France, Collapsing, the Enemy, Within

FRANCE, for the first time since 1962, has experienced a complete collapse of it parliamentary form of government. Now,a new government will have to be organized and mandated to govern. This will require compromise,no easy task in European countries nowadays, just as in the Unted States. In 1962 the issues involved the dispostion of France's far flung colonial empire in the post World War Two era of colony's demands for national sovereignty and independence from their long time European masters, as well as the governance of war hero Charles DeGaulle,among other conerns. This time, the issues involved are almost exclusively financial, as the French economy, again remindful of the American, sinks into ever deepening debt, with high interest payments neeeded to service it. In the ancient republic,once again as in these United States, a sharp national political polarization has left the nation with an extremist far right wing commumity, both in and out of the government, and a leftist democratic socialist movement, with its political leaders equally intransigent, unwielding. All too familiar to Americans. But in France, unlike in America, there is also a relatively strong moderate faction, a fact which, unlike in America, offers hope of reason and compromise. Problem is, all three factions unabashedly despise each other, and all three offer distinctly different and irreconcilable solutions to the nation's various looming financial crises, dimming all remaining hope of reconciliation and problem solving. This is nothing other than polarization, prouct of our narrowing minds, something about which we the American people know a thing or two, or should. Everybody goes to their side of the battle field, forms a protective bubble around themelves, isolated, in insular fashion, from all who dare disagree, a bubble of false contentment among sycophants and yes men. Nothing ventured,nothing gained, nothing accomplished, no problems solved, as we lay lurking in waiting, waiting for that one moment of opportunity, when we might sneak out from behind our barricaded sense of security, and, undetected, seek out and destroy the enemy. What is not desroyed, and what engendered the present set of circumstances and cannot be vanquished, is the most formidable enemy of all, the enemy within, the enemy within us all. We have gathered up our arms,and weaponized to our hearts content, have retreated behind our lines of battle, into our fortresses of safe despair. In his epic peoem "The Wasteland", written in 1922 by T.S. Eliot, who was born in St Louis but moved when young to England, Eliot captures perfectly, in five sections with 422 lines of intense,elegant poetry, the abject despair and hopelessness which festered in western civilization and culture following the senseless, useless destrucion of Word War One. The war to end all wars was caused by nothing, fought over nothing, produced nothing, ad ended nothing, other than hope and human happpiness, and gave us only destruction, death, and despair on a colossal scale. WE still feel the effects of it today. Today seems very much like the aftermath of the Great War, or perhaps like the prelude to another war to end all wars. A war of the spirit and the soul, fought with insults, venom, hatred, and lies. Our modern wars, said Goethe, make everyone miserable while they last, and noone happy when they are finally finished. WE inherent what we create, and our legacy is our foolish folly. Our fear, arrogance, and conceit are our enemies within ourelves. They create nothing, and they destroy everything, including ourselves. Utter deslolation, without even the faint hope of redemption. "This is the end, my beautiful friend", said Jim Morrison, dead at twenty seven, buried in France. Or, as Eliot said in "The Wasteland": "I will show you fear, in a handful of dust".