It vociferates, it yells, it insults, it sulks, it takes offense, it exaggerates, it comes out as a diva, it comes back as a victim, it barks, it boos, it applauds, it transforms the National Assembly into a ZAD as promised – at least we will no longer blame the left for not always keeping its promises. And here are the debates taken hostage. We analyze and decipher the circus of the National Assembly on a loop. We talk more about form than substance. We refer to the memory of the places that-have-heard-much-worse and-of-all-time, which is amusing for deputies who swear only by a benevolent society to the point of nausea, but for others, not for fighters against injustice and fascism. Jean-Louis Debré comes out of his peaceful retirement to play the rebels: “We’re not here to drink tea” – and why not bring the duel up to date? We complain about the lamentably low level of exchanges, but we do not rectify anything; one wonders if this is a political tactic or an improvisation that comes from the depths of hearts caught in emotion – really? Is there still someone who doubts, and who thinks that spontaneity presides over the exchange of gall? Rebellious France, eager for the Grand Soir whatever it may be, unable to predict whether it will be favorable or detrimental to it, watches itself put on the show.
What impresses above all is the subject of so many shouts and commotions: retirement. The subject is important, all the more so when it comes to difficult and long careers, default professions, physical professions, difficult professions. That the report is unstoppable, that it is necessary to work more because we live longer, that we have fewer children and that the French seem attached to the pay-as-you-go system is still debated. We take out the big sentences, we reduce work to the mine, retirement to pleasure and life to the Stations of the Cross. That there was no question of the relationship to work of the French, who, more than all other Westerners, suffer from work, that no one wanted to reflect on the lack of motivation of French employees or on the means of reactivating a healthy relationship to the emancipation and autonomy that work could represent, that the possibility of a partially funded pension has not been put on the table (as for civil servants since 2004) partly explains why it sucks more than you think.
That the government project appears day after day more messy, and the deputies more lost in their arguments; that amateurism be the guiding line of the reform because what matters is that Macron reforms for the annals – whatever the reform; that the discussions surf on the politico-politician wave, I give you that, you give me that, because convictions seem to have evaporated in contact with social networks where everyone plays at being more social, closer to the people; that the Rassemblement National appears as the most serious party even though its economic program is delusional – but it is only attacked on its supposed “fascism” which prohibits its members from marching at the risk of being attacked -, all this occupies all the space, and we will wonder in a few months what it was all about. Who still remembers that the fall-winter 2019-2020 collection strikes lasted longer than those of 1995 – the absolute benchmark for any movement against strikes?
“The imbecile is first of all habit and bias”, wrote Georges Bernanos in The Great Cemeteries under the moon. The imbecile has spread, everyone holds fast to their habit and loudly shouts their certainty – except among the LRs and the socialists, who can no longer find the keys to their respective houses and therefore yell even louder to make people forget their habits and the biases of yesterday without quite mastering those of today.
And the others ? those who still reason? those who offer another way? A Laurent Berger, follower of the idea of reform, is neither heard nor listened to, for causes so obscure that we come to the psychological analysis of Emmanuel Macron, who does not like those who take the light . Me, me, me or nothing, he seems to be telling us. We will wake up one morning to find that Macronie was a chopper for intelligent minds, a sieve of qualities, a factory of failed clones, a waste of time.
