a wintery view from my sitting room window
Paris,
and most of the rest of France is shivering again in ‘températures glaciales’.
Nice has snow on the Promenade des Anglais - that always gets a mention in the
météo - and dozens of minor roads have been closed in la basse Normandie.
The
temperature is glaciale in more than just the air we breathe. We watch and
listen to the vague pronouncements of the euro-politicians charged with finding
ways of disarming the speculators and helping Greece out of its debt-ridden
state. They haven’t yet had the guts, or the sense of common purpose, or the
vision, or whatever it is that they so lamentably lack, to lay out a clear plan
of action. And Greece is still being kicked round the financial playground by
the big bullies with their bonuses. A German newspaper poll is said to have
shown that 71% of Germans are against helping Greece, on the grounds that they’re
a nation of ‘fainéants’ (idle layabouts could be one way of translating that)
and why should the hard-working Germans dig in their pockets to bail them out
for their spend-thriffery and tax-avoidance? Nice note of solidarity in times
of stress. That’s the same Germany as pays its eastern citizens less than two-thirds
the wage earned by its west-living workers – something there about ‘casting out
motes’ or setting your own house in order perhaps.
France
alternates between congratulating itself on being slightly less deep in the financial
mire and then agonising over its creaking industrial base and its social
unrest. There’s plenty of that about. If social unrest was measured in euros,
France would probably be the richest country in the world.
The
debate on l’identité nationale’, so trumpeted in the autumn, has collapsed
absolutely at its last hurdle with a high-level seminar which Sarkozy chose not
to attend, leaving that particular poisoned chalice to his Premier Ministre. One
morning recently the news was all about two men who held up a post office
wearing a burka – la loi du burka has been a major theme in the identité
nationale question. Men have been holding up post offices in balaclavas for as
long as I can remember but I’ve yet to see a politician telling a journalist
that what’s needed is an anti-balaclava law.
We
all know what’s happening in airports with the new body-scanning techniques.
How long before some travellers are once more being herded like animals naked
through the gates for a shower as well? History may not repeat itself in detail
but that doesn’t mean it stops coming up with the same themes, the same tactics
of exclusion and desecration of the human.
I’ve
been reading Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Selfish Giant’ to the younger children. It’s a
story of redemption through love, a recognisably Christian story to anyone
reading it in Wilde’s own day. That’s what gives it the power to move, the idea
that a powerful giant could be redeemed by the love of a tiny child. We could
do with reading more of these children’s stories, for ourselves, as we struggle
to undo the mess we’ve let our ‘leaders’ get us into. For example, on the
question of the burka – how about the contest between the Sun and the North Wind
to see which of them could make the man in his winter coat unbutton it then take
it off? I seem to remember I learnt to read at school with stories like that.
In
the meantime the UMP (Sarkozy's party),is busy drafting a new law which will put a curfew on
kids, a fourteen year-old was taken from her home at 10.30 at night and held
for hours in the police cells for some minor offence, and to judge by the
reports from various secondary schools, children themselves are hitting,
kicking and maiming each other in increasing numbers.
It’s
winter in Europe all right. The giants have built a wall round their castle and
both children and adults are shivering in the icy blast. So far the North Wind
is winning – when will the Sun come out?
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