March 05, 2004, 10:19 a.m.
Kerry Nations

There are, on this planet home of ours, huge chunks of real estate where aristocrats govern a hapless but unquestioning population of shoulder-shrugging common folk. In America, these little kingdoms are as far apart as Massachusetts and West Virginia — two states divided by geography and accent, but united in their love for pork-fed government.

It isn't exactly intuitive for poor working stiffs to send millionaires like Kennedy, Kerry, and Rockefeller to Washington to represent their interests. But in fact voters in those states know that if anyone can bloat a bureaucracy big enough to float an entire economy, rich Democrats are the guys to do it. More government means not better government or anything like that. It means more government jobs. Propose to the citizens of these places the kind of reform that requires less government, and you'll be banished from the kingdom, no doubt by a very large committee of bureaucrats hired to slowly and inefficiently do the dirty work.

The biggest unions in America are those that represent government workers, and to them, "reform" invariably means more money and power. The result of this kind of benign, jobs-oriented bribery is a sort of laid-back acceptance of a ruling class. For millionaires like most of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, money has bought what they would never otherwise be able to enjoy: power and influence. The Maria Cantwells, Mark Daytons, and Jon Corzines of the world would not normally be voices heard with interest by anyone without the kind of amplification lots and lots of money provides.

Europe is smaller, so these sort of feudal states are conveniently located next to each other. France, for example, is Massachusetts to Belgium's West Virginia. In both places, ruling elites occupy seats of power heavily upholstered with a soft cushion of fat, expensive bureaucracy. In both countries, the state is by far the largest employers of heavily unionized workers. When France recently made it illegal for most people to work more than 35 hours a week, those with an entrepreneurial spirit may have suffered. But government workers didn't complain. Decrees like that one create a government that is distant and dull. At dinner with a French schoolteacher recently, I asked about how the headscarf ban would be enforced in the area's schools. "By a man with a phone in far-off Paris," was his sardonic reply.

The French may pride themselves on the separation of church and state, but the real accomplishment of the French Republic has been the separation of those who rule from those who are governed. It didn't happen by accident. One of De Gaulle's first projects after liberation was the establishment of the École Nationale d'Administration — French for "Technocrat U" — where the country's governing elite are trained to keep the electorate in its comfortable place. ENA graduates run everything in France — they do not handle middle-management positions well. Everybody who milks the big government vache in France is an "Énarque" — Chirac, Juppé, Jospin, Giscard, Raffarin. If your father was an Énarque, chances are you will be one, too.

Ostensibly a product of the meritocracy, the ENA is the ultimate insider's network, obliterating the normal ideological boundaries that inform modern politics. Right or left, if you're from the ENA, you rule. It would be easier for a conservative Republican to be elected senator from Massachusetts than it would be for a non-ENA grad to be appointed to run, say, France's finances. The ubiquity of Énarques in positions of power is a given, one of many that have contrived to invest the true Gallic shrug with such authenticity that only a native can do it with conviction. Men like Juppé and Chirac may be corrupt — in fact, a court recently declared Juppé, a former prime minister, to be a crook, and Chirac will be similarly convicted after his term ends — but the alternative would be real reform, and nobody wants that.

Nevertheless, every now and then, the French press takes a look around, discovers the insidious presence of Énarques everywhere, and runs a story on it. In this week's edition of Le Nouvel Observateur, the editors are shocked — shocked! — to discover that a "caste" rules France, that it is largely unaccountable to anyone, that it spends lots of money, that it does relatively little, and that it is in no danger of disappearing so long as the French remain dependent on the state for the existence of any economy at all. The dossier of NObs pieces are mostly excerpts from Ghislaine Ottenheimer's latest book, Les Intouchables, an investigation into the obvious, which is that the people running France are hopelessly corrupt. The "hopeless" part matters, because the average French Jo assumes the worst from his leaders, anyway. Besides, most French citizens collude in the corruption forced on them. Not just small jobs and minor repairs are conducted under the table, hidden from the taxman's spiraling eye; entire houses are built in France on the black, with everybody, from the surveyor to the carpet-layer paid in cash.

That sentiment is well-understood in Belgium. During the time I lived in Bruges, the one common element to most of the jokes I heard was the corruption of the government, seen by most Belgians as a kind of inter-bred, well-financed mosh pit: the elite might tumble, but they never hit bottom. Documented transactions in Belgium are as unwelcome as they are in France. Normally, Belgians just don't care what their government does, as long as it doesn't offend too deeply against the sensibilities of those who spend their day of rest worshipping soccer players and F-1 drivers.

The deep distrust Belgians feel toward their government was on display this week as the trial of Marc Dutroux, accused of committing horrible crimes against children, finally got underway in Arlon after years of delays and mistakes; La Libre reported on the weird serenity of the courtroom as the defense and prosecution met to set out their cases. Europe has its share of bizarre, violent crimes, but nothing quite like this one has so mobilized the citizenry against their rulers.

Conspiracy theories abound here, but the biggest one is the one that filled the streets of Brussels not long ago with hundreds of thousands of people after some of the principals in the case claimed the crimes were perpetrated by a pedophile ring that extended well into the upper echelons of the Belgian political establishment. There are just too many unanswered questions, as this report in Libération suggests. Fully two-thirds of Belgians believe their government is involved in covering up child-killing and pedophilia, even though no proof has yet come forward.

Dutroux is almost certainly guilty, Belgians seem to say, and eventually the trial will prove it. But everybody already knows the governing class is guilty — if not of this crime, then of something else, perhaps something less monstrous, but still harmful, like the constant, eroding corruption that is insinuated into every facet of Belgian — and French — life. Fortunately, the governments of both countries have created commissions to investigate the corruption that exists in all the other commissions. Maybe some day a bureaucrat will save the French from themselves. That's probably a more likely scenario than, say, a Kerry saving the people of Massachusetts from himself.

ITEMS

Returned to sender. Alistair Cooke has filed the last of his 2,869 Letters from America, one of the most consistently brilliant programs on the BBC's schedule. Now 95, Cook's doctors told him to hang it up, and he has complied. The Guardian offered a decent salute in farewell. This leaves the BBC with hours and hours of commentary by people who don't know how to write for radio and whose tortured, sentimentalized prose reeks of the kind of sensitivity that can only be produced by putting a sappy but overcharged adjective next to a soporific noun. For an American example, turn on NPR and listen for the words "my abusive father never..." Meanwhile, for something completely different, the Daily Telegraph reports the good news that on "The Archers" — Britain's oldest radio soap opera — gay guys will start kissing, at last.

Returned to sender 2. Maybe, if her wonderful piece in Commentary still accurately reflects her intentions, it's possible that Nidra Poller's thinking of returning home, done in at last by all these serious Frenchmen making their little Jerry Lewis noises. But I hope not. Her comments appear frequently here — but I first saw this thanks to the tireless "W" at the Merde in France blogsite.

There goes the arboreal neighborhood. More trees are going to have to die to satisfy Steve Glover's desire to get it right, quality-newspaperwise. Following up on what amounted to a kind of investor pitch in last week's Spectator (type his name in the little search box), the man who helped found the Independent only to watch it become ideologically codependent on the despised George W. Bush for a cogent point of view, has decided that British newspapers are too celeb-driven and dumbed-down to be of consistent interest. According to Le Monde, Glover has little use for news about sports figures or for "checkbook journalism" — my personal favorite kind of journalism, actually. As Glover told Spectator readers, "If you study the Times of 1990 you will find almost no stories about celebrities or furry animals." He thought that was a good, by the by.

Das Boot. The good ship Schroeder seems to be taking on water these days. Last weekend, the chancellor's party suffered what Der Spiegel reported was its biggest defeat in decades in the regional elections in Hamburg. Then came news, reported in EU Politix and elsewhere, that Germany, and its cohabitating partner, France, would continue to run deficits that violate the European stability pact. On top of that, according to the Suddeutsche Zeitung, the ECB, run by Jean-Claude Trichet (Énarque alert!), refused to help out either Chirac or Schroeder by lowering the interest rates that are keeping the euro at record high levels and deadening any economic revival in either France or Germany. No wonder, as John Vinocur reports in the IHT, Schroeder was running into the arms of George W. Bush, while former Bush-beater Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, was telling the Financial Times (subscription only) that the Franco-German plan for a "core" Europe was a bad idea after all. The current Franco-German economic recovery strategy: Hope the American economy will bail them out, painlessly.

No Passion, please. We're French. At first it appeared that The Passion, Mel Gibson's film about the last hours of Christ, wasn't going to be shown in French cinemas. Distributors said they were worried about inflaming the anti-Semitic tendencies of French-dwelling Muslims. But now, reports Le Monde, Tunisian producer Tarek Ben Ammar has taken on the project, explaining simply that he felt it was his duty to show a film about "love and forgiveness, since Jesus forgave those who caused his suffering." The film will be in Paris by Easter. A miracle.

Back in the saddle. Alain Hertoghe, the Belgian-born, French-educated journalist fired by La Croix for writing a book exposing the inept coverage of the war in Iraq by French newspapers, is covering the 2004 U.S. elections for France's Yahoo! Channel. In an interview, Hertogh told me that he had felt the press coverage of George W. Bush in the 2000 campaign was often unfair. A balanced look at U.S. politics will be a novelty for French readers, for sure.

The veil descends. The French senate finally passed the controversial legislation calling for intolerance of religious symbols in French schools. Chirac's signature will make it law — but not before The Dissident Frogman takes a shot at the topic from his pad in the blog-pond.

Buzz from the swamp. The BBC seems to have awakened to the fact that banning DDT does nothing much to help the environment but it does cost thousands of lives every day. The epiphany behind this long overdue about-face? George W. Bush's braindead endorsement of the global ban on the insecticide. Although it doesn't appear on this website account of the effects of the ban, the radio broadcast featured Bush explaining at length all the gibberish that has followed this topic since it first emerged from the polluted science of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. If Bush is for it, the Beeb's agin' it, no matter what, apparently. Meanwhile, the World Service this week took advantage of a drop-in by playwright Edward Albee to discuss his play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? which deals with an architect, his wife, their gay son, and the goat with whom the father is having an affair. It's all normal on the surface, said the presenter, approximately, but the father's having sex with the goat, so really, it's like America, isn't it? You bet, said Edward. On the BBC, America will be a nation of perversity both figurative and real — at least until we all become Arabs, according to the World Service's guidelines on "respect." Aretha spelled it out it better.