Which Is The Child?

Just as well that French President Nicolas Sarkozy has his concerned wife Carla Bruni Sarkozy to look after his welfare and well-being. The world knows how incompetent men are at looking after themselves. She is front and centre in his life, right on cue as he leaves hospital, ushering him from the confines of the heart treatment ward to the Elysee Palace. Such an escort, as is well known, is quite necessary for it takes a woman to guide a man to his place of comfort.

Monday, 27 July 2009

AP

Nicolas Sarkozy (centre), escorted by his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy (left), gestures as he leaves the Val-de-Grace military hospital in Paris

She grasps his hand, guiding him to his waiting limousine. He grasps her hand, needful of her guidance. This is an interesting photograph illuminating an interesting relationship. A mother takes a child's hand to guide the child while it is developing a sense of personal space and independence. The perspective here of an elected head of country requiring the emotional comfort and support of a spouse in lieu of a mother is fodder for conjecture.

Is this merely a loving gesture between a man and a woman, husband and wife, demonstrating their devotion to one another, and the fact that equality of presence is a fact of their co-existence? Is this a juvenile demonstration by two celebrity-figures of their mutual attachment to one another? One does not, after all, often view two mature figures clinging so obsessively to one another in public.

Is this head of state so incapable of measuring the quality of his life that he is incapable of acknowledging the kinds of foods he requires for good health and the amounts needed to ensure his energy levels in a high-stress position matches the energy output of his devotion to high-impact exercise? Is his acquiescence to the energy-input/output protocol his wife has devised for him indicative of an intelligence reflective of his political stature?

Does this human dynamo who so loves calibrating his activities so they resemble the frenetic activities of a shrew - which itself requires constant restocking of its energy resources to enable it to live as it rushes about - not understand the simple equation of energy input to energy output to maintain a reasonable physical and mental balance? Has he never heard of anything so pedestrian as mod - er - a - tion?

In all things? On the evidence, seems not.