Running and politics

Via FP Passport: As someone who runs a lot, I could not resist this story. French President Nicolas Sarkozy is being criticized for jogging.

Sarkozy seems to be confirming a French belief that jogging is an activity for self-absorbed individualists such as Americans, the Times of London reports. The editor of V02, a sports magazine, told the left-wing French newspaper Libération, "Jogging is of course about performance and individualism, values that are traditionally ascribed to the right." The Times writes that sports sociologist Patrick Mignon thinks that "French intellectuals have always held sports in contempt, while totalitarian regimes cultivated physical fitness."

So I might be a self-absorbed near-totalitarian. I’ll let my students decide.