Posted on 07/09/2007 7:31:27 PM PDT by 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."
This man wants to deliver 21st Century lifestyle to the French people.
Which might also include French nationalism over the resident Muslim population.
I know, it's hard....
What the hades is wrong with that frog-eating, wimpy, sniveling country? Good lord, every time I think that my opinion of the French can’t get any lower, they come up with more crap like this. Like they don’t have any real problems to get their panties into twists over.
My brother in law used to say “The french are an amazing race! They fight with their feet and f**k with their face!”
Charles de Gaulle as a giraffe....that's hilarious.
His nose would arrive a few minutes before he did.
As if that is important in any nation with muslim youths burning thousands of cars per annum. No, I am much more concerned with this sentence:
On the primary state television channel, France 2
They evidently never held Jacques Chirac in contempt for HIS favorite sport (les liasons), and never spoke out publicly about it as they are doing about the conservative's sin of jogging.
Not until about three weeks before the Chirac presidency began to crumble did France and the world find out publicly about his many mistresses, his illegitimate daughter by one of them, the whispers of another illegitimate child in Japan, plus the several attempted suicides of an unhappy legitimate daughter.
The leftist French intellectual and media establishments are no different than ours......tres hypocritical.
Leni
A few years back, Paris wanted to be the PORN CAPITAL of the world. Now a few bare knees has their panties all twisted up.
The French call Americans “Self-Centered.”
Wow!
"This conservative swine of a president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is [cough] not a true Frenchman.."One of the better quotes I've heard recently.
The foppish snobs attacking Sarkozy would prefer a leprous, sewer-dwelling terrorist rat like Marat for a leader.
And maybe even showers! Or at least baths.
MM (in TX)
the french admired jean-paul sartre’s
sedentary, cigarette-smoking, unbathed,
ways.
oui, oui.
They certainly turned a blind eye to Clinton jogging to the evil McDonald’s, as did our media mongrels; then Bush jogs and, all of a sudden, only brain-dead people jog.
Have you actually read his stuff???
Maybe he should take up cycling. I'm sure they'd have no problem with that...except maybe that the TDF has been dominated by Americans lately as well.
These “French intellectuals”, an oxymoron, if there ever was one, hate all things American, including individual success and accomplishment, i.e. sports.
The illigitimate daughter, named Mazarine, of all things, belonged to Francois Mitterand.
The unfortunate daughter who tried to commit suicide by throwing herself out of a window, and is now a vegetable, is Chirac’s legitimate daughter, Laurence.
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