After several hours of reading about what's happening in Paris and ten minutes of writing about it, I've solved the immediate problem: I'd declare an amnesty period and set up about a million conferences with civic leaders in and out of the affected suburbs toute de suite before someone gets killed. I'd muzzle the hardliners and get back control of my capitol and the news cycle.
UPDATE: Well, this makes everything about a million times more difficult. Stupid Chirac. Are there any world leaders who aren't useless in the face of crisis?
France's urban unrest claimed its first victim today when a 61-year-old man beaten by a hooded youth in the Parisian suburb of Stains last week died of his injuries.
The man, Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, had been in a coma since being attacked while talking with a neighbor about their cars near a working-class housing development.
Your hired.
Posted by: mparker | November 06, 2005 at 05:11 PM
Magnifique!
Posted by: eRobin | November 06, 2005 at 09:11 PM
I haven't followed the French thing at all. Why does everyone see it as a negative thing to have a few riots? As Thomas Jefferson would have it they are simply watering the tree.
Why do people bother to always have shit like that in the taglines and quote them and all that jazz if they don't actually ever take the notion seriously - at face value?
It's good to have a few riots. It's very bad if you don't have riots ocassionally.
The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and traitors
But as I recall he went on to make the same point a lot more forcefully by saying that if it didn't happen every few years something was seriously wrong.
Riots are a good sign. ok? That's what it means. Kudos to France was my thought when I heard about it. Very cool. Very democratic.
Posted by: DavidByron | November 07, 2005 at 12:44 PM
I actually understand what you're saying and one day of burning cars in response to a perceived or actual abuse by the State was, according to that famous quote, a very Jeffersonian thing to do. This has gone on too long now with no effective response from the State. And now someone is dead. Maybe that's what Chirac wanted all along.
As for holding people to what they say in their dKos signatures, why not look at what they have in their yearbooks?
A random line from a Doors song or from some other great work of literature is probably a pretty good political philosphy too.
Posted by: eRobin | November 07, 2005 at 01:08 PM
Well as for the dead people what do you think Jefferson meant by "the blood"?
Sure he knew it meant people dying. Now you'll have to correct me if I am confusing my dead american white males again, but at the time he made the statement it was in response to news about Shay's revolt in the US. although he was in pre-revolutionary France at the time as US ambassador or something? And I think Americans had just recently had their own little revolution of course.
Anyway I think he knew what he was getting into by endorsing a little blood-letting. He wasn't talking about a nice peaceful demo or a march.
Posted by: DavidByron | November 07, 2005 at 02:23 PM
Personally, I've always thought that was (a) a pretty cold-blooded sentiment of Jefferson's, and (b) a pretty hypocritical one, given his "God is just" handwringing over slavery on the one hand and his machinations and philosphizing on behalf of those wonderfully agrarian southern states on the other.
That is to say, if he was so eager to see trees watered with blood, that might have properly started with his own.
Posted by: Thomas Nephew | November 10, 2005 at 09:27 AM
That is to say, if he was so eager to see trees watered with blood, that might have properly started with his own.
Hear, hear. Of course he did take a risk being as involved as he was with the revolution. And by then he was believing his the hype and about being irreplaceable. It's so easy to send others to die - the ones that don't know how to write so well or seem to want to learn.
Posted by: eRobin | November 10, 2005 at 11:48 AM