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Enjoy the hypocritical eye candy.

In an article entitled Bloggers Pounce on Wobbly-Legged Frogs, which appeared yesterday on the Columbia Journalism Review’s Web site, author Gal Beckerman argues that bloggers often impose their own domestic (American) politics on snippets of foreign news, in this case the controversy in France over the recently abandoned labor legislation which would have affected new hires in that country under the age of 26. Beckerman alleges (perhaps quite truthfully) that, for the most part, people posting about the CPE’s demise have either criticised the French as ‘weak’ or politically ineffective, or celebrated the measure’s failure as a victory for the youth of France, in both cases viewing the country itself and the situation within it ‘not [as] an actual location, but rather a reflection of one’s own political beliefs and a way to score a cheap point or two for one’s team, be it left or right.’
Unfortunately, the mistake that Beckerman makes here is conflating the traditionally-motivated postings of America’s political Left vs. Right, which either mock the weak-willed ‘Frogs’ for capitulating to a bunch of ‘punk kids,’ or praise France’s progress away from exploiting its youth, with the article I posted recently. In this way, I believe Beckerman falls victim to the same fallacy the article claims to illustrate: that of misinterpreting a specific point by forcing it into a pre-determined Weltanschauung which alters its meaning.
Despite Beckerman’s implicit claim to the contrary, I do not believe that the failure of the CPE was a victory for French citizens under 26, who still must suffer from France’s over-governed, declining economy and a 22% youth unemployment rate. Thus, I take issue with Beckerman’s claim that I have a ‘positive’ take on the situation. I do, however, believe that any law which unfairly targets a certain socio-economic group is no solution to a problem which spans all socio-economic groups. In other words, if you think France’s problem is an overzealous government hell-bent on protecting the ‘rights’ of its citizens against evil capitalist business owners, and that some of the laws enacted to ‘protect’ workers have backfired and are now preventing qualified workers from getting jobs, logic would dictate you would want to roll back some of the laws protecting incompetent new employees–i.e. something to weed them out once it becomes obvious they can’t do what they were hired to do.
My question remains: Where does that logic begin to include specifically targeting youth? If I am 35 years old, and wish to change careers from a sanitation engineer to a nuclear engineer, should I be protected against my own incompetence in my new position any more so than a recent graduate whose paper credentials say he can do the job, but whose performance evaluation clearly indicates differently?
So, if Beckerman is alleging that my post illustrates an example of a ‘cheap point’ for (I’m assuming) the Left, perhaps the author should examine whether that argument exists only when one pre-supposes that a demand for a cessation of stereotyping and discrimination against the young is in some way an endorsement of stricter, ‘pro-employee’ labor policies. And that pre-supposition, I would argue, is one distinctly rooted in the culture of our nation, where anyone expressing sympathy for the young is assumed to be a naive ‘Liberal,’ an extremist with little real political clout. In France, where socialism is the norm, rather than the extreme, highly restrictive labor laws are a reality and probably will be the future, for better or for worse. Politically, then, it becomes expedient for leaders to shift the blame (to the youth), while maintaining the cushy job security that every voter over 26 has and wants to keep.
What disappoints me about Chirac’s and his party’s decision to try and solve a system-wide problem by targeting a specific group, however, is that it seems to me that, while general political attitudes in France and America are worlds apart, people in both nations share the same willingness to blame youth for the problems of their parents, and to try and ’solve’ the problems by punishing the young who, in a time when most other forms of discrimination have been outlawed in Western nations, have become the outcast class upon whom the failures of a previous generation are heaped.