Evo tipièan blesavi tekst u pseudo ozbiljnim novinama (Wall Street Journal!! od kvazi filoofa BHL-a) koji piše -šta - o sjaju u oèima, o blushing, kako je girlish i o bedastoæama.
Dinner With Ségolene
BY BERNARD-HENRI LEVY
PARIS--Of course she knew before we met that I am not--in fact, I am far from being--a strong supporter of her candidacy for the presidency of France. But it didn't seem to bother Ségolène Royal. And if I did see, in those first moments, in that hotel dining room--the nearly empty and perhaps too solemn space chosen for our meeting--a slight reticence, a hint of distrust, what struck me immediately was her astonishing freshness, her candor, her easy grace.
We begin with her gaffes, her famous blunders, the talk of Paris, ranging from her comments on Québec (for which she said she wanted "sovereignty and liberty") to her uncertainty about exactly how many nuclear submarines the French Navy has. She laughs out loud, like a young girl.
"Well, it wasn't me, to my knowledge, who spoke of razing Tehran; that was the Président de la République, Jacques Chirac."
The maître d' steps in to take our order: salad, filets of sole, a dry white wine. She continues, "Isn't it amusing? When someone else misspeaks, we call it a lapsus, a slip, but when it's me it's a giant misstep, a mistake. Maybe it's a double standard."
Then, more seriously, with a cold gleam in her eyes, the faint circles under them wrinkling a little: "In any case, they are stalking me, my colleagues, my children, myself and my supposed gaffes: Nothing stops them, I'm fair game, they're hassling me."
I point out that we are not speaking of mere gaffes. When she was in Beijing, for example, she said something about the marvelous speed of Chinese justice--"That was taken entirely out of context, I was speaking of commercial, not criminal, justice."
Fine, I say. But what was troublesome was that she was already backpedaling on the question of human rights while Nicolas Sarkozy--the conservative rival to her Socialist bid for the Elysée Palace--is now taking strong positions on Darfur, Chechnya and the world's dictatorships.
"Oh, Sarkozy and the dictatorships!" She roars with laughter again, like a young girl. "The right--and the dictatorships, that I've got to see. . . . But, concerning my trip to China, you must understand that I really did speak very strongly, I repeated my concerns about their not respecting human rights."
Aha, I say. And why do you call them "human rights" and not "les droits de l'homme"--the Rights of Man--the way the rest of France does? I get the impression it would scorch her tongue to say "the Rights of Man."
And we launch into a strange, somewhat surrealistic dialogue of the deaf in which I explain that for the antitotalitarian left which is now steering itself away from her, the Rights of Man is not just a phrase but a concept, one that is filled with memories of suffering, of Resistance, manifestly not to be played with--and she, argumentative, inflexible, a sharpness suddenly visible in her face, her forehead, asserting that it's exactly the opposite, that when one says "Rights of Man" she cannot overlook the literal sense of the words, the rights of the Male as opposed to the Female, the rights of her father versus the rights of her mother--and that is why she prefers to say "human rights."
"One day," she continues, "I was talking with a woman from a village in Mali. For her it was exactly that simple: If you say 'the Rights of Man' she understands they are the rights of the male population laying down the law there for centuries. So I choose her point of view, which is also, by the way, the same as that of any child you find in the street. And that is why I choose those words."
Sensing that we are now approaching a new level of misunderstanding, that in five minutes she is going to bring up the American feminist hardliners' demand for "herstory" instead of "history"--that she doesn't understand why in her Catholic catechism classes they didn't say, "God our Father-Mother" instead of the more macho "God our Father"--I change the subject.
So how do things stand with her rivals? What is going on in the Socialist Party? It is unclear whether it is she who doesn't want its support, or if it is the party, facing recent catastrophic polls, that has gone to ground.
"I did offer Dominique Strauss-Kahn"--the former finance minister whom she defeated for the Socialist presidential nomination--"a mission [as part of my campaign]," she says, as if to justify herself. "Dealing with fiscal questions." And Lionel Jospin? I ask--of another Socialist eminence, who was her party's candidate last time around, in 2002. The sommelier pours more wine. I observe she eats and drinks with real gusto, like Mitterrand did before he became ill; and that she has a little of Chirac's hearty appetite--is this a sign?
"As for Jospin, I called to invite him for the 11th"--today, when she unveils her grand policy platform--"telling him his place was with me, next to me." She dramatizes her invitation by pointing to a chair placed slightly behind us, which the maître d' had moved for our arrival. "But no, he said no. He has something else to do that day." A man at a neighboring table comes over to tell her he admires her. She stands, oddly moved, blushing a deeper pink than her suit, happy, her long, pretty neck rippling with pleasure.
As she sits back down, she says, "I understand Jospin. That a woman like me, a bécassine [girl from the provinces], was chosen as the party's candidate, succeeding in things that he never even got close to, I can understand how that might make him angry."
What sorts of things? "Chevènement," she says, referring to another heavyweight on the left. "Jospin still doesn't see how I got him, when he thinks that it is the fact that he didn't--that Chevènement was against him, is why he lost." I am about to retort that it is not necessarily such a great thing to have the anti-European, populist Jean-Pierre Chevènement in her camp, but she continues, thoughtfully, "Why do you think he lost? Do you have an explanation for Jospin losing against Chirac and even Le Pen?"
Then, as I answer that it might have had to do with a form of political elitism which was punished by the electorate, she says, "That's it, yes. And what bothers them is my will to break away from that elitism, that arrogance. What we call participative democracy, I have never claimed it is the panacea, or that one must govern with an eye to public opinion, but to listen to them, to hear what they have in their heads, since for so many years they have been force-fed their truths--it was necessary to do it and I am proud of doing it."
We talk about her vision of Europe, of Iran--subjects where she certainly seems less incompetent than others have described her to be. And will she not have a significant advantage over her rivals, rallying a certain percentage of the voters not merely to her panache and her white suits, but especially those who two years ago voted "no" on the European constitutional referendum?
She tells me she is probably no longer going to wear the famous white suits that have been her trademark, and which have been written about so much--the white of waiting, of the blank page awaiting the inscription of France's grievances as well as hopes for the future. She says the people have spoken, and that on Sunday she will in fact be translating what she has received from them. On that day, I picture her speaking in front of a wall plastered with the photos of the many men and women she has met over these past weeks, for whom she will no longer wear white.
She is sure of winning, she says, although she is a little nervous about today, her big policy day. So much is expected from her, that it is possible she will disappoint. But like Hillary Clinton, whom she admires, she is sure she will win over the conservative camp, frozen in its certainties, incapable of facing the challenges, "the suburbs, the banlieues--in the face of these burning tenements how can the only policy be repression, where demonstrators are no better than savages, barbarians at the gates of the city? Like the ancient Greeks do we not call those with less access barbarians? This attitude is madness, it is suicide."
I tell her again why the role of the intellectual is not to join in, rather it is to ask the tough questions, to lay out the issues, to--at the end, as late as possible--finally articulate his opinion. And she listens to me with a humility which belies her image, that of a strict, distant schoolteacher.
It is after midnight.
The restaurant is empty.
A last question about her choice of books: a book about women by Dominique Méda (she is surprised I don't know her), and Victor Hugo's "Contemplations," which she has had with her for some time.
I take my leave, still somewhat puzzled, but with the feeling that people may have been unfair to this woman--myself included, and that she does not really resemble the slightly gauche statue into which she has sculpted herself.
Eto. Pa ti L smisli nešto pametno i lijepo jer zaslužujemo pametno i lijepo...
Hvala A na mejlu.
Ne da mi se s mamom razgovarati. Zapravo je ne želim gnjavit. Danas popodne su me njih dvoje tako lijepo uspavali nekim pravnièkim boring razgovorom.
Èitala bakin dnevnik. Sweet, da. Kad sam došla do zapisa o smrti dede Joce sam stala. Toliko o izbjegavanju. Znam ja sve to negdje...
Post je objavljen 19.02.2007. u 20:07 sati.