Saturday, April 21, 2007

looking in from the outside

Two months ago I subscribed to Le Monde, the most prestigious French daily, also the most serious and most self-consciously intellectual. It's not that I'm going to the café to be seen with it. I just wanted to follow the election campaign, and I don't like TV. Le Monde offered me a three-month teaser subscription, and I had myself teased.

For more than fifty days now I've been drowning in newsprint, too many pages and too much content. It's incredible how dense this paper is. Debates are raging daily, pundits argue, spokespeople pimp their candidates and diss the others, and opinions fly across the spectrum, left to right and back again.

All this time, the discussion stays firmly in the context of France and this-is-the-way-things-are-done-here. I've come to find this very tiring and have to admit, at the end of a long day, I prefer opinions and suggestions traveling from afar. Only foreign news analyses give me the feeling that I'm seeing clearly. Yesterday, it was Die Zeit that satisfied my curiosity, today the New Yorker.

Did I mention that I apparently most closely resemble Frédéric Nihous, a hunter/gatherer straight from the dark ages? Anyway.

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