Replies

Friday, November 04, 2005

LE POT III [Jonah Goldberg]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_30_corner-archive.asp#081835

From the September 21, 2005 LA Times:

Some French commentators have been dismayed by the tone of the media coverage concerning the destruction across the Atlantic. Some prominent people in the French press and politics, they believe, have eagerly turned the catastrophe into an all-purpose symbol of American ills, real or imagined.

"If the United States didn't exist, it would have to be invented so that elsewhere we can reassure ourselves, as if to better hide our own defects and incoherencies," warned a recent editorial in Le Figaro newspaper. "It's easy to ramble on about the decline of the American empire. Some even see the difficulties encountered by the U.S. as the work of a vengeful hand from the beyond.... Derision and demonizing are out of place."

The extensive coverage has tended to paint the picture of a superpower brought down by economic inequality, racial conflict and neglectful government. A recent Nouvel Observateur cover summed up this stark view: "America Stripped Naked: The cyclone reveals the wounds of the every-man-for-himself society."

Marianne, a left-leaning newsmagazine, declared: "The American giant folds beneath the weight of its failures and struggles to enforce an order that it wanted to impose on the world."

Marianne's take typified the profound disdain for President Bush in evidence here. A special issue titled "The Fall of the Pyromaniac Fireman" blamed Bush for a planetary flash fire of crises -- from Iraq to global warming -- that, in the magazine's view, discredit an entire free-market-driven, militaristic "Anglo-Saxon model" of governance.

In the newspaper Liberation, Gerard Dupuy accused the Bush administration of "contempt for victims who without a doubt were doubly at fault for being both poor and black." He concluded that the neoconservative "crusade," which was "already mired in the Mesopotamian marshes" of Iraq, had "foundered in the Louisiana bayou."

LE POT CONT'D [Jonah Goldberg]

From the September 1 roundup:

France's LIBERATION also feels this is a huge crisis for the US, and its society.

"This is a major crisis. The proof is that Bush - whom no tragedy nor international crisis seemed to be able to bother during his Texan holidays - went to Washington on the gallop," the left-leaning daily says.

"But the most striking thing, and the most revealing, is the brutal collapse of a rich and highly developed society," it comments. "The greatest power in the world knocked out by a punch from the gods," it says.

"The authorities," both state and federal, "are floundering, helpless", it goes on.

"And violence, which is never very far in a region where it is often forgotten that misery and social exclusion are endemic, is taking over in the form of pillaging.

"After the rules of the gods comes the law of the jungle," it concludes.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_30_corner-archive.asp#081833

LE POT MEET MSSR. KETTLE [Jonah Goldberg]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_30_corner-archive.asp#081832

From a September 8 BBC Newspaper summary of the French press:

"Katrina's devastation points the finger at Bush's system," announces LE MONDE's top headline.
Below the headline sits an large cartoon of George Bush watching wide-screen footage of black people floating dead in the water or screaming for help as an army patrol sails by on a boat, heavily armed. Bush is being briefed by his generals. Distraught and determined, he says: "But, what country is this? Is it far away? We absolutely have to do something!"

"The ravages of hurricane Katrina, which has swallowed up New Orleans...have provoked in the United States a debate on George Bush's model of government," says the French daily, noting that "for some...the page is turning on September 11, and this is perhaps the end of triumphant conservatism".

"Issues forgotten for years are back to the fore: poverty, the state's absence, latent racism," it goes on.

"After the 2001 attacks, the blacks had felt better integrated. Problems concerning society and poverty disappeared behind anti-terrorist concerns," it concludes.