Infidelity, an American obsession?

Author: Rosa Maria Young

Sometimes we have to ‘take a tour’ outside of ourselves and find out what others think of us. At the moment the bloggers in the US are typing furiously, trying to add their wisdom at the continued saga of Barack Obama and Reverend Wright. I have my thoughts about that too but I think the net is already overloaded with it. Because I wanted to see how the Europeans looked at the spectacle of the elections I began to read some of their newspapers. And I found an article parts of which I thought I will share with you bloggers and readers. Maybe is not funny for some but definitely interesting. It shows how Pascal Bruckner, a well know French writer belonging to the ‘new philosophers’, sees the matter of the US and infidelity. x

Before I introduce some of the excerpts ofrom it, written in the French paper “Le Monde”, let me tell you that he certainly is not a favorite of mine. His ideas in the article will shock mostly the evangelical conservatives which will denounce all the French as immoral and sinners. Maybe I should tell you that he was an active supporter of the US cause and the invasion of Iraq as well as a having supported Nicolas Sarkozy, the current president of France, from the right-wing party ‘Union for a popular Movement’. That being said, here is the translation of some of the passages of his article ‘Infidelity, an American obsession’.

“When the new democrat governor of New York, David Patterson, a blind man, came into office some weeks ago after Eliot Spitzer, the ex-incorruptible found guilty of frequenting call-girls, what did he do first of all? He summoned the media and confessed that he had cheated on his wife several times with some office partners.”
“To the amazement of the average European, those who still remember the Lewinsky affair , instead of announcing his political program, there was a public official who expressed repentance from his errors fearing they could one day be revealed. In a word, the most powerful country in the world, which is in the process of losing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has re-established torture and electing twice in a row one of the most incompetent heads of State of this period, gets inflamed by miserable stories of sleeping around!”
“And what does one think of those seminaries for unfaithful husbands and wives who are being rehabilitated in ways similar to those of dissidents in the ex-Soviet empire?”
“Where Europe, made up of ancient countries rich in traditions, displays some free and easy manner, the United States exhibits rigidity and intransigence: when the most fundamental of all the bonds, that of a couple, is ruined, it is the future of the country itself that can topple over. America exorcises, through the conjugal offenses of its accountable citizens its own fragility. The stakes are only superficially moral: there are above all political.”

I will say that the article attracted many readers which immediately posted comments. Here are two of them chosen to show that there is still a lot of work to be done before we learn to accept each other.
“The list of the symptoms of this deep disease that touches that country is long. In all the aspects of life their values are deeply different from ours. At least I hope so… yesterday I looked at a program about the evangelic schools in the USA. Incredible when we see that we have the feeling of being in an Arab Muslim school. And Bush is an issue of it? Terribly disturbing.”
“Oh, yeah! Wedged between the puritanical Americans from one side and the extremists Muslims on the other, it is not going to be funny, my friends!”
.