July 22, 2002

 
 
 
 

How George W. Bush is playing in Paris

by Bruce Jackson


Being there
I was in Paris the week leading up to Bastille Day, July 14. The primary purpose of the trip was to give the opening plenary address and take part in the closing roundtable in a four-day international conference in Versailles on understanding and translating other cultures. A third of the participants in the conference were French, so it provided a good opportunity for conversations about current French attitudes toward what is going on in the US. I also talked about those matters with academic and publishing friends in Paris.

We got to Paris Sunday morning about 9:00 am. We were through customs and immigration and waiting for the Roissy bus into town within ten minutes of getting off the plane. We took the bus to town, then a cab over to our hotel from the Opera. The driver was grumpy, jabbering, petulant. At first I thought it was because he didn't like our French or because we were Americans, then I realized it was because he didn't know the small street on which our hotel was located and didn't want to admit it.

I'd heard and read of a recrudescence of French anti-Semitism over the past year, but the French Jews I spoke with said it wasn't true, that the incidents that had made the international press were nearly all in the south and involved militant Arab immigrants.

I'd also heard that there was ill-will towards Americans in France these days, but neither Diane nor I saw or felt any evidence of it. I knew we'd gotten a huge amount of sympathy as a result of September11, but I'd heard that much of that feeling had soured because of the Bush administration's actions subsequent to that. There indeed was a good deal of questioning of Bush's behavior and motives, and outright hostility to him and his focus on his Afghanistan war, but I didn't see any of that hostility leaking over to Americans in general. The French are very sophisticated about politics and they differentiate between what politicians do and what the people of a nation think and are.

A surprising delicacy
There was a surprising delicacy about politics, something I'd never seen before in France. In other years, my French friends and people I'd meet who were interested in and informed about world politics (that is to say, everyone I ever met in Paris) were quick to ask Diane and me about or hold us accountable for things the US had done or was doing or was supposed to have done that they found politically or morally offensive. During the Vietnam war years, for example, we'd frequently get lecturettes on how stupid and racist the United States was from people who thought France's nine-year-long stupid and racist war in Vietnam (1945-1954) and its eight-year-long stupid and racist war in Algeria (1954-1962) provided them moral and historical superiority. The discussions were always energetic and often infuriating.

Last week (and when we visited France last December), nearly everyone seemed to be walking on eggs. Several people I'd known before as highly political seemed this time almost disinterested—until we let them know that we were willing to talk about such matters, after which conversation began, albeit slowly.

There were three questions that had to be answered before there was any political discussion: how did we feel about George Bush, particularly his militarism? Were we open to discussion on the Middle East, or were we simply anti-Arab? And What did we think about the precipitous decline in world financial markets? These seemed, in their minds, the key points of entry: if you're happy with Bush and Sharon, and if you think the global decline in investment worth is random or an act of God, it's time to talk about what films you've seen lately.

It's because of September 11. It's almost as if the slaughter earned us the right to a pass on political interrogation. Where in earlier years political discussion was part of the atmosphere of conversation, now it enters only if we give permission. All those murders have engendered a discreet delicacy.

I suppose they don't want to be (or be thought) callous or insensitive or absurdly theoretical. When you talk about politics in France you're always talking about ideas—French intellectuals love to talk about ideas—but no French person I met was the least bit unaware of or theoretical about what happened to the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in rural Pennsylvania on September 11.

Jewish memories
And Jews in France remember or know perfectly well about what happened to French Jews in World War II. One French friend tells us at least once every three of four years, that when the Nazis told the officials of Paris to deliver adult Jews to a train station in Paris for deportation to a concentration camp, the Parisians also delivered a huge number of children. The Nazis told the French that they just wanted adults. "That's okay," our French friend says the French officials said, "take the children too." And the Germans did. "And," our French friend says, "they killed them all."

Thirty years ago the same friend took us to the Puces de Saint-Ouen, the great flea market which used to be a place where you could find great bargains (the flea market is still there, but the bargains are a thing of the past). He told us about a friend who survived the camps, who, after the war, came to Saint-Ouen to get furniture for his flat, which had been totally stripped while he was away. The man found his own furniture in a shop, which was priced to high for him to buy it back. His next door neighbor had sold it to the dealer when the neighbor had moved his own furniture into the flat. "The neighbor had denounced him to the Nazis, you see," our friend said. "He wanted the flat."

So when you talk politics with older French intellectuals, the events of the Second World War—both those to be remembered and those to be hidden—are there, as are the events in Algeria and Indochina. I don't know how much of that past is there with younger French intellectuals. (People my age in America still take the war in Vietnam very seriously and still have a lot to say about it, but my undergraduate students at UB see our involvement in Vietnam as part of a fuzzy category that also includes the Civil War, the War to End All Wars, WWII, the police action in Korea, and the war with no direct press coverage at all in the Persian Gulf.)

In addition to all that history there is, with French intellectuals of whatever age, September 11. It's the coffin at the front of the room.

The questions they ask
Once you're in a zone where politics can be discussed, the questions come fast, and they're almost always the same:

—Is George Bush as stupid as he appears or is it just an act?
—If he is as stupid as he appears, who really pulls his strings?
—If it is Cheney, why didn't the Americans make Cheney president?
—Which brother is the smarter, and if it's Jeb, why did the family and the oil moguls not make Jeb president?
—Why does the US waffle on Israel and make no move to force Sharon to make a real peace in the Middle East?
—Why does Bush have this mania about Afghanistan?
—Why is Bush so in love with war as a solution to political problems?
—Why does he let everything else in the world go and why can't his administration engage other problems that are far more important?
—Was the CIA involved in September 11?
—Why are Americans so docile about the incursions on civil rights by Attorney General Ashcroft? Don't they know that arresting people in secret and trying them in secret is exactly the opposite of what America stands for?
—Is Bush really planning a land war to depose Saddam Hussein? Even though he has the support of no major European power and none of the Arab powers?
—Is Bush controlled by the Christian fundamentalists? Is Bush himself a Christian fundamentalist? If not, why does he keep talking about making war on evil and being threatened by an "axis of evil"?

Bin Laden and the economy
There seemed a great deal of worry about America's focus on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and apparent lack of interest with what they see as more fundamental problems that make Bin Laden and Al Qaeda possible. They cannot understand the US obsession with Saddam and Castro.

It's not that people don't understand our involvement in Afghanistan; only, from there, it seems the Bush administration is focusing on that to the exclusion of everything else. They think what's happening to the world's economy, the sharp decline in the value of market holdings, the stiffening rigidity and unrelenting violence in the Middle East are far more important. "Fix the Palestinian problem and what do the Bin Ladens have to inflame people with? Chasing a dozen religious fanatics armed with 20-year-old Kalishnakovs around caves in Afghanistan fixes nothing."

There was a great deal of interest in, then disappointment with, Bush's July 9 Wall Street speech on the corporate disasters. The French papers reported the speech as weak and empty, and the few people who mentioned it to us saw it as further evidence of the Bush administration's refusal to deal directly with problems that have real meaning.

Arafat and Sharon
I met no one who liked or respected Arafat or Sharon, nor did I meet anyone who thought there was any likelihood of peace as long as Sharon is determining Israeli policy. Some referred to his recent statement about wishing they'd killed Arafat earlier. "How can anyone negotiate with a leader who gives press conferences saying he wishes he'd had you murdered?"

The French find Bush's public announcement that Arafat has to go amateurish. "The big nations have always disliked this or that politician," one person who has been in government said, "and they might say that. But they don't say that they won't participate unless the country in question elects a leader they like. That's schoolyard politics."

More important, and more frequent a matter of concern, is the way they see Bush intimidated by Sharon, or by American Jewish voters who back Sharon. In Europe, Sharon is seen largely as a thug, a man with no interest in reconciliation, a man driven by his hatred of Arafat and by his own demons. People refer to the massacres Sharon permitted at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982 and his September 2000 deliberate provocation of the Arabs by going with a large group of armed associates to the holy Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif .

"Why doesn't Bush put pressure on Sharon to stop being so brutal? Some Israelis are killed and Sharon goes and kills Arabs. He doesn't kill the Arabs who killed the Jews, but they're Arabs and for Sharon that's good enough. That's madness. He's only breeding more hatred."

"What makes Bush think that Sharon will work with any other Palestinian leader?" someone else said. "If he's going to get rid of Arafat, why not get rid of Sharon and at least let both sides start over."

Again and again I heard people say that Bush is the only one with enough clout to force a return to reason there, and that disorder in Israel is far more dangerous to the world than whoever the US is catching and killing in its military maneuvers in Afghanistan.

Bill Clinton
The French liked Bill Clinton while he was president and they remember him fondly. They talk about his sophisticated knowledge of world affairs and how he could talk intelligently about extremely complex issues. They compare him favorably to Bush, who had never traveled to Europe before becoming president and seems to them incapable of talking about international political issues in anything but folksy platitudes, which they find appalling.

There is also continuing puzzlement about and amusement toward our treatment of Bill Clinton. "That Lewinski matter wouldn't have been a scandal here, or any place in Europe," one writer said. "What did that have to do with anything? We wonder how the US government could have stopped everything to study that for so long." He said he also wondered why the US government spent so much time and money investigating whether or not either of the Clintons had made any money on their small Whitewater investment and nobody in Congress was calling for an investigation of how Bush had made his money, which seemed far more worthy of a close look. "The Clintons, it was a few thousand dollars, and they were only investors. Bush, it was millions, and it was his company."

July 13th
Paris, on the day before Bastille Day 2002, seems less paranoid that NYC. It's an ordinary Saturday in summer, different from past Saturdays in summer only in that there is far less dogshit on the streets. "Maybe Giuliani visited," Diane said. There are very few police in evidence, very few sirens in the air.

The French papers have few articles about the threat of terrorism. There are, rather, major articles about the French and international consequences of problems in large corporations and stock exchanges. There is, in the press and in conversation, a good deal of concern about the long-term international consequences of corruption in US corporations and multinationals, which they find more serious an issue than Al Qaeda. When a multinational tanks, multiple nations suffer the consequences. Every day since Bush's Tuesday address to Wall Street there have been references to it as platitudes without substance.

And there is a great deal of newspaper copy and frequent conversations about ordinary domestic politics. Many French intellectuals are still stunned by far right Jean-Marie Le Pen's coming in second in last spring's presidential primary elections."Americans aren't the only crazy people in politics," a friend said over dinner in Montmartre. "We're crazy here too. Where else would you find three Trotskyite candidates in the same primary? No wonder that monster came in second. I'll be dead before the Left comes back."

At 11:00 p.m., a few minutes after we got back to our hotel from dinner, we heard fireworks down on the Seine a few blocks away, then more distant fireworks further up and down the river. The reports continued for more than an hour. "How sophisticated," Diane said, "to start the fireworks an hour before midnight." Then we realized sophistication had nothing to do with it; it was all a matter of geography. Paris is far north of Buffalo (Buffalo about the same latitude as Rome; Paris is about the same latitude as Vancouver) so there's an hour more evening light this time of year.

Even when it's hot during the day, nights are almost always comfortable in Paris in summer, and there are no bugs, so the streetside cafés serve food and drink until very late, and back in your flat or hotel you can sleep with the big windows open. Our hotel was on a tiny street—two blocks long with a different name for each block, sidewalks too narrow for two people to walk abreast—with hardly any scooter, motorcycle or auto traffic at night and hardly any sounds at all. That night, after the fireworks, there was nothing other than a singing drunk about three a.m. His footsteps and his melody gradually came into and gradually fell away from the range of audibility.
 
Bastille Day
Many streets on the Right Bank were to be blocked off Sunday morning because of the huge Bastille Day parade, so we took a cab directly to the airport. It turned out that the main boulevards on our side of the river were also blocked off. Other than police cars, there was no traffic at all on Boulevard St. Germain. When he realized that he had that huge boulevard all to himself, our taxi driver raised both his hands to the roof of the car and yelled in joy to the city: "La mienne!" Mine!

There were gendarmes at every corner, and near Boulevard St. Michel we saw a parked convoy of perhaps ten police vans and busses, all of them fully occupied by police in riot gear.

Our ecstatic driver got to de Gaulle in twenty-five minutes and we were through security and at the gate fifteen minutes after that. The airport was far more relaxed than it had been when we were last there in December. Indeed, a woman went through ahead of us with a baby carriage and the security guy just had her lift the infant out while he lightly patted the bedding, then waved her through. I thought to say, "Aren't you going to check the kid?" but decided I'd best mind my own business.

We were in the air and having lunch about the time Maxime Brunerie, a 25-year-old French neo-Nazi took a shot at President Jacques Chirac during the Bastille Day parade, which this year was dedicated to Franco-American relations and which was led by 170 cadets from the US Military Academy. Brunerie's shot went wild, and he was wrestled to the ground by parade-watchers and gendarmes. Some countries might have gone on full alert after such an incident, but the French government and the French press dealt with Brunerie as a standalone nut-case.

Among the guests at Chirac's Élysée Palace garden party after the parade were a number of New York City firemen and family members of the September 11 dead.

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Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo. In February 2002 he was appointed Chevalier in l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.