GET YOUR GUN!

It all started when the magpies invaded my garden. Not only was their metallic croak nerve-grating, but they soon homed in on my bird feeders and frightened away the much smaller chickadees, redbreasts, and sparrows that had gorged on the seeds throughout the winter. Then a flock of pigeons took up residence on the roof of my garage and started snooping and clucking around the feeders. Even though they were too big and clumsy to perch on them, they would waddle on the ground and peck at the spillings. Like the magpies, they made the neighborhood less attractive to the smaller birds. Whenever I saw these bullies through my kitchen window, I would rap on the pane or open the door and clap my hands to frighten them away. Sometimes it scared them off, but often as not they would flutter away briefly and return.  I tried throwing pebbles in their direction, but my aim was erratic and the feathered beasts were not impressed. 

     Then an idea took shape in my mind: I would solve the problem with an air rifle.  I had no intention of killing the intruders. I would just pop them in the tail feathers or wings. They would soon realize my garden was an inhospitable environment and move on to somebody else’s garden. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to get my hands on a BB gun. This was just before Christmas. When my wife asked me what I wanted as a gift this year, I  said I wanted a pump-action air rifle. She thought I was joking. I explained that it was not really about the gun, it was about chasing away magpies and pigeons. She found the idea ridiculous, but I persisted. And the more I talked about it, the more I realized it was about the gun. I wanted that object—trigger, stock, barrel and all.

     It was a strange desire on the part of a staunch opponent of America’s gun culture. I have unfriended people on Facebook for posting photos of themselves posing with their arsenals. Parkland, Las Vegas, Sandy Brook, and all the other countless gun massacres sent chills up my spine and filled me with anger at the feckless politicians who do nothing to control the spread of deadly weapons. Yet here I was desiring, even craving, an object that had the size, shape, and feel of a real rifle. Was I wavering on the gun question?

     No. The more I thought about it, the more I realized my fixation was something whose deepest roots went back to my childhood. When I was about 10, my father bought me a pump-action Daisy air rifle. I don’t know why he chose that particular gift—he wasn’t a hunter or sportsman and, in fact, I never saw him shoot or even hold a gun. He hadn’t even been in the army, excluded from the draft by a heart murmur. Maybe I begged him for it, wanting to play cowboys and Indians or something. Or wanting to be like my Mississipi cousins who actually had .22 rifles and went hunting. Whatever the reason, I got the gun and I fell in love with it. I loved the smell of oil on metal, the feel of the imitation wood grain stock on my cheek, the adjustable crosshairs on the telescopic sight, the sound of BB’s rolling around in their chamber, and the thwunk when I squeezed the trigger. Most of all, I loved hitting targets—coke bottles propped up on driftwood logs along the levee, paper targets nailed to tree trunks, matchsticks glued to the sides of cardboard boxes. And I was good at it. I could actually split matchsticks at 20 feet. My father was impressed. “If we ever have a shooting war again,” he told me, “you’ll make a hell of an infantryman.” Those words made me proud. That gun was part of a father-son bond, and a source of paternal approbation. 

     Though I was never into hunting, I must confess there were times when I shot at  birds while wandering through the woods. I once killed a sparrow perched on a tree branch. It fell at my feet with its little head bleeding and its wings flapping helplessly. Then it lay still. I felt terrible and buried it in the sandy ground under a pile of leaves. Another time I shot at a pigeon on a neighbor’s rooftop. Hit in the head, it reeled over and fell down the chimney. The neighbor found it in her fireplace the next day and called an exterminator to remove it. I don’t think I actually intended to kill that pigeon, but I was remorseful—and fearful that my parents would suspect me of doing  the deed. (If they did, then never let on.) 

     Those are the only birds I remember killing. But I did do other dumb things with my air rifle, mainly egged on by friends. From the balcony of my parents’ home, a schoolmate and I traded potshots at a corner streetlight until we finally chipped through the glass globe and hit the lightbulb inside. It sparked briefly then went dark. Our momentary triumph was tinged with fear of being charged with destroying public property. We immediately hid the rifle under my bed and retired to the TV room to provide an alibi. Another night, we shot at the side of my father’s corrugated iron garage as someone was passing on the sidewalk. It made a loud whack and the pedestrian skeedaddled. Stupid kids. And lucky: what if the victim of our practical joke was packing a real gun and shot back at us? In a crime-ridden city like New Orleans, that was not a far-fetched scenario. 

     I eventually grew out of my gun infatuation as I grew older and my interest shifted to learning the clarinet and playing Beatle tunes on my guitar. By the time I went off to college, my Daisy pump-action was a distant memory. I have no idea what happened to that gun. There was no sign of it when I cleared out my parents’ home many decades later. In fact, I never even thought of it again—until the magpies and pigeons in my garden suddenly brought it back to mind. 

     For a time, I was dead bent on getting another BB gun. Seriously. I even visited the quaint old shop of an arms dealer in my town of Saint Germain-en-Lay, 10 miles west of Paris. I had observed it for years without ever going inside. It was a tiny storefront with a green wooden door and a window full of lethal-looking shotguns and enormous hunting knives with jagged blades. Inside the cramped interior, dusty display cases held row after row of rifles of various sizes and shapes. Behind the counter sat an elderly man who eyed me with suspicion, or perhaps contempt at my manifest ignorance of firearms. When I asked about BB guns, he exchanged amused glances with another white-haired man, apparently a customer. He pointed to a display case containing half a dozen guns. “Those are all air rifles,” he said. “They start at 250 euros”—close to $300. I said I was really looking for something in the 50 euro range. The two men laughed. “For 50 euros, cher monsieur, maybe you can get a cap gun, but not here!” 

     It turned out his air rifles shot lead pellets, not BBs, and they were used by competitive target shooters. “What do you want an air rifle for?” asked the man behind the counter. “Just to shoot at pigeons in my garden and scare them off,” I replied. He guffawed again and shook his head. “Monsieur, this is illegal—and dangerous. I will not sell you a rifle for such a use.” I left the shop enlightened, if somewhat humiliated. Back home, I found a whole line of Daisy air rifles on the Internet at prices starting around $35. I considered ordering one, but suddenly realized I didn’t want it any more. Had I finally grown up?

"AMERICA'S SUICIDE"

As an American writer living (at least part time) in France, I have often had occasion to look at what was going on in the U.S and despair. I have blogged from time to time about some of these issues, especially health care, but here's an insightful article by my former TIME colleague, Don Morrison, who puts it all together brilliantly in an article originally written for Le Monde. He has given me permission to include it in this blog. Read it and think.

Le Suicide Américain

Le Monde, December 2, 2014

Donald Morrison

Lately it has become difficult to enter a bookstore, open a magazine or turn on a TV without stumbling across the saturnine visage of Eric Zemmour. That sly provocateur has become France’s hottest literary celebrity thanks to his best-selling book, Le Suicide Français, a chilling jeremiad about the perils of immigration, the “feminization” of French men, the forgotten glory of Vichy and a number of other contemporary outrages which, he warns, will soon sweep France into the dustbin of history. At first I thought it was a murder mystery. Turns out, the book is serious.
And dead wrong. Not so much because Zemmour’s analysis is faulty -- France is without doubt suffering from a weak economy, an inability to deal with its restive immigrants and a feckless political leadership. Instead, Zemmour is wrong because he vastly overestimates the seriousness of France’s predicament. A French suicide is extremely unlikely.
To understand why, one need only look at a country that truly is killing itself: the United States. The French may be vexed, but their slump is nothing compared to the demented fury with which the world’s only (for now) superpower is systematically squandering more than two centuries of power, prosperity and prestige. The real danger today is Le Suicide Américain.
Consider that country’s recent mid-term legislative elections. Americans voted to hand control of the Senate -- and a wider margin of control in the House -- to the opposition Republicans, the party that shut down the government last year, threatens to do so again and has blocked nearly every major legislative initiative of President Barack Obama. The Republicans, however, did not seem to be a major issue in the election. Obama did. The President’s approval rating, at around 40%, is historically low among voters of both major parties (though higher than that of his French counterpart), and he is routinely depicted in the press as overly cautious at the same time dictatorial. (His critics are not bothered by that inconsistency.) Exactly why Obama is so widely disliked by his countrymen remains a mystery. After all, he presided over a reversal of the country’s economic decline, an improvement in its image abroad and a bold reform of its troubled health system. But Obama is a proxy for the national mood, and polls consistently show that most Americans believe the country is “heading in the wrong direction.”
That direction is, unmistakably, downward. The U.S. economy is recovering, but the benefits are not being spread evenly. Corporate profits are at record highs, but companies are using their newfound cash largely for share buy-backs and dividend increases, not to hire more workers. Wages for working- and middle-class Americans have barely risen in the past decade. By contrast, most of the gains from the recovery have gone to the top 1% of earners, giving the U.S. highest level of economic inequality in the industrialized world.
America is falling apart, literally. The country’s civil engineers have warned that thousands of bridges and tunnels are in serious risk of collapsing. U.S. airports and highways are stretched to capacity, and there is no high speed rail network (and barely any passenger trains at all) to share the strain. Broadband internet is the slowest -- and yet most expensive -- in the developed world. Despite all the deterioration, Obama’s calls for rebuilding America’s infrastructure have fallen on deaf Congressional ears.
Americans are also killing themselves, individually. Despite the recent health reforms, U.S. doctors, drugs and hospitals remain the world’s most expensive, though rarely the world’s best. Important measures of public health are well below the rich-country average, including life expectancy and infant mortality. About two-thirds of American adults are overweight; half of those are downright obese, (double the levels in France). Because contraception -- and even information about it -- is restricted, especially in the more religion-obsessed parts of America, 30% of teenage girls become pregnant, 80% of them unintentionally.
If their health habits are not lethal enough, Americans have guns -- 300 million of them, nearly one for every man, woman and child. About 31,000 people die of gunshots in the U.S. every year, 16 times more than in France. School shootings have become so common -- nearly 100 in the two years since 20 children were slaughtered at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut -- that such incidents are no longer front-page news. (One gun death, the recent shooting of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri, was an exception: It sparked nationwide protests, underlining America's continuing racial divide.) Periodic attempts to impose even minor firearm restrictions -- background checks, limits on automatic weapons -- are routinely thwarted by legislators fearful of the National Rifle Association, one of the richest and most fearsome of the Washington lobbies.
Lobbying has become one of America’s leading industries. Even before the right-leaning Supreme Court recently struck down long-standing campaign-finance reforms, American elections were swamped with money from special interests. Spending for this year’s mid-term elections hit a record $4 billion, much of it from industry groups and ideologically motivated billionaires. Political campaigns are dominated by “negative” TV advertising, composed of slick innuendo and half-true slurs. Partly as a result, American politics, and public discourse in general, have become poisonous arenas where extreme views are reinforced, moderation is discouraged and compromise is impossible. Thus, there is little will to fix any of America’s considerable problems.
Against this grim background, France does not seem suicidal at all. Americans may mock the French for their work habits and other stereotypical traits but, viewed from the U.S., France looks pretty healthy: fast trains, world-class health care, unadulterated food, globally competitive companies, healthy and handsome citizens, and a reverence for culture, leisure and learning that the U.S. has never really known.
More seriously, France is a remarkably durable nation, having survived invasions by the British and the Germans, long and bitter religious wars, home-grown revolutions, flawed Republics, disastrous colonial conflicts and the 35-hour week. And don’t forget immigration, especially that disruptive wave at the end of the Great War of uncouth, non-assimilating, obstinately un-French barbarians, most of them Americans. No, I am confident that France will remain a vibrant, highly successful society, and that national suicide is a Zemmouresque fantasy. I am not so sure about America.