Monsieur Quayle

The ass-hattery of American politics is so riveting at this moment that we tend not to notice similar flowerings of the same elsewhere in the world.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you… Nicolas Sarkozy.

So, a glancing familiarity with the current chaos of public life in France will yield the following: a widening scandal concerning the use of the treasury of the richest woman in the country (who is in her dotage) to finance the president’s political party; fanning the flames of bigotry by making a burqa ban a national priority; earning the well-justified horror of other Europeans by singling out an ethnic group, the Roms from Romania and Bulgaria, for mass and sudden deportations, thereby pulling off the best imitation of Vichy France since, well… the Second World War.

Poor Nicolas needed a break. So last weekend he went to visit the magnificent Cro-Magnon cave paintings of Lascaux, in the Périgord region. Apparently, the paintings are once again in danger of disintegrating. The very serious Président de la République went underground with an entourage of experts… historians, scientists and the like. During their fifty minutes inside he was given a meticulous explanation of what he was looking at.

When he emerged, he stood in front of the mikes and said this:

“Le brave néandertalien avait parfaitement compris qu’ici, c’était plus tempéré qu’ailleurs, qu’il devait y avoir du gibier, qu’il faisait beau and qu’il y faisait bon vivre.”

Translation: “The brave Neanderthal clearly understood that here was a milder place than elsewhere, that there had to be plenty of game to hunt, that the weather was fine and that it was a good place to live.”

The whole country burst out laughing.

As every French middle-schooler knows (Lascaux is a national treasure, after all), the paintings at Lascaux were done by Cro-Magnon artists, about 17,000 years ago. The Neanderthal had definitively disappeared from Europe some 15,000 – 20,000 years before that.

Remember: Nicolas had just been lectured by the world’s leading experts on Lascaux, at Lascaux…

The derision has been withering. My favorite was a French blogger who wrote something to the effect: There is something Homeric in the way our president speaks. And I don’t mean the Iliad, I mean Simpson.