Letter from Santa Clara

Paris: Living with Neo-Terror

By Bill Costley

I'd never experienced European neo-terror until I was in Paris in 1985. (On August 9,  1982, the bombing of Paris' Rue des Rosiers by the Abu Nidal faction had left 6 dead, 22 wounded.)

As a member the National Writers' Union-Boston local, I was making initial face-to-face contacts with our peer unions — in Paris, at Radio France on the right bank. Suddenly, I came upon one of Balzac's many short-term addresses (all with commemorative placques) from which he'd fled for lack of funds, usually a few steps ahead of the police, often out the back window, descending by rope ladder. This was one of his small houses, set a few feet just below the street, in its own little parklet; you had to descend a little set of stairs to enter it.

Right across the street was a children's school; it was just letting out, guarded by a squad of machine-gun toting French paratroopers in combat-cammies (not midnight-blue genderme capes), so I asked the Balzac house curator: what was going on? She said it was just a diplomats' children's school. Guarded by armed paratroops? Is this what life in The City of Light is like now? Obviously — yes.

Well, this is what it's like now, here, on mainland USA. Welcome to the belated metropolitan present. All it takes is a few (terrorist) bombings to change any metropolitan atmosphere considerably. It goes with the imperial condition.

Among other things I take now exception to here is the preemptive slogan: "Everything Is Changed"  — which I instantly took as a politically motivated counter-terror slogan. Look, if all's changed, then we were demonstrably vacuous airheads before this.

Frankly, the Brits ought to tell us to shut & shape up: what they went thru in WW2 was more spectacular than 9/11 by many magnitudes, but it takes mainland Americans to suck the whole world into their metropolitan trip. Look, the WTC was bombed a few years ago. Why wasn't NYC fully prepared for a re-run? Why was the civil air-defense so ineffective? People are to blame.

This is just more proof of what's hopelessly wrong with Bush2 & Co. Their incompetence feeds into compensatory neo-imperial wars: we've gotta save the world by war because we got zapped at home. Listen, they know we're gonna get zapped again: the RNC, via Cheney, is already pre-blaming Kerry, because you know sure-as-hell they won't ever blame Bush2, their savior of the neo-world!

—————

metropole (French) = metropolis, a capital-city of an empire.

Although Bill Costley has moved from Paris to Santa Clara, he is still a member of the National Writers' Union.