Traffic and the world around us

Morgane and I were driving to pick up some things from Zoe when the traffic on the periphrique went from "fluide" to "perturbé." As we crept along the traffic ballet began--cars trading places with each other in the hope that the other lane could get them to their destination quicker. I soon realized that as drivers the French change lanes with the same detached recklessness they use each day on the sidewalk. Walking along the city streets I noticed the tendency for the French to walk along, oblivious to everything around them, until they bump into someone or a horn is honked and they are momentarily halted in their self-absorbed journey.

Thus far I had yet to see this tendency carry over into the roadways. Very quickly I realized that no one really knows where the other cars are. A blinker is clicked and the car enters the next lane. No glances in the mirror, no waves. The lane is taken as if the road was empty. The closest thing to a "courtesy" or a "warning" is the blinker, which isn't much of a warning at all but it serves to absolve them. Unless you are also of the "head down" school of driving you must constantly be on guard.

Perhaps I'm being a bit unfair but it's not hard to make the leap from here to the examples of French Foreign Policy where this sort of "head down" attitude manifests itself. And here I'm talking about Rwanda, about the French insistence in handing out huge subsidies to farmers while the world changes around them--while it passes them by, while it threatens to alter their inflated sense of power.

(Paradoxically, France is the same nation that has given the world Doctors Without Borders as well as Reporters Without Borders. Paris is the headquarters for UNESCO. It's a confounding dichotomy)

Sarkozy rode the hope of systematic change to the French system all the way to the Presidency. But even his thrusts for change, his bids to regain prestige and economic viability have been characterized by his ability to see the goal and not the traffic around him. How else do you explain his handling of the Libya incident or Carla Bruni? He successfully negotiated the release of Bulgarian nurses who had been convicted in Libya of intentionally spreading HIV at the expense of the EU. A conquest of sorts that was the first step towards putting France back in the center realm of the national stage. Seven months later and this one mindedness has diminished the Sarkozian sheen. He seems to have stepped too far out into the street with the Carla Bruni business and the public has honked its horn. His popularity has tanked and with it, some would say, his "mandate for change."

Perhaps being cut off by a red Renault is too large a jump to genocide and Presidential policy after all.