A Little Schaudenfreude

The beneficiaries of the French arm of the great western european social welfare system are rioting and looting in the streets of Paris. A secret little piece of many in the good old USA is experiencing a little bit of Schaudenfreude-that's shameful joy when translated into plain ole murrican talk, for those out there (and you know who you are) who don't watch The Simpsons.

Remember when we were the bad guys for kicking Saddam's sorry backside, compatriots?

We are not colonists by force. The United States never has been a nation of colonial bent. We were the colonies that started it all by telling King George III to get a big old hammer, go to the Aussie outback, and pound all that sand up his...well, you know where.

We know that colonies will turn on their Empire. We INVENTED that!

God bless it, the French accepted the young American nation just to enfuriate the British. And then they go and act like themselves once we had a pulse and the British realized that we would probably continue doing grievous harm to their military presence elsewhere.

But the French kept colonizing. That is a country that could qualify for Special Ed. They were the ones who got run out of Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. It took Algeria another six years, mainly because the French forces could not get their Regie Renault tanks to go into reverse as they were designed to. The grommets fell out on the same day as Dien Bien Phu, but it took Renault six years to send the parts overland. It had something to do with the engines flooding off Marseilles.

This one is all yours, France. We owe you for dragging us into two World Wars and Vietnam. For the courage of every Charles DeGaulle and Resistance fighter, there was a platoon of cretins predisposed to Jerry Lewis and warm wine kowtowing to the Vichy Nazis.

And now, after fifty years of public pronouncements of how America's social system is racist and inadequate; after proclaimations of the moral and intellectual superiority of the French system; after telling us to have a nice life in the Iraqi desert, what the hell happened?

40 percent unemployment among the immigrant community in France? Our immigrants work, diligently. They assimilate, perhaps not as rapidly as some would wish, but they assimilate.

Mexicans and Central Americans are not burning cars in Los Angeles. Puerto Ricans aren't doing so in New York. They're buying the cars instead, along with their Cuban brothers and sisters who fled to Florida and escaped a tyrant.

France, you have yourselves to blame. The cradle-to-grave social systems of your modern western european model have destroyed initiative. The dole has given immigrants in France an elevated standard of living that will be ultimately unsustainable. If immigrants in France have no incentive to succeed, they will have no incentive to contribute to French society. If there is no incentive to contribute, it will depress the motivation to identify with Paris or Lyon instead of Algiers. What happens in twenty or fifty years when the most common first name in Nice is Mohammed instead of Jean or Pierre?

This is a good one for America to sit out. Eventually we will observe the culture that gave us Sartre and Proust, fading into obscurity. France may die alone, loved only by leftists on the other side of the Atlantic.

For fifty years, the question posed to capitalists has been "Why should an affluent society let the poorest live in misery when they can be helped?"

The answer is that the private sector is the only mechanism that has consistently brought people out of despair. Public sector programs do not end poverty adequately; rather they function as justification for an ever-widening stream of bureaucrats and social workers.

The far left is about to join the extreme right over issues of undocumented immigration in this country. The far right, in the guise of Pat Buchanan, is embracing the idea of a wall between the US and Mexico. The far left has chosen the environment as their battleground.

The truth is that the far right, on issues of "preserving language and culture," has aped the party of Jean Le Pen in France, and the extreme left has rebadged from "Socialist" to "Green" masking a similar anti-diversity, anti-Israel, anti-semitic message.

The far left, with the environment as their venue, will come down on illegals ineligible for their ineffective programs, i. e. repatriating dissenters. The objective of the far right is similar, although their motivating citerion will be the scoundrel's sanctuary of Nationalism.

Nationalism? Excuse me, but everybody in America is from somewhere else! It has worked pretty well for oh, about a couple of hundred years, maybe this is something worth keeping?

Embrace nationalism and one-note environmentalism, as significant numbers in France have done, and the next cars burning won't be Peugeots.

They'll be Chevies.