 |
| Memorial at Vel D'Hiv |
The executive of SNCF's apology for transporting victims during the occupation was part of a bid to build high speed rail between Tampa and Orlando. This instantly world-wide headline also mentioned the 2000 executed railway workers (well, management has no trouble owning the personal sacrifices of it's employees when it suits them). I am startled by the completely successful deception. Walking around and behind Montparnasse tower, I was startled at the historical revisionism that occludes the actual battle of Paris, in August of '44, commanded by the same leftist transportation unions that are bringing down Sarko now and forestalling American style neo-feudalism, centered in that deep metro station and which left the neighborhood in irreparable ruins. But, obviously, this is not the tourist-friendly haut bourgeois gimcrackery of the Rue de Rivoli, kilometer zero and of that facetious film Is Paris Burning ? (The real story didn't interest the young screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola any more than real wine does now: deliberately manque reality | Hollywoodism.).
So this SNCF mea culpa story is playing who ?
For whose benefit ?
The corporation, its the executives, or the members of the Orlando's jewish association where the speech was given, or Florida's political movers-and-shakers ?
Or is for the broader audience ? Us.Is it what we demand ? *
And now this unscrupulous hatchet job on Godard that I happily managed to miss until it wrapped up in Liberation ? How does a story which begins with the sociopathically banal Chantal Ackerman (anyone else seen her Là-bas ?) get published in America's crap-rags and change history ? Everything that makes this a story is despicable and incredible.
These both suggest that the monsters shaping/riding herd on our moral consciousness aren't even big fish. But we'll accept even that.
Why do we, Americans especially, remain so hungry for delusion?
Is the image we actually see in the mirror each morning so completely improbable, so impossibly incoherent that--in order to function--it requires a rush: the invention of fantastic recurrent crypto-nazis, anti-semites, tea-partiers & diaper-terrorists, innumerable Emmanuel Goldsteins, the reassuring continuo of TV's inane banter and--of course--your permanent global war on terror?
 |
| Jacq is very smart! |
to require to be played?
My dog is smarter.
_________
* *In Bondy's recent production of Ionesco's Les Chaises the majesty/sovereign/emperor (l'Autre) is an empty overstuffed TV lounge chair.
 |
| Haute bebe |
