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In France, the problem of how to repair a broken social-security system that, in a few years, will have one Frenchman working to support another Frenchman on a pension has now grown stale, mired in sullen, angry strikes, and demands that can't be met without either increasing taxes that are already stifling the economy or making people work longer to get their retirement grant. In the week preceding Bastille Day, when le président de la République is called upon to speak to his lowly citoyens by way of a TV interview, more than 70 percent of them, according to Le Figaro, wanted Chirac to explain how he proposed to fix the pension problem, especially, reported Le Monde, since Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the prime minister and the man walking point in this battle, has not learned Chirac's secret of guarding his credibility. But as the paper noted, Chirac couldn't quite bring himself to admit that it just can't be done. In order to keep afloat their full barge of benefits, France needs many more Frenchmen. While the French are genius at making more French bureaucrats (38,000 new ones last year alone, said Le Figaro), God knows the French can't make actual Frenchmen very well any more. So they import them from Algeria, and Algerians apparently have no problem making many more Algerians, who become the new French. Something like two percent of French Christians attend church on any given Sunday, but almost 100 percent of them practice birth control and "family planning," a euphemism for having a family that includes more cars than kids. Natural law, the richly ornamented expression of which is orthodox religious practice and belief, is easy to disregard. But you break the law, you pay the price. And in the case of France — and Germany, for that matter, as a cluster of pieces in the Suddeutsche Zeitung makes clear — the price of being fruitless and not multiplying is a smaller state-welfare apparatus and a working life that takes you right up to the edge of the grave, then pushes you in. For those who need to believe the state can always do what God can't, that's called dying for your faith. As Liberation made clear in its analysis of Chirac's Bastille Day intervention, pensions aren't the only problem the president isn't confronting. The headache of Corsican politics; an awkward foreign policy; the ongoing controversy surrounding the imprisonment of Green celeb-activist Jose Bove; an economy the projected growth of which is expressed in tiny fractions; and a debt that is swelling beyond the legal limits of the EU are all confounding Chirac's attempt to do what Blair and Clinton did — appear to seize the center by co-opting the opposition's issues. But it's never that simple. If the only issue Chirac had to deal with was America and the war in Iraq, he'd be in great shape and he'd still be enjoying widespread popular support. But the complications facing France can't be articulated by simplistic political rhetoric, so Chirac is falling in the polls and hoping to talk his way back into favor, while shrinking the expectations of the voters. If he weren't so
French, he'd fall on his knees and thank God for giving him such an inept,
fragmented left-wing opposition. The growing smallness of France —
diplomatically, economically, culturally — is a remarkable thing.
One day, I fear I'll go to bash the French and find myself making faces
at an Islamic Euro-state.
How you can have a Love Parade without Barry White is beyond me, but hey! Germany's sweetness is my weakness. And speaking of weaknesses… A note to the actress from Chicago who wrote to tell me that she loved me (exclamation point). I tried to reply to your kind note. Okay, I tried six times to reply to your kind note. But it bounced back each time saying "user unknown," and I despise ironic understatement. |
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months now, the European press has been filled with "news" —
to dignify these observations of the obvious — that the aging demographic
of Europe is making it harder and harder to be a believer in the extensive
system of benefits and programs that constitute a modern European state.
Thanks but no thanks. Joschka ("I'm sorry but I am not convinced")
Fischer is going to D.C. this week so that if the U.S. government asks
Germany to supply troops to help in Iraq, he can say no. If this seems
like an odd reason for a meeting, it is. So, 