We have been living in France for four months now. Before that, sixty years in the U.S. We are here because the United States gradually became intolerable. When the Supreme Court votes on Bush v. Gore based on party affiliation rather than the law, it is wrong. When people are kicked out of emergency rooms and die in the waiting room, it is wrong. When the Occupy Wall Street movement is shut down by storm troopers, it is wrong.
We had never paid much attention to French television, until today. We had France 24 in English on almost the whole day.
Nearly 90,000 police converged on northern France to handle the Charlie Hebdo terrorist situation and the hostage crisis at the Jewish grocery on the east side of Paris. They weren’t there to maintain status quo for Wall Street, neither the physical one nor iconic version representing much more.
Things are different here. First, the news people are smart, in addition to looking good. The good looks don’t trump brains, as they do on U.S. The people they invite onto their shows are smart, too. The newscasters have no problem saying that this is my opinion, it is what I think is right. They feel no need to be fair to some crackpot viewpoint. The sarcasm often dripped when speaking of Marine LePen and her anti-immigration right-wing extremist party. This is on mainstream France 24.
On-the-scene reporters were escorted by police so they could be as close to the action as possible. None of this U.S. protocol where police regard the press as an annoyance for them to manipulate and control. Here, people’s jobs are respected. A reporter’s job is to report. The police help them do it.
This was not 9-11, where the U.S. defense industry could not effectively scramble a jet. The same gendarmes and national police I have seen at airports and train stations toting automatic wepons were on the ground and in the air. No third rate police public relations officers conducting manipulative press conferences and Q-and-A sessions.
President Holland gave an extemporaneous speech and said (in translation), “I’ve called on the nation to remain unified. We’re a country with many different beliefs. But unity does not mean uniformity. Unity means respect for diversity.”
In the U.S., unity means to make certain you agree with the speeches written for a 1985 movie cowboy, who beyond all comprehension, somehow became president of a first-world democracy.
Of course, many things are not good in France, besides what just happened in the Charlie Hebdo offices and the Jewish grocery this week. I bought a local newspaper and, if I understand it right, someone planted a sign in a traffic circle in Ain saying the Front National will kill Arabs. A teacher pulled it up, took it into her classroom, and had the students write essays about what such a thing could possibly mean.
No glib answers here. France came close to civil war in 1957 over Algeria, something most Americans do not know or care about. Every commentator had that foremost in their minds with a context and history extending forward and back from that national crisis.
Things are going to get better or worse in France. Things are going to get better or worse in the U.S. Who has a value system and society and a citizenry better equipped to go the right way? Watch TV.