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Commentary by Matt Hickman•Herald/Review
You’ve gotta hate the French if for no other reason than they hated you first.
And if you were just waiting for a reason to support a pre-emptive attack, you need wait no longer.
France’s left-wing has made the daily jogging habit of newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy opposition talking point No. 1.
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Sarkozy is 10 times the genuine conservative of his American counterpart and would smoke the field of 2008 GOP hopefuls. Yet somehow he made the idea of nationalism and masculinity represented in a way other than sexual, a winning formula in the land that made socialism sexy.
Unable to attack him on policy, the lefties dig into his essence and point to his jogging as a telling symptom of his right-wing extremism and impending future as a puppet of the Americans.
Sarkozy, obviously realizing how his exercise gets their goat, often runs in an NYPD T-shirt and following the playbook of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, uses jogging as a photo-op in a country where jogging is seen as un-French as eating horse seems un-American.
Apparently, exerting consitutionals are as forbidden to the French intellectual as walking was to ancient Chinese princesses.
Have you ever heard anything so stupid? Can these people really be trusted to handle the deadly cocktail of nuclear weapons and millions of despondent Muslim immigrants?
As I was about to rest my case for war on France, I did something very un-American. I read beyond the headline and lede and even beyond the nut graph. There I found their rationale for opposing jogging and it froze me to the bone.
“Western civilization, in its best sense, was born with the promenade,” French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut wrote. “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.”
I found this to be eerily similar to a recent declaration of mine. For the past eight months or so, I’ve found time for regular exercise, to include lifting weights, and without a doubt, I’m glad for it.
But after kayaking in the Pacific Ocean, I came to the decision that lifting weights was not only something I found undesireable, but something altogether offensive to the contemplative soul. The only exercises an enlightened being should engage in are whole-body, like kayaking or rowing or swimming.
Isolating a muscle and hatefully working it over like a mule is vain at best and a salute to eugenics at worst. The man doing a whole-body exercise has many justifications, but the one lifting weights is only seeking to make the opposite sex submit, or his own kind cower under his power.
How embarassing such a pursuit should feel to an enlightened one.
Of course, the rest of the story is that even in my young, athletic days I detested weightlifting and all anaerobic activity in general.
So it is with the French. They don’t like to run because they’re lazy. What else would you expect from a nation whose best explanation for their generally good health is lots of red wine?
This is the bedrock of French philosophy: start by telling yourself a lie and then mold the lie into a metaphysical truth. That must be why I have so much affection for the French mind. It prefers the aesthetic of the attempt to the result, the motive to the action. Though I don’t have a drop of French blood in me, I think I’ve been French all along. You’ve got to love the French if for no other reason than they loved themselves first.
