Office Politikkks: Psychos, fascists and FN at the office.

“You know, Mussolini didn’t just make the trains run on time. The buses, airplanes and metro worked, too.” Setting aside for a moment the fact that the Mussolini-made-the-trains-run-on-time thing is just a relic of fascist-era propaganda, Rome didn’t even have a metro until ten years after the dictator’s death. More importantly to me sixty-two years later, why was I stuck in a conference room listening to this nonsense? Because I’d accidentally befriended a previously closeted right-winger in my office. And now that he’s out of the closet, there’s no going back.

As much as I complain about my little linguistic snafus, my French is getting pretty good. Too good actually, which is what got me in this mess to begin with. It turns out that Jean-Charles had wanted to open up to me, come out of his political closet, since I started working here, but he didn’t dare, since he didn’t think I’d understand him. Until now.

Why me? Because I am American. Since I come from the land of capital punishment, the right to bear arms and The O’Reilly Factor, he somehow assumed that I was a fascist just like him.

Since I come from the land of capital punishment, the right to bear arms and The O’Reilly Factor, he somehow assumed that I was a fascist just like him. Quotation

We were sitting in a conference room reviewing a file together and all was going well. In fact, too well, in that we finished our work too quickly and neither of us had another meeting for another hour. So he started in on small talk, which was when it started going downhill and never came back up.

We covered the basics—where we’re from, our families and so forth. But I apparently hit a nerve when I asked where he lives. It turns out, due to economic circumstances and not personal choice, Jean-Charles lives in a less-than-fashionable area of the 19^th arrondissement. “And the blacks,” he points out, “are all over the place.” For a moment I gave him the benefit of the doubt, thinking that maybe he was just painting me a picture, filling in some colorful detail to my mental image of his neighbors. “With their eight kids and their loose morals,” he tells me. Ah, I see, I thought, this one’s for real—I’ve got my first real racist friend!

As much as we more-or-less Francophile foreigners like to think of the French as an enlightened cosmopolitan bunch, it turns out that some of them are more provincial than they had led us to believe. The genius of Nicolas Sarkozy is that he wove together the laissez-faire economics of the middle-right with the fear, anger and racism of the far-right, so that the latter could pose as the former, come out of the shadows and proudly vote for “change” without saying which kind of change they wanted more.

And the Turks, my new racist friend says, have you seen all the damn Turks?