Tic-tac, tic-toc, time’s up . . .
Contingency plans are always second best. Some would call it reality messing up dreams and ideals. Some contingency plans are solid alternatives, others are forced down our throats and hard to swallow.
Roy Forget, “Contingences (le lapin),” 2013-2018, Oil on linen, 70 x 70 cm
When democracies elect an unknown entity, the popular vote is based more on fantasy than reality. But there is always a real history behind the fantasy and more often than not, that history will give rather clear indications of what that fantasy, as much as it may be a contingency, will eventually become. In the election of Emmanuel Macron to the highest seat of power in France, that has clearly veered towards a nightmare.
I know liberal-leaning moderates, especially in the USA, still have a je ne sais pas pourquoi small crush on the current French president. In their eyes, he is the embodiment of moderation, late capitalism’s ideals of keeping everything as is, in the status-quo, for the benefit of the “majority.” He is a supposed barrage (“barricade” in French) in face of populism and chaos. They forget that he came from the banking and finance world and as such would place that world in priority. They are perhaps bewildered as to why the whole country of France, so blessed with such youthful brilliance, would be in an unending spiral of protests, from the railway workers from a year ago, now to the yellow-jacket demonstrations, going on despite a cold and wet winter, disrupting the usual endeavors of this late capitalist regime.
Macron was a throw of the dice for the French electorate but, for the average person, his policies from day one resulted in loss of income and worsening of living conditions. The gilets jaunes, “Yellow Jackets” as they are called in the Anglo-American media, are actually mainly the working poor, people who pull in the minimum wage, and who more often than not live in the provincial areas, where having a car is an absolute necessity to going to work. When Macron’s government decided to raise fuel prices, it was in direct contempt (mépris) of the working poor.
He had, from the very beginning, held the untenable promise of being everything for everybody and downplayed the fact that he was actually elected by a hijacked electoral process, a democracy of attrition, pushed into power by his very rich financier and banking backers. One of his first “accomplishments” as President, was to push through a multi-billion dollar tax cut for the rich — cutting out a tax called “impôt de la fortune,” which effectively cost the French state a huge loss of revenue, 4 billion euros. So in order to fill in the deficit, he has raised taxes for the regular French citizen, and that being deficient, for “environmental and ecological reasons,” he decided to put a big tax on fuel, diesel especially, which is what most working poor use to fuel their cars, to get to work . . . All that in the honorable claim that this was a way to encourage people to become more environmentally conscious (“La transition écologique” is the catch phrase that his people have been using, a blatant euphemism that is only more provocative in its disdain and in your face contempt of the intelligence of the citizens).
For a succinct analysis of the Yellow Jacket demonstrations and Macron, I suggest Eric Juillot’s article where he has written, in French, a brilliant analysis of these protests, free from the constraints of industrial-fortune owned media’s editorial constraints, of which this is only one jewel of analysis:
Si Emmanuel Macron est indéniablement le président légal de la République française, il n’est donc pas évident qu’il soit un président légitime, tant sa politique porte atteinte aux intérêts d’une écrasante majorité de Français . . .
(My translation: If Emmanuel Macron is undeniably the legally-elected president of the French Republic, it is not clear that he is the legitimate one, where his policies are contrary to the interest and well-being of the vast majority of French citizens . . .)
Anyway, the fuel tax, now suspended for six months, which would have been enacted in the middle of winter, was the spark that caused all the yellow jacket upheaval here, but it is a spark that went off in a drought-plagued economy, which has for the past 30 years been on a slow fall from grace, where life, which was once comfortable and full of possibility, has been changed to one of subsistence that is barely, if at all, affordable. Macron wants to Thatcherize France, but thirty years after the Iron Lady. It is the equivalent of anyone in the USA promising that trickle-down Reaganomics will save the country’s fortune. There is nothing brilliant about it, it is imbecile. In the US, the working poor may just simply take on a third or fourth job . . . Here, well, they do too, but they also have a certain culture of “revolution”, where demonstrations are a civic duty to protest the excesses of the ruling class: from the bourgeois revolution of 1789 to the much more real populist revolution and overthrow of the establishment that occurred with Robespierre in 1791, again in 1830, to end the re-established Bourbon monarchy, and in 1848, against the capitalist excesses of Louis-Philippe, “king of the French”, and the Commune uprisings of 1870-71, bloodily put down of course, after the defeat of Napoleon III by Otto von Bismarck and his dream of a unified German state under the rule of Prussia.
With all that said, my painting “Contingences (le lapin),” even if it is about Macron, it is not directly about the Yellow Jacket demonstrations. It was started long before Macron even appeared on the political scene, in 2013, and finished this past summer, before the start of the Yellow-Jacket demonstrations, but during the scandal caused by Macron’s aid and supposed security detail, Alexandre Benalla, abusing power, caught on camera being abusive, doing exactly what his ex-boss is doing. It is about minorities, invisible or visible, in an electoral system that by nature has to promise everything and anything in the most blatant expression of cynicism, where the electorate knows in advance that the promises will not be kept nor the elected politicians held accountable for their lies. It is about a people that may have become indifferent to elections, as it provides no solutions, and in Macron’s case, only worsens the situation. And it is also about the anger inherent in this failure of the republic to be fair and live up to its motto of freedom, equality and fraternity. As the octopi graffiti are doing on the wall in the background and as the small city dogs are doing below, there is unrest.
Roy Forget, “La Confrontation,” 2018, Oil on linen, 50 x 73 cm
You can see these paintings at the second of my two January 2019 solo shows, “tic-tac, tic-toc, time’s up,” is opening tonight at the Duplex Bar, 25 rue Michel Lecomte, a couple of blocks north of the Pompidou Center, Métro Arts et Métiers, in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris. Opening hours are from 7 pm to 2 am daily. There will be a closing reception on Monday, January 28, at 6 pm. All are welcome.
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