<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2023/may/01/france-gone-to-hell-politics-nostalgia>
"The French adventurer Sylvain Tesson may have put it best when he wrote:
“France is a paradise inhabited by people who think they’re in hell.”
The images from France over the past two months have seemed hellish enough –
mounds of rubbish, sometimes on fire, serving as backdrop for violent clashes
between some of the more extreme protest groups and body armour-clad riot
police. Enough for my parents to repeatedly ask over FaceTime if it was really
OK for me to be out and about in my neighbourhood, which borders a main protest
square. (It was, I assured them each time, just France being France: the
overaggressive nature of the confrontations and the dismissive and “arrogant”
government response simply the self-fulfilling result of everyone assuming this
was just how things would unfold.)
Of course, France isn’t a literal paradise. It has had four decades of
structurally high unemployment; a lost decade of stagnating incomes after the
2008-09 financial crisis; lower levels of social trust than its happier
northern European neighbours (made worse by Emmanuel Macron’s use of article
49.3, which forced the legislature to choose between passing the unpopular
retirement reform or holding new elections); a population shifting away from
rural towns towards urban centres; and a slow, rolling recognition of its
relative decline on the global stage.
But there is an incredible disconnect between what tourists see, what
foreigners living in France see, what French people living abroad see, what
this recently naturalised français sees, and the hyperbolic, catastrophist
nature of France’s own domestic discourse about itself (that is, the French
people convinced their country has gone to hell).
In this tale, France has been submerged by immigration and Islam, or by
ultra-neoliberalism, or by authoritarianism (or some combination of these).
This doesn’t correspond to measurable reality, but the stories we tell
ourselves about ourselves are powerful."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-respiratory-diseases-labour-bangladesh-conservation-bolivia/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
