Adam Gopnik's portrait of Sarkozy. On y trouve tout. He indulges in outrageous generalization: "He adores her [Cécilia] the way short, ambitious men adore beautiful women who are taller than they are but tolerate their advances." He skates lightly over surfaces, substituting paradox for analysis: "Some suspect that Sarkozy’s secret strength in resolving the French economic 'crisis' may be that there is no crisis." Pas bête quand même. He stretches the "human bomb" story to universal metaphor (and makes it the title of his piece): "Sarkozy ... spent his first two months engineering a series of audacious tactical coups that were of exactly the human-bomb type: walking up to dangerous men and defusing them." ... "Sarkozy’s decision to spend his summer vacation in New Hampshire and have lunch with George W. Bush in Maine was widely regarded in France not as obsequiousness but as pure human-bombism: walk right up to the man considered dangerous and disarm him by talking calmly over a hot dog." He ends with a thumping bit of punditry gone wild: "But it is also possible that the election of Nicolas Sarkozy may be seen not as the start of a new pro-American moment in Europe but as a marker of the beginning of the post-American era." He manages to compare Sarko to Brigitte Bardot: "This makes his aura in France very different from his aura in America, where no French personality since Brigitte Bardot has been such a projection screen for wishful dreams and onanistic fantasies." He wonders about anti-Sarkozysm: "Lying in wait is a strident, powerful opposition that, with an intensity that seems to an outsider disproportionate to any offense, hates him, really hates him, and is waiting for a chance to get even."
Still, you'll find the piece diverting, I wager. In order to serve France up for the American palate, the dish has to be tarted up with a certain amount of Cajun spice rub, I guess.