It's that time of year again when the French hear the dire warnings of Le Bison Futé, the Wily Bison, about how bad the traffic is on the routes to the sun and surf: 556 km of traffic jams today dans le sens des départs. But not everyone is going. As I mentioned in an earlier post, "Clichy Plage," the divide between those who vacation and those who don't is one of the great class markers in France today. Le Monde has the numbers: depending on which survey you believe, either 12 million or 21 million French don't take vacations. Some don't go because they're very old, although it seems that "seniors under 65" are the great beneficiaries of increased leisure time (which reminds me that I don't have much time left to enjoy the boon). But most are held back by lack of means.
I was thinking of all this last night as I watched Michael Moore's Sicko. Of course it was heartening to see France presented in a positive light in an American cultural product, however one-sidedly polemical the presentation. But I admit to squirming in my seat a bit as Moore encouraged American yuppies working in Paris to rattle on about their marvelous vacations (as if the legal guarantee of vacation time made expensive vacations universally available), and when he showed the French engineer's wife with her collection of sand samples from exotic beaches (as if every Frenchman sojourned annually in Saint-Tropez, Bali, or Rio), to say nothing of the thirty-something convalescent who got a note from his doctor entitling him to three months' recuperation on the Côte d'Azur at his company's expense.
Film, it seemed to me as I watched, is a powerful medium for presenting comparisons of "social models" in a form accessible to large numbers of people and therefore useful for enriching democratic debate. A certain intellectual hygiene is desirable, however, or at least it seems so to me with my academic biases. Of course decorum has not always been a salient feature of democratic debate, and maybe it's better that no holds should be barred. I'm not sure that the kind of film I have in my mind would reach an audience as broad as Moore's, and the people in the theater didn't seem disappointed or bothered by the omissions or the obvious comparative improprieties. There was applause in the theater. But of course this was in Cambridge, Mass.