Faced with incomprehensible nature of social unrest, that man-about-town who writes SaleBete (dirty animal), a blog read fairly widely in France, takes to writing about his weekend travel adventures. Édouard (Ned Davies) is a New York City art dealer very much attached to France.
Like me, he seems to think dearly of her as well. (Each of us in our own way, of course.) However, for many on the left this permits both never criticizing what goes on there, and giving in to the temptation of appropriating a kind of French Cultural Exception for oneself. It gets to the point where in good conscience he can somehow call this simple question on the spanking-new BBC (Don’t)Have Your Say like forum “Francophobia”. «Mais qu’est-ce qui se passe en France ces derniers jours ? Les francophobes en sont ravis, bien sûr. Que faut-il leur répondre ?»
So rioting barely seems relevant to him, and only then when a response to criticism of it seems necessary, is it germane to address it.
You see, nothing is wrong, but coming to the wrong conclusions about it is.
His subject matter is often to telegraphing the material circulating the rumor-mill of the left in French to his readers, giving the impression that he’s suffering a kind of exile in the US. Otherwise there is the solipsistic display of his social life to keep things interesting to him. It has the well-timed appearance of emotional avoidance much like the fact that he writes to Francophones with the idea that there is a majority which accepts the same received wisdom that the American left has. In other words he is unlikely to come upon someone who disagrees with his tut-tuttery.
Although that what the social self-sorting mechanism often does, it’s unhealthy in large doses.
His critcisms seem to be reserved for the likes of George Boooosh, and are told within the prism of a sub-culture that agrees that those who disagree are barbarians (when they exist at all.) The familiar nod is passed around the dinner table, and the alternate culture goes on marching.
I have noticed that there is a highly anti-civic and separatist tendency among many on the left these days, which is to stop looking at people and events by what they do, and look merely at who they are. This habit forces even the very acknowledgement of events through an ideological filter, at the very least, not until it becomes an opinion.
An example appeared in The Washington Post: after 2 weeks of burying the magnitude of what has been happening in la France douce, they ran an editorial criticizing a lack of acceptance of diversity (“Accepting Diversity Is Hard (but Necessary”), as if not noticing many of the aspects of negative events, dwelling immediately on political abstraction instead, and seizing on a passing reaction to the thought crime of wanting to discuss it in the "wrong" terms.
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