Lucky and Ebullition

I got lucky today, after getting horrendously unlucky.

My sole final was scheduled for 9:30 AM, which is the same time that the class has been scheduled for the entire quarter. I have rarely been late. So of course, the one time I have to be late—and no mere fifteen minutes, these—has to be today, and I have to wake up at 10:27 AM. As for excuses—they can only be described as such—my alarm clock didn’t function, or I slept through it. I don’t think the latter is true, because this alarm is loud, intense. It’s impossible to do that, I think. So I can’t explain it.

However, I got lucky. I got to take the test after class, after spending only fifteen minutes on it (I arrived at 10:45). It went about as fine as could be expected.

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After that debacle, our Paris and Politics class went to Ile St. Denis, a banlieue in the north of Paris. We went there to speak to a group called Ebullition, an association whose name means “bubbling forth from beneath,” which connotes the solutions coming up from a bottom-up sprit.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, and it may be true in this case. The bottom-up spirit is lacking in France, and its emergence here may be the consequence of a lack of investment by other French sources, necessitating action from the community.

An example from my boss, Roxanne, for my media internship shows what I mean. The Rue Daguerre in the 14th, where she lives, is a narrow street lined by shops. It is a typical medieval-type street with a lot of foot traffic and outdoor interactions. It is the type of street which makes Paris great. Except for this instance. Typically, many streets of this type get Christmas decorations of some sort—the Rue Mouffetard, which I wrote about a week ago, is a beautiful example—and the Rue Daguerre usually does, except for this particular Christmas. For whatever reason, the president of the business association decided no one wanted the lights and that they were too expensive, so they weren’t put up.

But Roxanne went around to each of the shop owners and asked if they’d each be willing to put up some money, and the mairie of the arrondisement (think alderman) decided he’d be willing to meet them halfway, and so it looked like it might happen (I don’t know whether it did or not), but during the course of this quest, some French woman apparently said, “Why are you wasting your time like this? What do you want it for?” as if she was against individuals actively taking a care in their community.

You see it in the strikes, too. They seem like bottom-up activity, but they aren’t attempts to solve things for themselves, but instead are usually attempts to petition the state to solve their problems for them. Not to say this is necessarily all wrong, but civic life is about more than citizens and the state; it’s about citizens, civic institutions and the state.

Anyway, Ebullition is so bottom-up that they decided to take over the local government. Their former President, whom we met, is now the deputy mayor, and apparently the mayor also has ties with them. Furthermore, in Ile-St. Denis, there’s a citizen’s list, one unaffiliated with any of the major parties.

Their efforts are certainly needed in the community. There are a lot of great examples of modernist architecture—some of the best-looking high-rises I’ve ever seen—in Ile-St. Denis, and also some nice smaller houses, but the atmosphere reminds me of Buffalo or Rochester or another Rust Belt community in the United States, except with some French twists.

For example, in Rochester, we’ve been declaring Rochester Renaissance 2010 (or some variation of those three words) since I’ve been in high school, if not longer. Anytime you have to declare a rebirth is bad, because it means you’ve been dead in between. Similarly, if you have to focus on tomorrow, it’s usually because today isn’t great. There was a huge sign, bigger than most billboards, in a bright baby blue, stretched across a large building, declaring that “Tomorrow, We Will Be Connected” in reference to the new tramway line being built in 2009 (I think).

The lack of tramway lines in the banlieue are a general problem, because there are so few that they are essentially disconnected. Because they are disconnected, residents must first go to center city Paris to get to most other banlieue. The consequence of this is that it is harder to support general stores or other types of businesses.

This was certainly reflected in Ile-St. Denis. I saw four types of businesses: hair care (one store), a discount cell phone store (another one), a tabac, and several restaurants. Of the restaurants, almost all were ethnic—there was one Italian place and one Greek place—and most bore very ethically evocative names, ex. “La Medina.” The restaurants were mostly of the fast-food variety, and they took great care to emphasize their formules.

The people dressed in the hip-hop fashions, and a high proportion of them were young people. They were of many different colors and races, and seemed very multicultural. In fact, one incident demonstrated their multiculturalism best of all: as we were walking back from Ebullition’s building, a group of kids passed by us. We were speaking English, and one of the guys asks one of the girls, “Oh you speak English” while reaching out and grabbing her arm, and, when he was rebuffed, he continued all in the same breath, “Fuck you.” His friends laughed.

As for the meeting itself, we came to appreciate the problems faced by the banlieue: the lack of investment, the difficult relations with the government, the language barriers for immigrants. The women whom we met, who were in high positions in the association, often disagreed with one another in a spirit of friendly debate. One thing, however, was clear: Sarkozy was not a popular figure. Everyone was against his DNA testing provision in the recent immigration bill, and strongly so. One of the most grimly funny moments was when our professor asked about the new Marshall Plan for the banlieue, about what they thought about it. The reply: “Well, we don’t trust it very much, because there have been Marshall Plans for the banlieue for a decade or so.” Which is the same kind of stuff you hear from politicians all the time—oh yeah, we’ll do it, we’ll do it—and it rarely gets done the way it needs to, so sometimes the situation just needs to bubble up.

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Sarkozy’s position, however, is not one I envy. Not that I necessarily approve of his policies—his immigration policies, in particular, pander relentlessly to the far right—but whomever was placed in his position would have found it difficult. I think the problems that France faces in the year 2007 are similar to the United States’ in 1993 when Bill Clinton took office.

What was the bind Clinton faced? “It’s the economy, stupid” was his rallying cry, and Sarkozy’s appeals have been in large part about remedying the economy. Well, the economy faces (and faced, in the US) this problem: there is a deficit whose size is concerning, yet, at the same time, there is widespread unemployment and underinvestment in poverty-stricken areas. As economics would have it, this is a catch-22, as deficit spending is supposed to be about curing the last two problems, except it’s not and there’s an untenable deficit there. So there’s a problem, a conundrum that must be solved.

What’s interesting is that in both cases, the wishes of the financial elites have been served. I think Sarkozy has largely chosen that direction out of inclination, whereas Clinton needed to do so at least partially politically—after all, the Perot voters worried him. That is, after all, the source of James Carville’s hilarious quotation (you know, back before he was a rampant political hack for CNN): “I used to want to come back as the Pope. Now I want to come back as the bond market, so then I could scare everyone.” (undoubtedly paraphrased).

And think about it, who is going to win? Rationally speaking, a group of rich people who are probably in close constant contact with government elites is going to beat out a disorganized group, of which many can’t speak the language very well. One of the perpetual problems of democracies is how to effectively represent the interests of the de facto disenfranchised, and it’s unfortunate that the poor of the banlieue only seem to attract attention when they riot.