. For an assessment that is a bit deeper as well as more nuanced we can look to former German foreign minister (and famous Green Party head) Joschka Fischer, writing in Die Zeit (Over dream and reality in politics). Fischer is also pleased with Obama’s victory – delighted, in fact. He compares it directly (and you knew this was coming) to November 9, 1989, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, when “once again one thought oneself to be dreaming, because something came true that one had so often hoped for but at the same time not considered possible.”

Still, and just as the L’Humanité editors were so quick to point out, Fischer acknowledges the gravity of the problems awaiting Obama’s assumption of office: there is not only the world economic crisis and its particular incarnation in America to address, but also a war to end in Iraq, the moral standing of his country to rehabilitate, climate change and national health insurance to move forward on, etc. (By the way, Fischer has no problem in calling these “the mountain of unresolved problems, crises, and conflicts left behind by his predecessor George W. Bush.”)

Will he be able to make any progress? Will the main result over a couple of years be disappointment? After all, writes Fischer, look at how Bill Clinton’s ambitious legislative agenda (mainly centering around health care reform) was stifled within his first year in office, which was then followed in the 1994 elections by the Newt Gingrich-led “Conservative Revolution” in Congress.

Fischer does hold out hope that Obama will be able to match the sky-high expectations now surrounding him. In his view, the achievements of Obama’s campaign team against first the Clinton and then the Republican political machines have already shown his considerable potential for accomplishing policy success. Yes, there will inevitably be gaps between a policy vision and what that policy turns out to be upon implementation; there will be gaps of time, when what progress that is happening proceeds too slowly in the eyes of those who feel that they are his constituency; and there will of course be mistakes – not to mention completely unexpected events coming along to upset all calculations.

In Fischer’s view, though, all of that can be handled, as long as Obama realizes that his main resource is his great stock of credibility (Glaubwürdigkeit) – the credibility of his person, but also what will presumably be the credibility of his proposed policies. That will get him through whatever setbacks, emergencies or unavoidable compromises occur with his political support intact; Fischer warns that he needs to “protect it like the apple of his eye.” After that, he needs to have the ability to see things through (Durchsetzungsfähigkeit) and, don’t forget, also luck and intrepidness – because “whoever in politics does not get up again after blows, and who completely lacks the necessary luck, will not have success for very long.”

But Joschka Fischer sees no reason for worry in any of those areas. In fact, he expects the successful beginning of an “Obama Epoch.”

                          

Sorry, I’m afraid we’re not going to discuss that one today. (I know, I don’t even give you the link. That’s just another reason why you should go learn German yourself.) Rather, let’s take a look at a couple of other pieces, which together give a German look at the current political influence within the US of rap/hip-hop music, starting with one entitled The Irrelevant-Bitch Dilemma, by Oskar Piegsa. (Please pardon the expression, but that’s the title: apparently Nutte is “bitch” in German, i.e. the disparaging term for females. Please do not misuse this knowledge.)

This title, we can safely assume, is only secondarily another attempt at providing Zuender with that youth-attracting irreverent attitude, because “irrelevant bitch” is mainly what the rapper Ludacris called Hillary Clinton in a recent ditty that he composed in honor of Barack Obama. And Ludacris stands central as the embodiment of what hip-hop’s influence in the American political process (on the Democratic side exclusively, it hardly need be said) has become. Rap has been political from its earliest days but, as Piegsa reminds us with citations of “Fuck tha Police” from NWA in 1988 and “Fight the Power” from Public Enemy a year later, it has rarely been mainstream – until recently, until 2004 to be exact, when rap stars started to participate in public voter-participation efforts (e.g. Snoop Dogg with “Rock the Vote,” P. Diddy with “Vote or Die!”). Quite apart from the distaste for the George W. Bush administration that presumably lay behind such campaigns, they made sheer political sense because there was in fact a voter-bloc that these stars had reasonable hopes of being able to mobilize, namely what is called in the article the “HipHop-Generation” of Afro-American and Latino youth in America’s big cities. Despite the ultimate failure then to unseat Bush from the presidency, yet more rap stars have engaged in the 2008 presidential campaign (on the Democratic side exclusively, it hardly need be said), from the Obama endorsement by Jay-Z and Common in their music to the contribution Obama video contribution from the Black-Eyed Peas’ Will.I.Am.

Lock Up Your Daughters!

And from Ludacris’ music, as well – including his song “Politics (Obama is Here),” in which he he claims “McCain don’t belong in ANY chair unless he’s paralyzed” and, speaking of Hillary Clinton, claims “that bitch is irrelevant.” And there we see the problem: hip-hop artists and their ballades can all-too-easily become loose cannons when they are too closely affiliated with presidential campaigns, which, as Piegsa takes care to note, can potentially be sunk by one single inappropriate sentence. No wonder a spokesman for the Obama campaign was quick to disavow Ludacris’ support, terming his song-lyrics “outrageously offensive”; no wonder that Obama himself, while otherwise praising Ludacris as a great talent in an interview with Rolling Stone, qualified that with “It woul be good if I could let my daughters hear that without having to worry that they would get a bad self-image.”

Then again, Rolling Stone did not get around to endorsing Obama for President until late March of this year – at which point his nomination was not quite yet in the bag (the Reverend Wright controversy, among others, had yet to rage) but nonetheless likely. The hip-hop magazine Vibe, on the other hand, endorsed him back in September of 2007, and even as the very first presidential candidate it had ever endorsed.

Still, it is still by no means assured that Obama completely owns that “HipHop-Generation” voting bloc. (Piegsa tries to show how Hillary also had hip-hop support, in the person of Bob Johnson, formerly of Black Entertainment Television, who for a while campaigned hard for her (particularly in the South Carolina Democratic primary) and controversially alluded to Obama’s past drug use. I personally think he simply wastes the three paragraphs he devotes to Johnson – he’s black, for sure, but he definitively ain’t hip-hop.) Remember that, for most of its existence as a distinct musical form, rap has deliberately placed itself on the side of social outsiders determined to “Fight the Power.” Some rappers still refuse to come in from the cold, despite Obama’s appeal and his color, and Zuender also features an interview (“Obama lost me” – the title is in English, though the interview is entirely in German) with hip-hop activitist Troy Nkrumah, Chairman of the National HipHop Political Conference, which at the very beginning of this month held its biennial convention in Las Vegas, attracting 1,000 participants.

Nkrumah Disses Obama

What is Chairman Nkrumah’s problem with Barack Obama? interviewer Oskar Piegsa (yes, our old friend) wants to know. Don’t – don’t – don’t believe the HYPE! is basically his answer: Obama has gone too centrist. Nkrumah objects to the right-ward shift Obama has taken in many of his policies since winning the Democratic nomination: a support for Israel (and Israel-in-Jerusalem) that even goes beyond conventional Democratic expressions of support, and which according to Nkrumah is inconsistent with Obama’s alleged championing of human rights; his support of the recent FISA Amendment Bill which freed US telecom companies for liability for illegally spying on Americans at the request of the Bush Administration; and most especially his support for the “Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” (here Nkrumah must be referring to the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, which is still just a proposed law, not yet passed), which Nkrumah claims would greatly sharpen penalties for civil disobedience at demonstrations. On a more fundamental level, while Nkrumah concedes that Obama would be a very intelligent president, he cannot bring himself to believe that he would change the “System” in the radical ways that he feels it needs to be changed. He maintains that the more radical rapper groups that he claims to represent, such as Dead Prez (right, not a good group to be seen supporting Obama) and Immortal Technique, intend to support the Green Party candidate for president instead, Cynthia McKinney, even as he admits that she has no chance of winning. (Hey – she would be the first black and the first woman president! And it looks like the Green Vice President would also be a woman, and Latino!)

So it looks like hard-core hip-hop is going “green,” even as mainstream rappers stay “black” and the Obama campaign continues to try to figure out how close to allow them to get to the candidate. This should be a minor but fascinating process for cultural observers to continue to track – if, that is, Obama’s many hip-hop supporters can refrain from inadvertently providing that sentence or public scene that so turns off the wider mainstream of American voters as to deny him victory in the presidential election.

                          

It seems some NATO alliance partners are rather unimpressed with the level of contribution offered by certain others, and are ratcheting up the pressure on these laggards to get more with the program. This argument dominated the NATO conference of defense ministers held last week in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius. As you can expect, the US is the leading country among that first group, but Canada has been complaining as well. That country currently has 2,500 troops stationed in dangerous southern Afghanistan, by Kandahar, and has even threatened to send those troops home once its current commitment comes to an end if there are no new troop commitments to southern Afghanistan from other NATO allies.

Of course, it’s not too polite to explicitly name the targets from what we could call the “slacker” camp whom you’re trying to pressure to do more. Still, the side-hints were clear that Germany heads that list. For although there are now German troops currently serving in Afganistan, they are stationed in the relatively-peaceful North of the country, and they further operate under rules of engagement which restrict them to firing their weapons only in self-defense. German officials had been asked – prior to the Vilnius conference – to commit more troops, and to permit the new troops and those in the North to be transferred to the South, but so far the German government has refused.

On to Munich

That dispute was not going to be allowed to die in Vilnius, for – lo and behold – right after the NATO conference all the leading players were scheduled to proceed straight to Munich, to the Conference on Security Policy that takes place there each year at this time in February. Waiting for them was Horst Teltschik, the German politician and international businessman who serves as the Munich Conference’s chief officer, and as his visitors made their way there he had some remarks to make to German radio which were picked up by the home-town newspaper the Süddeutsche Zeitung (“NATO is at the limit of its possibilities”). NATO is trying to do too much, was Teltschik’s verdict; what was needed at the conference was an intensive discussion about just where NATO should be engaged and where it should not be. But shouldn’t such calculations already have been made by this point? Actually, In Teltschik’s view, no, they have not, because of poor communication between America and its European allies: the US marched into Afghanistan in the first place without any consultation, according to Teltschik. (This is a bit glib: the US attacked Afghanistan in October, 2001, in response to the attacks of 11 September, which spurred the NATO allies to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, essentially identifying the September 11 attacks as attacks on all NATO members. And while it is true that the Bush administration showed little need or tolerance for outside input when planning its attack upon Afghanistan, April 2003 did see NATO collectively and voluntarily take over command of forces there, the ISAF. I submit that it was that point – at the latest – which was the occasion for weighing whether NATO belonged in Afghanistan, and that the takeover of ISAF command constituted a clear, if implicit, answer.) Still, Teltschik is willing to countenance sending German soldiers to reinforce NATO efforts in southern Afghanistan, i.e. what the German government is currently refusing, although he also suggests that other NATO countries such as Italy and Spain be reminded of their obligations to the Alliance as well.

Ultimately, though, Horst Teltschik these days is not empowered to speak for that government, no matter how “plugged-in” he is to the highest German political circles. It is still instructive to hear the views of such a German politician, especially when he reveals himself to be somewhat less hard-line on the subject of reinforcing/modifying the German role in Afghanistan than his government. Die Zeit now has an article on-line (Die for Afghanistan?) which takes this further by surveying seven other prominent figures, most involved in some way in the German government, about whether German soldiers should be called upon to – as the title puts it – “die for Afghanistan.”

Still Believers in Afghanistan

Reading through the article, it’s a relief to learn that the vast majority of the interviewees still believe in the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Particularly interesting are the comments recorded from Eckart von Klaeden, who is the foreign affairs spokesman for the co-governing CDU/CSU (i.e. conservative) faction in the Bundestag. The German mission to Afghanistan, he notes, marks the crucial new stage in German foreign policy – whose beginning can be said to have occurred on 11 September – in which his country has shown itself finally to be willing to take up it global responsibilities with global deployments. (In the 1990s all that Germans were willing to countenance in the way of military deployment was the immediate European area, i.e. the Balkans. And before that, since World War II the Germans had been unwilling to consider any deployment of their troops outside of their own country at all.) He identifies what he calls “the danger of islamic fundamentalism” and says that anyone who thinks they can avoid that by avoiding the fight against it is fooling themselves. Now, all of this is the sort of language you would expect from someone who after all is a spokesman for government policy – except that there is nothing in his statement that holds back or qualifies the above statements, which might be rather strange in that, as I have noted, German government decision-makers currently have set their face against any change or supplement to the German mission. There seems to be an inconsistency here, no?

Further encouraging talk issues from Heiner Geissler, of the CDU, who is also a well-respected politician emeritus in the mold of Horst Teltschik. “If NATO is unsuccessful, then the Front [against terrorism] will shift to Hamburg, or to Frankfurt.” Good, hard-core stuff, but Geissler also sees justification for the German mission in Afghanistan in the advancement of human rights and democracy, namely against religious suppression. We’re fighting a world-wide civil war, Geissler avers, one that is dangerous because it is irrational, based as it is upon a religion, and “Islam is even a dangerous religion, because it empowers its believers to go wage war.”

Beer-Buddy

So much for members of the governing coalition – what about, say, the Greens? The Die Zeit article does also contain a brief interview with Angelika Beer, political-security spokesperson for the Greens in the European Parliament, and her attitude is also pretty much as positive as could be expected: “We stand responsible for stabilizing Afghanistan.” However, she is not in favor of sending the German troops to southern Afghanistan – not until conditions in the South become like conditions in the North where the Germans are already located, i.e. where things have calmed down to the point that meaningful reconstruction and other civilian-assistance projects can be undertaken. In other words: We don’t want to send our troops to the South to fight to bring peaceful conditions there until peaceful conditions in fact already prevail there!

There’s also a contribution from one Bernhard Gertz, Chairman of the Bundeswehrverband, which I interpret as being not really a soldiers’ union, but rather a soldiers’ lobbying group much like the Association of the United States Army. Gertz takes a “yes, but” position much like Green politician Beer: We must indeed fight in Afghanistan against al-Qaida, let’s not bury our heads in the sand! – but, then again, sending any more troops than there already are won’t really do any good. Finally, there has got to be at least someone from the “nay” side to give the piece some balance, and for that the Die Zeit editors bring in Feridun Zaimoglu, idenitified as “writer and member of the German Islamic Conference.” The German presence in Afghanistan is complete nonsense, Zaimoglu advises – it’s the “ass of the world” anyway, and sending our troops there only servers to advance American imperialism, etc. etc.

Taken as a whole, then, the tone of most of these interviews displays continuing support among leading German opinion-makers for the German mission in Afghanistan. Again, much of this is in fact hard to reconcile with the government’s current hard-and-fast “no” to requests to send more troops and deploy more of them down where they are needed, namely to help out hard-pressed NATO allied forces in the South of the country. This dissonance suggests to me that that German government “no” won’t stand for long, and at least some sort of compromise is sure to be found.

UPDATE: The evidence continues to pile up that the rest of the German government is hardly as opposed to the idea of sending German troops to the more-dangerous southern regions of Afghanistan as is the very top. This article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung reveals how Ruprecht Polenz (CDU) – no less than the Chairman of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee – has made it clear he sees nothing wrong with sending German troops to the South, in an interview with radio station SWR. And our old friend Eckart von Klaeden (quoted above in the Die Zeit interview-article) reappears here to urge his government to be “more offensive-oriented” in its support to NATO allies in Afghanistan. On the other hand, the Süddeutsche Zeitung also cites Gernot Erler (who, as Staatsminister im Auswärtigen Amt is the equivalent of an American Under-Secretary of State) to the effect that Germany cannot be called a slacker when it comes to contributions to the Afghanistan effort – 3,200 soldiers deployed plus Tornado fighter-bombers, and 26 dead so far – and it is therefore not fair to ask her to do more.

                          

Unfortunately, most of the articles I surveyed in the German press covering Kerry’s acceptance speech were happy to limit themselves to a mere “translation function,” i.e. explaining to their readers what Kerry said. Most disappointing was such a “translator” article in Die Zeit (Kerry Wants to Restore the USA’s Prestige), from which we ordinarily can expect better – and that article itself was borrowed from the German business newspaper Handelsblatt. EuroSavant readers presumably had plenty of opportunity to read in English what Kerry said, if they didn’t already see the speech on TV live, so such articles are not so useful.

Handelsblatt wisely chose to keep its higher value-added materials for itself, though, as we can see from its editorial on Kerry’s speech (Bridge-Builder Kerry) from correspondent Michael Backfisch.

Backfisch first notes Kerry’s efforts to “fully play-out his military experience” at the convention, in order to try to demonstrate that he can be just as tough on national security as President Bush. (No kidding; do I detect some second-hand “translation” happening here, namely of what every American has already figured out?) But then he starts to fill in more why he calls Kerry a “bridge-builder” in the piece’s title. Kerry’s deliberate policy of avoiding a confrontational tone against the present administration was a sign that he was trying to profile himself as a reconciler (Versöhner) between the two sides of a divided nation. He invoked John F. Kennedy by appealing to America’s pioneering spirit; but he also invoked Ronald Reagan when he asserted that America’s best days still lie ahead. Still, although Backfisch calls Kerry’s speech “one of his best,” he also notes that it was far from concrete and specific on a number of important points. In particular, in Backfisch’s estimation Kerry’s Iraq policy is just as schwammig (“spongy”; “porous,” if you will) as that of President Bush.

A SHARP FRANKFURT TONGUE

Even better commentary comes from Frankfurter Rundschau correspondent Dietmar Ostermann, who attended the Boston convention and had the time to file an article of personal reflections (Candidate Kerry) in addition to his straight-forward dispatches of what was going on there. Ostermann pulls few punches. He finds that salute and “reporting for duty” line that Kerry began his speech with “somewhat childish”: “The man wants to become president. Commander-in-chief, in other words. There he stands, grinning and saluting like some private.” And you might have heard that Kerry served in combat in Vietnam; Ostermann is quick to complain that the Democrats brought forth this particular fact of John Kerry’s life “again and again, until one knew it by heart and simply could not stand to hear about it again.” Out of that eighteen-minute biographical film shown, a full half was devoted to that Vietnam service. “Kerry was a mere four months in the Mekong Delta back then,” Ostermann writes. “Then he let himself be pulled out of the line of fire, and Vietnam, with three light wounds. Four months of hell, that’s supposed to justify a claim to the White House in 2004?”

That is some rather harsh evaluation – and the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper for which Ostermann writes is supposed to be rather “leftist” and so predictably on the side of any US Democratic candidate. But as Ostermann writes, the problem remains, even after the convention, that the only convincing filling-in of the sentence “I support John Kerry because . . .” is that he is the anti-Bush. And he is that in more ways than one; here Ostermann cites (but misspells the name of) Thomas Oliphant, columnist for the Boston Globe, who has known Kerry since the 1970s. John Kerry is certainly no “Mr. Charisma”; he is no Kumpeltyp (= roughly “man of the people”) like George W. Bush.

IS THE US READY FOR A BREZHNEV?

In his acceptance speech, Ostermann reminds us, Kerry spoke for a full 50 minutes, much against advice from media professionals, who warned that, in the age of the MTV attention-span, no one would listen to him all the way through to the end. But they did nonetheless, by and large, and in Ostermann’s eyes Kerry thereby succeeded with this speech in making seriousness (i.e. earnestness) the hallmark of his campaign for president. It’s Nachdenklichkeit statt Sprüchen: Thinking/reflection instead of sound-bites.

The question then is: is America ready for such a candidate, for such seriousness, even for a “Brezhnev” (as conservative columnist David Brooks has christened Kerry due to his long, heavy speeches)? At least the New York Times seems to think so; as Ostermann quotes the judgment of that newspaper, “In difficult times the country loses interest in the President as celebrity-figure and longs [instead] for solidness, trustworthyness, and sensible judgment.”

TURNING GREEN

Finally, a recurring theme in EuroSavant’s own blog-coverage of the Democratic convention has been that of foreigners-in-attendance, often as representatives of foreign political parties. The correspondent sent to Boston by the Financial Times Deutschland, Hubert Wetzel, comes up with a fascinating article (with a fascinating title: US Democrats Discover Little Green Friends) about how Democrats these days show more interest in working together with Germany’s Green Party than with what you would ordinarily regard as their more natural partner, namely the trade-union-oriented Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD. (The SPD happens to be the party of Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder and so is currently in power, although it most certainly won’t be after the next elections. But the Greens are also in power; they are the junior member of the current “Red-Green” governing coalition.)

One important reason for this alleged development is that the American labor movement itself dominates what goes on in the Democratic Party less and less. But it’s also because, as Will Marshall of the Democratic Leadership Council puts it, “Interest in innovation, modernity, and practical solutions is stronger with the Greens than with other German parties.” This is apparently more in line with the business-friendly, pragmatic attitudes of the “New Democrats” whose pioneer in the Democratic Party was Bill Clinton. In particular, Wetzel cites the common interest in reducing dependence on oil imports (although for the American Democrats this is a national security issue, while for the German Greens it’s a matter of ecological policy), and the promotion of democracy in the Middle East.

Accordingly, current Green Party leader Reinhard Bütikofer (the Greens rotate their leaders on a regular schedule) had by all accounts a great time visiting the Democratic convention in Boston, meeting if not with the candidate himself, then with his environmental adviser. And he was accompanied on his schmoozing with the unfortunately-named Ralf Fücks, who however is quite a VIP himself as head of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, basically the Greens’ own think-tank, whose Washington office, Wetzel reports, has taken up an important liaison function between these American and German parties.

So if it was not so cool to be a Frenchman in Boston – you had to stifle your accent and keep your head down – apparently it was still A-OK to be German, even if you sport a name that tends to turn American heads in amazement much faster than any French name would. Maybe that’s because Americans can always be sure that, deep down (and as that same Economist article reports) the Germans will always love us. They can’t get enough of American movies, for one thing. Among the best of the pack of “translation” articles reporting Kerry’s speech was the fact-filled contribution from Die Welt: you knew that Steven Spielberg worked on that Kerry film biography, but did you know that Morgan Freeman provided the voice-over, and that the whole thing was directed by Oscar-winner James Moll?

                          

Ah, the “opposition”; the “legislature.” Do I mean the Democrats and Congress? No, and that’s your clue (plus this entry’s title, plus the innocent fact that this weblog is entitled “EuroSavant,” after all). If you haven’t heard of all this, you probably have a good excuse since it is happening not in the US but in France, and reports on these developments are by-and-large only available in French.

Those who can handle French should probably first start getting up-to-speed with the excellent article summing-up recent developments in the Nouvel Observateur (Gay Marriage: The Socialist Party and the Greens on the Offensive). The Greens in France aren’t a very important political party, but the Socialists certainly are: they made up the previous government, under premier Lionel Jospin, and are likely set to form the government after the next general election, if the overwhelming success of Socialist candidates in the local elections this spring are any indication. As things stand, France is already relatively advanced (or depraved, depending on your viewpoint) in the matter of state sanction of intimate relationships between couples of whatever sex, in that for six years now the pacte civil de solidarité (known seemingly everywhere instead by the acronym “PACS”) has been in force, essentially a civil agreement between couples, of whatever sex or sexes, that falls just short of the granting the protections and obligations of marriage. (You can read the official details about it, in French, here. Nothing of this sort of “civil union” is to be found in the US, of course, except in Vermont, where it was introduced under Governor Howard Dean. It’s common among other European countries, though.) Nonetheless, last Tuesday (11 May) saw pronouncements by several leaders of the French Left that it was time to make legal full marriage between persons of the same sex (and, for many, the right of such couples to adopt children as well). Francois Hollande, current leader of the Socialist Party, announced to the Assemblée Nationale (the lower house of the French legislature) that his party would begin preparations in both the Assemblée and the Senate for drawing up two legislative proposals for formal introduction “undoubtedly in the autumn,” concerning marriage and adoption/children’s rights. His number two, Laurent Fabius (a former Socialist prime minister), piped up that same day, also in favor of gay marriage and adoption as well as making improvements to the PACS, and reminded everyone that he had made his position clear a year ago, in an interview he had with a French homosexual magazine, Têtu. Then there was Noël Marmère – himself merely only one of the three legislators in the Assemblée of the Greens (not a particularly important political party in France, ordinarily), but also deputy mayor of the town of Bègles (in the Gironde, the south-west of France), who promised publicly to begin performing homosexual marriages in that capacity in Bègles starting on 5 June.

(Linguistic detour: In the French on-line press where I looked you see “PACS” or even “pacs” everywhere, just everywhere, and never pacte civil de solidarité. I was fortunate, or smart, or whatever to have some idea of what “pacs” was supposed to mean, and to be able to confirm that through a little additional searching elsewhere on the Internet. Same thing with le garde des Sceaux – would you believe that that is supposed to mean “Minister/Ministry of Justice”? I was confused at first with that one – and maybe I still haven’t gotten it right yet; native French readers, your comments are certainly welcome! – since Sceaux is also a town somewhere in France. I tell ya, up to a certain level I can handle popular “code names,” like “Whitehall” for the British executive branch and Quai d’Orsay for the French foreign ministry, but such phenomena can easily get out of hand and start to restrict understanding about what is being written about, even in a publicly-published article, only to those “in the know” – the cognoscenti, if you will.)

THE DSK PHILOSOPHY

Then there was Socialist Party notable, and Economy Minister in the last Socialist government Dominique Strauss-Kahn (himself referred to everywhere in the press mostly by “DSK” rather than his full name; you know he’s a party heavyweight). No, I’m not going to go down the list of Socialist Party notables to report what they all said; it’s just that DSK’s remarks, made in an interview published last Tuesday in Libération (interview title: “For me, adoption by a homo couple, that’s a ‘yes’”), certainly give some food for thought. Consider:

The only argument of the Right for opposing marriage by persons of the same sex is to say that marriage must serve the cause of procreation. This fails in the face of facts: close to 50% of children are born outside of marriage today and there are, on the other hand, enormous numbers of married couples who have no children. The connection between procreation and marriage has been broken. As a result, what has marriage become? A declaration of solemn love between two beings who love each other and a contract to protect the interests and the patrimony of the parties. For my part, I see no reason to forbid this to two persons of the same sex.

And about adoption into a homosexual household:

Some think that, by nature, it is damaging for a child to be raised by a homosexual couple. I consider this to be a moral error [faute morale], and, until someone demonstrates to me the contrary, scientific nonsense. Sexual orientation does not determine one’s aptitude to raise a child. . . . What counts is the happiness of the child and his or her future, with a heterosexual or homosexual couple.

Controversial opinions? Less and less so in France, as it would seem from a timely opinion poll conducted in April by the French polling organization IFOP for Elle magazine, and published last Monday, whose results are presented in another article in the Nouvel Observateur (EuroSavant does not cover Elle magazine): the title there is 64% of the French Favorable to Homosexual Marriage. There you have it; and 35% are against homosexual marriage. What’s more, 49% of those polled were for allowing homosexual couples to adopt children, while 49% also were against, although a year ago, the article notes, only 37% of those polled then were in favor. And 51% of those questioned in the recent poll were even in favor of allowing artificial insemination of lesbian couples, while 48% were against. (None of those pairs of figures adds up to 100%, because you always have those who can’t make up their mind or have no opinion – in France, it seems, these are relatively few, at least on these topics.)

THE OLD FOGEYS REACT

Be that as it may, these recent declarations of the French Left immediately provoked reaction from the French Right. But it has tended to be largely unfocused – other than the many all-too-clear protests that what Noël Marmère proposes to start doing on 5 June is a “provocation” and publicity stunt. There have been the usual declarations that a family necessary involves both a man and a woman, that children can be raised no other way. (Not surprisingly, the noted conservative French newspaper Le Figaro has been pleased to publish these, such as from UMP Assemblée delegate Jean Léonetti.) These have generally included the complaint that six years ago, when the Socialist succeeded in having the PACS instituted, they swore that it was by no means supposed to be the first step towards allowing gay marriage. But, as Guillaume Tabard points out in an excellent analytical piece in Le Figaro, although it has apparently taken them by surprise, the French Right now seems to know which way the wind of public opinion is blowing on the issue. Resistance that is too die-hard could only label them as a bunch of ringards (another French word you won’t yet find in any dictionary; it has got to mean “old fogey”) and lead to electoral losses in the future. So it’s significant, as Tabard notes, that the substantive reaction by the current French government to the brewing storm has been to offer substitutes, such as accelerated work on a law outlawing expressions of homophobia, and improvements to the PACS. (Note that, six years ago, the Right was completely against the PACS.)

Oh, then there is also the matter of Minister of Justice Dominique Preben (depending on your attitude, you could label him the French John Ashcroft) reminding one-and-all that homosexual marriage is in fact still illegal on the French statute-books, and instructing judicial authorities in the Bordeaux region (which contains Bègles) to put a stop to the same-sex marriages M. Marmère plans to conduct on 5 June. But that’s OK, say the Greens: if M. Preben wants to play nasty that way, it just so happens that they’ve been working on a legislative proposal of their own, to make homosexual marriage legal, for a long time and will have it ready on 6 June to bring before the Assemblée, so that the issue can be pushed forward sooner and no one needs to wait for the Socialist Party proposal in the fall.

One final article French-readers may want to examine is the excellent summary of the positions – pro, con, and indifferent – on this issue from the leading figures involved, gained from their public statements. I happen to like best that of Henri Cuq, the minister for the government in charge of relationships with the Parliament, who dismisses the entire explosion of the homosexual marriage issue last Tuesday as political jockeying among the various future Socialist Party presidential candidates. “It’s the worst, most detestable way to present a debate which surely deserves better.” Paul Quinio of Libération – the very newspaper DSK chose to lay out his opinions to! – offers a similar viewpoint in an analysis of his own (DSK Pushes the Socialist Party into the Arms of Gay Marriage), calling the whole affair a surprise initiative by that eager presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn, catching his Socialist colleagues unawares and not really ready to take up the issue just now, but certainly politically unable to object or resist.

                          

As you probably have noticed, I generally cover the national press, not the regional press; and I generally cover the “broadsheets” rather than the “tabloids.” (These terms refer to the physical format of a newspaper – whether you read it with the long side vertical or horizontal, respectively – but they also have come to mean “respected, mainstream publication” and “pandering to the crowd,” respectively.) It was easy to find a webpage with the Austrian newspapers, but it was not clear which of those satisfied my criteria. If there are any Österreichers out there who can help me along, by telling me which other Austrian newspapers I should have included but didn’t, or perhaps which of the ones I did choose that I shouldn’t have, I’d be mighty grateful. And I’ll be prepared for that “next time” – say, when an Austrian is elected EU Council President (if the draft Constitution proposing that new office ever gets off the ground).

As with the French press, the challenge here is to find coverage that adds something new to the blanket recitation of facts about the recall election that you’d be able to find anyway in the English-language press. Turning first to the Kurier, only two articles stand out in this regard.

One is a decent bit of analysis on the problems that “Arnie” faces now, now that he has won: Herculean Assignment for Arnie. He’s got to do something about the big state deficit, currently at $8 billion is, but which could go up to $20 billion if a lawsuit against the issuing of state bonds succeeds; he’s got to submit a budget to the legislature by January, and two-thirds of the legislators have to approve it for it to pass. He’s hampered by the fact that California now has the worst credit-rating among all the states; he’s got to attract jobs back that are now going to Arizona and Nevada, and elsewhere (spurred along by the measure Gray Davis had passed and signed, which requires all California businesses over a certain size to provide health insurance for their employees).

To do this, he’s got to work with the Democrats – this despite California Democratic Party spokesman Bob Mulholland being quoted by the Kurier as warning Schwarzenegger that he will be subject to recall himself, if he doesn’t make any progress within the next 100 days. Of course, he married into that arch-Democratic family, the Kennedys, and the Kurier makes the rather facile assumption that, because he’s so closely associated with the Kennedys, he’ll get along fine with the Democrats. In any case, President Bush and the nationwide Republican Party will be watching him anxiously; if he does succeed, he can count on being drafted as a Zugpferd, or “draft horse” to energize Bush’s campaign for re-election in 2004.

Then there’s the Kurier’s local-angle story on Austrian tourism, specifically tourism to the Styria region of Austria where Arnold is from, and how it’s expected to benefit from his political fortunes. The article is entitled Styria Rejoices over Gain for Image. “Arnie is our best advertiser,” exults Herman Schützenhöfer of the Styria Tourist Council. Why, in the past days the word “Styria” (together with variations) has been used a full 3,437 times in the international press and on the Internet. “This free PR-effect,” adds Schützenhöfer, “is worth more than any costly ad campaign, since it places Styria in the middle of the world’s attention as an attractive, safe land.”

Moving to Der Standard, the lead story, An Hour of Triumph in LA, advises Arnold not to put too much trust in Gray Davis’ assurances of assistance during the transition; the recalled governor has used the last few weeks to pack key state offices with his own hand-picked appointees, “in order to make life difficult for Governor Schwarzenegger.” This article also places far too much reliance on Arnold’s marriage to Maria Shriver as a guarantee that he will be able to deal with the state Democrats.

But Der Standard also weighs in with some good analysis pieces. One such, by Eric Frey, is entitled A Sickness Called Arnold. (Click on the “Kommentar” link in the column to the right.) “Sickness”? Well, yes, but it’s a nationwide sickness: the steadfast refusal by American voters to pay more taxes. Frey points out that Schwarzenegger’s apparent fiscal plan – lower taxes, provide more services, and still somehow solve the gaping budget deficit – closely resembles the plan that President Bush has succeeded in implementing since his 2001 inauguration. (In Bush’s case, though, those additional services were mostly of the security or military variety.) The key thing is that Bush can do this – for a while, at least – while Governor Schwarzenegger will not be able to, since California (like 48 of the other states) has to balance its budget yearly. Yet raising taxes seems to be out of the question; Schwarzenegger sharply rebuked his adviser Warren Buffet early in the campaign for making that suggestion and, anyway, according to Frey, California is still the land that brought about the national tax-revolt with the passage of Proposition 13 back in 1978.

Then there is the commentary piece contributed by Peter Pilz, who is the security spokesman for the Austrian Green Party: Grinning instead of Knowing, Posing instead of Self-Control. Even more than Herr Frey, Herr Pilz sure knows how to ruin the party mood. As his article’s title implies, to Pilz American politics has become all about appearances, rather than reality. “Whoever preens and shines has won half the battle right there. Whoever instead tries to address California’s problems of the collapse of the energy sector, the polluted water, the exploding unemployment, and the out-of-control immigration, whoever thereby troubles the fortresses of luxury with life’s daily problems, is out.”

In any case, as an Austrian Pilz asks himself whether the sort of upward mobility and acceptance of immigrants that California has shown could ever really take hold in his own country. Could someone born in Turkey, say, ever become a regional governor. No: “[Wolfgang] Schüssel [Austrian premier] and [Jörg] Haider [famous far-right Austrian politician, governor of Carinthia province] want to rejoice in Arnie, even while they continue to exclude the Arnies [coming] out of Ankara and Pristina.”

Please refrain from referring to Pilz as “Peter Putz” – although his name does mean in English “Peter Mushroom.”

                          

We start with Le Monde, which features no less than three commentary pieces on the California election results, in addition to several reports of a more factual nature.

(Of the latter factual bulletins, the one I found most interesting was Le Monde’s coverage of the reaction in Austria, entitled “Mozart Is No Longer the Most Famous Austrian”. Among other things, the director of the tourist office in Graz – the city where Arnold is from – ventured that “This victory will have consequences for us that we can’t yet imagine. The first one is that Americans won’t confuse Austria with Australia any more.”)

The commentary by Samuel Blumenfeld (a Frenchman?) gives away its gist with its title: A Vote For an Image Rather Than a Candidate. You would think, Blumenfeld writes, that Arnold is following the same Hollywood-to-the-statehouse path blazed in the ’60s by Ronald Reagan, but you would be wrong. Ronald Reagan was already a substantial politician (or at least “political person”) when he was first elected California governor, as he had been active in union activities (i.e. the Screen Actors’ Guild) and politics generally ever since 1947. In contrast, Arnold of course has very little (which is not to say “no”) political experience.

Of course, that hasn’t mattered to enough California voters, who have elected him anyway. Rather than vote for any sort of explicit program (which Arnold has not offered), they have voted for an image – as Blumenfeld puts it, for “a golem in flesh-and-blood with the mandate to solve the citizens’ problems.” So does Schwarzenegger’s election mark the definitive marriage of politics and the cinema? No, says Blumenfeld, it actually marks their divorce. For politics, so goes the saying, is the “art of the possible,” while of course cinema is the “art of the impossible,” i.e. the depiction of fantasy; “nothing is more removed from cinema than politics,” in fact. Politics in a democracy is inevitably “long, difficult, irritating, and frustrating”; in the movies (and especially in the action films Schwarzenegger is famous for appearing in), the action is clear-cut and direct: the Terminator heads straight for the bad guy. The citizens of California, Blumenfeld implies, are about to find out that solving the state’s problems isn’t going to be quite as easy as it would be in the movies – but at least any political commentator worth his salt had better take up film studies as soon as possible, if he or she desires to remain relevant.

Then we have Eric Fottorino’s commentary piece, entitled The Caliph. (The “caliphs” were of course the leaders of Islam back in the Middle Ages; no, I don’t get it either, unless Fottorino just wanted to have a pun on “California,” since in French “caliph” is le calife). This is the sort of French view of the events in California that popular American prejudices would have expected to find out there somewhere: haughty, condescending. (Thank you, M. Fottorino! How confused I would have been if there had been no one French to provide this sort of commentaire!) The best way to understand the California recall election, he opines, is just to take a movie poster and use it as a political campaign poster. The casting was simply all wrong: in the face of the state’s serious problems, Gray Davis gave his constituents Diane Keaton, when what they really wanted was du saignant et de l’expéditif, i.e. “the bloody and the quick-acting.” “Biceps instead of ideas. Simple words – and please, not too many words . . .”

Too bad the California governor doesn’t really have much power. That’s true, but one could well wish that M. Fottorino went into this point more. Instead, he makes us all wonder whether he really knows what he is talking about by declaring that “Real power is in the hands of those dishevelled guys fooling around with computers in their garage overlooking the Pacific.” Hmm . . . right.

Will we have a groper (peloteur) in Sacramento after having already had a liar in the White House? he asks. No, that can’t be: no less than JFK’s niece has declared Arnold to be irreproachable, a true saint. Well, that’s good. Still, there is a French song about the Golden State that Rottorino cites at the end of his piece: “California/is near here/Just by closing your eyes/you can see it.” No thanks, he says, I’ll keep my eyes open. And too bad for California.

After this, the collective editorial about Schwarzenegger’s victory by Le Monde’s editorial staff is rather restrained. They start with that old saw that innovations which start off in California inevitably find their way eventually across the rest of the USA, and then across the Atlantic to Europe. To them, that is worrying (inquiétante) – not so much the fact of Schwarzenegger’s election, but the process that brought it about. California is a big, important political entity, with a GDP about equivalent to that of France herself. How could it vote to depose its governor, whom that same electorate had voted into office less than a year previously, who had not committed any crime or indecency? Plus, many out of that electorate found themselves voting using the same faulty technology that had caused so many problems in Florida during the disputed 2000 presidential election – “as if,” Le Monde writes, “no lesson had been retained from that fiasco.”

In sum, “direct democracy” is encroaching more and more on the “representative democracy” which is supposed to be the way politics works once political entities have grown too big for all citizens to be able to meet together in one big hall to decide things. It is not a good thing at all – and Governor Schwarzenegger will feel its effects himself, when he takes office and finds that 70% of state revenues are beyond his power and that of the legislature to allocate, since they are pre-allocated to various ends by previous referenda.

I’m sorry to report that, at the time of this writing, the Communist paper L’Humanité had yet to post any comment on the California recall election on-line. That’s a disappointment, and it means we have to move on to the daily Libération. But there’s also little material here to comment on, in that this newspaper confines itself mostly to factual reporting of what went on. The exception to that is the transcript Libération publishes of an over-the-Internet question-and-answer session over the recall with US correspondent Annette Lévy-Willard. It’s entitled “It’s Not Just a Joke, and indeed the answer from which that line comes is pretty representative of the dialogue that goes on:

Q (from one “axeldom”): Texas used to be the laughing-stock of the world, is California challenging it for that?
A: No, I don’t think so, because this is a real political problem. It’s not just an actor coming forward, it’s not just a joke. It’s a true political movement of resistance to the status quo. It’s at the same time about the insecurity of Californians, who watch as unemployment rises, who see the economic crisis, and who let themselves be seduced by a guy who reassures them.

Much better coverage comes from the newsmagazine Nouvel Observateur. But that’s not so much from its reporting and commentary – although it does devote one article to an interview with a supposed French expert on the US, Guillaume Parmentier. (He’s founder and director of the CFE, the French Center on the United States.) The big problem in California is the fiscal situation, Parmentier pronounces; Gray Davis truly is “grey” and made too many enemies – OK, so far so good. Schwarzenegger simply doesn’t have any program to deal with the situation. He’s talked about taking some measures, but he’s really not in any position to make them happen. So much for that.

No, the Nouvel Observateur does its best work – much like EuroSavant, you could say – collecting up what others have to say. For instance, here it summarized the reactions to Schwarzenegger’s triumph from various prominent world personalities. A sample:

George W. Bush: According to his press spokesman, Scott McClellan, Bush “looks forward with pleasure” to working with Schwarzenegger, and should have the opportunity shortly to congratulate him in person. As for the propriety or otherwise of the entire recall process, Bush “has said that he is interested in following the event from a political point-of-view, as a simple interested observer.”

Nicolas Sarkozy (French Minister of the Interior, and a rising political star): “I’m very divided about it. It’s true that, in France, when someone hasn’t attended the ENA [the most elite of French universities] one looks at him with a bit of pity. At the same time, it’s true that Schwarzenegger’s capabilities have not yet been demonstrated. Still, despite everything, I find that American democracy has this capacity to bounce back: someone who was a stranger in the country, who has an unpronounceable name and who [nevertheless] can become governor of the largest of the states, that’s not bad.”

The Greens. (Note: The Green party is very important in Germany, but not so important in France. It’s not in the government there, and it doesn’t threaten to get there anytime soon. Still, I thought you might find the reaction of their spokeswoman, Marie-Hélène Aubert, interesting): Schwarzenegger’s election is a “caricature derived from political spectacle.” And, unfortunately, there are some advanced signs one could point to that the same thing is happening to French democracy, although “we’re not quite there yet.” “If fiction is confused with reality and if the Terminator is as effective as he is in his films, then one really must be worried – it’s alarming, it’s terrible!”

On yet another web-page, the Nouvel Observateur offers more selected commentary – but this time concentrating on the opinions of Hollywood stars, in a piece entitled Hollywood against Schwarzy. Yes, the vast majority of Arnold’s movie studio colleagues took a dim view of his candidacy: Barbara Streisand, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan, Richard Dreyfuss, Annette Bening, Danny Glover, James Cromwell – all of these took out a collective advertisement in Variety urging Californians to vote “No” on the recall. Plus George Clooney, Harrison Ford (“No, I’m not voting for Arnold”), Cybill Sheperd (Arnold’s election would be “seriously the worst tragedy in California’s history”), Sylvester Stallone (“I think he’s entering a minefield. Actors should stay actors.”), Tom Hanks, Martin Sheen (“All this seems to be part of the White House’s strategy” – and he should know, right?, since he plays the President on “West Wing”), and then Woody Allen, who is true to his Hamlet-like, New York persona: “California has important problems and it’s difficult to imagine how, without any true political experience, he will be able to change the course of things . . but you never know.” The Nouvel Observateur points out that few Hollywood actors are known to be Republicans – with perhaps the outstanding exception of former National Rifle Association head Charlton Heston. (And John Wayne, yes, yes, I know. But I’m talking here about living Hollywood stars – and the Duke long ago rode up to that great Cattle Range in the Sky.)

Next up: Rave reviews for Arnold in his new political role from his Austrian homeland. Which means that – in view of the last-entry-first nature of the weblog medium – if that is already posted, then you’ve probably already read it. How was it? Good? I can’t wait to find out myself – just as soon as I write it!

                          

In its coverage today of Prof. Abenhaïm’s resignation, Le Monde revealed why the professor had now changed his mind about staying in his post.

“In the face of the current polemics about the handling of the epidemic associated with the heat wave [which is canicule in French">, I prefer to be able to explain the actions of the [health] services serenely.” Soon after resigning, Prof. Abenhaïm went on to serenely declare on French radio that “at the moment, it has not been demonstrated that errors were committed.” Explaining himself, he continued “We announced the alert for the first time on 8 August, saying that the heat wave could have grave consequences, not excluding deaths.” Well, he’s already caught himself out there: 8 August was a Friday, and this heat wave had already gotten off to a healthy start by at least the preceding Sunday.

(I was in it too, folks, although Amsterdam-by-the-sea is definitely a nice, relatively-cool place to have to withstand this sort of thing. But we still have a serious drought problem – maybe more on this at a later day. Actually, if things get too bad, electricity blackouts could very well kick in – not caused by any system break-down, as occurred last week in the US Northeast, but by insufficient water to cool the power-generation plants. That could turn out to crimp my postings to the Internet. But, anyway, I’m due shortly to travel a bit.)

As Le Monde goes on to reveal, even as he was happy to regret the professor’s resignation in the afternoon after he had accepted it, Health Minister Mattei had spent part of the morning also on the radio, regretting that an “official” (fonctionnaire) had failed to inform him in time about the gravity of the situation – indeed, had told him on Monday, 11 August, that the situation was under control (maîtrisée). Now, who could that official have been? But this is hardly enough of an excuse for many, especially those in the opposition. Perhaps the Green Party said it best when calling for his resignation (quoted in the Le Monde article): “M. Mattei is applying the principle of precautionary treatment in his own way: saving his own head at any price, and leaving the sacrifice to others.”

There’s also a noteworthy companion article in Le Monde today: Trois questions à Gilles Brücker, or “Three Questions for Gilles Brücker,” who is the head of the French National Health Watch Institute (Institut national de veille sanitaire (INVS)). No need to get into all three questions, as the very first one cuts to the quick: “How do you explain how the INVS, of which you are the director, was unable to give any alert of the risks connected with the heat wave?” The answer boils down (oh no! Unintended pun!) to the unfortunate fact that, even though “the INVS analyzes and works with tons of epidemiological information about infectious diseases and cancer-causing problems in the environment,” a heat wave “was not integrated into our field of activities.” In other words, the INVS is only set up to react to data it is fed from other institutions – not to “data” any of its employees could grasp upon waking up on sweat-soaked sheets. Naturally, M. Brücker promises that this will change – and the horse is already out of the barn, as kitchen refrigerators are being pressed into service by hospitals all over France to hold the surfeit of corpses felled by the heat.

You can imagine that the vast majority of those corpses were not long ago elderly French citizens, a demographic cohort particularly vulnerable to the stress such weather can put on the human body. So one leading theme arising from this public health disaster is the way France treats its elderly. (Another such theme is the predilection for government officials to go away on holiday and stay there, even as such a crisis arises back home. Yet another is the influence the famous French law mandating a 35-hour work-week – for medical workers, too – could have had on making this crisis worse.) Another French daily, Libération, covers this aspect particularly well with a couple of articles. Ceux qui sont «partis» hantent les Airelles (or “Those Who “Have Departed” Haunt Les Airelles”) gives a poignant account of the situation at the Les Airelles nursing home in Paris, where eight of the eighty-seven elderly there were felled by the heat. Temperatures rising to 40º C (104º F) inside rooms whose elderly residents still are too panicked to leave; care personnel reminding their charges to drink and drink, while trying to think up gimmicks and tricks to make sure they do so; the local Franciscan monks even calling up nursing residents to urge them to drink; victims succumbing to the heat simply by falling asleep inside, at a sunny window (they then dehydrate to the point that they fall into a coma, but no one knows about their emergency until it’s too late); and then, of course, on Saturday the ninth, when seven of her charges are already hospitalized and thirty on IV, the director of the nursing home getting a visit from representatives from the préfecture (that’s the government unit in France, roughly equivalent to a state in the US) to advise her how to deal with the heat. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry; for Libération she offer the comment that “They only talk about the elderly when they need them for politics. These days, the only thing you hear about is saving money on public health.”

And that is basically the point of the accompanying Libération editorial entitiled Vieillesse: la grande hypocrisie de Raffarin, or “The Elderly: Raffarin’s Great Hypocrisy.” (Jean-Pierre Raffarin is currently the right-wing prime-minister of France.) In the wake of this tragedy, the newspaper reports, Raffarin declares that he is profoundly shocked, and has proposed new initiatives to reform public health institutions. But his government’s recent record merely demonstrates a determination to save money from the services offered to the elderly – including the considerable tightening-up of eligibility for the allocation personnalisée d’autonomie, or “personalized autonomy allocation,” which makes money available to those French elderly who don’t have the financial resources to go into a nursing home, to at least hire someone to help them out where they live for a number of hours during the day. The editorial cites an estimate of 800,000 citizens who would be eligible by 2005; with the new administrative changes, many of these have been shut out of the program.

Belatedly returning from his own vacation to start to clean up the public-health wreckage, premier Jean-Pierre Raffarin declared on Saturday that “One must not remain indifferent to the closed window-shutters,” a reference to the many elderly shut-ins who died from a combination of the intense heat and neglect. But Libération replies: “Before making society bear the entire responsibility for indifference towards the elderly, the government would do well to examine its own conscience [or, in the actual idiomatic French, de balayer devant sa porte].”