Category: Social Commentary

Categories
France Social Commentary

What the USA Does Well

In my opinion, that is . . .

Plenty of my fellow citizens are enjoying what has turned out to be a historic opportunity to talk about everything that’s wrong with our country. It’s THEM! Uh, okay, that isn’t what this is about. After almost a year and a half of living abroad, here are some things I think that the United States does quite a good job at.

  1. Entertainment options. Okay, there is an argument about bread and circuses, but please don’t comment about that. The quality of the entertainment is what I’m writing about, and, frankly, the US puts out some truly excellent stuff. Something for everyone? I believe so. Any one thing for everyone? Heaven’s no! Maybe you don’t like country music, or pop, or Marvel Universe Movies? Fine, why should you? There are books, movies, and streaming programs of every conceivable genre available 24/7. Don’t get me wrong: there are some great programs produced in Europe, too. I like French police procedurals, but there are only so many of them, and they tend to be compared to American productions. Yes, Capitaine Marlow does owe something to Columbo, it even says so in the blurb for the program. But remember who came up with Columbo, and it wasn’t a French producer.
  2. Maintenance of Public Conveniences. I’m mostly writing here about elevators and escalators, moving sidewalks, things commonly found in airports and such places. Sometimes these things break down in the US, and sometimes it takes a few days for them to be repaired. Consider, though, that in the spring of 2022 the elevator in a parking garage adjacent to the Poitiers train station was out of service, and it was still out of service in the spring of 2023, and that it still out of service to this day! Also at Poitiers, one of the escalators leading to the old city from the train station was down last time I was there. At Charles de Gaulle airport there is always at least one moving sidewalk out of commission. It’s at least a quarter mile from where International flights drop you to the train station, at least. France is proud of it’s history of innovative and genius-level inventors and mechanical engineers. They put high-tech satellites into orbit using French designed and built rockets, short story, they do have the talent and ability to keep everything running sharp, but, alas, everything runneth not sharp. Americans are pretty intolerant of inoperable technology, mainly because it’s rare to encounter much of it. Nice job, America!
  3. Bureaucracy. What? Am I kidding? It’s enough to smother you! Not really, compared to what you find in other countries. I applied for my residence permit in April, had my interview for it in July, and should receive my permit in November, I hope, as my visa expired in May. I’m not sure why I don’t have my insurance card. I have a number, I can get reimbursement for medical expenses, but I have no card, after many months. I should be getting a number that will let me take the online drivers’ test at the post office any day now. Will I? Who knows? Other countries endure similar bureaucratic fun. No, friends, the United States has one of the most transparent and easily navigated bureaucratic structures amongst developed countries. We have it easy, please believe that.

Well, that will do for now. I do think that there are things that France does better than the US, but to a remarkable extent, those things are being discussed in connection with the Presidential election, so I’ll just refer you to that ongoing flurry of discussion for more. This blog is actually about moving to France, so next time I’ll be writing about some things about France that I find a mite peculiar.

Ciao!

Categories
OddGodfrey Social Commentary

Apartheid?

This man hated apartheid. If you don’t believe me read his excellent novel, Huckleberry Finn

The previous post, by Leslie of Oddgodfrey, inspired me to write this. If you missed it, it’s really a link to their blog. You can skip going to the previous post and simply click here to follow that link. They’ve been in South Africa, and to judge from their posts, that is a beautiful country where various people seem to mix and mingle with each other freely, but where, as she writes, something is wrong; something is missing. It reminds me of the United States of America. This is a great country, and I love the USA. My first ancestor arrived here in 1729, lived in Philly, married a girl from Jersy City in 1730, and 12 of their 13 sons fought with the Continental Army. The one I’m descended from, one Phillip Powell, fought with a Connecticut regiment. His grandson Andrew Powell was a corporal with the 123rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War. Andrew was a bit of an oddball. He was a religious nut, for starters, spoke in tongues (no snakes that I know of.) He was shot three times during that conflict, shot in the ass and that’s the truth, plus in the thigh. He received maggot therapy, which worked, but he limped for the rest of his life. Besides being unusually religious, he was in it to end slavery, while many Union soldiers were more concerned with the Union. He believed that saving the Union was the surest way to end slavery. We’re still awaiting the results of that experiment, which brings me to the theme of this post.

We don’t have legal apartheid in America. Haven’t had since the Civil Rights Act of 1965, but I do remember it. I had an aunt and uncle who lived in Bartow, Florida, next county to where Orlando is. Uncle Louie was half Choctaw, from his mother, and one of the most honorable people I’ve ever known. He ran a pallet making factory after serving 20 years in the Army after his WWII service. He had a black foreman over a mixed-race crew. He said, and I can quote this, “If anyone doesn’t like it, they’ll just have to find another job.” But most of Florida, and most of the South, wasn’t like that. There were separate restrooms by race, separate drinking fountains by race, blacks couldn’t patronize many restaurants, schools were segregated, whew! It scared my nine-year-old self because I imagined getting in trouble simply by trying to pee in the wrong room. Never happened, of course.

Post Civil Rights Act, there is no legal separation by race in America. But there is a long ingrained and incredibly stubborn refusal by many “white” folks to even see anyone who isn’t “white” as a regular person. “There is no white privilege.” Horseshit! Being white (an actual WASP, even) I know that I never have to think about race if I don’t want to. That’s a hell of a privilege right there. You think black people don’t have to think about race? Like when a cop pulls them over and they don’t know if they’re going to be cited, arrested, or shot? Gee maybe they do. But, so many “white” people refuse to consider talking about it. “I’m not a racist!” Sure, I’m not either, but I sure have benefited from white privilege. And I mean that, I’m not, and probably other people who say that they’re not mean it, too. But, if you look at a room full of brown people and fail to see anyone, that’s racism. There is at least one person in my neighborhood who went over to the local mall at Christmastime, which is at that season crawling with people, primarily latino or black, either African American or actually immigrants from Africa, and wrote that there “wasn’t anybody there.” Seriously! And you know what? Those Latinos in particular are living the 1950s, Leave it to Beaver lifestyle, raising families together, doing things as a family, shopping, playing around, all that supposedly superior stuff that Beaver and his family used to do. Yeah, but they’re nobody. As long as it’s common for a “white” person to not see perfectly normal people doing perfectly respectable stuff in the mall, we might as well still have apartheid. Frankly, it makes me angry to the point of being sick.

Hell, I know what everybody wants, because we all want the same stuff. We want food, clothing, shelter, companionship, and a better life for our kids. And some of us also want America to get better, not to return to the bad old days, but we get drowned out by sheer stupid stubbornness. And it is stupidity, the worst sort of stupidity, because it is willful. I’ve been putting quotation marks “” around the word “white” because of course the concept was invented by Europeans needing to not feel guilty about stealing people and selling them off. Any geneticist will tell you that the idea of human “races” is a myth, and it’s a damned persistent myth, isn’t it? But not one I intend to ever subscribe to again. The first Brits were dark skinned and had blue eyes. Striking, I imagine. And what does one do with that knowledge in light of “racial identification?” “Swedish ‘negroes?'” Right. Sure. That’s just a quick illustration of how stupid racism is in the first place. Well, it matches our societal obsession with stupidity, which we celebrate, but I’m going to quit now because that topic requires a book, not a blog post.

Just like South Africa, here in the land of the free (and it is, in many ways) something, you know, just isn’t right.

Categories
Social Commentary Writing

Étre Poli

Joan of Arc was polite to the French, but not the English. See what that gets you?

Apparently I never published the reasons why the French insist on politeness here. So, here they are.

France, like another country with which I am quite familiar, ditched a monarchy. It took the USA seven years. It took France a century. To be fair, the monarch lived in France, but across an ocean from the United States. Now that brought up a problem of personal address. With an established nobility (also still living in country) there were established ways to greet nobles. You wouldn’t just go up to a Compte (Count), slap him on the back and ask, “How’s it hangin’, old buddy?” And then the lower classes were designed and created by God (according to the nobility) for the nobility to ignore and walk all over. Suddenly, though, Lafayette, with some advice from Thomas Jefferson (told you that these two countries had similar beginnings) went to work on a “Delcaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” That document is a portion of the constitution of the Fifth Republic of France. It is not unlike the Bill of Rights, so I won’t go into what it grants, but I will point out that, with that document joining the official government papers, you couldn’t just ignore the peasantry any more. But, then how to address a former peasant?

The revolutionaries, much like the later Bolsheviks in Russia, invented all sorts of ridiculous answers to that question. Heck, “comrade” might even have been one of them, but those ideas died after the Reign of Terror. Along with thousands of humans, of course. But, probably during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, the following ideas were adopted.

To say hello, say bonjour. Bonjour is a compound word, a portmanteau it’s called, combining bon which is “good” and jour which is “day.” Because, when meeting a noble, you want to wish them a good day, of course.*

Consider the politics. Those nobles didn’t want to give up being addressed respectfully, and who could blame them? But if everyone is addressed as nobility, they won’t lose, and the peasantry gains. How much do the peasants gain? Well, consider that madame is made from the words ma, or feminine “my” and dame, or lady. When you call the store clerk madame you are calling her “My Lady.” Same with monsieur. Mon is the masculine “my” and sieur is an old way to say “lord” so you’re calling the guy fixing your car, or lunch or whatever, “My Lord.” That’s a big step up from invisibility, I’d say.

Of course, one also uses please and thank-you when addressing a noble, so now Si’l vous plait or S’il te plait are now used politely for everyone. Thank you is the relatively well-known, merci! And then, not to insult your noble, you end with something like “Thank you, see you next time!” Right? Well, Au revoir translates into “Until We See Each Other Again.” Et voila! There were tender alliances to be tended to in the government, the nobility would not accept demotion, but they did accept de jure promotion for everyone else. In other words, in France, everyone is nobility. Noble titles are strictly honorary, and that’s been true for a long time, but the fact remains that everyone in the country (including tourists) is to be treated like nobility. Well, in greeting and transacting business anyway, if not in privilege. Add that to the fact that French restaurant dining is a more relaxed, drawn-out affair, during which you must ask for the check (addition) when you’re ready to pay, Now, if you haven’t used all the proper greetings, etc, and you’re an impatient American diner, you think that the French are impolite, when in fact the opposite is true.

And that’s the truth!

* The way to wish someone a good day is now “bonne journée”. A journée was once a day trip, now it’s a day.

The title of this post means “Being Polite.”

Categories
Social Commentary

Conspiracy Theories

My great-grandfather Andrew Powell was a corporal with this outfit. One of these men is probably him, but I don’t know which one it is.

Conspiracy theories are an old phenomenon. People need to know how come things happen, and if they don’t know, they make stuff up. Right now, maybe for a long time now, conspiracy theories in the US seem to find their best home with those to the right of the political spectrum. Do radical conservative views and conspiracy theories have a similar basic source? I just report. You decide. There is one conspiracy theory, though, that seems to have developed great legs over the years. That is that the left is deliberately importing people of races other than white in order to replace the current, legitimate, old-time, American government with one of socialist, communist, totalitarian bent.

As a person whose views have always been leftish, I can categorically state, before I go on, that none of that theory is true. Except that minority people are becoming more politically powerful. That is because of basic demographics, not any conspiracy. I promise you, the left has nothing to do with it, other than that it seems to be more attractive to immigrant populations than does the right, but even then, not always.

So, what the heck? Well, the Replacement Theory is racist on its face. I mean, if someone were conspiring to allow, I dunno, English people to become more powerful, would there be a backlash? How about Irish? Italian? German? You know, the English are the only one of those four national origins that has not been the subject of irrational prejudice in the US. Chef Boyardi (Boy-ar-dee, get it?) was advised against opening an Italian restaurant in New York because of this anti-Italian prejudice. Now, of course, Italian food isn’t even considered ethnic. It’s just American food, like hot dogs and hamburgers (both of which came from Germany.) And there has always been a vein of mistrust of strangers in history, but until relatively modern times, no mention of “races” of humans. The Romans disliked those “dark skinned foreigners” and sometimes gave them grief even in the Legions, for example, but the Romans never said those people weren’t, well, people, normal people, but with odd customs. Okay, that’s natural. But race? Where does that come from?

Simple enough to see, historically. When Columbus first encountered “Indians” he wrote that it would be a good thing to make Christian slaves out of them. Slavery was common until a couple of centuries ago, after all, so that’s not surprising. And the religion common in Europe at that time preached that a Christian slave was freer than a pagan free man (sound familiar?) So there’s that: religious justification for enslavement of other peoples. But wait, there’s more!

De Gama and other Portuguese explorers not only found what were to them now territories and foreign people, they also discovered the lucrative trade to be engaged in of buying slaves in Ghana to sell to wealthy people in Europe and, increasingly, the colonies. Unfortunately for the slave trade, the Enlightenment was stirring, positing notions of ideas such as “all men are created equal.” (That was a later refinement, but the roots of the idea are to be found considerably earlier.) This meant that, to be considered an educated and sophisticated person, one had to endorse the notion that men were inherently free. What then, of the slaves? They looked like men, but they certainly weren’t free. What about them? Well, now here comes the idea of classes of men based on their region of origin or appearance. Those slaves were all of the darkest complexions, so what the heck, let’s call them “black.” We enlightened Europeans, of course, are light-skinned, so let’s be the opposite of black, that is, “white.” And, once we’ve established that, we can classify the entire population of the world based on what amounts to the color of their skin. Et voila! Race is born!

The idea of races of people was made up by Europeans now calling themselves “white.” It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now, but there is a substantial group of people in the United States who cling to that lie as if their lives depend on it. Conspiracy theories about race all stem from the one root theory, that there is such a thing as a white race in the first place, which there isn’t. No wonder the current right-wing contingent is so biased in favor of “replacement theory” and other euphemisms for White Supremacy. Their entire underlying assumption is a lie to begin with! All they’d have to do to feel better about the world is give up the idea of White Supremacy. A few will. Some have. I imagine it’s difficult. And I don’t believe that denigrating them on social media will do a thing to help ease the situation.

They are Americans, after all, and they deserve some respect simply for being human beings. If it’s true that love beats hate, then the way to defeat the right wing is to love them, not hate them. And I do believe that the best way to show that love is to lovingly vote their people out of public office. Please. This is a crucial year for the experiment that is the United States. What do you say we move it a notch or two closer to what our founders said it was going to be? Let’s give it a try, okay?

****

By the way, I am descended from a genuine, Philadelphia, W.A.S.P. named William Powell. 12 of his sons (!) fought with the Continental Army. My great-grandfather Andrew fought with the 123rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War. His side won.