Forty years ago I was laid up in a hotel room, running a hundred and three fever. I was positioned toward the open balcony. Military jets buzzed overhead in preparation for Bastille Day. I coughed, my throat was fire, I had the chills. And the people had been rude. I swore never to return.
Forty years is a long time to hold a grudge.
And, forty years later, as I landed, I felt achy and my throat hurt. When my wife and I arrived at our hotel, I swallowed excessive amounts of Zicam and snorted Nasacort as aggressively as Hunter would cocaine. The next day I felt great, the Paris curse lifted.
And the people were so extremely nice. What happened to the Paris I so hated?
Paris was fully decked out in holiday regalia. In the neighborhood in which we stayed, Christmas lights hung between buildings, six lighted Christmas trees adorned the front of our hotel, Joyeux Noël declarations were in most of the storefronts, and an overall cheerfulness permeated the streets. I felt transported back to a time most have never seen: an innocent naïveté of hope for a future most expect to be bad.
Strolling through the Latin Quarter is a stroll through crafted scents. Bakeries and bistros pull you through the narrow alleys, leaving you in a perpetual state of quasi-hunger. The food options are astronomical—there was a fajita restaurant just down the street from our hotel. Tex Mex is not something I expected. Needless to say, we passed.
And the French are nice because, overall, they are simply nice people. Maybe they’ve just been misunderstood. My faith in humanity was restored just a bit.
On the flight over, I had already thought out the theme for this piece: It was going to be about failing Western culture and civilization, about how Notre Dame being destroyed symbolized such decline.
But Notre Dame is being rebuilt and it’s not going to be a multicultural “celebration” as was proposed, with steel girders—replacing the absolutely stunning engineering feat of the original timber roofing structure—and glass roof panels. One of the proposals I had read just after it was burned down would have provided assigned areas within the cathedral for different cultural ethnic groups (read DEI) with little room for Catholicism. And yet not one of these celebrated cultures built anything remotely impressive as the original Notre-Dame de Paris.
I was given hope for the future of Western civ as it is quite apparent the restoration is a true restoration. Besides being cleaned and retrofitted for modern fire prevention, the cathedral will be as it was. They are using 1,000 trees in order to rebuild the roof support structure—sourced from the original forests used in the original construction—and a further 2,000 for the remainder of the project. A new lead roof will be installed after the substructure is complete. The only modern element I could see were steel bolts instead of wood pegs as fasteners.
It should be reopened next year. And it will resume as a house of worship.
In hindsight, isn’t it strange that it burned down in April of 2019, on the cusp of the greatest social upheaval we have seen in our lifetimes? It’s as if the fire ignited the flames of tyranny and, as good firemen, we are now trying to douse them.
But there was something else going on in my subconscious that I couldn’t quite put a finger on—a certain “je ne sais quoi”—and really didn’t coalesce until we returned to Houston—and even now it is still somewhat elusive.
Besides prevalent graffiti in certain areas, in the bougie areas of western European cities, there is a reverence by the citizens for the ancient structures that surround them. There seems to be a larger element of self-respect: you dress well, you act nice, you’re as pleasant as can be under the particular circumstances in which you may find yourself, and you don’t project delusions of grandeur upon yourself to the detriment of others. In these major European cities there is a sense of history and a deep respect for that history, warts and all. They don’t spray paint Free Palestine on their Lincoln Memorials.
Not so here. Relative to Europe, our own history extends back only 250 years; their history extends back into the fog of a century or so. They have always lived in a mostly monocultural heritage while we have had multiculturalism almost from the very start. We’re a shaken-not-stirred Martini; they’re a glass of red wine.
We have done quite well at integrating our cultures into the great melting pot. Only through wokeism is that starting to unravel in spectacular fashion.
Europe has not done so well at it, thus the political and cultural divisions that are beginning to boil over (France has bore the brunt of lone wolf attacks by terroristas which spurred whispers that Notre Dame was a successful attack.)
One commonality is that the governing elites throughout the West despise those who they govern. They despise themselves. They have a hole in their heart and it can only be filled with the destruction of all that made us highly successful. The Americans are becoming quite adept at this self-destruction of our society through wokeness. The Europeans, regardless their own self-destructive tendencies via the tyranny of nanny-statism, have not embraced wokeness. They have rejected it. Even that strange little man who is the French president has proclaimed wokeness an enemy to civilization. They have rejected it because they refuse to give up on their history. We seem to be okay with burning it all down.
They have embraced American culture only in small helpings and that, I believe, is the major difference; it is why going to a major European city reminds me of a sanitized version of what I believed we should be. My vision, certainly, is not shared among most of America’s inhabitants.
There was only one major blemish I saw: The NBA has a shop in one of the major shopping districts in Paris. I’m hoping this shop goes under. I’ve had enough of that in-your-face culture where winning means winning at all costs, even to the point of cheating. We have seen this change in sports and most certainly in the arena of politics.
We Americans live in a raw culture; theirs has matured and while not remotely close to perfection, to me it can be more comfortable than our own. They are very comfortable in their own skin; we are reminded daily of sins we did not commit but must be held to account.
I don’t want to wait forty years to return to Paris. I wasn’t really ready to leave; just a few days more would have been great.
But I’m very happy to be home. Our daughter, who lives in Amsterdam, came back with us. There is nothing more gratifying than family and embracing our own history, warts and all, during the important observance of the birth of Christ. So…
Joyeux Noël to all, and to all a bonne nuit!