After the Seismic Shift
Dunkelflaute days are upon us
La France va mieux. Pas mieux que l’année derniere. Mais mieux que l’année prochaine. (‘France is doing fine. Not as well as last year. But better than the year to come.’)
– Coluche, French comedian
Yet another dispassionate dissection of the current European malaise, with a few jokes along the way. The Old Continent seen from the Moon, where there are no political parties and we live on a diet of sunshine and hard cheese. The Chinese promise a colony here soon, which gives us hope for a varied cuisine and conversation. Return to the Culture Desk shortly.
The Latest Lowdown
There’s a scene in The Disenchanted where the two leads Shep and Manley Halliday – the Fitzgerald stand-in – get off the train at a stop in the middle of nowhere. They’re looking for a cup of coffee, something to eat. At the all night café, the cashier, single-handedly running the nightspot, listens as Halliday moans, ‘That’s how life is, friend, we spend 92% of our time doing tedious things so we can spend 8% on what we love.’ Ain’t that the case, she replies wearily, as the whistle blows and the train pulls out, stranding the two wayfarers. Budd Schulberg wrote it.
It feels like that in this ruined villa I call a shop. I’m supposed to get some writing done around here but if it ain’t one thing... I’m currently crawling around on the floor with screaming kidneys. I was writing a humorous piece on French scandals when the world went haywire, only to find I can’t sit at a desk for more than ten minutes at a stretch. Short takes follow, dredged from the piles scattered across my desk...
Glories of Paris
Notre Dame in Paris reopened after five years, record time. You’ve got to give Macron that. It only happened because French masons and tradespeople lavished infinite care on the job, while the bureaucratic regulations that slow everything to a crawl were suspended just this once. Too dangerous to try on a regular basis. The French might demand more of it. Still no explanation for the fire though....
A Big Picture
The full calculation of shattered empires and lost illusions over the last month awaits the historian with a high-powered microscope. Since November we’ve had: Trump’s definitive trouncing of the Demo Wine Lady, the never-ending bloodbath in the Ukraine, the never-ending slaughter in Gaza, the fall of Syria where ‘reformed’ Jihadis now rule, the continued destruction of Lebanon, the ongoing industrial meltdown in Germany, a change of Prime Ministers in France (again), plus outrageous attempts at regime change in Georgia and Romania. BRICS continue their pronouncements about the world to come, while China opened a new port outside of Lima. The Chinese are talking up a railway across the continent, Peru to Bolivia to Brazil. Blinken at the War Desk threw a few old trains at the Incan Empire, just to show them America’s still in the game.
Is competition on the international reserve currency market a good thing ? Trump doesn’t think so. He sent this message out to the world: “The idea that the BRICS Countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER. We require a commitment from these countries that they will neither create a new BRICS currency, nor any other currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar, or…”
What are his chances ? King Canut already tried it with the waves. Sanction countries that dare to trade in other currencies ? They’ll shrug and calculate the odds on their abacus. Time for American hegemons to get a grip.
France: Emmanuel Macron’s Unassisted Suicide
The king, aka Jupiter (so he referred to himself in sunnier days) is off his rocker, wandering the halls of the Palais Elysée, prone to irrational decisions made off the cuff, calling former Prime Miniter Attal and his circle an outrage (cage aux folles), his closest counsellers child fuckers (pédés) and faggots (tarlouzes). He trusts no one apart from his hairdresser and his wife. He believes the plug has been pulled, persons in the ‘System’ having decided he is no longer useful. Long gone is that beautiful moment when he caressed the tombs of the French kings in Saint-Denis and accepted his destiny. Back then he had it all figured out.
Where did I find this, you ask, some some mean, prevaricating, fakenews, oh go ahead I know you want to, ‘fascist’ website ?
Mais non. Le Monde – the liberal Times of France – in a revelatory four-part series this week. There’s more but yes, I gave you the juicy bits from behind the paywall. Macron has out-figured himself, trapping himself behind walls of his own design. Gabriel Attal, a pretty boy of no consequence who once upon a time was Prime Minister, he who appointed his husband as Foreign Minister, takes the insult, waiting for his chance.
A little further down Rue St-Honoré this week, the Court of Appeals dismissed ex-President Sarkozy’s challenge to his conviction on influence peddling. Three years, house arrest, ankle bracelet, loss of civic privileges. He wasn’t convicted of his real crimes but – one president at a time.
We’re in uncharted waters now. Must the vanity of kings always end like this ?
C’est le moment Bayrou
Why waste words on François Bayrou ? Let concentration camp survivor and jurist Simone Veil say it. She called Bayrou ‘worst of the worst.’ A career rider on the Paris merry-go-round, he instills fear in no one, too busy living the high life and lining his pockets. (He lasted a month as minister in Macron’s first cabinet.) Le Pen and Mélenchon watch from behind: Bayrou could depart even more quickly than his predecessor Barnier; for left and right, it would be almost as good as getting rid of the Man himself. Defenestrating the president now would force early presidential elections. Le Pen and Mélenchon have to join forces to make it happen. Meanwhile the French soldier on, with or without a functioning government.
Le Grand Continent provides in-depth polls of European opinion. In a recent survey about the EU, France leads member countries in wanting to exit (65% stay/26% go); believing membership weakens their country (France, 43%); on handling immigration independent of the EU, those in favor were Italy 80%, Belgium and Spain 71%, Germany 66%, France 55%. The EU has brought nationalism back from the dead.
Centre Paris. Police vans tear through the busy morning streets, racing toward the Palais du Justice with sirens blaring. Samuel Paty, schoolteacher, was beheaded in Conflans-Ste-Honorine in October 2020. The trial of the accomplices in a killing that shocked France is now in its last stages, when the defense presents its case: a young jihadi blogger, an inveterate Muslim preacher, even the student who spread false rumors about her teacher, are all making their pleas. None of them wielded the knife but each played a role in the terrible chain of events. The Chechen killer is dead.
Far from the courthouse France endures an unprecedented crime wave, as if the gates of maximum security jails were thrown open for the holidays. There are enough immigrant and Muslim names on the rap sheet to light up an identitaire with righteous indignation. Make way for Le Pen in ’27 or even earlier.
S.N.A.F.U. Germany, Or, What’s With Them Anyway ?
Deutschland, powerhouse of Europe, is having a meltdown, live on stage. NATO’s defense of Ukraine is an assault aimed at Europe as much as at Russia. Hard pressed between American adventurism and Chinese acquisitions, the German economy is a shambles; with the loss of Russian gas, the price of the fracked American variety is driving energy-intensive industry out of business – even Volkswagon is cutting workforce and closing plants. Demand for Swedish and Norwegian oil is driving energy prices up in those two countries, too, so no love lost there. President Scholz slumps like a man without shoulders, baffled by events, he, too, lost in an endless hallway he can never escape. After this week’s censure, he called snap elections in mid-February.
The decline began before Covid and can be attributed to the Merkel government’s gobsmacked indifference as the Chinese bought controlling interests in one industrial player after another. Behind that lies the stifling uniformity of the Euro. Germans obey the rules (unlike the French who continually overspend) but they were too busy torturing Greece to see what was coming. Draghi predicted the single currency would be a disaster and so it has proved. Twenty five years of stagnating economies! The world has left Europe behind. (If you want the chart and statistical version, Eurostat is the place to go.)
Week after week German officials excoriate Russia for not playing dead and China for becoming an industrial powerhouse. Unintended consequence, the war has pushed the two giants closer together. Watching German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, from the Greens, insult China before she jets off to the Middle Kingdom to wring trade concessions out of the laughing Chinese is to see a player completely out of her depth. Does she share EU Foreign Affairs secretary Kallas’s opinion that Russia ought be carved into mini-states ? No criticism of Ukraine ever passes her lips, no concession to reality on the ground: the war is unwinnable, territory gone for good, men fleeing the battlefield, all while unelected President Z. closes a deal on a ski-resort near Colmar. At least one of the clowns in this gang of meshuggahs is planning ahead ! He’ll have a choice between his Miami mansion and the Alps.
The Green Project is an albatross around Europe’s neck. Renewables and low-tech solutions have been hijacked by hedge funds, lordly billionaires and movement fanatics on the order of Just Stop Oil, that last the pet of a rich guy too radical for Extermination Rebellion. Even the English countryside of quaint towns and Maggie Thatcher impersonators is in the throes of rebellion: winter fuel subsidies cancelled, BlackRock roams the hinterland buying farmland and the devil himself, Bill Gates, experiments on the English like guinea pigs, giving cows gas-reducing feed, unknown chemicals residual in the milk on the shelves. Who cares if cows fart ! No one has a clue what effect these additives will have on humans but no one can stop Billy from playing mad scientist. He made a mint off Covid so why not try again ?...I’ve strayed across the North Sea...
Enter the dunkelflaute, dark, gloomy, windless days. Germans shut down their nuclear in the aftermath of Fukishima, imagining they could power the country on good intentions. The Greens seized the moment. Everywhere this suburban cult of bien pensants have wormed their way into power, mis-direction and stalemate ensue. If you were a writer, you might call it a conspiracy... The dunkelflaute depresses wind and solar generation so Germany is presently relying on Scandi-oil and hein! coal power from Poland plus nuclear from France. Très ecologique !
Germans now threaten to vote for unacceptable candidates. (You know the lingo.) As in other countries, volk who live in what Americans call Fly-Over Country have had enough of Scholz and Baerbock. Who can blame them, hardly a week goes by without a new scandal or slaughter. Even mainstream parties are polishing never-happen proposals. The dread AfD leads in some parts of the country, with Sarah Wagenknecht’s socially conservative liberals close behind. A Germany that tells the EU to fuck off seems fetched, but maybe not so far-fetched as all that. I’m probably wrong. On verra.
Germany Could Use A Joke Or Two
A retiree in Basse-Saxe came up with a pretty good one. The whole country knows that Minister Baerbock likes the trampoline after a long day scaring the bejeezus out of people. Said retiree, 66-years old, living on a monthly pension of 1,500 Euros, quipped in the comments section of a webpage, “Her head must have hit the ceiling a few too many times.” Someone, perhaps the Minister herself, complained and a lower court fined the man 800 Euros for insulting a public official. Other cases have made the news, and there’s the American Berliner C J Hopkins, who compares Germany today to the Nazi era and regularly finds himself summoned to a court bench. The trampoline joke is now circulating widely in German newspapers and websites.
The Big Sum Up
War on the people continues. European elites have a long history of betraying those they rule: the Dukes of Burgundy sold Jeanne D’Arc and France to the English, and Vichy ran half the country for the Nazis, to cite but two instances from France.
Europe is no longer the center of anything and the ideals that were the EU’s raison d’être have been replaced by suitably vague ‘values.’ The war in Ukraine confirms what many long-suspected: the Continent is a semi-dependent American vassel. Elites are comfortable with the dysfunctional Euro because they’re rich and don’t have to dirty their hands governing anything: they have a mediocre, insistently-expansive bureaucracy do it for them. Crime waves, immigration outrages, economic stagnation, endless war, none of it matters to the Cozy in Brussels.
The French have quicker pulses than Germans. France will leave either the Euro or the EU or both before the end of the decade. That’s my prediction and I didn’t read it in Le Monde or pull it out of the grisaille covering the skies over Paris.
°°°
Long one. That’s all for now. If you laughed once or were outraged twice, my work is done. You can buy me a cup of coffee – a frigging cup of coffee, you freebie-munching ingrates! – or you can subscribe to Riffs. Thanks.
Thought for the day: Europe isn’t going anywhere. It will still be here even when the EU fragments or collapses. It might even be a more vibrant place to live.
I chuckled a couple of times and wasn't outraged in the least. We share a similar worldview. If it didn't go against the strict tenants of my religion to give money to worthwhile people, I'd give you some. Thanks. G.