On Nov 30, 2007 I think it might be worthwhile to take just a switch of time and make some note of the fact that this is the 100th birthday of Jacques Barzun. There are few historians and cultural critics who can publish a (massive "Summa") work in 2000 that included memories and recollections of the German bombardment of Paris in WWI - who can make piquant and erudite proclamations on the decline of culture from his sitting room while under the watchful gaze of a cubist portrait of his mother done by Albert Gleizes (only the third cubist portrait, not the third cubist picture, but the third cubist portrait he is determined to make clear); a man who can do so after having played about in Duchamp's studio as a child and attending an orchestral performance of Stravinsky's "Le Sacre duPrintemps." Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage remains the only work of his 37 published books (he is currently at work on his 38th apparently) that I have read in its entirety and I am forced to admit that I did that so long ago I can barely recall its contours to say anything more than that the tone of polemic that runs through the bio-synopsis of all three men in the title have informed the way(s) in which I have formed my own opinions. It is a work that long ago took a hazy place in the upper-bookshelf of my mind as the small and scattered handful that pushed me down the path that I ultimately took. That noted, like the near ubiquitous line in almost every preface to every academic book published wherein the author thanks friends and colleagues for their support and influence while making mention of any errors being their's alone, let me add that neither I, nor those around me, nor any of my students, should hold Monsieur Barzun responsible for my track.

On an aligned, if not parallel, note, I am moved to think that those many (and increasing and too many legislators thank you very much) folks who insist that the teachers of history -- those first-line historians among whom I am (occasionally) proud to admit my place -- teach just the "facts" should be made to read almost anything byBarzun. For those interested, here is a nice piece from last month's New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_krystal

Somehow it also seems appropriate that Evel Knievel died today.

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And now for something not entirely different

I am sure we are all by now well aware that as the transit strike drew to a close - and leaving the university students who took to the streets just as that was happening without an interested audience (though I am sure there remain a few knots of Sorbonne-ers out and about) - the north-of-Paris banilieue, Villiers-le-Bel has been gripped by riots for the last couple of days/nights since the death on Sunday of two teenagers - deaths caused by an accident between the youths' motorbike and (of all things) a police cruiser. Thus far, the worst of it occurred on Monday night when clashes between young rioters and a platoon of riot officers reached a near unprecedented level of violence that saw more than a hundred officers wounded - some quite severely. In its most in-depth piece on the situation thus far, the New York Times on Wednesday insisted that while reference to the riots of late 2005 were common, two things set the latest skirmish apart: the riots have been localized largely to Villiers-le-Bel (though there were apparently some dust-ups outside of Toulouse on Tuesday night) and the "new tactics" being used by the rioters. Unfortunately, while the NYTs piece was nicely well-rounded with a scope that reached towards "the underlying causes of frustration and anger — particularly among unemployed, undereducated youths, mostly the offspring of Arab and African immigrants — remain[ing] the same" as those that motivated the 2005 riots, the catch of the work - and the new tactics they seemed focused on - was the use of firearms on the part of the rioters Monday night.

Indeed, that is a troubling development - more than 30 officers were wounded by shotgun pellets, with at least one losing an eye, while another had his body armor pierced and his shoulder nearly destroyed by a high-powered hunting rifle. Nonetheless, the concentration on weaponry beyond paving stones and brick bats is actually unfortunate and I suspect it was not (entirely at least) the reason for police spokesman, Patrice Ribeiro, insisting that “This is a real guerrilla war,” - though he did caution that the police (who have shown a fair measure of restraint thus far) will not be fired upon indefinitely without responding. Rather the real point of interest and concern should instead be the level of coordination that the rioters apparently exhibited through the night. According to eyewitness reports, kids as young as 10 or so acted as scouts and lookouts for the main "force" which was made up of youths from (roughly) 15 to early/mid-twenties who were, in turn, coordinated and directed by older men (apparently with some training) who focused efforts in specific places and towards specific actions with Le Monde reporting on the sighting of at least one "strapping man in a black track suit" wearing a walkie-talkie tuned to the police frequency and guiding teams of rioters. As opposed to the riots of 2005, headless hydra that they were with both random violence and lootings, those involved this past Monday were focused - rioters were stopped from burning the cars or looting the stores of "family" though a symbol of the state, the library, was gutted by molotov cocktails - and the brunt of their actions were directed specifically at the police with the "event" nearly culminating in riot forces being hemmed into an open intersection by coordinated "pincer" movements of the rioters where the bulk of the police injuries were suffered.

From the reports I have read, the level of organization was indeed quite high, waves and rough formations of the young rioters moved in concert, dodging and parrying the efforts of the police as they funneled them into the area they wished to truly engage them. The rioters wore scarves around their mouths and noses to not only obscure their identities but lessen the effects of the tear-gas that was fired to disperse them - and in what was likely an act of spontaneous support, from the surrounding apartment towers women screamed warnings down to their "sons" as they threw pails of water to wash the tear-gas from them and dampen the noxious clouds. To put it mildly, if this is to be the face of riots to come, Paris, if not all of France, is in for quite a time. I suspect things will get worse before they get better.

All of that noted, I actually see something of a Les Miserables silver lining in all of this. After the 2005 riots much was made of the occasional (if loud) shriek of "Allahu Akbar" that was to be heard among the rioters; but during this (more) violent skirmish, calls to the greatness of God were missing. Instead, it was, as was reported in Le Monde, invective hurled at the police as "pigs" and commands to stay grouped. In other words this was a call to arms, a manning of the barricades. Frankly, it was notice that for all else that has occurred, be it institutional neglect on the part of the state or "square-peg in a round hole" on the part banlieusards, this was a reaction française to a situation that for myriad reasons has been an issue since the end of WWII; one that was only covered over by Les trente glorieuses and that had the curtains pulled back on it by its end. In other words, the rioters were only and simply behaving as Frenchmen and in many regards, whether it be the unfortunate deaths of two teenagers that acted as the lighted wick, it is entirely appropriate that it came full on the heels of the transit strike - where the issue was of undoubtedly (with the wrinkled nose of Barthes when he discussed what was "natural" in France) French men and women striking in defense of their own slice of the welfare state pie - as here it was a matter of it is time that they in the banilieues get to taste the berries of said pie.

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La grève in the grave? Some thoughts on the French transit strike

My apologies for the long absence. I was finishing my manuscript, attending a conference on multiculturalism, and vacationing in France. It is the last of the pretentious items that I wish to write about.

Our family vacation to Paris almost perfectly coincided with a nine-day transit strike which crippled France’s transit system. As a result, I failed to put on any weight (a usual outcome of my trips to Paris) because I was pushing a 50lb five-year old in a pram across the vast urban terrain of the City of Lights. I also think I pulled something in my back.

While the strike personally inconvenienced me, it also cost France about $592 million a day and chipped away at Sarko the American’s image as untouchable. While Sarkozy’s current popularity ratings are down, he is most certainly not out. Nearly a third of Frenchmen still support him (and by extension, his attempts to reform the bloated French state). His decline in popularity saw a measly five-point drop, something I am sure the cocksure president can live with.

Some have rushed to declare his presidency over, reform at an end, and a return to the “good ol’ days” of the welfare state, however, let me set you straight. Most Parisians condemned the strikes vehemently, while not even mentioning the government. I only met one gentleman who supported la grève, but he did so only on principle, suggesting that the government had signed a contract which they were now trying to reneg on. All others wanted the strikers to go back to work.

President Nicholas Sarkozy was quiet during most of the storm—only speaking out a day or so before the strikes were suspended. Once he opened his mouth, the strikers backed away. The French seem to have reconciled themselves to the realities of globalization and their important place within the process. Rather than let the future pass them by, they are willing take a leadership role. With Bush flailing in his self-created morass and Putin orchestrating the rapid creation of a postmodern police state, the world needs France now more than ever. And that also means they need Sarko. He has the capacity to get the French to realize that abandoning certain aspects of the welfare state is a good thing. No one expects France to become the predatory, capitalist free-for-all that is America (nor would any thinking person want that). However, it’s time move beyond the 1970s. The global economy is an incontrovertible reality. France cannot continue to act like it did when China was a third world country, and the existence of the USSR kept the world from facing the impossibility of socialist utopias.

I love France, and the French. But they—like us—are going to have to adjust to the realities of the current era. France gave the world the strike—now it’s time for them to give us something else. I, for one, am looking forward to their contribution.

Come to France for the objet d'arts, stay for the . . .

Of course, with all else that has emerged from France in the last weeks - presidential divorces, new museums, personality diplomacy in Chad and Libya, etc. - this struck me as the most "wow" inducing. James Lipton, host of "Inside Actors' Studio" once made his way in Paris as a pimp!

l'enfer, c'est les autres – part deux

There is a manner in which the whole project might be read as a particularly fuzzy French attempt at Guliani's "broken-window" policy, combined with aforementioned basketball league. Give the rambunctious young'uns someplace else to break the windows and commit the vandalism of "tagging" (a vaguely protected piece of urban cultural production since Jack Lang in the 1980s) - and wouldn't it be an interesting twist if this box that apparently no one wants/uses became a contested territory between rival groups. But it also seems to reduce the problem of juvenile delinquency to an issue of place; and “place” has been an issue among the French for sometime, committed as they are to the construction of what Pierre Nora has called “sites of memory.” Though there is also the wary speculation of Michel Foucault who, in his Discipline and Punish, offered the “Panopticon.” A “site” which should not be “understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form . . . polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons.”

The question now becomes what the “distribution of individuals in relation to one another,” means when the space allotted is not really a space at all but the recreation of an entry-way – when the passage from the external world to the ostensibly internal becomes an end in itself? Mies van der Rohe once declared that the role of the architect and modern architecture was to “express the will of the epoch . . . For the meaning and justification of each epoch, even the new one, lie only in providing the conditions under which the spirit can exist.” What “will” is being expressed and whose “spirit can exist” in an architectural equivalent of purgatory? Considering all this, it is only the most fortuitous expression of ironic convenience that the “faux hall” is made of a shipping container – somehow it doesn’t seem as if its economic role in the transport of things away and out of sight has changed all that much, it has only become a social one.

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