I’m Just So Very Much NOT Hysterical About Notre-Dame de Paris

Let’s burn the rest of them down, too.

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YES, GENTLE READERS, TODAY’S THEME IS “disasters, real or imagined” and to kick off, I must apologize for my absence from these bloggy parts during the last few weeks. You know how much I crave your attention, and the very quickest among you will therefore deduce that only the very choicest disasters Contents: One Acme Premium Fuck-Up (keep refrigerated until use) would prevent me from lying naked on my front lawn, under the ever-judgmental eye of Joyleen, Timbercreek’s Tenant Total-Compliance Manager and unofficial red-hot mama, and wallowing in it.

Well, right you be, and this particular chunk of premium personal disaster, which thudded into my life like a chocolate-covered cluster of Santa’s leftover coals, managed to glom together:

The calculator-wielding gremlins of the Canada Revenue Agency, who for some reason has wanted my response concerning six years of unfiled taxes, and for which I have apparently discarded all of my receipts and records, and resorted to the sleazy low-ball strategy of assessing me at over forty-thousand owing, garnisheeing my pension then freezing my bank account; AND

The task of placating and managing two pissed-off potential roommates, pissed off because I promised the room to a new one, then got cold feet and backtracked, promising to continue renting my room to the current one, then changed my mind again and promised it for real to the new one, then backtracked again and sort of, kind of, promised both of them that they’d probably overlap and it would work out OK for a month, though secretly wishing the first one would storm off in a huff and solve my problem for me.

I know, right? So you see how all this could sideswipe one’s delicate creative process.

I will not spare you the update, which goes:

I am finally preparing my delinquent tax returns, aided by my long-suffering buddy, a former corporate tax lawyer, who has taken his duties so much to heart that he is literally gasping for breath during our phone meetings and bombarding me every minute with over-determined, lengthy text messages about the exact percentage of my bedroom that can be used as a business expense but only during neap tide and in years that are divisible by three, and saying huggy stuff like, “You might be in serious trouble!” so that my brains plop out of my ears in chunks, like boiled cauliflower, with the stress. Check!

And what was the other one again?

Of course, the roommates: I figure I’ll just let them both believe they’re exclusive occupants of the room, set up a webcam on June first and sell tickets to my new reality show on YouTube. Because they can’t hate me any more than I already do. Can they?

Oh, yeah—I think someone, I have no idea who, has the keys to my apartment. It’s always good to keep a potential disaster in your back pocket, just in case life starts jumping in the puddles and singin’ in the rain.

Nip that in the bud!

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I am constantly reminded that there are some goals I won’t achieve, qualities that will elude me no matter who I pay or what I practice; and though it makes no difference what the cause might be, you can blame it, if you like, on brain cells now walking with canes or too many distracting, shiny objects in my field of vision.

One of these elusive qualities is relevance.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, or have just wandered in by mistake while searching online for a homemade poultice that will improve your bad temper, know this: I will never be relevant.

Waiting for timely commentary from me is like being bathed in the attenuated light of a supernova that exploded two billion years ago, around the time that we were single-celled plankton just beginning to figure out how to torture each other and smirking behind the reinforced windows of our gated plankton communities at the plankton wannabes, the plankton rapists and murderers, the hungry and undeserving plankton, and above all the loser plankton who didn’t realize they were supposed to be born rich plankton and thought they’d just rely on the kindness of algae.

Didn’t work then. Doesn’t work now.

So it happens that I am the last lonely voice in the blogosphere responding to the supposed catastrophe that is the loss of the roof—the roof, mind you— of Notre Dame de Paris, that saucy little French tramp of medieval cathedrals. This disaster, I will add, resulted in the loss of not one single life, which, let’s be honest, is kind of major underachieving for the Catholic church. You’re not going to win hearts and minds with that kind of complacency, Holy Fathers! Take those choirboy dicks out of your mouths and focus!

For if this, the loss of just a centuries-old roof and some resulting bruised French egos, is a disaster, what should we call the religion that caused Notre Dame to be built?

Here’s a “religion of love” whose First Crusade alone was responsible for over a million “infidels” slaughtered—who knows what the numbers might be when we reckon with the extirpation of pagans and “heretics” (by the Inquisition, who put Galileo under permanent house arrest and executed Giordano Bruno); those slain during four crusades, the “witches” burned at the stake, the toll from religious wars, the forced conversion and genocide of native peoples and Jews?

The Holocaust alone, at six million victims, is beyond comprehension, and that is only a drop in the bucket of the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity and its hippy-haired, anemic Prince of Peace.

Think of those souls lost to us: the artists, writers, scientists and philosophers who never walked the earth and whose genius might have transformed our destiny beyond recognition. Think of the brilliant ideas snuffed out, the awful silence which sublime music might have electrified. Think of the great loves, the life-changing friendships, the Alexanders and Hephaestions, the John Cages and Merce Cunninghams, that never happened.

So, I ask you, why? Why the great affection for and allegiance to this Shriners’ convention of maniacs? Why the weeping and wailing from Parisians who cannot all of them, I reckon, have attended Mass that regularly, practiced what was preached, or successfully avoided coveting their neighbour’s wife, ox, Renault or Le Creuset enameled bakeware?

Yes, Notre Dame is an iconic landmark, but so is the Chernobyl exclusion zone. And at least land denuded and rendered sterile by a nuclear meltdown doesn’t peel your skin off in shreds while telling you it’s for the sake of your everlasting soul.

Denuded land wouldn’t delude itself like that.

Some argue that, despite its little failings like mass murder, the Church was at least a repository of “knowledge” during the Dark Ages. True enough, if you don’t care whether your knowledge contains any facts, and if you put high store on the ability to illuminate manuscripts or to determine the number of angels on the heads of pins. But in that case priests were nothing more than a class of scribes, which would have existed in some form or another; and besides, the Renaissance replaced the weird fairy tales of Scholasticism with its revival of Classicism and its change of direction towards the observable, the logical and the open-ended.

The truly useful and advanced knowledge that had existed in the classical world—that the Earth was round and even the measurement of its circumference; the engineering marvels of aqueducts; knowledge of crop rotation and irrigation—had already been swallowed up by Europe’s collective amnesia. All the Church provided was more classy busy work, the single approved pastime of the era that didn’t involve creative use of cow dung or lancing boils.

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The French must be forgiven for their utter lack of dignity around the Notre Dame fire. They spend so much time worrying about the purity of their culture and not bathing that they end up a little low on genetic variety and a little high on insecurity and neediness.

They over-react a tad.

They suspect, rightly, that they are mostly crashing bores who distract us with eye-popping fashion, caloric desserts and post-structuralism. These are all fairly useless finials on the curtain rod of culture, but hey. One secret of success is to get there first and write all the rules, taking care to ensure that the rules highlight your strengths.

The primary French strength is writing, then following, the rules.

Perfection is all very well and commendable when the result is rows of exquisite concoctions in a bakery window with every dollop of ganache glossy as lacquer, icing sugar stenciled just so and a platoon of strawberries standing identically at attention.

Not so great when your tendency to perfectionism leaves the pâtisserie and runs amok in the real world, building instruments of torture and preparing concentration camps. Society’s perfection is a fascist fantasy, populated with happy workers and rosy-cheeked peasants whose memories have been wiped clean and replaced with the party line; perfection must cram many-faceted, multifarious human beings into an assembly line of identical, dutiful square pegs, and truth reverts to the medieval format, “because I say so.”

Fascism can be understood as turbocharged bureaucracy, with electrodes as back-up when computer says no fails. And the French are the ultimate bureaucrats. They’ll guillotine a cartload of nuns as soon as look at ya if the civil code says atheism’s the flavor of the month (renamed and shoehorned into the calendar like an ugly sister’s foot into a Louboutin pump), for they apply the same exacting standards to their citizens as they do to their pastries.

Then, like, just throw it all out and another king.

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Muddling through or perfection? The English, muddlers from way back, developed a free-wheeling, uncodified system of common law, law created on the fly by judges, and by which future judges would be bound—so long as the facts of the case were similar.

This puts great store on the judiciary as the source of law and justice, and the idea that we would limit the discretion of judges is one we find suspect (think of how offended we are at the rigid “three strikes” laws and minimum sentencing guidelines of the United States).

We even developed a second discretionary system, the law of Equity, to rectify the inevitable injustices that might occur by applying precedent.

To keep everything ship shape we enshrine top-level concepts—inalienable rights and freedoms— in a constitution or charter, and trust judges to interpret the law according to these principles. Constitution above statute, above equity, above common law. Two systems of discretion, but ultimately trumped by codes and charters.

Quel horreur! Discretion! Interpretation! Where are the rules?

The French opted for a civil code, a nailing down of law, much like the Constitutional originalists in the States would like to nail down its meaning strictly according to “original intent” of the Founding Fathers—slave owners and misogynists and “well-meaning” perpetrators of native genocide in a pre-technological society.

Similarly, Republicans would like effectively to do away with judicial discretion simply by stacking the Supreme Court with right-thinking, pun intended, judges. This ensures that any possible discretion will be the correct, pre-determined flavor.

And this brings us to Québec’s Bill 21, “An Act respecting the laicity of the State.”

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Bill 21 could be considered the province of Québec’s version of the medieval sumptuary laws, which set out what colors and textiles might be worn only by the aristocracy, and what was permitted to the peasants.

Bill 21 hides its true intent behind a veil of equality and religious freedom, while banning any form of religious expression by anyone in a public service job, and especially anything that covers the face. This applies equally should you present yourself to receive a service and need to be identified.

In effect, it bans clothing. Clothing. A law that dictates what you can and cannot wear.

By a neat coincidence, these face-covering religious symbols just happen to be worn only by Muslim women, which leaves them with a distinctly oppressive choice: Follow their religion by quitting their jobs and staying at home, or head to their public service jobs and break the law, subjecting themselves to the disapproving glances of the “pure laine” (“pure wool”, meaning direct descendants of the original French settlers in the province).

Forgive me if I recoil ever so slightly at the concept of “purity” raised in tandem with race or heritage, and if the means to achieve “freedom of conscience and freedom of religion” is applied selectively.

(In theory, the ban also extends to turbans worn by Sikhs, but by a twisted, obscure logic these particular non-whites, being males, are spared the spotlight: Partly because they’re non-white and therefore don’t really merit the attention, partly because turbans don’t cover the face to render the wearer anonymous, and partly because—well, they’re men, and we don’t want to push our luck, you know?)

It is the business of the state, the Act declares, to maintain a secular society, and this means that certain public expressions of religion are banned. These are, apparently an intolerable intrusion on the sensibilities of the non-religious.

Of course. This is why the good, secular people of Québec make like so many Nosferatu’s and shield their tormented vampire eyes from the sight of church steeples; and should those church doors be open on a Good Friday, I plug my ears against the invasive assault of the St Matthew Passion of Bach, which must threaten my very sanity, not to mention I keep bumping into lamp posts and parked cars because of the sensory deprivation.

This is why I welcome the burning of Notre Dame de Paris, and my only regret is that some snowflake apparently called the fire brigade in an act of wishy-washy accommodation.

Is our inalienable freedom respected, by default, by non-intervention? Or is freedom state suppression to prevent offence? If so, whose offence will take precedence?

For your answer, I suggest you look to the graven image of a naked man nailed to a cross, an object which holds pride of place above the chair of the Speaker of the Québec National Assembly and has done so for nearly eighty-four years. This crucifix was affixed in its current position by Maurice Duplessis, the conservative premier of the time, in 1936, around the same time he first referred to the Assembly as “Le Salon de la race;” that is, the Assembly of the pure French.

But isn’t this a religious symbol intruding in an intolerable manner on the secularity, the “laicity” (a word straight from Revolutionary rhetoric) of the state?

Not at all, for Chapter 4, Section 16 of Bill 21 states:

“This Act must not be interpreted as affecting the emblematic or toponymic elements of Québec’s cultural heritage, in particular of its religious cultural heritage, that testify to its history.”

Assemblée nationale du Québec, Bill 21, “An Act respecting the laicity of the State,” 14.6

In other words, we are white and we are Catholic, we are descendants of white Catholics, we are pure laine, and the crucifix is part of our history, not a religious symbol.

Crisse de tabarnac, ça c’est fucké!

Look to another bill, Bill 62, the “religious neutrality” bill put forth by Québec Justice Minister Stéphanie Valée and passed in 2017. This provided that women wearing the niqab or burka would have to request and be granted official accommodations to access any of hundreds of public services, from bus rides to libraries to health care, or be forced to unveil. Vallée explained that such accommodations would have to be considered on a case-by-case basis, and precedent would not be created by any accommodations granted. The Québec Superior Court suspended this particular section of the bill twice, pending a legal challenge

This is neither neutrality nor justice. This is an aggressive act of racism and religious intolerance. This is not truth. This is the argument from authority, because I say so.

This is fascism.

If we want to perfect society, it is obvious that we will have to admit whose perfection we’re talking about; admit that these bills have nothing to do with religion, but with race: with protecting Québec’s pure, white wool.

Pure laine. In my mind, that phrase conjures up an inescapable and chilling vision of the pure white hoods that veil the faces of the Ku Klux Klan.

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