NY Times' Roger Cohen: French People Are Lazy
October 18, 2007 -- 9:44 AM EST // //
The New York Times's Roger Cohen has a column this morning extolling a number of "reforms" being cooked up by the French government, including possible legislation doing away with the 35-hour work week. Cohen notes that French workers are likely to resist this, and offers this explanation:
Deep in the Gallic soul resides the notion that work is exploitation, a ruse concocted by American robber barons, best regulated and minimized and offset by hours of idleness.Idleness? My trusty thesaurus tells me that this is synonymous with "laziness." Also note the suggestion that the French people hate work and that the pleasure French people take in their vacations is indicative of a character flaw on their part.The...mantra in the French bureaucracy might be: the fewer hours you work, the more vacation you take, the more time you have to grumble about the state of the universe and the smarter you feel, especially compared to workaholic dingbats across the Atlantic with no time for boules.
Look, Cohen can throw around the word "soul" all he wants in order to feign profundity, but strip away the phony high-flown language and this really is nothing but rank jingoism and bigotry. Yet there it is, right there on the Times's Op ed page.
I spent some time in France and I think the French rather have the right idea about this. Shockingly, in addition to work they like making sure they have time to spend with their kids, time to eat good food, and time to pursue activities they enjoy.
Cohen, of course, is fortunate enough to have a very enjoyable job that earns him lots and lots of money. Yes, it's true that Cohen has told us that he spends a great deal of time "agonizing" about great questions, so maybe his job isn't perfect. But his lot is much better than that of millions of French people who don't have interesting jobs and don't make lots and lots of money, the way he does. Naturally, such people are going to try to do their best to make their lives as good as possible under the circumstances life has dealt them, and will embrace government regulation that does this.
I don't know what's in the "Gallic soul," but in Cohen's soul there clearly resides the idea that his own character is made of much sterner stuff than that of all these hapless folks. You can debate whether such regulation is a good idea and what impact it has on the country, but you'd think that suggesting that the millions of people who embrace it are lazy and slothful is beneath a dashing man-of-the-world like Cohen. Obviously it isn't, but it's certainly beneath The Times.
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