Reflections on America While in Paris
Courtesy of Michael OsmendaI'm back from Paris, where my wife and I spent nine days. We went well outside the tourist parts of the city, but in even that spare time, I found that there were observations about life there that are compelling to an American who is befuddled by our current debate about public funding and the individual good:
Courtesy of M@rg1. Parisians are friendly people. With the exception of a snippy little man in an information booth in Gare de l’Ouest, every person I came in contact with was thoughtful and kind. If you try a little French, they appreciate it, and all I possess is the ability to create broken sentences with verbs in the present tense, with the words for hello, thank you, I'm sorry, please, and good night. Many Parisians have sad expressions and furrowed brows, but they are not unpleasant to Americans. Our fashionable disdain of the French is based on popular media stereotypes, and we are probably as nice to them as they are to us.
Courtesy of Dat2. There are no fat people. It's extraordinary to visit a place where overweight people are the exception to the rule. The people jogging in active wear on the sidewalks are mostly visiting Americans (though not this American) but back home, we are mostly large, containing multitudes. I can't say that the diet of Parisians is all that healthy, and many people smoke, though not as many as you might think. They drink well after the late summer sunset (around 10 pm) but not to the excess that you see on Saturday nights on South Street in Philadelphia.
Courtesy of Wonderlane3. A walk down any busy street in Paris for an American is striking because very few people are on their cell phones. Very few are playing with their iPhones. In the evening, the native diners are talking and eating, and conversation consumes the dining experience. Though we finished our dinner, we practically had to beg the waiter for the check - not because he wasn't doing his job, but because people are supposed to sit and talk well after their meal is done. Since tipping is not as important there as it is in the U.S., it's less important to attend to the specific needs of the costumer, but it's also seen as bad business to rush people through their meal. On two occasions, people were turned away from restaurants we were in when half the diners inside were just finishing or had finished their coffee.
Courtesy of Lee Coursey4. Scooters are everywhere, which isn’t particularly green, but the city has successful a bike rental program called Velib. Even in a city where the traffic is bad and unruly, the bicycle is recognized as having even more of a right to exist than it does in even the most nominally progressive of American cities, like New York. My own city of Philadelphia has recently let one of its very few (and relatively cheap to maintain) bike rental programs die for no apparent reason and with no real plan to replace it.
Courtesy of Gillesklien5. Walking is important, and it enhances life in Paris. In as large a city as Paris, the car does not philosophically rule (though when push comes to shove, the car always has right of way over the right of the pedestrian crossing the road, which I found inexplicable). There is excellent, efficient and predictable public transportation. There are active small business storefronts everywhere. I don't know what kind of business they do, and I don't know about incentives or tax breaks, but if business is doing well, it's because there is also the expectation that people will be walking or biking by the shop windows, not driving by.
Courtesy of Chloester6. Big book chains are the exception in Paris. Small bookstores are everywhere. In Philadelphia, we are down to barely a handful of really good, small bookstores while the colonizing force of Borders has retreated, leaving a desolate browser’s landscape in its wake. In Paris, there are also longer, more casual lunch times during the workday. France is not an economic superpower, whatever its pretensions, but the environment values small business far more than anything our own economics are currently capable of imagining.
In all of this, I was compelled to wonder, in an admittedly generalized fashion, and using these random examples, about the relationship between the individual to society. As an American who has watched his national politics made paranoid by an increasingly distorted view that the values of the individual are inconsistent with the needs of the community, I wonder at how easily some Western societies (admittedly in a famously metropolitan area) are able to walk the line between the two without making desolate their landscape of thought.
It makes me wonder: is it really unfeasible for our society to find ways to discourage our addictions to food and chemicals, or to a consumerism imbued with an escapism that de-humanizes us on an individual level? Can we not encourage healthier ways to live in our culture? Can we not find ways to develop a culture that values a simple face-to-face conversation more than an over-reliance on texting one another and using social websites? If we cannot, why not?
***
Paris is not paradise by any stretch. Charles De Gaulle Airport is a nightmare. There are no helpful signs, even in French. People have plenty of jobs at the airport, but no one appears to think for himself. We had no bags to check, we had already checked in online but were unable to print our boarding passes, and this combination was too difficult for airport personnel to fathom, and no one would print them out for us before we went through passport and security checks because "it's not my job." Finally someone did after we had to wait on line with people checking their bags. It wasn't a business model that encouraged personal initiative.
France as a whole has cultural problems that are evident in Paris. Its wide avenues and monumental designs (some of which are visible in Washington, D.C., whose original design was created by a Frenchman) speak of an imperial sense of entitlement that compelled the French to believe that it could conquer other nations, strip other cultures of their native languages, and yet vainly defend itself against Nazism's evil by simply relying on the integrity of its republic alone.
You will hear that France is a more diverse society than ever, but you won't see any more of it in Paris center than you do in Philadelphia Center City. Take the B train to the airport, and the scene changes. The Parisians of Arab, African and South Asian ancestry live on the margins of Paris' glory. And France's presumption that it can force Muslim women to remove the burkha in public is, I feel, an inherent violation of individual values that Western culture purports to defend. And though the people of the city seemed horrified by the events in Oslo, one senses that even in Paris that there is an inherent sense that Islam is an “inferior” ideology. I feel we Americans have learned more from our history and can comprehend the casual sense of evil in such sentiments.
But the pleasantries of Paris can be instructive to Americans. For example, I was struck that among all the bicyclists, no one that I could see was wearing a helmet. Children did not wear bike helmets. This may be a terrible example; there are lots of silly theories we can use, some of which might even bear some grain of truth about how Parisians think bike helmets are aesthetically displeasing and inconsistent with good style. Personally, I feel naked riding a bicycle without a helmet in Center City Philadelphia, but I don’t know if I feel safer. I've been told by parents here in the U.S. that if your child is seen without a helmet, you get the feeling that someone will call Child Services on you. But are we any safer than Parisians? I found a very old study that showed that Bostonians rode with fewer bike lights than Parisians, and I remember that in England, I would have been pulled over by a cop for not having bike lights, not for missing a helmet.
What makes for good safety on a bike? More generally, what are the best ways to enhance individual life in both a diverse and a plural society? In our struggle with the American sense of the individual, transcendental or rugged, do we need to start listening more often to Western societies struggling with their own definitions (and not just Parisians)? When I consider how personally relaxed I felt in one of the most densely populated cities in the world, I have to wonder what it was that was so pleasingly foreign to me, other than the language.
America, Bikes, French, Gare de l'Quest, Muslim, New York, Oslo, Paris, Philadelphia 
Reader Comments (4)
Great post. I have been lucky enough to visit Paris twice, and you do a great job capturing the feel of the city. Your observations made me think a lot about something I considered as I visited Paris and other big cities in Europe--how young America is in comparison. And I think this shows in the American attitude about many of the things you write about. We're kind of like spoiled teenagers now, arrogantly thinking we have it all figured out, and we're the first ever to do so.
Thanks for showing how across the Atlantic there's an old uncle who helped us out in our childhood that is using the wisdom of his years to appreciate some of the little things that make life enjoyable.
I was taken with your restaurant part and the night before I read it, I had dinner at Outback. We rushed through dinner because that is the way of the place. It is cold, dark, and the servers run around like they are on fire. I am not a big fan of the place but your piece help make sense of things.
We pay tips for waiters to be efficient, quick, and to get out as soon as possible. Meals are a means to an end, and not the end themselves. It is not like that in the city or a place you feel comfortable. The restaurant trains are assembly lines to move the costumers and I glad you woke me up. It has been a awhile since my wife and I had a nice cup of coffee and a half hour later, we ordered dessert.
Paris sounds like a fascinating place and you left out the tourist areas and focused on the people and that is an amazing vacation, when you no longer visit a place, but the people and customs of a place. That comes through. The US is young, as Wordsmith said, and we are still trying to catch our breath, shout our opinions, and prove we are right, and very few times we sit back and consider others, the world, and how we fit in, instead we think how we can use the or be better. That is the debt ceiling debacle in a nut shell.
I like your Paris and if you think a blog can't change actions well my wife and I had a slow dinner in, with a quiet salad, mancotti, some baked bread and yes coffee afterwards. It was a great chance to see her eat, to talk in good light, and comfortable temperature. We made it together and we took nothing home. Your reminder helped us to enjoy the meal, for it is mostly that what we work for.
Welcome back to lunch and please keep your helmet on downtown. They have been giving out tickets like crazy. You might have missed that.
Cool perspective. I think you are probably right that American disdain for the French is based more on stereotypes than reality. It makes me want to go back and watch Amelie, the first film that really sparked my interest in France.
I like your observation on walking. In my experience, walking is great for staying thin and gives you a whole new perspective on where you live. In our American haste, we often forget how to rely on our own bodies instead of technology to perform our simple tasks. I hope the next place I live is close to shops like the ones you describe. As your post suggests, a city is not defined by its monuments or museums, but by its neighborhoods and the people who inhabit them.
Nobody on cell phones. No helmets while riding a bike. Spending an hour and a half prating on and on even after dinner is over. Small authentic book stores. Wow! (Sarcasm) How awesome! (Sarcasm)
Why don't you, Gwenth Paltro, and Johnny Depp just get a time share together (as if they'd want to share one with you) in Paris and hate on America all day while drinking fancy wine and eating stuff you can't pronounce and having real discussions without cell phone interruptions and ride around bikes without helmets while quoting French verse from overpriced books you bought at some musty old bookstore. So cool! (more sarcasm)
In all sincerity, this trip sounds amazing, and I am truly envious. Having just returned from the mid-west (Denver) and the west (San Francisco) from cities I feel maintain a much more European philosophy on life, especially San Fran, I too couldn't help but think of the incredible learning value of travel and my wish that America would work to learn from other states, cities, and countries even.
As I argued in one of my educational pieces, American government can learn so much from their European and Asian counterparts. Although it's easy to bash American corporations right now for their greed, their incredible success is one thing that can't be ignored, and a large part of that comes from their amazing ability to collaborate so well with foreign countries in a unified effort. I feel like our government is unwilling to pursue such interaction and transference of ideas and information, and it's a shame.
Your piece makes me wish I had more time, and money, to travel. I've always wanted to see France, more the countryside than Paris, but I will have to wait for now and rely on your words to do it justice.
Until then, however, I think I'll plan on just talking on my cell phone while riding a bike, with a helmet of course, and riding past fancy restaurants downtown and throwing books bought at Borders at people lingering too long at dinner.
Thanks for the read!