Guns

Long ago, shortly after my arrival at Gamone, while looking out from my bathroom window, I noticed a mangy fox about fifty meters down the hill. I grabbed my camera and managed to get a picture of the animal before it disappeared into the woods. To be wandering around in daylight so close to my house, the fox was probably sick. When I showed the photo to people in a café at Pont-en-Royans, the barman scolded me mildly: "William, as a rural property-owner, you should have grabbed your rifle, not your camera, and shot that sick animal." When I explained that I didn't own a rifle, the people in the café looked at me in disdain, as if I were a naive outsider (which I was), unaccustomed to French country traditions.

In fact, I do own a couple of weapons (not requiring licenses), but there's no way in the world that I could use them to down a fox at a distance of fifty meters. As a child in Australia, I saw my father using a rifle, on countless occasions, to kill rabbits. My uncles, too, owned shotguns enabling them to go duck-shooting in the nearby swamp. So, I found it quite natural, and still do, that a rural house should contain various firearms.

From time to time, I've thought about the idea of carrying out some kind of bush excursion in Australia, and it occurred to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea to carry a rifle in the vehicle. Last year, when I made preliminary enquiries about this idea, I was surprised to learn that Australia's new (?) laws concerning firearms are extraordinarily draconian. It is simply out of the question for an ordinary citizen to keep any kind of weapon in his home. To my mind, this is excellent legislation... although I fail to understand how landowners now deal with rabbits and dingoes.

Talking about things I fail to understood, there's the US myth about the right of citizens to defend themselves with personal firearms. But that's just one of many things I don't understand about Americans. Even after the tragedy that has just taken place in Virginia, President Bush refrains from even hinting that their legislation might be modified in order to keep guns out of the hands of psychopaths.

In a country where many leading figures have been gunned down, various observers have evoked the possibility that a highly unpopular president such as Bush might be a likely target for US gunmen. Somebody said recently that the main reason why Bush is relatively safe from such a happening is that his assassination would result in the presidency being handed over to Dick Cheney. And it goes without saying that no self-respecting US gunman in his right mind would wish to bring about such a nightmarish situation!

English traps

Commercial people in France are constantly using English words and expressions to identify their products, because they think it looks smart, but they often get things screwed up. They love to use words that end in an apostrophe-s, as this looks very English, but few French people seem to understand this construction (which is not necessarily straightforward for people whose native tongue is English). For example, there's a small Red Indian theme park not far away from here. The proprietor has named it Indian's Valley, imagining no doubt that this designates a valley with a certain number of make-believe French-speaking Red Indians who dwell in teepees and ride horses. It would be impossible to explain to him that the name suggests in fact a valley inhabited by a solitary Indian.

The following brand-name patch appears on the back of trousers I bought recently:

First, I'm intrigued by the term Chino. It doesn't seem to mean anything in French but, just as Dick is an abbreviation in English for Richard, Chino happens to be the traditional abbreviation for my son's first-name, François. Don't ask me why. The patch contains another funny word: pant. Obviously, the French manufacturer has heard of pants, he's learned that it's a plural word, and so he has invented a singular version. A pair of pants, so one pant. After all, in French, the word for pants is singular: un pantalon.

An English word that stuns French people is toothbrush. Is it a fact, they ask, that Anglo-Saxons [that's the generic term used to designate people whose native tongue is English] brush their teeth one at a time?

Thin line between facts and Fascism

We're four days away from the first round of the French presidential elections. Since I'm not French, I won't be voting, but I have my personal aspirations and apprehensions. I would like to see a great victory for the Centrist François Bayrou, rather than the lightweight Socialist Ségolène Royal, because he appears to envisage French politics in a new light, without the eternal split between the Left and the Right. My vital hope, above all, is for the massive defeat of the Extreme Right of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

For the moment, the super favorite would appear to be Nicolas Sarkozy. I can understand this preference in the sense that many people would like to see France governed by a ferocious little bull terrier, which is exactly the image of Sarkozy. The possibility of a resurgence of Islamic terrorism in nearby Algeria promotes the case of a strongman such as Sarkozy, who doesn't beat around the bush when it comes to pointing a finger at societal outlaws, designated spontaneously as scum in need of Karcher-style cleansing.

In a recent interview with a philosopher, Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell that was picked up immediately by everybody. First, in speaking of pedophiles, Sarkozy said: "One is born a pedophile. Besides, it's a problem in that we don't know how to handle this pathology." Then the pit bull turned to an adjacent subject: adolescent suicides. Here are the words of Sarkozy (my translation): "Some 1200 to 1300 young people commit suicide every year in France. They did so, not because their parents weren't taking care of them, but because they were genetically fragile, victims of a precursory pain." Programmed genetically to die. This is strong language, which brings to mind the terrible theme of eugenics.

Today, few people remember the unexpected but profound collaboration between the French Nobel prize-winner Alexis Carrell [1873-1944] and his young disciple, the American aviator Charles Lindbergh [1902-1974]. Carrell was a believer in eugenics: the science and potential technology of breeding humans like stud cattle. Hitler, among others, was fond of this theme.

Nicolas Sarkozy is a smart guy, and he knows where to stop, before going too far. He's perfectly aware (I hope) of the thin line that separates facts from Fascism.

A small step for William

I've never ventured into a pawn shop with stuff to sell. [I'm told that my mother was keen on this kind of transaction, and that our precious family bibles probably disappeared in this way, once upon a time, in Merv Mulligan's celebrated shop in Grafton.] Apparently, the pawnbroker gives you a paper stating that your stuff has been duly deposited, then you simply wait around for buyers and, finally, cash.

In many ways, the following uninteresting French document is a little like a pawnbroker's paper:

It states that my naturalization application has been duly deposited, first in the tiny municipal office of Choranche, and now in the Grenoble headquarters of the Isère département, on 11 April 2007. This banal document—filled out by a woman (with whom I've often spoken on the phone) whose handwriting suggests that she might have been a school teacher before working at the préfecture—is the French way of informing me that all is in order, and that I now have to wait patiently until the next higher level, that of the république, handles my application. It's a rational and logical Napoleonic process, of a kind I appreciate. [On countless occasions, over the years, I've felt myself more intrinsically French than the French.] The almost inevitable outcome (maybe in a year or so, unless they were to discover that I've been a criminal) will be a French passport.

A great idea that didn't work in Australia

Antoine de Maximy is an intelligent 43-year-old French TV star. The title of his most popular show might be translated into English as How about inviting me along to your home? It's a travel video recorded in foreign lands by Antoine himself. He starts out by striking up conversations with random people he meets in the street. As soon as he encounters an interesting and friendly person, Antoine rapidly steers the conversation around to the above-mentioned question: "How about inviting me along to your home?" The general idea of Antoine's production is that the ideal way to obtain in-depth knowledge about people in a foreign (non-French) country is to interview them in their own homes, maybe around a dinner table.

An original aspect of Antoine's production process is that it's a strictly one-man show. He does all the video recording by himself, using three cameras that are either hand-held or fixed to his body. As depicted in the show's stick-figure logo, when he's doing his filming, Antoine looks a little like a tambourine man. One of the cameras is located at the end of a metal strut that juts out from his waist, making it possible to obtain shots of Antoine himself informing TV viewers about his on-going operations and intentions. Later on, back in France, all the recorded stuff is cut and edited in a video studio, to produce a feature-length TV program.

Normally, one would expect that, in a friendly land such as Australia, inhabited by warm open-hearted Aussies, Antoine's production technique should be a sure winner. Well, it wasn't. It was a shameful disaster. Retrospectively, an informed viewer (that's to say, an Australian such as myself, aware of what the French journalist had set out to achieve) can end up understanding what went wrong at each stage of Antoine's encounters. But it's a pity that all these mistakes and misunderstandings were congealed into an ugly mess, painting a most dismal picture of "average Australians" at home.

The opening scenes show Antoine in the office quarter of Sydney, probably at lunch hour, surrounded by people in business attire scurrying along the footpaths. It's not exactly the kind of environment where people would want to stop and chat with a guy whose body is wrapped in weird video gear, who speaks English with a strange accent. Sydney office workers seemed to take Antoine de Maximy for a crackpot. Maybe they're right. You have to be something of a crackpot to imagine that you can start talking with strangers and end up getting invited into their homes, to find out what makes them tick. In any case, Antoine never got anywhere near finding out what makes Sydney's business people tick. In an off remark to French viewers, he says: "I've always known that it's impossible to strike up conversations with chaps dressed in suits and neckties."

Next, Antoine heads to Bondi, where he meets up with three or four guys seated on the lawn in front of their beach house, drinking beer and trying to attract the attention of females walking along the footpath. Their mating call to Bondi birds is elementary: "Hey, come on, do you want a beer?" Needless to say, Antoine's camera never captured images of any girls who did in fact want a beer. Instead, Antoine succeeded in getting himself invited into the ringleader's flat and filming a sad monologue on the theme of sexual frustration, porn movies, booze, etc. It wasn't even an account of the seamy side of Bondi, if such a thing exists. It was simply the uninteresting confession of a poor guy who had got into the habit of trying to drown his big dick in beer. Hardly an image of typical Australia?

Antoine then decided to go bush. Coober Pedy, opals, Aborigines and all that kind of stuff, including more beer. Here, of course, Antoine didn't have to beg to be brought inside. I had the impression that owners of dugout homes found it perfectly normal that French TV would have dispatched a video-equipped Martian such as Antoine to explore the interior of their strange underground abodes. On the other hand, God only knows why Antoine should have found himself talking to two ordinary-looking teenage girls, in their parents' dugout, who started spontaneously to relate outrageous stories, which may or may not be totally factual: "Concerning Aborigines, we don't mind saying that we're totally racist. You see, we've both been attacked, several times, by drunken Aborigines. So, we try to avoid any contact with them." Nasty stuff for Antoine's cameras.

The only nice sequence in Antoine's presentation of Aussies was his encounter with a miner who organized a small outdoor get-together with his lady friend and mates in honor of the French journalist. Setting aside the fuzziness due to beer, viewers learned that opal mining is often a kind of fascination that gets transformed into an expensive addiction. On the rare occasions that a miner strikes it rich, he immediately invests his new wealth in bigger and better machines. Other individuals in this rough world were prepared to talk with Antoine, but they shied away abruptly from the idea of taking him back home for dinner, bed and breakfast.

Finally, I could see what was coming when Antoine started to talk with a genuine Aborigine. After listening to the conventional explanations about the plight of Australia's indigenous population, the journalist from another planet sprung his standard "Take me to your home" request. I had the impression that the starkly negative but natural reaction of the dumbfounded Aborigine was more spontaneously profound than anything else in Antoine's vain video attempts to get himself invited into Australian homes.

Latest Provençal fashion garment

When I arrived in Marseilles last Saturday morning, Natacha and Alain gave me an unexpected gift: a high-fashion T-shirt.

A closeup view of the front reveals lovely portraits of three animals (Moshé, Gamone and Sophia) on a background composed of postage stamps forming a map of Australia:

The back of the T-shirt is composed of home pages of various websites:

Highly topical graphics, to say the least. After all, we're in France. And avant-garde fashion keeps in touch with major current happenings, n'est-ce pas...

Losing a war

Some time ago, when I first voiced my belief in French opposition to a US invasion of Iraq, I recall the sarcastic words of a fellow in Australia who asked rhetorically, as if it were an intelligent and relevant question: "How long is it since France won a war?" He believed idiotically that Humanity is still keeping a count of wars won and wars lost, as in Napoleonic times, with a view to declaring an emerging winner, as if it were a global game of golf.

Today, the words hurt, but they will soon have to be pronounced. America has lost the war in Iraq. Australia, too.

Blog readership

It goes without saying that I'm writing this blog primarily for myself, like a personal diary. Over the last few months, since deciding to start Antipodes, I've grown accustomed to the daily challenge of recording an almost insignificant Internet record of the way I see things... which might or might not interest other individuals in the universe.

In the beginning, I looked upon this style of communication as an optimal solution for my communications with Australian relatives, since some of them relied upon local ISPs [Internet service providers] such as BigPond who had concocted the convenient conclusion that everything emanating from France was necessarily shit... not to be delivered. Normally I'm neither aggressive nor revengeful, but I've often felt like telling those ISPs to get screwed. But what the hell does it matter? If there are folk in Australia who imagine that the state-owned ISP in France tolerates spam, all I can say is that they're fuckwits.

Apart from that, I'm discovering with joy that a lot of people, in many places, are in fact reading my daily words. This makes me immensely happy, and encourages me to carry on with my modest blog.

Today, halfway through April, here's the readership breakdown:

It's normal that about half my readers are French, and the other half Australian. That, as planned, is my personal family of readers. I can understand, too, the Canadian one percent. That's probably Patiti. But I marvel before the huge twelve-percent of American readers, followed by minority scores for Chinese, Japanese and Germans. It's a fine feeling to be read, even if I'm not quite sure who's doing the reading.

America didn't listen to France

It has just been revealed publicly, in the prestigious daily newspaper Le Monde, that the DGSE [French secret service] submitted to the CIA chief in Paris, on 5 January 2001 (eight months before the destruction of the Twin Towers), a precise report concerning the threat of aircraft hijacking by Al-Qaeda terrorists. This note even included an organizational chart of the senior Al-Qaeda hierarchy.

Since France had been the target of terrorist attacks at an early date, French intelligence concerning Oussama Ben Laden was far in advance of US knowledge in this domain. The report sent to the CIA by the DGSE mentioned seven airlines that might be targeted by Al-Qaeda hijackers, and this list included the two that were finally chosen: American Airlines and United Airlines. The January 2001 report spoke of timing, explaining that the hijacking project, initially prepared for 2000, had been postponed.

Bush invaded Iraq without paying attention to warnings from France concerning the grave consequences of such an idiotic act. Today, we learn retrospectively that, well before Iraq, ignoring French advice had already become a style of foreign affairs "thinking" in the USA. It would be well, I feel, if this situation were to evolve soon in a positive sense.

Return to Gamone

At the end of my third splendid day in Provence, Sophia and I got the train from Marseilles to Valence, where I picked up my car and drove back to Gamone. Today, Natacha and Alain introduced me to Gordes, Sénanque Abbey, St Saturnin, Roussillon and Lacoste. I've just been looking at today's photos. It's too late in the evening to start talking about these exceptional places. I'll have more to say about these three marvelous days in Provence. Sophia, exhausted, is already sleeping soundly in her big wicker basket in the kitchen. I wonder whether she might be dreaming about the extraordinary places we've visited.

Les Baux, Arles and back to Marseilles

We spent the morning in the magnificent rocky environment of Les Baux de Provence:

Then we picnicked in a nearby grove of olive trees:

On the road to Arles, the ancient Montmajour Abbey was the source of Catholicism in the Royans (my homeplace):

Stately Arles:

In Arles, I saw for the first time a Rugby World Cup poster:


Back in Marseilles, Natacha led me into the mysterious basilica of St Victor, near the Vieux Port, where I saw the celebrated Black Virgin.

To wind up a dense day, we were invited to dinner by Natacha's parents. In the middle of our pizza meal, my dog Sophia decided to piss on the fine dining-room carpet. Then Natacha's father invited me to use Flight Simulator on his computer to fly a plane from Grafton to Yamba and back. An exhausting day! And I missed out on seeing O'Grady winning the Paris-Roubaix cycling race. But it was a truly splendid day for me.

Provençal excursion

This morning, I drove to Valence, accompanied by my dog Sophia, we jumped aboard a TGV (high-speed train), and an hour later we were in Marseilles, where we were picked up by Natacha and Alain. I admired for the first time their delightful new flat in a quiet neighborhood of the city. For a cold lunch, Natacha had prepared an excellent Provençal dish whose name, aïoli, I would not attempt to translate: vegetables (potatoes, carrots, beans, etc) accompanied by thick mayonnaise mixed with garlic crushed in a marble mortar.

We then spent the afternoon strolling through the sunny streets of Aix-en-Provence. Posters in the Provençal capital remind us that a major French election is just around the corner. On the Cours Mirabeau, a grand statue of Good King René identifies the ancient but eternal chief of this magnificent city. With such a monarch bestowing his grace upon them, one wonders if the people of Aix really need to elect a president.

Maybe a whitewash for Chirac

Everybody in France is familiar with the time-honored satirical weekly named Le Canard enchaîné (the duck in chains)... including people who've never actually read it. Long ago, tabloid newspapers were referred to disparagingly as ducks because their content was likened to a quacking noise. [In English, too, fake doctors are called quacks, probably for the same reason.] The great statesman Georges Clemenceau [1841-1929] edited a newspaper called L'homme enchaîné (man in chains). When the Canard enchaîné was founded in 1915, its name was a humorous allusion to Clemenceau's newspaper. These days, in the title of the newspaper, the "ears" on either side of the name (which generally present a topical pun) feature ducks.

The Canard enchaîné has just thrown a spanner into the electoral works by suggesting that, "according to informed sources" (as the saying goes), the candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has promised Jacques Chirac that, after his re-entry into civilian life, the ex-president will not be pursued by the law for misdemeanors allegedly committed back in the days when he was the mayor of Paris. Naturally, both Chirac and Sarkozy immediately rejected this allegation, but there's a good chance that it's true, because claims made by the Canard enchaîné usually turn out to be based upon factual information. In any case, it's true that Chirac will have some serious explaining to do when the law starts to ask him questions. So, the idea that he might have bartered his support for Sarkozy, against a legal whitewash, is perfectly plausible. It's an interesting hypothesis. All we can do is to wait and see.

Kurt Vonnegut's peephole has closed

I mentioned the great American novelist Kurt Vonnegut in my February post with the title Watch out for life! And I quoted these opening lines from Deadeye Dick:

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings.

The 84-year-old writer died yesterday in Manhattan.

To me, Vonnegut's novels are like a bugged computer program. When you examine a detailed section, everything seems to be in place, and it should work fine. But when you assemble all the sections into a whole, either the global program doesn't work, or else it produces the wrong answers. For Vonnegut, the source of the bug is life itself. He was a joyous pessimist. His philosophy: If something can blow up, it will... and there'll be a great bang and fabulous fireworks. He might be described as an existentialist novelist. A great story-teller, too.

Comparing the candidates

I've translated the thumbnail descriptions in this banner that points to an excellent website, the Comparotron, created by the newspaper Libération, which makes brief point-by-point comparisons (in French only) between France's twelve presidential candidates.

Traces of the past

As a child, I often used to accompany my father, of a weekend, to his bush paddock near South Grafton, at a place called Deep Creek, where Dad would leave the Jeep and wander around on foot, inspecting the cattle. Although it was not a particularly wild or remote setting, I always liked to nurture the absurd thought that we were surely the first human beings, since the dawn of Creation, to stroll over this virgin land. It was fairly easy to cling to this illusion, in spite of the fact that this land had no doubt been exploited by previous proprietors for beef grazing. Except for my father's barbed-wire fences, there were no visible traces of human intervention in that dull environment.

Here at Gamone, the situation is totally different. I often have the impression that I'm a usurper on a territory that belongs to hordes of more or less ancient phantoms. Yesterday, Natacha sent me a paper written at the end of World War I concerning agricultural activity in the Bourne Valley. The author points out, not surprisingly, that the male work force was decimated, here as elsewhere in France, by the ravages of war. But he adds: "From Rencurel to Pont, no land is abandoned. Women, old people and children make sure of that." That's where Choranche is located: between Rencurel and Pont-en-Royans. Today, alas, there is no longer much agricultural activity here. In emptying the French countryside of its rural families, the economic attraction of urban areas has been even more effective than warfare.

The soil nevertheless remains a vast storage house full of traces of the past. After reading Natacha's paper, I was out in the yard digging up a plot of earth to plant tomatoes, and my hoe unearthed this curious iron object (which I've cleaned up and painted with anti-rust liquid).

It's a bullock shoe, which must be quite old. I would imagine that a Gamone farmer once used a pair of bullocks to drag a plow on the slopes. When I think of the effort involved in planting a tiny plot of tomatoes, I realize that it must have been incredibly difficult for these individuals to survive in such a place. In any case, I look upon trivial traces of the past such as this old piece of metal as small treasures. I have a tremendous respect for the hordes of phantoms.

Angels

Maybe I have a distorted way of looking at things but, when I first saw this image, I had the impression that the red-haired angel was handling a roll of toilet paper. When you think about it, that would be a great question for Byzantine theologians: Do angels use toilet paper?

Sometimes, in the middle of a spirited conversation between several people, the talking stops abruptly, for no particular reason, and there's a gap of maybe ten seconds or so of spooky silence, up until somebody takes up the conversation once again. In French, there's a quaint expression to designate such an incident. They say: An angel just passed by.

You might be wondering why I've brought up the subject of angels. I hasten to add that this has nothing to do with Easter Monday or the alleged resurrection of Jesus. On the contrary, I wish to mention a down-to-earth affair: a white paper with a curious title, République 2.0, on the challenges of digital technology in French society.

A few weeks ago, the presidential candidate Ségolène Royal called upon a distinguished Socialist personality, Michel Rocard, to produce a report on this highly topical subject.

And angels in all this? In browsing through the report this afternoon, I was intrigued by the following recommendation, in the section of Rocard's report that deals with technological innovation in France:

Encourage logic of a "business angels" type.

Here, the abstract term "logic", which is highly popular in technocratic French, simply designates a way of doing things. The expression "business angels" appeared as such in Rocard's report, in English, and the inverted commas ("twitch twitch") were no doubt inserted to underline the author's awareness that he had switched momentarily into less than academic French. And what exactly does this recommendation mean, when translated into everyday language?

In case you didn't know, so-called business angels are wealthy individuals who get a kick out of operating as venture capitalists, using their personal cash. They're the sort of individuals who are capable of being so enthralled by the great ideas and ambitions of a talented innovator (who knows how to sell him/herself) that they're prepared to bury him in bags of money (like in a Dilbert cartoon) enabling him/her to set up a business. It goes without saying (but I'll say it all the same) that Michel Rocard is convinced that, in the domain of digital technology, there are many brilliant young French innovators who would be able to achieve marvels if only they had the financial resources enabling them to get into action. Who knows? Maybe he's right...

I've never thought of France as the kind of country where it's easy to start off with a brilliant idea and build it into a business. First, the competition's stiff, in the sense that, in a brilliant country such as France, there are hordes of bright individuals with brilliant ideas. But the real problem is that, in France, the concept known elsewhere as free enterprise turns out to be a terribly expensive affair. As soon as an individual decides to set up a business, to do anything at all (or even nothing in the immediate future), the entrepreneur is hit with a massive volume of charges of all kinds, and it's hard to survive. Either you have to make piles of money rapidly, or else the charges drag you into bankruptcy. That's France.

Years ago, I had a brilliant idea (in the course of a lifetime, this can happen), and I would have loved to be discovered by a business angel hovering in the skies of Paris. I remember writing down a neologism, wearware, on a piece of paper, and trying to explain to friends that it was a matter of designing exotic garments incorporating various kinds of digital devices, maybe coat pockets that flashed messages of a kinky kind with graphic and audio effects. Just imagine it. If only I had been able to develop the brilliant idea of wearware, I would have become filthy rich, and I wouldn't be here today in my modest Alpine abode typing this silly blog message. Retrospectively, I believe it's quite likely that my guardian angel stepped in, fortunately, and saved me from spending my life as a filthy rich developer of wearware.

All-purpose automobile

I often think it would be great to own a nice new automobile, sparkling on the outside, and spotless inside. The only problem is that I need to be able to cart around such things as fencing material and miscellaneous rural stuff. The nice thing about my old Citroën ZX is that it runs perfectly and I don't have to worry about it getting dirty or scratched. Back in the days of the primitive but much celebrated Citroën 2CV, American tourists used to refer it by a quaint title: basic car. Today, that expression suits my vehicle well.

Mixed messages

When speaking, we often quote other people's words, or use expressions that, if written, would be surrounded by inverted commas. Some speakers, whenever they do so, have developed the habit of holding up their hands and twitching a couple of fingers on each hand, to represent visually the inverted commas. Although I like and employ natural hand movements of all kinds during conversations (a Mediterranean habit), this relatively recent "twitch twitch" mannerism always irritates me, because it glares out as an acquired quirk, rather than a spontaneous gesture. Now I realize that I shouldn't be irritated by the "twitch twitch" thing, because it's a pure example of the acquired behaviors known as memes, which I referred to in an earlier post whose title was Imitation. Basically, a meme is an act that individuals encounter by chance and then imitate impulsively. So, there must be something in the "twitch twitch" mannerism that urges viewers to do the same thing.

In France, over recent years, a popular hybrid verbal/gestural meme has enabled people to reply negatively to a request for a service. The meme, which soon spread like an epidemic, consists of pointing to your forehead and saying: "There's no sign there marked Post Office."

Countless memes are purely verbal, consisting of no more than a fashionable expression such as "doing his thing" or "getting a life".

I've often thought it would be fun to invent and introduce a striking meme, to see whether it would succeed in proliferating. Here's one of my schemes: If ever I were to appear on a TV talk show (an unlikely idea), I would wait for an opportunity to introduce the ordinary expression "bare facts". This would be easy. In replying to a simple question, I would ask: "Do you want me to give you the bare facts?" At the same time that I pronounced these words, I would casually turn my backside to the camera, make a gesture as if I were going to drop my pants, then slap myself on the arse, hopefully evoking the theme of bare buttocks. That's all. (I would need to practice this act in front of a mirror, to get it right.) Afterwards, if my meme were successful (that's to say, to catch on and proliferate), we would find other participants in talk shows turning their backsides to the camera whenever the question of bare facts arose, and tapping themselves on the arse. Later, if it were a champion meme, certain courageous users would unbuckle their belts when the discussion turned to bare facts, and actually exhibit their buttocks... which would be much more spectacular than just twitching your fingers in the air.

The question of successful memes is similar to a theme that I talked about in an earlier post, whose title was Second-hand creativity: the way in which a few adolescents wearing used and embroidered jeans can create, unwittingly, a vast fashion and marketing phenomenon.

There's a successful verbal meme that has recently acquired celebrity status in the mouth of George W Bush: the metaphor of sending messages. It's a hi-tech substitute for the old-fashioned notion of "giving an impression". For example, when Democrats urged that means must be found to put an end to the US intervention in Iraq as soon as possible, Bush shot back with rhetorical questions about the kind of "message" that such measures would send to the forces. Recently, a remarkable Democratic lady, Nancy Pelosi, has been doing essential diplomatic work that should have normally been performed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, or by Bush himself.

Bush and his associates have hastened to criticize Pelosi's visit in terms of the kind of "mixed message" of national disunity that it will be sending to people in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Today, sending messages is primarily an e-mailer's pastime and a blogger's preoccupation. International diplomacy, on the other hand, is surely a more serious activity, or art ("twitch twitch"), than simply sending messages. Bush should change his verbal memes.

Benedict XVI on the historicity of Easter events

We know with relative certainty the day of the week on which Jesus was brought before Caiaphas, then Pilate, and fixed to the cross. It was the day before the Jewish sabbath: that is, a Friday. This information is provided by two of the four evangelists:

— Mark 15, 42
By this time evening had come; and as it was the day of preparation (that is, the day before the sabbath), [...]

— John 19, 31
Because it was the eve of the sabbath, the Jews were anxious that the bodies should not remain on the crosses [...]

We also know with relative certainty the day of the month (but not the year) on which Jesus was crucified. It was the day of preparation for the Pesach (Passover) festival: that is, the Hebrew date of 14 Nisan. This information is provided twice by one of the four evangelists:

— John 18, 28
From Caiaphas Jesus was led into the governor’s headquarters. It was now early morning, and the Jews themselves stayed outside the headquarters to avoid defilement, so that they could eat the Passover meal.

— John 19, 14
It was the day of preparation for the Passover, about noon. Pilate said to the Jews, ‘Here is your king.’

It is also provided by a purely Jewish document:

— Babylonian Talmud, Nezikin ("Damages") order,
Sanhedrin tractate, V, 2, 43a
The day before Pesach, they executed Jesus of Nazareth [...]

Using the fact that Jesus was crucified on a Friday, 14 Nisan, historians have been able to conclude that this event probably took place on Friday, 7 April 30, when Jesus was about 36 years old.

At some time prior to this fateful Friday on the eve of Passover, Jesus had a final meal with his apostles.

Concerning this celebrated Last Supper, which inspired the Christian ceremony of the Eucharist, there is a dating problem that has not yet been solved in a way that satisfies everybody. Most people consider that it took place on the evening of Thursday, 6 April 30, but this convenient date raises problems, for reasons that I shall now summarize.

There has always been a ceremonial Jewish dinner on the eve or the first evening of Pesach that is known as the Passover Seder, or simply Seder. Christians often refer to this Jewish ritual as the paschal supper. Clearly, since Jesus was tried and executed on the eve of Pesach, then the Last Supper could not have possibly been an ordinary Jewish Seder. Besides, at the start of Jesus's final meal, John describes a curious event that is not part of a traditional Seder: Jesus washed the feet of his companions. Furthermore, as described by the evangelists, essential ingredients of the Seder appear to have been absent in the Last Supper. The gospels make no mention of the presence on the table of lamb, matzot (unleavened bread) and various symbolic foodstuffs.

In spite of these negative factors, the Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) persist in speaking of the Last Supper as if it took place at the start of Pesach and constituted a traditional Seder. For example:

— Mark 14, 12-16
Now on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered, his disciples said to him, ‘Where would you like us to go and prepare the Passover for you?’ So he sent off two of his disciples with these instructions: ‘Go into the city, and a man will meet you carrying a jar of water. Follow him, and when he enters a house, give this message to the householder: “The Teacher says, ‘Where is the room in which I am to eat the Passover with my disciples?’” He will show you a large upstairs room, set out in readiness. Make the preparations for us there.’ Then the disciples went off, and when they came into the city they found everything just as he had told them. So they prepared the Passover.

The Catholic Church has always recognized, of course, that there are contradictions in the Gospels concerning this central theme of the Last Supper. Last Thursday, in his homily during the Holy Thursday mass in the basilica of Saint John Lateran, Benedict XVI made an allusion to these contradictions. Then he went on to make an astonishing reference to Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Here are the words of the pope:

In the narrations of the Evangelists, there is an apparent contradiction between the Gospel of John, on one hand, and what, on the other hand, Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us. According to John, Jesus died on the cross precisely at the moment in which, in the temple, the Passover lambs were being sacrificed. His death and the sacrifice of the lambs coincided.

This means that he died on the eve of Passover, and that, therefore, he could not have personally celebrated the paschal supper; at least this is what it would seem.

On the contrary, according to the three Synoptic Evangelists, the last supper of Jesus was a paschal supper, in its traditional form. He introduced the innovation of the gift of his body and blood. This contradiction, until a few years ago, seemed impossible to resolve.

The majority of the exegetes thought that John did not want to communicate to us the true historical date of the death of Jesus, but had opted for a symbolic date to make the deeper truth more evident: Jesus is the new and true lamb that spilled his blood for us all.

The discovery of the manuscripts of Qumran has led us to a convincing possible solution that, while not accepted by all, is highly probable. We can now say that what John referred to is historically correct. Jesus truly spilled his blood on the eve of Passover at the hour of the sacrifice of the lambs.

However, he celebrated Passover with his disciples probably according to the calendar of Qumran, that is to say, at least one day earlier -- he celebrated without a lamb, like the Qumran community who did not recognize the Temple of Herod and was waiting for a new temple.

Now, the explanations of Benedict XVI are really weird, for two reasons that I shall outline briefly before concluding this lengthy article:

— In suggesting that Jesus was an Essene, the pope has decided, as it were, to rewrite New Testament history on the basis of archaeological findings at Qumran made in the middle of the 20th century.

— Among the great Qumran scholars, nobody has ever imagined for an instant that the historical Jesus might have been an Essene.

My own explanation of the contradictions (for what it's worth) has the merit of being simpler and more orthodox than the pope's. I would imagine that the instructions about going into the city and meeting up with a man carrying a jar of water were in fact given by Jesus on the morning of Thursday, 6 April 30. After all, since the troublemaker from Nazareth and his followers were being spied upon by the authorities, it is feasible that Jesus thought it wise that his followers should be assembled in the "large upstairs room" well in advance of the eve of Passover. One can imagine that this room might have assumed the role, in the mind of Jesus, of a temporary shelter from his pursuers. But, by the end of Thursday afternoon, when everybody was present in the upper room, Jesus foresaw already that he would never live to see the eve of Pesach, twenty-four hours later. So, he transformed Thursday's assembly into an advanced and abridged ceremony: a sort of symbolic Seder. Since it was too early to envisage their evening get-together as a real Seder, there would be no lamb or special Jewish foodstuffs on the table, and the bread would be ordinary, not unleavened. But Jesus, knowing now that his time on Earth was about to end and that he would never be able to participate in a real Seder with his companions, improvised a virtual Passover supper... whose powerful spontaneous symbols (Jesus was equated to a sacrificed lamb, with Thursday's ordinary bread and wine of the upper room symbolizing his flesh and blood) gave rise to the Christian ritual of the Eucharist as we have known it ever since. To my mind, there is no need whatsoever to drag the Essenes into the picture.

In any case, the words of Benedict XVI, the day before yesterday, were astonishing and his reasoning is hard to fathom.