France Has Truly Bust A Nut For The Squirrel

"In Europe this week, the news — late-night, around the clock, in the papers, first thing in the morning — is all about love. The love of Obama. In the smallest villages you can buy newspapers and magazines filled with Obama love. It’s on radio Alouette, France 2, and even on the BBC. Love is in the air.

In the French tradition, it’s a passionate love, but a proper one. O-love is not the O-love of Pauline Réage. It’s post-kink, trending deeper into obsession. It’s the crazy love Moonies have for that Korean guy, the love middle-aged women have for Maureen Dowd, the love that only your dog can have for you. It’s a spiritual fascination with a devotional kicker — what Le Monde’s blogging logophiliacs, Martine Rousseau and Olivier Houdart, wryly call “obamalâtrie,” a religious fantasy fed by ubiquitous apparitions of that “Christlike figure on all the front pages in the universe . . . ”

The gist here, if I’m not being clear, is that Le Monde, its readers, its bloggers, its coffee-drinking bureaucrats — the entire population of its small cosmos, in fact — are humming with an intensified version of the fervor that fills the tent just before the evangelist jumps to the pulpit. “With the 44th U.S. president, we reach the highest stage of worship, that accorded to God . . . Obama has already entered the pantheon. Soon, no doubt, he will perform miracles.” Soon? Rousseau and Houdart must be kidding — and of course they are. This is meant to be arch humor, but something tells me not everyone gets the joke."

-- Denis Boyles, peerless observer of all things European, in The National Review.

Ahh, the French - when will they stop dreaming? When they stop making life so hard on us all, and pay tribute to: