Jeremayakovka

Tariq Hat Trick

David Solway's third recent article on Tariq Ramadan.

See also Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi.

Kafir Caveat Again

David Solway again on Tariq Ramadan, whose memoir could justly be titled Dreams From My Grandfather.

Cortázar: "Walking in Paris Means Moving Forward Toward Myself"

Kafir Caveat

David Solway on Tariq Ramadan.

Happy Easter

Catholic: Is Paris Praying? (w/ pics)
Gospel: According to Al Green (w/ video)

More Midcentury Virile Thinking - Romain Gary

This time, from Frenchman Romain Gary who in 1970 published a splendid, sardonic memoir about racism in America, White Dog (Chien Blanc). In the late 1960s he was married to American-born film star Jean Seberg and the two were living in the Hollywood Hills. She pursued her acting career while he served as French Consul in Los Angeles. Gary shows Seberg becoming radicalized and manipulated by the emerging Black Power movement (caught up in what later became known as "radical chic"), whereas he serves as a jaded witness to America's and Jean's upheavals.

In one of several instructive passages, Gary cuts to the quick about Islam's appeal to black militants -- how it provides, almost literally, a fantastic cover for their antisemitism, their racism, and their anti-intellectualism:

I find the idea of an antisemitic black very seductive. I'm inclined to observe that the blacks "need" Jews like everybody else does.

This antisemitism is due partly to the comedy of Arabism and Islamism which extremist blacks play out in search of a spiritual elsewhere. Ninety-nine point nine percent are completely unaware that that the Arab conquerors were their ancestors' unremitting slaughterers, destroyers of tradition and the true African religion which was animist. They don't know that the Arabs converted blacks to Islam by the power of the sword in the same name and at the same time that they transformed the least resilient into eunuchs and sold their human goods to Portuguese, British, or American slave traders...

It would be unfair and unworthy to bear a grudge against today's Arabs and to cause them grief for the crimes of their ancestors, which at the time weren't crimes. Nothing is more far-fetched than to want to judge past centuries through today's eyes. But to go from there to seeing in Islam the incarnation of the soul of Africa means covering quite a few light years. When Malcolm X writes about white people, "How could I love the man who raped my mother, killed my father, and reduced my ancestors to slavery?" that nevertheless is exactly what he did when he threw himself into the arms of the Prophet...

Illiterate Gypsy Chants For French Vedette

Even insecure civilizations beating geopolitical and cultural retreats display flashes of verve and gusto. Here flamenco guitar great Manitas de Plata works the strings for screen idol Brigitte Bardot.

Now And Zen Cohen

I have abdicated the throne
both the temporal and the spiritual
-- Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

[Welcome, readers referred by online muses, Fausta's Blog and Atlas Shrugs and Alarming News.]

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Yesterday I read the bestselling collection of latter-day Leonard Cohen poetry and drawings, Book of Longing. Read it start-to-finish and in silence, the way it's intended, I sense. For one thing, the bulk of it was written inside a Zen monastery.... A daintier presenter will give readers leave to "pick and choose" through this 229-page volume, but Jeremayakovka does not advise that.

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Leonard's longing is longer than any of the Book of Longing's 100-something individual compositions and 40-something drawings. The little works smolder in the ear and/or eye, bolder than quips or limericks yet shy of odes or elegies. Taken individually in short-footed, almost sing-song cadence, their form contradicts the pretended gravity of Leonard's notoriously heat- (and wet-) seeking flesh. Some of the Book of Longing's freshest moments are stringent admissions of his own, often priapic, aporias. Out of context they would rate as just an old man's dirty dunceries. Here they ring in deadpan, almost comic relief:

still looking / at the girls / but there are / no girls / none at all / there is only / (this'll kill ya) / inner peace / & harmony (p. 207)

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Leonard is neither gone nor forgotten of course, but either state can turn inert. Neither guarantees a just appreciation. For "appreciation" without estimation is flattery; if not, it might render one vulnerable to flattery. One thing Leonard reminds by the Book of Longing is that he's always longed for order. Not an angelic order (his order being baser), but something closer to that of Rilke who elegized Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen? Who, if I cried out, would hear me out of the orders of the angels?

Still, the Canadian Jew is not as transcendent as his German predecessor. Leonard's verses (as Rilke's) do not scream so much as murmur, murmuring of the heart while filtering through feminine flesh. This order is, as it must be, of Leonard's own devising. The trick (and this is every artist's acid bath) is that it also be a calling, and that the calling, if it doesn't do the devising, then revises it.

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Whatever may be Crooner Leonard's proven power, Poet Cohen writes at times in the baffled habit of the ex-monk. The habit fits too close for confidence as well as for comfort. Wrestling not with an angel, the ex-monk eats the embarrassment of having stumbled out of that order. His witness  is always to a kind of beauty. It's just that the witness is sometimes lowly and at most just short of holy. Or holy only inadvertently (see p. 207, above):

taxes / children / lost pussy / war / constipation // the living poet / in his harness / of beauty // offers the day / back to g-d (p. 175);

Anyone who says / I'm not a Jew / is not a Jew / I'm very sorry / but this decision / is final "Not a Jew" (p. 158)

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--Hypocrite Leonard,--mon semblable,--mon frère!
--Mon vieux,--mon pauvre,--mon debonaire!
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the road is too long / the sky is too vast / the wandering heart / is homeless at last (p. 215)
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(p. 167)

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For you, Gentle Reader. Verses I jotted, and worked, since opening the Book of Longing:
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Fanfare

My genius is an anchor
Grappling o'er the waves.
Hauled 'weigh by steaming Rancor
The calm seabed it craves.

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This Birthmark On My Skin

Thinking about my father
Gets in the way of thinking
About the men I admire.
Which is how he thinks
About his father.

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California Hotel #1

Having me put out of mind
Once inscribed I on your heart,
     Your inmost rind
     Is where they'll find
Your torrents bloodying my mark.
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California Hotel #2

Come! Nibble at my rotted heart.
Speed your tongue along wormworn trails.
Pay no heed when the thing falls apart.
     Feed then, Liebe. Bitte,
     Feed on the frittered entrails.

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Tenderloin Hotel #1

You know it is no casting chore
     to lick you by the bushel.
Just nod a knee to bid me more
     or sigh my first initial.
How tyrant Time tricks every whore.
     Dare you defy the benevolent official?
Go, then! Anoint your imperious store
     whose lounging supple diadem
     wrings reign o'er brittle thistle.
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Contemplation

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Totalitarian tyranny is built not on the virtues of totalitarians
but on the vices of liberals.
-- Albert Camus

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The drawing I did back in 1993. (The model was written up most justly in the book The Undressed Art.) The quote is from Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947, "Why Spain?" (p. 301), reviewed by Erika Dreifus.

Wretched Gentile Becomes Righteous Gentile

In Claude Lelouch's version of Les Miserables (1995) Jean-Paul Belmondo (best-known as the young romantic thief in Breathless) plays an aging truck driver who tries to save a Jewish family during WWII.

Hugo's masterpiece is palpable and oceanic. It significantly affected Whittaker Chambers compelling him to seek out the Communist Party to try to do right in the world (which he confesses early on in Witness).

In contrast to the truck-driving desperados of Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear), it could also be titled Le Salaire de l'espoir (The Wages of Hope).

So what that the following video is French-only -- What are you, deaf? -- Let the mellow chanson roll over you....

And of course it's a little sentimental and lusty -- it riffs off of these posts

Yay for the righteous Yanks!

Time For Some Jewish Resistance - "The Partisan," Performed By Leonard Cohen

To be victorious in the long run you need a tradition of fighting, you need myths and martyrs' haloes -- otherwise national character will fall into decay.
-- Edward Kuznetsov

Leonard Cohen, the most famous renderer of "The Partisan," performs live this originally Russian-French ballad of survival behind Nazi lines. He sings in English and French, with the video offering Spanish subtitles. Many songs of anti-Nazi resistance songs have been sung -- in Yiddish and in Russian, especially. This one's a treat for lovers of Romance languages everywhere.

That might be John Bilezikjian on the oud (I'm pretty sure that's an oud), I'm not sure. (He's one of the outstanding personnel on Field Commander Cohen).

"The Partisan": words by Emmanuel D'Astier de la Vigerie [link in French only], music by Anna Marly. Described in her obituary as "the troubadour of the French Resistance," Marly was the daughter of deposed Russian aristocrats (pictured below).

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For French & Yiddish songs, try Sarah Gorby's The Unforgettable Songs of the Ghetto [Gorby link in Russian only].

English version of the original "Chant des Partisans":

My friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains?
My friend, do you hear the dulled cries of our countries in chains?

Oh, friends, do you hear, workers, farmers, in your ears alarm bells ringing?
Tonight all our tears will be turned to tongues of flame in our blood singing!

Climb up the from mine, out from hiding the pines, all you comrades,
Take out from the hay all your guns, your munitions and your grenades;

Hey you, assassins, with your bullets and your knives, kill tonight!
Hey you, saboteurs, be careful with your burden, dynamite!

We are the ones who break the jail bars in two for our brothers,
hunger drives, hate pursues, misery binds us to one another.

There are countries where people sleep without a care and lie dreaming.
But here, do you see, we march on, we kill on, we die screaming.

But here, each one knows what he wants, what he does with his choice;
My friend, if you fall, from the shadows on the wall, another steps into your place.

Tomorrow, black blood shall dry out in the sunlight on the streets.
But sing, companions, freedom hears us in the night still so sweet.

My friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains?
My friend, do you hear the dulled cries of our countries in chains?

Love In The Time Of Necrophilia

Even if a husband lives ... two hundred fucking years ... he's never going to be able to discover his wife's real nature.

Welcome to "an Atlas lovers art thread" (Thanks, Pamela):

Better in many ways than his iconic turn in Apocalypse Now, but to many Americans less relevant probably, is Brando's tour de force in The Last Tango in Paris. Here's even more Brando, by quality and quantity, than in The Godfather. "This is one of those performances that goes beyond acting into something more confrontational." It goes without saying that the above scene hits harder if you're watching the whole flick.

The Last Tango in Paris is not about sex per se, no matter how famous (or infamous), no matter how startling, how unprecedented those scenes. It's about the infiltrating onset of decay -- the decay of ideas and possibilities, of desires and affections, all sheltering but festering lustfully still in a mind housed agonizingly in the flesh. It's about the decay of that flesh -- flesh livid and vivid, alluring and onerous, porous and odorous, yielding and unyielding. Whether stumbling, agog with helpless wonder and hesitant trust, upon life's fullest vigor, or contemplating with bracing bewilderment and piercing bitterness its incrementally impending exit, The Last Tango in Paris is decay by degrees. It is decay on the installment plan.... Not coincidentally, the film also sifts the diminishing returns of the barbed shards of shattered historical expectations -- revolutionary, colonial, decolonial. (Note well, apart from this clip, a certain earlier monologue, plus two later dialogues.)

The vigor of The Last Tango in Paris is a vigor mortis, its love a love in the time of necrophilia.

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 6) - "Close, But No Cigar"

A journalist asked Bill Clinton whether French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal conformed to his idea of a beautiful woman. He said, "Close, but no cigar."
-JMK

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For previous "Chillin', Not Trillin" click here.

French Idol, Round 2 - Ségo's Dangerous Socialist Rhetoric

This is not a military war only, it is even more a spiritual, intellectual, and political debate.
-- Bat Ye'or, author of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis
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This Sunday's French presidential election runoff between socialist Ségolène Royal and center-right Nicolas Sarkozy offers an opportunity to consider more closely the final candidates' stated principles in an election that will have ramifications not just for France but for all of Europe and the entire liberal West. Regardless of outgoing President Jacques Chirac's Just say NON! policy on American and Israeli military interventions against the Baath Party of Iraq, Hezbollah, potentially Iran, and most recently even the Taliban, France can no longer ignore its place on the frontline of Islam's jihad. Saturday's runoff  is the république's referendum on just what political will it's going to muster (or not muster) in order to confront (or not confront) its failed immigration and integration policies and, as a consequence, demographic threats to its viability as a free Western nation. So with the American presidential campaign already shaping up as a referendum on the Bush Doctrine, France once more has the opportunity to offer the world some enlightenment.

Socialist Party standard-bearer Ségolène Royal invites special scrutiny. A colonial colonel's daughter who inherited a strict Catholic upbringing, she has bucked traditional family structures while pursuing an ascendant public career on the Left. Should she manage to capture the presidency (Sarkozy has long been the front-runner, though not by much), she would upset not just electoral expectations, but long-held calculations about how, exactly, a woman might carry 20th Century "progressivism" into the 21st Century. Beginning Sunday morning, Down with Maggie and Angela! Up with Ségo and Hillary! could become the rallying cry for a post-60s Left that would have come full circle by finally conquering the center. (The presidential victories of Bill Clinton, the first major-power head of state to have come of age during the 60s, were each delivered by a plurality.) Comparisons with Democratic presidential front-runner Rodham Clinton -- the Goldwater Girl turned Saul Alinksy student, Watergate lawyer, and longtime marital ally of this generation's most scandalous adulterer -- are not just inevitable but irresistible. Everything is possible! insists one French socialist pol (also a woman), in a not so mild reprise of May '68. But is it?

Given these stakes, what can and should be resisted is Ségo's 21st Century socialism. Since she circulates in a French political culture which has long accommodated socialist and even explicitly communist platforms, it should come as no surprise that this former protegée of François Mitterand sets hers forth unapologetically, even elegantly. A Ségo victory would only sweeten the temptation to go down a socialist path, one from which even some Democrats, seeing nothing but strange, Big Brother-like fruit in the prospect of a Rodham Clinton presidency, already recoil.

Yesterday I found a YouTube video of a portion of a telling speech Ségo delivered back in February in which she outlined her future vision while making tall claims for France's socialist legacy. When I next have some time, I will comb through it, connect more dots, and report back....

French Idol, Round 1 - The Battle of the Campaign Videos

And now for two things completely different.

On one hand ... the rockingest, most techno, most pop presidential campaign video you may ever see. From center-right, Union for the Popular Movement candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, it features his official campaign song, Sarko - Oh! - Oh! and is guaranteed to -- pump -- you -- up.

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And on the other ...  a polished conversation with performance by Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal. Here, in addition to her long record of public service, she emphasizes her reconciliation of private and public duties and her appreciation of voters' "concrete" concerns. [*]

Vive la République! Vive la France!

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[*]: Here also Ségo suggests that her true colors are red more than white or blue. "Concrete" (which she employs multiple times in this pitch) is a buzzword by which to insist on material evidence of socialist beliefs. In The God That Failed Arthur Koestler points out that German Communist Party members typically pestered him about whether his analyses of situations were sufficiently "concrete". That's how I conceive of politics, affirms Ségo.

The 1950 Nobel Prize Ceremonies - It Just Doesn't Get Any More Pompous Than These Circumstances

Had Ingmar Bergman never made it as a director, he might have ended up making rent through cheesy side work like what you see in the video (below). Solemn, self-important, and self-satisfied as only the face of Old Europe peeking out from behind its (soon to be post)modernist, excessively secular mask could ever be, here's a Swedish newsreel of the penguin-suited, stuffed-shirted ceremonies that bestowed the Nobel Prizes of 1950. Note the massive formal banquet in the 9th and final minute. I don't know about you, Gentle Reader, but given the nearness in time of the Nazi era, I must confess a Riefenstahlesque frisson at the sight of those rows of uniformed diners. A lonely thought, perhaps, but one in which I trust I'm not alone....
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Our boy Bill accepts his prize at 6:45. Rumor has it the down home romancier got deep into his cups before making one of the most exhortatory Nobel acceptance speeches ever. Hell, I would too were I being recognized for a lifetime of tackling the great reducing topics of adultery, incest, and lynching ... of broken promises and prison breaks ... of living with the dead and of surviving living ... all enmeshed in a regional American context, glossed with tsunamic linguistic force gleaned from the Judeo-Christian tradition. O Bill, you were our man at the 1950 awards ceremonies: a Marshall Plan of the mind from Mississippi....
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It's hard to watch this short and not start to grasp what Ingmar Bergman had to get away from in order to get to in, say, his first feature, Ode to Joy (1950, left), about the drama behind a classical musician's struggle to rediscover meaning after enormous personal tragedy -- or somewhat later in Through a Glass Darkly (1961, right), with its play-within-a-play and novelist/father-daughter & novelist/father-son subplots. Like certain European writers of that  burgeoning decade (think Albert Camus and Kateb Yacine) Bergman may well have been shouldering, in cinema, the import of Faulkner on the European mind. Of necessity, this would have entailed sidestepping the phenomenon of Faulkner....
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I don't hate the Nobel Prize! I don't hate it! I don't hate it! I don't....
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"The Battle of Algiers" - A Black & White Blueprint For Full-Color Fauxtography

* Updated * (Naomi Ragen emails that Frida Ghitis confirms this post with "How the Media Partnered With Hezbollah: Harvard's Cautionary Report")
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Last night I screened The Battle of Algiers for the first time since last summer's (unfinished) war between Israel and Hezbollah. Gillo Pontecorvo's Academy Award-winning masterpiece is in some ways a great dramatic record of the tragically implacable, anti-colonial war that ravaged Algeria's people and countryside for nearly a decade while leading directly to the downfall of France's Fourth Republic. The definitive English-language history of this 1954-62 conflict, Alistaire Horne's worthwhile A Savage War of Peace, is so titled for good and terrible reason. (Horne, btw, is on record chiding America's forward strategy of toppling Saddam Hussein.)
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Similar to Picasso's Guernica which had become (after the damage was done) lionized as Europe's definitive objet d'art commemorating all victims of fascist aggression, La Battaglia di Algeri became in the succeeding generation something similar: Europe's definitive objet d'art, extolled in the service of (perceived) anti-colonial, (perceived) aspirations.  With still panel and flickering image attempting to refract war's gory horror through prisms of unblinking moral lucidity, it's no surprise that director Gillo Pontecorvo chose to depict his subjects in black & white. Within that, however, are also many shades of gray. Thus we see in The Battle of Algiers artistic expression of necessary aspirations for independence, self-determination, and peaceful coexistence among all peoples. At the same time, it directly inspires the cult of armed revolution which in turn has spawned endless apologias for the exceedingly and unfailingly cruel list of tin-pot genocidal masters -- from Ernesto Guevara to Idi Amin to Pol Pot to Yasser Arafat to Saddam Hussein to Robert Mugabe -- not to mention independent Algeria's road to its own, homegrown, and precarious socialism. Uncritical screenings of this objet d'art , then, screen damage that continues to be done by dictatorial movements, both the aspiring and the realized.
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In terms of the poster art, note how the above image seems handily handspun from otherwise disparate, but equally strident, visual styles of inter-war Social Democratic pacifist Käthe Kollwitz and post-war Marxist-Leninist Huey Newton. Are the politics of The Battle of Algiers marching forward to socialism? Retreating backward from barbarism? Going round and round in the night consumed by fire? Reflecting neoconservative concerns, are its politics somehow now, nearly two generations later, marching backward to barbarism -- which is to say, retreating forward to socialism? The latter-day result is that -- from street agitators to the academiklatura and minds in between -- the Left adores The Battle of Algiers, to the point where it has elevated (that is, reduced) it to cult status. One thing I'll propose is that the West's inability (or refusal) to arrive at clear determinations about its own history -- and the attendant, staggering spiritual uncertainties -- have created an intellectual vacuum which postmodernism now most ponderously, with a kind of diffuse determination, fills.

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In the meantime, a mental note I took during last night's screening. In one of several fauxtography scandals during last year's Israel-Hezbollah war, the New York Times published advertised a demonstrably staged photo-op of the devastation effected by Israel's aerial bombardment of southern (i.e., Hezbollah-headquartered) Beirut (below). By a kind of visual verbatim, the pose in the news image seems not just staged but copied from images of a sequence halfway through the The Battle of Algiers. It's right after colonial police, acting under an exacerbated but concentrated authority, have blown up a building in the Arab casbah, and its residents (to paraphrase Jim Morrison) bring out their dead (above). Real warfare, real damage, real suffering, and real reportage aside, the latter-day result is neither drama nor journalism, but melodrama -- and melojournalism!

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See Michelle Malkin's substantive post for in-depth treatment of this and other recent fauxtography scandals.

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The dead speak: Poor mountain folk, poor students, poor young people -- your enemies of tomorrow will be worse than those of today.
-- Mouloud Feraoun (1913-1962)

Bonus: Leonard Lopate's sensitive, informative interview of U. of Nebraska prof James Le Sueur re Mouloud Feraoun. (Prof. Le Sueur has written a methodical and highly readable introduction to the French-Algerian War, which appears within his introduction to Mouloud Feraoun's Journal 1954-1962.)

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Defining the enemy, at home and abroad, that's our first task.

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Previous: "Hezbollah, Mon Amour" "Lesbollah"

Souad Massi - "Bladi"; with Marc Lavoine - "Paris"

If you haven't yet heard of Souad Massi, you've been missing out. This Algerian- born folk-pop-rock singer, whose star has consistently risen in France, is one of our generation's most beloved francophone cross-cultural chanteuses. Here's an intro to her life and career; here's an interview; here's Souad's official site (in French).
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"Bladi" is her pop-protest antiwar standard. Unlike American "antiwar" singers, Souad comes from a land that throughout the 1990s suffered 200,000 dead (of a total population of merely 30,000,000) in an Islamic-fueled civil war. So I don't grudge her direct call for an end to war, period. Although since the recent 4/11 al-Qaeda bombing in Algiers, I say it's time to write a new and improved version.

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Since "Bladi" is in Arabic and French, Gentle Reader, if you don't understand either you'll just have to take your chances and trust me (who can get by in one of them). Her own introduction: I call for an end to war. It's a completely naive song, but for an artist that's the only way to say that you're against wars, that you're against all human stupidity, against all forms of oppression that can exist. There's definitely something to be said -- for an artist -- about the supreme importance of naivete. For a politician naivete is deadly, but for an artist it's how hope springs eternal.

The chorus:

Earth has become a hell
Fire has burned up the spring
Stop making war
You're making war on children

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That's Souad's style: naive, truly felt, softly delivered. It puts me in the same camp with Amardeep: I don't know Arabic, but after hearing what Souad Massi does with the lanaguage I wouldn't mind learning. From NPR (audio w/ sound clips): In her own small way, she's become a small feminist cult figure for Algerian women.
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A more alluring sample is the hit duet of "Paris" she recorded with French pop star Marc Lavoine. Two-parts sensual and one-part brainy, it's a hymn to rootless cosmopolitans everywhere. I sing with her every chance I get, Marc introduces her. I just might, too.

Marc LAVOINE & Souad MASSI-Paris(live)
Uploaded by hakim93200

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Now you can say you first heard of Souad Massi from Jeremayakovka.

Post-Partum Aggression

Can't let this one pass unnoticed: Muslim husband assaults gynecologist for attending his wife after she's given birth.

Fouad ben Moussa burst into the delivery room at a Paris hospital last November and shoved, slapped and insulted Dr Jean-Francois Oury as he examined the woman after a complicated birth, the prosecution said in court on Wednesday.

Police had to intervene to remove him.

Ben Moussa, a 23-year-old lorry driver, apologised for the attack and said he had requested a female doctor. French state hospitals comply with such requests when staffing permits but say patients must accept treatment from the doctors on duty.

Of course, other questions need to be asked in order to fully understand what went down: Had the patient herself requested a female doctor? (unclear) Had the hospital carelessly assured her or M. Moussa that a female doctor would attend? (unlikely) And so on. One thing is clear from the outset: M. Moussa viewed Dr. Oury's professional care as an aggression (and no doubt a "humiliating" one). Another thing clear is that this incident is not isolated:

French media have reported cases in recent years of Muslim men barring male doctors from treating their wives, sometimes resorting to violence....

Bukowski - L'Ineffable Éructation Exécrable

* (02/19/08) Welcome, Stumbleupon readers. Actually, I was in North Beach today and I was invited to an upcoming poetry reading. *

Today's guest poet in JMK's "Burn that MFA!" series is ...  Charles Bukowski!

This may lose me invitations to return to North Beach to join upcoming poetry readings ... but ... I'm just not particularly a fan of Bukowski's œuvre nor of his status as counterculture icon. One exception, granted, is a poem in this anthology because it laments the rivers of sorry, derivative so-called poetry that typically pollute any poetry "scene." (I've heard more than my fill, as CharBu must have, too.) If you would like more info on the guy, try this guy who wrote a book about him. Or better, just read him.

Despite my admitted prejudice I recommend the following clip (below) of a Bukowski appearance on the French literary television show Apostrophes. It's the picture of a man who's followed his own path, who's being trailed by a pack of stiffer and stuffier Frenchies. The moderator does his best to handle what he was handed -- an unenviable job if there ever was one (though he ends up functioning as the dullards' point man, their enforcer). So stick with it -- even if you can't follow the French -- by letting its non-verbal aspects work on you. I can't deny that in a roundabout way CharBu makes me proud to be an American.

As for the cigarette-weaving, wine-slugging persona he projects, and, as you'll see in the video, him dropping comments about beautiful whores and panty hose, take them as saucy metaphors for living up to Baudelaire's thunderous exhortation to "Enivrez-vous" ("Get drunk"):

De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise!

See? It doesn't have to be -- usually shouldn't be -- from wine that we get drunk. More often than from wine, poetry! And more often than from poetry, virtue! I've tried all three and virtue works the best. There's the lesson to be drawn from CharBu! Or rather, despite him. For who gets drunk from virtue nowadays? I mean drunk ... but ... from virtue. Don't mistake it for quaint, because it's not:

Let's get drunk -- from virtue! 
(Start with any of virtue's definitions provided here.)

"But ... How ...?" you may ask, perplexed, and even annoyed.

Ah! that's for you to figure out ....

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(Video clip found at No Pasaràn!)

Whew, what a mug! Looks like Bert Lahr with elephantiasis.

The Clash - à la française

Remember those trendy reggae-rhythmic punked out Clash tunes you use to try to get "into" while probing for an anti-establishment cultural vein? You know, songs like "White Riot" and "Armagideon Time"? Maybe you didn't, but for a while during college I did.  Until I realized that there really is no great "voice of the people," or of "the revolution." This caused me great dismay, at first: I didn't/couldn't/wouldn't believe that were so. Now I know better. (ftr: Don't get me wrong, The Clash did have original power, thinking for example of "The Card Cheat"....)

I mention that band because this story of awful news from France shows just how dangerous is the Big Leftwing Radical Myth of "Urban Rebellion." The decrepit social reality of France's banlieues and their inevitable rebellions demonstrate not so much an ardent need for change from below but for change from above.

What will the French state do?

(I reproduce this article in full here because Yahoo! News pulls all its stories not long after publishing them.):

French Police The Target In Urban Guerilla War

By Jon Boyle
Mon Nov 27, 11:29 AM ET

Stoned, beaten and insulted, their vehicles torched by crowds of hostile youths, French police say they face an urban guerrilla war when they enter the run-down neighborhoods that ring the major cities.

"Our role is to guarantee the safety of people and property but the great difficulty today is that police are having problems ensuring their own safety," said Jerome Hanarte of the Alliance-Police Nationale union.

Bedside television interviews with officers hospitalized after beatings in "les banlieues," or suburbs, support statistics showing a 6.7 percent jump in violent crime in the 12 months to August.

Fourteen officers are hurt every day in the line of duty, unions estimate, and law and order is sure to feature prominently in next year's presidential election.

The head of the French crime statistics body told Reuters the rise in attacks on police was partly due to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy's 2002 decision to order police back into tough areas, to disrupt the black economy that fuels crime.

Some residents complain the move spawned constant police harassment which has only exacerbated tensions with local youths, many of whom come from ethnic minorities.

"You can see discrimination in ID controls," complained Kader Latreche, 36, an Algerian with his own photo equipment repair shop in the La Courneuve suburb.

"Why is it always people from the Maghreb or black people who are being stopped and checked? If it happens over and over again, it gets to you. People are frustrated, that's obvious."

CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE

How much those frustrations are driving the violent reaction to police is hard to gauge but Nicolas Comte, general secretary of the Syndicat General de la Police (SGP), said officers now face guerrilla warfare in the suburbs.

"The simple presence of men in uniforms in some areas is no longer a provocation but a declaration of war in the minds of some louts," he told a recent police union rally.

The spike in violence has sharpened the political debate and the left is demanding a return to community policing, with more officers on the beat making contacts with local people.

Sarkozy, favorite to represent the mainstream right in next year's elections, says police are paid to detect crime, not play the social worker.

Dispirited officers complain they are caught in the middle.

"The latest insult I got was 'Sarko's suppo' (suppository) -- so I don't know if it's the police officer who is the target or our minister that's the cause of the problem," said a plain clothes officer in the tough Seine-Saint-Denis district.

Sarkozy is a hate figure for many suburban youths and his strong language about delinquents is blamed by many for fomenting last year's suburban riots in which some 8,000 vehicles were torched along with schools, creches and other public buildings.

Karine Guigon, a police officer and SGP union official in a suburb south of Paris, says the security forces have become society's nursemaids.

"We are there to apply the sticking plaster pretty much everywhere. But the follow-up work isn't done," she said.

Guigon joined the force 10 years ago, attracted by the contact with the public and the chance to make a difference on the street with wayward youngsters. In the intervening period, society at large has done little to improve matters.

"Ten years ago, when I worked in the education system, teachers were being told to educate youngsters because the parents couldn't manage to any more," Guigon said.

"Ten years later, I'm working in the police and we're being told to help youngsters because the education system and the parents aren't succeeding."

FALSE DEBATE

Guigon favors a return to the community policing approach abandoned by Sarkozy in 2002, but not all her colleagues agree.

"It's a false debate," said Hanarte, whose union is generally supportive of Sarkozy and wants judges to take a tougher stance against delinquents.

"Why put foot patrols in these districts if they will be systematically attacked by youngsters, who are repeatedly arrested and then systematically released by the justice system?

"Having police in these areas can only be a good idea if, beforehand ... police have arrested the delinquents in the suburbs. You have to start by that, restoring a certain calm."

Calm is a long way off.

The plain clothes officer in Seine-Saint-Denis said seven colleagues were attacked recently after chasing a driver who skipped a checkpoint. Their vehicle was torched and they narrowly escaped serious injury.

"The high number of officers hurt means that police themselves don't feel safe," he said.

"That's pretty serious, because if police don't feel safe, you can imagine what the ordinary citizen feels," added the officer who asked not to be identified.

To protect themselves, police often move in large groups -- a tactic youngsters say is heavy-handed and overly aggressive.

Comte says the threat to police is so great in some neighborhoods they should exercise their "right to withdraw." That means refusing to respond to emergency calls if they judge they cannot guarantee their own safety.

"Frankly, it's not worth getting your head kicked in for an end of year bonus of 200 euros ($256.8)," said the plain clothes officer.

(Additional reporting by Kerstin Gehmlich)

Riots in France an Imperfect Jihadist Storm

A recent and delicious satire at The People's Cube rewrites an AP version of the ongoing French riots. 

Where AP writes:
Hundreds of youths from the poor, immigrant suburbs that erupted in riots last year marched through Paris Wednesday to present a collection of 20,000 complaints to lawmakers and urge the disenfranchised to make themselves heard with a vote, not violence ....

PC rewrites:
Mobs of Muslim ingrates who should be in jail after last year's uproar, had the nerve to march through Paris today with a list of 20,000 complaints. Isn't it nice to come to someone else's country, live off its dwindling wealth, and march the streets with 20,000 complaints about it?...

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I strongly appreciate PC's un-PC rewrite of the news item, but to it I also add that the problems facing the French state are greater and graver than, I think, any of us would like to admit. For example, merely locking up tens of thousands of violent youths would continue putting off a constructive confrontation with the issue or, at most, be but a first step.

I see these riots as operating in a vacuum of French civic authority, with the clear and present danger that they are -- to an exponentially increasing extent -- becoming an organized Islamic "perfect storm." Just such a perfect storm is what the slick, determined imams and terrorist recruiters who loathe their host country hope and aim for. In the blogosphere, of course, it's only the "counter-jihadists" who are calling a jihadist spade a spade; so, OK, we've called that a spade. Now what? For the dynamic of thousands of youths rampaging anarchistically, even if there exists (as I'm convinced) some degree of coordination and calculation, is violence of a different order than that of 19 individuals, some highly educated and multilingual, who trained for years on several continents to hijack jet planes for a spectacular suicide mission.

The bottom line is that the French state has to step in and restore order at all costs immediately. That is the only possible first step towards a constructive solution. Can the French bourgeoisie be so spiritually enervated and economically insulated that it simply hopes "to get back to the way things were"?  That is very, very dangerous.  Letting the riots simmer down on their own would be like wounded prey swatting off attacking hounds, but still lying exposed for the next attack. These rioting youths and jihadist organizers smell and taste blood (literal and metaphoric) and they'll want more -- tomorrow, the next day, and next year. To get back to my original metaphor, these riots are an imperfect storm that's getting more and more perfect by the day.

Agence France Press Scoop: Attack of the Killer Mushrooms!

Wow.... I don't mind that this is some kind of news item.... And I understand that, barring big crises, the weekend is a good time for news sources to float a puff piece. But as a big crisis breaks out in France and neighboring countries, Agence France Press transmits this?!

"Poisonous Mushrooms Leave Three Seriously Ill in France"

French "Intifada" Planned, According to French Intelligence Sources

Pajamas Media's Richard Miniter interviews Paul Belien, Belgian lawyer and journalist and one of the West's most reliable European allies (from that most appropriately named blog, No Pasaran!):

Take note, take heed, take action!

Related:
* Bookmark Belien's online news source, The Brussels Journal, now.
* European authors urge young Europeans to emigrate. "We are watching the world of yesterday," says one. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it," says another. Read, swallow, and digest these lamentable truths at The Brussels Journal. 

* Update 10/28: Looks like a Dutch (or greater European) "intifada" as well.

The Eurabian Civil War in France

The Belmont Club says what needs to be said right now about unruly France:

If even conservatives can develop a political ideology, nothing in principle prevents French youth in the banlieus from developing one of their own. Or prevents them from adopting a proven, culturally familiar ideology which has already survived for longer than European civilization. Why should car-burnings fueled by alienation and joblessness not, at some point, become fueled by ideological Islamism? After all Islamism does have secret organizing cells; a common handbook and training camps. The current attacks on French police may or may not be driven by an ideology, but they certainly can be in the future.

I tacked this link to Belmont inside a recent post, but on second thought now I urge everyone to go read it for himself, in full. For example:

“The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said Bruno Beschizza, the leader of Synergie, a union to which 40 per cent of officers belong. Action Police, a hardline union, said: “We are in a civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists.”

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According to this news item referenced at No Pasaràn!, yesterday a gang of 30 torched a bus in broad daylight in Grigny, France. Hmm, where have we heard of a bus attack sparking a Middle Eastern civil war before? At least this gang evacuated the passengers first. But don't take heart. In this Eurabian civil war, the war is not between rival factions, but between rival societies -- a pompous, rotting French one and an emboldened, enraged, and implacable Islamic one. As you read this the criminal conflagrations are being exacerbated and exploited by Islamic gauleiters in Europe and beyond. How will Gallic Frenchmen, historic Europeans, and other (nominal) Westerners seize this moment?

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Update 10/23: Read and see direct reportage, including footage of French teenagers firing rockets in the streets (via Atlas Shrugs).

"Hurricane Mohammed" Costs French Insurers 160,000,000 Euros

*** Updated ***

A French newspaper reports that last year's nationwide (chiefly Muslim) riots -- which spread like wildfire throughout France, laying waste to dozens of public buildings and businesses and 9,000 cars, trucks, and busses -- cost insurers 160,000,000 Euros (more than US$200,ooo,ooo). $200,000,000 for a nation whose GDP is approximately that of California!  That's a huge bill to pay. Maybe it's time to think of such riots -- past, present, and future -- as "Hurricane Mohammed."

The interested insurance companies are holding the government responsible, which is a natural and necessary direction in which to point fingers. A generation and more of a plainly failed immigration policies has saddled France with a predominantly Muslim underclass that appears permanent and permanently unruly. Can the same French government be trusted to transform France's ethnic tinderboxes into anything socially useful? Barely. In the meantime, we know, radical Islam worked wonders on the mind of one of France's native sons. How many more is it working on right now? Who in the end will save France from its demographic rot (and in turn save the rest of the West from this French rot)?

This past Easter JMK asked, Is Paris Praying? One year after the riots we ask, What price Muslim immigration? What cost? and What benefit? Or as V.I. Lenin would ask, Cui bono? (Who benefits?) Because we know that radical imams, like all implacable, warring enemies, ask themselves that question all the time....

And don't look now, but Hurricane Mohammed is back with ever-mounting costs:

An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France so far this year and there have been 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services. Nearly 3,000 police officers have been injured in clashes this year.

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*** Update ***

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French police officers tell their government: "What are we, chopped foie gras?"

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Update 10/22: The Belmont Club takes a hard look at the situation:

“The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said Bruno Beschizza, the leader of Synergie, a union to which 40 per cent of officers belong. Action Police, a hardline union, said: “We are in a civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists.”

Arrivederci, Fallaci, Fare Thee Well

Now that you were dead, they would listen to you.
-- Oriana Fallaci, A Man

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They called her aggressive, abrasive -- racist, even. Her mind was the fierce, gifted offspring of a most felicitous marriage of reason and emotion: each book an assault on the citadel of postmodern European presumption, each sentence a cavalry charge. Were we to conduct an intellectual autopsy on Oriana Fallaci, were we to behold her brain we would have to compare it to a cannonball; her sex we would have to compare to its etymological source, to a sword's or dagger's sheath.

One of the boldest of contemporary voices of a dying (or rather, long dead) Europe, she was a ferociously indignant echo of what had once been the most harmonious chorus of civilization. Ever. This was a civilization that in the 500-year aftermath of its glorious Renaissance could devise only more and more grotesque ways of betraying its own promise: the Inquisition, the Hundred Years' War, the Jacobin Terror, the Napoleonic Campaigns, the Scramble for Africa, the Great War and its eventual issue, the Great Dictators, each of whom -- the German and the Russian -- bequeathed to posterity (to us) totalized, collectivized, industrialized state murder.

But indignation assures that one's pessimism will never be overwhelming, never quite enervating. Reading Fallaci I sense thrust together the split scream of Antonin Artaud and the unified sublimity of Friedrich Schiller. I hear the cri de coeur from a cryptic public address Artaud gave upon his release from incarceration in an insane asylum -- eight mean, mostly war years during which he incurred dozens of electroshock sessions and the loss of his teeth and much of his hair, but also during which he wrote fully half of his 24 volumes of Collected Works -- the cri de coeur, C'est un vrai désespéré qui vous parle! ("This is a truly desperate man who speaks to you!"). Reading Fallaci I sense that bitter but proud solicitation blended with the admonishing, transcendent aspiration of Schiller's "Ode to Joy" which Beethoven adapted for the finale of his 9th Symphony, after he himself had gone deaf:

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!                   Oh friends, not these sounds!
Sondern lasst uns angenehmere            Let us raise our voices in more
anstimmen, und freudenvollere!           pleasing and more joyful sounds!

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That, to me, is the force of Fallaci's reason. That her mere body, wracked of late with cancer, has perished means little compared to the relentlessness with which in her late years she chastised a dead Europe and exhorted its despised but would-be savoir step-children, America and Israel, to carry on the fight -- our fight -- for civilization worthy of the name. Fallaci was a restless, rambunctious rebuke to all of our intellectuals who have gone deaf, dumb and/or blind in the face of the calamitous threat of Islam.

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Arrivederci, Fallaci. Fare thee well.

(H/T to Asher for the wee-hour heads up on this one.)

* Updated with new links *

Some further tributes:

Iraqi Bloggers Central has the definitive round-up
Stefania
Debbie Schlussel
Michael Ledeen
David Horowitz
Michelle Malkin
Robert Spencer
Judith Weiss
ZionistYoungster
Stop the ACLU.
Gates of Vienna
The Anti-Jihad Pundit

Read the comments at ¡No Pasarán!
A 2002 review of Fallaci's The Rage and The Pride

*New! (9/18)*: Daniel Pipes's informative summary of her career
Say goodbye to Oriana: video footage from her funeral.

* Three galleries of photos * (this one's my favorite):

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