H.J KAPLAN
25
simply dismissed or explained away with references to the media or the
intellectuals or the political class or whatever. It is like the "why" questions
in biology, which cannot be answered, only begged, by reference to God or
Natural Selection - since on the one hand, God keeps His counsel; and, on
the other, the Darwinian principle, insightful as it is, cannot explain why
certain phenomena combine to produce certain forms when other combi–
nations might (for the purposes of survival) have produced the same or
better results. We can say only that this is the way things actually happened,
e.g., this is how creatures - and peoples - become what they are.
Needless to say, I am uncomfortable with this analogy - between soci–
eties and living organisms - and propose to say no more about it until I
have gone back to school and passed Biology
I.
And a few courses in
History, as well. Next year, perhaps, when Marcelle is back in shape and
things have settled down here, chores done, etc. Meanwhile, it occurs to
me that this business of burying Mitterrand after watching him die in
public amounts to what Raymond Aron called a psychodrama, presumably
in distinction to events which occur in the real world, not merely in peo–
ple's heads. A dubious distinction. However that may be, this was the term
Aron used to dismiss the events of May 1968, when the students at the
University of Paris, whose numbers had increased exponentially since the
advent of de Gaulle a decade earlier, suddenly began demonstrating in
protest against the inadequacies of their schools and the poverty of their
prospects, and then built barricades in the time-honored way, amid clouds
of tear gas. Under the leadership of Maoist and Trotskyist elements, they
occupied public buildings in the Latin Quarter, resolutely proclaimed their
hostility to the so-called consumer society and all its works, and launched
what looked for a couple of weeks like the dress-rehearsal for a revolution,
with the government playing nothing but a bit part at first, hardly even a
walk-on - both de Gaulle and his prime minister, Pompidou, being out of
the country during the first act. Pompidou came back first, moving care–
fully to contact the union leaders and rein in the police, who were in
danger of losing their cool, and reopened the Sorbonne, which the stu–
dents promptly occupied. And then de Gaulle, looking quite unlike
himself: out of touch, uncertain, and (one suddenly saw it, alas)
old.
He was
pushing eighty, and one remembered his remark about Petain, his protec–
tor and patron in the late Twenties: "Old age is a shipwreck ." By
mid-May the trade unions, although led by Communists, Socialists, and
other archaic types - bureaucrats who had never so much as heard of, say ,
Herbert Marcuse, and had nothing but antipathy for the
gauchiste
students
- had got into the act and unleashed an effective series of strikes, idling
some ten million workers, for higher wages. Soon people in certain min–
istries, as I discovered when I visited one of them, were burning personal
