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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l'enfer, c'est les autres

If the "resistance" bona fides of Sartre's Occupation-era work has been called into question (I am often prone to paraphrase the historian Julian Jackson and argue that if you have to parse out the meaning and intent and even then it is still available only to a discreet few then I wonder what is meant by "resistance" or member thereof - in more cynical moments I fall to the postion of Merleau-Ponty and say that all resisters were killed) there remains no doubt about the cultural legacy of said work. Particularly the premier piece of insouciant, though incessant, dread - or at least the life-looping, shoulder-shrugging, make of it what you will static maze - No Exit. The "aura" of this work (to steal from Walter Benjamin) - if not simply France's 20thC Voltaire, as de Gaulle was wont to call the wobbly walleyed philosopher - and the more than faint residual draw that existentialism generally has left in the land of the champions of ennui, still marks much of the most frequently (and vociferously) lauded cultural products. Despite its relative age (being just over a decade old), I admit that I think most here of Kassovitz's 1995 "La Haine." True, the frowsy interior of a Second Empire parlor has been replaced by the more expansive (but equally entrapping) confines of the banlieue and the conversation has changed from discussions of the inappropriateness of a man presenting himself to a woman in his shirt-sleeves to any manner of dress in a space of decidedly fractured social scapes, but the general dynamic of three characters interacting in a setting besotted by a very Sartrean utterance "tu n'es rien d'autre que ta vie" (you are nothing else but your life) remains tightly to type.

Of course it's hardly a secret that the banlieues have (overtly?) re-entered the French political and social scene in the last couple of years; and given Sarkozy's use of the inflammatory "racaille" during the 2005 riots they were an important part of the presidential election this spring. Even with all this being said, I was still caught by how perfectly and peculiarly "French" the recent attempt to manage urban deliquency in the port city of Le Havre was. Anyone familiar with Luc Besson's 2006 parkour vehicle knows that the entry-ways of the modernist blocks of apartments that make up the banieues are frequent hang-out spots for local toughs with little other place to go. According to Jean-Pierre Noit, Director General of the Public Housing Authority, this has become a serious issue in the port city's housing projects. "Entry-halls should be places of conviviality," he insisted, "but the reality is that they become the focus for social tensions, and many tenants find them unbearable." To that end, a daringly existential experiment has been undertaken that once again reduces the outlines of the social experiment called life to the confines of a single space - this time not a drawing room but a "faux hall" intended to create the illusion of a foyer to an apartment building - complete with door and windows, interphone, entry code-pad, mail/letter boxes, fake elevator door, and a stairway to the roof of what is actually a former 12 meter long shipping container - some 30 meters away from an apartment block of 400 "real" apartments. The results, and discussion, of the experiment have been mixed. Nathalie Nail, of the PFC, has called it a "total failure" and another example of how the youth of France are "made fun of" rather than listened to. One of the local youths has insisted that no one ever goes to it while another, Kevin, testily called it a joke; "They're trying to pack us in like sardines in tins."

Given the awkward way in which the French are only beginning to address the role and place of immigrants in the country - beyond futbol of course - there is something about this that does stike uneasily. Though is it much different than a midnight basketball league, just with a little more ennui? Whatever else might be the case according to Noit, given Le Havre's place as a port city, it would take no more time to bring in the crane and remove the box than it did to place it in the first place - and as an experiment in social organization, "the object was to empty the halls of the buildings to make life more pleasant for the tenants, for the moment it has worked." And if there is something that might mark the experiment at least a temporary success, lending it some of its own gritty authenticity - the faux hall was recently vandalized.

Fear of the Other in Campaign 2008

Maybe it’s just me reading too much into it, but I am currently aghast at the level of fear mongering vis-à-vis the "Other" that going on right now in the Republican presidential primary campaign. Case in point: Mitt Romney’s recent quote, “Actually, just look at what Osam — uh — Barack Obama, said just yesterday. Barack Obama calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. That is the battlefield. That is the central place, he said. Come join us under one banner.”

In this gaffe (or Freudian slip—call it what you like), Romney’s fear of the Other is laid bare. The Democrats—personified by a black man and a woman—are bent on destroying America from the inside (the internal other) while the jihadists target America from the outside (the external other). The irony is that even if this was a mistake (I am sure it was), it is not a departure from the general tone of the Republican discourse as the candidates prepare for January in Iowa.

I listened to Sunday’s Republican debate in its entirety only to hear former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani “softly” threaten Putin with his “big stick” (the phallic undertones need not be explored here) to thunderous applause. This while Ron Paul was booed for suggesting that the PKK terrorism is a Turkish issue and should be left to Ankara to solve (after the Hispanophobe Tancredo eviscerated Speaker Pelosi over the Armenian resolution).

To believe the Republicans, Iran is bent on world domination and capable of projecting its imaginary missiles at Finland (thus the universal approval of magical missile defense in “Czechoslovakia” wherever—or should I say whenever—that is). China and India were both held up as nefarious economic and demographic bogeys lurking on the other side of the globe, but insidiously near in the deterritorialized world of call centers and cheap shipping containers. Even the generally even-handed Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee threatened America with the specter of a bunch of “old hippies” (the late 1960s internal other) finding out their drugs are free under “HilaryCare.”

Let’s hope this frightfest is simply part of an “October surprise” by the Republicans, and that after Halloween, the politics of the real rather that politics of the preposterous seeps back in to the Red campaign.