No to 2007
So apparently hundreds of French people staged a mock protest against the advent of 2007.
I wanted to enjoy this story, but there were a couple problems.
1) The fundamental joke is cuteish but not really very funny.
2) The politics behind it are reactionary to the extreme.
Anyhow, happy new year. Sorry we've been on hiatus. The holidays and all that.
Parodying the French readiness to say "non", the demonstrators in the western city of Nantes waved banners reading: "No to 2007" and "Now is better!"
The marchers called on governments and the UN to stop time's "mad race" and declare a moratorium on the future.
I wanted to enjoy this story, but there were a couple problems.
1) The fundamental joke is cuteish but not really very funny.
2) The politics behind it are reactionary to the extreme.
Anyhow, happy new year. Sorry we've been on hiatus. The holidays and all that.
posted by Solomon Grundy @ 12:36 PM
6 Comments:
At 1:50 PM,
Josh K-sky said…
To the extreme? Wouldn't you prefer to live in a country where the reactionaries were funny and powerless?
At 6:14 PM,
Solomon Grundy said…
Heh, true. I was being so hyperbolic that it makes my eyes explode when I reread it. Luckily I'm usually the most understated person ever. Ever.
Hm to my attempt to be comedic just there. I'm thinking about taking an improv comedy class at Upright Citizens Brigade. This funny writing stuff is harder than it looks.
Anyhow, yeah, it's good to have a sense of humor about your political convictions, and this protest means something different in France than it would in the US, but there's still an international conspiracy to make progressive idealism a laugh line and nothing more (cf that annoying movie Tilsammans, or Togetherness).
At 6:17 PM,
Solomon Grundy said…
Also, I would definitely prefer to live in a country where the very language requires its speakers to pout all the time.
At 6:21 PM,
Solomon Grundy said…
And upon further consideration, this story is, in fact, giggleworthy.
At 10:31 PM,
Josh K-sky said…
I loved Together. But yeah, I see where you're going with that.
(I also lived with Coco in the Mansfield Commune -- so for me the micro-critique of how annoying is communal life was more readily felt than the macro-critique of There is no alternative. The special feeling of hearing your housemates crank the Gipsy Kings so they can fuck, or riding out to meet the co-op truck at dawn, or finding the dishes in your bed 'coz you forgot to them merits its own farce. And then he came back with Lilya 4-Ever, and I was shaken.)
At 2:49 AM,
Solomon Grundy said…
The special feeling of hearing your housemates crank the Gipsy Kings so they can fuck
heh good god.
well, if you had made the movie, i'd have liked it. but i just didn't trust his politics. at the very least, it was very easy to interpret it as reactionary.
Post a Comment
<< Home