{"id":70443,"date":"2009-01-03T19:11:07","date_gmt":"2009-01-03T19:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2009\/01\/03\/la-tres-difficile-mission-de-barack-obama-no-we-cant\/"},"modified":"2009-01-03T19:11:07","modified_gmt":"2009-01-03T19:11:07","slug":"la-tres-difficile-mission-de-barack-obama-no-we-cant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2009\/01\/03\/la-tres-difficile-mission-de-barack-obama-no-we-cant\/","title":{"rendered":"La tr\u00e8s difficile mission de Barack Obama : \u201cNo, we can’t<\/em>\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tout tourne autour de l’American Dream<\/em>, qui est une pure d\u00e9lusion (le terme, dont le racine est le latin delusia<\/em> et deludere<\/em> pour tromper), dont la mise \u00e0 nu est le d\u00e9fi essentiel de notre temps. La chronique de Matthew Parris, de ce jour<\/a> dans le Times<\/em>, et signal\u00e9e par ailleurs<\/a>, donne une excellente description de la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 am\u00e9ricaniste et de la triste, et tr\u00e8s difficile mission qui attend Obama: \u00abYes we can! was an easy sentiment to recommend. No we can’t, will be a far, far harder thing to say.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tParris estime qu’Obama est le pr\u00e9sident du d\u00e9clin, celui dont la t\u00e2che historique va \u00eatre de conduire le d\u00e9clin de l’Am\u00e9rique, certains diraient g\u00e9rer le d\u00e9clin comme s’il s’agissait d’une affaire qu’il importe de conduire aimablement \u00e0 une faillite acceptable. Apr\u00e8s avoir vivement bross\u00e9 le th\u00e8me de campagne du nouveau pr\u00e9sident, l’atmosph\u00e8re cr\u00e9\u00e9e autour de son \u00e9lection, qui est un pur produit \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard de l’American Dream<\/em>, Parris observe, laissant la parole au destin:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00abBut maybe destiny has other plans. America’s fate in the half-century ahead is not to be transfigured, but to be relegated. Steering your team through a relegation can be as important a test of leadership as handling a promotion, but it is a different test. Though he may not yet know it, the role for which the US President-elect has been chosen is the management of national decline. He will be the first US president in history to accept, and (if he has the gift) to teach, not the possibilities but the constraints of power.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tD’une fa\u00e7on assez audacieuse par rapport aux jugements conventionnels universellement accept\u00e9s, Parris fouille dans ses souvenirs pour rapporter ce qu’il connut et devina de la chute de l’Empire, dont il estime qu’elle est venue aujourd’hui \u00e0 maturit\u00e9. Sa remarque selon laquelle les USA \u00e9taient, d\u00e8s les ann\u00e9es 1970, un double dissimul\u00e9e de l’Union Sovi\u00e9tique dans ses structures, son organisation, sa lourdeur bureaucratique, son inefficacit\u00e9, cette remarque est effectivement lumineuse (\u00abThough infinitely more successful and politically free, it was in some indefinable way more like the Soviet Union than either country would have wished to acknowledge.<\/em>\u00bb). Il est toujours surprenant de trouver chez un commentateur britannique, qui plus est ancien officier du Foreign Office et ancien parlementaire du parti conservateur, une vision si d\u00e9pouill\u00e9e de pr\u00e9jug\u00e9s de l’Am\u00e9rique r\u00e9elle, telle qu’elle s’est d\u00e9velopp\u00e9e sous nos regards en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral assez vides, notamment au travers des exemples de l’automobile, de l’infrastructure et ainsi de suite<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00abAs a keen amateur car mechanic I have, since the age of 16, been puzzled by something about America. Here was a nation crazy about automobiles and held out to me as the last word in modernity, innovation, capitalist dynamism and go-ahead technology in all that it did. But its cars weren’t any good. I say weren’t we’re talking 1965 here because some commentary about the current woes of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler has suggested that it is in recent years that the US automotive industry has slipped behind; and it’s certainly only quite recently that they’ve started losing a lot of money.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bbBut the product, though always flashy, has been technologically inferior since the end of Second World War. While European carmakers were pioneering front-wheel drive, independent suspension, small diesel engines and efficient automatic gearboxes, the Americans kept churning out big, thirsty, fast-rusting, primitively engineered behemoths. Partly this was because fuel was cheap, but the oversprung American limo, loose-handling and imprecise, was always a pig to drive, too. At root the problem was lack of competition.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bbAnd when I visited America, first as a boy then as a postgraduate student (in the 1970s), what struck me was not the modernity of modern America, but its inefficiency and old-fashionedness. The bureaucracy was Stone Age, the postal service unreliable, medical and dental treatment twice the cost of private treatment in England, and government officials treated you like serfs. People lived richly and worked hard – that was undeniable – but in a parallel universe clumsily and wastefully managed, and beset with internal friction. You couldn’t even get a bank account that worked properly outside your state; and, for all the ostentatious vigour of retail competition, there was a curious lack of diversity in product choice. Though infinitely more successful and politically free, it was in some indefinable way more like the Soviet Union than either country would have wished to acknowledge.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bbWhat (I now think) I was encountering as early as 40 years ago was an ageing empire, losing its edge, almost imperceptibly losing its immense economic momentum, but still indecently wealthy and impervious to the emerging challenge of competition.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bbRather suddenly, all this has caught up with it.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tVoici donc la t\u00e2che hercul\u00e9enne du President-elect<\/em>. Saura-t-il convaincre les citoyens am\u00e9ricains, apr\u00e8s s’\u00eatre convaincu lui-m\u00eame, s’il y arrive? C’est bien entendu la question centrale du propos, et Parris laisse percer un certain d\u00e9couragement (I quail for him<\/em>), parce qu’il est entendu que les premiers croyants de l’American Dream<\/em> sont ceux-l\u00e0 m\u00eame qui en sont les premi\u00e8res victimes: \u00abReading, as I often do, the furiously chauvinistic online reaction from US citizens to any suggestion that their country can be beaten at anything, I quail for<\/em> [Obama]\u00bb. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tMis en ligne le 3 janvier 2009 \u00e0 19H14<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tout tourne autour de l’American Dream, qui est une pure d\u00e9lusion (le terme, dont le racine est le latin delusia et deludere pour tromper), dont la mise \u00e0 nu est le d\u00e9fi essentiel de notre temps. La chronique de Matthew Parris, de ce jour dans le Times, et signal\u00e9e par ailleurs, donne une excellente description… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2899,708,6208,4907],"class_list":["post-70443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloc-notes","tag-declin","tag-empire","tag-obama","tag-parris"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}