If you read the newspapers and watch network TV, you have recently been made aware of riots in France, about a week after they began. Nobody knows who is perpetrating these riots, except that they are young, “youths”, to be precise. And they are the children of “immigrants”. And they are unemployed. Nobody knows exactly what they are rioting about, and nobody has any idea what to do about it.
If you get your news and opinion from the blogosphere, as I do more and more, then there are plenty of theories about what is happening, and there is even a smattering of reports from the front, bloggers in Paris (sounds like a song). Although there is no shortage of opinion in the blogosphere, nor is there much agreement. Which means that pretty much anybody’s opinion is as good as anybody else’s, at this point. So this is an opportunity for Just Opinions to tell it like it is, without fear of contradiction by reality, at least for a few weeks.
This is what I think is going on. The reason the “youths” are doing what they’re doing is because they perceived that they could, and they could get away with it. They’ve been doing it at a low level for many years. They live in a lawless subculture festering in the Stalinist highrises on the outskirts of all major French cities. What are the root causes? As Marlon Brando said in The Wild Ones, “Whattaya got?”. That is not to say that there are not many well-organized Al Qaeda cells in France, and radical imams in the “suburbs”, who are gleefully seizing the day, and attempting to make hay while the sun shines. I don’t know if they can pull it off or not, probably not. France has a serious problem that makes the inner-city ghettoes in the U.S. look almost tractable. I read one account on some blog (I am sorry I can’t remember where), that quoted one of the rioting “youths” to the effect that his heroes were “Osama Bin Laden and Rodney King”. This is key. This is a ghetto riot. Watts looked like fertile ground for Black nationalists and communists, and Paris looks like opportunity to Al Qaeda.
France will more than likely come up with whatever it takes to quell the riots. But then, obviously, some kind of painful re-examination of French policies and French politics is in order. If they decide that this is somehow Capitalism’s fault, as many Europeans seem to be saying, then they are doomed. They just don’t get it. In the United States, Anglo-Saxons, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, Irish, Puerto Ricans, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Africans, Vietnamese, and, yes, Muslims, to name a few, seem to get along fairly well, with the partial and gradually improving exception of African-Americans. The reason for that is because the American dream is not a nationalist or religious or racial or ethnic dream. It is a universal dream. In France it’s all about being French. In America, it’s all about being free, and seeing what happens.
I’ll be honest with you. I hope we kill every single one of those Al Qaeda bastards, everywhere in the world. But these riots in Paris are not really about that, unless Al Qaeda succeeds in co-opting them, which I kinda doubt will happen.