Hello from Paris!
This morning, I declared winter officially over, and completely turned off our electric heaters. It’s reassuring to know that spring always comes, the sun always rises, even if it’s over a changed world.
We just got back home after several days in northwestern France visiting Ana’s brother and mom. (Not to mention my friends the ducks). The Mom needs a lot of help, and we’re lucky to be in a country where the government heavily subsidizes home aides. I got to meet a couple new ones, including a cheerful but efficient woman from Colombia, and a West African guy who wasn’t chatty at all but expressed himself with flashes of color in his spotless sneakers and perfect jeans. Our stints together turned into impromptu three-way language lessons. The thing stopping a wheeled chair from rolling is a brake is a frein is a freno.
The Colombian woman and I also had a long chat about how happy we were that Macron won reelection, defeating far-right Marine Le Pen, though the country’s in an uproar again because the first round of legislative elections is June 12. If, as expected, Macron’s party loses his majority, he might be forced to pick a prime minister reflecting the new arrangement, creating what the French call a “cohabitation”.
The extreme left populist demagogue Jean-Luc Mélechon has been rallying his party faithful, making alliances with other groups from the left, and is already printing posters demanding that he be the next PM.
Yikes. I really can’t express how much I hate the guy, and rage at a Left that adores him. I mean, he’s never met a dictator he doesn’t like.
Not just Putin, but Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez and their successors which the Western left has pretended for generations are innocuous, eagerly swallowing any amount of fake news and propaganda from regimes that frame their nations as communist utopias, and blame all their ills on the Yankee power to the north.
So much for the people that are starving in those proletarian paradises because their rulers are grifters and incompetents. So much for how the people who speak up against those regimes are endlessly harassed, jailed or disappeared, sometimes permanently, by their very own murderous cops.
It’s almost like Brown Lives Don’t Matter. Not for the mostly white bourgeois revolutionaries, anyway.
In 2017, when the front-runners for the presidential election were largely the same, Macron, but also Mélenchon and Le Pen, I remember discussions between some Latin Americans and North Africans—all with experiences of dictatorships— about who they would vote for if the final round were between the equally authoritarian extreme right Le Pen, and extreme left Mélenchon.
And even though none of them were white French, a good many quietly admitted they were considering voting for the anti-immigrant Le Pen because they calculated that there would at least be a chance that the usual French lefty suspects would take to the streets to block anything Le Pen did. Whereas if the caudillo-wannabe Mélenchon took office and implemented the exact same policies—other than immigration, maybe—the usual suspects would sit home cheering in their Che tee-shirts, booking vacations to Cuban resorts, and celebrating the demise of that neoliberal fascist dictator Macron.
Hell, what other word is there for a man like him? A guy who oversees a government that subsidizes home aides for the elderly, and when a pandemic strikes makes sure that almost everybody keeps their jobs and the doors of almost every store in the neighborhood are able to stay open—unlike in devastated New York City run until recently by a lefty Sandinista-loving Democrat.
Macron reduced the amount of students in each class in poor immigrant neighborhoods, drastically lowered unemployment, and created welcome apprenticeships, among other things, although his ambitious plan to end their physical, social and cultural ghettoization remains unfinished. And, contrary to Mélenchon’s role models, everybody who protests his policies—plenty of which do deserve protests—are afterwards able to return home and go about their business without the cops beating down their doors.
If I had to compare Macron to a recent American politician, it wouldn’t be Donald Trump or even George W. Bush, but maybe Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, both largely pro-business, both having catered to the right to some extent. And like Macron, instituted policies that benefitted some, hurt others.
This is the thing—it’s not accurate to call any of them fascist dictators. And we shouldn’t call names and exaggerate the ordinary weaseliness of politicians to make a point, because words matter.
Words shape how we think, the conclusions we draw, and whether our sense of proportion is based even remotely on reality or simply wishful thinking. Because the only way you can call a centrist like Macron a “fascist dictator” and delight in Mélenchon is if you’re both far to the left, but also so privileged or blind that you can actually believe you’ll never need the moderating effects of democracy and the rule of law, because there, on the “right side of history,” you’ll never fall afoul of the vagaries of the strongman du jour, and what he does to his enemies he’ll never do to you.
I care, not only because the global left’s investment in the fantasy of worker paradises ensures they’ll continue to prop up ugly Latin American dictatorships, but because it traps the left in the past, like cops who, having settled on a suspect, quit looking for other solutions. Meanwhile, the guilty get out of town. And the poor get poorer and the rich get richer and the planet burns.
What I’m Thinking About Lately
That’s it for this time,
Disgruntledly yours,