Cocoon

I am a bit sick; I’ve caught a slight bug. It isn’t great enough to stop me from doing anything, but it is just enough to make my life more unpleasant than otherwise. If I were just a bit sicker, I’d be just incapacitated enough to not do anything while still not feeling totally awful, which in my opinion would be great. I’m not so I hope I’ll get over it quickly, especially since the quarter is winding down and there are a legion of assorted small tasks arrayed against me.

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I tried to go to the Louvre today for another lecture. Given my slight sickness, I was actually slightly dreading it—concentrating while sick is always like walking against the wind—so it was actually slightly pleasing that the lecture ended up canceled. But I needed something to substitute for not going to the lecture; I wasn’t going to schlep up to the Louvre (admittedly not that far) just to turn back and convalesce curled up in bed. I decided to relax in Starbucks, a first for me in France.

If I ignored the tourists and the French chatting up a buzz, I would’ve sworn that I had fallen into some rift of the world and landed back in America. The décor is, like any McDonald’s, exactly the same the world around (although of course Starbuck’s décor is actually pleasant; something you might use for your own home). The music, though, is what did it for me. It’s no secret that the French love American music (or, rather, their own twisted taste in American music; just as Woody Allen and Jerry Lewis are exponentially more popular in France than in America, some weird, weird American music that I can’t identify gets a lot of airplay), but this music was one of the few times that was exactly pitch perfect what would’ve been played in America: they were all Christmas tunes, and the specific selections within that genre, Ella Fitzgerald and that Charlie Brown Christmas song, is exactly what the bourgeois upper-middle-class demographic of Starbucks listens to come Christmastime (my parents always break that out with the eggnog, at least).

I suspect, however, that this isn’t cultural blending as much as cultural dictation. I bet at Starbucks World Headquarters, someone is paid to make the decisions for the playlist for everyone, with one Venti-size fitting all (in France, at least, the sizes are reasonably named: Moyen [Medium], Grande [Large] and something large than Grande [something bigger than big]). Not to say the French on hand really disliked either choice—they love Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone here—but it just felt really American, like I’d slipped into a cocoon, in a location as French as the Louvre.

With the globalization era upon us, these little American cocoons are being shipped everywhere. The Louvre isn’t the only quintessential ancient governmental seat to witness the planting of one; the Forbidden City had a Starbucks for a while too. I’m no cultural purist; if people like Starbucks, they like it, you know? But it feels weird to walk into a store that is in many ways so unbowed to local tradition (actually the menu includes what seem to be bows to French tradition—are there crème brulee lattes in America? And if not, please tell me—I feel I need to sample that exquisiteness). It feels like a cultural conquest.

Certainly the French feel that way often enough. The government hands out cultural subsidies like a college hands out condoms. They limit the amount of American music to a certain percentage. Similarly, French movies are the beneficiary (apparently according to statistics) of plenty of protectionism, although that doesn’t seem to prevent the Hollywood onslaught from continuing. Americans feel similarly—there’s a 1984 painting called “The Triumph of the New York School” which shows a mechanized, modern American army (an allegorical representation of post-war American artists) open and smirking, arrayed against a disorganized, antiquated group of Europeans mounted on horses and suchlike. The clear subtext is: we’ve beaten you, so suck on that!

Which to me is a pretty infantile attitude. Culture is about making life good; that’s not a zero-sum game. It is a plant that benefits from cross-pollination, and it does well to be mixed with other types of crops. Slavish devotion to one type or another weakens the overall evolution. For me, some of the most fascinating cultural products of the past few years have been the result of cosmopolitanism, not cultural protectionism.

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Speaking of cultural appropriations, yesterday, many of the rioters shouted “Fuck des polices!” (Fuck the police!). What is interesting about this, to me, is that it shows that, the immigrants of the Parisian banlieue feel a kinship not merely with each other but also Americans, probably specifically African-Americans. That they do means that the US is many things to many people; George Bush hasn’t ruined that, thankfully, although if he got a few more years, I’m sure he’d make an honest effort towards that goal.

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Sarkozy has announced his policy, a major crackdown. Francois Fillon, the relatively less popular prime minister, reaffirmed the plan to create a “Marshall Plan” for the banlieue. This strikes me as a mistake. By relegating the positive side of the plan to the less popular underling, it definitively shows a lesser emphasis.

There are two possible reasons for this. The first is that Sarkozy does not actually think the “Law and Order” portion of his program is more important; he feels he must emphasize that portion to retain the allegiance of the far-right supporters of Le Pen who propelled him to the Presidency. The second is that he really does believe that crushing resistance in the suburbs is the most important priority in the situation.

Far be from me to decide which one is true, but they both suggest bad news for the suburbs. Incidentally, if I had to guess, it’d be the latter—he did promise in the Presidential campaign to clear out the “scum” in the banlieue. Either way, the underlying problem of the banlieue will not be addressed: the economic problems and the problem of inclusion into France’s nation. If the former reason is true, then the majority of Sarkozy’s energy will be devoted to appeasing the far right supporters whose conception of the problems of the banlieue are skewed, meaning that comparatively less will be devoted to actually solving those problems. That Sarkozy feels it necessary to append a “and National Identity” to the “Ministry of Immigration” provides a good example of how Sarkozy’s relative focus can result in marginalization of the immigrants. That’s nothing but an insult towards the banlieue. And if the latter reason is true, it shows that Sarkozy has not learned the lessons of insurrections: military or police success means little; political success means everything. Keeping order with force is necessary but not sufficient; if the political problems are not addressed correctly, then there will forever be a fresh supply of rioters.

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Incidentally, when I was writing of the sizes in the Starbucks in France, I accidentally and unconsciously inserted an ‘et’ in the middle, which is ‘and’, without realizing it until five minutes later. Now it happens, of course, just when I’m about to leave.