The Worst Are Leading Western Society on the Wrong Path

If you are wondering what happened to the American people and the West in general, on the road to committing societal suicide in short order, F. A. Hayek has a plausible answer in his book, The Road to Serfdom.

Hayek, an economist and philosopher, a pioneer in monetary theory and proponent of libertarianism, lists three reasons why the worst elements of society have formed such a strong group of sycophants with homogeneous views on the direction that the western, free market societies must take to become the communist utopia-that-never-was.

1.     "The higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values.”

However, the education system has made sure that the miseducated are more homogeneous in their indoctrinated views and beliefs via the generalized teaching method of what to think, not how to think.

2.      The ‘docile and gullible’ have no strong convictions of their own and are easily swayed to accept a “ready-made system of values” if “drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.”

This is where the lying mainstream media comes into play, with their daily scripted and identical reports distributed to them by the socialist Democrat party.

3.      It is “almost a law of human nature” that people tend to agree more on the negative rather than the positive. Therefore, it is easier for people to agree on “the hatred of the enemy” or “on the envy of those better off.”  

The clever narrative becomes ‘we’ vs. ‘they’ and the fight crystalizes under the banner that ‘they’ are the enemy which must be destroyed.  The Soviet totalitarian leaders have vilified the ‘kulaks’ (Russian peasants as defined by Stalin’s regime) and the Germans vilified the ‘Jew.’ (F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 160-161)

The common enemy today labeled by bureaucrats and career politicians as dangerous are the ordinary Americans who love their country, their families, their Christian faith, and who reject the woke-ism of current young generations indoctrinated into believing that everything good about America, its economy, its history, its culture, its values, are evil.

These indoctrinated generations, whether in America or other western nations, believe that anything goes, socialism is great, being responsible humans and citizens is passe, free stuff is the way of life, jobs are for dummies, sex and gender are fluid, and biology is a construct to keep them oppressed.

To say that the worst and not the brightest among us are leading our country and western civilization in the wrong direction is an understatement, they are destroying it, and the damage is already at the point of no return.

Congress screamed insurrection when a few hundred Americans entered their hallowed grounds through the opened doors, taking selfies in the Chamber, but are turning a blind eye and deaf ears when five million illegal aliens have invaded our southern border and are now walking among us, all over the country, unvetted, unchecked, unvaccinated, possibly criminals, murderers, slavers, sex traffickers, and gang members. Can we get our country back after this massive invasion? Probably not.

Can we reverse fifty years of miseducation in public schools and in the high-priced colleges around the globe? Probably not without a lot of misery, sacrifice, and decades of determined efforts from millions of people.

How can all these young people today, with children of their own, help change the miseducation they received and that of their children when they have no memory nor role models to follow in order to cause a positive change to return our country to its former glory?

Worse yet, because of technology, human connections, social skills, and the ability to empathize have declined. Sherry Turkle of MIT wrote that “44 percent of teenagers never unplug from their devices” even when watching movies, eating, playing, or during meals with friends, in school, or with family.

Teenagers are so consumed by social media and influencing that they become unable to focus, to listen, to make eye contact, or read body language, an important non-verbal component of communication. It is easy to see that such humans are easy to sway in the wrong direction, a direction that often undermines their own interests.

As some psychologists remarked, once technology and social media were unleashed, humans have proven unable to be satisfied with being bored, relaxing, doing nothing, and enjoying it. They became irritable, stressed, scattered brained, unable to focus, tense, and anxious without constant stimulation from electronic devices.

Herbert Simon was right when wrote in the 1970s that too much information created a dearth of attention. I certainly saw plenty of that in the classroom from teenagers to adult students in college. People became, as Simon said, “overwhelmed and on overdrive, in a state of constant stress.” This state of constant stress caused “exhaustion, frustration, resignation, and even despair” in many people.

An important question must be asked, how capable are these narcissistic people, who are staring constantly into their smart devices and taking selfies, to lead society onto the right path of survival and excellence when they have little general knowledge and understanding of economics and history? Do they even care, in their drug-induced stupor, how many lives socialism and communism have destroyed in the 20^th century or that they are repeating history and expecting a different result?

 

 

Notre Dame vs. European Secularism

Photo: Ileana, Christmas 2002

Notre-Dame spire

For centuries the European faithful have sacrificed to build exquisite monuments to their faith that subsequent generations would cherish as much as they did. It is a legacy that unfortunately secular Europe has been busy extinguishing for decades. The transformation has been visible to any visitor who cared to observe the change.

Secular Europeans today value venerable old churches as cash cows, to the extent that they provide millions of visitors annually who spend a lot of tourist money to marvel at and admire their remarkable history, art and architecture, and often climb (for a fee) to the rooftop for a breathtaking view of the surrounding city.  

According to the CIA World Factbook, the population of France in 2014 was approximately 66.3 million. France is mainly Catholic Christian, with 63-66% Christians, 23-28% secular people, and 7-9% Muslims. Some areas of Paris like St. Dennis are 40% populated by African Muslims.

There are pockets left of the fervent faithful who are still attending church on a regular basis while the rest may attend Easter services, Christmas, weddings, baptisms, and burials.

While strolling in during service, I often noticed with regret the small crowd of worshippers and their advanced age. The young Europeans seemed to be missing among the parishioners. They were found outside, enjoying their secular existence devoid of God.

Following an alleged accidental fire, the beautiful Notre Dame Cathedral’s spire has burned completely to ashes. The stone base, the altar crucifix, the interior statuary and artwork, and some of the famous rose stained-glass windows fortunately remained intact.

President Macron and the secular French immediately proclaimed that the spire will be rebuilt better and grander, from modern materials and with a design that would be even more beautiful - a multi-faith monument that reflects France of today. Who will get to decide what alterations improve on the original? The atheists and the non-Christians?

Almost one billion dollars has been donated so far for the rebuilding project that was estimated unrealistically by the former banker now President Macron to be five years. Those of us who appreciate old churches as a place of worship, the soul of western civilization and of its Christian people, know that beautiful, masterful, and enduring construction takes a lifetime to achieve. I am not sure that the master craftsmen and stonemasons of yesteryear still exist today.

Notre Dame cathedral itself did not collapse because medieval builders knew that rib vaulting and flying buttresses were the best ways to support the massive structure to withstand the passage of time. They built for endurance, almost nine centuries of existence.

John Harwood, an architectural historian from Toronto, said, “Any rebuilding should be a reflection not of an old France, or the France that never was – a non-secular, white European France – but a reflection of the France of today, a France that is currently in the making.” He sees Notre Dame as a “reflection of the modern zeitgeist;” cathedrals are “political monuments.”

Rev. Ben Johnson disagrees vehemently – “Christians built cathedrals as earthly embassies of the kingdom of Heaven, … created as an expression of faith. Their beauty and wonder provide a foretaste of the splendor and order of eternity.” He argues that, if Notre Dame reflected who the French are today, it would be a parking lot or a concrete government building because atheism “erects no cathedrals.” What are the European values, one wonders, suicidal tolerance and failed multiculturalism?  https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/notre-dame-may-be-rebuilt-secular-monument

Architecture, art, sculpture, poetry, and literature were inspired by Christian faith and created by the West. Notre Dame was and is the symbol of Christian faith and of our collective western civilization, not just of Catholicism. Rev. Johnson argues that “The belfries of all Christendom echo its message of hope, redemption, and peace. Only those ablaze with the fiery flame of divine love can rebuild Notre Dame, or Europe, from the debris.”

The cathedral reconstruction should never be about “what modern French people want” even though it is in the center of Paris. Notre Dame, like all other cathedrals in Europe, is a monument to Christianity and part of the history of Western Civilization and must be restored as it was.

Progressivism Makes America Worse

Photo: Ileana Johnson

Americans are bored with their abundant lifestyle.  Western civilization is bored with its wealth, bucolic life, and success.  Academics and Hollywood elites have taken it upon themselves to bring all this success and wealth down a few notches if not to the first rung of the prosperity ladder. They’ve had their fun time in the sun, it is now time for the third world to take over and to teach them how to live, work, and worship the right way.

Having just one protected class in America was not enough; we brought in Islam with its clean living and fertility to replace the declining birth rate in the west. Western young women and men are not interested in marriage and reproduction, they want to have fun, and, if it means having it in the street or on reality TV, the more the better for the narcissistic society that we have become.

Right now the welfare spigot is open and it is flowing generously to the rest of the world. Although America is despised by all, they crowd the irrelevant border to cross illegally so they have an opportunity to our generous welfare system, our injudicious immigration laws, and to take over our wealth and our way of life.

Americans used to enjoy working long hours, overtime, bought every amenity imagined on credit and became slaves to banks, credit cards, the downtrodden, the aging population, and the ersatz disabled. Now they are still slaves to a bloated financial system  but have added their liberal children in the basement and the protected illegal immigrant underclass and pretty much any third world tin pot dictatorship that can force its way into the United Nations human rights council and muscle and squeeze more billions out of Satan’s country, the very generous U.S.A where money grows on trees just waiting to be plucked by intrepid illegals with no intention to ever assimilate or to contribute their share to the society they are plundering.

Gadgets that open the window to the world have cast a 24-hour glow on the faces of all generations, beholden to social media. They are stars, they are somebody, they are Internet and Instagram trolls, they can reach the stars with their hidden identities. They are finally somebody, no longer the ignored taxpayer or the bullied public school specimen brainwashed into liberalism and global citizenship utopia.

The vice of working endless hours every day is slowly dying down, replaced by apathy and a sense of entitlement to the government’s trough in the European socialist style. Nobody is asking the obvious question, the elephant in the room, which group of people is going to replenish the abundance trough if everybody adopts a lifestyle of government dependency from cradle to grave?

Materialism has triumphed for decades and opportunity has turned to success, and the rat race has ensued which turned the vast country into a fine-tuned watch; but its components are beginning to age and rust, and materialism has given way to indifference and apathy to anything that could remotely resemble what once used to be “borders, language, and culture.”

Americans have been brainwashed for many decades of academic excellence and liberal experimentation that they don’t have a culture and their history is bad, their men of fame, their inventors and entrepreneurs were bad people.  Inventions that made life easier and saved billions around the globe have suddenly become a danger to the planet and to Mother Nature itself.

The United Nations and the global elites have taken it upon themselves to socially engineer the masses into compliance with their wishes because, as rich as they are, they know for sure what is best for everyone, freedom be damned. They are gods of technology, of banking, of genetically modified agriculture, of pharma, of law, of politics, and are far superior to the dumbed down masses who must obey or be nudged through the power of the law, the courts, and of imprisonment.

“Thoughts are free” says an old WWII protest song, Die Gedanken sind frei, but corporate and political elites know that you have an “unconscious bias” and these thoughts you didn’t know existed in your brain must be rooted out with indoctrination classes in the workplace. If they could have, they would have physically extracted your evil and unapproved thoughts with pliers as if they were rotted teeth.  If you want to keep your job, you must think the way elites tell you to think and you must harbor thoughts only approved by progressive guidelines of the new world order.

Half of Americans who vote are ashamed of their country, of who they are, of their history, and of their culture. Teachers are more than happy to indoctrinate your children into their twisted political views.

Unconcerned Americans are at cross-roads of self-destruction, following in the footsteps of the intrepid Europeans who are busy committing demographic suicide and societal hara-kiri by bringing in non-assimilating masses of economic refugees from Africa and the Middle East at such alarming rates that many beautiful European cities have already been turned into cesspools of violence and destruction.

The triumph of materialism has finally hit a reinforced concrete wall built by progressive agendas and elite billionaires who can afford tall fences, expensive security systems, and armed body guards, in a gated and protected luxurious life that the rest of us cannot afford. We don’t want their wealth, we just want a safe country with well-defined and protected borders.

The West’s ladder of success is sporting dangerously loose rungs and the last few are even missing.  Can it be repaired and salvaged? How many Donald Trumps would be needed to fix it? Are we passed the civilization point of no return, headed for a down-sloping road into a furiously bubbling cauldron?

To put it bluntly, no matter how hard President Trump tries to make America economically better for everyone, those afflicted by a serious mental disorder, best described as liberal race-baiting and the progressive worship of the dictatorship of the oppressed, are making America worse.

Misplaced Nostalgia

Photo: Ileana Johnson May 2016

Lately I’ve been nostalgic about my birth country, about Europe, wondering what would be like to live there again. Perhaps my nostalgia is surfacing because I am fast approaching old age and the ball of yarn called life is getting smaller and smaller.

Maybe I have misplaced nostalgia because my adopted country is in such turmoil and nothing seems to redress what people are complaining about. Life goes on, the sun comes up every day, the routine we take for granted continues, children must be fed and taken to school, people go to work, football season started again, and the masses are not restless as long as the welfare checks come in on time and the dependency faucet flows, tummies are full, the gas tank is topped, and illusory abundance looms like a Potemkin village.

I know, I can never go back home again because home is no longer there, but I still want to from time to time. Life has moved on and, I found out quite painfully, I am now a stranger in my own land. The something I was looking for, what the French term, “je ne sais quoi,” is no longer there. Many relatives I grew up with are now residing in the cemetery, others are as old as I am, with elderly people problems, bad socialized medicine and care, and some simply don’t care if I exist. But then most people’s relatives, far removed or close ones, could not care less if others lived or died. We are but a blip on the screen of life.

Four trips to my hometown and I have not yet been allowed to erect a marble cross on my Dad’s grave. His burial plot is marked by a simple wooden cross painted antique blue, with lettering long erased by the inclement weather and the sun. It’s not that I cannot afford to pay for a better cross, unlike years ago when I was financially broke, living on minimum wage.

I have gone as far as ordering a marble cross, paying for it, and hiring a priest to bless its installation. The most painful part was choosing what words to put on the cross that best represented my Dad’s life. I decided on his name, his birthdate, his death, and the phrase, “The best father who gave me life and let me fly far away because he loved me.” But that did not really tell the story of his life, the sacrifice he made at such an early age, he was 61 years young.

As the self-appointed remaining patriarch, Dad’s only living younger brother objected to Dad’s cross. Each time there was a different reason. He wanted a bribe because I was a “rich” American ripe for fleecing.  He said no during another trip because it would disturb my grandparents’ grave nearby, somehow the extra marble weight would be toxic and disturb their eternity slumber. On the third visit, he said, it would offend his wife who was buried in the same family plot even though she was family by marriage. And, the most unreasonable objection was that I did not help his pregnant daughter find a job in America and did not give her a place to live, rent free, in my house. Had she heard of anchor babies, she could have become a life-long ward of the government like everybody else born in a poor country who manages to cross the border illegally in the last months of pregnancy.

So I decided to erect a memorial here, in this country, where my Dad never had a chance to visit because his life was cut short by the very people who were supposed to give him a visa but refused.

It was futile to explain to his brother that we have 94 million Americans out of work, blue collar jobs are scarce, and I don’t personally employ anybody, I am just a retired teacher. To him, and to the rest of the world, America is still the land of plenty, of filthy-rich people; money grows on trees if you fertilize them with enough B.S., and welfare flows like milk and honey. 

There is a reason why illegals and refugees are brought here, we are told, they do jobs Americans don’t want to do and take whatever wages, without complaining. As our president said, “Americans are lazy.” Then these hard-working illegals send their paychecks to Mexico or to their countries of origin, while they live on welfare. America is a great country! Did anyone ask him, how it became the envy of the world if Americans were so lazy?

On the other hand, he may be right, I did see lazy locals in the morning on my way to work, sitting on their porches, laughing and enjoying themselves, drinking beer, while I was looking at my watch nervously to make sure I would be on time for my 8 a.m. classes.

Illegal immigrants who are often unskilled, illiterate, and on welfare, fare better medically than our own veterans do. They even get translators in hospitals for free and gender reassignment surgery. What a deal! At the same time, educated legal immigrants who want the opportunity to better themselves professionally in the United States are rejected when applying for visas because they happen to be the wrong nationality, religion, skin color, or we ran out of H1B visas. Why bring in immigrants who can contribute to the greatness of this country when we can bring the dregs of third world society to take our country down to size?

Progressives have been telling us that it’s high time to redistribute our wealth to the rest of the world, we’ve been well off for far too long, we owe the rest of the world their turn. If our children and grandchildren will live much worse than we, their parents, so be it, it is social justice to impoverish ourselves while supporting large families from countries that hate our guts and wish our destruction.  

As the most successful country in the world, we are no longer desirable. Hillary Clinton told the world half of Americans are a “basket of deplorables.” Academia keeps telling us, we are evil, primitive cultures are noble and good, and we should learn from them by serving their needs, by allowing them to rule over us with help from United Nations tin pot dictators.

The other half of Americans blindly look up to Democrats because they think they are wise; they’ve been telling us for a long time that we should emulate Cuba and Venezuela’s failed socialist/communist regimes or Europe’s failed multiculturalism.

Europeans seem so bucolic from afar, so much greener over the fence, healthy, and content riding their bicycles everywhere. Who wants to burn $10/gallon gas and choke Mother Nature to death when they can travel in style by trains that run on electricity generated by windmills?

The problem I see is that even my native country is turning into a basket case of European Union totalitarianism by technocrats. According to the SüdDeutsche Zeitung, France and Germany are preparing to synchronize plans for a joint European army. http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/vor-gipfeltreffen-deutschland-und-frankreich-wollen-verteidigungspolitik-der-eu-reformieren-1.3155310

Male Muslim refugees of military age are flooding everywhere, even beautiful Venice and Milan. One such refugee, screaming Allahu Akbar and making death threats to passengers for two hours, was deported from the U.K. to Venice. Why Venice, the historical jewel of the Adriatic, the open air museum of our western civilization? Italians have spent billions trying to prevent the sinking of its archeological treasures. Why bring the enemy inside? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3783356/Terror-EasyJet-flight-migrant-deported-Venice-screams-Allahu-Akbar-29-times-death-coming-17-times-die-nine-times-shocking-two-hour-frenzy.html

I was wondering why so many Muslims were taking photos of Catholic churches around Venice and Milan on a recent trip. I saw women in burkas taking photos of churches from gondolas in Venice; I am sure it was for touristy reasons. After France24 reported on the failed attempt by an entire cell of Muslim women to blow up Notre Dame Cathedral, I understood, it’s a dry run for the open season on western civilization. http://10thousandcouples.com/2016/09/france-opens-probe-into-notre-dame-cathedral-car-bomb/

Communism was bad enough, but I don’t know what to expect in a huge banana republic like ours and I certainly don’t like European Union’s bureaucratic socialism run from its the facto capital Brussels.

I had misplaced nostalgia to revisit living in the country of my birth or some other place in Europe. I get frustrated because this country I’ve adopted is fast becoming a banana republic and few seem to care. Change is inevitable and expected; positive change is good but forced progressive transformation is another story.

 

Education Enabling Cultural Decline

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2016

Trying to have a rational discussion based on facts with a College of Education graduate who uses Common Core teaching methods, how children learn, and the dumbing down of America's education, is like trying to reason with a petulant child who happens to be a member of the Communist Party USA.

They take everything very personal and in a fascistic way, it's their way or the highway. If we don't do it this way, children will be doomed forever. Since 1979 when Jimmy Carter established the College of Education (which alone gobbles up close to $75 billion a year), our children's education has gone down significantly as evidenced by test scores and a shameless lack of general knowledge.

Just because you are able to use technology expertly and know how to look up information does not make you smart, you just know how to use a search engine. What you are able to do with that information is another story. I've had technological savvy students who actually knew very little, were awkward, lacked common sense, and social skills.

On the other hand, I’ve had students who did not care that much for technology, were talented and creative, but were not exactly top scorers on the standardized ACT or SAT tests. Yet these students became quite successful in life.

According to Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education), there are eight intelligence types and we all have some percentage of musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic abilities, weaker in some, stronger in others. It is because of this nature of the human being that we should not box student into testing molds, one size fits all, particularly when public education has a strong component of indoctrination by those who write the textbooks, the curricula, the teaching materials, and the standardized tests.

Teaching to a standard determined by progressive academia is a disservice to the wonderful talent in our schools. Teaching is an art and the fly-by-night teaching methodologies that have come and gone since 1979 prove that they were invented by control freaks that had one goal in mind, a pliant society of busy bees under the guidance of academia in service of the ruling elites who fund their secular ideas and methods.

I’ve heard progressives for decades vociferously demanding the separation of church and state, even though our country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and God and prayer always had a place in the classroom and in government. But now, the same progressive academics are teaching in every grade, through Common Core Standards, indoctrination into Islam, forcing Christianity and prayer out of schools and out of extra-curricular activities. What happened to their cries of separation of church and state?

Patrick Deneen wrote about the loss of our cultural identity in his essay, ”How a generation lost its common culture.”

“My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.” https://thelogcollege.wordpress.com/2016/02/23/how-a-generation-lost-its-common-culture/

As a retired teacher of thirty years, I am certain that the concerted effort to mindlessly indoctrinate students into the progressive PC construct, a political correctness that has constrained everybody’s freedom of speech, turning students into whiny ninnies who need a safe space from their inner real or imagined fears of divergent opinions, and to distort and rewrite history in the vein of Howard Zinn’s very popular textbook that is widely used around the country, has contributed to the decline and loss of cultural identity to such a degree that students are ashamed of their own history, of their nation’s exceptionalism and accomplishments, of their common citizenship, and of their own culture.  

Sadly, these students are busy destroying and replacing their own culture with the culture of other primitive societies they were told in schools to admire and venerate, simple cultures that are invading western civilization with the blessing of the United Nations and regressive western governments. It is baffling to think that these are generations of children and grandchildren of great Americans who conquered space and made flight possible.

The chickens of intolerance and communist social justice have come home to roost on the American campus. Decades of Marxist indoctrination by the vaunted communist academia are finally paying off -- our cultural heritage is replaced by cultural Marxism and by primitive cultures that are deemed superior to ours and worshipped.

Our mis-educated youth, who can barely read or write a complete and coherent paragraph, but their fingers fly on Twitter in hashtags and 140 characters, staring constantly like robotic drones into illuminated smart devices, are now chasing Pokémon-Go.

Young people don’t seem to care if their culture survives or not. If they are given everything free, tiny housing units, Internet, smart devices, food, education, Netflix, pot, and public transportation passes, they will remain on the globalist environmental social justice train forever as anonymous global citizens.

Paris, a Symbol of Our Western Civilization

Southern façade of Notre Dame
Photo: Wikipedia

On my third trip to Paris, it was ten days of drizzly and bone-chilling December. We stayed in a cozy but insufficiently heated hotel, just narrow and winding streets away from the magnificent Basilica of Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre. The stark white dome of Sacré-Cœur situated on top of the hill was visible on a sunny day from most points in Paris. Winding down the cozy village-like streets from the Basilica was Place Pigalle. When we walked down the Basilica’s steps on New Year’s Day, remnants of the fireworks and parties were scattered everywhere.

On our daily treks to the Metro, we passed by Cimetière de Montmartre with its lugubrious atmosphere. Located in the 18^th arrondissement of Paris in “the Butte,” the nickname Parisians gave to the Montmartre hill, it is the third largest necropolis in Paris which opened in 1825. Located below street level in an abandoned gypsum quarry used during the French Revolution as a mass grave, the cemetery has only one entrance under Rue Caulaincourt and is the final resting place of many artists and writers who lived in Montmartre such as Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Alexandre Dumas the son (1824-1895), Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), Emile Zola (1840-1902), and Heinrich Heine (1797-1856).

Montmartre Cemetery

The tomb of Heinrich Heine

We watched our steps carefully to avoid the dog poop and the slippery streets that were seldom clean. Nobody walking their dog carried around a plastic bag for their animal’s necessities. The metro tunnel reeked strongly of urine and the loudspeakers informed us almost every day that, ladies and gentlemen, there are robbers on the train.

No matter how careful we were with pickpockets, a little boy, perhaps 7 years old, managed to open the zippered-pocket of my purse resting against my hip. I felt a feathery touch to my elbow and caught him. He winked at the laughing Arab vendors by the Eiffel Tower and ran away while shouting back in perfect English a four-letter word when my husband tried to grab him.

Eiffel Tower Photo: Wikipedia

The Parisians have a love-hate relationship with their expensive landmark that is so costly to maintain. Gustave Eiffel was highly criticized in 1889 for building such a gauche monstrosity for the World’s Fair but Le Tour Eiffel has become a cultural icon. Accessible by lift, the tower is 324 meters tall, the equivalent of an 81-story building, with 3 visitor-levels and restaurants on the first and second levels. We had a romantic dinner on the second level, followed by a very windy and spectacular 360 degree view of Paris.

Although the tower was to be dismantled twenty years later, the city decided that it was valuable for communications and meteorological experiments and let it stand. One of the most famous visitors, Thomas Edison, was invited by Gustave Eiffel to his private apartment at the top of the tower and signed the guest book. I was excited when we took photographs that are now catalogued into the permanent visitor database. The tower boasted its 250^th millionth visitor in 2010.

Place Pigalle with its 19^th century cabarets and the infamous Moulin Rouge, which I am ashamed to admit that I was talked into going to watch a very expensive and debauched show with elbow-room only, was a cacophony of neon lights, falafel stands, rotating hunks of shaved lamb, decadence, wine, irreverence, and a Sex Museum, in sharp contrast with the quiet and charming houses just streets away.

Parisians call Montmartre “the Butte,” a former village incorporated into Paris in 1860 as the 18^th arrondissement. It has a storied reputation for depravity on account of its many brothels, cabarets, illegal activities, and Bohemian life that has attracted many artists, writers, and a bourgeois following from Paris.

Churches such as the Royal Abbey of St.-Denis, built in 1133 A.D. by Louis VI, St.-Pierre de Montmartre, and Basilica de Sacré-Cœur  bear witness to the area’s earliest places of worship. The Roman-Byzantine Sacré-Cœur, dating to 1876, is a parish of pilgrimage where around the clock vigil has been held for over a century. The Savoyarde Bell, one of the largest in the world, resonating a high C note, was pulled to the top of the hill by twenty-eight horses.

The “Butte” escaped modern development because the gypsum and limestone quarries left throughout their existence numerous tunnels, crisscrossing the Montmartre underground.  

I walked through Montmartre, looking for the feel of that bohemian village of long-ago and I only found the restaurant Moulin de la Galette, where one of the two windmills painted by Renoir still exists.

From the garish Place Pigalle, past Boulevard de Clichy, there was Rue de Martyrs where famous Christian pilgrims walked on their way up to Sacré-Cœur. On rue Yvonne Le Tac, at number 9, it is alleged that St. Denis was beheaded in the 3^rd century and Ignatius de Loyola founded the Jesuits in 1534.

St. Denis at Notre Dame
Photo: Wikipedia

St. Denis, the patron saint of France, was the first bishop of Lutetia (today’s Ile de la Cité) where the Celtic tribe Parisii first settled. St. Denis was tolerated by the Romans for a while until they decided that Christianity was taking hold and they needed to suppress it.

According to legend, St. Denis was arrested, thrown to the lions, and crucified. Unwilling to give up his faith, he was dragged up the Mont des Martyrs (Montmartre), and finally beheaded. He rose from the dead and picked up his head and carried it to a northern village. In the never-ending churning rain, I searched the cobble stones for evidence of blood stains soaked by the dirt or washed by the rains of time.

I can spend days in the Louvre and in Musée d'Orsay.  Opened in 1793 with 537 paintings, the Louvre is located on the right bank of the Seine in the former 12^th century fortress turned palace. In 1682, the Louvre Palace became a repository for royal arts collections when King Luis XIV chose Palace of Versailles as his residence. The world’s most visited museum, the Louvre houses 35,000 pieces of art in many interconnected buildings covering 652,000 square feet.

Situated on the left bank of the Seine, the former Gare d’Orsay, a railway station built in 1898-1900, the Musée d'Orsay houses the largest collection of French art (1848-1905), paintings, sculptures, photography, and furniture, with the largest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist works by Monet, Manet, Renoir, Seurat, Sisley, Gaugain, and Van Gogh.

Palace of Versailles
Photo: Wikipedia

I loved the Palace of Versailles with its fabulous fountains and gardens. Château de Versailles is located in the Ile-de-France region, 20 km southwest of Paris. The court was located here in 1682 by King Louis XIV and then relocated to Paris in 1789 after the beginning of the French Revolution. Versailles is now a wealthy suburb of Paris. A symbol of absolute monarchy, Versailles is surrounded by gardens, fountains, and other quarters. Political functions are still held at Versailles today including exhibits. The dormant gardens were still magnificent and carefully manicured. The famous Hall of Mirrors appeared somewhat tarnished but it was understandable, Galerie des Glaces dates back to 1678.

The famous Hall of Mirrors
Photo: Wikipedia

But the most fascinating places for me were the Cathedral de Notre Dame, Musée de l'Armée, and Napoleon’s Tomb.

The construction of Notre Dame began with the cornerstone in 1163 and ended in 1345, a labor of love that lasted almost two centuries. One legend describes the recasting of the great bell, Emmanuel, which weighs 13 tons, in the 17^th century. As the metal was melting, ladies threw their gold and silver jewelry into the mixture perhaps contributing to the bell’s F-sharp tone. Although there are ten bells, all but one had been taken out of use due to their excessive vibration causing damage to the structure.

Notre Dame de Paris is an example of French Gothic architecture with flying buttresses, rose stained glass windows, water spouts in the shape of phantasmagorical gargoyles and decorative gargoyles called grotesques. It is the Cathedral of the Archdiocese of Paris, with important reliquaries such as the alleged Crown of Thorns, a fragment of the True Cross, and one of the original Holy Nails of the crucifixion. These relics are brought out once a year during Good Friday.

We waited for an hour in the cold blustery wind and drizzly rain in order to climb the narrow stairs up to the south tower platform overlooking the spire, the flying buttresses, and the magnificent river Seine and Paris below. I imagined Victor Hugo’s character, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, carrying Esmeralda up to safety. Perhaps Hugo’s book inspired Parisians to raise money to save their Lady from demolition. Desecrated by radicals during the French Revolution, much of the religious artifacts and icons were damaged or destroyed. It has been restored continuously since 1845.

During Napoleon’s self-coronation in December 1804, Notre Dame was so damaged that tapestries had to be hung to cover the dilapidated interior. The Revolutionaries had robbed the treasury, pillaged the church, and smashed the 28 statues of the Kings of Judea thinking that they were statues of the kings of France. Twenty-one of the heads were found and are now housed in the Musée de Cluny. The head of King David is exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Notre Dame has great historical significance because it was built over the ruins of a Roman temple in Gaul dedicated to Jupiter, a fourth century church, and a sixth century basilica. Twelve stones originally used in the Roman temple were found in the foundation of the basilica.  The Huguenots (French Protestants) damaged parts of the cathedral in 1548, having considered the interior statues, paintings, and stained glass windows idolatry. During the French Revolution, Notre Dame was rededicated to the Cult of Reason in 1793 and then to the Cult of the Supreme Being. Damaged by stray bullets in WWII, Biblical stained glass windows were replaced by geometric patterns. To me Notre Dame is a symbol of survival, in spite of numerous assaults from those attempting to destroy the house of God because it contradicted their beliefs.

Les Invalides Hotel Photo: Wikipedia

Within the grounds of Les Invalides,  there are three museums,  Musée de l'Armée,  Musée de l’Ordre de la Liberation, and  Musée des Plans-Reliefs.  Napoleon’s Tomb is located behind Les Invalides massive courtyard.

Musée de l'Armée, one of the most complete military museums in the world, was established in 1905 and contains Napoleonic memorabilia, his personal effects, antique armor and weaponry through modern times, artillery, uniforms, paintings, and anything imaginable of military history.    

Musée des Plans-Reliefs contains collections dating back to 1668 of three-dimensional models of fortified towns. The newer Musée de l’Ordre de la Liberation was established to honor all who fought for France during WWII. General de Gaulle created the Order of Liberation in 1940.

Les Invalides was a hospital commissioned by Luis XIV in 1670 for 1,500 invalids among his veterans of war.  Its success prompted other monarchs to model their military hospitals after Les Invalides. During WWII German troops set up headquarters in Les Invalides with its huge interior courtyard.

The church of Les Invalides is the final resting place of Napoleon Bonaparte and several of his family members, military officers who served under him, and French military heroes.  Designed as a royal chapel and completed in 1706, it became a mausoleum for Napoleon’s body when it was returned from Saint Helena in 1840.  His ashes were incased in a porphyry crypt in 1861.

In the middle of the church dome, Napoleon’s remains are encased in six coffins, iron, mahogany, lead (2), ebony, and oak.  The exterior is a huge red quartzite sarcophagus, resting on a green granite base. In the recessed opulent marble walls encircling Napoleon I massive sarcophagus are the resting places of his family, his officers, and other French military heroes.

Napoleon’s elder and younger brothers are buried here, Joseph and Jérôme-Napoléon Bonaparte, and his son, Napoleon II (1811-1832). The bodies of many generals, marshals, vice-admirals, and admirals are interred here as well as the hearts of some military men of note. My friend Harriet would be pleased to know that a Gen. Henri Putz was buried here in 1925.

Not far from Notre Dame, the national French pastime of drinking wine and dining with friends late at night is visible everywhere. King Louis XVI believed that persons not drinking wine are fanatics. He blamed the French Revolution on the fact that its leader, Robespierre, drank only water. (David Hoffman, Little Known Facts about Paris, 2008)

The poetic Parisian moniker, the City of Lights (La Ville Lumière), of the Age of Enlightenment, has perhaps little to do with the electricity from the 276 monuments, thousands of hotels, 70 churches, fountains, bridges, and canals that illuminate the romantic city every night, even though Paris was one of the first European cities to be lit by gas street lights.  It refers more to the light of knowledge borne by philosophers, poets, writers, artists, sculptors, painters, and musicians when Paris became the cultural center of Europe and of the world.

 

Parisians have never been frugal, leaving behind a legacy of unmatched beauty, with the exception perhaps of Etienne de Silhouette, King Louis XV’s finance minister, who attempted to balance the nation’s budget by melting down all items made of gold and silver. Thankfully, reasonable minds prevailed. He was so cheap that he became the symbol of frugality gone awry and of “silhouettes,” shadow profile portraits cut from black paper that were cheaper than real portraits.

So much history, so much art, so much heroism, so much beautiful architecture, music, and so many firsts in our western civilization can be found in Paris alone. What will happen to all the art, to church icons, sculptures, outdoor statues, monuments, obelisks, old Basilicas, stained glass works of art, archeological ruins, and ornate fountains when Muslims become the majority in Paris and elsewhere in Europe? Would all evidence of our civilization be wiped out as idolatry? Would they suffer the fate of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan that were blown up by the Taliban in spite of protests coming from around the civilized world?

What would happen to the priceless works of art at the Vatican, the very Vatican that is now embracing with ardor the violent religionists of peace who put fatwas on snowmen because they are overtly sexual?

Would all symbols of our advanced culture meet the fate of the Madonna in Perugia, Italy, which was shattered and urinated upon? What would happen to our western civilization that fundamentally clashes with the cult of death and destruction?