Notre Dame Restoration

The most famous Roman Catholic cathedral in Europe outside the Vatican, Notre-Dame in Paris, has been restored to its glory five years after a destructive fire that gutted the structure and risked destruction to numerous sacred items and artifacts (many if not most of which were saved).  French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to have it restored completely by the 2024 Paris Olympics or, failing that, by the end of 2024.  The restoration crews got the job done with 24 days to spare.

The cathedral looks as grand and opulent as it did when completed in 1345, and the restoration crews cleaned and unearthed architectural details and cleaned paintings of grim and dust that had long since accumulated before the fire.  Notre-Dame has more than regained its place as a house of worship designed to make you feel like you are in heaven itself, the whole point of the grandiosity of Catholic ecclesiastical architecture.

President Macron has called Notre-Dame the soul of the French nation, and he told Bill Whittaker of CBS News that the restoration project helped unite France, a country that's as bitterly divided these days as much as the United States.  He also told Whittaker that working for a common goal and recognizing what brings a nation together can be a good way to heal the divisions.

Of course, don't expect anything like this to take place in America, where the most important building in the nation, the Capitol, was crapped in during the January 6 insurrection.  What goal could we stupid Americans set to unite the country?  Certainly not restoring a Catholic cathedral, as that would violate the separation of church and state, and besides, progressives would be incensed at any public works project that gives preference toward a faith known for its patriarchy and misogyny . . . even as these same so-called progressives demand that we respect Islam.

Build a national high-speed rail network?  No, conservatives insist that's an effort to intrude on our freedom of mobility - to go where we want, when we want in our cars.  Eradicate the measles?  No, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as the incoming Health and Human Services Secretary, won't allow the necessary vaccinations.  Get money out of politics?  Don't make me chortle.  We're not likely to get behind a common cause unless the Germans invade us.

But then, the last time the Germans invaded us . . .

. . . we welcomed them with open arms.

The truth of the matter is, for all of the bad breaks France has had economically and politically, the French people know who they are and have known for over a thousand years.  Here in the United States, after nearly a quarter of a millennium,  we still have no idea who we are.  If we have a common identity at all, it's an adherence to the Constitution, which seems quaint as Trump prepares to return to power, or maybe making lots of money.  Other than that, we can't agree on anything.  It should thus come as no surprise that the French would spare no expense to rebuild in five years a masterpiece of medieval architecture dating back to the reign of Philip VI of the House of Valois, a cathedral of stone, wood and lead that has stood for eight centuries, while in United States, took well over a decade to fill the hole in the ground left by the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a pair of buildings dating back to the 1970s that were made of steel, aluminum, drywall and spray-on fireproofing held together with spit to cut costs.

Sad.

So it seems somewhat appropriate that Trump has named the money-grubbing and crooked real estate developer and pardoned felon Charles Kushner, father of Jared, as his ambassador to France.

This country needs an enema.

Meanwhile, in Paris . . .

Maybe it's because it's too early, but I haven't found much about the 2024 Paris Olympics to make fun of.  Except the opening ceremony, of course.  Whose bright idea was it to have the opening ceremony with the teams riding bots down the Seine in the pouring rain?  Even if had been sunny out, it still would have been awkward and cumbersome to pull off.   And in the city that gave us Catherine Deneuve and François Truffaut, the whole production - complete with a masked policewoman as the torch bearer - this was way to Hollywood!  Which reminds me, Los Angeles is hosting the Olympics in 2028, and if you think LA can do something similar on its river . . .  

. . . sorry to disappoint you.

And while we're at it, what the hell was Lady Gaga doing performing a cabaret number?  I mean, this is Paris, the home of many great chanteuses who carry on  rich tradition going back to Edith Piaf, and they get an American?  An American known for that Vegas-style theatricality that the French always sneer at?  I guess Joe Scarborough was right when he said we're the cultural envy of the world.  Given Gaga, and given that Snoop Dogg is on NBC's reporting team as a color commentator on the City of Light, apparently there was no one round to say, "Poor world!"

One non-American athlete that caught my attention is swimmer Siobhan Haughey, the grandniece of  an Irish prime minister.  She's competing for . . . Hong Kong.  (Her mother is Hong Kong Chinese.)  But why isn't she competing for Ireland?  I mean, Hong Kong is run by a repressive dictatorship, and when you consider her parents had the opportunity to flee, and . . . 

See what I mean when I say there's nothing really to make fun of?     

I was hoping to see some travelogue segments about France in between competitions, but NBC prefers to show celebrities in the stands, like Jessica Chastain, Tom Cruise, Ariana Grande, William "Flavor Flav" Drayton, and, of course, Lady Gaga.  Nice seats if you can get them.

Of course, there'll be the inevitable documentary about the fall of Paris to the German Wehrmacht in the spring of 1940, which brought Hitler to goose-step down the Champs Élysées . . . a scene that might very well be re-enacted on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington six months from now.

Is Paris Burning Again?

In late 2019 and early 2020, I was hoping to spend a month or two in Paris in the immediate future at the invitation of a friend who lives there - possibly as soon as the summer of 2020.  When COVID hit, I decided that I should wait until the pandemic abated - by 2023 at the earliest.

Yeah, I'm not going to Paris this year either.  And not because I've given up any hope of going anywhere in Europe ever (though I have) . . . 

It seems that the French are on the warpath again, burning everything in sight, including this unfortunate Peugeot (at least I think this is a Peugeot; it's hard to tell when the brand emblem and the radiator grille have both melted), because of President Emmanuel Macron's move to raise the retirement age.  Macron wants to raise the retirement age in France so that the national old-age pension plan doesn't go bankrupt due to the aging population and the low birth rate (which made me wonder how the French could be such great lovers yet still be unable to procreate, until I remembered that even Marine Le Pen wouldn't criminalize birth control).  The French are not only burning cars but going on strike in just about every industry and service, letting garbage pile up on the once-romantic streets of Paris.

What does Macron want to do with the retirement age?  He wants to raise it from 62 years to . . . 64.

Are you kidding me?

I mean, in the United States, the retirement is even higher than Macron wants it to be in France, and many Americans can't retire at the U.S retirement age of 65  - and by the way, the retirement age for my generation and for subsequent generations is higher still, at 67.  Some politicians are already suggesting that the retirement age in the U.S. could be raised even higher, like up to 70.  The French will still have it better than we do with a retirement age of 64, and yet they start destroying and shutting down the country in protest?  It makes you wonder what we could achieve if we protested as angrily and as violently as the French.

Oh, right . . .

I remain utterly amused by the French.  They have it better than we do in so many ways - paid family leave, high-speed rail, Emmanuelle Béart - yet they go ballistic when they're asked to give up something small or tolerate a minor inconvenience, even when the result is continuing to have a better quality of life than us silly Americans, still without a Cabinet-level equivalent to France's Ministry of Culture.  Raising the retirement age to an age still below that of the retirement age in the United States - a country where workers can't take all of August off - is hardly the reason to let the trash pile up higher than Mont Blanc.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: Sure, the French have more to lose than Americans do, but that's only because they have more in the first place!

President Macron has directed his prime minister to subvert the French Parliament and push his retirement reform bill through by using an obscure procedure allowed by France's 1958 constitution.  The 2024 Paris Olympics are going to be a big disaster, if this keeps up.

Notre Dame and Civilization

The devastating fire that almost completely destroyed the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris only reminds people all over the world how tragic life can be . . . except maybe most Americans.

Yes, that was a loaded statement, so bear with me.  Notre Dame was and is a monument that encapsulates everything that signifies Western civilization.  It was built to project, truth, faith, beauty, art and culture.  It's only fitting that it stands in Paris, regarded as the most beautiful city in the West, if not the world.  But it was likely built with the understanding that something constructed and furnished with such great care and attention to quality and detail, could be easily lost.  To understand civilization is to understand that, as James Howard Kunstler (expect me to quote and paraphrase him liberally here) wrote, life is tragic, everything we love is bound to be lost, and life will go on without our own selves.

Architecture defines a civilization, and the architecture of Notre Dame defines France perfectly.  So, alas, does architecture in the United States.  While our older buildings - those that have been preserved as opposed to those that were cavalierly destroyed to make way for, say, sports arena that look like giant carburetor filters - define our past, our more recent buildings define our present.  And the buildings we've been erecting for the past seven decades mostly define our tawdriness, our disrespect for tradition, and our lack of standards (qualities commonly reflected on the record charts these days).  Kunstler wrote in his 1996 book "Home From Nowhere" that Americans defy the reality of life's tragic nature - the essential building block of any civilization - by erecting buildings not worth caring about. Virtually every tract house, highway retail strip, condominium complex, and office building amplifies that apathy.  Kunstler explains it this way:

"When a hurricane blows away sixty condo clusters along the Florida Coast, nobody outside Dade County sheds a tear for what is lost, not because other Americans are heartless but because people of even modest intelligence can tell whether places are worth caring about, though perhaps they can't say why.  In the heartland, mobile home parks are commonly referred to as 'tornado bait.'  Nobody could say that about an Italian hill town and get a laugh, not even an American."

And what are we to make of the recent tornadoes that hit the American Southeast and the Midwest?  Many of the houses destroyed were poorly, shoddily built, and it could be easy to shrug off a rural shack in Mississippi or a tract house in Ohio as no big loss.  But the news reports remind us that people died in these structures, and it only serves to remind us that no matter how hard we try to deny life's tragic nature, life reminds us of how tragic it can be.

The weather system that affected the Southeast and the Midwest, by the way, produced severe thunderstorms in the Northeast, and one struck the new World Trade Center with lightning, as if to mock the idea of such a building reaching to the sky.  It only reminded me of the karma of 9/11 in that, before the Twin Towers were destroyed and before the Pentagon was hit, these buildings were derided for their inhuman gigantism and their banal architecture, yet the U.S. Capitol - one of the most beautiful buildings in the United States - survived 9/11 when passengers on another jet airliner foiled the attempt terrorist mission to destroy that building.  Imagine the even greater tragedy that would have unfolded had al-Qaeda succeeded in destroying that temple of democracy.

And Americans do get it, even if they don't know it.  Case in point: In 1989, Mead Hall, the 1836 mansion on the campus of Drew University, my alma mater, in Madison, New Jersey, was in the middle of renovations when a fire gutted the building.  Students were sad for the mansion . . . while making wisecracks about how it was too bad the fire didn't happen to the University Center, a loathed brick and cinder-block box built in 1958.  Mead Hall is still standing, the renovation having been completed in 1992.  The University Center was replaced by a new building that, likely, will sooner or later inspire the same derision that its predecessor did.  To say that it's nicer than the old building may not be saying much.  But that is the difference between buildings worth caring about and buildings not worth caring about.  We mourn what is lost when we recognize its value we laugh at the loss of what we know has no value.

And then there is what our unwillingness to deal with tragedy has done to whole places.  Our efforts to build a civilization that contradicted reality by replacing real places with perfect, sanitized simulacra of authentic human settlements - namely, cities - only led to the devaluation and destruction of most of our great urban centers.  I once mentioned the fall of Detroit, once thought of as the Paris of the Midwest, as well as the current state of Newark, outside which I live.  Our clownish efforts to deny life's tragic nature is evident in the fact that, while no one could ever make jokes about a great loss in Paris, Newark, like Detroit, is a punch line.  Notre Dame may be gone - temporarily - but Paris is still there.  In Newark, the Catholic archdiocese's Sacred Heart Cathedral is still there.  It's the city that's gone.  When Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders said the same thing about her hometown of Akron, Ohio in one of her songs, she could have been referring to virtually any city in America.     

The fire in Paris came at a sadly ironic time - the beginning of Holy Week, which celebrates Christ's martyrdom and resurrection for the redemption of humankind so that the Gates of Heaven could be reopened.  The fact that the French plan to rebuild Notre Dame is a testament to their faith not just in the promise of redemption but also their faith in culture and history, two ideas Americans are increasingly divorced from these days.  We are increasingly one of the least happy peoples in the West, looking for real connections and real life in our everyday existence but not finding it, except maybe only a simulation of it online or on TV, but our failure or unwillingness to understand the realities of life undermine that.  "All our efforts to nullify life's tragic nature have paradoxically led us into deeper unhappiness," Kunstler wrote in 1996.  "What we have done to the physical fabric of our country finally is not an illusion but a genuine tragedy.  We have come close to making civilized life impossible in the United States."

And we completed the job at the ballot box twenty years after Kunstler wrote this.

Yet Another Open Letter to Janet Evans About the 2024 (and 2028) Olympics

The latest news about where the next two - yes, the next two - summer Olympiads are being held requires me to once again write an open letter to Olympic swimming champion Janet Evans, in her capacity as Vice Chair of the Athletes Commission for Los Angeles' bid for the 2024 Olympic Games, as I now have reason to assume that she is in line for a major role in an official 2028 Olympic organizing committee.

Dear Janet:

Okay, I was wrong.  No sense in trying to approach this evasively, but yes, I'm coming out and saying it - I was wrong; Los Angeles is getting the Olympics.  But in 2028, not 2024, as the decision has been made to award the Summer Games after Tokyo to Paris, and then the Olympiad after that to LA.  But I still say that you and your fellow southern Californians have to wait four years longer than you wanted to in large part because no one wanted to take the chance of Donald Trump somehow getting re-elected President in 2020 (which could still happen) and officiating at the Olympics in the last year of a second term.  I guess Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti's efforts to honor the Paris Agreement - the agreement about climate change, which Trump won't support, not the one about the Olympics, which lets Paris go first - got LA some brownie points after all.

So, congratulations.  But bear in mind, Janet, that the bid committee you have proudly served will have to re-adjust the costs for Los Angeles to host the Games, because, as the New York Times reported, the original cost estimates were based on a seven-year, not an eleven-year, forecast, and that the time difference will render the cost projections becoming exponentially higher even by conservative budgeting.  Also, Rick Burton, a former chief marketing officer for the United States Olympic Committee, admitted that some LA sports venues may need to be upgraded with new technology, and that new venues may be needed altogether if more events are added.  And I think he said something about the possibility of a severe natural disaster like an earthquake, which is always impossible to predict.

But then, New York bid for the Olympics once, and Hurricane Sandy proved that natural disasters could affect a hypothetical Olympiad in the Northeast.  And you, Janet, like most southern Californians, know how to deal with an earthquake.  We in the Northeast still haven't completely recovered from Sandy.  I just hope you don't get another drought a decade and change from now.

But you guys did get a sweetheart deal for the Games, didn't you, Janet? The International Olympic Committee has promised to grant $1.8 billion - billion, with a b - to the Los Angeles organizing committee and $180 million in advance payments for the extra four years to prepare for 2028 - and even some money for youth sports programs now instead of later!  How did you swing that?  I'll bet you yourself had something to do with the negotiations, huh, Janet?  Because you can charm anyone with that chipper Southern California accent of yours!  You could sell ice cubes to an Eskimo!  (Not that you would sell ice cubes to Eskimos . . . )

What surprises me, apart from this deal that leaves Paris and Los Angeles both big winners, is that this wasn't - and isn't - going to be official before the meeting of the International Committee (IOC) on September 13, and IOC president Thomas Bach just couldn't wait that long to announce it.  When he stood with Eric Garcetti and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to make the announcement, he looked like he owned the earth.  Well, he does, at least the part of the earth where international sports are played.  And the Los Angeles City Council and the United States Olympic Committee still have to approve this, I understand, but, don't worry, Janet, I'm sure they will.

Having said all that, Janet, my criticisms about Los Angeles from my open letter to you in July 2016 still stand.  Los Angeles has already hosted the Games twice.  Also, it's more of a suburban-sprawl settlement than a city,  it doesn't have a vibrant cultural life, and it's too dependent on car travel (however, I award LA points for trying to expand its rapid transit service). It's nothing personal, it's just that I'm from the Northeast, and we roll differently out here.  Besides, as Will Smith once observed, you can't even get a decent Philly-style steak sandwich in LA.  And of course, I, like Will Smith, I'm sure, would have loved to see the Games in Philadelphia.  Oh, well, maybe Philly will get the Pan American Games one day.  And if the City of Brotherly Love ever does bid for the Pan Ams, I hope you will be supportive.  And I highly recommend that you visit Philadelphia one day if you haven't already.

I recommend Pat's Steaks for a good steak sandwich. Cheese is optional, but onions are de rigeur.  Just be careful with the grease - you hold that sandwich the wrong way and it will slide right out of your hands.  And if you get any grease on your sundress, well, I'm sorry, Janet, there's no detergent strong enough to get it out.  It might even eat a hole into the fabric.

Sincerely,

Steven Maginnis

P.S.  As always, you know I still love you, right?  I must, since I gave you fair warning about Philly steak sandwiches. :-D