After police shot dead a teenager on the streets of Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, France has been stunned by days of sustained street protests and riots. Police are trying to end the mayhem, arresting hundreds of people across the nation and calling in thousands of reinforcements from suburban and rural areas. France is notorious for its culture of police brutality, but the country's leader, Emmanual Macron, has a brilliant theory of what it's really about:
He suggested some young people appeared to be copying violent video games. "We sometimes have the feeling that some of them are playing out the video games that have intoxicated them in the streets," Macron said.
To think riots triggered by a cop executing a child in the street are about "video games" is an interesting delusion. Even if you take it seriously, Macron might just be thinking about Tik Tok, or the original 1992 version of Mortal Kombat, or something Paul Ricoeur once wrote psychoanalyzing Pac Man. Everything nuts about the third way, Blairism, Clintonism, neoliberalism, "reactionary centrism," whatever we call that particular floating world, is on show because the crétin parroting it doesn't quite get it right. How can it end but in anything but fire?
Correction: Nanterre, not Marseille.
