Picking the daisy
Picking the daisy
Translated by Elio Flesia
[French idiom meaning "He loves me… he doesn't love me… he loves me…" etc.]
October 24, 2004
Jean-Pierre Petit Astrophysics
People of my generation will surely remember that this referred to a film starring Brigitte Bardot. But that’s not the daisy I’m thinking about today. I’m thinking instead of an image sent to me by one of my readers. In France, as in many other countries, we are like a daisy that the State keeps plucking petal by petal. The State nibbles away at public freedoms one by one, endangering social progress already achieved. Since there is no longer any solidarity among people, and no political party or union capable of defending the people and workers, everything collapses in silence and indifference. On the daisy, none of the petals react when the one next to it is pulled off, nor do they realize that one day or another, the same fate will befall them too.
Unable to see any alternative on the horizon, people succumb to despair. Periodically, Arlette Laguiller [French political figure from the far-left Workers’ Struggle party] runs in elections, reciting her usual monotonous, shrill speech. She speaks of the "workers' party" and the "bosses." While some obvious injustices are thus denounced, her political message is utterly impoverished, nonexistent—just like all the speeches of those men and women who declare themselves "left-wing," whether proletarian or affluent. Some speeches echo the sixties theme of "self-management," the most absurd idea ever concocted in our social history. No, enterprises cannot function if run by workers' soviets. Communism itself was not efficient. It’s true that things are more complex. Even though the USSR had many good intentions (and perhaps even honest people), that empire, based on a more violent autocracy than even Stalin’s butcher’s rule, died of economic suffocation, forced by the United States to develop an arsenal devouring the largest part of its gross national product. The USSR never had the chance to have both butter and cannons. Everything eventually collapsed like a house of cards, and the Russians proved poorly equipped to shift from one extreme to the other—from an isolated, centrally planned economy cut off from the world, to a market economy. It’s as if they had gathered all our flaws in one single block, without benefiting from the few strengths of our system. Now, train stations are full of minors prostituting themselves, markets full of elderly people selling rags just to survive. Soviet social protection has been replaced by poverty. In Cuba, the American Mafia, expelled by Fidel Castro, won’t take long to return to what was once its headquarters. Mao’s China inherited the iron fist of its Great Helmsman. There, the fight against drug trafficking involves executing even those caught with just a small amount of any hallucinogenic substance. China managed to escape the delusions of its leader, that guru or intellectual who loved young flesh and claimed expertise in metallurgy with little success. For those unaware, Mao decided that peasants should produce steel in municipal foundries. Meanwhile, across the border, Stalin acted as an agronomist, immediately after the war declaring that his people would dramatically increase agricultural yields by plowing the earth to a depth of one meter—using tanks converted into tractors. The result was that vast regions of fertile land were buried a meter deep, covered by infertile soil incapable of supporting crops, rendering the land sterile for years.
In Arab countries, the common people’s anxiety serves religious leaders who offer their flock the Sharia and the burqa as life rafts to protect them from the corruption of Western customs, increasingly visible. At least this solution has the merit of simplicity, even though it was invented over a thousand years ago. One must admit it’s an ideal answer: a rigid, well-defined way of life, a social system extremely stable, ready to accept any inequality, and excellent solutions against existential anxiety. Everything is predetermined. While Westerners drown their hypochondria in antidepressants, build walls, or recklessly fire missiles in accordance with the biblical law of retaliation, on the other side, a wonderful escape route is offered to the most desperate: suicide with the guarantee of paradise in the afterlife. Nothing could be better or more perfect. Unbeatable! But in both Arab countries and the United States, political leaders never send their own children to be killed. Death has always been for the poor, everywhere and at any time.
The system of Islamic fundamentalism is also asserting itself as an international political force. The kamikaze system is unbeatable. It’s nothing less than the "atomic bomb of the technologically underdeveloped," against which cowboys armed with lasers and nuclear weapons, backed by hypersonic spy planes and GPS-guided bombs, remain completely defenseless. This situation has never been seen before. Historically, it’s extraordinary. European countries resemble bundles of straw waiting only to catch fire. The Algerian War of Independence proves how quickly things can deteriorate. When the first bomb explodes, the far right will bring out its OAS [secret terrorist organization that fought Algerian independence movements], already waiting in the wings. Who will initiate this? A good question. Who is acting behind the scenes? Who will launch the first wave of attacks in this or that European country? Religious leaders—or perhaps… the Americans themselves, seeking a way to force Europeans to join them in a crusade "against terrorism"?
Did American hardliners possibly accelerate events through a so-called "self-inflicted attack," a totally Machiavellian maneuver, that infamous September 11? The matter remains unclear. A subtle international political maneuver to gain free hands, only to become deeply entangled in intractable and humanly catastrophic situations. Iraq is becoming the retreat from Russia. Historically, the two situations are strikingly similar.
Even science is unable to find a solution, having compromised itself with military-industrial interests (a type of activity that today has become the majority of "research and development" efforts), thus completely discrediting itself. Science serves above all the pursuit of greater profits and the circles of power, monopolies, with total irresponsibility, plunging headlong into ventures like genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and many others. Occasionally, the common people ask the great priests of science—those with beards and suspenders, or those in wheelchairs behaving like holy men promising them… the craziest things, advancing theories "that will be useful in several centuries" because they are "too advanced," evoking a TOE (Theory of Everything), a "Theory of Everything." Really pitiful...