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It's one of those mild early summer evenings in Paris, perfect for taking yourself out for a soul-searching stroll. I decide to take the kids for a few spins on a manège, one of those merry-go-rounds or carrousels which are among Paris's great lingering legacies. We wander over to place de la République, perhaps the most schizophrenic of all of Paris's major places. Schizophrenic because it is so many things at once and takes on bits of the quartiers that converge on it from all sides the Marais, the grands boulevards, the Bastille, the up-and-coming parts of the 11th, the heavily-accented flavors of the immigrant communities... (There's no real translation for place in English: geometrically it isn't a square, psychically it isn't a circle, functionally it's neither a roundabout nor an intersection. In fact, it's much bigger and more complex than the English notion of "place," as in "Peyton Place.") In its center, place de la République has a massive sculpture, the kind of landmark that you can go by a hundred times without realizing just how impressive its structure really is. The 1883 bronze lion commemorating universal suffrage is an incredible piece of work. Place de la Nation, too, has an astonishingly beautiful statue at its center, and the more obscure place Félix Eboué is graced with a magical, albeit forgotten and often dry, sculpted fountain. The manège at République is wonderful because it is one of only a handful of Belle Epoque survivors, like the carrousels at Les Halles and the merry-go-round at Trocadéro, which keep us linked to a glorious and artful past. But the one at République is special in that its clientele are still proletariat locals who roll their own cigarettes while their kids twirl around, sport unfashionable haircuts, shop at the Tati store on the corner, reuse the popular plastic bags forever and have little reason to leave the quartier. Although there's a Holiday Inn on the place, a McDo, a Bistro Romain, a Darty and about10 other chains of mass consumption, there's something about place de la République that's impervious to a global market and wholly indifferent to even the latest trends of the New Paris. The manège is 10F a turn but for 50F we get eight tours, and we climb on the tired painted horses with worn leather bridles and tarnished brass stirrups. (The pleasure for adults to ride an old manège despite the invading melody of "La Macarena" is indescribable.) As we begin to spin, I notice in the fenced-off park in the middle of the place a long and orderly line quietly but swiftly forming. In a matter of minutes, there are a hundred or so simple people, men and women cloaked in diverse ways of disguising their hunger, with plain dignity and a common objective. The Restos du C�ur van, a mobile soup kitchen promoted by the late comic Coluche, is parked on the place, and a score of cheerful volunteers are routinely setting up tables to distribute the evening dinner. As we spin past every 20 seconds or so, I watch the scene build itself and the line grow in length and girth while it maintains a characteristic sense of patience. Styrofoam bowls of what I make out to be hot lentils or dark beans are being readied for distribution. As the plaster horses drive us up and down and I watch the happy, absorbed faces of my little ones, my thoughts tether back and forth between a vague pride that we live in a society where helpful programs like these exist and an acidy shame that here in Paris near the end of the second millennium far from the harsh Kosova-Macedonian border camps or the barren stretches of the Sudan or the desperate outskirts of the Iraqi capital here, on this warm evening in Paris, beneath a bronze tribute to Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, ordinary Parisians in tattered shoes and threadbare jackets need handouts of lentil soup. I watch now the plastic spoons rising to eager lips. These people are eating with hunger. Hunger. My kids want barbe à papa cotton candy the most frivolous of all the junk food, but yield to a promise of pizza a bit later, and we head home. It was probably the statistic that I had heard earlier in the day that made the park scene seem so poignant. Twenty years ago the income of the peoples of the world's developing countries (a term we use to ease the stigma of dire poverty and the guilt of massive indifference) represented three percent of the wealth of the west. Today the figure has slipped to 1.5%. As we get caught up in the addiction of quick fortune-building and inflated values, the divide between the haves and the have-nots actually widens. And the interest in pouring more public resources into the general good is becoming a less and less popular idea. Just yesterday I received a petition by email protesting Newt Gingrich's congressional attempt to slash further the already paltry funding of the Public Broadcasting System and the National Endowment for the Arts, practically the only two areas of state subsidy targeted to heighten cultural values and intellectual public life in America. Beyond these two entities lies an opulent wasteland of Intels and Philip Morrises whose contribution to the greater good is a two million dollar sponsorship of the catalog of an art exhibition at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan, for which a hefty tax credit is awarded. No one wants to sound cynical, but these are the facts. In The Financial Times today there was an article about how the 2000 presidential election will be the costliest in the history of the United States. Candidates are fearfully rushing off to spend more dollars than their competitors. Hundreds of millions will be wasted on prime time TV spots, Java-scripted Internet banners on overvalued web sites and demographically-targeted email spamming all to sell us our next emerging leaders. We walked, hand-in-hand, off the place de la République, past the building in which Gustave Flaubert once lived and wrote, past my first address in Paris where I shared a somber flat with a French pornographic filmmaker whose flics he marketed in the US under the name of Harry Paris. Time, generations and future fluttered by in those seconds as Anna and Ernesto held my hand, and I wondered deeply what was really going on in the world, and in which phase of history we were really in. Ted Turner recently told departing seniors at the University of Georgia graduation ceremony that it was hard to be positive about the future when it wasn't even certain that humanity would make it to the new millennium. Over 10 thousand bombs and missiles have now been exploded in Yugoslavia and much of the world's people think of the United States in hateful terms. Six billion dollars for more military ballistics are being approved by the US Congress while it votes to dismantle the arts budget. A million dollars a missile, eight tours for 50 francs, the bowl of lentils were free. I've always loved Paris for its gentle, melancholic means of seducing those of us who chose and choose to live here to think deeply about things and to contemplate with the pain of good poetry the larger daily issues of existence. David Applefield (david@paris-anglo.com) is the author of "Paris Inside Out," "The Unofficial Guide to Paris," and the novel "Once Removed." He edits the literary journal Frank and the Paris website www.paris-anglo.com. |
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