Vive la France

My oh my, so many of my worst fears coming together in Paris, in a profoundly forgettable week (if only it were so easy). So now the same pundits who've spent years ridiculing and otherwise lampooning the French (Fox News and Sarah Palin come to mind, with their 'Freedom Fries' jibes, and G.W. Bush, who just couldn't help himself and insisted "the French don't even have a word for 'entrepreneur'".) So now they've somehow, incredibly done something I very much doubt our trillion dollar Homeland Security apparatus could have done, and caught two escaped mass murderers in one day. That they died in a hail of gunfire was perhaps fitting, given their Charlie victims were unarmed and never had a chance.

How sad, however, that this all revolves around the apparently incompatible issues of free speech versus freedom of religion; tainted by the notion very present here in the U.S.A. as well, that when you are a True Believer, all others are suspect; if they don't follow your doctrine they are therefore evil and deserve to die. Muslims in France have always struggled to find a place in an insular culture centuries old; much as African Americans have struggled to find a place in a country that held them as slaves for two centuries and still doesn't welcome them. Can you imagine what would have happened if those Paris killings had taken place in the U.S. and the perpetrators were black? I lose sleep thinking about it. And yet it has never happened here: no black mass killer with a grudge for vengeance has ever done such a crime as those two brothers did. The killings of two police officers in New York is the closest any has come, and how tragically ironic that those two murdered cops were both minorities, and weren't even white!

It all comes down to the availability of guns in our world today. Guns are nowhere near as common in Europe as in America, but chances are our gun dealers played an active role in putting those weapons in the hands of those Islamist killers, because we remain the primary source (with eager, active NRA complicity) of most of the weapons in the world now.

I can actually remember a time when people could disagree and settle a dispute over a beer, or a cup of coffee or, certainly in Paris, a glass of wine. Then of course came Hollywood, and the myth of the Western, when disputes were settled by gunfire (President Andrew Jackson actually killed someone in a duel). Since the rise of talk radio and hate speech and Rush Limbaugh and the gun lobby, people now assume they have a right to settle disputes at gunpoint. But now, it seems, the real winners are the ones who have guns while their opponents do not: and that was the case in Paris. Those two killers went out in a blaze of glory, and I don't doubt for a minute they fully expected to be rewarded with 64 virgins in the afterlife.

Paris is easily my favorite city in the world. My eldest brother lives there, and I have been there many times. So this event was heartbreaking for me (as was the second hostage taking and killing). Yet the French, perhaps better than any other society on Earth, have always understood what it means to remain civilized no matter what. And they continue to do so despite what happened there this week. I can only weep for them, then salute them: Vive la France!