Monday, October 25, 2010

If I kept a commonplace book

If I kept a "commonplace book" as nineteenth century people used to, I'd put this in it:

"Liberalism doesn’t only encroach upon things like opportunity and standard of living. It’s what it does to the self that’s most dangerous and pernicious. It pushes out the individual imagination and replaces it with wooden convictions. Before that wreaks havoc on a polity, it has its way with a mind."

Abe Greenwald, Commentary's Contentions blog, Oct. 25th.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Guilty pleasure (I like Carla)

I can't help it. I like this woman.


Image from The Swamp


Granted, she is painted in a new biography as a "narcissistic sexual huntress." I have no idea how you go about being that and it's probably bad, but it sounds much more exciting than folding the laundry and getting dinner. Granted, all France is apparently laughing fit to die at her latest music CD. And granted, I can't imagine too many worse nightmares than waking up next to Mick Jagger, which she did for eight years. This was either before or after Eric Clapton. Then Donald Trump. Then some philosophizing French father and son in succession.

The deceived wife/mother in that menage wrote a novel about it, in which Carla figures, slightly fictionalized of course. Still she -- Carla -- blazed on with her life. Now she is well along in her career as wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy and therefore first lady of France. She looks smashing, she looks delighted with her lot, and she looks particularly fascinating in the photo above, whispering into her husband's ear at some official function or other.

Someday, I want an American president's wife to do this. Just for a moment, be young, beautiful, and distracting, and make all the other important men world leaders look silly because after all this is what matters most anyway. I will also be pleased when an American president's wife has a website like this one. Go to the English translation page and note how the drawing of the guitar strings become both the outline of a pert and adorable naked woman, seductively posed, and the water she is dabbling her foot in.

I can't help it. I like her.