What's going on in France right now is pretty damn nuts, and like most people, I'm disturbed by the unrest that has spread and as of yet shows no clear sign of settling. I say "like most people" because in an attempt to dig a little deeper than most American media would allow - and not speaking French well enough to make much sense of the French papers or blogs - I very foolishly visited the most recent crop of AOL chat boards. I don't know why I'm shocked any more when I read such bile - posts so awful that when I tried to click on them again they'd been removed by the AOL community (thus, no linking). Smug, righteous, and ignorant all in the same breath; in one corner viciously denouncing Islam and in another, blaming Bush's war on Iraq for the entire history of French sentiment about Arabs in the first place, curiously seeming to (or at least at the time I read them) avoid the whole wrenching "morte pour rien" issue. And perhaps just as sad; if only I could say I'd ever encountered such bigoted idiocy through the cold remove of AOL boards....
Thankfully, the New York Times has got a really excellent article up on its site today about the whole mess; extremely thorough, managing to get past the equivocative standards of journalism and flesh out the issue socially, without being sensationalistic or partisan. Thank you, Craig S. Smith. As for the message boards (surely not confined to AOL) ... oh, jesus.
"Do you hear the people sing", indeed...?
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