j’aime la Paris

It was August in 1977 that I made my trip to the City of Lights. Learning of the war that defeated the wily Austrian corporal leading the awesome Wehrmacht that fed Aleman’s illusions of superiority, and a chance to educate the status-conscious European into the proletarian ethos of American democracy, I knew more of Europe than my own location in Southeast Asia.

I was on an overnight direct flight from Chicago to Paris when I woke up at the Aéroport de Paris-Charles de Gaulle, aka Roissy Airport. With its futuristic design, the escalators at the center of the building with its transparent plastic tunnels made the place look like I just landed on a pad in outer space.

Mehran Karimi Nasser landed at the airport shortly thereafter as a stateless person after he protested against the Shah of Iran and stayed in the facility for 18 years, inspiring the Tom Hanks movie, The Terminal. Our Amboy the Shad did not think much of freedom of speech.

August in Paris is when shopkeepers drive to Cote d’Azur for three weeks of R&R. My host, who I planned to surprise, turned the table on me, as the household went to south Provence to imbibe the first juice of the orchard.

I arrived in the morning, moseyed over to the Champs Elyseés and Arc de Triomphe where one can see the Tour Eiffel from a distance. I went to the Louvre but decided I did not have time to do justice to its art collection, so I walked to the Latin Quarter and watched an arty foreign film. A very tall Parisian lady beside me at the theatre joined me over coffee in one of the sidewalk cafes that sprouted after sundown. She was eager to practice her English, and we were both solo with time to spare.

We parted after 11pm, surprised when she found out I was “homeless” and could not invite her over to a five-star, nor me to an apartment full of girls; demurred when she discovered I was headed for Rome to join Oblate Fathers. She might have assumed I was celibate; I wasn’t sure if she was glad or resentful.

She pointed me to a part of town where they had two-star accommodation for aliens and descended to a Metro for home. I headed to Montmartre (that sported Sacre Coeur on a hill) where the backpackers roamed the street at midnight, eating their crepes downed with red wine; the famous Moulin Rouge was walking distance. My Arabic hotelier was laidback, offered me what he said was the lowest price in town.

I mistakenly overpaid for dinner at the Latin Quarter (a Viet waiter must have thought I was a generous tipper), and the two-star hotel was still a dent on the pocketbook, so I counted my francs, smelled the roses, and headed back to the airport. The Oblate Religious House in Rome included meals, compliments of the host padre. Intentional poverty included compassion.

It was the satirical bent of Charlie Hebdo in Paris of 2014 that riled the nerves of Muslim warriors who thought the European sense of freedom of speech and press was grossly disrespectful. The newspaper went too far, satirizing the prophet Mohammed. In 2015, the guns went blazing as the paper received its perceived come-uppance and my city of lights became a city of fright and flight.

The media continues to portray all Muslims in the Middle East as a homogenous body, either through ISIS or ISIL, even when 20 responsible imams declared to tackle global climate change. Bombings we conduct inflict casualties on the innocent population, e.g., bombing of a Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) hospital. Casualties from us are “collateral damage”; theirs are victims of terrorism.

Any death as a consequence of violence is deplorable. The carnage in Paris last week where suicide bombers led by a French-born national, reared in Belgium of Moroccan descent, inflicted disproportionate damage to further a cycle of retaliation moving ad infinitum, ad absurdum!

EU promised a human federation but German Chancellor Merkel bound to a stadium for a friendly soccer match between Germany and the Netherlands attracted a bomb scare; game cancelled.

Terrorism in France did not start yesterday. The rate US-EU consumes fossil fuel and our coercive ways of accessing the resource is not unrelated to the Arab Spring, the conflict in Syria, and the carnage in Paris. Kneejerk Muslims are not justified but it is well not to lose the historical perspective on the West’s relationship with the region many decades before France this week.

“Trust but verify” was President Reagan’s characterization of his relationship with the former USSR. I tend to go with him in the same spirit as the American legal sense of “innocent until proven guilty.” Fear has now become the modus vivendi of everyone in the world, including the Muslims whose oil we exploited.

Like the U.S. whose fear saw the Chinese Exclusion Act passed by Congress in late 1800s, the Turks in Germany and those of former French colonies of Africa and SEA are making their presence known while Europe royals convulse in spasm. Fear reigns. Hope is a choice.