by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2021 Paul Ben-Itzak

Sometimes news events conspire to feed the shameless columnist ready fodder for showing off his uncanny ability to reconnoiter connections. But before the neo-libs roll their eyes and declare, “Another Wocky ((I still don’t know what this means)) American trying to artificially import another radical Yankee college campus construct to a country, France, where it doesn’t apply because we don’t have the same history etc.,” I’m not using my pundity prescience to point to Intersectionality but rather, serendipity.

Sometimes the actuality serendipity doesn’t go beyond enabling the erstwhile ranter-raver to show how clever he is in daring to see connections where his confreres can’t rise above the ruckus of the daily headlines. This was the case a few weeks ago, when several developments in France seemed to fall under the category of Things that go Boom:

1) The lache whose explosive belt either couldn’t or wouldn’t go off — et tant mieux — preventing him from killing even more innocents than the 130 he and his fellow terrorist nihilist brethren massacred on the cafe terraces, outside the stadiums, and in the music halls of Paris on November 13, 2015 getting up in the trial of he and 14 accused accomplices in the old Palais de Justice made famous by Simenon’s Maigret on the Ile de Cité in Paris, not too far from Notre Dame, and answering a question about his occupation by describing himself as a “combattant” for the so-called “Islamic State.” Non monsieur, vous n’etes pas un combattant, vous etes un lache; un combattant se livre dans un combat contre les autres soldats (du coupe, vous n’etes meme pas un soldat, vous etes qu’on petit voyou homicidal) egalement armé, tandis que vous, vous vous avais ‘battu’ contre les civilians sans arme et qui vous n’ont jamais fait aucun mal. (American readers, push the Google translation button on the right.)

2) The death of a grand actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo, two of whose most memorable, fin de film performances involved combustions: His (petit mais au moins drole) voyou in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 “Breathless” exhaling his final cigarette smoke after he’s already been gunned down (in apparent self-defense) by policemen and accused Jean Seberg of being “dégueulasse,” prompting Seberg to utter one of the most memorable lines ever pronounced by an American ingénue in a French film: “C’est quoi ‘dégueulasse’?; and his frantic and ultimately futile attempts to snuff out the fuse of a dynamite bonnet he’s wrapped around his head — ” Mais qu’est-ce que je suis en train a faire?” — after killing the girlfriend who betrayed him, Anna Karina’s mome, in the climax of Godard’s 1965 “Pierrot le Fou.” In contrast with the murderous acts of the terrorists of November 13, in this case the only victim was himself. The triumph was Godard’s: In Belmondo, he found an interpreter who, with his Bogart-like ‘gueule’ (‘pan’ to you, bub), was a marker with whom the common man could identify, infusing these art films with a vital verisimilitude. Que Belmondo vas retrouve Karina — who died in 2019 — dans le soleil.

3) While it was, unfortunately more predictable than ‘deguelasse’ (I’ve given up on trying to spell this word right) the circling around the wagons by her fellow functionaries on France Culture, France’s middle-brow radio chain, provoked by the indictment of the previous health minister on a charge related to her handling of the early stages of the Covid pandemic was nonetheless disappointing. Patrick Cohen, the new host of the chain’s Sunday talking-heads show “Esprit Public,” ‘busculated’ the regular International segment so that his four panelists, rather than examining the merit of the charge itself, could attack the judiciary system (which they all did, no matter their supposed political proclivities), making a good case for the show’s being re-named “Esprit Public Service,” civil servant solidarity proving more important that serving the public.

… There are also, fortunately — for the ranter who wants to be seen as part of the solution — news cycles in which apparently disparate events can compliment each other when analyzed by a perspicacious pundit, in this case your (non-public) servant. This has been the case over the last week. First the events:

  1. The doctors of S.O.S. Medicines held a 24-hour strike to demand an increase from the 10 Euro sur-charge they currently get for house calls. (Total cost: 35 Euros, in-house doctor visits here costing only 25 Euros, 40 if the treatment is more involved.)
  2. President Emmanuel Macron proposed making restaurant tips received by credit card tax-free for both the wait-staff and the employer.
  3. (Here I might get some of my details wrong, mais c’est pas grave.) After several months of neighbors complaining about a group of about 150 Crack addicts who had taken over a public park straddling the 18th (right below Montmartre) and 19th arrondissements of Paris, harassing them and their children, the Prefect of Paris, under the instructions of the Interior minister, finally took action… by moving between 50 and 100 of the Crack addicts to the border suburb of Pantin…. More specifically, a tunnel (or a park on the other side of a tunnel) at the Porte la Villette… on either side of which employees of the Prefect, or the City Hall promptly constructed walls… whose purpose, the Prefect reasonably argued, was to seal off the tunnel and protect the zone (presumably the crack addicts from being run over)… Which reasonable argument didn’t stop neighbors from both sides, i.e. the 19th arr. of Paris and Pantin, from labeling the barrier “the wall of shame,” One wag on a Facebook group I belong to, Collectif 19, pointing out the irony of France criticizing ex-president Trump’s border wall… The Socialist mayor of Pantin, meanwhile, complained that this would only add to the Crack problem in his city and nearby Aubervilliers.
  4. President Macron announced that psychology consultations would now be re-imbursed by health insurance, or at least up to 40 Euros for the first consultation and 30 for subsequent meetings… which some psychologists pointed out would only pay for a 30-mintue consultations.

How to connect these four news events to the edification of all involved?

  1. Make the doctors eligible for non-taxable credit-card tipping.
  2. Send the head-shrinkers out to the Porte de la Villette to treat the Crack addicts.

5 centimes please.

Unknown's avatar

Published by danceblogger

Contact Paul Ben-Itzak at artsvoyager@gmail.com. Paul Ben-Itzak was educated at San Francisco's Mission High School, the San Francisco Center for Theater Training, and Princeton University, where he studied with Robert Fagles, Joyce Carol Oates, Ellen Chances, and Lucinda Franks. Also at Princeton, he was founding managing editor of the Nassau Weekly and began contributing to the New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, Atlantic City Press, and many others, later writing for the Arts & Liesure section of the Times. As a San Francisco-based correspondent for Reuters, he was one of the first reporters to cover the AIDS crisis, also covering the arts, the tech sector, and the financial markets. In 1998, he co-founded the leading international arts journal The Dance Insider & Arts Voyager (http://www.danceinsider.com ) and, later, Art Investment News (http://www.artinvestmentnews.com). Paul has also worked as a DJ, children's theater teacher and playwright, and made his debut as an actor on the New York stage in 2011, playing Weston in Sam Shepard's "Curse of the Starving Class." To date, Paul has translated the sketches of Boris Vian, reviews of theater performances , French tourism sites, and research proposals and articles from CNRS and other researchers. His editing work includes dissertation level papers.

Leave a comment