PUNDIT WATCH
Douglas, Susan
PUNDIT WATCH Susan Douglas Strike? What Strike? Imagine thai in reaction to Republican proposals to gut Medicaid, cut back on health-care benefits for the elderly, slash aid to dependent...
...in the asje of Thatcher, "defended archaic privileges against technological advance...
...It followed up with its special "year in cartoons" issue...
...and participants in The McLaughlin Group did what they do week in and week out (don't they ever get bored of this...
...which is predict who will win the 1996 election...
...Imagine that they shut down subway and rail service, the post office, hundreds of schools and day-care centers, and severely curtailed airline travel...
...American news executives and pundits alike know that we chuckleheads don't care about foreign countries at all—unless our vacation plans are at stake...
...since "it has a lot to do with the French national character...
...France, the Times reminded us, suffers from "a European-wide problenv...
...Pretty big story, huh'.1 But wait — it didn't happen here (taut pis...
...And let's queue up thai interview with General Hai^ one mote lime...
...AND I ¦ i IKK GRIDLOCK, the Times taught us that the French can't help being in "such a stew...
...Newsweek chose to put Elizabeth Hurley—supermodel and Hugh Grant's delightfully understanding girlfriend—on its cover...
...Maggie set those bo/os straight...
...Well...
...So gel back to those c,moons m Newsweek...
...Despite the gridlock and other major aggravations, the strikers enjoyed the support of hi percent of the population, a level of sympathy the Times described as "baffling...
...And so it was that during the same week that somewhere between 500.000 and 1.7 million French people took to the streets...
...unwilling or unable to grasp the consequences of maintaining an "overburdened state sector...
...This is so different from the United States, noted one fawning French source, who longed for the extensive "public debate" over major social change that we have here...
...we learned that "the French cannot think about the future before bringing the present crashing down around them...
...Her column appears in this space every month...
...The New York Times, however, did cover the strikes, and after reading these stories...
...The Times made it quite clear that the French workers just don't get it—a little supply-side economics, and they'd be back to their posts in no time...
...PUNDIT WATCH Susan Douglas Strike...
...In another Time.s storv subtitled Unions Ari- Divided...
...Bl i Sikikf Got-s On (the American labor movement should only be so divided...
...This week, the answer was Clinton...
...ABC's This Week thought it was more important for us to hear from Alphonse D'Amato about Whitewater (puhleeze...
...Our national newspaper of record...
...an economy so burdened with the costs of providing five-week vacations, comprehensive free health care, and generous pensions thai it can no longer generate enough jobs...
...Susan Douglas teaches a! Hampshire College...
...Imagine thai in reaction to Republican proposals to gut Medicaid, cut back on health-care benefits for the elderly, slash aid to dependent children, and give rich people a tax cut...
...And so it went...
...This was part of the ongoing, fin-de-siecle confrontation over whether national governments will continue to honor their commitments to care for everyday, ordinary people when they become unemployed or sick, or when they retire...
...we did get to hear a recently exhumed Alexander Haig hold forth on whether Oliver Stone's Nixon was historically accurate or not, which is like interviewing the Ayatollah about the veracity of Salman Rushdie's work...
...the term repeatedly used to describe the cutbacks...
...The implied solution, of course, is to emulate the United States, a country with the widest income gap between rich and poor and the highest infant-mortality rate of any Western industrialized country, with fortv million people lacking health insurance of any kind, and with an economy that pavs vou |List enough to hover below the poverty line...
...The Tunes likened the French unionists to their British counterparts who...
...Unlike the Germans, who are "far-sighted" (their unions understand that "ever-rising wages and social benefits threatened to make German exports uncompetitive on global markets"), the French are '"profligate...
...On Christmas Eve...
...Imagine these collective actions got the government to back off...
...somewhere between four and five million Americans went on strike and staged demonstrations in cities around the country...
...We girls got to hear Fred Barnes pronounce the International Women's Conference in Beijing "the most boring" story of the year and, as an added bonus, hear George Will reflect that the Equal Rights Amendment (which he likened to the failed flag-burning amendment) represented a "perfectly pointless abuse of the Constitution...
...The coverage we did get ol this extraordinary outpouring of worker resistance and solidarity cast the French strikers as spoiled, greedy, and mvopic...
...1 guess it is more important to pay attention lo Elizabeth Hurlev than these out-of-touch...
...In an article entitled LlBER TE, EgALIII...
...For at least three weeks in a row...
...This Week With David Brinkley managed to go on the air without anyone uttering the words "France" or "strike" once...
...Sound familiar...
...Yet the story was either totally ignored or told from a deficit-hawk perspective...
...In reaction to proposals by President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppe to cut subsidies to the national railway service and lav off a percentage of its workers, scale back national health-insurance benefits, and raise the retirement age for public employees, strikers brought transportation in Paris to a standstill, and some French cities like Marseilles experienced their most widespread social protest since the 1968 student-worker demonstrations that brought down Charles de Gaulle's government...
...Thev don't even know what's good for them...
...At one point, the cuts were dressed up as "the government's attempt to safeguard social benefits...
...This happened in a foreign country where they don't even speak our language or anything, so who cares...
...The cither thing the strikers didn't understand—because thev love "mortgaging their future'"-—was that Juppe's and Chirac's proposals were "reforms...
...crazed French people...
...And we certain!} don't want coverage or commentarv that would give Americans any cra/v ideas...
...I'm so glad that here in America we've jettisoned that old muddle-headed, bleeding-heart thinking about inefficient government "entitlements" and have recognized that if just left alone, the altruistic and compassionate free market will solve everything...
Vol. 60 • February 1996 • No. 2
