Cultural schizophrenia | The Press

I’m in Paris.

Pompous, isn’t it? It’s done on purpose, to be unpleasant, as much as a Parisian waiter.

But it always lends itself well to conversation, like a plane tree leaf in the coldness of spring!

It does that to me, me, Paris, I take myself for Georges Brassens.

But I’m here to work, not to rhyme, so it’ll be fine for simple little formulas.

It is also an opportunity to experience a new episode of my schizophrenia as a French-speaking North American. The psychiatry of the thing has always fascinated me.

I am a member of a newly invented people, but certainly not the creator of this expression. A mesclun, the result of several shoots and transplants. world race, would remind Victor-Lévy Beaulieu.

And just to complicate the equation a bit, son of an adopted father. That said without misery here, only for the purpose of analysis.

Thus, for the genealogy, that fluctuates.

I would even be ripe to spit in a little jar, and transmit my saliva to one of these charlatans who will analyze my DNA and tell me my origins. I’ll bet I’ll end up from Breton sources with a hint of Iroquoian rootlets. Not surprised, I hope? It’s like a fortune cookie telling you that a pleasant surprise awaits you… OK, but when? Or a fortune-teller who warns you that someone will think of stealing your vehicle in the next three years… OK, but which year, and the month if possible?

I have often listened to myself to fully understand what made me feel just as comfortable on the Left Bank, on a terrace in the Latin Quarter in Paris, as I do now, sipping a bottle of red, as in an Irish pub in Manhattan. , to blow on the brew of a pint of stout.

Why I rave about the subtlety of French food – Odette’s cream puffs in the 5^e – even in the most unremarkable bouis-bouis of France, while drooling over a Sicilian and mafia pizza from New York. Corleone, get out of this body!

And finally, why I let myself be so easily taken by the frenzy of a PSG match at the Parc des Princes, still in Paris, as another of the Packers, at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, a city otherwise non-existent without this activity.

These two half-brains that form ours are fed by two different cultural spinal networks: Gallic and Anglo-Saxon.

On the Gallic side, where I’m drinking now, I like to daydream and imagine the intellectual effervescence of the neighborhood at the time when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the illustrious couple, were enthroned there.

Moreover, when a friend gets turned down by his girlfriend, to make sure he doesn’t decompensate at the idea that the dismissal is due to his appearance, I remind him of the love story of this duo, where a a superb woman like de Beauvoir loved a head of creton like Sartre.

By the way, I’ve often wondered if these two sometimes take a break from the philosophy of existentialism on Saturday mornings to run errands at Canadian Tire.

But curious country that France all the same, where one always questions the liberal economy, currently by the intermediary of La France insoumise, a weak left which would have passed François Mitterand for a small provincial banker.

Where being an intellectual is a recognized profession. Whooooo! Mr. Legault, intellectuals! Who reflect daily on the “human fate”, as Flagosse Berrichon said so well, in gables street.

Where culture and beauty are royally valued, and writers, princes of places, deified. The whole forming a substantial part of the economy.

Where the public debt is so monstrous that it makes Justin Trudeau pass for Harpagon, the Miser of Molière.

And where the use of too many anglicisms in the media vectors is pitiful, and saddens us for this so-called mother country.

But ultimately they speak French there, and that does my soul good, like when I visit my Belgian and Jura friends.

On the Anglo-Saxon side, Marie-France Bazzo wrote in these pages recently that she was, like Serge Bouchard, convinced that we are intimately more North American than French.^⁠1.

I pretty much agree with that assumption.

Besides, I was absolutely dumbfounded on my first trip to London to feel so comfortable there. Yes, it’s okay, the Beatles, Pink Floyd and all those rock geniuses, but that wasn’t enough of an explanation.

I concluded, after a few days, that this comfort emanated from my North American Anglo-Saxon half-brain. Well, the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, there, we calm down, I am not a traitor to the nation for all that!

Backbiting: Do you know what former French President Jacques Chirac once said about British cuisine? “English cuisine, at first, we think it’s crap and then we regret that it’s not^⁠2. »

O Lord! horribilis !

But despite my general ease in the USA, my blockages generally arise from this orgiastic side, in everything, and from this latent violence. Particularly these faces of confederates, who don’t care about the future of the planet like their democratic redneck, at the wheel of pickup mammoths, glittering from Armor All, who will never drive a single kilometer of bush with the accursed car.

Having written this, I candidly admit that I am benefiting en masse from the orgy.

Until recently, I was in the kingdom of Mickey to please two young women in my life. And I will not deprive myself of attending these professional sports meetings, places of rumbas and excesses par excellence.

Finally, our privilege is to have the choice of tuning into the channel we want, when we want, and to have them within our reach, Gallic and Anglo-Saxon.