Flying high over the economic landfill that is France, Domenique "The Gull" Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin, sees "GENIUS!"

GALLIC GENIUS WILL SAVE FRANCE SAYS VILLEPIN

PARIS, June 9, 2005 (Guardian) - France's new prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused yesterday to push the country down the road towards free-market reform, saying "Gallic genius" would help put back on its feet a "suffering, impatient and angry" nation that has failed to adapt fully to a changing world.

We don't mean to spoil the grandeur of Dom's bloviation, but we feel compelled to point out that it is this very "Gallic genius" that has produced today's "suffering, impatient and angry" French nation.

Now if today's troubled France were just a nation in need of a better puff pastry or another noisome cheese or a more sensational torpedo bra or tangier toilet water, or any of a number of pricey over-nice but inessential items, well, "Gallic genius" is your ticket.

But apply the qualities of "Gallic genius" to government or social policy and what you get are pricey, excessively fastidious, often cruel, and/or impractical remedies. "Gallic genius" has produced some 15 national constitutions, the bloated and recently miscarried EU constitution, the Régime de Vichy, the Maginot Line, Les Noyades, et al.

And our favorite product of "Gallic genius": le calendrier républicain, scil., the French Republican Calendar ("FRC"). The FRC was a government extravagance with the one virtue of re-ordering time to conform to the French finger system, but solved none of the shortcomings of the Gregorian calendar it presumed to replace, used the commutable equinox as the start point of each new year, and was incompatible with the normal rhythms of life and trade. (Today is Quartidi, the 24th of Prairial, Year 213).

But [Dom] insisted that an increasingly heated public debate about the shortcomings of France's high-tax, high-protection social model compared with the more liberal Anglo-Saxon system was irrelevant.

"In a modern democracy, the debate is not between the liberal and the social, it is between immobilism and action," he said. "Solidarity and initiative, protection and daring: that is the French genius."

Just who does Dom think he is fooling with this double-talk? In a modern democracy the debate is about the best ideas. Apparently Dom feels that what the French need is a really stimulating after-dinner speech instead of a rigorous debate on the merits of the French socialist paradise as compared to "the new communism of our age". (Jack, of course, is prepared to say anything, anything at all -- no matter how specious, inflammatory, or outré -- that plays to the empty notion of French superiority.)

The part-time poet and former foreign minister added: "My government will be guided by one principle: the imperative of justice; by one criterion: the general interest; by one aim: to improve the lot of every French man and woman."

And what has the "Gallic genius" come up with to reform France's structural unemployment? Showing more solidarity than initiative and more protection than daring, the best that Dom could do were those old government master-strokes: A jobs program, public make-work projects, and the rescission of tax relief. These will not generate any lasting wealth -- rather they will drain the public coffers ("All the spare money in the budget will go on jobs.") -- but it may be enough to get Dom's government over the 100-day bar. Dom is not a timid strategian. He is a timid tactician.

VILLEPIN JOBS PLAN FAILS TO STIR FRANCE

PARIS, June 9, 2005 (AFP) - A new plan by French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to tackle chronically high unemployment was met with a mix of cautious approval and outright condemnation Thursday.

Yes. Not us either.