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Gauche caviar
My French is truly execrable but I like to add to my small stock of phrases when I can.
From a piece by Mick Hartley quoting Richard Wolin on revolutionary
tourism I learn that the French for “champagne socialist” is “gauche caviar”. (In fact the French is
the original and the English is a derivation, as is the American “limousine
liberal”. Pleasingly, there is a bar in East Beirut called Gauche Caviar.) Among the revolutionary
tourists cited are – quelle surprise – Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva visiting Mao’s China. Sample:
Barthes observed that, since communism had
cured “alienation,” psychoanalysis had been rendered superfluous in China... In
Les Chinoises (Chinese Women), Kristeva went so far as to justify the traditional
Chinese practice of foot-binding as merely a harmless, female variant of male
circumcision. In any event, remarked Kristeva, Chinese habitudes and mores
could not be judged by Western standards, since the latter were pervaded by
petty bourgeois biases and prejudices.
I wonder what the French for “useful idiots” is. Hartley says of Kristeva:
It’s a reminder that making excuses for the
most extreme manifestations of misogyny, as long as they’re practiced by
non-Western societies, is a form of blindness that has a long and discreditable
history among sections of the feminist left.
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