France is the oldest ally of the United States, and the US wouldn't exist without France's help, so it's annoying when people diss France.

Howdy Doody (R-Ky), the senior senator of that state (and closet case), is busy trotting out potential GOP themes to see what works.  This latest is a laugher.

WOID XIX-6. Renidet usquequaque

reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language.

One thing the black poet and politician Aimé Césaire did very well: he had a knack for turning the oppressor’s weapons against him. Sometimes I think it was a useful knack, but a limited one: Césaire celebrated Africanness in a French as fine as Racine’s; as Mayor of Fort-de-France he helped to give Martinique the worst traffic jams in the Caribbean; and today, if you go to the bookstore he co-founded in Paris, Présence Africaine, you’ll find it rather quiet, while just down the street there’s another publisher, l’Harmattan, whose shop is crowded every day with people from all over the African Diaspora, carrying on.

De mortuis nihil. Today, once more, Césaire and friends and family turned the oppressor – a very short man by the name of Nicolas Sarkozy – out of his smug position of power. A few years back Césaire had refused to meet with Sarko to protest the then-Interior Minister’s defense of French colonialism. Today he had no say since the occasion was his own State funeral. Césaire was 94 years old.

The Los Angeles Times reports today that Republican nominee John McCain has begun a quiet retreat from the centerpiece of his foreign policy vision, a so-called "League of Democracies."  First unveiled in May 2007 and a highlight of his March 26 national security address, McCain despite his past angry criticism of America's European allies envisioned a league of democracies which could "act with great influence and power, both economically and militarily."  Unfortunately for McCain, what thrills his neoconservative backers is what worries America's friends: the true purpose of his proposal is to "kill the UN."

Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(lied about the world, lied about me)
that you have ended by imposing on me
an image of myself.
underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That ís the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image!  What's more, it's a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
and I know myself as well.
Aimé Césaire, 25 June, 1913-17 April, 2008.

This may be somewhat arcane, and unrelated to American politics and the general interest of this site, but I think this deserves attention.

Aimé Césaire, poet and former mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the French National Assembly from Martinique, has died at the age of 94.

The Media and Anorexia

Anorexia nervosa is a disease
Of being too skinny but not knowing it.
Healthy people can be many shapes and sizes
But media promotes a narrow size limit.

Some people are naturally meant to be very thin.
Others are naturally meant to be wider.
But the media promotes “thin is in”
And bigger people are made to feel unpopular.

Media bias against wider people is problematic
Because it often lowers a person’s feeling of self-worth
And motivates some people to become anorexic
To avoid being ashamed of their wider girth.

5,000 Chinese demonstrated in the streets of Melbourne, Australia today and 1,000’s more in Sydney

The second paragraph of Nick Kristof's piece, after recognizing Condoleeza Rice's correct observation that we cannot simply invade a 3rd Muslim country, reads as follows:

But this week marks the 14th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide — the last time we said "never again." And while Ms. Rice is right that we can’t send in American ground troops, there are concrete steps that President Bush can take if he wants to end his shameful passivity

I am no expert in this part of the world, nor in military and diplomatic affairs.  I am also a Quaker, and prefer the use of diplomacy to that of force.  But I also refuse to stand silently by in the face of slaughter.  And I think Kristof's Memo to Bush on Darfur should be mandatory reading, and the starting point of serious discussions.   Let me explain why.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

According to Bloomberg, FARC has now said that it will not allow France's medical mission to treat its most famous hostage, Ingrid Betancourt, whom it has held hostage for more than six years:

One may read Philippe Marliere's short essay on Sarkozy in Counterpunch here.

Not being French, I can't say more than that it's an interesting read. And for those interested in intellectual currents, one wonders if this new "French neoliberalism" will have a greater impact on the EU than traditional French thinking. And Marliere depicts how the leaders of the French right have diminished in intellectual stature:

Before Sarko, the Gaullist right was not quintessentially vulgar and anti-intellectual. Charles de Gaulle was a well-read man who had the good taste to choose André Malraux as Minister of Culture. Georges Pompidou was an Agrégé de lettres and a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. The apparently less highbrow Jacques Chirac is a great connoisseur of Japanese civilization (and, some cynics might like to add, of his banking system) [and leaves the splendid Branly museum as a monument, Editors]. Sarkozy breaks with the Gaullist tradition on that count: he is a self-professed idiot.

Obama won the first round of the Democrats Abroad primary, 4.5 delegates to 2.5 for Clinton.  But now, the second round of voting is taking place in what is known as the "International Waltz" of overseas voters. And the International Herald Tribune reports today that the decision by a "hyper delegate" from Democrats Abroad France to support Clinton could have a major impact on the results.

Last September, I wrote a diary entitled A View from Abroad which collected a few impressions from our local villagers.

To recap, we now live in a small village (pop. 1000) in the South of France (photo), having left Los Angeles in January 2005. (There's a blog and a book.)

Last Monday, Easter Monday, was, for a reason which escapes me, Omelet Day. Our local city hall had organized a town banquet, half-potluck, but with a giant omelet being the centerpiece. It was very convivial and a good time was had by all.

Being the town's token Americans, we were naturally grilled about the recent developments on the US front.

(More below fold.)

As much as anything else, presidential campaigns are won and lost by the media narratives that rightly or wrongly come to define a candidate.  In the case of Repubican nominee John McCain, the seemingly unshakable narrative of the political "maverick" could not be further off the mark. At almost every turn, McCain in his eternal quest for the White House has reversed long-held positions, compromised core principles and swallowed his pride in order to curry favor with both the leading lights of the conservative movement and right-wing Republican primary voters.  The untold story of campaign 2008 is simply that of John McCain's transformation from maverick to prostitute.

As a student I was fascinated by history and geography. Being a mathematical dunce I easily gravitated to our collective past and devoured hundreds of books on the history of our world. I became relatively famous in my neck of the woods for being able to enunciate the names and the functions of all the Greek Gods and their Roman counterparts, was an avid reader of the near conquest of Western Europe by the Saracens, an expert on the rise of the Mongol empire, the battles fought by Attila the Hun, the Napoleonic wars, but the one war that I could not properly understand was our own war, the 100 Years War between the French and the English.

One hundred years! Actually, it lasted 116 years.

That's about the time McCain proposes to stay in Iraq, the same McCain who predicted a quick and easy victory, not an intractable insurgency back in 2002.
From which parallel universe does he hail from? He doesn't seem able to understand that you cannot solve a political problem with military force, and that is truly frightening as he really believes that the U.S. military is a stabilizing force in the Middle East. Let me tell you about what happens during a war that lasts 100 years.

Over the past two days, the fawning American media has provided rave reviews of John McCain's visit to France.  While the New York Times lauded "McCain's soothing tones," Time gushed about "McCain's Paris romance" and the transformation of Franco-American relations made possible by his warm embrace of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.  But lost in these accounts is John McCain's vitriolic France-bashing in the run-up to the war in Iraq.  Back in 2003, John McCain stood shoulder to shoulder with the Paris-hating purveyors of "freedom fries" and "old Europe."

WOID XVIII-50. Sadness in Sarkozie

[reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language]

I)
Talk of wretched refuse. Courtiers who fell from grace in the Early Roman Empire were shipped off to live among the Black Sea barbarians. Courtiers who fall from grace in France’s Sarkozian Empire get shipped off to America. David Martinon, former spokesman for France’s right-wing President Sarkozy, is rumored to be the future French consul-general in New York just as under Augustus Caesar the poet Ovid was sent away in exile. Ovid had apparently seen some sexual shenanigans at the Imperial Court, but there can’t be many sexual shenanigans at Sarkozy’s court to be discovered.

As a brief intro for newcomers, we left Los Angeles at the end of 2004 and relocated in early 2005 to a small village in the South of France, as once told in the Lupin Exodus diaries. We have a blog with photos, etc. and wrote a book, OVER HERE: AN AMERICAN EXPAT IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE, on the subject.

Recently, the medical professionals in France have not been happy campers. They feel that they have not been getting paid high enough rates, which are price-controlled by the Government, for various procedures, and there have been various protests.

<more below fold>