Newly
elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy is an avid runner.
According
to some French critics – and here, the term “critic” carries its most common
contemporary meaning of “someone who feels obliged to offer a negative comment
when no one else sees anything requiring any discussion at all” – the preceding
sentence contains a very severe judgment. This
article captures the flavor of the minicontroversy.
For
these critics, running for health is right-wing, individualist, Anglo-Saxon. To
feel the full weight of this judgment you must keep in mind that these are, for
them, bad things.
M.
Sarkozy is advised to walk, and not merely to walk
but to stroll, to promenade. To promenade is to display oneself publicly in
walking mode, in short to perform, something French intellectuals understand
instinctively and, as a consequence, frequently mistake for seriousness. The
contemplative mien, the slow but seemingly purposeful amble, et voilà! the
philosophy.
M le president’s hobby reminds one, if one
is old enough, of John F. Kennedy’s presidency, when he reinvigorated the President’s
Council on Youth Fitness and appointed as its head Charles
“Bud” Wilkinson, the football coach who had turned the Big Eight conference
into “Oklahoma and the Seven Dwarfs.” In 1962 Kennedy came upon an
executive order from the days of Teddy Roosevelt, in which that notoriously
vigorous president questioned whether Marine officers were capable of walking
50 miles in 20 hours. From that discovery sprang a short-lived fad for such walks.
The president’s brother, Robert Kennedy, completed one, as did (if memory
serves) his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver and
various other government figures. (The White House press secretary did not, but
then his first name was Pierre.)
We
learn from the newspaper that, the critics notwithstanding, this particular
form of exercise is fairly popular in
Interestingly
– or not – my own evolution has been in the opposite direction, from the
running when I was younger to the jogging I can just manage nowadays. Footing
can’t be far in my future. If this means I am not cut out to be French, so be
it. Still….
We
had known, of course, that nothing in existence, or indeed in nonexistence,
escapes the notice of the true philosophe. What strikes one now, therefore, is not
the triviality of the matter presently under examination but the poverty and
crudity of the categories available to these facile and lucid minds. I mean, right-wing? This is the kind of analysis for which one
can get paid? Je suis
just a little bit jealous.
