The American Suicide

In recent times, it has become difficult to go into a bookstore, open a magazine or turn on the television without coming across the gloomy visage of Eric Zemmour. This genius provocateur has become the most sulfurous author of the fall thanks to his best-seller, “The French Suicide.”

Certainly serious, but also largely off the mark. It is not so much that Zemmour’s analysis is in error — without any doubt France suffers from a tattered economy and does not know what to do with its immigrants, and the ineptitude of its political class has henceforth come to light. No, Zemmour is wrong because he overestimates in an extreme way the gravity of the situation. A French suicide is just as probable as François Hollande and Valérie Trierweiler having a candlelit dinner in the salons of the Elysée.

In order to understand this better, it is necessary to turn our attention toward a country which really is on the path to suicide: the United States of America.

Take the results of the recent midterm elections. With their votes, American citizens decided to entrust control of the Senate to the Republican opposition while reinforcing its hold on the House of Representatives. This is the same Republican Party which shut down the government in 2013 for 16 days and which threatens to begin it all again in blocking practically all of the principal initiatives of President Obama. This is the same party through which the last head of state, George W. Bush, invaded a country on a foundation of lies, authorized recourse to torture and, before leaving, allowed the most serious economic crisis that the world had known in a century to develop.

“Obama Bashing”

These Republican exploits did not stop their last electoral campaign from wrapping itself around the image of President Obama, whose confidence rating has reached a historic low with 40 percent approval — even if French leaders would dream of this popularity. The exact reason for which Obama has been rejected by so many of his fellow citizens remains a mystery. After all, he has repaired the essential harms inflicted on the economy and American diplomacy by his predecessor, while putting in place major reforms of the healthcare and immigration systems. But Obama bashing is an outlet for national ill humor, and polls show regularly that, for the majority of Americans, their country “is going in the wrong direction.”

America is collapsing, in the literal sense. Everywhere in the country, engineers provide warning about the multitude of bridges and tunnels which the state doesn’t guarantee are safe for users. The country’s airports and highways are at maximum capacity; no high-speed train network exists to share the burden — where a train network does exist, it is inadequate. Its so-called “high-speed” Internet is the slowest in the developed world, something which doesn’t stop its operators from charging the highest prices. In spite of all these signs of deterioration, Obama’s calls to reconstruct the country’s infrastructure have fallen on deaf ears, those of Congress.

Americans also kill themselves, individually. Despite recent reform of the healthcare system, American doctors, medicines and hospitals remain the most expensive in the world without being the most efficacious. Public health indicators are below the average of rich countries, including life expectancy and infant mortality. Around two-thirds of American adults are overweight, half of them truly obese; French rates are half of these. Because contraception — and the information that accompanies it — is limited, more than 30 percent of adolescents have become pregnant at least once, 80 percent of them without wanting it.

A Durable Nation

If their bad habits didn’t suffice to send them to their maker, Americans can count on their guns — there are 300 million of them throughout the country, practically one per person. Each year, 31,000 people die by gunfire in the United States, at least 16 times more than in France. School shootings have become so common — there have been nearly 100 since the shooting at Newtown in December 2012, during the course of which 20 children were murdered in their elementary school — that they no longer make page one in the newspapers. Sometimes, a single death by gunfire can excite passion, as in the recent murder of a young unarmed black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The riots which followed underline another problem which continues to tear apart the country: its racial divide.

In comparison with this dark picture, France doesn’t appear to be inhabited by suicidal impulses. Americans love to mock French people but, seen from the other side of the Atlantic, France is in pretty good shape: high-speed trains, a healthcare system which is among the world’s best, healthy food, an enviable lifestyle, veneration for culture, leisure and education that the United States has never known.

More seriously, France is a remarkably durable nation which has survived all sorts of invasions, the most savage religious wars, several bloody revolutions, imperfect republics, disastrous wars of decolonization and the 35-hour workweek. Without forgetting immigration, which has permitted people like Marie Curie, Picasso or Zinédine Zidane to raise the colors of their country. No, I am convinced that France is going to remain a dynamic nation always capable of more, and that French suicide will remain a Zemmourian chimera. I would not say as much for America.