Touching the bottom

– Hey how are you? What’s new in France?

– Oh you know… the usual. A beheaded teacher two weeks ago, three people killed in a church in Nice lest week, and a national lockdown has been implemented again for a month starting this Monday to try and slow down the skyrocketing death toll due to the epidemic escalating …

Since I’m here, I might just share with you my “discomfort” and recent permanent feeling of nausea,… The New York Times got my attention with its title “A Teacher, His Killer and the Failure of French Integration”…

The syntax and the choice of words…

Whose failure are we talking about here?

When reading this title, I instantly think of the too famous story of the girl who was wearing a short skirt and got assaulted. And the usual question: whose fault was it? The length of the skirt?

I read on about this 18 year-old Russian of Chechen descent who grew up in France from age 6, who beheaded a teacher because he had been offended by cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad shown in a class on free speech – not that he attended the class or anything. He just read some comment about it on social media.

He read a comment on social media…. He read a comment…

The article describes thoroughly what laïcité means, the strict secularism that separates religion from the state in France. “Our democracy was established against the Catholic Church and the monarchy, and laïcité is the way that democracy was organized in France (…)”.

I keep on being surprised that our way of functioning is questioned abroad. Many seem to believe that the concept of laïcité contains a degree of outright hostility towards Muslims. They point to legislation banning headscarves and the burqa in schools for example. France’s democratic model (…) rejects the notion of multiculturalism, in the sense of a template allowing the state to differentiate between citizens according to their religious or cultural backgrounds. (…) The thinking behind the law is that the state must protect schoolchildren from pressures that might hinder their freedom of conscience once they become adults. It is for the same reason that headscarves are still allowed at French universities, where students are generally over 18 years old. 

I keep on being surprised too when I read the world struggles to understand what it is about caricatures the French like so much. And the current debate about whether France’s cartoons should be toned down for the sake of tolerance and in the name of security is frightening.

Have we touched the bottom?

Today, the USA are finally choosing their next president. Strangely enough, a very large number of citizens seem to like the caricature figure they’ve had for the past 4 years. The country appears to be composed by Hollywood stars and well-read intellectuals on one side and complete morons hooked on various conspiracy theories, casually carrying their guns around as if it was a fashion statement on the other.

Have we touched the bottom?

Kylie Jenner, 22, can make more than $1 million per sponsored Instagram post. I mean… Kylie Jenner… the sister of the strangely shaped beige butt??!

The average social media use in Europe is a little less than 2 hours daily and the average U.S. TikTok user opens the app eight times a day and sticks around for 46 minutes. That’s a lot of minutes…

Due to the new lockdown measures “non-essential” shops are closed in France. That means bookshops and libraries. Eat, smoke and drink all you want. But if you want to leaf through something, you’ll have to wait.

Have we touched the bottom?