Eddy was finally back from his long Southern hiatus, and insisted on dragging me off to a bar to watch the game. An Irish bar, in Paris, typically full of louts of all nationalities. Before I could object, he started reeling off the stats.
“France comes in to this one heavily favored. They won the last three qualifiers. They played the Greatest Game Ever against the Argentines at the last Championship, even if they weren’t there for the first half, a weird somnambulist performance on the burning sands of the Gulf. Ireland coach Stephen Kenny must be pacing the sidelines like an exasperated barman who can’t remember where he hid the bottle of eau de vie. He’s going to need it. His star, 18-year old Evan Ferguson, is a scratch. A loss tonight will make it three in a row in the Euro Qualifiers.
“Match-ups, position by position, don’t tell in Ireland’s favor. On a good night Pavard, Grizu and Mbappe could run the table by themselves. Still, it could be a game if Ireland catches France napping. We’re into a sultry spell now, in September no less, with temperatures hitting 95°F day after day (closer to 200° for fans on the métro out to the park), and even superstars can get fagged out.
“Tonight’s match is at Parc des Princes instead of Stade du France, where patriotic fervor is leaking all over the place in anticipation of the France-New Zealand rugby match Friday night, with movie star Jean Dejardin pedaling across the field in wife-beater and beret, bring home the day’s baguettes, a performance which has already occasioned furious rows on social media about whether you love or hate this 3D postcard of France during its happy days. No abayas in sight, no Jeanne d’Arc burning at the stake, no Crusades but on Friday night, President Macron mounted the podium to say important things about sport and society, only to enjoy clusters of derogatory whistles which swelled into sustained bursts from the rugby crowd. (No way for security to check for that on the way in.) A rare moment of unity for the French as the culture wars heat up.
“The first half gets under way, both sides taking stock of their opponent until the 19th minute when midfielder Aurelien Tchouameni hits an unstoppable shot into the corner after being teed up by Mbappe. That’s the French way, the beautiful moment school: staring straight ahead, Mbappe flicks the ball to the side like he was shooing a pigeon, to the waiting Tchouameni, who hits a curling rocket into the back of the net. The timeless poetry of the instant that French football specializes in. The conundrum of this team only becomes clear in the second half, when France revealed how very, very good they are, without ever being ruthless. Mbappe knows how to manufacture those moments for the French side, he proved it when he single-handedly got France back into the game with Argentina. He almost did it in this game, too, but refs called his late first-half goal offside. The Irish papers naturally said it was the correct call but it’s tricky, isn’t it ? Marcus Thuram wanders less than a foot ‘offside’ and kicks the ball away from the goal… to Mbappe who isn’t inside the box and who then scores…The goal is no good ? Must play be brought to a halt to satisfy persnickety refs ? If Thuram isn’t there, the ball rolls into the Irish goalie’s mitts. It’s okay with me, I prefer low-scoring games. At least the referees didn’t use VAR, their replay oracle, which drags everything to an unbearable halt.”
I sometimes hang with this know-it-all, a crank who likes to dispense wisdom along with the inside game. A political fiend, too. I just don’t know why he had to pick an Irish bar to give his oration in. We could have chosen a French place where no one would have bothered with two guys at the end of the bar arguing in Franglais but here we are, and the natives are restless. Don’t know, perhaps he likes the thrill of causing a commotion.
“45 minutes and it’s into the break, with its downpour of unending adverts. The bar is buoyant, looking forward to a hot second frame, dreaming of an Irish comeback, which doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. I don’t drink (much) so I’ll just tell you what I think.” The screens overhead are panning across Irish faces sweltering in tropical Paris. There’s no air conditioning in France, which I (the guy writing this all down) consider a sign of civilization, an older and maybe better civilization, so you’ve got sweaty heads a the bar staring at sweaty pink heads on the screen between ads. “It’s nice they came all this way to get beaten. Can we talk about politics until things start up again ? In French, so they won’t understand.”
“If you must, brother. But keep it reasonable this time. There might be spies lurking in the dark.”
“Where, I wonder, is Ireland ? I mean physically.” Here we go, I told myself. “It’s been replaced by a phantom isle, a rogue state doing a brilliant impersonation while the real Eire drifts in an impenetrable Hibernian mist. An outlier in every sense. Why is the country allowed in the EU ? They should be tossed out. Ireland is right up there with Luxembourg as one of the Continent’s most successful tax havens, tout légit, where companies large and small hide avoid taxes in the country where they make the dosh. Isn’t there a Penalty Box Ireland can be put in, or are the Eurocrats really and truly afraid of the toothless, coke-headed Celtic Tiger ? Can’t they whisper something in those fabled Hallways of Power, something like ‘Mate, you’ve gone a bit overboard there’ ? Hoarding money is standard fare but since the EU only gives lip service to stopping the practice, in reality it endorses it and they’ve let Ireland become the Florida of the European Union, where Zanies rule and anything goes.
“I know this is bit far from le foot but it’s still the half and we’ve got time to kill. Just a bit more. I’m interested in Ireland. Tax havens are one thing. The raging cult of Gender Woo is another, and it has found no warmer reception than in Ireland. The country has forsaken the embrace of one set of priests to rush into the arms of another.”
“In French, please, Freeench, Eddy ! You’re getting on people’s nerves. They’ll kill us if you go on like this.”
“My pleasure. I’m sure you know that there are gender clinics galore in old Eire, in some pretty rural locations, all busy drugging young men and women, convincing them they aren’t the sex they are and putting them on a path to lifetime medicalization and in most cases, sterilization. Outcry in high places ? So small you can’t hear it. I know what you’re going to say but comparisons to lobotomy are on the money: both depend upon physical modification (to be polite, if I must) to relieve psychological distress, hence the impossibility of resolution leading to lifelong medical dependence. The difference being that adults had to sign consent forms for a one-time lobotomy while now teenagers can opt in to Lupron with and often surreptitiously without the permission of their busy ‘helicopter’ parents. Easy on-line.”
“Why the hell are you going on about this gender nonsense at a sports bar, at an Irish sports bar ? You know they’re pathetically ignorant about sex.”
“I’ve been there, I’ve read up on it, and it’s beyond belief. In Ireland, retribution is swift if you object to this strange, sex-denying cult born of Big Pharma and Gender Studies departments. It makes the UK, ‘Terf Island,’ with its rowdy demos and suddenly wavering politicians, look like a free-speech paradise.
“Taking cases only from Ireland in the last year, Garda (Irish police) are busy visiting the homes of lesbians who say disrespectful things about posh men in skirts on social media, a teacher is behind bars for refusing to indulge the orthodoxy in his classroom, a music star is being cancelled by her label (while they’re busy counting the receipts) for saying that ‘Puberty blockers are fucked’ in a private Facebook post and women’s jails must accommodate men with rap sheets for violent crime as soon as they snap their fingers and declare they’re really Suzy not Stephen. The island’s newspapers are careful to call certain rapists women, when everyone knows they’re not. Get the picture ? Full court press. No Debate in Eire. Look down next time you’re waiting for the light to change in a small town like Falcarraigh in Donegal and you might see a crosswalk repainted with the ever-expanding rainbow colors because… Because ? No one knows. It drives seeing-eye dogs crazy. The whole thing is a NGO wet dream of DEI ‘inclusivity’, a handmaiden’s tale in reverse, and it amply convinces unbelievers that progressives have not only lost the thread, they’ve lost their minds.”
“I think we knew that already but go on. Just keep your voice lower, they’re staring at us.”
“And the pols over there on the Emerald Isle ? What’s their reaction ? No gender madness disturbs the blasé look on the face of the Prime Minister the Irish Can’t Get Rid Of, Leo Varadkar. Didn’t he lose the election ? But he’s still there, a career politician devoid of bonhommie, one of the untouchables, with the vacant expression of the man filling prescriptions at a methadone mill. Nothing to say about the gravest medical scandal of the century. Just giving the Irish what they want, evidently, unless of course, they never asked for any of this and it’s being forced on them. I say, toss them out. The Irish tiger can come back in when it can walk a straight line.”
“Eddy, I’ve had it. Shut the hell up. Those boozers in the corner are going to burn us at the stake.”
“How very French of them.”
The second half saved us. The crowd forgot about the two dissidents chewing on the world at the end of the bar, busy screaming at the screen and cheering on Eire. My friend shifted in his seat and leaned back. A few minutes in and he was at it again.
“And a brief moment of hope it was, with Thuram scoring for Les Blues just like that. A messy goal, the ball banging back and forth in a melée near the cage, not clean and poetic like France’s first. Pressure off, Les Blues come alive, rolling like the great machine they are, rattling the bars but never quite scoring. Their passing game is a pleasure to watch. Dembele can do weird things with the ball, giving it strange spins in the heavy air, threading past three Irish players and landing at Griezemann’s feet on the other side of the pitch. But somehow, they don’t score. Outclassed by a mile, the Irish put up a fight. Their goalie got a workout keeping the score 2-0, while they came close to getting on the board a few times. Their manager will probably get sacked if they lose to Netherlands on Sunday.”
And that was it. The banging on the bar, like some grande jouissance ensemble by twenty men at once. (It really does sound like that, admit it.) Game all over, everybody outside for a smoke to commiserate. We almost had the bar to ourselves, except for one sullen type who seemed to be listening in.
“Game’s over, so what about the EU ? I’d like to know what you think. Ah but you’re one of those Americans who just idolizes the Union, aren’t you?”
“Well, idolize I don’t know. But it’s a grand idea.” I didn’t get a chance to get any further.
“What’s the European Project at this point ? It seems to exist for the benefit of a cumbersome bureaucracy in Brussels, a kind of revenant Austro-Hungarian empire which cannot resolve the issue of tax evasion even within its own borders.”
“Do you expect something like the EU to exist without a bureaucracy to carrying out the hard graft of moving papers around ? And, speaking only as an immigrant, the French are no slouches in the bureaucracy department.”
“So where are the leaders, then?” Eddy shot back. “The unelected and unelectable von der Leyden, the moldy, moody German Scholz, a depressive who moves like a puppet with his strings cut. Macron, who once called NATO ‘brain dead’, better suited to be a small town Richelieu, where he can lecture parishioners until they get fed up and hang him. Nothing out of any of their mouths about a resolution to the terrible conflict in Ukraine. Silence, discrete silence about the Nordstream pipeline. Nothing about the apparently incredible shift in world dynamics happening right before everyone’s eyes. Africa…
“And the grand projects ? The Americans or maybe the Ukranians themselves blew up a major energy supply and Brussels reacted with all the ferocity of a tired salesman with Do Not Disturb on his hotel door.”
He paused long enough to finish his rotten Côte du Rhone. It was all they had.
“Grand projects ? You want a grand project ? The Chinese are running Pireaus, the port in Athens. All the EU ever tried to do was to send Greece back to the Stone Age to keep French and German bankers happy. Vaccines ? The Institute Curie in Paris couldn’t create a single one for Covid. The Cubans came up with three !”
“Artists, playwrights, filmmakers grappling with who we are and where we’re going ? Isn’t that part of what Europe’s about ? What about imperialism, sexual politics, the bizarre gender cult which is suddenly everywhere in countries like Belgium, Germany and Ireland ? Rather quiet there, too, eh ?... An ever-shrinking Postmodernism, with its tired ‘inclusivity first, ideas later’ chant, its flashy, ahistorical architecture and conceptual art. Photography is very clean and professional and it’s dead. Europe isn’t producing new aesthetics and it’s no wonder why...Richelieu at least invented the table knife, what did these widgets ever come up with ? A new app to make our lives go by even faster than they did before ?”
I threw up my hands. He was on an unstoppable tear now.
“Look at the heroes welcome those old sinners Polanski and Allen got at the Venice Film Festival. Standing ovations everywhere they went. That’s a real rebuke to the Wokeists…But who’s writing books about what it’s like to live under the tyranny of this constant moral opprobrium ? …I went to a rave on Sunday, and the music was so bad no one was dancing…”
The man at the other end of the bar looked at us with a mean quizzical expression. He could only half make out what we were saying but he didn’t like it. He slapped the bar, yelled Next Time! at the barman and sauntered out to the late summer evening.
“Oh well. Did I tell you about the time I brought one of Cruise’s Jack Reecher epics to a standstill on Avenue d’Opera ? I had the avenue to myself, from the Garnier to the Louvre, I cycled around while one assistant after another ran up to me with pleading expressions on their mugs… I had to do my bit to screw up American cultural imperialism. Enough, let’s get out of here…Let’s walk through the crowd slowly and see what they say. They can call me any names they like. I’m pretty sure I can take it.”
12 9 23, slightly edited for tender sensibilities.
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Riffs relies on subscriptions, paid and unpaid, to spread the word. Want unaffiliated, unhinged commentary from Europe on a regular basis ? Skip Le Monde and the Times. Paid subscriptions, set as low as Substack allows, keep bread on the table and I’m grateful for every single one of them. Shouts about articles that should be written always listened to intently. Thank you, mon grand public.