French angst reflects anxiety in Western Europe as a whole
Yes, Europe, it is widely reported, is undergoing an existential crisis of the sort no other nations go through.
"We are united by a hatred, and a fear, of where France is heading," she said as another protest march passed by her. "We cannot see a future where we will be able to live as well as our parents. We are all afraid of the future, and we are not alone."Yes, you are not alone, Pauline. We Americans of a certain generation are undergoing the same process. It's just that we're preoccupied with speed-dialing American Idol or lining up the green lights so that we get home in time to speed-dial or sitting in a puddle of American angst (disclaimer: Americans do not suffer from angst, unlike their European brethren; they suffer only from attention spans that do not focus appropriately on the kindergarten requirements for med school).
"There is no longer the belief among the young . . . that it is possible to get inside the economy," Thode said. "But it is also clear that the social society is changing. They feel trapped."Not in the US! Social Security? We'll all win the lottery that the alignment of the stars and Jonathan Edwards have already foreseen. Immigration problems? Not in the land of the melting pot. The American Dream? Have some ritalin.
Yes, yes, I know. This is Don DeLillo-esque itself. But there's a pretty simple difference to point out here, in spite of the clichés about French retreat/defeat (here also, or retardedly here), and patronizing remarks about how economies are supposed to work (the American model). It is that the "angst" brought out the student and labor multitudes into the streets and the policy ultimately changed in response. This is, of course, a French tradition. It's a good one. It's one that has been taken up by the recent immigrant population in the US.
Angst. You want angst? Look at those populations of citizens who don't think they have any voice at all any more in the directions of their countries. Hell is the mirror image, dude.
3 comments:
You know, I find it interesting that US media seems so very, very preoccupied with Europe, especially the angst and identity crisis bits, as well as the weird "they hate us!" angle. Europeans seem to not care about it the way US media seems to do, and certainly don't spend anywhere near as much print about what we think about the US as US media spends on reflecting on why we do.
To put it this way: The "identity crisis" is an ongoing thing; we've been doing that for the past eight hundred years or so. Europe certainly works a lot better than it has ever done before, so any complaints about it has to be taken with the condiment of your choice.
Seemingly Americans don't even know democracy anymore when they see it. Rumsfeld called the post-fall looting of Baghdad democracy. Labor law legislation in France is what democracy looks like. Probably most of the angst is in DC at the idea that we'd realize that.
Janne - Americans are fragile beings. We seem to have to know that others are having crises too when we're going through our own. Then we can invade them and set them right.
Europe has embarked on an experiment that seems to me true to the spirit of democracy in the modernist (or postmodern, whichever) sense of some progressive 20th-century American thinkers. The US has many problems, but often few ideas for tackling them. I suppose this makes for a volatile combination of envy, self-doubt, and the will to see others fail. It's seldom that Europe gets any US press on its achievements because it's a lot easier to say that the Europe project is a mess. It is indeed messy, but it's one thing to proclaim that and it's another to genuinely look into the real herky-jerky processes of any genuinely democratic reform. Europeans with doubts about the European constitution seem to me to have done precisely the latter.
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