(((Oh listen to them whine and moan here. It's like they've never heard of a Napoleonic personality cult. At least the photos are hilarious.)))
(((I don't think the French yet get it that France is too small to hold this guy. As for her, she's not even French.
Every once in a while Europe breeds a Europe-sized politician. Traditionally, this means a violent welter of gore – but in this case it's a mere welter of media. We should count ourselves really lucky.)))
Link: What's ailing the French? A Sarkozy obsession - International Herald Tribune.
PARIS: Serge Hefez is a practicing psychiatrist, and he has identified a new mental illness among the French: "obsessive Sarkosis" - an unhealthy fascination with President Nicolas Sarkozy.
"As I listened to my patients during consultations, many of them mentioned Sarkozy by name," Hefez said in an interview. "He's penetrated some of their deepest fantasies. I noticed all this passion in people speaking of him, and I thought there is something particular about this man - he's like a reflection of us in the mirror."
The French project themselves onto Sarkozy, Hefez said.
"He's the incarnation of the post-modern man, obsessed with himself, turned toward pleasure, autonomous and narcissistic. And he exhibits his joys and sorrows, all his private life, his sentimental doubts and pleasures. He represents the individualism of the society to the extreme - that it's the individual who counts, not the society." (((Psychoanalysts talk utter crap, but I suspect there's something to this. You know what kind of individual is *literally* bigger than a society? A Napoleon, that's who.)))
A year after taking office, Sarkozy can appear to be everywhere - at least in the world of television and print. The daily Figaro counts at least 100 books devoted to the French president, (((!))) his life and loves, with more than a million sold for about $25.1 million.
"Some of the titles display the fury and fascination that Sarkozy has stimulated: "The King Is Naked," "The Man Who Doesn't Know How to Pretend" (or, "behave"), "The Liquidator," "He Must Go!" "The Duty of Insolence" and "Summersaults and Flips at the Élysée."
Last month, the magazine Paris Match ran a cartoon by Jean-Jacques Sempé showing a woman talking to a psychiatrist, saying: "I'm very worried. Sunday, at the Louvre, I asked a guard where to find the room of Egyptian Sarkozycophages. At dinner with a musicologist, I said twice that my favorite opera is 'Sarkozy fan tutte.' I'd like to know if this is serious and how to cure it?"
Television covers Sarkozy's every gesture, both in homage and mockery, itself an effort to try to create distance from the phenomenon that it perpetuates and magnifies. It is all part of what the French have come to call the "pipolization" (((They mean "People" magazine from the US))) of political life - the idolatry of celebrities and soap opera, which Hefez considers an example of "democracy turning against itself, as Tocqueville foresaw."
Hefez has expanded on his thoughts in an article and then a book, in which he identifies other illnesses - from Sarkophrenia to Sarkonoia.
And the game of trying to psychoanalyze Sarkozy from afar is too much fun for many French writers to resist.
But Hefez, too, is part of the disease he was among the first to diagnose. And like any good analyst, he is fully aware of the problem, and the irony.
"The reaction to my article was interesting for a psychiatrist and didn't surprise me," he said, laughing, "because it corresponds precisely to the obsession."
The newspaper Libération, for whom Hefez sometimes blogs, ran a magazine photo spread of models looking like Sarkozy and his third wife, Carla, "at home" in the Élysée Palace. Sarkozy exercises in Ray-Bans and a sweaty New York Police Department T-shirt while his wife watches him adoringly, a guitar across her tightly jeaned lap. (((Here they are.)))
In another photo, a preoccupied president lies with his head on that same, mini-skirted lap, while his wife gazes into the distance. In the last of the photos by Bruce Gilden, the president, in boxers and socks held up with garters, his bare chest looking soft, sits on the edge of the bed, staring into the void, while his wife, standing in a silk nightgown, stares down at the back of his head....
For Hefez, Sarkozy's quick marriage to the rich, beautiful model and pop star, soon to release her third album, is telling. "She is the perfect feminine equivalent - very fascinating, very narcissistic, very occupied with herself," he said.
