Defining Post-Modernism

From the International Herald Tribune comes this story on the president of France. I find him to be a fabulous subject when trying to define our "post-modern age."

PARIS: Serge Hefez is a practicing psychiatrist, and he has identified a new mental illness among the French: "obsessive Sarkosis" - an unhealthy fascination with President Nicolas Sarkozy.
"As I listened to my patients during consultations, many of them mentioned Sarkozy by name," Hefez said in an interview. "He's penetrated some of their deepest fantasies. I noticed all this passion in people speaking of him, and I thought there is something particular about this man - he's like a reflection of us in the mirror."

The French project themselves onto Sarkozy, Hefez said.

"He's the incarnation of the post-modern man, obsessed with himself, turned toward pleasure, autonomous and narcissistic. And he exhibits his joys and sorrows, all his private life, his sentimental doubts and pleasures. He represents the individualism of the society to the extreme - that it's the individual who counts, not the society."

A year after taking office, Sarkozy can appear to be everywhere - at least in the world of television and print. The daily Figaro counts at least 100 books devoted to the French president, his life and loves, with more than a million sold for about $25.1 million.

Television covers Sarkozy's every gesture, both in homage and mockery, itself an effort to try to create distance from the phenomenon that it perpetuates and magnifies. It is all part of what the French have come to call the "pipolization" of political life - the idolatry of celebrities and soap opera, which Hefez considers an example of "democracy turning against itself, as Tocqueville foresaw."