Odious comparisons between US and Europe

From the London Times:

“A single verse by Rimbaud,” writes Dominique de Villepin, the French Prime Minister, “shines like a powder trail on a day’s horizon. It sets it ablaze all at once, explodes all limits, draws the eyes to other heavens.” Here is a rather different observation, uttered by George Bush Sr in 1998, that might stand as a motto for his dynasty: “I can’t do poetry.”

In that gulf of sensibility lies the cultural faultline of our times. For George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld words are blunt instruments, used to convey meaning, not feeling. Actions speak louder. The President of France, by contrast, rocked by the rejection of the EU constitution, has attempted to shore up his Government by having a poet as his Prime Minister, a patrician intellectual in the French romantic mould, a true believer in the transcendental and redemptive power of words.

These are the polar extremes of poetry, Rimbaud in one corner and Rambo in the other: the French patron saint of sensitive, tortured adolescents alongside the monosyllabic American action man.

M de Villepin’s poetry — four volumes so far — is a triumph of French style over substance, a torrent of adjectival acrobatics: grand, uplifting and painfully obscure. He speaks in a grandiloquent style that delights French audiences, but baffles most English-speakers. His high-flown rhetoric before the United Nations in the build-up to the Iraq war (“We are the guardians of an ideal”) marked him as the political and cultural antithesis to the US, and his appointment as PM was intended to send the message that French exceptionalism is alive and well.

M de Villepin sets himself the task of restoring French self-confidence, of infusing France with a sense of its poetic destiny: “We need a heart that beats for everyone.” For this poet, practical considerations are secondary. As he wrote in his recent 823-page treatise on French poetry: “What does it matter where this path leads, nowhere or elsewhere, if the furrow continues flowering, if the flash of lightning still inflames the night ... If the poet still consumes himself, he refuses the enclosures of thought, certainties, to camp in the heart of the mystery, in the living spirit of the flame.”

To which the American response will be a resounding: “Whatever.” The Bush White House does not do poetry. At a Nato summit in Prague, Donald Rumsfeld was once forced to sit though a performance of modern dance and poetry. Asked for his reaction afterwards, he shrugged: “I’m from Chicago.”

Les Anglo-Saxons — as Villepin likes to categorise America and Britain — have seldom mixed poetry and politics. There have been numerous British writer-statesmen, but no poet-politician of note. Clement Attlee scribbled self-mocking limericks, but can you imagine Tony Blair penning anything more poetic than pop lyrics? John Prescott might have been invented for the purposes of doggerel: “There was a young man from ’ull/ Who usually spoke total bull ...” Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams were both published poets, but in modern times the only president-poet was Jimmy Carter. His 44-poem collection Always, as brave as it is bad, was received with thinly disguised and richly deserved mockery: “The geese passed overhead/and then without a word/We went down to a peaceful sleep/Marvelling at what we’d seen and heard.” John F. Kennedy commissioned Robert Frost to deliver a poem at his inauguration, and Bill Clinton had Maya Angelou do the same. But poetry does not stir the soul of President Bush, unless you count the Bible and George Jones singing A Good Year for the Roses.

To the Anglo-Saxon mind there is something dodgy, even dangerous, in the man who rules the world by day and writes verses by night. As W.H. Auden wrote: “All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornados, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.” Indeed, the precedents are not happy ones, for there is a peculiar link between frustrated poetic ambition and tyranny: Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Castro, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh all wrote poetry. Radovan Karadzic, fugitive former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, once won the Russian Writers’ Union Mikhail Sholokhov Prize for his poems. On the whole, you do not want a poet at the helm.

Yet in France, proof of a refined literary consciousness is a prerequisite of high office, and the virtue that eclipses sin. When François Mitterrand died, French commentators touched only briefly on such aspects of his career as wartime collaboration, cynical political opportunism and obsessive adultery, while devoting acres of print to his love of books and remarkable literary output. Every French politician is expected to produce a trophy bouquin. Before writing the ailing EU constitution, former President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing penned sensitive novels.

M de Villepin places himself firmly in the tradition of French diplomat-poets. In the preface to his 2003 book he effused: “This eulogy owes nothing to artifice or chance. It has ripened inside me since childhood. From the bottom of my pockets, stuck to the back of my smock, hidden in the corner of abacuses, poetry gushed out.” That statement immediately earned him a nomination as Poseur of the Year by a New York newspaper.

His existence is certain to increase the accusations of pretentiousness from the American side, and philistinism from the French. The chasm has never been wider, or more in need of a bridge. America’s public image could benefit from a sense of imaginative wonder, a little more Rimbaud and a lot less Rambo. Anglo-Saxon mockery is the essential antidote to Left Bank belle lettrism, which too often uses poetic complexity to state the obvious, or nothing at all.

George Bush and Dominique de Villepin might learn much from each other, but no amount of translation could allow them to speak the same language. In the aftermath of 9/11, M de Villepin walked through Manhattan: “In the flayed city, facing the raging winds, I called upon the words of Rimbaud, Artaud or Duprey. At such a grave hour, how could one not think of these thieves of fire who lit up, for centuries, the furnaces of the heart and the imagination, of thirst and insomnia, to build an empire only within oneself.” Mr Bush also surveyed the city, but did not think of poetry or imagination: he invaded Afghanistan.

2. OK, that's a poetic difference. It would have been nice if Bush could put some Churchillian poetry in his speeches, but he just ain't all that inspiring. Anyway, here is a much more mundane difference between the U.S. and Europe (from a letter to the NY Times):
"German and French workers now work about 1,450 hours a year, while Americans work about 1,800 hours. But Europeans have higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality than Americans, achieved through mostly public rather than private health care provision. And they receive more generous pensions, child policies, disability and other benefits than Americans. In other words, Europeans get more services (and better outcomes) for less work, while Americans get fewer services for more work. And Europeans enjoy more equitable wealth distribution, less poverty, lower crime and incarceration rates, and stronger environmental and safety standards than Americans."

ONE day we'll get ourselves a single-payer health system, but it will have to be over the dead bodies of our health insurance companies. When will we be sensible enough to kill them for the sake of our health?