The French sense of scandales and a sense of proportion

I posted this in 1998, I repost it because I liked it.

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A week ago one of my two favorite newspapers, Le Monde (the International
Herald, the Frankenstein of American Journalism, is the other)
had another long editorial commenting, at the end, on the lack of
a sense of proportion existing in America on the whole Clinton scandal.
I whould say that lack of a sense is attributed to the Republicans
in the Congress. The French are surprised that there are far fewer
puritans in the USA than they assumed, even hoped for since it permits
them a laugh or two at times.

I will digress a bit here and say that in French there are two
classifications of scandal, just a plain scandale and a "vrai scandale".
A "vrai scandale is 10 to 100 times worse than a mere scandale. The French
classify this whole Clinton thing as a scandale but no attribution
of vrai scandale has come out in the press. More importantly, it is
Starr who is the scandale, the Darth Vader, to the French. This
morning the local wash lady on the rue Abbe Gregoire, in the quartier
where I have now lived over 20 years, snared me with a "what to you think
of this Clinton thing?", she gave me no opportunity to answer, and
went on to tell me what she thought. In very certain terms, since to
mess around in anybody's private life is a sin worse than sex,
which has a low sin index (1 on a scale of 10) in France. This only
applies to other people than one's spouse. Sex-sin is highly personalized,
it is a problem between you, your spouse and God. As much as the Americans
love money, the French political sins only have to do with money.
Abuse of power is standard, no biggie, tapping journalists' phones,
done all the time. But money.

Money is evil and sinful. For nearly 2000 years the French had nothing
much to do with money, it was so corrupting, and left it to the
Jews to handle the stuff. Occasionally they killed Jews for being
mixed up too much with money (the only thing they were allowed to do),
especially if the Jews asked for the money back they loaned the Christians.
The French nobility was always adverse to repaying its debts. Certainly
never on time, in fact being late was a badge of honor.

For the French, the original Watergate investigation was about money,
that is OK, when it turned to sex, that was not OK and American credibility
sunk out of sight.

But the whole question of a lack of a sense of proportion got me
thinking architecturally. *My own first impression of not being able
to judge the relative importance of something was standing on the
rim of the Grand Canyon and being unable to judge the distance
across, it could have been 300 yards or three miles. In geometrical
terms, the eyes are not separated far enough to triangulate and judge
distances. This also use to be true before atmospheric pollution
prevented seeing large distances from the top of a California mountain,
hundreds of miles. I am one of the still few living people who has
seen Catalina from the Hollywood hills, back in the 1930s. What may
give Americans a lack of a sense of proportion, politically, is
derived from their geographical experience. It stretched later into
urban architecture. One can understand the economic need of building
high rise buildings, the gratte ciel, as the calls the in French, a
literal translation of "skyscraper". It has always been an American
thing and copied by other nations.

The problem for me is when I see a super large building, I have the
strong feeling that man is diminished in its presence. I live a bare
two blocks from the Tour Montparnasse, a true monstrosity which
finds no praise among the Parisians nor any foreign visitor I have
met. If one stands on the grand platform of the Trocadero, where
Hitler once stood with Speer to enjoy his conquest, one sees
before one the Tour Eiffel, also once considered a monstrosity.
It's ugliness was transformed with time, converted to a thing
of beauty in the mental clay of men. *But the Tour, our architectural
Darth Vader, stands there in its dark presence, we try to ignore it
but there it is. It does to the skyline of Paris what Parisians dogs
do to its streets. I shall not digress now and remark about
a similar contribution that Kenneth Starr is making to American nation,
but the thought is there.

Clearly, in a moment of weakness, the powers that be did not have
a sense of proportion in constructing the Tour, it diminishes man.
The Tour was not the only madness of the 1960s, the 13th arrondissement
starting a high rise building program which was finally halted before
too much damage could be done, and the new Tres Grande Bibliotheque,
the new BN at the edge of the 13th, is at the edge, tall and without
architectural value, it is at least remote to my haven in the 6th
or the inner city of Paris. *Pompidou was supposed to be responsable
for the madness of the 60s and early 70s, but Giscard D'Estaing is
credited with stopping the madness. Afterwards, no buildings higher
that 6 floors, that is higher that the other buildings, are now
being constructed in inner Paris. If you want Manhattan you can
go to La Defense, banished to beyond the river's turn, east of Paris.
Even some of the French love this gigantism, New York is an exciting
place to them. A nice place to visit but "I wouldn't want to live there"
mentality. Some inner voice may have warned them off.

The final question is whether the French, with their best and their
brightest, have a better sense of proportion than do the Americans
of the same general "culture". Each nation will be self-congratulatory
and more critical of others than themselves, self-criticism has
rarely afflicted individuals or nations. *

So Le Monde will probably always project the image
that they have it figured out better than their counterparts of
the New York Times and the Washington Post. I do not include the
renowned International Herald Tribune because they have no independent
editorial policy, apparently prisoners of their owners in the USA.

In a certain sense, modern French Americanologists are always
struggling to reproduce De Toqueville brilliant analysis of the
American nation over a century ago. *He had the Americans
very well figured out, more than they did at the time, but they
were not very introspective then and one has doubts about it even
now. The periodic moral panics that brushfire America do not give
the image of a sense of proportion.