Marge and David
The other day I was looking at pictures in old money, and I was wondering whether I hadn't become Americanised the Marge Simpson way, like in that memorable episode about the David statue coming to town. It seems Miguel Angelo is at the renaissance stage after having previously been at stake. Do I understand classical art any more?
In the olden pre-Euro days, the 100 French francs banknote bore a brownish reproduction of a Delacroix, Liberty Guiding the People. It shows a top half naked woman holding a kid by the hand to the forefront, and a blurred mass of fighters in the background. There aren't many countries in the world where it does do to use female nudity as legal tender. The only one other example to my knowledge is a 20 000 lire banknote circulated in Italy in 1975: it is a reproduction of Titian's Sacred and Profane Love. Sacred love is a woman dressed up in some serious clothes standing by the side of a trough, Profane is a naked woman standing opposite. The painting was allegedly a wedding gift, it must have pleased the Mrs no end. But these are just pictures for money, as the lady of the residence says in The Girl with a Pearl. The world has moved on since, what with la Bardot, Cicciolina, Femen, Pussy Riot and what have you. I don't know what it is with Continentals that they will have to use ''filth'' for currency. Old man Freud had a theory about that. It is in the mind of many that women owe us dirty. No they don't. We owe them clean.
Taxation without vexation:
Cleanliness as the beginning of holiness is held in disregard by the French, or so the common belief goes, if your source is ''men in the pub''; I'd say in all fairness that moral cleanliness is usually regarded as a threat to the nation, and that women are still treated as sexualised objects just like they were in the US and the UK in the fifties. Women had to have sex-appeal, or they weren't thought of as women, and they were raised to please - and to know their place in a macho-driven society. Considering that France may still be a bit backward in that regard, I tried to understand why there had been so many cases of French women killing their new-borns in recent years, it is a firm trend, sadly enough, the most significant case being that of Madame Cottrez. There's an interesting article about these infanticides in content.time.com, Was it Mental Stress or Murder?
Neither one nor the other.
A French emigre to Canada called Winckler wrote a book, Brutes en blanc (Brutes in White) about what is politely referred to as ''brutalites medicales'', medical brutalities, in plain English rape by medical staff. They even have a quango in France to deal with that, rape and sexual humiliation are such a fixture of French patients' life. And this is nothing new under the evil sun. Winckler calls the brutes in white coats ''aristocrats'' and he says, wistfully, that it might take a revolution (another one?!!!) to get them out. I wish success to his risky enterprise, however, I should like to point out that it is the Revolution of yore that put the very brutes on the pedestal they are standing on in the first place, as the revs needed a new Herrenrasse to replace Catholic priests once pillars of the Ancien Regime. What better than cold science to fight and oust what was considered superstitious beliefs? Men of science would also grant legitimacy to the new state in the name of progress, nothing to do with disgusting, unreliable, base politics of course. Yeah, right, a bicentenary later, life is beautiful for cowboys only Americanised as far as fistfuls of dollars will take them, forget about the bus boy act to get through med school, the volatile private market and death row if. The French political state takes over everything from their schooling to their career, it buys their medical soul if they're selling. For the carefully sovietised patient, life becomes uglier and uglier. They shut up and they pay up. Then a medically raped mother kills her children, and she is the monster.
Controlling bodies, especially women's bodies, mothers' bodies has always been a fixation for dictatorships, a signature act. There were natalist policies in Hitler's and Mussolini's days, with yet more policies about eliminating competition from not so pure (and not so pliable) ''races'', there was Ceaucescu sending state agents to ''accompany'' childless mothers to their gynaecologist; there's the antidote Hans Fallada and his Little Man, and my favourite dissidence, Otisanek, an Eastern European gem. The new racy lords even made it to Hollywood, like Kermit the Frog, with the Doctor Mabuse series authored by a conveniently forgotten Luxemburgisch writer, Norbert Jacques. For the romantically inclined, and for the more plebeian part of the population, there's always Cronin the Solid Scot of the Citadel et cambrienses alii, and Madame Bovary. The latter is not a (juicy?) book about adultery as everyone believes, it is a book about illicit sex between the post-revolutionary French state and its dubious ''men of science'', the sinister and ridiculous charlatan pharmacist and the sub qualified doctor Charbovary. The only one qualified medic of the story is a surgeon called Canivet (his name sounds like the French name for gutter, caniveau) whose cameo appearance comes across as nothing but an arrogant and idolatrous vignette. The deus can't rescue Emma from the machina-tion. Of course not. It would defeat the purpose of the narrative, which is not only Emma's murder-suicide, but the unmasking and the execution of the anarchical petty-bourgeois world born of the mercantile revolution - and quite possibly of the decrepit Old Regime, we all have two parents. Not worth doing away with Charity hospitals, nursing nuns and pharma-monks for.
We can't have that. Instead we'll have von Goethe aus Weimar doing in the class enemy in style:
Was is ein Philister
Ein hohler Darm
Mit Furcht und Hoffnung ausgefuellt
Dass Gott erbarm!
What is a philistine
A hollow gut full of fear and hope
That God will have mercy!
I am so grateful for the translation by Matthew Arnold, him of ''the scarlet poppies peeping through the thick corn, And round green roots and yellowing stalks'' (The Scholar Gypsy) (our kids is learning). Come to the philistines, Wim Delvoye said it as it was with Cloaca; far less politely, but a chip of the old Benelux buffer block (read ''doormat'') that also happens to be the butt of French ''Irish jokes'' is more than excused.
Dura mater:
The Writing is on the Wall. The temple to filth philistines built to themselves will collapse on them, squashing them like gnats. Ruination is the fate awaiting the master races who make of women prostitutes of their temple, forcing them to be subjected to unwanted nudity, to undergo unnecessary procedures naked, to give birth completely naked in front of total strangers, damaging their bodies and their minds at will. This is the reason why women like Madame Cottrez kill their babies. Such anti-women behaviour is standard in that advanced nation that still thinks of itself as the centre of the world and as a beacon of enlightenment, boasting of a free, equalitarian and exclusively fraternal state where sadistical punishment in white garb is doled out to the bitches (les salopes as they routinely call their women) who dare retain that unique power no body can take away from them: the power to give life. Is there any difference between those brutes and a genocide such as the Tsarist Caucasian genocide or the 1915 Armenian genocide, with perpetrators ripping open enemy women's bellies to get their babies out for the sake of killing and entertainment? To me, none, because I have heard French women say that if you happen to be fat, old, ugly, lesbian or all of the above and with NO connection whatsoever to the medical profession, you're a goner. If you complain, you're not heard, you get threatened, you get told in a patronising, superior tone that the medical staff is ''endurci'', not fussed, not fussy either, hardened rather. Knickers to all that, we all know what part of a man's anatomy hardens when he sees a naked woman with her legs spread-eagled, and it is NOT his heart. The French medical establishment is a corrupt state within a corrupt state, a law unto itself just like the gangsta in Pepe Le Moko (still a reality in today's run-down suburbs). All that matters to medical students, who are taught facts and nothing but fuckts is the dosh and the bods they are going to lay their hands on. Just like their elders, just like any other pen-pusher in the pay of the state, they will be mere technicians with zero moral duties. You would find more morality among mafia executioners, and at least some sense of honour however misguided. Look at Le Scouarnnec's case, he became a surgeon only because his father told him that money was in it, he became a prolific paedophile and proud of it, and he got done only because he was stupid enough to touch up one of his own. Pity it took hundreds of innocent, lesser humans before the paedo-saga went to trial. Some are definitely more equal than others in the porcine community. I'll end up believing Paul Morand when he says the Frenchman is ''le cochon international'' in Borealis, the Scandinavian night (Open All Night, 1922). Charity doesn't begin at home, it's l'amour toujours for the far-away victims of FGM, for non-European child brides and for women under Taliban rule, but nothing for the neighbour not quite as loved as themselves. French natives only have the right to lay down, think of Porkland and pay up.
Ca n'durera pas toujours. Winckler wishfully thinks of a revolution to rid humanity of the brutes in white coats. Mine is happening, Romantic, Literary, Spiritual and Levantine - minus royalties. Theirs will be violent, as suits the violated. They are now having to deal with Chechen terrorists the same way previous generations had to deal with Irgun or Asala. Hopefully the next revolution will lead to the shortening of another end that the top one. Abraham's freely consented self-mutilation is more than enough, in which case we got savvy.
Coventry:
Ladies, put on the robes of pride and think of Coventry this week in 1940. The walls of the Cathedral were laid bare by the Huns, but the Peeping Tom who feasted his filthy eyes on the heroic Lady Godiva got blinded for an eternity. The Huns got their deserts eventually. Here is what the Gallant Liegeois (Valeureux Liegeois) has to sing out to you:
Mesdames ce n'est que pour vous
Qu'on brigue de porter des chaines
Ecrasons nos tyrans jaloux
Et soyez nos souveraines
Ladies it is only for your sake
That we accept to be in chains
Let us crush our jealous tyrants
And may you be our sovereigns
So much for Douce France et le petit Lire.
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