Tidbits from La Seduction: dinner with uncuddly Rupert, titters over DSK

Elaine Sciolino's La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life, published all of eleven months ago, sheds occasional interesting sidelights on events of the past year. One is the m.o. of Rupert Murdoch.  Writing of the strenuous efforts of Jean-David Levitte, France's ambassador to the U.S. during the runup to war in Iraq, to repair France's image in the U.S. after the French declined to join Bush's invading coalition. Here's Levitt's version of dinner with Rupert:

Most of his work went nowhere. The most brutal attacks came from Fox News, which night after night drove home the point that America had saved France from tyranny in World War II and that the French were traitorous ingrates and supporters of terrorism. At one point former secretary of state Henry Kissinger tried to mend fences by arranging a dinner at his home for Levitte and Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox. “I asked Murdoch to stop the French bashing,” Levitte claimed. “He looked at me coldly and said, ‘As long as it sells, I will continue’ I spent the rest of the evening charming his lovely wife, Wendy  (p. 268).

I guess we only have Levitt's side of this conversation, but it does sound like the brutal old huckster, doesn't it?  So glad he's captured one of this country's two major parties as well as playing master puppeteer to the British government for two or three decades.

The joy of catcalling

Andrew Sullivan's Dish has run a series on 'the terror of catcalling', in which women recount the intimidation, shame, inhibition, anger etc. they suffered when subject to the catcalls and other unwanted expressions of sexual interest of men in public places.

Not to in any way diminish the problem or gainsay the pain recounted in these narratives, but coincidentally, I had just been reading about a place in which such encounters are often experienced completely differently: France.