By Timothy Egan
Guest ColumnistThe New York Times"One of the memorable scenes in 'Sicko,' Michael Moore’s latest cinematic provocation, comes from France, where he shows doctors in their little white cars making house calls — for free.
But it’s not just France. When we lived in Italy some time ago, a doctor came to our farmhouse rental on Easter Sunday morning to diagnose a stomach ailment. He charged nothing.
Let’s stipulate that Moore is a one-sided pamphleteer, with a bit of Mark Twain and Pat Robertson in his schtick. But like all propagandists, his job is not to find some objective truth, but to anger, challenge, ask hard questions.
With Independence Day just passed, a good nationalist shouldn’t be afraid to answer those questions. So, who lives better, us or them?
In Italy, this was a regular parlor game when friends came to visit. Inevitably, after a few days of taking in our new world — a village public school for the kids, neighbors who opened the doors of their ancient homes to us, a lengthy siesta every afternoon — our houseguests would side with the Italians. I would counter for the U.S.A., to keep the argument alive.
The Italians won on health, family and food. The United States was better on race and opportunity.
With health care, the anecdotal often carried the argument. One day, a tenant farmer named Sergio, our neighbor, woke with a terrible eye infection. He was full of pain, unable to see. Sergio got world-class care in Florence. After three days of attentive fussing in the hospital, he came home entirely well and without a bill.
Had he showed up at any American hospital — poor, no insurance — well, good luck. Especially in a place like Texas, where 30 percent of adults lack health insurance and what can pass for medical care is a get-in-line form of triage.
But even with insurance, Americans are stuck with what may be the worst of all systems: one that lets a handful of corporations make life-and-death decisions, with incentive to dump and deny.
Little wonder that the United States ranks 37th in effectiveness of health care. Italy ranks 2nd. This is a country that can’t form a government to last longer than the soccer season, and yet, they make our medical system look barbaric.
If our system doesn’t kill you — see the infant mortality and life expectancy rates, bringing up the rear — it can put you in the poorhouse. Medical catastrophes are the leading cause of bankruptcy, and most of those are people who have some insurance, clinging to the frayed edge of the middle class.
O.K., so what about leisure? Americans spend nearly a third of their disposable income on good times, baby. But we can’t relax. Sorry — no time. Lunch averages 31 minutes. And the U.S. ranks dead last among 21 of the world’s richest countries when it comes to guaranteed days off, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Most Americans don’t even use their allotted days of leisure. The Italians take 42 vacation days a year — No. 1 in the world. The average American takes 13.
A quarter of Americans receive no vacation at all. And it’s not like we don’t need it: one in three are chronically overworked. We even work 100 hours a year more than the Japanese.
President Bush has it figured out, with his month off at the ranch. But for a profile in clueless, Bush set the mark when he lauded as truly American some citizen who told him she had to work three jobs. Ain’t that something?
Ah, but what about taxes? Europeans pay more than we do, to fund that free health care. Take that, Euro-trash, while lying on the beach. And yet, our tax system is approaching Gilded Age disparity. Listen to Warren Buffett, the third richest man in the world. Last year, he was taxed at 17 percent of his taxable income, he said last month. His receptionist paid nearly twice that, at 30 percent.
Where America shines is with our multiracial society and the easy access to opportunity. It was jarring to listen to otherwise thoughtful Tuscans denigrate Ethiopian immigrants or even their Sicilian countrymen.
By contrast, nothing made me prouder than telling Italians that I came from a place with an African-American mayor and a Chinese-American governor. Or that I grew up in a big Irish-American family with little money.
A patriot should not be afraid to have this debate, vigorously — after a nap.
Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of 'The Worst Hard Time,' is a guest columnist."
By
Maureen DowdThe New York TimesPARIS
The French can be very, well, French when it comes to the personal lives of their leaders.
They take affairs, illegitimate children and tumultuous marriages in stride.
But they suddenly turn traditional when it comes to the role of the first lady. They do not like the idea of Nicolas Sarkozy entertaining world leaders alone at the Élysée Palace. It is not comme il faut.
Maybe that’s why this country is so mesmerized with the question of whether the beautiful Cécilia Sarkozy, a former Schiaparelli model who was for years her husband’s influential political adviser, is going to serve as the chatelaine of the Élysée, or run off again with a lover.
No one seems sure if she will bolt, leaving the entertaining duties to Sarko’s mother, an elegant lawyer, or agree to play a limited role at the palace.
“We have a hard time imagining an intermittent first lady at the Élysée,” sniffed Le Temps, a daily newspaper, online.
Cécilia was missing in action during the final weeks of her husband’s campaign. “I don’t see myself as first lady,” the 49-year-old said. “That bores me.”
Bound by strict privacy laws, and cozy with the elite ruling class, the French press shies away from printing the skinny on relationships, even though the skinny French public loves gossiping on the subject.
Trying to fathom what is going on with power couples here is like watching a French movie — scenes brimming with emotion and ambiguity.
Cécilia left Sarko for several months in 2005, moving to America to live with a French events organizer — reportedly a response to her husband’s affair with a French journalist.
When Paris Match published pictures of Cécilia with her lover in New York, Sarko became furious with his good friend, Arnaud Lagardère, the magazine’s owner. Soon, the editor was fired.
Mr. Lagardère stepped in again to kill a story in another publication he owns, Le Journal du Dimanche. On Sunday, the paper was going to reveal that Cécilia did not bother to vote.
On the night Sarko won the presidency, Parisians were watching Cécilia’s every move. She was not there when he won or when he made his acceptance speech, and some of her friends were saying that the marriage was over.
But her two pretty blonde daughters from a previous marriage apparently prevailed on her to show up later that night at a victory rally. She came dressed down in a gray sweater and white slacks, in what one friend said had originally been her “escape outfit,” and looked distracted as her husband spoke, plucking at her sweater.
At the post-rally party, Paris Match — now following the Sarko script — was given an exclusive on their happy reunion. They were in a hotel suite, the magazine said, behaving “like lovers.”
“And the new president, regaining for an instant the taste of rhythm that invaded him in his youth, took a step in dance,” the story said. “In front of all their friends reunited, he dances for a single person: Cécilia.”
When Paris isn’t fixated on Cécilia and Sarko, it’s buzzing about the town’s other power couple.
As Ségolène Royal tries to build on her strong showing to become the Socialist candidate for president in 2012, her relationship with the father of her four children and the head of her party, François Hollande, grows more byzantine.
She brazenly bounded past Mr. Hollande — who wanted to run himself — and now she wants to eclipse him totally. This competition — the opposite of Billary — certainly did not help her candidacy. “Every morning I would open the newspapers and ask myself which Socialist was going to attack me over what I was saying,” she told a party conference the other day.
Their relationship is the subject of a new book, “La Femme Fatale,” by two respected political reporters from Le Monde. The couple is suing to have some passages cut.
“Disappointed in her private life, she chose to go into battle without worrying anymore about François Hollande, but also with the assertion that she was more popular than him, and he hadn’t been able to renovate the Socialist Party despite hopes of party activists and elected officials,” Raphaëlle Bacqué, a co-author, told a journalist, noting that the fact that Sego and Mr. Hollande were at each other’s throats, while keeping their status a mystery, had “serious political consequences. They should have been unbeatable. ... him at the head of the party, her a candidate. But instead we saw two teams in endless competition.”
The book quotes an interview in which Mr. Hollande was asked where he would live if Sego won. “At my house!” he replied.
Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
By
Maureen DowdThe New York TimesParis
Beauty has been chased off by the Beast.
Now France waits to see just how feral and domineering Nicolas Sarkozy will be.
The lovely Ségolène Royal — more phenomenon than politician — ran a maternal, Manichaean campaign painting her intense, Napoleon-sized opponent as an immoral political animal and a brute whose election would spark riots and “a sort of civil war.”
The luminous Sego did not even deign to address the “dark” Sarko by name, either in the debate or in her concession speech Sunday night.
Cartoonists have depicted the tough guy — who bullies rivals, betrays mentors and calls young troublemakers in low-income housing in the Paris suburbs “scum” — as a gargoyle, Dracula, an evil sorcerer and a devil.
The imagery of the presidential duel tapped into mythic Gothic tales of France, like “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Phantom of the Opera,” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
With Hungarian, Greek and Jewish roots, with a father who deserted and belittled him, with his jittery ambition and pugnacious talk, Sarko is jolting the inbred, insular and introspective world of elite French politics. The far right has called him “a foreigner with an unhappy marriage,” and a Sego adviser scorned him as “an American neocon with a French passport.”
“He’s an arriviste,” said Bruno Ract-Madoux, the owner of a vintage shop in Paris. “From the beginning, he was someone who would sell his mother as fast as possible to get ahead.”
Or as an elegant Parisian woman who voted for Sego warned guests at a postelection dinner party, “He’s like a little Donald Trump.”
Sego was serene and protective — but vague; Sarko was kinetic and pushy — and concrete. As it turned out, the French wanted to be prodded even more than they wanted to be pampered. Perhaps they have decided they have to stop being sluggish so they can continue to be supercilious.
Liberals mocked Sarko’s campaign theme: “A France that wakes up early.” Gérard Biard wrote a piece in the far-left weekly paper Charlie Hebdo: “At dawn, I ripped myself out of bed. ... I took a cold shower, put on some mismatched socks and downed eight espressos, as I headed out to meet France in the morning. ... The France that wakes up early would rather stay in the sack.”
But even some who voted for the woman who would have been the first La France Présidente admitted that they did not want their country to calcify. “Who has a 35-hour workweek?” said Phillippe Rosenthal, who sells leather chairs.
Sarko wrote in his political book “Testimony” that France “is not a museum” and “must find the energy” to succeed. In his acceptance speech, he said he would “rehabilitate” work, and an adviser promised he would be “a presidential entrepreneur.” (Just as soon as he comes back from his yachting vacation.)
One expatriate friend of mine observed that the French are not lazy, they just want a leisurely lunch.
At a Paris flea market on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, the vendors did not eat fast food or takeout at lunchtime. They set up tables with tablecloths, china and crystal and joined other vendors to dine on whole roasted chicken, fresh salad, bread and wine. And some would not interrupt their meal even for shoppers who wanted to buy their wares.
When I was reading newspapers during lunch at a Left Bank hotel, the maître d’ approached. “You’re a journalist,” he pleasantly accused me, implying that only such a robotic American creature could work while eating. He had a point. Nearby, in the lobby, Catherine Deneuve was having fun, smoking and drinking wine with girlfriends surrounded by Chanel bags full of Chanel bags.
They do not want the joie to go out of de vivre, but the French are not averse to being whipped into shape by drill sergeant Sarko. They want the fireplug to plug France into modern capitalism. The French sphinx should bound past the Celtic tiger.
“He wants to make people work and make more money,” said one French professional woman I know. “The French are like children who love to be beaten. Sarkozy is saying, ‘Go do your homework or I’ll beat you.’ The French need to be told that.”
It will be fascinating to watch Sarko try to discipline the French, and change their psychology about work. Or will they discipline him, burrowing into their Camembert cocoon, chasing him away as he did Sego?
The mood here was best summed up with a take on an old Bette Davis line. Jean d’Ormesson, a commentator in Le Figaro, advised: “Fasten your seatbelts. This will be quite a ride.”
Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
By
Maureen DowdThe New York TimesLILLE, France
It’s hard not to be drawn to a presidential candidate with a name like a Bond girl, a smile like an angel, a figure that looks great in a bikini at 53, a campaign style like Joan of Arc, and a buffet for the press corps brimming with crustless fromage sandwiches, icy chocolate profiteroles, raspberry parfaits, red Bordeaux, espresso and little almond gâteaux. (When in France, let us eat cake.)
Ségolène Royal brought back the sizzle to socialism, raising the ire of Stephen Colbert’s right-wing TV host, who warned that “socialism is always a threat but never more so than when it looks like this.”
At first, Ségolène seemed like the ideal candidate for a country that knew it needed change but didn’t really want change, because she looked like change but wasn’t really going to change anything. But the infatuation dampened, like a spring romance.
I entered the Ségosphere, as her supporters call it, Thursday evening in Lille, for the last big rally — and perhaps last hurrah — of her “serene revolution,” as it’s dubbed.
The unmarried mother of four and daughter of a misogynistic army colonel entered the factorylike hall to a militant techno beat, gliding through the cheering crowd of 20,000 with a radiant smile and bright red jacket. Supporters, including many young ethnic Arab men and older women in head scarves up front, strained to touch and pat her.
On stage, she channeled a divine aura, levitating her arms like a Blessed Virgin statue, presenting herself as a glowing beacon against the forces of darkness, a k a Nicolas Sarkozy. In the Ségosphere, the right-wing front-runner is a brute, Rudy Giuliani without the restraint, while she is a healer. She consciously casts herself as Marianne, the symbol of France — playing “La Marseillaise” at rallies — but comes across more like Marianne Williamson, the New Age spirituality guru, going for the chakra vote.
“What I want, it’s for everybody to unleash this energy they feel within themselves,” she said, “but this energy that is sometimes curbed, curbed by so many blockages, curbed by so many negative speeches, curbed by so many shadows. ... It is not the dark side that I want to awake. It is the side of light, it is the side of hope, it is the part of joy, it is the part of smile, it is the part of France that loves itself as it is.”
Even though her strategy of playing the woman card fell flat, she kept it up in her last week. In Lille, she said she knew some wondered: “Is it really reasonable to choose a woman? Is France going to dare? I want to say: Dare. Dare! You won’t regret it.”
Ségo is bolder than the cautious Hillary, but stumbles into mistakes more often; unlike Hillary, she has not done her homework on foreign policy. Ségo blends a fierce will and feminine style more deftly than Hillary, but is also seen as somewhat cold, porcelain under her porcelain skin, rather than seductive, like Bill Clinton.
Ségo showed verve and grit in her self-professed role as a “gazelle” darting past the sexist old Socialist elephants — not to mention the father of her children, François Hollande, the head of her party, who wanted to run himself. Though Mr. Hollande supports Ségo, she does not seem as dependent as Hillary on getting her man to push people around for her.
France is chauvinistic — women got the vote in 1944 and compose only a small percentage of the National Assembly — but the country seems less neurotic than America about the idea of a woman as president. The trouble with Ségo’s campaign is not her gender. The trouble is that her only vision for France is herself. Hence, her nickname: Egolene.
A Sarko adviser called Ségo “a very pretty gadget” who looked modern but had no real plan to move France out of malaise and into the future.
When Ségo lost her temper at Sarko during Wednesday’s debate, on the issue of disabled children’s going to regular schools, it was denounced as contrived and inaccurate. She wanted to seem assertive and goad her abrasive and volatile rival into boiling over. Instead, he pushed the gender card back, telling her to “calm down” and stereotyping Serene Ségo as too moody and changeable to run a country that likes big, powerful leaders.
“She is not in a good mood this morning; it must be the polls,” he said Friday, after she warned that he was “a dangerous choice,” with “the same neoconservative ideology” as W., someone who could cause the country to erupt.
In a contest between what one Parisian calls “le fou” and “la fausse,” the crazy and the false, France may say oui to le fou.
Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
