January 11, 2015
François Hollande
Source: Shutterstock
The day after I flew from Paris, Muslim fanatics attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo. The hapless M. Hollande’s first pronouncement on the subject was at about the level of his economic thought. This, he said, was certainly a terrorist attack: a thought that surely must have occurred to many others of his countrymen. Poor M. Hollande! There he is, trying to be a “normal” president (that is to say, an average citizen who happens to be head of state), when these terrible things continue to happen and to require something abnormal of him.
For some reason, the image in my mind of the two young men”young but nonetheless full-grown, and long past voting age, playing electronic football with deep seriousness and failing to take the newspapers on offer as they boarded the aircraft”recurred to me as I followed the events the following day. Are we a society “amusing ourselves to death,” to quote the felicitous phrase of the late Neil Postman, while we face grave challenges from within and without? (France is no different in this respect from other Western countries.)
But what difference would it make if such as they read the newspapers every day with intense attention? Surely one of the freedoms we value is the freedom from the tyranny of politics?
The problem is that if you do not go to politics, politics will come to you. Throughout my life I have never been able to resolve my own dialectic between indifference and obsession.
