Rue Rude

Bison Futé, the canny buffalo

 Today is the beginning of the August holidays in France. Perhaps that does not call up a mental picture, so I have provided one.

In my first couple of years in France, I did not understand that it was not a good idea to travel on August 1st or 15th. As a result my family and I insouciantly left for Paris from Normandy at about six o'clock one evening. It's a two-hour drive. In the small hours of the morning, exhausted, we found ourselves on a route nationale (a smaller highway which we had taken to escape a horrendous traffic jam on the autoroute), 70 miles from Paris, absolutely stationary. People were having picnics on the roofs of their cars. 

To avoid this scenario, I quickly learned to take advantage of the Bison Futé ("canny buffalo" or "clever bison"), a French-government-run program to help people avoid traffic jams. Today, for example, its webpage looks like this:

 It also has an English version-- annoyingly signaled by the British flag, even though very few of the world's English speakers are British and we actually fought a couple of wars not to be-- which offers a "Live Informations Map" (no need to find a native speaker, apparently).

The former logo of Bison Futé, a green buffalo, has recently been replaced with this one:

 

Traffic jam outside of Denver

 We all sat there for half an hour and no one honked a horn.

Los Alamos

On a trip to New Mexico recently, I took a detour and drove up to see Los Alamos, New Mexico. It is the place where the atomic bomb was developed during World War II. Before that, it was the site of a boys' ranch school, described in idyllic terms by Edward Hall, a influential cultural anthropologist and former student there. (I got interested in him when I first moved to France and tried to figure out why the French were so different from me.)

The area is spectacularly beautiful, about fifty miles west of Santa Fe and on the top of a mesa separated from the outside world on three sides by cliffs and on the west by high mountains. In the museum I learned that more than once, mothers of boys going to the school fainted on the journey up the frightening unimproved road (you can see the modern road up on the right, above).

During World War II, unfortunately for the school, a father of two of its summer campers was in charge of finding a location for the Manhattan Project and decided, along with J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had a ranch not far away and was in charge of the project, that the Ranch School would be perfect. In November 1942 the school was told the government was seizing its land by February 1943. 

People who were to live in Los Alamos during the secret time were given the address P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico. All their letters were censored, their drivers' licenses had numbers not names, and their cars' license plates were not listed. After reporting to Santa Fe or to the train station at Lamy, they were taken up to the top of the mesa and rarely allowed to leave. The mesa still has an isolated aspect, but Los Alamos is now a normal American town with bored teenagers walking around eating ice cream cones, and has spread to two mesas on either side of the original one. There is still a lot of government research going on there, though. I took a wrong turn and ended up at what looked like a toll plaza but was a long row of manned security checkpoints for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. There was a cheerful sign that said "Visitors Welcome!" but I nervously turned back anyway. I noticed a Human Genome Center outside the labs.

The local movie theater was playing "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."

 Once I met a young cowboy who said that his family were ranchers not far from the Trinity bomb site, where the atomic bomb was first tested. The locals were told that an ammunition dump had blown up. "They knew it was something else, though," he said. "There was a girl in the neighborhood who had been blind since birth. She was in the car with her family when it happened and she said, 'What was that?' She could actually see the light from the explosion."

Air-conditioning vs Sweat

 

In Europe and in the U.S., this has been a hot month of misery for people without air-conditioning-- which  is to say, most Europeans, and almost no Americans. Like racism in the old days, air-conditioning is a topic that used to make Europeans feel righteously superior to Americans. Air-conditioning is bad for the environment, makes you sick and separates you from nature! I used to hear. (Americans are natural racists! Not like us open-minded French/ Dutch/ Brits!)

Now that Europe is actually getting somewhere near as hot as parts of the United States in the summer, and after about 30,000 people died in the European heat wave of 2003, I expect the same slow realization that Europeans will begin to act much like Americans when faced with the same issues.

Space

This country has it. 

Factory food

Back in the U.S.A.! 

I love my country, but this is something I don't love. Across much of the U.S., especially outside the big cities, it's hard to find a place to eat that does not serve what I call Factory Food, or non-food product. Everything is a fake version of something that tastes good. There are whole parts of the U.S. where fake food is easier to find than the original. 

 

 Fake whipped cream

Fake butter. Wait, it gets worse!

 Fake margarine

Fake cream

Fake eggs

Fake sugar

Fake mayonnaise

Fake cheese

Fake bread 

Fake potatoes

Fake coffee

and the horribly ubiquitous 

"croissant" 

Visit to Paris: the canicule

 Visiting Paris for the day, to do a couple of important errands. Not a pleasant experience during an alerte canicule (heat wave alert). It reminded me of why Parisians leave Paris in the summer. 

Why don't the French invest in air-conditioning? It's hot here, people. 

Left vs Right at (publicly funded) Radio France Inter

 

I think it's fair to say that the average American is politically to the right of the average French person. Many scholars think that this left-right difference goes back to the origins of the two modern nations. In spite of this little girl's French-revolutionary Phrygian cap, the American and French revolutions had little in common. The American revolution threw out a now-seen-as-foreign power and united the new country in an independent version of the same system. The French revolution overthrew other Frenchmen, creating a divide that still exists today. 

 Americans who were loyal to the British king, who didn't like the new country, left-- mostly to Canada. They were called Tories (not the same as British Tories) in our history books, and were so reviled that I was astounded when I discovered in Nova Scotia that many Canadians were proud of being descended from them. Now, imagine that all the Tories stayed. Well, that is a bit what France is like. 

It always made me laugh when President George W. Bush talked about Président Sarkozy as if they were fellow rightists. The typical French voter on the right has views that would place him solidly in the  ranks of mainstream U.S. Democrats. Likewise, when French leftists hailed the election of Barack Obama as one of their own, I knew they would shortly be very, very disappointed; for practical political purposes, Président Sarkozy and President Obama are two P's in a pod.

                         Maison de la Radio 

So I was amused to see the latest left-right skirmish at Maison de la Radio (a spectacularly hideous, usually filthy white building on the banks of the Seine in the 16th arrondissement). Like most French radio stations, Radio France Inter is a taxpayer-funded, publicly owned radio station that is part of Radio France.  In France, as in the U.S., the mainstream of journalists and intellectuals tends leftwards. Two well-known French radio journalists of the station were just fired* by their Sarkozy-appointed boss for going too far ("inhumanity") in their political comedy programs-- in which one of them, Didier Porte, remarked several times in a skit about former "right" Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin that he was sodomizing President Sarkozy.*  The other, Stéphane Guillon, lashed out to an assembly of his supportive colleagues protesting the decision, "France Inter is a leftist radio station that behaves like the worst rightist business." [France Inter est une radio de gauche qui se comporte comme la pire entreprise de droite.] 

*In France, you can "thank" or "disembark" someone to fire them!

**However the word he used, enculer, although insulting, is much more commonly heard in France. It also got Nicolas Anelka fired off the French national soccer team at the World Cup.

Bad news and good news

Yesterday was pretty stressful. My family is spread out this summer in five different countries, and yesterday my daughter went missing for seven hours after speaking to another family member from an airport taxi. We were actually dealing with police, who were very concerned. All's well that ends well, and I received the good news that she was all right... seven minutes before the end of the Netherlands-Brazil game. 

I hadn't needed to watch television to know that the Netherlands had scored two goals and Brazil only one. Anyone with ears in Amsterdam could have heard the same thing.