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Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005

YESTERDAY, I NOTED the prison-like atmosphere of Clichy-sous-Bois, and how it works as a prison of the mind. In retrospect, the place blends the isolation typical of a rural community with the oppression of an urban ghetto. As far as I can tell it's worse than both combined.

Most of the time, if you live in a rural community, you may have little to do, but at least you're in the country, or something resembling it. There is a way of life that you might call traditional, even if it involves hanging out in a quarry or working on your car. For a kid, rural life can be extremely boring, but there is, at least, a way of life. Human beings are rural critters from the beginning. There's usually enough going on in the central school districts that you can do something with your life if you want to -- band, sports teams, and other extracurricular activities exist in all but the most impoverished districts. And at best, you can really get to live in a beautiful part of the country and have that experience shape and affect you positively. In an actual rural community, there's always something to do.

If you live in a city, even in a poor part of town, usually you can easily get to the city center. There, you can see that there is more to life, even if you don't have access to it at the moment.

What is genuinely strange about the northern "suburbs" of Paris is how isolated they are from anything; how complicated and expensive travel into the city is; and the limited opportunities for what to do even within the city of Paris proper, if you can even get there -- as unemployment is high, life is pretty expensive, and the issue of discrimination is significant. It's well understood that as mayor of Paris, Jacque Chirac, now president of France, was involved in the plan to create the Cités during the 1960s (that is, the housing projects, sometimes called estates) and move racial minorities and immigrants out of the city to preserve its image for tourists.

And the people who live in the Cités are on the edge of nowhere. I've lived in some isolated places since leaving New York City, and when that "nothing going on" sense sets in, the feeling is creepy. The detail from yesterday's visit that seems the most perplexing is how little car traffic there was on the road leading to the Cités. True, it was noon on Sunday, but you could have laid down in the street near buildings that house thousands of people. This, supposedly in "Paris," one of the great urban centers of the world.

A comparison with New York City will make the effect of that isolation a little more clear. A friend asked me today whether I thought the architecture of Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan was just as oppressive as the Cités. This is one of many huge housing complexes in Manhattan, and I happen to have stayed in this one for a week when I was in college. The thing about Stuyvesant Town is that you can walk out your door and in 10 minutes you're in the East Village. And despite being this huge red brick behemoth of 30 or so towering buildings, the place felt alive and maintained. There was a sense of dignity.

Even if you live in some of the parts of New York City most comparable to the Cités, such as the South Bronx or Harlem, you're only a subway fare and at most half an hour away from midtown.   If you really have to walk from Harlem to 59th street, you can. You can get to a job, you can meet friends from other parts of the city, you can go out. Columbia University is located right at the edge of Harlem. You have a sense that there is something besides what you grew up knowing.

My sense is that for a great many dwellers of the Cités, that's all that exists. Teenagers have enough problems with boredom unless you really go out of your way to give them something to do. Even if they have energy and talent -- most teenagers do -- this needs to be nurtured and developed to go anywhere. I'm not surprised it was they who led the uprising.

These are the people Nicolas Sarkozy, France's interior minister, referred to as the racaille. But the truth is Paris knows the story of the racaille, and the alleged majority support for Sarkozy during the riots was a form of denial.

The word he used, a nasty insult, is related to "rascals," idiomatically meaning the dregs of society, from an earlier Latin root that relates to gratings (gratter), such as metal gratings or saw dust; the waste products. What a way to describe people who have so little and need so much; who are human like the rest of us but have no extra claim to being anything special.

When I left the Cité yesterday, I was cold and cranky and glad to leave, and very happy to surface again near Notre Dame and Shakespeare & Co. Books. Today, I can't wait to go back, find some friends there and hear what they have to say.

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Today is the 42nd (not the 32nd) anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This Wiki link might be of interest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kennedy