Dear Alex,
I am just back from Paris, where I was preparing a documentary on the semiotics of grief-management for UNESCO and enjoying the city’s many excellent pingpong parlors. The first thing I always notice on returning home is how fat and ugly Americans are. The second thing I notice is the infernal noise here. The French outlawed horn-honking in the 1950s. They do not have sirens or car alarms or back-up beepers on trucks. Do any of these things contribute in any way to the sum of human happiness?
The French presidential campaign was quite exciting. One night I joined a demonstration against Le Pen at the Place de la Bastille. It is fun to chant. Le Pen! Salaud! Le peuple aura ta peau! we all cried. (“Le Pen! You beast! The people will have your skin!”) I also showed my opposition to fascism by declining to meet Diana Mosley (nee Mitford), the widow of the English fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, who lives out her declining years in fashionable exile in the Faubourg Saint Germain. (Actually, I hear that for one of the Mitford sisters she’s rather a dim bulb.)
So, this morning the headlines say that Chirac beat Le Pen by 82 percent to 18 percent. European neo-fascism is, for the nonce, crushed; the Fifth Republic is saved. I have two things to say about this. First, it is only because the French have a lousy voting system that Le Pen ever posed a threat. Of course, the French runoff system is mathematically superior to our own way of electing presidents—at least their first choice actually won in the end. The irony is that the optimal voting system was invented by a Frenchman named Borda back before the revolution, but the only country sophisticated enough to use it is New Zealand.
The second thing I have to say is that I wish Le Pen had done better. That would have taken a little of the moral heat off the United States for Bush’s disgusting decision the other day to renege on the treaty creating an international court to try crimes against humanity.
As for Chirac, although the French call him supermenteur (“super-liar”), I would say that he is wedded to the truth; but like other wedded couples, they sometimes live apart.
Well, I’ve bored you enough about France. Why don’t you go ahead and bore me?
Fraternally,
Jim
