It is often said that you should avoid meeting up with old friends. If this is not always true, you always take the risk of an insert that ruins the taste of the wine. Exactly. Dear reader, I admit that I am still very doubtful about natural wines, apart from the fact that they systematically give off a scent of olive oil, I do not understand how a natural wine from the Loire can have the same dull light red color, the same absence of taste as a natural wine from Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. That the geographical and climatic “natural” produces the same soup with a ridiculous name at a crazy price leaves me speechless.
What an integrated social animal must think
The poor piece located at the very top of the social basket of a friendly Parisian dinner explained to me learnedly that “yes, but” it is a question of education. Terror. The wine is certainly disgusting, but that’s because my palate has not been re-educated in accordance with the dominant doxa. What followed was a spectacular sequence of everything an integrated social animal must think: from guilt over the climate to fascism in power everywhere (from Macron to Milei, without forgetting the indispensable dinner accessory that Elon Musk has become) in going through the genocide in Gaza (and Sudan is okay?) etc.
Internal (and external) laughter but above all great fatigue from hearing without complexes the conformist pearls of the conscious and progressive urban perfect as the day before yesterday, as a teenager, I listened, looking for an escape, to the patriarch considering that today everything had a bad taste, that nothing would hold together and that the General would have felt nauseous. All this was part of the same social conformism but what worried me was the standardization of this conformism, this same melody which is found everywhere I turn my ear. But how had the Parisian world been reduced to this point?
Suburban and Bulgarian families
The next day, while walking in a Paris emptied of its inhabitants where happy tourists were crowding, my steps took me to the urban and economic disaster of the rue de Rivoli and in front of the BHV, this department store still popular at the time of my five years as a student selling tablecloths and cutting oilcloth part-time. I still remember Saturday afternoons when suburban families tore around the bulgomme with or without anti-slip, gay couples who lovingly held hands, old couples from the neighborhood who had been buying the same tablecloth for twenty years, social diversity that crowded the shelves, where the periphery and the center found themselves served by salespeople who were not just part-time students to the background of electro music.
Twenty-five years ago, we were two student salespeople, the rest of the staff were professional salespeople, many of whom had worked as gueltes in the department store since they were teenagers. I had lunch with my department head in her pavilion in Saint-Denis bought with her husband, department head in faucets, I witnessed the marriage, with a colleague of Jewish obedience, of a Catholic colleague who married a protesting at the town hall of Boulogne-sur-Mer, I talked frantically about cinema with Franck the warehouseman who had spent ten years in the army. I came into contact with unknown worlds with surprise and pleasure, in Paris which was then an island where all the ideas, all the bullshit and all the votes coexisted.
Territorial standardization was still in its infancy and today’s widespread conformism is the result of borders which now make it impossible to move from one world to another in the absence of places to meet. It’s impossible to escape natural wine and selective cardboard humanism when you live in the center of Paris. There are no more saleswomen at the BHV to offer you the chance of a coq au vin served with a Malbec which you will tell me about, there are no more mother-in-laws and son-in-laws arguing at each other at bulgomme department because they can no longer reach the center of Paris. All that remains are clones trapped in a social superego that offers no escape from critical thinking. Digital social networks are a geographic reality. And it’s as sad as it is distressing.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
.