No creativity, so no interesting title today

Hello, everyone.

We have photos today. I am trying to figure out how to post three photos, but I may not be able to post more than one, because it seems that the software I'm using puts the extra photos on top of the text.

The second photo (as I view it after publishing the entry) is the view outside the living room window of the apartment. Although Karen promised us there was a young lady somewhere within this view who ironed her clothing wearing only tres cher French lingerie, I have yet to see her. Actually, I have yet to actually look.

Yesterday (Wednesday) was glorious in the morning, but Paris weather is very much like Chicago weather -- if you aren't pleased with what's going on, just stand still for 15 minutes and it will change, often dramatically. By late afternoon, I was reminded that the Atlantic Ocean's behavior is rather stuck in a rut; namely, throwing as much unpleasant weather against land masses as it can muster (see: Katrina, Wilma, Beta, et. alia).

By midafternoon, the skies over Paris had begun to take on that peculiar grayness that makes one feel they are locked inside a galvanized tin box -- not quite so dark as to be "leaden", but uniformly gray as only the mer Atlantique can provide. By nightfall, Paris looked just like the Delta, if only the Delta had Belle Epoque architecture everywhere.

OK, I finished that paragraph and then tried to add a second picture, et voila! it appears NEXT to the other one instead of down here where it would make more sense.

That second photo shows you the view out the kitchen window. I used a telephoto setting; the tower is not quite in the side yard, but it's not far away, and at night it's quite spectacular when the millions of white LED's blink on and off, making the entire seem to be the world's most elaborate Bastille Day sparkler. Photos do not do it justice; Kelli will bring the video camera, we will tape it, and you will have to sit through our entire vacation video to find them.

The third photo won't happen, I guess, because it will most likely overwrite some of the text. It wasn't all that interesting, just a street scene -- I only included it to show all of you just how MANY unburned automobiles exist just outside my apartment. Really, it's so quiet and normal here that, well, if you didn't already know, you probably wouldn't know about the troubles. If you read some French, you would know, of course, because every newsstand shows it, but it has had no visible effect on daily life here.

What's important for everyone to understand here, I think, is not that there are riots going on in or near Paris, but rather, some possibly more disturbing things: The people rioting are doing so because they have been born and raised in France, and are full French citizens who have been reared with Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite, the French motto (Freedom, Brotherhood, Equality) that was born of the Revolution. Their experience has shown them anything but Fraternite et Egalite, and that severely limits their Liberte. By way of explanation: the unemployment rate in France is a woefully painful 10% right now; the unemployment rate in the affected areas, populated almost entirely by descendants of immigrants from former French colonies in Saharan and tropical Africa and the Middle East, is above 40%.

To put a finer point on it, consider the experience of Californian Maya Angelou. African Americans have always been rather welcome in Paris, every since Rousseau's concept of the Noble Savage took hold in the Age of Reason a few centuries back. Angelou was treated like royalty, and people were trying to convince her to move to Paris to pursue her poetry.

She was invited to a reception, and brought with here two friends she had made in Paris -- these friends were Ghanian, from the former French Colony of Ghana, in tropical Africa. She was treated extremely poorly on the streets while walking with these people -- because all three of them wore traditional African clothing. Once she spoke, people realized she was not African, but African American -- and everything changed -- but only for her. Her guests were not welcome at the home-based reception once she arrived, and she returned to America, understanding that the French concept of integration didn't work, either.

So, it's about race and color, much more than it is about Islam -- not all of the affected areas are majority Islamic. It's about poverty, despair, and lack of opportunity, even if education has been obtained.

More sinister is the fact that it is occurring in the suburbs.

Unlike America, Europe's cities are venerable -- hundreds of years old. When housing projects are built, they are built in the near, or sometimes, the distant periphery of the cities -- imagine, in the Bay Area, constructing massive public housing projects in Gilroy and Livermore, and you have the concept. Instead of housing the society's less affluent in the city's central core, as we usually do in the States, they are bundled up on industrial land in massive concrete blocks that remind me of what I saw in Moscow and East Berlin -- without heart, soul or culture.

We tend to think of the suburbs as safe. We also live in a land where the suburbs are quite regularly subsumed into larger urban sprawl, so we forget they were originally suburbs. Compton comes to mind -- built to house workers in WW II, it was a suburb of LA at the time. So was Marin City in the Bay Area, and Richmond, as well. Most of what we have in America has come from Europe, whether we like it or not -- art, architecture, language, systems of laws, the warp and weft of our society are woven of Judaeo-Christian European ideas and ethics. I offer a few quotation from philosopher George Santayana, who is most famously MIS-quoted on the lessons of history. I will include the actual quote below, along with its context.

"A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world."

"The wisest mind has something yet to learn."

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience."

This one spoke to me about the condition of those who resort to violence to act out their despair:

"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."

And, finally

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."

None of this is meant to excuse the lawlessness, the destruction of property, etc. It is simply to remind each of us that the magic word is HAPPINESS -- not just to philosophers, or to those who would live off the labor of others. It appears rather prominently, and more than one time, in the following:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

I trust you all recognize that paragraph.

Finally, I'll let Santayana back into the conversation:

"A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity."

By the way -- Georges Santayana was born in Spain, but became a citizen of the United States and did much of his writing and work in America.

I genuinely appreciate everyone's imprecations (by e-mail) that I stay safe, stay out of trouble, etc. The disaffected have little or no quarrel with Americans, and no quarrel whatsoever with tourists. I am, and shall remain, physically safe. It's impossible to remain intellectually safe, however, when so close to the roots of one's own cultural history.

Morning has broken, and there is fog. The top of the Eiffel Tower is obscured, yet I know it is there. We usually expect "The Truth" to be as tangible as that tower, but it so often hides in the fog.

Enough. Basta cosi, as we say in Italian.

On to less ponderous thoughts....

My first night here, I wandered across the street to the grocery store, as I said I would. There was a display with two kinds of wine at silly-reasonable prices -- they don't quite have Two Buck Chuck here, but Four Buck Jacques is available everywhere. Three older people, speaking English with a definite Eastern European accent (Russian or Ukrainian would be my guess) were looking at the Cotes du Rhone and the Saint Emilion, having trouble deciding because they were unfamiliar with both wines.

I asked if they minded if I butted into their conversation. I then told them what I knew about the characteristics of the two wines, and they made a selection. At the end of the conversation, the man said "by the way, your English is excellent. Thank you very much."

Kelli will immediately understand where I got my response, which was "my English SHOULD be excellent, I've been speaking it for 54 years. I'm from San Francisco."

Imagine my delight when I learned they thought I was not just French, but Parisian, and "so friendly".......(I'm rarely successfully accused of being "friendly").

Yesterday, as I was coming out of the apartment, the door to the other top=floor abode opened, and two women came out -- one in her late middle age, the other, possibly her young adult daughter. They began speaking very rapid-fire French to me; as many of you know, my ability to speak sentences in French is limited to "J' desole -- veuillez parler plus lent, je ne comprennent pas le francais tres bien." (It means "I'm sorry, please speak slowly, I don't understand French very well.") When I added "J'ai etranger aux Etats Unis" (I'm a foreigner from the United States), they said "Oh, that's fine -- we speak English."

So, here's my secret to you: Even if it's a bald-faced lie, when people ask you where you are from, tell them San Francisco. Everyone in the world has heard of it and seen it and has either BEEN there, or desperately wants to go. It's the best ice-breaker in the world. Yes, they had been to San Francisco, in 1986, and still remembered it fondly, and had questions, and, well -- the only thing that I learned is that I've been quiet enough - they had no idea I was here.

Strange things: There are spice shops here, which sell herbs and melanges d'epices (that's missing some accent marks, but I refuse to try to convert my keyboard to French). They don't, however, stock basil or oregano. They have dried rosemary (why?) and sage, but not basil or oregano. Grocery stores have it; I just thought I'd go get "the good stuff", but, no.

Cheese is a living thing. No, really, that's not a romantic statement, it's scientific reality. Because of that fact, cheese must be tended as it is aged.

Brand-new cheese is an emulsion of proteins and fat, primarily butterfat. As you all know, fat rises to the top of other liquids. Same thing happens in a cheese -- the fat rises to the top. So, it has to be turned over, frequently when it is young, and less frequently as it ages, so that the "paste", as the non-rind part of a cheese is called, is evenly distributed and has a consistent texture and taste.

Someone has to do this. That someone is an affineur in France, or an "ager". They buy quality cheese directly from farmers or farm cooperatives and age the cheese in caves for weeks, months, or years.

It's a dying art. The labor laws in the EU prohibit anyone from working an apprentice more than 35 hours, or 5 days, in a week.

Cheese has to be turned every day.

There are fewer than three dozen affineurs left in France. There's one in Paris who is world-renowned. Her name is Marie-Anne Cantin, and her shop is a block away. Yeah, I'm in heaven, but it goes deeper than that.

Another affineur who is quite famous is Jean d'Alos, in Bordeaux. I've met him, and hope to meet with him in January when we return here. Marie-Anne is le fromageur to the stars here - supplying virtually every three-star Michelin restaurant, as well as the Palais Elysees, the French White House. Her operation must be different from the one in Bordeaux; I smell an article here, and I will be meeting Marie-Anne next week when she returns from visiting her stores in Tokyo, Kobe and Hiroshima.

Why haven't you ever heard of her? Well, because she doesn't have any stores in America. Not even in San Francisco. Why, you might ask?

Because our insanely nitwit government, which does whatever Giant Agribusiness wants it to do (89% of all farm subsidies now go to corporations with profits in excess of $100 million per year per company -- they really need the welfare, you know), is in the process of enacting regulations that will prohibit the importation of non-pasteurized cheeses.

So what? So, no more Parmesan for your spaghetti and meatballs. No more roquefort dressing. No more brie for your whine and cheeze parties.

It's being passed off as a "health measure". Yeah, right. Just like they won't let you bring in those cheeses, or uncooked meats (salami and prosciutto are uncooked) from Europe, to "keep you safe from dangerous organisms". What, those organisms only bloom when I pass through US Customs? They aren't concerned enough about my health to advise I not eat those things during my visit here...It's horseshit greed, nothing more.

And the only thing I can think of to do is to write about it, to try to do an article about this artform that is dying, to get some people pissed off enough to stop this. You might have noticed in the news that the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge was saved at the last possible moment -- by people who were both pissed off, and too stupid to lay down and surrender to the greed that drove that silly idea. 15 years to develop a reserve of oil that will last us less than 6 months at today's rate of consumption, and probably less than 3 months by time it's on line. That's almost as laughable as banning non-pasteurized cheese for health reasons.

You can't pasteurize milk and make interesting cheese. Pasteurization kills the organisms that live in the milk. And, as was pointed out above, cheese is a living thing. Until it's pasteurized, that is. Then, you have to inoculate it with organisms to make it back into cheese -- but those organisms are 1) standardized, so all cheese made with them tastes alike, and 2) produced by large industrial companies to make a profit. The organisms in non-Pasteurized cheeses are made by nature, and are free of charge, indigenous to a locality or an aging cave. Damn, no way to profit from them? Gotta do something about THAT.

Quiz:

How many people have died from the effects of eating non-pasteurized cheese in the entire history of the United States?


Answer:

Zero.


Quiz:

How many people have become violently ill, and/or died, from listeriosis contracted from eating PASTEURIZED cheese in the US which was improperly handled, or past its pull date and then incorporated into "processed" (read: American) cheese?

Answer:

Tens of thousands.

Santayana got this one right, too:

"Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily."

See you soon. It's Veteran's Day here, and the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, when the armistice was signed to end the "War to End All Wars", is normally commemorated with the pealing of bells in churches throughout Europe. I plan to be in front of Notre Dame Cathedral when this happens today.

Au revoir.

Stay safe over there.