Right off the bat to reflections à la française: fake news, fake sentiments, fake ideas, alternative realities.
I can see the enmisting Invalides, a former military hospital and veteran’s home turned into a rather ironic monument to France’s martial prowess.
Following the inevitable rout of France’s incompetently-led armed forces in 1940, the egregious Hitler made an effort to gain support from the country’s strong and anti-democratic National Right – made up, in spirit, and, in fact, of many of the same people whose 100-proof political spite combine with a thorough lack of military nous, mirabile dictu! led to the destruction of their old enemy, la République, la gueuse, that nasty, hoi-polloi-coddling whore, Marianne, as many of them often put it at the time. Hitler felt the French National Right should be made to feel as comfortable with thorough National Socialist German victory as they were with giving the Republican whore and its supporters a thorough fucking over.
Hitler’s idea was to bring the ashes of Napoléon’s tragically prematurely-dead boy, his only heir, tragic infant King of Rome, fondly called, in his time, “Little Eagle”, there, to les Invalides, true seat of French racial pride, there to “sleep” eternally beside his doting Father, formerly beloved & feared Emp’reur des français, scourge of Europe, as Hitler himself, a world-historical figure, and model for a certain type of overwritten Romantic Hero. He thought marketing such an alternative reality worthy of at least a small investment of looted resources.
But, you cry, What sane person could possibly be struck favorably by such fake language conveying such fake sentiments, such fake history… such, such, such guff?
Well. Such persons apparently did exist to be favorably struck, since the next thing you know there were high officials in the French state calling for German victory, blithely sending the cops out to round up, among other Republican hoi-polloi, “racial aliens”.
So, fake works. The alternative realities thus constructed have before now been able to work to the catastrophic disadvantage of the few and of the many, without distinction.
This is strange for anybody who has the vague belief that people generally seek their self-interest.
My eye lights on the Invalides’ sublime cupola.
I am put in mind of a pornographic film featuring a fake cheerleader and, if possible, an even more fake “intellectual” nerd, well-hung, however, having vigorous anal sex.
The film sticks in my mind because, wincing greatly, the fake cheerleader exclaims, “I love this – I don't know why."
Why? Could it be the money? Not likely.
The fame, then? Not credible.
A friend of mine, whose sexual predilection is “bottoming” with other men, once confided, while pacing feverishly back and forth in front of my bed, that he had anal sex only and uniquely for love.
“Otherwise,” he cried, glaring at me as if I were responsible for this unhappy state of his affairs, “How can we fuck?”
Unlikely as it seems, the fake cheerleader, too, could have been doing it for love. I guess.
But as I think about it, it begins to dawn on me that the fake cheerleader’s perplexity is actually just eyewash for a particularly repugnant and widespread type of human perversity.
Like so many of us humans, using fake facts and sentiments about herself, she has previously created a catastrophically disadvantageous alternative reality for herself, which she clings to in an ecstasy of self-congratulation.
The fake cheerleader’s real pleasure comes not from actually fucking herself but from pretending she’s not cruelly mistreating herself, even to herself.
And in this obvious pretense, to my mind, she concisely represents the collective mind-set that elected Winkie Donald J. Trump, a blustering fool who openly boasts of supporting ideas and actions that will reduce the general well-being of most of those who voted for him.
The need for pretense explains the otherwise obvious stupidity of income-guaranteed French farmers who want to withdraw from the European Union, English working people who vote to throw themselves over a political-economic cliff to keep out a couple thousand Bulgarian carpenters, Hungarians who want to cozy up with Putin’s foul secret police apparatus, supposedly, to protect national sovereignty, after 70 years practice at being poor and unfree under variously fascist or communist boots.
“Whew”, as my late brother used to exclaim, theatrically wiping his brow, when any serious conversation with the adults in charge was forced on is, indicating his relief at a narrow escape from a potential train wreck of imbecilities.
Well, then. Not a single announced policy, not a single one of what reasonable people scrabbling for rational expression might call “Us-first” or “neo-national” positions, can, or is even meant to, give the least pleasure or advantage to any voter, apart from your occasional local Small Winkie who wants to fake being well-hung by waving a flag around.
For, if the “Us-first” electorate is who rational people seem to say it is, then, as constituting the big battalions of soldiers, entitlement beneficiaries and wage slaves, they can only suffer from proposed forays into pointless trade disruption, galloping inflation, non-existent public services, worse & less-accessible education, political instability, police brutality and war.
These soldiers, wage slaves and entitlement beneficiaries are a broad swath of ordinary citizens who are doing not so bad: your bank advisor, process engineer, mid-level civil servant as well as your vast pool of hardly-overworked “service representatives” and “associates”. What they are definitely not are dispossessed hillbillies or put-upon “marginalized” working people or unappreciated residents of a “forgotten rural” somewhere or another.
All that rationalizing political analysis talk of put-upon categories of people is just as much guff as Hitler’s King of Rome/Napoleon schtick.
This most recent catastrophe, like famine, is all about fake facts, fake sentiments and alternative realities. It’s about what humans are and how they work, about politics, not about facts on the ground. There’s plenty of food for the hungry. It’s just that nobody but people who aren’t involved in local politics really cares to make sure they get fed.
The truth is, keeping in mind that truth is in no way a remedy to fakeness, the famously economically-disgruntled marginalized citizen doesn’t exist, any more than famine-victims exist. Just as there’s nothing wrong with the food supply, there’s nothing really economic that’s wrong.
The farms are all heavily subsidized or, in US Appalachia, growing lucrative dope crops, and the old folk and almost everybody else almost everywhere in the West, except traditionally-mistreated minorities and newer immigrants, have subsidized, or free, housing, medical care, state pensions and plentiful food as well as leisure, culture and education should they want it.
Bah! The winkie-voting stiffs who have not moved out of the economically-declining areas of wherever they happen to be have jobs while those who have moved, given they are the majority race, face the daunting prospect of full employment.
In the evening mist that is now garlanding the elaborate but entirely fake tomb of the first of our era’s catastrophically fake leaders, I can see that a human tendency toward congratulatory self-fucking and the concomitant pretense is threatening to turn places I care about into winkie-countries, where politics is turned toward The Pursuit of Sourness.
I wonder if Karine will instantly perceive the affective baggage of a call to discuss her theory of Vaginal Perplexity and hang up or let her vanity kiss off good sense, so to speak? The call will go better with a drink.
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