SYNCHRONY

—published in Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ am Sonntag)

13 nov 2005

Synchrony (given half a chance, the world acts in unison)

Paris-based documentary film-maker Hubert Sauper (“Darwin’s

Nightmare” 2004) arrived in New York yesterday, and over dinner I

asked him about the riots in the Paris suburbs and beyond. Since the

violence has mainly been acted out on the periphery of the city, in the

ghettoes for “foreigners,” he hasn’t directly felt the heat from the

burning cars, but the riots didn’t surprise him. Arab and African

French youth have been disenfranchised for years, he said. He

dismissed the idea that it was a coordinated Islamicist uprising, and

felt it was more a bubbling over of deep-rooted frustrations. Maybe

this will change something, he said.

In New York City the riots are front-page news, in part, one can’t

help but speculate, to give beleaguered Americans a crisis beyond

our borders and seemingly not of our making to point to for awhile.

For many months, stretching now into years, it’s felt like our primary
export has been misery—whether an unwillingness to be part of the

international community, policies driven by reckless profiteerism,

bad movies, or our new-found pride in our status as a state that

endorses torture—and now we have a chance to point elsewhere, at

the failure of Europe to “integrate foreigners and give them a stake in

a new national identity” (Richard Bernstein, New York Times, 8 Nov

05). While this may be true, it may also be a case of America’s

reluctance, once again, to do any soul-searching of our own. For it

does seem that to hold America’s history of race relations over the

past 40 years up as a model for the world to emulate is, at best,

deluded. This isn’t to say that Europe, as far as I can tell, has dealt

with the issue any better.

In the same New York Times is a small piece on the theory of

“synchrony”—a theory that, given half a chance, the world acts in

unison—fireflies will light up at the same time, pendulums will

swing in harmony, and yes, even humans will reach a place where

they, spontaneously, act together. It’s hard not to see the youth in the

Paris suburbs, communicating as they are through cellphones and

getting their information from the same television news, as acting out

a theory of synchrony. And, perhaps, they are not just

communicating among themselves, but are also connected to the

masses of disaffected youth around the globe.

Here in the states, after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast,

a short rap video appeared on the internet called “George Bush Don’t

Like Black People,” a brilliant piece of agitprop hastily thrown

together while tens of thousands were still without food or water.

The clip mixed images of African-Americans stranded in a flooded

New Orleans with George Bush’s tourettes-like prevarications. The

reality versus the delusion was laid bare and struck a chord—it was

downloaded maybe a million times before being pulled off the

internet. Why it was pulled I can only speculate (perhaps it was

feared it could spark a riot?). In it’s clarity, simplicity and wailing

Ray Charles-sampled chorus it synthesized the problem—George

Bush (i.e. white comfortable (psychopathic?) America), could care

less if black people died, although it was unfortunate and distasteful

that their lingering deaths filled the nightly news. And,

midbogglingly, here’s a sickening statistic—80% of white America

says that the Federal response was in no way racially motivated. I

guess this means that 80% are convinced that the United States

government would have left white people to die as well, and this
may well be true, if those white people also happened to be poor, but

still, personally, I doubt it would have taken quite as long, and it

really doesn’t ease my mind.

That disenfranchised blacks have been left to die in America has been

an ongoing reality for years (I worked in New York City public

schools in the 1990s, in the center of the richest empire in history, and

the black schools were literally crumbling, and this crisis has only

gotten worse under Bush—read Jonathan Kozol’s “The Shame of a

Nation” if you’re interested in the details), it’s just that most of the

country was able to develop a type of blindness that left this reality

invisible—a development that would leave Darwin scratching his

head, for what evolutionary purpose does it serve, for an entire class

of people to render themselves blind?

I won’t pretend to know anything about the root causes of the Paris

riots, though I could imagine a disenfranchised French youth of

African or Arab descent living on the periphery (in what we call

“projects” and the French call “cites” or “banlieus”), seeing the

images of black Americans left to die after a bad storm, and this in

America, where the New York Times can still, with a straight face,
hold up our system of integration to France’s as a model. And I can

imagine that youth’s despair and anger bubbling over, and him

coming to the realization that he could sit and wait for a storm to

come and wash away what little he has, or he could be the storm.

Martin Luther King, America’s homegrown and home-executed

prophet of non-violence said, “There is a time to let things happen,

and a time to make things happen,” and maybe, through some

hidden synchrony, that youth synthesized all he’d been seeing on

television, of a flooded city and people who looked like him left to

die, and decided, along with thousands of others, that it was time to

make things happen. It’s unfortunate whenever violence erupts,

whenever desperation reaches that point, and the consequences of it,

but perhaps it is equally unfortunate that the blind still cannot see.

But perhaps now they can feel the heat from the flames.

nick flynn

nov 2005 new york