Learning from the Past: On Going Backwards

By Judith McKelvey

Vintage Perspectives

Long, long ago, in another century and with different haircolor, I lived in France and sat through many dinner parties: some at tables groaning with six courses of food; most on the floor with a menu of coffee and a baguette, no butter. After about one year abroad I figured out that the amount of time spent talking politics during the meal correlated to the degree of the hosts’ wealth. If the menu was glazed duck confit with six stinky cheeses and mixed fruit tartine? Then the guests were card-carrying communists with two vacation homes arguing loudly with centrist socialists who were in turn rebutted forcefully by a monarchist holdout. The wine flowed. Everyone laughed and kissed each other goodbye when the meal was done.

Meanwhile, in a dilapidated house furnished with sleeping bags, I lived for a month with the mostly unemployed anarchists who had plucked me off the street. A few times we went for days without food, and all I could think about were flowers—stomach grumbling, all I wanted in the world was a fresh bouquet of bright flowers. Isn’t that weird? But strange circumstances perhaps make us focus on strange things.

Also weird was how much my revolutionary hosts did not talk about politics, not really. There were flyers about anarchist meetings and rallies skittering around the floors and collecting in corners and stairwells; but the talk was only about things in their blinkered now: music (free jazz) and sex (also free) and strategies for the next trip to Turkey for hashish (I never inhaled). The smoke furled. Everyone laughed, and we kissed each other goodnight at the end of the loaf of bread.

With dinners as my informal education, I learned to conflate politics with lifestyle and leave it at that. But then, in the 1980’s shortly after Mitterand was elected as the first socialist president and about a year after I’d moved with my Parisian boyfriend to a crappy apartment in a slum neighborhood in Lyon, I spiked a high fever that would not break. On the edge of hallucination for days, I was not surprised to open my eyes at one point to see a stranger with a black doctor’s bag sitting on the floor next to our mattress. A doctor, literally bedside! I happily wondered if time had reversed and this was my childhood bed and the man and his bag were here to tend to all four of us kids with the mumps.

What snapped me back to reality was the conversation between the doctor and my worried boyfriend. Eric asked how much we owed for the visit. The doctor said, “She is your concubine, yes? I mean, you have lived together for at least a year, yes?”

And that’s how we learned that under socialist healthcare, you are 100% covered a long as you are having sex in the same house as your lover.

As soon as the fever broke, I read everything about Mitterand’s socialist party that I could get my hands on. It didn’t seem all that radical, even to an American born in the 60’s and raised to associate the far left with the threat of nuclear war and having our homes stolen by the peasantry. Mitterand’s 100 step plan was grounded in common sense, aiming at gradual shifts toward basic safety nets and equal opportunities rather than espousing a revolutionary change. The anarchists were not invited to ransack the fancy six course dinner homes. Wine still flowed, smoke furled. But also, doctors visited the sick, and young people just starting out did not go bankrupt paying for it.

I wrote about this time in my life twenty years ago for the CDT shortly after starting a family here in State College. Back then, my point was that I missed all the political engagement and party differences woven into the French culture. I wished that my beloved country could get more informed and daring and directly engage with life in a republic. Why, I lamented, did we vote so little? Why did we take a stance so rarely? Why didn’t we talk about it for real? And wouldn’t universal healthcare be healthy for all of us? What were we so afraid of?

Here’s what I know now in the aftermath of the 2016 elections: the anarchists I lived with were strangely mute on politics because they stood for nothing–they were just against everything. The way to look at it, they explained just once when I asked, is that they tolerate chaos as a way of getting back at the all-inclusive evil “establishment,” which is why anarchists have no real platform or incremental plan. Their politics were about hating the “they” out there who were magically responsible for all the vague things that each anarchist resented.

Apparently it’s a winning formula in 21^st century America. My anarchist friends were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who knew?

Back in the late 1970’s, I thought these anarchists were puzzling but sweet—after all, they took me in without knowing a thing about me except that I looked like them and had the added value of the acceptable exotic: Look, a skinny white un-rich American who wants to live in France–let’s show her off to our friends! Eventually I figured out that there was a dark side to a negatively energized community whose entire platform was to scapegoat “the establishment”—and I got out of there fast. Started cobbling together 12 hours of work a day tutoring and substitute teaching in bilingual charter schools. I grew up, and put childish things behind me.

Or so I thought. It may be a new century, folks, but this new day looks an awful lot like the old dilapidated house full of self-satisfied angry rebels dulled by the smoke of their hazy rhetoric and hyped up on the caffeinated confidence that everything is someone else’s fault, and that a magical not-like-all-the-other-guys member of the household will make it all great again. Pouf!

Weirdest of all is seeing that the dinner party in that tired old house is being thrown by the six-course-meal crowd that the anarchists despised. On the menu? Yuge amounts of talk. Gold-flaked chocolate mousse. Servers stiffed on the tip.

And told with a derisive snort to keep the change.

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