Things Fall Apart

Just back from nine days in Nice and Paris, terrific clay court tennis to watch at the Monte Carlo tournament; the pleasure of long, unhurried days spent with a 17-year-old daughter poised on the cusp of leaving the nest.

Nice is faded but beautiful. But the talk of the city was the murder in broad daylight of a 25-year-old Paris schoolteacher, who was walking in a wooded park with her three-year-old nephew. Three "youth of Mediterranean type" were being sought, though nearly all of Nice is "Mediterranean" of one type or another.

On Saturday night we saw Helene Segara, a French pop singer. Into the auditorium trooped one family after another, parents with children, sometimes children, parents and grandparents all together. American performers with this kind of transgenerational appeal are rare, though Harry Chapin had it, and perhaps Neil Young does as well. Segara's repertoire is traditional love songs, some disco, some vaguely Oriental numbers. Toward the end of the set she sang lyrics derived from the "Hail Mary" prayer, on her knees. I was left breathless, overwhelmed by such an onrush of innocence and depth all at once.

This France still endures, but may not have much time left. Among the young, the nose-ring set is making serious inroads. And of course low birth rates bring the whole national enterprise into question. An historian friend (and no conservative) remarked recently that the steady state of humankind might be religious fundamentalism: other forms of social-cultural organization, such as the individualistic and hedonistic modern West or AIDS-riven Africa, may just die out over the long term. Throughout this trip I felt the haunted sense of Europe's impending end. Italy has gone from big families to the virtual abolition of motherhood in less than two generations. Italian?which my daughter has been avidly soaking up?will soon be little more than a regional dialect, like Gaelic or Breton.

In Paris, it is generally possible to go through the day to day without confronting the fateful triptych of race, crime and poverty. Still, there are more moments than there were 10 years ago when a group of young men in a subway car or street corner put one on full alert. The problems in school and with the police of "les jeunes"?a sort of euphemism for immigrants of color?is now a regular feature on the tv talk shows. The French suburbs you never see regularly suffer a kind of low-level rioting, as if under foreign occupation.

Back in the USA, riots seem to have started again, after several years of respite. Seattle and now Cincinnati have experienced violent antiwhite outbursts whose true nature is underplayed in most of the national coverage.

In New York, the cops?whose esprit has been wounded by years of charges of racial profiling and wanton brutality?seem, as if in a spirit of vengeful black humor, to be undertaking compensatory harassment of the middle class.

Or at least I heard this story upon my return: the a.m. rush hour at 86th and Lex, a packed station, one subway turnstile not reading the MetroCards (but still rendering them unusable for the other turnstiles), frazzled commuters struggling to get on a train, eventually waving their cards and walking through the gate. Whereupon the cops would pounce on them for fare-beating.

In one account I heard, a woman protested, explaining that she had first called over a police officer, demonstrated that the machine had refused her valid monthly card, then showed the card to a subway employee. Neither the cop nor the MTA worker had answers for her, instead pointing vaguely to the token booth, where a half-hour line stretched up the stairs and into the street. Finally, holding her card high, she opened the gate and walked through. The waiting cops hurried over and wrote her up for fare-beating. Trying to explain the situation for the third time, she asked why someone didn't at least rope off the nonfunctioning turnstile that was root of all the trouble. The cop yelled in her face, "I don't tell you how to do your job, do I?" She has since spent part of the working week in court, with more to come.

This is the point, I suppose, where the liberal bien-pensant columnist will write, "Now we can understand better the harassment that black people have to go through every day." I won't take it there: The cops have a tough job culling the lawful from the lawless, and most do it about as well as can be expected. But there is something about rude and thoughtless exercise of authority that makes the blood boil. In some 40 years of living in New York, I've never had a bad experience with a police officer, but I imagine under the circumstances I would have acted the same way as the woman with the summons and the other "fare-beaters." I'd now be wondering where the "Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect" had gone to. And the cop-bashers would have a little bit of an opening to work with.

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