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Saturday, July 30, 2005
AMBIENT MOROSITY “La morosité ambiante tient au fait que rien ne peut être fait et personne ne semble avoir la solution,” writes Maurice Levy in Le Monde about contemporary France. We French today are “perdants,” he says -- losers -- and no one seems able to do anything about it. “Mr.Levy,” reports The Telegraph, “said the French had only themselves to blame for losing the Olympics, and that the country needed a wake-up call. ‘We have narrowed and stunted ourselves and we paint ourselves as losers, and no one wants to be among the losers. It's time we opened our eyes wide, took an icy shower and looked reality in the face: we are in decline, going down a slippery slope.’” Well, those last couple of sentences present a very rich mix of metaphors, but UD won’t bother with that because she wants to concentrate instead on the claim Levy makes that the whole world rightly regards France as a loser, and that unless there’s a political and cultural reckoning soon, France won’t count at all in the new global economy. This seems to me a plausible claim. I posted a little essay about my impressions of France shortly after having lived and taught there. It said similar sorts of things. Here it is. |