It has now been 47 years since
Curmie last visited Paris, and over 50 since he last viewed the monument you
see here. It’s located in the Jardin du
Luxembourg, and commemorates the sacrifice of students in the French Resistance. This statue ranks with the Eiffel Tower and
the treasures of the Louvre among most powerful memories of Curmie’s fall term
in France in 1974.
It may be a little difficult to read the inscription on the base:
“Ami, si tu tombe, un ami sort de l’ombre à ta place.” (“Friend, if you fall, a friend will come out
of the shadows to take your place.”) A
dozen years ago yesterday, in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing,
Curmie wrote the following on his Facebook page:
I think of those words often, as we confront the horrors of the world, like today’s events in Boston. We can run, hide, cower. Or we can gaze into the heart of the abyss, unflinching. We can muster every ounce of Sisyphusean resolve and endure... and thereby overcome. The faces of evil are many, but they all seek a single goal: to engender fear.
I’m not buying. This page is dedicated to “cynics and other romantics.” I despair of the world because the idiots and the charlatans so often appear to be in charge. They aren’t. We are. And we are manifold. Dark forces seek to cajole, to bully, to intimidate us into submission. Ain’t gonna happen. I’m right here. Come get me, you bastards. And if I fall... there will be a friend emerging from the shadows to take my place before I hit the ground.
We now face a challenge not unlike the one faced by those
courageous students of the 1940s. Somehow,
a dim-witted narcissist with literally dozens of felony convictions got elected
to the Presidency of what had once been the most powerful force for democracy
and individual rights the world had ever known.
It turned out even worse than we’d feared, as talented civil
servants were replaced by sycophants, and agencies that actually helped people
or kept them safe—FEMA, Social Security, the FAA, and so many others—were gutted,
as were those who sought to restrain the unsafe and illegal business practices
of a certain (probably illegal) immigrant multi-billionaire.
Federal agencies are headed by people chosen not despite, but specifically for, their lack of qualifications—Hegseth, Kennedy, McMahon, Noem, Oz… need Curmie continue?
People are being kidnapped by masked government apparatchiks
and sent to foreign hellhole facilities without a whisper of due process. Sometimes they seem to be targeted for
expressing views the wannabe dictator doesn’t like; at least as often, they
simply have a name that sounds “foreign”: you know, Gentle Reader, like Madawi
or Abrego-Garcia. Folks with good,
solid, American names—like Drumpf or Musk or Hegseth, for example—are exempt,
of course. For now. But Trumpian minions should check out what
happened to Georges Danton or Leon Trotsky or Ernst Röhm before they get too
comfortable.
The stock market is being manipulated to work to the
advantage of the plutocratic class, in about as obvious an instance of insider
trading as you’ll ever see. Colleges and
universities are being threatened for allowing perfectly legal, First Amendment
protected, dissent. It’s okay if the
Vice President simply makes shit up to smear an innocent man (slander, in other words), but don’t even
allow someone else to criticize the Netanyahu regime or you’ll lose federal
funding. The list goes on and on.
Meanwhile, the GOP-led legislature cheerfully abrogates
their responsibilities to the nation they purport to love so they can curry
favor with the Manchurian Cantaloupe.
And SCOTUS waffles behind semantic quibbles, virtually begging for the
MAGA marauders to ignore their rulings.
And yet. And yet… Millions of people showed up for those April
5 protests. The Bernie and AOC tour is
packing in overflow crowds at virtually every stop, many of them in the heart
of red states. The handful of town halls
Republican legislators dare to attend are also attracting a lot of attendees,
but those crowds, even in “safe” districts, are in a considerably less cheerful
mood than those who are feeling the Bern.
We’re behind in this fight; there’s no question about
that. But those French students were
behind, too. They didn’t all make it to
the end of the war, but their cause did.
They needed a little help from the US, and we may need them to return
the favor in the not-too-distant future, but we shall overcome. We must.
Curmie is no gung-ho flag-waver, but he’s spent at least two months in
three other countries, all democracies, and his preference for the US, at least as it was before
the last election, is not founded on mere nationalism.
We have work to do, Gentle Reader. Republican legislators may be unwilling to do
their jobs, but we must do ours.
Resist, my friends.
Resist.
