Weekend Fishwrap

After 2 weeks of factional warfare in France, the WaPo's Outlook Sunday guide to the opinions you should have, has finally addressed the issue. Two pieces appear, one is a somewhat misguided piece which itself mostly seems to notice little more than skin color [by Keith Richburg], but astutely notes:

"Europe still has not come to grips with the fact that its’ societies are changing."

Never mind that people need above all else to share in of a social contract to live together, Richburg doesn't think France is genetically diverse enough. Titled in the forgoing page “Torching France’s Assimilation Model”, I have to wonder if Richburg want to give ammunition to the anti-republican “separate but equal” model of celebrating diversity, one ethnic borough at a time, which people do on their own anyway without the enobling name.

Taking the temperature of the urban and more urbane indicators which are traditionally thought to model a society by example, Frances Stead Sellers on the other hand sees something more than what is skin-deep. She describes two different cultures which are caught in one-another's throats and presents the example of the "aboriginal" French who when traveling will "do as the Romans do when in Rome," while may from the other communities couldn't care less.
She goes on to say:

"Everyone looks across the Atlantic at the world's most ambitious yet culturally imperfect multicultural experiment. Can countries that don't have America's founding philosophy of equality and have not yet suffered the liberating agonies of a civil rights movement find a philosophy that will put their citizens - new and old - on equal footing?"

None of it is as telling as a small item in Friday's Le Figaro in their centerfold page tableau covering the riots. Cécilia Gabizon point out that at the dilapidated street level, French-Sub-Saharan-Africans and French-North-Africans are blaming one another for the violence.
As a point of comparison it took a decade for any enmity to develop between Jews and Blacks in the US. It didn't start with any violence, and it ended in a matter of 2-3 years after there wasn't as much of a need for them to lobby the rest of society together. The myth continued only on the widely ignored lecture circuit of people who needed something to write about.

As pedestrian and passing as that and the north-Saharan/south-Saharan subculture divide seems, the few pages further a Pandora's box is opened. In the letters to the editor corner of Le Figaro, two writer notes that the uprising can't have much to do with education or employment because they don't just stink, they stink equally for everybody. Another writer notes that while Germany has gone "ungoverned" in the past two months, unemployment there has dropped slightly in that time. He also suggested that this proves that a more "modest" government that tries to do less in somehow manages to accomplish more than the highly interventionist French model.

Another correspondent still unwittingly undermines the delusion that the riots are by "youths" or have a great deal to do with unemployment by begging for a cure to both. Wouldn't les émeutiers have to be at least 16 to worry about unemployment enough to start brick-chucking?

Leave it to a wise old priest to provide us with a semblance of a clue. Olivier de Berranger, L'evêque de (the bishop of) Saint-Denis doesn't mention specific religions, but of a malady in the heart. With seeming shades of do-gooder-ism, he notices blankly that victims of society inspire compassion, but able-bodied rioters bring out indignation only to give us a tangible explanation of the real cause: the meaninglessness of the non-familial family:

« La raison d'abord. Interrogés sur les causes du drame, ceux qui en sont témoins aux premières loges n'ont qu'un mot, d'emblée : la famille. Quand parents et enfants ne parlent plus la même langue, n'utilisent pas les mêmes références, ne sont debout ni ne dorment aux mêmes heures, la parole ne circule plus. Venus souvent de cultures où l'autorité paternelle était affirmée, des jeunes de chez nous se trouvent soudain plongés dans un environnement qui se veut libéré de tout engagement au long cours. Ce n'est pas alors la carence scolaire, ni même celle de l'emploi qui sont en cause. Toutes deux interviendront après. Mais le pacte familial, le premier de tous, est souvent menacé ou rompu.»

«The cause? When those who are most deeply involved in these areas are asked, they say that it is the dissolution of the family. When parents and children do not speak the same language any more [ED.: I think he means that literally], do not use the same references, don’t wake and sleep the same hours, communication ends. Often coming from cultures where paternal authority is respected, these young people are suddenly plunged into an environment which discourages close bonds and meaningful relationships. It isn’t then bad school, nor even employment which is at the center of this issue. Both will intervene soon enough, but that the family bond, the primary element, is often threatened or non-existent.»

This distinction is important in the Republique ultra-yackity-yackaine, since a complex social miasma would evoke one solution: keep paying off people who do stupid things with their lives, and make them no better for it.