Frogs to Princes: Paris to Washington, DC

by Nidra Poller | Paris 3 October 2006

The perfect traveler consults TSA’s online list of prohibited-permitted items neatly presented in two columns — cabin baggage, checked baggage. Shotguns, rifles, double-edged swords, machetes, Kalashnikovs and RPGs are “No” in both columns. Toothpaste can be checked in but not carried on. Happily, cell phones, flash memory drives, and laptops are no longer classified in the danger zone with toothpaste and mouthwash. Strangely, nothing is said about chocolates. I decide to check them in this time, out of consideration for security personnel. Can you see them with their gloved hands searching for explosive ganache and lethal praliné in five boxes of luscious Jeff de Bruges chocolates?

My chance remark about current security measures for traveling chocolates served as an introduction to a smooth, rich, ultrafine conversation with the proprietress of our local concession, who graciously filled the boxes with my personal choice. We ran a range of subjects from 9/11 to the illegal immigrants of Cachan, with a long detour through the choked streets of Paris currently smashed and battered by a Socialist Marie-Antoinette mayor who raises a disdainful brow and says “let them take the bus.”

Betrand Delanoë, who does not like cars tracking their dirty wheels through his city, gave free reign to an ecological dictator who has created an Imperial Traffic Jam. My one-woman polling sample deplores this contempt for modernity and commerce. She also deplores her government’s betrayal of the trans-Atlantic alliance. And resents being finagled into contributing to the upkeep of untold illegal immigrants whose fate is currently exploited in the ongoing real life soap opera, Les expulsés de Cachan.

These and other perfectly reasonable opinions expressed by a normal humane French citizen rarely if ever find their way into the mainstream media. They may well find their way into the ballot box… and my guess is that they will go to Sarkozy, not Le Pen. She said as much, though adding well-founded doubts about his capacity to impose the radical changes that are necessary. It may be too late.

Cachan is the cause célèbre of la rentrée. Hundreds of people have been occupying a dorm on the Cachan campus for the past eight years. It was a health hazard, a firetrap, and a usurpation of public property. A few years ago the university got an eviction order. This summer it was finally applied.

Mommas in boubou with babies on their backs and toddlers in tow, husbands, uncles, and bachelors, legal and illegal immigrants, the employed, the underemployed, and the unemployed, all of them looking as if they had stepped out of their African village the day before yesterday, poured out of the building and into the public eye. Temporary housing in hotels was offered, but rejected by most. The socialist mayor of the commune gave them temporary refuge in a school gym… for three days. One month later they are still occupying the gym and don’t intend to move out until they get full satisfaction: residence permits for the illegals and proper housing for all… all together. It would take a hundred years to absorb the current demand for subsidized housing; the economy would collapse under its weight.

In Paris today, middle class wage earners are forced to move out of the city to find housing for a modest family of four: the Cachan refugees need comfortable lodgings for families of ten and, what’s more, it can’t be scattered here and there; they want a reconstituted village, no less. Movie stars like Emmanuelle Béart and Djamel Debouzze photo-op with them, volunteers bring them food and disposable diapers, NGOs and extremist housing rights associations are on the scene. The mayor who offered them the gym is caught in his own trap: either he gets the heartless authorities to pull them out, or he faces the wrath of parents of school children deprived of physical education and exposed to an increasingly unhealthy, tense, and now violent situation.

The media are pumping Cachan for all its worth. It wipes out concerns about Darfur (labeled a “civil war”) and competes with Palestinian “victims of Israeli violence” (labeled unjustified cruelty). The problem is, normal citizens like Madame who sells delicious (Belgian) chocolates, are drawing rather different conclusions and asking tough questions. Even if she didn’t read Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia, she knows there is something illogical in encouraging an unlimited flow of immigrants unequipped to survive in a modern European society, even a decadent declining one. You might ask “how about our immigrant grandparents who came to America as greenhorns?” Yes, how about them? It’s all the difference between a welfare state and a sink or swim free market economy.

Parisian cabdrivers are on strike. Lucky they aren’t public servants. I would have had to carry my luggage on my head like a refugee and make my way to the airport by public transportation, if it wasn’t on strike, too, in solidarité with the suffering cab drivers. I don’t know what they are suffering from, but the strike was partial, and I managed to find a cab to take me to the airport.

Thanks to Delanoe’s ecological vizier it took forever to get out of the city. Actually most of the worksites are inactive. Streets are torn up, half-blocked with hoardings, and most of the sites are idle. The height of ideological incompetence. Sometimes it’s hard to believe how frivolous government officials can be. Whether or not you think cars should be allowed to drive in the city, and even if you appreciate wide tree-shaded sidewalks, you would assume that someone had prepared a comprehensive plan. Apparently not. Paris looks like a playground for spoiled kids who dragged out all their toys, opened all the boxes, dumped out all the pieces, turned everything upside down, and then sat down to watch cartoons on TV.

Baggage handlers at Roissy airport (we freethinkers never call it Charles de Gaulle airport) are also on strike. I don’t know if it is an ongoing thing or a wildcat operation. They didn’t have posters, banners, or leaflets. Just bunched together and snaked through the crowded airport, visible in their orange or green fluo vests. I wonder if they are on strike because they can’t steal from the luggage anymore. No, it’s not a security measure. The last ring of thieves was dismantled recently and it takes time to form a new one. Well, that strike was partial too. No canceled or delayed flights.

Since the London plot, what they call the “supposed” plot, several checkpoints have been added, and scrutiny is visibly increased. I would venture to say that there have been changes in personnel as well. Does it have something to do with the dismantling of a network of illegal Muslim prayer rooms at the airport?

Waiting to check in for my flight I see a young woman, who had obviously neglected to consult the TSA list, pull out lip gloss and do her lips. She wouldn’t be intending to gloss them with explosives and try to kiss the pilot?

Next checkpoint — passport control. Two policemen in glass cages, and two lines: one for Muslims, one for infidels. You think I’m kidding? Two lines. One, slow line for miscellaneous others. One fast track for a party of about twenty escorted by a high ranking border police officer and a female underling, both speaking Arabic, who usher them through the checkpoint with VIP attention. The police officer takes all the passports, calls the passengers to step forward one by one as he hands the passports to the agent on duty who expedites affairs with great speed and minimum attention. Some of the men remove their dark glasses. The women walk through in voluminous black hijab, unperturbed. The last in the line of the privileged few were a family composed of a little boy eating a cookie, his father in casual dress, and his mother, a slim woman, small as a girl, her face completely hidden behind a black veil, only her eyes visible. I wanted to see if she would be asked to lift the veil, but my law-abiding reflexes prevailed over legitimate journalistic curiosity. I assumed I would arouse suspicion if I lingered to gawk at the exotic spectacle.

So I stepped onto the moving sidewalk that leads to the departure gates… and embarked on a conversation with the woman just ahead of me. It turns out she’s a colleague — writes for the Jewish monthly, l’Arche - and had observed the scene with the same surprise and stifled indignation. Who ever heard of border policemen serving as tour guides? Why didn’t we wait to see if the veiled child bride was asked to lift her veil? Well, we didn’t. So our respective reports will be incomplete.

As we waited in line at the last checkpoint I heard the loudspeaker paging a passenger for the flight to Ryadh.

A safe flight, a safe landing. France is obsessed with America but America hardly notices France. It disappears. Resurfaced with the report of bin Laden’s demise, published in l’Est Républicain. Just as quickly dismissed. What could they know about anything?

Only a scrupulously honest reporter would admit to a sudden attack of homesickness. Rosh Hashana, the high holidays in the Marais, old world yiddishkeit spiced with Sephardic intensity. Shops closed, synagogues filled to overflowing, the sound of the shofar awakening the Place des Vosges, men in kippot, women in elegant high holiday dress, haredi families, and such a subtle way of being, for a few short days, the majority in visibility if not in numbers.