Friday, December 07, 2001

How Paris Turned Into South Bend

My honey and I recently came back from a fantastic trip to Paris. The highlights included eating strawberries that seemed to be gifts from the Gods, piles of oysters, crusty breads, apple pastries, and yogurt so seductively creamy the fat content became a bragging right. When not eating, we spent our afternoons wiling away our time in cafés, taking lots of nice walks, and going to museums–-where, at the Louvre she prevailed upon me not to buy a bronze cast of this really huge four-foot foot. To top it off, the tv has lots of naughty things on it. Who could ask for more? Given that my French sounds like this, “bonjur madame, parlez-vous Anglais,” and my wife speaks a bit of German but not too much French, we were expecting some difficulties in navigating the world of Brigitte Bardot and Jean Paul Sartre. Yet, we had few difficulties, and upon reflection I am unhappy about this lack of struggle.

In fact, what I experienced, time after time, were the similarities between the City of Lights and the world of Grape Road. I’m not speaking about that usual bogeyman, McDonald’s. That’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. No, the foreignness of Paris is now a world where if you need money you just take out your ATM card and stick it in the nearest cash machine....and presto you’ve got the coinage of the realm. And as an added bonus, they don’t apply service charges, so my transactions cost less than if I had dared to use a non-TCU branch here in Michiana. And with that cash you can go to any of the Pizza Huts conveniently located near museums and other cultural centers. I could tell you to avoid them and the other temples of fast food and mammon that seem to be sprouting everywhere--and instead go this great French-Vietnamese restaurant called “Paris to Hanoi” or “Dam Jeune"--but there’s no telling where you’ll run into people with white sneakers and khaki shorts on, sure signs of hungry Americans abroad. But to continue, if you want a beer, well Bud’s always available in that quaint outdoor café. Need to make a copy of a document or buy some paper?, there’s the handy Office Max just around the corner.

I guess I was expecting beret-sporting French intellectuals, dangerous black-clad sylphs on mopeds, and Gene Kelly dancing in the rain. The non-Hollywood reality of Paris led me to think that if I’m going to shell out lots of hard cash to go abroad I want to see some damn foreigners and I want to see them acting all foreign. Not angry foreigners or especially snooty foreigners mind you, but just different than your typical Hoosier. But the foreignness in France is being sifted away through the gentle wash of the American Empire. Given the considerable energies they have spent trying to protect their culture from all things American, you can see why some might come to resent our values and commodities. It gave me a new understanding of being anti-American, and as something more than just knee-jerk reaction to our jolly largeness.

This French surrender to our prescribed sameness speaks to the more insidious quality of how the world is becoming more and more interchangeable. Today, you can go to a casino in Las Vegas and it’s a simulacrum of Paris with Eiffel Towers and walks along the Champs Elysees next to the blackjack tables. Meanwhile, in Paris you can eat at a place called Indiana Tex-Mex. What is the point of traveling, then, if you can get the original back home? And by the way, what is Indiana Tex-Mex? I shudder at the thought.

This lack of the foreign led me to return to Daniel Boorstin’s classic book, The Image. Though written in 1962, he understood what was happening here all too well, and his despair led him to coin the phrase “pseudo-event,” which describes a world being overrun by non-events and unreal experiences that were designed solely to be photographed or commented upon as if they were real. As he suggests, modern Americans have developed a kind of “pseudo travel” as well, an effortless glide through the sights of foreign lands with little of the discomfort or cultural unease experienced by travelers in earlier eras and with minimal contact with the natives. Boorstin’s point was that this lack of the real only led to a pervasive self-deception that threatened the very fabric of American culture and democracy. What he didn’t realize was that 40 years later his jeremiad has become a totalizing reality for just about everyone on the planet. All we have is self-deception these days.

Now, it is true that after a week in Paris I noticed differences, but some of them could only be found with real effort. The highlight here was when I saw a weatherman point to the map on tv, and I swear, mutter, “this is the weather. You must deal with it. Or not. That is the plight of the human condition.” Now, would Mike Hoffman or Rick Mecklenberg do such a thing? And I walked past a store that sold horse meat--and only horse meat--and nearby it was another store that sold swords--and only swords. I guess I’m happy that France still has that pesky foreign language thing going for it, but we are all becoming one. Yippeeee, and pass the Euro so I can go out and buy a sword. But count me in if anyone wants to open up a Starbucks there. It’ll be a hit.

Broadcast by Jonathan Nashel on December 07, 2001
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