#92 After The Truck Stopped In Nice

July 16, 2016

Forty-something man sitting on the ground: cross-legged; a little lop-sided. Hair receding, cut short (not shorn) to minimise. Shorts, t-shirt, hooded top; sandals scuffed – they’ve schlepped a few pavements, not just the beach. Wrists resting on bended knees, fingers interlocking.

The position his hands are in seems one stop short of prayer, but this man has already reached a moment of quiet contemplation; perhaps hundreds then thousands of such moments throughout the warm moistening of a Mediterranean night.

I have stopped short of saying what he’s contemplating. Because I don’t rightly know. On the one hand he is not directly contemplating the thing under the pink beach towel within touching distance of where he is sitting, because the pink beach towel is covering that thing so that no one – least of all this man – has to contemplate it simply as a thing, no longer a human being. On the other hand, the man is only there because the thing is; the thing that is, that used to be human.

Maybe this is how it works: sitting but not quite touching the thing that is, this is the closest he can get to the being that was; and if he sits there long enough, he may even be able to reconcile himself to the fact that ‘is’ and ‘was’ are irreconcilable.

Or perhaps it’s nothing of the sort, and he’s only there, looking with infinite tenderness upon the hidden corpse of a lost loved one, because he can’t contemplate being anywhere else.

#44 Hebdo Killers: Sont-Ils Charlie, Aussi?

January 15, 2015

Don’t I know you, Cherif and Said Kouachi? Your cropped hair and dead-eye stare seem familiar. And I think I know where you got that blank expression: not in the East, but west of Budapest.

Far from fundamentalist, the brutal story of the Brothers Kouachi is a parable of les temps modernes; from shooting the satirists (violent disaffection with graphic disillusion), to ‘death by cop’ – the only possible outcome of their shoot-out with les flics.

What could be more Left Bank than coming to life by reference to death? Compare theBrothers K to the chapter in Sartre’s Iron in the Soul where his alter ego Mathieu Delarue finds authenticity by firing on German soldiers: it’s a Paris match.

Agreed, the trappings are different. Yet the brothers’ actions were no more Islamic thanThe Mummy is Egyptian; instead of The Koran, more in keeping with Kenneth Anger’s disdain for America’s discredited dreamland. They wanted in on the new spectacle which contemptuously consumes Koran and Kardashians, Raskolnikov and kalashnikovs alike.

Rather than killing an Arab, this time the Arabs did the killing. Not that Islam made them do it – nor the new spectacle; more that the West failed to make them into anything else.

So you wannabe a rock’n’roll star?

February 3, 2013

School-age children rapping his name to the beat of a djembe drum (djembe meaning ‘everyone gather together in peace’: life imitating spin – but better), arriving in Timbuktu to a rapturous reception President Hollande may even have considered crowd-surfing – launching himself off the gunmetal plane and into the shifting dunes of desert peoples below. It surely was his School of Rock moment: Hollande had come to congratulate French troops and soldiers from neighbouring African countries for liberating northern Mali; he clearly relished this ‘very emotional’ day. Stiffening slightly in the presence of the military, loosening his gait in the midst of the African crowd (they’re so loose-limbed, y’know), Hollande is congratulating himself…..for taking on the colours of his surroundings. He feels like the Lizard King; he’s more like a chameleon. In response to keywords – terrorist, Islamist, linked-to-Al-Qaeda; keen to be seen to be decisive, the president of France launched an invasion force without thinking about how to get it out again. In search of a shared national experience, Hollande has plunged the tricolour back into the long-running conflict between the Malian mainstream and increasingly Islamicised Tuareg rebels (not many Tuaregs among the Timbuktu welcome party: liberating the town led to looting their shops) – a conflict inherent in the way the colonial power manipulated its exit from North Africa in the 1960s. Half a century later, Hollande comes back with nothing that would serve to fix the region and/or bring its peoples together. He is only saying: we want you to be able to dress in colourful clothes and play that twangy guitar music which we love so much. French foreign policy as if all the world’s a world music festival. Climbing back onto the plane to fly south to Bamako, the president brushes desert dust off his sleeve. But the consequences of Western intervention are not so readily dismissed. As Neil Kinnock came to regret hectoring a Labour crowd ‘Are y’all right? Are y’all right?’ at the climax of his 1992 general election campaign, Hollande will have to face the discord from his big gig in Mali. read more

President of Self-Consciousness, Washington

May 30, 2012

In the White House, the new French president faces the press alongside Barack Obama. Monsieur Francois Hollande is dumpy and speccy compared to the iced-coffee elegance of his host. Although Obama stumbles over his visitor’s name (hesitates, then over-frenchifies it), it is Hollande who is somehow in the wrong. Instead of simply being the President of France on his first visit to Washington, he is also thinking that he is the President of France on his first visit to Washington; that kind of thinking which is one step removed from being there, doing it. Hollande only has to sit still while Obama introduces him to the Washington press corps. Naturally, Obama followed the ‘remarkable’ election in which Hollande ousted Sarkozy. Of course, having read his biography, Obama knows that as a young man Hollande spent time in America studying fast food. Meanwhile we can see the President of France wriggling in and out of his own skin: one moment inside himself; next second, beside himself. At the end, he chips in with a line about French fries and you only wish he hadn’t.

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#92 After The Truck Stopped In Nice

#44 Hebdo Killers: Sont-Ils Charlie, Aussi?

So you wannabe a rock’n’roll star?

President of Self-Consciousness, Washington