The Marriage of Macron

For my part I cannot remember the last time that the American media accorded the personal life of a foreign president--especially one of whom that media seems to think highly--so much attention as it has that of Emmanuel Macron. This has partly been a matter of the "idiosyncratic" details of his meeting of his wife with their makings of a Lifetime Channel thriller-of-the-week, partly a matter of the gender politics side of the matter with a certain type of bourgeois feminist in ecstasies over a high-status man being married to a (much) older woman, and of course, the latest foolishness in which Candace Owen went Austin Powers on the world (you know full well which scene I'm talking about) in declaring on X that "I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man." And of course, got herself sued by Monsieur and Madame Macron, which action on their part has of course not put an end to that discussion, but thrown gasoline on the dumpster fire instead.

Light-minded would be a very generous way of the media's attention to these stupidities given the sturm und drang of Macron's time in office. This has, after all, been in the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis whose shock to the world economy just never went away, against the backdrop of the continued decay of an already frail French industrial base, the increasingly intense conflict of the West with Russia with all it has brought in its train, and the catastrophe of the pandemic, with Macron's militantly neoliberal and neoconservative conduct intensifying the troubles as it drew France's working people into the streets in protest, the machinery of the French government grinding to a halt again and again amid his intransigence, repression by state forces which incessantly make clear that so far as they are concerned "human rights" are something to invoke as an excuse to bomb the "lesser breeds" rather than something to be respected at home, threats of a coup from inside France's own armed forces (it says a lot how little impression that made on people's thinking), and the ever onward and upward march of the far right, partying like it's June 1940 (such that whenever we see pictures of Marine Le Pen she is striking the "Return of Beef Supreme" pose so often seen on the part of people of her political persuasion in the wake of their hearing election returns these days). But Macron's marriage is what they lavish their attention upon, reporting on this as they neglect all those stories, lest we forget that the U.S. news media is just Michael Scott writ very large and made very high-tech to produce a Weapon of Mass Distraction that has been damnably effective at, if nothing else, keeping a great many people's minds off of everything important. Indeed, one can be forgiven for imagining that Macron isn't totally displeased about that.