A Dyke A Broad #79 Obliviots edition
On the upcoming French election, Marine Le Poutine, and a tiny ode to Benadryl and spring.
Hello from Paris!
If I were a dancer, I’d leap around and twirl for you until I was dizzy, then collapse in an artistic heap, unartistically scratching my eyes out in a joyful ode to spring.
But since I’m a writer, I’ll just encourage you to imagine it. The birds atwitter, the naked sun shining, the mild breeze circulating the fucking pollen that the walnut tree in the back garden is fecundly shooting into the air.
At least I can stuff myself with Benadryl at night. There’s no remedy for my allergy to the puke-inducing elections in France where the polls put centrist incumbent Emmanuel Macron ahead of extreme right Marine Le Pen, but not by nearly enough. About 66% of the voters who chose the extreme left populist Mélenchon in the first round have threatened to abstain or cast invalid ballots, including the irony-impaired students at the Ivy-League equivalent Sorbonne who closed down their university this week, denouncing an election featuring Le Pen and Macron whom they, blinded by privilege, find absolutely, 100 percent indistinguishable in their terribleness.
That perspective is only possible because they, after all, aren’t immigrants who will have to pay taxes, but will be refused social benefits like unemployment and health care under Le Pen. They aren’t asylum seekers who will no longer have the right to apply to become residents unless they first go back home to the country they fled. They won’t apply for public housing only to be told they’re at the bottom of an eternally long list because they weren’t born in France. Neither will they be stymied in their quest for naturalization because there are just too many hoops to jump through. Let’s not even talk about the millions of people immediately impacted when Le Pen withdraws from NATO and works to destroy the European Union, abandoning Ukraine to the calculated genocide of her pal Vlad.
No, for them, safely ensconced above the comfortable safety nets of upper and middle class French whiteness, there’s not much difference at all. They can keep their votes pure. Like the Americans who said there’s no difference between Gore and Bush, or Clinton and Trump and abstained or threw away their votes on a no-chance third-party candidate promising all-you-can-eat pie in the glorious, cloudless sky.
Thanks to them, at least in part, we ended up with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the erosion of the judiciary, the imminent end of abortion rights for women in the U.S. including my home state Kentucky which just last week became the first state to essentially end abortion in all cases, even for pregnancies resulting from rape and incest. The last two clinics in Louisville will close. Kentucky doctors won’t even be able to prescribe the “morning after pill.” And while some groups are filing a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the law, the suits will be a moot point if, as expected, the U.S. Supreme Court full of Trump appointees completely overturns Roe v. Wade.
All this of course will be a mere inconvenience for the middle-class and rich who can afford to hop on a plane or drive long distances, but it will be devastating as always for poor women, often women of color and rural women who barely have the cash to fill up their gas tank to get to work.
Meanwhile, every day reveals new atrocities in Ukraine, executions of civilians, mass rape of women and young girls who, if they manage to escape to Poland, are themselves unable to access abortions. Things will get far worse if Le Pen wins. Not that anyone cares. Saturday I went to another demo for Ukraine that was bigger than the last one, but I couldn’t help noticing, included very few French people.
I can’t accuse the privileged French, or folks in the U.S. for being particularly stupid, declaring themselves antiracist, anticapitalist radicals while screwing over immigrants and the poor. (Not to mention women, never them.) This kind of navel-gazing blindness is both universal and timeless. Already a gazillion years ago the prophet Jeremiah was railing against the foolish people “who have eyes, and see not; who have ears, and hear not.” Leaving everybody else to clean up the mess. As the French say, Après nous le déluge. After us, the flood. Somebody else’ll pick up the tab.
EAT THE RICH.
In related news…
A nice pair of long reads from the Atlantic grappling with the effect of social media on democracy.
Why the Last 10 years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.
How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire Our democratic habits have been killed off by an internet kleptocracy that profits from disinformation, polarization, and rage. Here’s how to fix that.
Also
After reading this article, When people say ‘people’ online they may mostly be thinking about men and others like it, you have to wonder if gender neutral language is a scam to maintain the status quo, or even worse, actively erase women. Because it certainly isn’t including anybody except men and men and more men.
Welp, that’s it for this time.
Here’s a pretty picture to take some of the sting out, though don’t blame me if even the sight of a blooming tree provokes uncontrollable sneezes.
Disgruntledly yours,