LETTER FROM PARIS #8 Idealizing again

I could excuse myself by saying that just about everyone has something or someone they idealize; something or someone who has to be purely and simply better in every way. My sister, for example, a total Francophile, remembers everything she has ever seen, or experienced, or eaten in France. She is, even more than I, held in a kind of mindless thrall.

So why now do I have to confess to my elevation beyond reality of this city and its people? Picture this: you are riding the Metro. It moves quickly. Someone has given you their seat. (It almost never happens in Toronto.) This time I am riding the RER, a double-decker train system that operates alongside the Paris Metro. I am looking at the windows, or rather; I am looking at the carefully scratched out “tags” on the windows. Unlike any other surface, they can’t be erased, washed off, or painted over. In my idealization of this city, I can’t accept that there are brain-dead miscreants who do this criminal vandalism living in the City of Light. I wonder about it all the time.

When I am home, it simply makes me angry. No subtle shades of distaste and disappointment, just anger. The police say that “tagging” unlike creative graffiti, is done by gang members. They are I guess, like dogs with fire hydrants, marking their territory and daring anyone else to invade. Now I am really flying far too high for such a low subject.

What do you think? Are there thousands of these people among us? Or are we being besieged by a small but active number? I don’t know. I have no idea whether or not authorities could tell me how many of these “taggers” there really are.

I am deeply offended. Not that the “crime “is so heinous, but that I live here too, or my heart lives here, and you are stepping all over it. You make me a non-person.

I think sometimes about how the people who developed “fixing broken windows” dealt with the problems of social misbehaviour. They insisted that minor things, if unattended, became major. They wouldn’t overlook minor stuff. A few years ago we had a great man David Gunn, running our transit system and not appreciated nearly enough – he and Howard Moscoe were like cats and dogs. Anyway, he left for New York. He dealt with the epidemic of graffiti on that city’s transit. He simply did not tolerate it. Every night, if necessary, he would have the cars washed or even repainted so the taggers would not have the satisfaction of seeing their work immortalized.

It is in a way, not unlike the nonsensical love messages people paint all over the beautiful pre-Cambrian rocks that run through Muskoka.

Like I say: if it happens at home – I get mad. If it happens in Rome, where it is rampant, I am sad. But when in happens in Paris I am devastated. Someone make them stop.