Their culture is strange as is my own. Their justice is strange as is my own.
I have lately been thinking about how strange French people seem. It often makes me feel strange among fellow liberals who love the idea of France: all the cheese, all the thought, all the fashion. It began with the controversy over Nicholas Sarkozy's practice of jogging. It seems that the French people thought having their President jog was not intellectual enough and too individualistic to boot. Alain Finkielkraut, who proclaims himself a "leading French intellectual," has claimed that "western civilization, in its best sense, was born with the promenade. Walking is a sensitive, spiritual act. Jogging is management of the body. The jogger says I am in control. It has nothing to do with meditation." This reaction among French intellectuals was totally foreign to me. In America, both sides of the political spectrum claim individualism, liberty, and the value of proper management (and even the value of exercise) as their own. I was sort of offended, but knew that cultures could be different and that that difference was okay. It was a difference that I even celebrated.
And then, the filmmaker Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for having sex with a 13-year-old girl who he gave quaaludes to 32 years ago. He fled America (where he will most likely be extradited) in 1978 after being convicted there for the crime of having "unlawful sex with a minor." In my mind, 13 is clearly below the age of consent and he should go to jail (the only defense that makes any sense at all to me is somehow that he was all fucked up in the head 8 years later due to the fact that his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson clan (but, then again, that's just my American mind making too much of psychology). This was not the reaction in France. First of all, he has lived there openly for 30 years. Second, artists and intellectuals are standing behind Polanski. Bernard-Henri Lévy, über fancy-pants philosopher, is quoted in a NY Times article as saying that Polanski had "perhaps had committed a youthful error" even though he was 43 at the time; talk about sweeping something under the juvenile's hand-stitched rug. The Times article further claims that "the arrest painted the usual picture of moralistic America versus libertarian France." This is all the usual stuff, and, of course, Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon (and in an awesome side note, deal swinging megalomaniac Harvey Weinstein is quoted as saying that "Hollywood has the best moral compass") nodding towards Europe as opposed to the heartland. But what I thought was particularly interesting and troubling was how the French seemed to place being an intellectual and an artist over being a citizen (and how strangely anti-dreyfusard (and thus seemingly anti-French) using an opaque metaphysics above the law truly was). As Christian Viviani, a French professor of film, is quoted as saying, "being an artist or intellectual is considered a privilege in France." That is, being an artist is considered a class (but a class with unreadable rules of attainment) that is at times incommensurable with the demands of being a citizen. That is, the lesson is that you can be a real shit in life if you are a great artist. Thank God, we've gotten over that, I thought to myself.
However, in America, we have our own classes of people who we don't hold accountable: bankers and soldiers (at least mercenaries). When Blackwater guards shot 17 Iraqi civilians our State Department offered them immunity from prosecution. This is just the most egregious example. If I were more liberal (or if I could break out of my own natural attitude) I would have many more examples, such as the fact that we didn't prosecute Rumsfeld when we should have. But I don't need that. It suffices to say that we hold our military above the law. Thus, on with the bankers. We bail them out. They get huge immoral bonuses. There are no consequences for their actions. In fact, they even receive our secular communion, the swine flu vaccine, before the rest of us.
Is it possible not to hold anyone above the laws of the land, at least the laws that we would agree to, if asked? Our natural attitudes pin us within our own horizons. What counts as a crime must be agreed upon, but we are different. Their culture is still strange, but I will withhold my judgment now that I see that mine is strange as well. (Besides, being an artist myself, the French model benefits me.) We are different and we live in a globalized world; yet, how do we do that?
