FROGS TO PRINCES

School supplies. Can you believe it? A ten-minute feature on school supplies. Where? Not on a mail order channel, not on a morning show on a minor cable channel in Iowa (excuse me, Iowa) but right smack in the middle of the half-hour prime time news cast. School supplies. Not once, but at least fifteen times. Starting in mid-August.

Some people are getting a jump on things, buying school supplies before the back to school rush. Here’s monsieur so and so in this big supermarket chain, surrounded by packing cases packed with school supplies. He doesn’t have a pencil tucked behind his ear, but he talks as if he does. Yes, they’ve ordered and the shipments have come in, the shelves are stocked and the stock is backed up right here. Long shot of nifty clean warehouse. Pan to the school supplies department. A pretty young mother just happens to be there with a few neat clean children in summer clothes.

Philosophical comments on the price of notebooks, multiplied by the number of children, not to mention but of course she does mention the pencils, the erasers, the rulers, the felt-tip pens and colored crayons, the pencil cases, and a healthy dose of commonsense: of course she tries to avoid the “gadgettes” (French for gimmicks), though it isn’t always easy to resist, the children see the things on television (uh oh, we’re television our own selves!), you know, notebooks with Star Wars, pencils with flashlights…it adds up.

The reportage always ends with a long shot on the book bags. Ah what a splendor of varied choices, and the children approach, eyes shining, and the reporter oohs and aahs over the pleasures of choosing and then, out of respect for individuality, the camera discretely fades out before we know which bag the little darling has chosen.

Palestinians are killing each other, Hizbullah is rearming, hair-raising details about the presumed airplane plot emerge, Iran has said the Persian equivalent of nyet to all carrots and sticks, the banlieue is certainly stewing some exciting new projects for the fall, two Fox news reporters were kidnapped, held hostage, forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint, the blogosphere and a noble sector of the msm in certain enlightened countries is digging up startling evidence of fauxtography, fauxreportages, staged scenes and borrowed battered bodies…none of this is mentioned on prime time news in la République française. All of this is hidden behind a puerile smoke screen of school supplies.

Then suddenly last Friday one whole entire aisle of display shelves collapsed in an Auchan supermarket in the Bordeau region. Over a ton of merchandise fell in one horrific boom! Shoppers were shocked and injured. A nineteen year-old woman suffered a broken neck that would likely leave her paralyzed for life. The supermarket chain promised to investigate.

Impressive, no?

Guess what was on the shelves that collapsed.

Got it?

School supplies! And do you think the TV cameras were there to capture the dramatic incident? Can you see the book bags crushed under a ton of notebooks, pencils, crayons, rulers, erasers, compasses, pencil cases, and gadgets with Star Wars motifs? And the suspense! What if one of those sweet little girls in her summer dress was just about to choose a Barbie book bag when the whole thing came crashing?

Yeah, well let me tell you, I heard a barebones report on the incident on the radio, and that was the first and the last of it. It never hit the prime time news, the whole subject of school supplies disappeared, you’d think it was as taboo as Ahmadinejad’s nuclear toys and exterminationist projects. The kids went back to school, and going back to school became the smokescreen of the week, but school supplies were banished for this year and who knows maybe forever.

I couldn’t find anything more about the great school supplies accident on the radio, it wasn’t in the print media, it may have turned up in the regional newspaper but it never made it to Google. I spent hours trying to trace the story, and finally gave up.

I suppose the Auchan supermarket chain is a big advertiser in all the media. Does that explain why the story was squashed? There’s no hint of anti-Semitism as far as I know, so that wouldn’t explain the sudden silence. Were the workmen who set up the shelving …uh… of immigrant origin? Or maybe illegals?

Or is it just that the entire journalistic population was so stunned at seeing school supplies really become news, that they were left speechless?

Nidra Poller is a novelist, journalist and translator living in Paris.