Sermon: Comparisons Are Invidious

     Before I break down, lose all my cool, and prepare a blog based around The Kinks song “Where Have All The Good Times Gone,” I thought it would be preferable and possibly therapeutic to examine why "comparisons are invidious."  

      I use that expression (become sort of a cliché) often because it seems frequently to apply these contentious days where the worst are definitely filled with passionate intensity and popular humor has devolved into endless repeated expressions of dark-hearted sarcasm and assertions of personal and "affinity group" superiority. 

      It’s difficult to imagine how cerebral, sometimes surreal, comedians like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny and even Jackie Gleason (who combined delicately robust physicality with humane, socially conscious, character humor) would be able to find audiences in this ur-ugly time. 

      When I say a comparison is invidious, it's usually triggered by someone's apples/oranges analogy mistakes, but I am also sometimes telling my daughter, who is at the stage where kids compare their lot in life to everyone else’s and find fault at home, that it is generally better to shelve those thoughts because they’re unreliable and impractical.


      That being said, “physician, heal thyself,” applies to me as much as to anyone else and during this straitened, enervating period I am hardly illusion or envy-free.

  Therefore, when I discovered the other day that a local person I have known for years, someone who on paper might arouse all sorts of personal and professional jealousy, is in a hideous amount of personal and professional trouble, his name daily typeset  large all over the agora, trouble that is likely to ruin him, I was nonplussed.  

      As always is the case, the signs (which in retrospect appear as large as roadside billboards) were there all along that trouble was waiting for him.  Now that it has arrived in a first-class carriage and exploded, I wonder how we’ll all feel once the big bang shock has worn off?


  Personally, I already feel a little wiser and more secure about myself and my own instincts, ethics, and capacity to self-generate  appropriate apprehensions of fear and a sense of consequences. 

 

       As for the small but significant horde who formerly danced attendance on this man, some are already probably looking for new sources of gossip and backs to stab and bite; others will simply deny the significance of their prior relationship or claim they were never ever deceived.


  Say your prayers.   Amen.

Idiot Doomed French Politician Condemns Cheese (From The Telegraph)

It is an admission that is verging on sacrilegious for a French president. But Nicolas Sarkozy's top chef has revealed that the French head of state has banned cheese from the table at the Elysée Palace.

By Henry Samuel, Paris, The Telegraph (London)

 

7:39PM BST 05 Apr 2012

Charles de Gaulle once famously declared: "How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?" 

   The fitness mad Mr Sarkozy has chosen to remove the source of De Gaulle's angst from his sight, according to presidential chef Bernard Vaussion, who is cooking for his fifth French head of state.

   The French were famously dubbed "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" by irate US Republicans when they failed to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

   But Mr Sarkozy has done away with the high-fat stuff altogether after meals, his chef explained, as "it was too much" for him.

The World is round and disc-shaped

His cheese aversion even threatened to spark a diplomatic incident last October, when he offended Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, by telling another EU leader that over dinner "she says she is on a diet and then helps herself to a second helping of cheese".

   The health-conscious leader opts instead for "light, balanced meals and poultry to red meat", his chef said, in a clear break with his predecessors who were not afraid of heartier fare, even at lunchtime.

   The French had already found it hard to swallow the fact that their leader drinks no wine, a source of great national pride. The latest revelation risks striking another symbolic blow to the leader's credentials as a flag-bearer of French gastronomy.

   On the advice of his former supermodel wife, Carla, 13 years his junior, the one-time chocoholic president has been on a draconian fitness and nutrition programme for most of his presidency, served a frugal diet of fish, vegetables, salads and sorbets. Cottage cheese, it is believed, still makes the grade.

   Some blamed the low-calorie diet on Mr Sarkozy collapsing in 2009 during one of his gruelling daily jogs

Glorious French Cheese

 

However, with presidential elections just three weeks away, Mr Sarkozy has chosen to throw his normal dietary rules out of the window if it can help him win an uphill battle to secure a second five-year term.

   In a sign he is prepared to go the extra political mile, he kicked off his re-election campaign with a visit to a cheese-making factory in the Alpine city of Annecy, also stoically accepting chocolate, crepes and sausages from shopkeepers.

   "I'll put on three kilos and it's only the first day," he joked before going on to enjoy a fondue lunch with a group of supporters.

   He then spent four hours at Paris's annual agricultural fair accepting offerings of langoustine, chocolate and Reblochon cheese in a bid to stave off the National Front, whose leader Marine Le Pen claimed to be the "champion" of rural France.

   If, as the polls predict, the Socialist François Hollande wins power next month, the Elysée chef may be asked to bring back the gooey stuff.

   However, Mr Hollande has also been on a strict diet in a bid to shed his unfortunate nickname of Flanby – a wobbly caramel custard dessert.

   "There is always uncertainty. We will see, it will be up to him to decide," said Mr Vaussion wistfully.

Dopey.  It is a fine thing to be thin and fit.  It is quite another to be a neurotic, vocal diet bore (who happens to look like a crocodile wallet).  I’d say Sarkozy’s political career is doomed.  Post-presidency “cash-in” time is clearly looming. Query:  Can This Marriage Be Saved?