COMensarations
Friday, November 11, 2005
And the Beat[ing] Goes On — 051111
No armistice in Paris on Armistice Day.
Today is a big day for celebrating in France, historically speaking. Today, what we call Veteran’s Day, the French celebrate as Armistice Day, the day the slaughter of the Western Front in World War I ended.
I usually enjoy the day by hanging the flag out and watching the DVD by A&E Network titled The Lost Battalion. It is a superb rendition of the assault by an American division that convinced the Kaiser’s General Staff that things were only going to get MUCH worse for their side when the rest of the American’s showed up, if they could not crush a single tenacious battalion of infantry that had managed to get behind their lines.
The flag is hung. And I’ve still got plenty of time to watch the movie.
However, in Paris, things are not quite as peaceful as you might imagine. Especially if your only source of news is the So-Called Major-Media (SCMM). The reports of riots in that city, and across the rest of the country, of the last fortnight seem to have become part of the ‘disappeared’. However, if you rely more on good sources of information on the web than you do on the news-feed[ing ‘tube’], you’ll observe that things are not so peaceful after all.
The riots continue. The parameter that the French are using to report their steady decline is the number of burned cars that they have to haul out of the streets; down last night to 463 from 482, the night before. That is an ‘improvement’. However, I have to wonder about the value of that measurement. After all, if the ‘youths’ are burning cars and they’ve burned a lot of them since this whole thing began, could it be that they are finding fewer and fewer cars to burn, having burned most of this years crop already? Will the French people have figured it out that if their cars are in the proverbial ‘kill zone’, that if they don’t move them or slap on a sticker indicting their religion of choice is the “Religion of Peace”, they’ll have to buy a new car in the very near future? So, they should probably move them out of harms way. Therefore, there are fewer cars to burn. And thus fewer cars reported as burned.
The point is that the rioting is still going on. We just are not hearing much about it, thanks to the SCMM.