The final month of the year, a time when one is
traditionally slipping into the lead-up to Christmas, has been dominated by the
yellow vests. The infamous revolting gilets
jaunes have been burnin' and
a-lootin' in Paris, and stopping traffic in the provinces and generally
making a nuisance of themselves. Christmas can't come too soon.
The Good Wife of La Poujade Basse is out on the road more
often than her house-bound house-husband, travelling back and forth to Brive
four days a week. So she was the first one to notice the cars driving about
with their fluorescent yellow security vests (an obligatory part of every
motorist's kit for a number of years) folded or scrunched up above the
dashboard. When I started spotting them myself, I realised there was something
more going on than the breakdown-drill of a few over-zealous motorists.
Now I spot them everywhere I go. There's a couple in the
nearby hamlet who have hung one on their front gate. I would say that one in every
three cars now wears its yellow heart (as it were) on its sleeve. Maybe more. The
drivers are a motley crew to look at: ranging from old people to brawny
white-van-men to serious-looking young urban professionals. It's depressing. For
some reason, I feel most down-hearted when I pass female yellow vests. It
depresses me to think that the involvement of womankind is a sign that things have
really escalated. I live with this touching faith that women generally know
better than men and it's perturbing to realise that they can be just as dumb.
It's only good manners that stops me giving them the finger, too.
Not that there's anything necessarily stupid about protest. It's
high time for a revolution. We all wanna
change the world. But I question whether the impulse for demonstration in
this case has anything to do with a desire to change the world in the kind of
truly radical way it needs to be changed. It seems much more about preserving
the comfortable status quo. Being charitable, you could say that the yellow vests
are doing what the Peter Finch character did at the end of Network, bellowing to the world that they're as mad as hell and
they're not going to take it anymore. God knows, we have enough to be mad about
in France. After Denmark, it must be the most taxed country in Europe. Over 50%
of your income disappears without even seeing it. So the rise in diesel prices
can of course be seen as the straw that breaks the camel's back. And yet...
On my way to the local supermarket last Saturday morning, a
whole bevy of yellow vests had occupied one of Martel's fistful of roundabouts.
They were handing out leaflets and proclaiming themselves on makeshift banners
as citoyens en colère. I drove past
one such angry citizen before he could thrust a leaflet at the car, employing
the tactic I use for hunters: denying eye contact. Fairly tame, I know, but a
little more ambiguous than flipping the bird, which could end up in the kind of
scuffle that would leave me significantly worse off than my opponent.
Yeah, mate, I
snarled from the safety of my car, I'm
angry too. I am angry that Macron is revoking the wealth tax that will make
the rich even richer. I am angry that the deputies of parliament have, I
believe, voted themselves a nice fat pay rise. But I'm also angry that it takes
a rise in the price of the filthy pollutant that fuels our cars and fouls our
air to get people off their arses and out on the street to demonstrate their
displeasure. And how telling it is that they employ the traditional French
tactic of setting fire to old car tyres, just to confirm how little they are
concerned by what's happening to the planet. Many of them, too, will no doubt come
out with the Trumptonian angle that climate change is just a big hoax, anyway,
and has nothing to do with the way we go about our daily business on this
fragile over-populated planet of ours. It's just the media and liberal bleeding
hearts trying to push an inconvenient truth down our throats.
I'm angry that my ungovernable compatriots seem happy to
fiddle while the world burns, voting every four years for someone espousing
much-needed change only to take to the streets each time he tries to enforce it.
I'm angry that they will go on repeating the pattern until finally they put
their faith in some strong and charismatic leader who persuades them that life
will be better if they get rid of Jews, blacks, migrants, homosexuals and
anyone else who doesn't conform to the norm.
I'm angry that instead of lobbying their representatives and
the Fat Cats of big business, they take to the street and make life doubly
difficult for the ordinary people they purport to represent. Brive was like a
ghost town on Saturday morning when I went to buy some pipes for our imminent
new water cisterns. Admittedly, I went early to avoid yellow militants, but I
can imagine that shoppers are staying away in droves. And how's that going to
help the small shopkeepers who are already feeling the pinch of online trade at
the one time of year when they can normally rely on a bit of human traffic?
I'm angry, too, about all the Frexit posters popping up all around
town. Instead of trying to reform the institution that has managed to keep
Europe war-free for decades at a stretch, the gilets jaunes are just the very people to bring it down by voting
instead for a trip down memory lane. Ah yes, the glory days of insular
self-interested nation states. I remember them well.
Of course, when you talk to the folks at the barricades
they'll tell you that some of their best friends are 'coloured' Jewish
homosexual migrants, that they've got nothing against them on a personal level,
but when you get them en masse... At which point, I should stress that I've got
nothing personal against individual gilets
jaunes. The couple down the road who wear their vests on their gate, for
example, are good people. They walk their dog instead of letting her run wild,
they've adopted two orphans from somewhere like the Reunion Isles, and Monsieur
once gave me a whole basket of girolles
he found in the woods. I know some of these people and appreciate how
marginalised they feel here in the Styx, far from the capitalists of the capital.
No, it's the thought of them gathered together in a mob that feeds my ire.
I fear the mob, even bearing legitimate grievances. The gilets jaunes could be the 21st
century reincarnations of the sans
culottes. They'll be there cheering at the guillotines when it's time to
round up the scapegoats and despatch swift and summary justice. Every day in
every way we reinforce our ignorance of what history teaches us. The next
financial crisis is just around the corner now. The big one is coming to push
us over the edge. Then we'll see how many of the good citizens of France, the
ordinary people, swap their yellow vests for brown shirts. Be afraid; be very
afraid.
