Creative Senior Moments Read online

  Human beings are the product of evolution and they were meant to live in small communities: they form groups of a few hundreds to a few thousand people, even in Paris or in New York.

  In Paris, I met an old woman rue Dauphine who complained to me that her life was miserable since she had been moved to a new neighborhood. I thought she moved from the other bank of the Seine, the “rive droite,” where the atmosphere is different, but no, she had moved from further south on the same street, two blocks away.

  In Savannah, I lived four years on 40th street, and four murders were committed on my small block; during the same period, no crime was committed on the same block of 41st street.

  In New York, I met Portuguese people who had lived there for thirty years and did not speak one word of English.

  This shows that our communities are small no matter where we live.

  If the community is closed, fear and resentment of another group are just around the corner. It is the reason why racism and prejudice are always with us: there is always another group just around the corner. In France like in the US, fear (like after 9/11) or rapid changes in the population structure (like when one million French Algerians came back to France or when there is a large change in Mexican immigration in the US) induce an immediate reaction: racism seems suddenly justified.

  The existence of small communities and the persistence of local habits and local accents attest that we are meant to understand ourselves in small groups. This explains how an actual fascist candidate was the main opponent to the democratic right in the French presidential election of 2002.

  Each American town comes with its own dialect or group of accents, from Pittsburghese to Texan to Southern, we all sound different. My own town of Savannah was created in 1733 by 113 settlers (before them we had a Creek population and some Spanish people). They had mainly, I suppose, English and Scottish and German accents. How did that become one Southern accent? The population went from 113 to 200,000 in less than 300 years. Most of the people who live in Savannah today are not the great-children of the first settlers. But a local distinct accent was created (several accents, in fact, because I still hear an upper-class Southern accent in some shops) and remains alive to this day. I find it extraordinary that each region keeps its own accent despite the fact that 800 million people fly around the US every year and only 60 percent of Americans reside in the state where they are born and we are all unified by TV and YouTube. It certainly says something about our will to belong to a small group.

  It is a similar story with the French people from Algeria. In 130 years, the French population in Algeria had created its own distinctive accent and its own culture. It only takes five generations, probably less. Languages are at the center of each culture.

  The south of France has a distinct way of talking that originates from the languages of Oc and Oïl (the two main ways to say oui, yes). The accents are still there, despite the persistent efforts of the French government to suppress them (until I left France in 1998, I never heard anybody with a southern accent on the French national television). Similarly, do you hear strong local accents on national TV in the US? Why not?

  Spanish accents in Spain are so different that when you learn the language, you can understand one way to talk and not the other. The same is true in Italy. On their national TVs, however…

  What does it mean? Anywhere in the world, humans create their own small community with its own dialect and its own culture. We do it because we want to be unified, to form a small group and identify ourselves as a community. Then, anybody else is foreign and a potential adversary. I think that it is the origin of any bigotry, and therefore bigotry is here to stay.

  So, how can we fight racism?

  ***

  What we should not do is close our eyes when it is convenient for us, create a new class of unprotected people and complain that they are here illegally when the economy is going down the drain. Every country does that and it is a shame. I remember that Great Britain foolishly offered the British nationality to all Indians from Kenya, and when riots occurred in Kenya and all that community wanted to flee to Britain, Britain said that you did not need just a passport, you needed to have grandparents born in Britain to be able to find refuge in Britain. So they corrected a stupid mistake with a perfidy. There is an echo of that period in the Tom Hanks movie The Terminal: I have seen thousands of cases like that, cases of life and death, and it was not funny at all.

  Foreign-born residents in GA are over half a million (I am one of them) and constitute 7 percent of the population. Muslims are about 6 percent of the population in France. Foreign-born immigrants are over 8 percent in the UK. In such countries, too many immigrants at any one time in a community cause an adverse reaction that we cannot control efficiently. It is the difference between keeping racists under 5 percent and letting them grow up to 15-20 percent where they start to be political bombshells. There is no country, to my knowledge, that had over 5 percent immigrants and dealt efficiently with the problems it created. The truth is that we are a bunch of hypocrites. We like immigrants who work on the cheap and go back to their own country when we want them to.

  ***

  What can we do to avoid bigotry? We should keep our small communities open. Let children meet with people who are different in appearance, in faith, in origin, in languages, in crafts, in artistic expressions and let them sometimes eat food from somewhere else. Make this mandatory for schools. Let children know that people who are handicapped or different are also part of our community, make children meet the kids of another district once a year. Make this mandatory for schools. Organize small neighborhoods festivals.

  I wish our churches would find mandatory to respect and serve all the members of the community. It is not the case yet: not many churches are pro-active, especially down here in Georgia.

  Torture

  Torture up close

  People like me, born with WWII, have a different view of torture: it was in conversations so much when we were kids that torture was one of the first words you learned, together with hunger. I remember hearing of a man tortured by the Germans who was forced to count the whippings. It frightened me: I did not know very well how to count then, I must have been four years old. I was an adult when I realized that you do not learn by being beaten.

  Then came Nuremberg: the American legal team said that torture was forbidden and that you were responsible for your own acts, even if your boss told you to torture somebody. The most awesome was that they did teach that to their own soldiers. Such was the American doctrine. This is why they hanged the main Nazis and it is why I wanted to become an American.

  In the following decades, most European countries did use torture, usually far away or just far enough from the mainland, in the colonies fighting for their independence.

  When I worked with new colleagues or a new boss, the first question that came to my mind was would they betray me, if there was a war? Would they betray you if you were a Jew? Most of them would, you learn to live with that. It is even worse with boyfriends. For anybody else, if a guy betrays you, he is just sleeping around; for me, he might send you to a gas chamber.

  It is what happens to the mind of little girls in wartimes. I kept thinking: I want to die in America, where they do not torture anyone.

  And finally my dream came true.

  Torture again

  So, one of the saddest things I witnessed was the return of the legitimacy of torture here in America, the country who had rooted it out in 1948. It would have desolated my father who used to teach that the US was the most remarkable country in the world because not only it condemned torture but it believed that its own soldiers had a duty to disobey if they were ordered to commit acts against humanity. Nuremberg meant so much for Europeans.

  But Human Rights are volatile. Every generation is likely to forget. I should have believed Aldous Huxley, when he said: That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important
of all the lessons that history has to teach.

  The first time I heard about physical torture and knew what it meant, I was less than five years old. The last time was yesterday.

  The first time I shook hands with a man who had no nails, I was just a kid. My father said: “Remember this all your life.” I do remember. The man was a friend of my father, an Austrian anti-fascist, and a very old man. He had been tortured during the war and his nails never grew back.

  But later, I was involved with European Civil Rights, and I lost count of all the hands without nails that I held in mine: Spanish, Greek, Russian, South African, Algerian...

  This is the beginning of the 21st century. These hands come back, and I hold them in the night. Often when I sleep, if I sleep, I still dream that I sleep in a pool of blood. But it means nothing to me.

  One day, I mentioned the concentration camps to a French colleague, and he asked: “What is it to you? You are not Jewish.” Millions of Jews were killed in my lifetime. What is it to me? Indeed, I am not a Jew. Three million Gypsies were killed and forgotten in my lifetime. What is it to me? I am not a Gypsy. This would mean, today, more than wiping out every human being in Ireland. What is it to me? I am not even Irish. And one could add to this a few millions corpses in Biafra, in Rwanda, in Yugoslavia, in Darfur, but it never made history, so what is it to all of us?

  Have you ever met IRA people? I have. I met two of them, a long time ago, and promised I would never make bad use of what they said, never describe them and never say where we met: that was the deal. I can describe them to you accurately without breaking that promise. According to the most common definition, they were both “good people”: they did not work, or take risks, or get wounded, or die for their own sakes. They both bore obvious marks of their courage. Nevertheless, we did not make friends. I did not meet them so that they could convince me that the cause of Ireland was a good one: I sympathized with the ideal of Irish unity long before that. I just wanted to ask them how they felt about murder.

  ***

  One of them was a learned man, an intellectual, and I recognized him immediately. If you have read the Germinal of Zola, it would be easy for you too: he is the anarchist that has no friends except a rabbit, and when the rabbit dies, he is alone. He is the one that places a bomb in the mine to punish the miners who go back to work. Then his own friends decide that the strike cannot go on any longer, they go back to work and he says nothing, knowing that they will be killed. The earth moves under his feet from the explosion, and he carries elsewhere his ideal and his destruction. That Irishman was like that.

  I am certain that you have met the other terrorist as well, you have seen him a thousand times at the movies: he played the handsome second role, war hero, kid-for-ever, the one who tells all the jokes, and shouts with joy when he “gets one”, he is the guy who dies at the end, while saving a friend’s life; and the film loses all momentum after his death.

  ***

  We could not communicate: they were so convinced that I did not “understand.” It is another Irish characteristic that goes together with playing in the same play again and forever: nobody understands them.

  I tried in despair to appeal to their Christian side. For once it seemed, as I recall, that the Church of Ireland had said that it was not nice to shoot people in the back. It was not as bad as fornication, but it was not quite permitted either.

  “Don’t you feel afraid for yourself when you kill innocent people, I asked. Aren’t you afraid of God?”

  “It cannot be avoided,” said the first one.

  “One can always find a priest,” the other replied.

  We never shook hands.

  ***

  The Prime Minister of the “New Yugoslavia” was once interrogated about Kosovo, in London, and answered: “All history books should be kept away from children.” This gave me a bitter pleasure.

  There are still countries where any mention of the massacre of Armenians is banned. I was once censured on the Belgian radio for mentioning it in a pastoral address. My protestant colleagues did not support me: they thought nobody should talk about it.

  How does torture come to mind? When each generation comes to war, there is a temptation to save lives by forcing some people to talk under torture. It is easy to find young men who believe that by torturing, they achieve a greater good, save lives of their countrymen, protect their own. And then, they are not sissies; they have to do what has to be done. The discourse is successful in any country. It was in France in the 60’s, a country that has many faults but is generally considered civilized.

  The problem is that we never really know who knows what, so we torture innocent people. The problem is that most of our enemies don’t know squat, and they tell us what we want to hear. The problem is that with each wrongdoing, each atrocity, we create a century of hate.

  I know exactly what the Germans did to my family in 1914. Armenians know exactly what the Turks did. Black people remember their history. You will have a hard time finding Japanese Americans who do not know that their grandparents were in camps during the war. None of us wants to forget 9/11.

  It is a pity that each generation has to be explained this again and again and again, and that so many governments hide bad deeds, poor administration and stupid revenge under the guise of a need for information.

  Legal wartime behavior is not easy to achieve: there is the pressure of war, the rage of seeing your friends killed, the fear, the sense of urgency. So I do not condemn soldiers who go too far. What I criticize is the Executive for its lack of vision and for the lack of training in appropriate techniques of war when it will boil down to man-to-man contact.

  What do we want after the war ends? All wars end. It used to be that Americans, specially the army, were admired worldwide for their restraint as opposed to the Nazis’ immorality and for the way they carefully protected works of art in all of Europe during wartime. We didn’t do that in Iraq, I guess some generals did not know that Iraq has cultural treasures of the greatest importance for all of us: it is where writing was invented and where many Bible stories come from.

  Respect of the rules of war is the way I like it and at the end of the day, it is the only efficient way.

  Looting

  Let me start with my own recollection of Nazi looting. People my age know that the Germans during WWII looted a lot of museums and private collections. Little as I was, I remember that the bells of all the churches from my native Belgium were to be melted in Germany and used for weaponry. When I was a child, many people were too poor to have a watch: they usually got one for their retirement. When people worked in the field, it was the sound of the bell that gave them the time. The loss of the bells was resented by all, but mostly by small children, because we believed that the bells travel to Rome and come back each Easter with eggs and gifts.

  Some of our bells of course never came back from Germany. Belgium lost forever 3,358 bells to be precise. But some were found in Hamburg and came back for Easter 1947. These are the bells I remember. The whole country celebrated the return of our bells, and it did not matter what religion you had. Belgium is a country of belfries. The city of Mechelen has a belfry dating back to the 13th century that is part of the UNESCO World Heritage. The city hosts an international school of carilloneurs, bell ringers.

  During WWII, the Nazis stole art from all of occupied Europe and from their own Jewish countrymen in Germany. The saving of some paintings by the French resistance is illustrated by a still superb movie with Burt Lancaster: The Train.

  So, when a German citizen named Harry Fuld Jr. flew Germany in 1937, the Germans confiscated his belongings. He had a Matisse representing the hospital of Ajaccio in Corsica named The pink wall. The painting was discovered by the French in 1948 in Germany, hidden by the man responsible for delivering the poison to the gas chambers of Auschwitz death camp. Nobody knew who the real owner of the painting was, so it ended up in a museum in Paris.

  Years passed, H
arry Fuld died. But there were, all over the world people interested in the history of looting, and families wanting their paintings back. Where do you find what belongs to you and how do you prove it belongs to you? It is almost impossible to win. But little by little the various French governments, with varying amounts of enthusiasm and perseverance, found the owners of about 60,000 works of art; 2,000 remained without an owner, about 10 percent belonging to Jewish families that have never been found. The rest is thought to have been sold on the German black market. A catalogue of these lost paintings was published and an exhibit of about 50 paintings was shown in Israel and then in Paris in 2008.

  The Paris exhibit was at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme. The name of the exhibit was appropriate: Looking for owners. It is not small stuff: there is Ingres, Degas, Monet, Delacroix, Vlaminck. One painting by the Flemish painter Pieter de Hooch (The Drinker) did belong to Edouard de Rothschild. It had been stolen and it was found back in the collection of Goring. Later, it was given back to Edouard’s daughter and she offered it to the Louvre.

  The owner of the lost Matisse was found after many years of research by German art historian Marina Blumberg. It so happens that the actual owner, through a series of wills, is a British charity involved with emergency medical needs in Israel. So, they intended to sell the painting and fund more work with the proceeds. The French Minister of cultural affairs, Christine Albanel, gave back the painting to the rightful owners on Nov 27th 2008 and said that this would bear testimony to a major work of remembrance and justice.

  Dallas

  The Dallas Effect

  I was listening to an actress called Angelina Jolie, and she explained that she had a boyfriend at age 14, living with her in her mother’s house. She said that she used to cut herself with razor’s blades in order to feel alive and true. Her mother, who had been an actress as well, apparently had been teaching her to connect with her feelings, in the imperative style and method that Lee Strasberg made famous.

  The story made me smile: nobody ever asked me how I felt about anything. As far as I remember, my feelings have been no major concern for anybody in the last seventy years, except when I was in physical pain. My mother used to wake me up every morning with a cup of tea and a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville. The quote goes like this: “Life is neither a pleasure nor a sorrow. It is a serious task that it is our duty to carry out with dignity and propriety.”