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April 24, 2006
Marching Against History...
.. Is about as stupid and uninsightful a thing as conscious beings can do. And yet they do, eh? Commenting on the recent upheavals in France over the liberalization of labor law William Pfaff writes in the New York Review of Books that this party (i.e.- the modern social democratic welfare state) is just about over, ready or not.
"These are people", says Pfaff, "who profited from the growing prosperity and upward social movement that characterized French society from the end of World War II until quite recently, when chronic unemployment became a factor in French life. The marchers included members of the generation that took part in ‘the events’ of 1968 (after which ‘nothing was to be the same again!’). These older people now approach retirement; mostly they have become proper bourgeois (or ‘bourgeois bohemians’—‘bobos’ in current social shorthand), concerned for the future of their children and grandchildren."
Despite the much envied and ballyhooed educational system enjoyed by French schoolchildren (by American educrats anyhow), students there have never heard apparently the fable of King Canute, much less understood its implication for their situation. Oh well, economic reality will teach them what they failed to learn in class. Sad though.
Posted by Ali Massoud at April 24, 2006 12:36 PM
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