French Toast

As everyone now knows, France is awash in civil unrest. And of course this is a terrible thing. But... the French just need to understand that this is the price they must expect to pay for their support of Israel*.

Wait, no, that's not it. Hang on...

Got it! This unrest is a terrible thing, but... how else should their disaffected Arab yoots react to France's support for America's imperialist war in Iraq?

Um, hang on. That's not it either.

Okay, I'm stumped. I'm not sure what the deal is, and frankly, nobody else does either. But then I read this post by Jane Galt, and it really seemed to get to the heart of what's going on. While there may be some religious overtones to the embroglio, this doesn't seem so much to be about making demands or venting frustration as it is about breaking shit. A quote:

Is it because Arabs/Muslims are a roiling repository of violent, seething hatred, ever threatening to bubble over onto unsuspecting victims in their path? Because the French are so damn mean?

Let me suggest another possibility: Muslim youth are rioting in France because breaking windows and setting cars on fire is fun.

Everyone who has ever taken their .22 out to the back forty and shot up a line of old bug spray cans knows this. Seeing things break, disintegrate, or explode, at absolutely no personal risk to yourself, lights up some primitive reptilian part of our brain with searing glee.

I'll side with the hairy legged Women's Studies majors when they say that most of the problems in the world are caused by men. Although to be more specific, fired-up young men. That's what wars are. Two or more groups of fired-up young men with guns shooting at each other. And they don't stop until one side runs out of guns or young men or fired-up.

The whole point of civilization -- well, maybe not the whole point but the main reason it's so important -- is to take these impulses and turn them into something constructive. Or at least benign.

Like football or Heavy Metal.

As the above posting goes on to point out, if you're an 18 year old, and you don't have a job you need to be waking up the next morning for, and you're pretty sure you won't get caught, since everyone else is doing it and they can't catch everyone, why not torch some cars?

So someone needs to figure out how to break that equation. Like making sure they have a job to wake up in the morning for or increasing the cost of torching cars by arresting and/or shooting at the people doing it. Well, you can't do the last one, since that would perpetuate the "cycle of violence", and God help us all if they do that.

On the other hand, if they had any idea how to make sure people all got jobs, they'd have done it by now. They tried getting the government involved in finding people jobs and that didn't work. So they tried get the government even further involved and that didn't work either. Right now we're at 10% unemployment, with young people in the suburbs closer to 50%.

So, apparently they're going to eliminate the middle man and just have the government hire the people directly. Which might work for a while, but eventually someone actually has to be doing something, you know, productive, to make sure the bills all get paid. Unless they've invented some kind of government perpetual motion machine where everyone works for the government, but no money anywhere ever gets wasted.

In all seriousness, though, that's the plan. They're going to coopt the rioters by giving them all government jobs. And they're going to put the screws even further into what little private industry is left to make sure they aren't doing anything discriminatory. (French private industry isn't even hiring any French people, let alone Arabs. So I don't that will be a problem.) I'm not saying they've decided to give appeasement a chance, but it sure sounds like it.

And if this new initiative doesn't work, if the 20,000 or so people are hired and find out that government jobs are way more boring than torching cars, I suppose they'll just riot again.

* Remember that one?