Hot conversations await France's hard-pressed sea, sex & sun seekers
The British EU referendum and the supposed decision of certain of France’s unions to go head-to-head with the government over a planned protest march made of Thursday 23 June 2016 a day of future determining.
Towards the evening of that stormy day, Karine and I couldn’t find any useful information on how the referendum was faring, so we decided to go first to see a hip-hop concert and then go to the Nuit debout – Up all night – protest at the Place de la République and see for ourselves what had come of the union-government confrontation, if anything.
The Nuit debout movement in Paris has been staying up all night – a combination of sit-in and continous debate/speechifying – at République since March 31st. The movement has is origins in, especially, protests against the national emergency laws promulgated by the government following the November 2015 terror shootings by religious fanatics. It was then carried along as a general protest against the way things have got to be.
According to Politis, a political magazine, Nuit debout-ers in Ile de France are highly educated, uncertainly employed and Parisian. They are young people who reject party-political commitment and young union activists along with older, “left-leaning” persons with time on their hands. They have no political traction in the broader country. This corresponds with my personal observations.
Intellectually and politically, Nuit debout-ers can be summed up in bold sentiments, such as this one, scrawled in a place usually reserved for paid advertising on the number 3 métro:
“Either everybody gets to share in the wealth or working makes no sense”.
When Karine and I got to République – a teensy tipsy from some impromptu boozy hipping & hopping – some discussion was taking place as to how to separate the Nuit debout movement from its association with the union agenda. There were also some people telling very patient policepersons that a policeperson’s job is a shame to the people and so forth and so on.
All was pretty much tired-out talk and in this respect much like the gnashing of teeth on the other side of la Manche (formerly the "English Channel").
Since 1703, England’s had a pretty good run at world empire. Some of it has been positively brilliant. One thinks of Wilberforce or Paine. Jane Austen writ my Bible and Keats my creed, and Trollope my parliamentary handbook. I still laugh at the Flashman novels and paw around to find what’s newly-published in the iles. I envy Lucky Jim, O! How I envy him. Bravo, les anglo-saxons!
But it’s all like the earnest plea to discuss the independent future of Nuit debout Karine and I heard – just nostalgia-based make up for the hard facts: Bzzzz! Game over!
The European Union could certainly do worse than Angela Merkel or one of those clever Danish women so in view these days. And, as far as I can see, we will do better with schrecklich-dresser Merkel than otherwise. Those ugly jackets hide real spine as well as her womanly ass. Little England will get “One Nation Tory” Teresa May – a campaign idea that seems to me just about a winner for everybody: lucky little England.
As to France, it’s always a sad moment to see nice people full of good ideas drooping under the weight of disappointed hopes for something… something… well, for something better. It is discouraging to have pinned any hopes at all on such unreliable people as political labor unionists. But, thank you, stars, no unpleasant, possibly anti-Republican realignments have taken place in the froth of it all.
And Nuit debout (including the protests that preceded it) has real victories to its credit in the matter of public debate. First, the Nuit debout-ers see themselves as proud citizens of a Republic, not members of some identity-obsessed, complaining interest group in a corporate state. Second, they have come up with ways to conduct organized open debate in disorderly crowd situations. Third, insistent confrontation over control of symbolic public space has meant that today citizens hold the public spaces, not the police and the religious boobies.
Vacation starts today, July 1st. France (and everybody else else in Europe too) are going away for the next few months, including the Nuit debout-ers. Everybody will be able to think things over, but you can bet the Nuit debout-ers will: the legitimation/integration of the extreme right and political realignment generally, immigration into Europe, EU leadership, economic growth (or “no growth”), wealth distribution, individual and collective (identity) rights and empowerment.
We will think these summery thoughts even if, as Karine claims, we’ve all got to adapt to living in a Scotland-like climate of raucous cloud and chilly breezes.
“Wool underpants, mon Tracy,” she adds, hopefully. “We’ve got to make wool underpants. Then we shall be rich as well as adapted. No?”
Thinking about wool underpants and the Nuit debout movement puts me in mind of the fabulous, dizzy moment of Harold Washington’s dead-of-winter 1982-3 Chicago mayoral campaign. In those days, Chicago was the last white New Deal city. Demographics and development made it an new city and, I realize now, was a pre-visualization of contemporary American politics.
President Obama was famously there at that time. But so were many others who figure or have figured in his administration, along with unsung Democratic Socialist activists (who had the wit to see that lifestyle was the coming issue), old guard Hyde Park radicals, journalists and bureaucrats. To the delighted astonishment of our ordinary black neighbors and the disdain of the political ones, I was there, too, with my pals, Jonathan and Tom, putting up posters and knocking on doors.
I think the Nuit debout-ers have been learning about politics in France in the wake of the November mass murders as I learned about politics in America at Harold Washington’s feet.
I learned that American politics are, above all, dirty, cruel and violent. Everything turns on race perception and a whiny feeling of being hard-done by (For this reason, Bernie Epton, an undistinguished but white person, originally the token candidate put up by the hopelessly coopted Republican Party, became a serious contender – Sound familiar?) Politically-minded people care principally about power not principal and certainly not the public weal (The white-dominated City Council refused to accept the result – Sound familiar?).
In short, in Chicago, I saw that politics reflects human beings and a little bird tells me that Nuit debout-ers have seen this, too. If you want to go forward, you’d better get used to working with unpleasant facts and people. Be prepared to be swept away, as was poor Bernie Epton, by your own unsavory, unexplored, impulses.
But, finally, even if politics is the moral equivalent of bonded servitude in a tar pit, it’s both useful and beautiful. Politics is a uniquely honorable, dangerous, undertaking for decent human beings such as the Nuit debout-ers, of whom we have not heard the last.
Meanwhile, Vive la République. Vive la France. Vivement les vacances.
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