Looking at America From France
So, I had to go to France for a week for reasons that aren’t important. I’m kind of done with Europe because I’ve lived here a lot, several years during the Cold War and then a year in Kosovo in 2005. America is always cleaning up Europe’s messes, and I feel like I’ve been a janitor long enough. However, it provides an interesting perspective, especially when America is going through such a consequential election. And it’s also kind of a preview of what we may see in America. It’s not exactly what I expected.
We didn’t spend much time seeing the sights but had some adventures. We had an Uber driver with no sense of direction who would’ve taken us to Luxembourg instead of the Arc de Triomphe if we hadn’t stopped the car. Bizarrely, we had trouble finding a decent meal anywhere – in Italy, it’s hard to find a bad one. We finished the complete tour of the Museum of Great French Military Victories in about 15 minutes.
As for the French, they were remarkably nice. And they were remarkably thin. Everybody walks here. Every time I get to Europe, it takes me a minute because, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of Americans are huge. And they dress well here. They dress like I used to think New Yorkers or people in Vegas would dress – stylish and with care. But New Yorkers dress like bums now, and everybody in Vegas is in cargo shorts and tats. But they look nice here. I had to step up my fashion game. But of course, you can still tell an American male just by looking at him.
More people spoke English than I remembered when I was in Paris. What was interesting to me was that I had heard that immigrants flooded the city, but that wasn’t what I experienced. Yes, there were a few diverse folks, but generally, it looked like a Mitt Romney family reunion.
Maybe things are different in other parts of the city. We stayed in the nicer areas and didn’t make an attempt to hit any of the ethnic enclaves, but the idea that Paris has been handed over to the Third World is simply not so. There didn’t seem to be any ethnic tension where I was. A mixed group of people would sit at the café with a little wine or coffee, usually smoking and chatting. I didn’t get any kind of hostile vibe or threatening sense. I know that’s not exactly what the narrative is for us conservatives, but I’m telling you what I observed. Frankly, it was very pleasant. Everybody seemed cool, though a little aloof. I found it weird that Parisians get edgy when you try to pet their dogs. The dogs are aloof, too. Not always – we met a very nice terrier named Jazz, whose owners were quite friendly. They were very interested that we were from Los Angeles and when Trump came up, they didn’t point, scream or run.
Now, we didn’t talk politics with a lot of the French. I’m not particularly interested in what foreigners think, and I wouldn’t presume to tell them what to do about their own country. There was a recent election. It was pretty traumatic, but there’s no evidence of it. There’s no tension in the air. I saw several gendarmes on foot, and none with the automatic weapons you often see in Germany or Britain. However, there were cops escorting limousines everywhere with those obnoxious wah-wah, wah-wah sirens. A lot of them were ambassadors. I saw a couple of cops escorting one Mercedes with a Romanian flag. I saw another with a Palestinian flag and flipped it off.
The French are not known for their efficiency. They’re known for being French. If you want efficiency, go to Germany. I made that observation with the French, and they loved it. Things would happen that we foreigners couldn’t understand. Random things would be shut down. Stuff would stop working. Poor Irina got trapped on the metro because the ticket app failed. By the way, the metro, just like the city itself, was immaculate, and there was none of the sense of menace you get on public transportation in an American city. And, of course, the buildings were designed without the benefit of any kind of building codes. But that’s part of the charm, I guess.
Some of the most interesting stuff we noticed had to do with the fellow Americans we encountered. Most of them were like us, a little older, successful, and used to traveling overseas. Many of them came from California or other blue areas. Basically, you would expect a substantial number of them to be Harris voters. Well, that wasn’t necessarily the case. As we talked, we did the usual tentative probing that one does when one lives in a blue state to make sure of who you’re talking to, and most of them turned out to be conservative. Most of them turned out to be Trump supporters. I’m sure some of them weren’t, but it was kind of surprising to see in this demographic the number of people who were going to vote Republican. I’m not sure any of them were outright MAGA, but they didn’t have any love of Harris. We didn’t talk politics a lot, but it was weird to get a sense from people who you would expect the Democrats would own that they aren’t owned.
The bottom line is there were many things I didn’t expect here. I’m not going to pretend that I got deep into the culture or that I understand it, but it wasn’t the total hellhole we sometimes hear about from our own side. I wasn’t in the more challenging areas, but the fact is that Paris may constitute a kind of bubble where the promise of a prosperous and secure life exists. The question is whether it exists all through France or just for the ruling class, and I can’t answer that. But I know you can go to Washington DC and New York; parts of them are hellscapes, but other parts of them are wonderful. They’re very nice. And that’s where the people responsible for allowing the hellscapes to be hellscapes live.
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