Electioneering French Style: the Red, the Rose and the Black

I periodically like to take a ramble through the French on-line press. Lately the coverage seems to be all presidential election news all the time, which, since DSK was eliminated, can be almost as boring as the American Republican Primary campaign. Sometimes, though, an interesting item or two will pop up. Today I came across a story about candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, operating in full-throated electoral mode.

It seems that last Thursday, about 200 metal workers from a company called ArcelorMittal came to Paris to meet with the President. But instead of a welcome mat, they were greeted in front of his campaign headquarters by "an accueil musclé"-- i.e., they were blasted with tear gas. Outraged, the metal workers marched on to the Eiffel Tower, intending to post a banner identifying the tower's steel as from their own region. You'd imagine that a sensitive candidate might want to apologize for such an ugly incident. But when questioned about it by a TV journalist, Sarkozy was his typically irascible and vulgar self. He responded (this is a loose translation): "What do you want me to say-- you think I give a damn?" He followed this remark by turning on the journalist, calling him a "couillon," and then attempting to make a lame joke about it. In the French Le Huffington Post article at this link, you can see a video of the exchange. Note the astonished looks of those around the reporter.

Meanwhile today, elsewhere in Paris, there was a large, cheery march from the Place de la Nation to the Bastille in support of the Front de Gauche party and their candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Melenchon and backers of the Front de Gauche on their way to the Bastille/photo Bastien Hugues sur Twitter

The crowd-- estimated at about 100,000-- carried various quotable banners. The one I liked best: "Mettez à la mode la couleur rouge!" I suppose Mélenchon has as much chance of becoming President of France as Ron Paul has of winning the Republican nod. But Mélenchon's campaign has lately been gaining a surprising amount of enthusiasm. If he gets the approximately 10 per cent of the vote that pollsters consider likely, he could make a serious dent in the turnout for the Socialist party candidate, François Hollande. Consequently, there's been a bit of snarky chatter in the media about the purposes of the Front de Gauche campaign. Cynics ask: Is Mélenchon, a radical leftist, actually a "coqueluche" of the arch-conservative Sarkozy?

Hubert and Jan van Eyck: Extremely Close and Incredibly Beautiful

Thanks to a grant from the Getty Foundation, anyone can now examine in stunning detail-- up close and at astonishing magnification-- the splendid Ghent Altarpiece. The high-definition digital images of Hubert and Jan van Eyck's masterpiece, The Mystic Lamb (1432), have been made freely available at a newly established interactive website.

As reported by Melissa Abraham (February 24, 2012, getty.edu), the Ghent Altarpiece recently underwent emergency conservation at the Villa Chapel in St. Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium. At that time, the polyptych was removed from its glass-enclosed setting and dismantled, an unusual event which provided an extraordinary opportunity for scholars to study and document the altarpiece and for professional photographers to produce high-resolution images of the work's individual panels. Subsequently, the photographs were stitched together to create the digital images now available on the interactive website. That site is said to contain 100 billion pixels.

Further details about the images, the team who developed the website, and the decision to use an open-source approach are available in Abraham's report as well as at the site itself.

Super-Vapid Tuesday

The New York Times today (the morning after so-called "Super Tuesday") had an excellent editorial on the depressing Republican primary and the obnoxious positions taken by the candidates. Here are a few excerpts:

"Long before Super Tuesday, the Republican Party had cemented itself on the distant right of American politics, with a primary campaign that has been relentlessly nasty, divisive and vapid.... This country has serious economic problems and profound national security challenges. But the Republican candidates are so deep in the trenches of cultural and religious warfare that they aren’t offering any solutions....There are differences [between Romney and Santorum]. Mr. Santorum is usually more extreme in his statements than Mr. Romney, especially in his intolerance of gay and lesbian Americans and his belief that religion — his religion — should define policy and politics. Mr. Santorum’s remark about wanting to vomit when he reread John F. Kennedy’s remarkable speech in 1960 about the separation of church and state is one of the lowest points of modern-day electoral politics....
Mr. Romney has been slightly more temperate. But, in his desperation to prove himself to the ultraright, he has joined in the attacks on same-sex marriage, abortion and even birth control. He has never called Mr. Santorum on his more bigoted rants. Neither politician is offering hard-hit American workers anything beyond long discredited trickle-down economics, more tax cuts for the rich, a weakening of the social safety net and more of the deregulation that nearly crashed the system in 2008."

The editorial goes on to berate the candidates for their mindless and vicious attacks on Obama and for their potentially explosive position on Israel and Iran:

"There is also no space between Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum in the way they distort reality to attack Mr. Obama for everything he says, no matter how sensible, and oppose everything he wants, no matter how necessary.... They also have peddled the canard that the president is weak on foreign policy. Mr. Romney on Tuesday called President Obama 'America’s most feckless president since Carter.' Never mind that Mr. Obama ordered the successful raid to kill Osama bin Laden and has pummeled Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, all without the Republicans’ noxious dead-or-alive swagger. Now, for the sake of scoring political points, Mr. Romney, Mr. Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who is hanging on only thanks to one backer’s millions, seem determined to push Israel toward a reckless attack on Iran."

The entire editorial should be widely read. One wonders how relatively sane Republicans (are there any left?) have been responding to this despicable primary campaign. If such temperate right-wingers do still exist, perhaps they will demonstrate their sanity at the ballot box in November.