Here’s an interesting French word: inconséquent. It means something like “frivolous” but implies that the person so-named either doesn’t care about or doesn’t know about the consequences of his actions.
It appears to me that there is far too much inconsequence. Only this can explain why I am so cruelly treated, on a daily basis.
Of unsettled mind and in almost summer-like sunshine, I busted out of my office chair around three in the afternoon and made my way into the streets, toward home and, possibly, a little nap.
Who missed me? Who could have missed me? Can you tell me that?
Today the evidence of cruel treatment is the Métro, which, at five minutes walking from my place is quite far, proof of the incompetence of the public transportation system, the RATP, backed up by barely-democratic, wildly corrupt governments.
Disdaining the enforced six-minute wait for a two-minute bus ride, I was obliged to pass Mufassa, proprietor of Au Village, who, fedora pulled low on his brow, was leaning against a plate glass window of his establishment, enjoying a spray of yellow sunshine over his body. Though I doubt he knows my name, Mufassa is always so pleasant to me that I can see no reason, not even the prospect of a nap, not stop for a pint and an earful of whatever live music is happening – there seems always to be some sort of live music there.
So as not to waste any time – I fret about using my remaining years consequentially – I sat down and almost immediately began thinking about inconsequence and about popularizing a brand-new Theory of Sentiments, based on human moral complexity.
I like to think that erecting a Theory of Sentiments for the modern age is a complementary corollary to Karine’s Penis Envy Project, which, despite her misunderstandings in other matters concerning me myself, us and herself, continues to pump along. Some skinny refugee-looking guy – funny how you can spot them – strumed and slapped out some dam’fine geetar while I was brooding it all out and drinking up.
By the time I left, the sun was beginning the final leg of its long, long lone descent, which is one of the glories of this part of the world. My figurations, as well as the beer, tipped me toward a less somber view of affairs though trudging up the street, I couldn’t be bothered to curse the inefficiency of the RATP.
The entry code to the residence where I live, a diabolical digital security improvement of ten difficult-to-remember digits, has been designed to scare me. I am always afraid I will forget the code and be forced to hang all my groceries by my teeth while I slap all my pockets for the little electronic disk, thus raising, quite unjustly, I think, my general level of anxiety.
And for what? Can you tell me?
The numerical sesame swung the grill fro and I stepped inside our residential garden.
In the foreground, I saw Childeric and Jorinde, Joringel and Alice stretched out on the lawn, taking a lazy apéro-dînatoire – hors d’ouevres with enough little snacks to obviate a more formal supper – and, as people from France say, en train de refaire le monde, “remaking the world” – chatting about this and that. They invited me to sit, eat and, in my turn, pontificate. Childeric makes me think of a sharpish Rhett Butler. Jorinde is who Elizabeth Taylor would have been were she Emily Dickinson, of an inexpressibly lovely deepness of thought and intellgence. Joringel, a picture of earnest rectitude, loyal, slim, trim, tall and able to handle both circular saw and ball peen hammer. Joringel is actually married – rare these days – to Alice.
Alice is my favorite. Why? Surely, it’s simple.
With a pug nose and easy smile perched above a willowy frame all arms and legs, Alice seems always to just be discovering the world and its plethora of through-the-looking-glass amusements. It is a delight to meet Alice in the stairwell, even when pressed to get on. She loves to chat, but, by some miracle of creation, is always pleasant to listen to; her bits and remarks are as slyly entertaining as the tinkling bubbles clinging to a champagne glass.
Here’s something. Wagging her head in airy disapproval, Alice once told me that her mother is inconséquente, “unserious”.
She then showed me a picture of a fine-looking woman of, as they say, a woman of a certain age. Taking care to turn my face into the shadow, I opened my eyes wide when I heard this, said nothing. The woman, of about my own certain age is, according to her cheerful, pleasant daughter, parentally-challenged, as I am, by all accounts, myself. Lookin’ gooood, I think, feeling sure that, arms about our thickening waists, we could have much in common by the end of an evening…
Joringel and Childeric, both green-and-better-world dreamers, supported Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of elections, and are now discussing what to do about the second round vote on 7 May. It’s a clear contest between Marine Le Pen – economically incoherent enough to attract voters on the far right and left, promising an exit from “un-national” Europe, jobs, jobs, jobs, a crackdown on unspecified “security threats” exemplified by “burkinis” on the beaches and of course “no-nonsense leadership”: risky, unreasonable but exciting – and Emmanuel Macron, a center-right centrist leftist with a practical, establishment-approved, to-do list to get the economy back on track and the promise of a more just, reformed, liberal and humane France-in-Europe. Reasonable, achievable, but not exciting.
Macron represents the modernizing social democrat that the deplorable Dominique Strauss-Kahn had been slated to represent in 2008. That was before he had to buy off rape charges from a very credible hotel housekeeper in New York and beat off charges of pimping here in France. Not only did the accusations have too much weight, consistency and coherence to ever be ignored, Strauss-Kahn’s private tastes, once on display, dismayed a public inured to sexual peccadillo. François Hollande, a decent man, but not much else, took Strauss-Kahn’s place.
Le Pen’s National Front “movement” has long grouped together those who feel they have nothing to apologize for, whether that might be enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazi murder machine, the Algerian colonial war, casual racism and contempt for democracy or just general meanness. And ‘though the woman’s marketing folks play down the general fascistic crumminess and Action française-style authoritarianism of its oldest and firmest supporters so as to ease the path for voters who might be skittish about unapologietically voting this blameless crowd into actual power, it remains that, the Front’s updated program notwithstanding, these are her firmest, earliest and most enthusiastic supporters.
Childeric, taking a long swig of very aromatic beer from a large, non-metric-looking milky-white bottle graced with a ceramic flip-off stopper, enumerates the strong Green-Red program of Mélenchon, which, while it emphasized a reorientation of the economy on ecological principles, California-style recalls and referendums, boldly included quitting today’s “undemocratic” European Union and broad “communalization” of basic resources, including air, water, lands and money.
Mélenchon’s supporters now blame the Socialists for refusing to join his campaign in the first round, thus ensuring a Macron-Le Pen, instead of a Mélenchon-Le Pen, faceoff.
Childreric sourly compares the shifty “liberal reformism” of Macron to Mélechon’s strong, limpid political purpose.
Alice says, “But if you don’t vote Macron, Chichi, Marine Le Pen will win.”
Childeric looks Alice straight in the eye. “How can it be worse than Macron? Macron will continue selling us out to the banks and the corporations.”
“But Childeric,” Alice exclaims, “We hate the ideas of the extreme right. We are for Europe, not against immigrants. How can you say this?”
“She’s no racist,” Chichi replies quickly, “At least, no more racist than the liberal policies of Macron are objectively racist.”
Smugly, I think, as I see he’s puffing up for Alice. Macho jerk.
“Marine’s dropped that anti-foreign crap and the anti-semite stuff, too, long ago, no matter what they say. Objectively speaking.”
“See? I didn’t say anything about racism or anti-semitism, Chichi, and you …”
Childeric turns away from Alice to look hard at Jorinde.
“– I’m speaking objectively. Jojo … Except for the nuclear stuff, she has a program that gets to grips with our impossible situation. At the same time, we real socialists can stay in opposition and take our opportunities for progress as we find them – think about reforming Europe…
“For a lot of things, she’ll have the capitalists against her, too. That’s an opportunity for us.”
I see Jojo stiffen, look sharply off to the side.
She wonders what this all means?
The air around our little group seems to mist up and thicken: will Jorinde stand up and denounce Childeric as a skirt chaser, a girlfriend-beater, an inconséquent who keeps her away from the things she loves on pretense of love?
Alice hisses into the silence, “What impossible situation, Chichi?”
She dangerously slips a carrot stick between her lips and chews.
“Can you tell me that?”
“Yes, what is impossible about your situation?” Jojo says.
With a tremor of emotion, Alice underlines, “Can you tell us that?”
I realize I am feeling very angry.
“You are getting angry,” Childeric says – to me? to Alice? to Jorinde? to silent Joringel? – somehow he manages to underline his own apparent calm reasonableness.
Smugly, I feel.
Is Childeric enjoying our distress? Is it a sort of sadistic steam-off for him? Or is he just stupid in a way I have so far never had occasion to care about?
Why do I feel ashamed of my anger?
What’s so good about calmly, as opposed to angrily, flushing 70 years of peace and progress down the toilet for some risky and mysterious notions, just for a change of political management?
Why not punch Chichi in the nose? Won’t it do any good? Sure about that?
Then again, maybe a good punching out will do some good. At least it will do me some good. Maybe rational argument has no role in any of this.
Then maybe I should just punch in Chichi’s face and, as I stand over him to deliver a final, contemptuous, kick to his inconséquent ribs, warn him that active practice of stupidity leads to more, and more vigorous, correction?
But then, don’t I wind up in a sort of spiritual Weimar Republic, with Communists and Nazis both hammering away at my political reason while I, a sort of half-hearted social democratic Reichsbanner, try to stay in the game by pretending to a frightful brutishness that I don’t want to cultivate in myself or in others?
“But politics is not about somebody’s feelings, guys” Childeric continues, daring now to wag a finger.
“Politics is about politics,” he asserts. “Politics is about power. Politicians want power, that’s all. Macron will do what it takes to stay in power. So will Marine. So, what’s the real difference? Can you tell me?”
Chichi pauses, takes a long tug of beer, smacks his lips with a bravado that is preparatory to saying something he thinks courageous, insoumis – rebellious against the current order of things – as the Mélenchonistes like to style the attitude, something he is not sure will be well-received, but which he believes is somehow triumphantly true and therefore worth saying or doing for the sheer thrill of it.
“The question we have to answer is,” Childeric says in a stage whisper,” Is: Why not Marine? We already know why not Macron.”
“I don’t know why not,” says Jorinde, tightly, leaning backwards, away from Childeric.
Joringel stutters as if to start speaking, maybe to protest, but, as if afraid of showing an emotion he shouldn’t reasonably feel, or maybe afraid of being thought to defend Jorinde, or maybe not feeling reasonable himself or… something…
Something, whatever words Joringel had wished speak spill into the heat of restrained and restraining emotion, boil off, dissipate in the vacuum of Childeric’s triumphant show of rebellionness.
“If Marine,” – Le Pen’s a woman, so, as with Hillary Clinton, supporters and opponents alike, male and female, we all feel we can call her by her first name (things can’t be expected to change so much so fast, can they?) –
“If Marine is elected,” Childeric rebelionizes, “She’ll drop everything that doesn’t help to keep her there... Like Trump in America.
“There’s more danger with Macron. What Macron wants is what the capitalists and the planet-rapists want, so he’ll do everything he says he will. He’ll drive us to the wall! What’s to stop him? Who’s to stop him? The Socialists? Don’t make me laugh!”
I instinctively lean forward to pluck Childeric’s sleeve, as if he were a kid dipping his hand too deeply into a bin full of candies; my wine spills into the grass.
“But that’s… “
As if to pull me back, Alice instinctively slides her hand up the ridge of my shoulder, grips me; she catches a broken nail on a loose thread, pulls back abruptly, exclaims, Shiiitt!.
Joringel hears Alice’s exasperated curse; consternation passes like a cloud over his placid face; instinctively he lowers the petit-four that he was a bringing to his mouth, looks away as if to walk away.
Instinctively, as if to reassure herself in the calm of his kind friendship, Jorinde turns her lovely face to find Joringel’s, finds his waxing back, drops her eyes, lingers on the little dishes spread in the grass between us. As if to stifle a sob, she raises her palm toward her face and as soon drops it, heaving a sigh.
“Things just changed,” deep-feeling Jorinde whispers, looking at me, beyond me, to Alice, speaking to Childeric, “And I don’t know how.”
Whoever wins, that’ll be true. I think I can tell you that.
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