At the manif

 

Nobody knows what to do with Bardella’s name.

We all hate Macron. Last year’s protests against Macron stealing the living time of future generations – otherwise known as the “reform” of the pension system – were joyous, a sort of political charivari. For one thing, everyone knew that the vast majority was against the “reform.”

So Macron just thrust it down our throats. And the left responded by – fighting over who would be the fearless leader. Or something. All that time, all that marching, all those strikes – an utter failure.

But Bardella is a new villain, and not even one that we care deeply about. Le Pen, yes. Macron, double yes. But though there were many tries to make fun of Bardella’s name, none came up with anything interesting. Adam, when I came back, said easy: Bardello. My son, the slogan genius.

What to do with the contempt Macron instills in the average French heart? Well, the extreme right knew what to do. As Macron’s card is neither one nor the other – a reactionary economic policy with all the right rhetoric to celebrate women’s rights for the “other” side – they just smacked him around. And because Macron, while insensitive to the point of blindness to the left, is as sensitive as an easily tickled goof to the Valeurs actuelles crowd, they got the immigration “reform” they wanted, melting away all of the supposed difference between our paper mache Jupiter and the right. The rage against Macron, the failure of the left, and the National Front’s refusal to quit combined to create a brown France. As brown as Mussolini’s mIlice uniform.

So I went out to the manif for the new united popular front. It was, as always this year, gray and drizzly. I have a sort of dream vision of the thirties as an overcast decade that became even rainier at the end of “Casablanca” and then went into full storm mode until a mushroom cloud stood over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This was not the joyous flex of last spring’s demos. Because it is all so sudden, the majority of the signs were scrawled on industrial cardboard torn from boxes. But there was a lot of people – the press and police will say 75,000, the organizers 150, as is usual for left wing demos. We all looked very Vitamin D deficient out there. We’d all filed down these streets before. But after a while, the spirit of the demo picked up. It is one of the great advantages of having gay and trans advocates in the march that the spirit of masquerade and music visits their parts of the crowd – and that infects other parts.

Hard, though, to dance in the streets this time.

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3Anna Kornbluh, Nataša Bašić and 1 other