April

I spent April in Paris.

I like Paris. I like it in the same way that everyone else likes it. I like the buildings. I like the food. I like how the grown-ups dress like grown-ups.

I like laying on the grass in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, side by side with the sort of perky, stylish youths who drip from head to toe in Americana. They’d say they loathe America, I’m sure.

I like sitting on the keystone of the Pont du Carrousel while dangling my feet above the Seine, and pretending that I’m about to jump whenever a boat full of tourists passes underneath. I think that I could land on one of the taller barges without getting hurt.

I’ve never smoked a cigarette, but I like walking into the clouds that get left behind by the people in front of me.

April was a relaxing time in Paris.

I avoided the pension riots, mostly. I got caught up in a demonstration a couple of weeks ago while running errands on the Rue du Quatre-Septembre, but most of the people were polite and well-dressed — a very bourgeois, compliant lot.

The whole thing had an exceedingly mild and performative feel.

French riots don’t seem very destructive, at least compared to the riots in the States.

I remember walking around Dallas the day before the 2020 election, just as I remember walking around Dallas the day before the Chauvin verdict. The storefronts were boarded up with plywood and burglar bars. It was eerie. People were scared.

There was a palpable sense that murderous mobs would form. There was a real fear that neighborhoods would be destroyed.

American riots, when they get going, are terrifying.

I don’t think the French have the same penchant for violence or chaos. I think they prefer melodramatic reprisals, especially those that can be democratized and stylized.

After France was liberated, the French women who slept with Nazis throughout the war were rounded up and brought to the central squares of their cities and towns. Then, in front of jeering crowds, their heads were shaved. These women were not beaten or brutalized, but they were mocked and debased in front of their communities.

Les femmes tondue: the shorn women. I’m sure everyone had a blast.

French people like public humiliation rituals, but they’re really not especially violent.

What would happen if Macron threw some minister or senior bureaucrat to the crowd for a tarring and feathering in the Place de la Concorde? Everyone has a laugh? They compromise and set the retirement age at 63?

It’s getting hotter. My hair is getting longer.

It’s a real shame I haven’t done anything treasonous lately.