French won't stand for Sarkozy's jogs

Cleveland Plain Dealer ^ | 07/08/07 | Joel Garreau

[ellery]

Washington -The sight of the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, jogging - often wearing his favorite NYPD T- shirt - has fired up a tempest in a Reebok in France and Britain this summer.

Sarkozy's running is an un- French, right-wing conspiracy, suggests Paris' left-wing newspaper Liberation. In response, British commentators gleefully conclude: The French have lost their minds, again.

On the primary state television channel, France 2, Alain Finkielkraut, a French intellectual, demanded that Sarkozy give up his "undignified" exercise. Not only did he imply that exposing the boss's naked knees is something that never would have occurred in the time of Mitterrand, much less Louis XIV, Finkielkraut claimed strolling is the proper activity of the thinking person, from Socrates to the poet Arthur Rimbaud.

"Western civilization, in its best sense, was born with the promenade," said Finkielkraut. "Walking is a sensitive, spiritual act. Jogging is management of the body."

Sarkozy has fueled a French suspicion that running is for self- centered individualists like Americans, reports Charles Bremner, Paris correspondent for the Times of London.

"Patrick Mignon, a sports sociologist, noted that French intellectuals had always held sport in contempt, while totalitarian regimes cultivated physical fitness," Bremner writes.

The British press is having a wonderful time with all this.

"The Sarkozy jog, say his crit ics, is a sad imitation of the habits of American presidents and a capitulation to 'le defi Americain' [a phrase that was the title of a book published here as 'The American Challenge'] as bad as the influx of Hollywood movies," writes Boris Johnson, a British member of Parliament and confirmed jogger, in the Telegraph.

"I am not deterred . . . by the accusation that jogging is right- wing," he says. "Of course it is right-wing, in the sense that the facts of life are generally right- wing. The very act of forcing yourself to go for a run, every morning, is a highly conservative business. There is the mental effort needed to overcome your laziness.

"Charles de Gaulle . . . moved with the stately undulation of a giraffe and never broke into so much as a trot."

[dasboot]

“These “French intellectuals”, an oxymoron, if there ever was one,”

Bastiat.

[bajabaja]

Chomsky...intellectual???? Have you actually read his stuff???

I understand your comment, but I was searching for a balanced approach; Chomsky has contributed to linguistics, and from that standpoint may be called an intellectual. His writings outside of his area of expertise, I agree, have all the understanding of the common house fly.

[dasboot]

Roger that...linguistics. I only know him from his fractured historical fairytales.