Poison from the Podium

We are all conditioned to jump to to the tune of the news. As you perhaps know I am buying a house in France and am about to go there to sign the first papers. My flight to Paris is booked for next Monday, and of course when I first heard what had happened there I wondered how it would affect me. But my decision to move back to France is no better or worse now than it was two weeks ago, despite all the horror.

Statistically, in France I will be 15 times less likely to be murdered by gunfire than where I am now (though five times more likely than in the UK), but I also know that these figures are meaningless. I have a huge amount of control over my circumstances and the infinitesimal risk of my being shot to death or blown up is probably no different here in Covelo than it will be in Aspiran.

Somebody recently posted a protest in Facebook –  which migrated onto my page –  that we are only deeply moved by terrible events that affect us closely, and not by far larger human disasters that occur  far away. I’m afraid it’s human nature, and reflected as always in the media. I wrote about it in Dreaming of Jupiter, because I was in Brazil when the planes hit the World Trade Centre. From that distance – cultural as well as geographical – it seemed at first more a spectacle than a tragedy. I knew very well, from my days as a newspaperman, the rough rule of thumb the media used to decide the importance of a disaster; its proportional to the number of dead, and inversely proportional to the distance away.

So Parisians are in profound shock. The people of France, one step removed, in general feel violated. Normally, thousands of miles away here in the States, people would have said “How sad, how terrible,” and gone on with their lives. But this time it’s different because the perpetrators (ISIS, ISIL Daesh, whatever) are on everyone’s radar screen, and so, of course, is the fate of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Most Americans, left to their own opinions, would feel nothing but pity for the torrent of families driven out of Syria by the violence of warfare, but the attack on Paris has become fodder for the spin doctors on the Republican campaign trail.

Nothing could be more repugnant than the way it has been used to pander to the xenophobes among us. Defying all logic, whipping up all the paranoia that is all too latent here, 30 or more Republican governors cry, “Not a single Syrian will cross my threshold.”

Regardless of the fact that this is a futile boast in itself –  States don’t have defensible borders – they completely ignore the fact that these were not Syrians who smashed up Paris; these were Belgian citizens who were perfectly entitled, if they wished, to fly to the USA without a visa. Syrian refugees, on the other hand, having gone through who knows what kind of hell  to get to Europe, then have to endure yet another year or two of investigation before they even catch sight of the statue of Liberty, a bureaucratic nightmare which is in itself a travesty.

I m not the first to point out what a ridiculous notion it is that ISIS would send it’s murderers on that bitter, dangerous and uncertain trail through Eastern Europe to get to America. ISIS have plenty of money. They clearly have connections. They could as easily fly to Alabama tomorrow.

But no, these sinister Syrian families and orphaned children must be kept out at all cost. Hysteria and paranoia are ugly phenomena in themselves but not nearly so repulsive as the men who manipulate them for their own purposes.