I Can’t Wait to Try This New “Waterboarding”!

by Michael B. “Moondoggy” Mukasey

I admit, I was a little surprised when everybody started asking my opinion of “waterboarding.” I haven’t even tried it yet! The Judiciary Committee finds that hard to believe, but it’s true.

I guess my reputation as a surfer precedes me. You might not know it to look at me today, but back in my youth, I was a first-class boardsman. Not a champion, maybe, but I could “hang ten” on the “glassies” with the best of them! I’d get up before dawn, ride the bumps all day, then watch the sun go down as I sat around a campfire with a bunch of cool dudes and tasty bikini wahines, roasting weenies and singing folksongs. What a bunch of great friends: Stingray, Squirrel, Gadget, H-Bomb, Madman, Noser. Those brahs are all on the federal bench nowadays. But they still call me “Moondoggy Mukasey.” (Granted, a couple of them called me “Michael B. Mucus,” but they were just nipping squids on the appellate court.) And I sure miss the good times we shared. Kumbaya, man. Kumbaya.

How often during my career as a judge have I yearned to break free of my confining robes and my stuffy courtroom, and plunge headlong into the pounding surf! Sometimes during a long, boring trial, I just shut my eyes and dream. Forget about endless summations, I’m thinking about Endless Summer! I see myself, young again and at home, my real home, the waves of Malibu or Newport. One summer, I hitchhiked to Oahu and spent a week, sleeping on the North Shore by night and ripping by day. Now, I know you’re going to say there’s no way to hitchhike to Hawaii, but you can’t underestimate a hardcore surfer like me.

Mukasey (second from left) and friends, circa 1971

So you can imagine how my curiosity was piqued when people in Washington started talking about “waterboarding,” and asking me what I thought about it. Now Washington isn’t known for its waves, so I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t know anything about this new trend in surfing. What surprised me was that I knew as little as they did!

Apparently the best beaches for waterboarding are in Cuba and Iraq, but I keep getting the feeling that there are some other, even better beaches out there that nobody will tell me about. I asked Dick “Big Chahuna” Cheney about it the other day: “Bro, where can I do me some waterboarding?”

And he goes, “That’s classified, bro. But there’s nothing illegal about it.” Whoa! What kind of clucker does he think I am? I don’t care if it’s legal, man, I just want it wet and gnarly!

You gotta figure, if everybody is so hush-hush about it, waterboarding must be truly excellent. They’re trying to keep it to themselves. And I don’t necessarily blame them: look what happened to Bondi! That place has turned into some kind of Ozzie poser zoo. But if waterboarding is that good, I want a piece of it, and I’ll go where the action is. I’ll bet you if I got to Guantanamo, somebody will tell me where the really good, secret waterboarding goes down.

So as soon as my confirmation is over, I’m grabbing my new full-on sick boardies and heading to Cuba. It’s like the Beach Boys say:
“Everybody’s gone waterboarding!
Waterboarding U.S.A.!”

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Trick/Treat

Queen of Hearts (as a Tart) sold separately
Or rented by the hour
N.B. These are not children.

Ordinarily, the trouble with satire is that real life so often surpasses it: how do you make fun of the headlines when the headlines are so funny themselves? The jokes are so obvious that you can imagine schoolchildren on the playground saying exactly what you’re thinking. But in the present case, imagining schoolchildren on the playground is another part of the problem.

This morning, reading the Washington Post, I was inspired by an article. “Preteens Trading Fairy Wands for Fishnets,” runs the headline, and staff writer Brigid Schulte goes on to describe the latest trend in Halloween consumption: erotic costumes for little girls. The parents who spoke with Schulte were unanimously dismayed by the outfits on sale, although the little girls seemed perfectly willing to dress up as sexy nurses and French maids, the kinds of costumes that Britney Spears, when sober, would think twice before buying. And you’ve got to think, if there are so many of these costumes available, somebody must be buying them: that’s capitalism.

The urge to satirize is unstoppable — almost. Because what can one say (and get away with) about a society that dresses its little girls like prostitutes? Especially in an age when the fear of child molesters touches on mass hysteria? I like to illustrate my blog entries with photos, but we’d all be arrested if I posted any image that reflected the subject matter.

Thus I’m left with no option but the dreary jeremiad, which I’ll cut short: What is wrong with you people?! Does anybody really require an explanation why this is a bad idea? If you buy your daughter a Major Flirt or a Sexy School Girl uniform, if you dress her as a Runway Diva or a Mean Girl Slut, you’re going to Hell. I don’t even believe in Hell, but that’s where you’re going. Be sure to say hello to the people who sold you the costume in the first place.

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Victory by Blimp

War starts at midnight: Roger Livesey (Blimp)
and Deborah Kerr (“Johnny”) in Colonel Blimp

Paris being the sort of place where the passing of an artist is commemorated with exhibitions, I was able to return to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1943 Technicolor epic, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, the other day. The screening paid homage to the leading lady, Deborah Kerr, displayed in the full blooming flower of her luscious youth. She portrays three incarnations of a particular ideal of British womanhood: a feisty governess, a genteel hostess, and best of all, a spunky soldier in the women’s Army who hates her given name, Angela, and announces, “My friends call me Johnny.”

I hadn’t seen the film since 1980, when Powell visited the Brown campus with a cartload of his richly imagined films, only a few years after I’d met Deborah Kerr, his muse. Thus Colonel Blimp is the rare movie in which I “know” the responsible parties, and as such it commands my attention. But it’s also a war movie, and a satirical depiction of a class of English society taught “to fight like gentlemen,” who discover that history has moved on and that the modern enemy are no gentlemen at all. Though I remembered the film with admiration and affection, I hadn’t anticipated that Colonel Blimp would speak to me so directly about current events, and the war that America is fighting today.

Colonel Blimp is a propaganda film, like several that Powell and Pressburger produced during World War II: one of the finest of these is The 49th Parallel, a passionate plea to Canada to come to the aid of the Empire, even though the Nazi threat appears (and underscore “appears”) so far distant that it’s somebody else’s problem altogether. And on its surface, Colonel Blimp is an attempt to boost wartime morale by poking fun at fuddy-duddy attitudes. The leading character was born in a comic strip, and predictably enough he’s full of hot air, clinging to old orders.

Somehow Powell and Pressburger turned Blimp into a shrewdly observed, fully dimensional, human figure. A veteran of the Boer War and World War I, he’s brought out of retirement at the dawn of World War II — and almost immediately returned to the inactive list when he declares he’d rather see Britain lose the war than fight dirty, the way the Germans do. He’s frequently brought short by a younger generation, including “Johnny” Cannon’s boyfriend, who are more willing to do what it takes to win — even citing Pearl Harbor as a model for a surprise attack.

Strong advice: Anton Walbrook as Theo

Later in the film, Blimp’s best friend, a German refugee and a gentleman and retired army officer himself (portrayed by the always wonderful Anton Walbrook), gives him some straight talk. “You’ve been educated to be a gentleman and a sportsman, in peace and in war,” he says. “But Clive! Dear old Clive, this is not a gentleman's war. This time you're fighting for your very existence against the most devilish idea ever created by a human brain: Nazism. And if you lose, there won't be a return match next year, perhaps not even for a hundred years.”

This is of course the argument being espoused by Vice-President Cheney, among others, in the current struggle. Preemptive strikes, secret prisons, eavesdropping on one’s own citizens and imprisoning them without due process or proper legal defense, and the adoption of Nazi and Soviet interrogation methods: all these things are justified, we are told, by the need to defend the nation from an inarguably deadly enemy.

Yet the passing of 64 years has made it possible to view Colonel Blimp in a different light, and I suspect the same light will shine eventually on the positions taken by the current U.S. administration. In World War II, Britain and America played mostly fair, and we won anyway — though we couldn’t know the outcome when Powell and Pressburger made their movie. We know more now about the Nazi tactics, too, than we did in 1943, and we have a better grasp of what it would have meant to employ them: we know, for example, that the Nazis were weakened by, not strengthened by, those tactics. And we know that we would not want to be like the Nazis in any way at all. We can tell the world that we are not Nazis, and the world hears us.

For on a more purely philosophical basis, the more you behave like your enemy, the less distinction there is between you. When the enemy is (as the Nazis were, as Al Qaeda is) bent not merely on conquering you but also on converting to you to his philosophy, you hand him victory every time you behave as he would. Quite a lot of unpalatable practices are justified in the pursuit of defense, but if you cross a line, you are defending buildings, not a nation. You are defending lives, perhaps, but not the worth of those lives. And you make it more difficult for the people you’ve saved, and their children and grandchildren, to hold their heads high, as free and righteous citizens.

This is not at all the message that Powell and Pressburger intended to send in a propaganda film made at the height of wartime. But it’s the message I heard, not least because the filmmakers made a figure of fun a character so sympathetic — you understand why he makes his arguments, whether or not you agree with them — and also because I believe that the spirit embodied by Deborah Kerr is worth not merely defending but preserving.

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Truths Universally Accepted at the Movies

I coulda stayed home and read a book.

I did not go to hear Mika in concert yesterday evening. I waited until the last minute, or nearly, before deciding that I really couldn’t face the crowds, the noise, the youth. I chickened out.

“Chicken” may not be the apt word, given the difference between my age and Mika’s, but so be it. Instead of attending a pop concert, I went to the movies: Becoming Jane last night, and Knocked Up today. As a result, I have come to the conclusion that movies exist primarily to make men feel superior about themselves. And if I were a woman, I might never go to the movies again at all.

This conclusion has been long a-borning. The first clue comes from almost any picture, in which it is considered perfectly normal for the hero to bed or even wed a girl young enough to be his granddaughter: no one even mentions it. If a heroine dates a man only a few years younger than she, the circumstance automatically becomes the main plot of the entire film.

There’s another school of movies in which the leading man is thoroughly repellent, and yet the leading lady finds him a paragon, for whom she will sacrifice everything, for whose every transgression she will make pardon and excuse, for whose every shortcoming she will find strength to overlook. The model of these pictures is Leaving Las Vegas, in which Nicolas Cage treats Elisabeth Shue terribly, whenever he isn’t throwing up on her or passing out. Nevertheless, she’s devoted to him. She’s a hooker (because in movies hookers always look like Elisabeth Shue), but she doesn’t even charge Nicolas Cage for her favors, on the rare occasions he’s conscious enough to sample them. On the contrary: she pays him.

And what is the job description of Nicolas Cage’s character? Why, he’s an unemployed Hollywood producer, funny you should mention.

The picture is a producer’s wet-dream fantasy: I can be a complete slob, lose my job, and still get Elisabeth Shue.

What’s wrong with this picture? Knocked Up

You’d think Leaving Las Vegas had the last word on this sort of story. Nevertheless, Knocked Up gives us a hero (Seth Rogen) who’s less pathological yet just as much a loser, and we’re supposed to believe that the sublime Katherine Heigl will keep his baby — and ultimately fall for him — after a drunken one-night stand and an awkward morning-after. He’s a fat, unemployed, ambition-free, immature stoner, while she’s a rising television star who looks like Katherine Heigl, and she’s smarter and funnier than Rogen, too. Even his goofball roommates are more interesting than he, yet somehow we’re supposed to think it’s a good thing when Heigl and Rogen wind up together at the end of the picture.

Who the hell writes this stuff? Men do.

Yet surely some of the women involved in the production must have tried to take the men aside and to explain to them that Transformers had a more believable plot.

You’d think Jane Austen would be safe from all this idiotic movie machismo, but she made the fatal error of writing too few books that turned into too many successful screenplays and that therefore demand sequels. Of which there are none. So we’ve seen updates of her plots and revisionist remakes, trying to show how the Austen plots speak to today’s times. In most cases, these have required unbuttoning the passions and unlacing the bodices, as well, to address our post-Romantic aesthetics and our need for explicit sex in entertainment. Darcy, Heathcliff, Rhett Butler, the English Patient, what’s the difference, as long as people buy tickets?

When Byronic met Ironic: James McAvoy and Anne Hathaway
in Becoming Jane

But Austen wasn’t a Romantic, and to try to turn her into one is a colossal mistake: do it, and you rob her of her principal interest. Her characters feel deeply, yes, but they conceal their own feelings and guess at each others’, just as society demands. To write these stories required tremendous psychological insight and a complete grasp of the dominant social order. Romanticism came after Austen, and the two don’t mix. The minute Keira Knightley has an emotional outburst in a cloudburst, on a wuthering moor no less, you’ve entered Romantic territory and your adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is lost.

Becoming Jane tries to present Austen’s early life as fodder for the novels she would write later. There’s scant historical evidence to support such ideas, but that’s almost irrelevant. For not only does Becoming Jane present us with a quasi-Romantic Jane Austen, a rebel artist defying societal conventions — it shows us a Jane Austen who requires a man to show her how to write.

I am amazed that no one burned down the theater.

That man is a drinking, whoring, arrogant, penniless gadabout who dares criticize her writing after hearing — not even reading — a single composition. By the way, he arrives late and falls asleep before she’s finished that reading. Rather than cut him or slap him, she heeds his advice and seeks out more, then falls in love with him. Inspired by their experience and by some of the characters they know, she sits down and scratches out the entirety of Pride and Prejudice in (by my count) three sittings.

Who writes this stuff? Not Jane Austen, certainly.

The actress who plays Jane is the aptly named Anne Hathaway, an alumna of Vassar College. Perhaps when she is a little older she’ll find the courage to tell the people who make movies that their scripts are offensive. Either that — or we can look forward to a lush historical romance in which we learn that Vassar was a school of no account until it began to admit male students.

I should have gone to the concert.

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Grow Up! The Children’s Closet of Classic Books

Ready to whip out his wand: Dumbledore

It is high time that young readers awoke to the aberrant sexuality of many of the best-loved characters in children’s literature: not merely Dumbledore in the Harry Potter books, but dozens of favorites are doing all sorts of naughty things. What’s striking is that J.K. Rowling admitted her character’s sexual deviancy openly (and after the fact), rather than letting readers figure it out for themselves. Now that everybody knows that Harriet the Spy is a lesbian, and that Alice in Wonderland is a nymphomaniac, we can move on to more challenging characterizations in children’s literature.

Sapphic Sorceress: Glinda “recruits” young Ozma and Dorothy

Glinda the Good, the Oz books: But start with an easy one. Glinda lives in a palace with 100 beautiful maidens, defended by an all-girl army. There’s not a man in sight. L. Frank Baum doesn’t even try to conceal his character’s sexual orientation. If you didn’t pick up on this as a child, you were not paying attention.

And I needn’t remind you, need I, that any character who practices magic — whether Glinda, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, or Tinkerbell — is a de facto Satanist. We’re here to talk about sex, not religion, but I wanted to clear that up at the outset. Now we can move on.

Winnie-the-Pooh: Author A.A. Milne makes clear that Pooh is a “bear” — that is, a hirsute older man, typically with a big belly and a taste for hardcore, often fetishistic gay sex. Outcast by society, Pooh is obliged to live under an assumed name (“Mr. Saunders”). Several of Pooh’s practices are implied in his unconventional “friendship” with Piglet (a term commonly associated with younger men who like uninhibited or “piggy” sex) and his obsessive interest in “honey pots.”

Kanga, the Pooh books: Although it’s clear that Kanga is an unwed mother, no mention is ever made of her husband or indeed of any romantic or sexual attachments she might have. This is because there are no other females in the Hundred Acre Wood.

Back into the closet: Pooh indulges his illicit appetites

Mary Poppins: With her extreme taste for discipline, Mary is a dominant, rather butch figure who might at first blush be construed as a dominatrix or a lesbian, or both. More interesting, perhaps, is her taste for rough trade, as seen in her relationship with Bert, a sometime chimneysweep who demonstrates, in his “jack-of-all-trades” career, that he’ll do anything for a pound.

Willie Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: His name is, obviously, a reference to masturbation (“willie wanker” = one who “wanks,” or manipulates his penis, or “willie”). Unmarried, Wonka lures unsuspecting children into his lair with promises of chocolate. When they do not submit to his desires, he punishes them with devious, cruel tortures. This behavior is typical of child molesters. At the end of the novel, Wonka traps the boy Charlie in an elevator, then crashes it through the ceiling and explodes high into the sky, in a symbolic depiction of male orgasm.

Prancing Wonka: And frankly, that purple tailcoat is suspect, too

Mr. Tumnus, The Chronicles of Narnia: Somewhat similarly, the faun Tumnus delights in exposing himself to small children. He wears nothing but a knitted scarf (around his neck, not his nether regions) even in the dead of winter, and his unusually hairy legs arouse considerable excitement among the Pevenseys, particularly young Lucy, who avows she’s never seen anything like them, in a standard evocation of the sexual awakening of a small girl in the presence of a mature male. Tumnus may possibly suffer from satyriasis, as well, and readers should not overlook the horns that sprout, perpetually hardened and erect, from Tumnus’ head of thick, curly hair.

Another character who “flashes” children is, of course, Captain Underpants, a prime exemplar of infantilized sexuality in the adult male.

Wee Willy Winky: The nursery rhyme describes the male child’s anxiety upon glimpsing his father’s penis. The realization that his own, immature penis is much smaller (“wee”) than the adult’s causes the child to run “in[to] my lady’s chamber,” that is, returning to the womb or seeking sexual congress with the mother.

“Fantasy” Lovers: One ring to bind them

Everybody in The Lord of the Rings: When Peter Jackson’s films were released, a number of moviegoers were startled by the tender, Brokeback devotion between Frodo Baggins, the Ringbearer, and his “servant,” Sam Gamgee. Fellowship? Get over it! All these guys are gay, gay, gay, and the only woman who interests them is the cross-dressing Princess Eowyn.

Mary Lennox, The Secret Garden: In a tale worthy of D.H. Lawrence, author Frances Hodgson Burnett graphically depicts a girl’s sexual awakening in an early-adolescent ménage à trois. Mary eludes her twisted, impotent uncle and his hysterical, bedridden son, Colin; she prefers to trim her neglected shrubbery with the virile, working-class garden-boy, Dickon (a diminutive form of “dick,” or penis), who shows her how to plant seeds. Under Dickon’s tutelage, Mary becomes more physically adept and attractive, and when the couple introduce Colin to their garden, the invalid is able to stand erect, in the novel’s climax.

Dr. Dolittle: A confirmed bachelor who spends all his time with animals, the beloved veterinarian of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh is a coded bestialist. The Pushmi-Pullyu symbolizes Dolittle’s menopausal impotence and ensuing frustrations: because the creature has two heads (and, in the books, two sets of horns — i.e., he is extra “horny”) but no behinds (and thus no sex organs), the doctor can “do little.”

Oedipal victim: Peter pantsless

Peter Rabbit: Emasculated by his oppressive relationship with his widowed mother, “Peter” (another slang term for “penis”) refuses to wear trousers and fixates on phallic substitutes (witness his oral consumption of carrots), while engaging in a warped sexual drama with the farmer, Mr. McGregor, and his “hoe.”

Peter Pan: Another “peter,” this one hangs out with “lost boys” and fairies. Note also the “dagger” and “sword” with which he repeatedly confronts the castrated father-figure, Captain Hook.

Pat the Bunny: Although rabbits are traditional symbols of fertility and rampant sexual activity, “Pat” is not gender-identified. Child readers of both sexes are encouraged to stimulate themselves by stroking the creature’s luxurious fur.

Beezus Quimby, the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary: Sweet Mother of Beezus, her very name is a blasphemy coupled with an obscenity! How can we permit libraries to keep such books on the shelves where children can get at them?

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Peg Bracken

I never met Peg Bracken, the humorist and frozen-food pitch- person who died on Saturday. But if it is true that “you are what you eat,” then up until the age of 18 or so, I was a Peg Bracken recipe.

She’s best remembered for the I Hate to Cook Book, a collection of “quick and easy recipes” that strike fear in the hearts of folks today, yet struck a blow for liberty when they first appeared, in 1960 — the very year my parents wed. America was still in the vicious clutches of the 1950s, described by no less an authority than my English professor, Carolyn Heilbrun, as the worst decade in human history. Women, who had entered the American workforce in great numbers during World War II, were ripped from their riveters and thrust into the kitchen. They were expected to be deferential to their men, devoted to their children, and absolutely nuts about cooking.

Bracken realized that she wasn’t the only woman in America who hated to cook. The 1950s had seen the rise of “time- and labor-saving devices” in the kitchen, and a number of prepared foods came on the market: ingeniously, she came up with dozens of recipes that exploited the innovations, took little time and less effort. This begged the question of what, precisely, the American housewife was supposed to do with all the time she saved. Alcohol, tobacco, adultery, and obsessive involvement in the P.T.A. were only short-term solutions. But soon enough, the American woman figured it out. She ceased to be Laura Petrie, and she became Mary Richards.

Today the American economy depends on two-income house- holds, and you’d think that Bracken’s advice would find even more eager audiences now. However, the true American revolutionary in food burst on the scene at almost the same instant as Peg Bracken: Julia Child was as funny (and less sarcastic) in her kitchen as Bracken was in hers, and Child added a gloss of intellectualism (next- door to Harvard) and culture (French, always tony) that Bracken couldn’t rival and didn’t want to.

America rose to Julia’s challenge. We grew to like things other than steak and potatoes. We grew to enjoy fresh (even organic) ingredients. And although Julia, bless her, always emphasizes the importance of technique, and although some of her recipes do appear quite time-consuming, it’s perfectly possible to succeed with her recipes even if you are clumsy and refuse to watch the pot. I know: I’ve done it. I do it all the time.

But I am the son of a father who cooked perhaps three times — and much to our stupefied surprise — while I was growing up, and of a mother who truly, deeply, desperately hates to cook. My father was, for his generation, broadminded, and my mother worked outside the home, yet there was no question of sharing the kitchen duties. Since both my parents were children of the Great Depression and firmly convinced that poverty was just around the corner, there was no question of dining out every evening. And no serious question of allowing my brother and me to starve. Though I’m sure the thought occasionally crossed their minds.

Peg Bracken’s books answered prayers that my mother may never before have dared to voice. Her recipes proposed functional food: it kept you alive, it tasted okay (though it frequently looked … strange), it required no skill and little patience. And the recipes were funny enough to keep your mind off what you were doing. Tranquilizers were hardly necessary.

This is not Peg Bracken, and that is not a can of Spam.

I should underscore that my mother did not succumb to the temptations of drugs and drink and illicit sex. I’m not sure she was aware that such temptations existed. She was entirely virtuous. That’s why housework was driving her crazy. She needed an outlet — and she found one, in teaching.

And so with the torch of Bracken, the spark of my mother’s feminist liberation was lit. The ensuing flame never rose high enough to burn her brassiere, nor even to singe it much, but it warmed her heart. She struck out in new directions, and she crooned along with Helen Reddy: “I am woman, hear me roar.”

I never owned any of Peg Bracken’s books, and I wouldn’t have dared to bring them with me to France. (Can you imagine the reactions?) I can’t quote or recall with specificity any of her recipes, although I can cite some that are Bracken-esque, such as the Thanksgiving classic:

Take two cans of French-cut green beans and one can of mushroom soup. Mix together and dump into a baking dish. Cover with a can of fried onions, being careful to remove the onions from the can first. Bake until congealed and hot, then serve.

Don’t deny it. You know you love that stuff. There’s also the recipe that Jimmy Swenson’s mother recommended when he went off to college:

Make some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Spray a baking dish with Pam. If desired, cut the sandwiches into triangles and remove the crusts. Then arrange the sandwich pieces to line the bottom of the dish. Open a can of chicken noodle soup. Do not add water. Pour the undiluted soup on top of the sandwiches. Bake until it looks like a casserole; serve and eat while it’s still hot.

I admit, I’m nostalgic for some of this stuff. There was a chicken recipe, very sweet, that I remember fondly, though I can’t recall the name. I think my mother prepared the immortal “Skid Road Stroganoff” several times, until she found a recipe that was even easier. Bracken gave her recipes funny names and sprinkled her instructions with jokes. (The New York Times cited this: “Let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.”)

This much is certain: if it hadn’t been for Peg Bracken, I’d never have discovered Julia Child, or French cuisine, or the pleasures of cooking for myself. The reason is simple. I’d have died of hunger shortly after I stopped breast-feeding.

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The Peasants Are Revolting!

We are not amused: Louis XIV would never have stood for this...

The transit strike in France slumbers fitfully these days. There are brief stoppages, and I glimpsed a half-hearted protest demonstration that blocked most of the traffic in the Place de Clichy at lunchtime yesterday. But I don’t think anybody seriously believes that this baby is down for the night. Sooner or later, the “social movement” will begin again in earnest, and nothing at all will move anymore.

The strike began last week, on Thursday morning, just in time for the arrival of several friends from the States. There is nothing like a labor uprising to win the heart of a conservative Christian lady from Texas. Nevertheless, my friends greeted the circumstances with an admirable mixture of curiosity, ingenuity, and good cheer. I was the one who got screwed.

...Not in these heels, anyway.

I was in Beynes, and I missed the last train on Wednesday evening. I knew the strike was coming, but I made the mistake of believing the union officials who assured us that the strike would last only a day.

Obviously, the rank-and-file union members weren’t entirely convinced, and it’s become clear that there are factions or splinter groups of the big transit unions who simply didn’t watch television, read newspapers, listen to the radio, or access the Internet: they didn’t get the message. They continued to strike on Friday. The officials assured us that would be the end of it. But again, the message didn’t come across to everybody. Saturday saw persistent “important perturbations” in the subway and commuter trains. Buses were running, if you could squeeze onto one. I couldn’t. Though I managed to return from Beynes, I couldn’t find public transport to bring me anywhere near my apartment. So I walked, nearly four miles, while carrying baggage. (Once I arrived, I had to climb six flights of stairs. We have no elevator in this building. But that is not the strikers’ fault.)

We were assured that Saturday was absolutely, positively the last day of the strike (for now). Naturally, on Sunday, the strike continued in isolated pockets. These included the RER train to Versailles: my friends and I arrived on the platform just in time to hear an announcement that “technical problems” required the suspension of service. Thinking quickly, we went to the Gare Montparnasse, where we caught a perfectly charming train that ran just fine. We opted for the RER for our return trip, only to sit in the train at the platform for more than an hour. This time, there was no announcement, no explanation, and precious little warning when the train did pull out. When we emerged at last at the Invalides, there was an announcement that the strike on the RER C line would continue all day Sunday — and Monday, as well. This was the first anybody had bothered to mention it, and of course the announcement flatly contradicted the officials of the unions involved.

A high-speed train, motionless: This is quite normal.
I am surprised you even notice it.

Now I’m not complaining, particularly, because everybody’s got such stories to tell. We were luckier, because I speak French, than the thousands of British and South African tourists who descended on Paris this weekend for the Rugby World Cup finals, to say nothing of all the Irish, Scottish, and New Zealander fans who never left town after their teams were eliminated.

When Nicolas Sarkozy campaigned for president, last spring, he vowed to change the pension plan for government employees (and these include transit workers, because the state runs all the transit systems). He also vowed to require “minimum service” on transit lines during all strikes.

Obviously the unions are having none of that. Granted, the French people generally agree that their economy is cruising toward disaster, and that the pension program is unworkable (not least because so many enterprises are state-owned, with the result that some 60 percent of the population are civil servants eligible for federal pensions), like a cancer on the nation’s long-term health. And yet you will walk a very long time before you find anybody, anywhere in this country, who is willing to make any improvement or change; any sacrifices must be those of someone else, and heaven forbid if I receive so much as a scratch in whatever surgery you undertake to remove the cancer. No, no, we must defend our right (and in their eyes, it is a right) to short workweeks, long vacations, child care, and universal health care in low-skill, high-paying jobs from which we cannot be fired, and from which we will retire at age 50 or 55 with full pension and benefits.

On the one hand, one sympathizes with the striking workers. They signed a contract when they took their jobs, and they expect the government to live up to its agreement. If the country’s economic problems are so dire, why are the unions being singled out to make the first sacrifice? Does the government hold them in such low esteem? I daresay it’s hard to show up and work an honest day when it seems your boss finds you beneath contempt.

Really, the strike is mostly a warning: Sarkozy hasn’t even begun his reforms. He has barely proposed any. So if he thinks the strikes are bad right now, he is free to imagine how much worse they’ll be if his reforms are radical, or even realistic.

Since the Revolution, every French government has lived in fear of popular uprising, and very often the behavior of the citizenry has justified that fear. To this day, the French take to the streets in protest at the drop of a hat, sending even the most ardently reformist governments into panicky retreat. Most Americans find this absolutely mystifying. We’d much sooner call out the National Guard and blast the protesters back to the Stone Age.

Lovely day for a walk: Members of the chief labor union,

In a different strike, in another town.

But Americans are mystified, too, by the French workers’ arguments. The cushiness of a French transit worker’s lot is unimaginable to most of us. We enjoy none — none — of the Frenchman’s benefits, and yet we somehow muddle through. Why can’t these people suck it up and move forward, for the good of their country?

As I puttered around the gilded halls and infinite gardens of the Château of Versailles, and the next day as I climbed the Leftist stronghold of Montmartre, I contemplated the enduring, sometimes violent tension in this country between the forces of order and the forces of freedom. France has seen a continuing cycle of chaos followed by repression, and although this week’s strike is a mild example, it’s nevertheless proof that the cycle continues. The French seem comfortable with these revolutions; they are awfully good at them. They have had a lot of practice. It is almost a sport to them, a way to stretch the muscles and a topic for discussion in cafés. Provided you can actually get to your café from here, Monsieur.

UPDATE, 24 October: Some railway unions continued to strike Tuesday, while announcing another round of “important perturbations” for today: seven full days of a strike supposed to last only one. A general strike that would include all civil servants (including teachers, postal employees, etc.) is under consideration for 20 November.

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