Still Standing

I vowed a few weeks ago to keep an eye on the singular protest movement called Nuit Debout (Up all night) that has been variously amusing or annoying the French populace for a month now. And so I have, though it's not easy, as there is very little in the English language press. What there is isn't all that helpful either: analysts make comparisons to Occupy Wall Street or Los Indignados in Spain, but Debout continues to prove elusive. Its 'horizontal' or leaderless structure, its refusal to engage in ordinary political struggles or make demands or promote candidacies or place itself anywhere really in France's overcharged political landscape has left the conventional commentators puzzled and skeptical, to say the least.

One observer, reporting today in Slate.fr (here, in French), describes two distinct gatherings, each occupying a different quadrant of the vast place de la République. On one side, the 'real' deboutistes, with their daily popular assembly, their informational booths and rallying points, a collection of 'students' or at least young, well-educated, mostly bourgeois Parisians, fed up with their dysfunctional government, their sluggish economy, the lack of prospects for the young, and the failure of imagination to invent alternatives. But across the plaza this reporter sees quite another group: all-night partyers, some homeless, some Roma, rappers from the banlieue looking for some exposure, drinkers, dancers, a rowdy group of the disaffected. Being French, the reporter understands this as the dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the Head and the Belly, and a host of other tropes.

To this dualism the reporter adds a third: the smaller group, led by philosopher Frédéric Lordon and other intellectuals from Le Monde Diplomatique who actually launched the movement on March 31st and are now trying to give it content as they stage their own occupation across town at the Bourse du Travail. Lordon has himself gotten considerable attention for his unequivocally radical social vision, as has filmmaker François Ruffin, whose documentary film "Merci Patron!" ( a French take on Michael Moore's breakout film "Roger and Me") has been screened at République and has become a sort of leitmotif of the movement. But has the Debout movement left the station with these intellectuals still waiting on the platform?

Philosopher Jean-Claude Monod, reporting sympathetically in yesterday's Libé (here, in French), doesn't think so. Rather, he feels the movement is still trying to find itself, in place. As he describes talking with an enthusiastic colleague, also a philosophy instructor, he is willing to grant that the deboutistes have identified a momentous fact: many of the French middle class no longer believe their society has governance, direction, or much hope in its present configuration. But they haven't found a coherent alternative either. Hence all the coy talking around, the endless debates, the desire to hear everyone's ideas rather than choose.

Interestingly, neither of these reporters has much to say about a fourth venue, which was of considerable interest to the deboutistes at République just a week or two ago. At that time the big question was, can the movement spread to the banlieue, the vast public housing cités, full of the poor, the unemployed, the alienated children of immigration. It was there that riots broke out ten years ago in response to police violence, and where French eyes look with fear at the possibility of ISIS cells. Attempts were made to launch Nuit Debout events at many of these locations outside Paris, and notably in the crowded, disaffected cités in the north of Marseille. With little success: the banlieusards apparently find little common ground with the more privileged deboutistes, and the connections haven't been made (as far as I can tell at this distance, with limited press coverage). So the prospects for a real insurgency, within the most disaffected populations with little to lose, is apparently far from being realized at this moment.

It is nonetheless a significant fact that Nuit Debout has shown the staying power it has. More politicized versions such as the Indignados movement in Spain and Syriza in Greece have stumbled against the realities of entrenched power. The young who flocked to Bernie Sanders are discovering the same thing here. How they will respond--either withdrawing from the stage or accepting the realities of Clinton's candidacy--will be a large question in coming months. The fortunes of the Debout movement will respond to different vectors, but the movements are integrally related. Our overripe societies are not offering sufficient opportunity or satisfaction to rising young adults. Something has to happen. Something is starting to happen. Stay tuned.

Exodus

This Friday Jews everywhere begin their 8-day celebration of the Exodus from Egypt. 'Exodus' is a funny word, part-Greek, part-Latin, suggesting 'the road out.' A better translation might be 'the Book of Migration,' and indeed the story is a migration narrative, fraught with all the ambivalences and hard choices migrants face. Take Pharaoh: he can't decide whether to hold onto his low-wage migrant labor force, or deport them. And the people of Israel themselves, like migrants everywhere, are unsure whether to put up with the misery they know or risk the unknown. So the story has a contemporary, timeless quality, and in that light I've been thinking about four particular Red Sea situations that trouble our world right now.

The best known is the Aegean, whose waters parted last year to allow a million or more Syrians, Iraqis, and others to reach the Promised Land of Germany or Sweden or some other European receiver. Those waters closed over some thousands of others whose boats weren't sea-worthy, and now Pharaoh Merkel may be changing her mind about letting these people go. And I say that with respect--like all politicians, she has no easy choices when it comes to migration. This Exodus story has received quite a lot of attention, and we Americans have been occasionally reminded how our reckless invasions have precipitated much of the upheaval in the region.

We hear less than we should, though, about a second migrant crisis for which we bear almost total responsibility. I refer to the Holocaust taking place in slow-motion in the northern half of Central America, with murder rates more than 50 times (!) those in our most dangerous cities. Thousands of migrants have taken their chances and headed north, despite uncountable murders along the route, despite the fact that as many as 90% (!) of the women and girls on that migratory route are raped or sexually enslaved. Despite the fact that our Red Sea--the Rio Grande, I suppose, though it's really the whole border--doesn't open willingly if at all. When our present Pharaoh and all the Pharaoh-candidates talk about stabilizing the border and developing a comprehensive immigration policy, these Central Americans fleeing their local holocaust are the ones being talked about. And let's be clear: not only is this Central American crisis a direct consequence of 100 years of American intervention, subterfuge, exploitation, and violence, but the gangs that have made life no longer worth living in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were formed in Los Angeles, their members deliberately deported by our government to wage their reign of terror 'back home' in countries where they had never lived.

A third Red Sea, about which we hear even less, is the Timor Sea, where migrants crossing from Indonesia are routinely intercepted as they reach Australian territorial waters by naval vessels that transport them to offshore detention centers in places like New Guinea and Nauru. There, facing mounting threats of hunger and disease, they will wait forever, as Australia vows not to admit a single boat-borne refugee, regardless of circumstance. Many of these refugees are fleeing Syria and Iraq, though some are Muslims fleeing terror and ethnic cleansing in Burma, and others are climate migrants from Bangladesh. Australia's Liberal [sic] government not only rode to power on this rigid policy, but is widely marketing it to European politicians, who are listening with interest.

And a fourth Red Sea, probably the most deadly, is the slip of Mediterranean Sea that divides the coast of Libya from the Italian island of Lampedusa. For a time this route declined in use as the Aegean one looked more promising, and the EU tried to put more controls in place, but with the closing of the Aegean--and in the absence of any effective Libyan governance--the Libyan exodus is expected to resume with full force. While these migrants are coming from all over Africa--North, sub-Saharan, Horn--as well as the Middle East, it is worth noting that some fraction of them are in the first wave of what will gradually become a huge swell of climate migrants. Diminishing rainfall, along with rising coastlines and other agricultural displacements, will become a major theme of this century, on a timetable we don't quite know. All the other migrant crises already in process might come to look like dress rehearsals for this big one.

So what should we learn from our retelling  of the Exodus story? I would suggest that migration, exodus, always poses difficult and dangerous choices. We as a species are moving inexorably, whether we like it or not, toward a vast decision, taken perhaps in many stages, but it's the same fundamental choice: are we a global species, all 7 or 8 or 12 billion of us, interdependent and mutually accountable for our collective and personal welfare? Will we address the migration question globally, as one people, one species? Or will we fall back into our separate clans and groups, fortify our borders and violently defend them, keeping the Other out at all costs? It's worth recalling that the Book of Exodus concludes with horrific accounts of conquest and ethnic cleansing--no easy answers there. But if we can see ourselves as the migrant, the stranger, the pilgrim in search of milk and honey, corn and wine, perhaps we can see others, ALL the others, that way too.

Up All Night

For the past two weeks a strangely amorphous protest movement called Nuit Debout (Stand Up All Night) has been disturbing the streets of Paris at ungodly hours, conducting all-night open-air assemblies in the iconic Place de la République, and generally making known its dissatisfaction with the state of things. It all started back on March 31. For several months a more recognizable Left had been protesting France's proposed liberalization of its labor laws, and as often happens, Paris's students, both lycée and université, joined the marches. Then on the 31st, at the end of a big march in the pouring rain, a group, of young protestors decided to continue the protest by camping out at République--and never stopped. Sometimes a few thousand, sometimes a few hundred, they have been there for fifteen days and counting. They debate and dance and listen to music. They hold assemblies and vote on procedures and address organizational questions. They give lots of speeches and think up better ways to run society.

Comparisons with Occupy Wall Street have naturally been proposed. The improvised but very open democratic forms, the chaotic and all-inclusive rhetoric, the naive goodwill all resemble those days and nights in Zuccotti Square before Bloomberg called the cops. A closer parallel is perhaps the Indignados movement in Spain a few years ago: the protest against inequality and especially the deplorable unemployment that plagues young adults in Spain and France and most of Europe is a common theme. But while the Indignados formed a political party and scored a modest success in Spain's elections last winter, it's not clear that Nuit Debout aspires to that sort of official clout. 

Perhaps the clearest precursor, as many of the debouters themselves are saying, is the May 1968 movement, when radical students and their allies came close to bringing down the 5th Republic. Debout is just a tiny speck compared to May '68 (though all such movements start small), but both are partial to expressing rather generic utopian desires, rather than any specific program. What strikes me most about the interviews with young people in République is their rather inarticulate diagnosis of the ills they protest, and the absence of clear solutions. Anything and nothing seems to be on the agenda--a general notion that life as it is is insufferable, so that even a night in the rain, with hundreds of comrades, is preferable to just going home. 

Is this another step in a sequence of inchoate, anarchic resistance to global capitalism, from the G-7 protests and social forums to Occupy in all its manifestations, to the Indignant movements in various European cities? Or just a spring outing, a fad that will soon go its way? The New York Times has recently acknowledged Debout's existence--a benchmark of sorts. More seriously, there are some efforts underway to bring the movement to the cités, the huge suburban housing projects where the children and grandchildren of immigrants, many of them Muslim, have far more serious grievances than the labor laws or the malaise of Paris's jeunesse dorée. A protest, much less an uprising like the 2005 riots in the banlieues, particularly in this climate of terrorist threats and state of emergency, would be serious indeed.

So I'm not sure what to expect of Nuit Debout, though I think it's worth keeping in view. To my American eyes it suggests affinities with the "Feel the Bern" surge among young people here, where the practical outcomes may be similarly elusive (though the program--elect Sanders--is far more coherent). But maybe the really important thing is still in gestation: the refusal of a rising generation of post-industrial, post-modern, post-political activists to accept the givens of inequality, climate destruction, and a certain anomie. Among the many destabilizing forces at work in France, the US, and all over, this one may represent an imaginative and resonant call to action.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

So it's a trivial incident, what the French call a fait divers, but it has lit up the social media in France, for good reason. I refer to the recent remark by French Minister for Families, Children and Women's Rights Laurence Rossignol, who decried the decision by some high-end clothing manufacturers to market hijabs and other traditional Muslim women's apparel (the modest bathing suit called the 'burkini,' shown here, for example). Rossignol went on to suggest that Muslim women who freely choose such traditional cover-up clothing were like certain "nègres américains qui soutenaient l'esclavage."

First, the linguistic angle: Rossignol's remark was widely--and polemically-- translated across the internet as "American niggers who supported slavery." This is a fair approximation--the word 'nègre' is widely recognized as insulting, and decent people don't normally use it (the minister apologized for the term, but not the sentiment). Then the the English-language press adopted the sanitized term 'negro,' perhaps to defuse what had become a storm of protest in Muslim social media. As it happens, the anti-imperialist cultural movement called 'Nègritude' embraced the term Nègre' (as I learned in this quite interesting article) specifically because--unlike the more genteel word 'noir' or 'person of color'--it was the slur widely used to refer to black laborers throughout the French colonial gulag. Cultural radicals decided to make it their own much as the LGBT community has appropriated the slur 'queer' as a badge of honor. Nonetheless, Rossignol's slip made visible the festering nexus, just below the surface of the French governing elite, of racist feeling directed at blacks, Muslims, and all the other not-quite-French.

But apart from Rossignol's unfortunate word choice, the larger question is one that Europe, and perhaps the US, can't really avoid. Is Islam, particularly in its fundamentalist or Wahabbist forms, compatible with liberal western society? The venerable French feminist Élisabeth Badinter has called for a boycott of the Muslim-accommodating clothing manufacturers. Like Rossignol, she sees the hijab, the niqba, all the items of women's clothing that sequester the female body, as inherently offensive to liberal society. Muslims in the West simply have to accept a view of gender equality that gives women the right--and indeed, the obligation--to display their bodies. After all, as Badinter doesn't say but strongly implies, female bodies are meant to be sexually provocative, inducements to pleasure and procreation, and the refusal of this life-affirming display can only be the result of oppression, of restrictions on freedom that are intolerable in liberal society.

Some Muslim women are no doubt simply, silently accepting the patriarchal rules that keep them from full membership in civil society. This is problematic, for sure, though western liberal society got on pretty well with comparable restrictions on women's freedoms until about three generations ago. Other Muslim women are actually pretty articulate about why bikinis and other hide-and-seek women's fashions are actually more objectifying than liberating. (These are the self-hating, internally-oppressed Muslim 'nègres' Rossignol was quick to dismiss.) I expect fully liberated, westernized women share a wide range of feelings on this question, though for Badinter and other French feminists there is clearly only one right answer.

Does this tiny tempest have relevance for the much bigger questions, the 'clash of civilizations,' the increasingly global incidence of Islamist terror, the challenge to diversity one hears from politicians all over the West? Frictions like the one captured in the photo, above, are indeed part of the larger picture. European nations in particular, with much higher ratios of Muslim residents than the US, really do have to find some common ground--non-pork options in school cafeterias, acceptance of religious-identified clothing, public support for mosques to the same degree as temples and churches--or risk the exacerbation of tensions and alienation that are driving young Muslims toward desperate solutions.

And yes, ministers who use ethnic slurs, even 'by mistake,' should be fired. And so should presidential candidates who promote discriminatory policies. Islamist terror, and the Wahabbism that promotes it, need to be fought with stronger weapons, in other venues. But there's no excuse for allowing public figures to foment hostility and misunderstanding at home.

Spring Training

Sports arenas are microcosms, little moral universes where the rules are exceptionally clear and the consequences--winning, losing--unambiguous. Perhaps it is that simplified, stripped-down quality that has attracted me over the years to spring training, professional baseball's annual six weeks ritual of rejuvenation. It is a sign of spring: the news photos of fit, agile young men, tossing baseballs under blue skies across the deep-green grass. The new faces, rookies and recent draft picks, the eternally reawakened hopes of making the team--it all has the lustre of renewal, a secular sort of Easter, a promise of things to come.

Spring training is always optimistic. Every team, it seems, could be a contender; for every young player this could be the year. And it is mostly high-spirited: there is time for card games in the clubhouse, golf on the off days, and the whole experience is routinely referred to as "camp." Camp for young adult millionaires.

And every year there are stories--endless stories. When I was little, I read deeply in the genre of sports fiction. A lot of the drama unfolded at training camps--and it happens in real life too. Last spring the big Red Sox story was how no one was replacing traded pitching ace Jon Lester because all the pitchers were aces. (It wasn't true--they bombed.) This spring it was about veterans and newcomers: last year's rookie surprise, Travis Shaw, has apparently seized third base from the once acclaimed (and overpaid) veteran Pablo ('Panda') Sandoval, while it seems touted newcomer Rumney Castillo can't hit fastballs (they pitched slower in Cuba, where he made his name), and is headed for bench-warmer's limbo. Ageing star Allen Craig failed to make the comeback in exhibition season that would keep him in the game, while last spring's injured rookie, catcher Christian Vazquez, has bounced back from surgery and should be in the swing by mid-season. You could find half a dozen sports novel plots just in the Red Sox camp this season.

Unfortunately for me, the pleasure of pro baseball has for some time been compromised by the dollar signs stuck all over it. Soon the real season will start, with hundred-dollar seats at Fenway Park, cable-only broadcasts, and sports stories that talk endlessly about free agency and contract options, how much David Price gets paid per pitch or David Ortiz per swing. Championships become commodities, and team-building an exercise in venture capital. Even the spring training competitions like Shaw vs. Sandoval is framed in terms of use value vs. exchange value. The long arm of financialization has reached into baseball's pockets--bringing along its nerdy cousin, Big Data or sabermetrics--and the joy of the game is now heavily mediated by this nexus of statistical and financial calculation.

Still, for six weeks in late winter, as the last snows melt away in Massachusetts, the new crop of players pops up in Fort Meyers like crocuses: new faces, new hopes. It's camp. Players are loosening up, getting ready to play the game. If you squint and block out all the scouts, executives, and middle managers, it could look like the vanished sandlot of my youth. It could look like a bunch of ball players, having fun.