Scenery Notes: A Pork Rainbow
The Paris Olympics are a smorgasbord of international bicycle cops
A brief note on August in Olympic Hell:
Aside from the disembodied cloud fights over political stuff and all of the trains into the city being sabotaged for the opening ceremony, I feel like Terror-Con 2024 has, so far, relied more on petty annoyances and a general feeling of menace to make Parisians’ daily lives garbage than on terrorism and international affairs.
On the other hand, filling the city with every single nose-picking semi-militarized junior-level police officer in the world might actually be worse than the bleachers exploding.
This weekend, Paris was so full of roving, random clots of Kevlar-coated coppers from all over the world, wearing a rainbow of scary-looking uniforms, on top of all the tourists on e-scooters—which have started to involve an increasing number of flashing lights—that I’m pretty sure I can put “was a minor character in a 1980s low-budget sci-fi movie, except in 2024,” on my resume now.
OK, I realize Terror-Con was supposed to be so dangerous there weren't enough police in France to stop everything from exploding, so the global community chipped in to help, awwwww… But if you're one of those people who think the cops are one more street gang—and the optics here surely do not argue against that hypothesis—then it looks like a huge gang rumble that's ready to go.
This is not your grandmother's impromptu Olympic drag race. Cripes, if you wanted drugs, you and your friends could get together, slap together some matching uniforms that say "Tibet" or “Austria” on them, and start frisking the tourists; in ten minutes you'll have more edibles and vapes than you can stuff in your mouth.
There’s not been nearly the spectacular terrorism-tourism I was inspecting—YET—terrorism-tourism being my attempt at coining a phrase for the habit of seeking big touristy events to showcase one’s favorite acts of blood-soaked political speech, like the Boston Marathon, or most Olympics (thus my affectionate nickname, Terror-Con).
Clearly there’s nothing in my environment that I’m able to control: The first symptom is making up names for crap.
But if I can hold back the vomit long enough, the parade will march away, leaving the city to deal with the current normal-abnormal level of human shit in the streets, generally hovering between knee and ankle deep.
I wonder if elderly Parisians regret ever complaining about the dog poop.
Well, even if I’m in hell, I’m trying to be as cheerful as possible; the summer has finally arrived, sort of; I’m not a boxer, thank god—even when it’s TERFs, feminism has this weird fixation on solving problems that only affect .000001 percent of women—and, best of all, it’s never been a better time to write science-fiction. Even if there never was a worse time to be a science-fiction author. I guess I’m lucky.
Science fiction, eh? Mary’s Queen & Jesus is king. Everything else IS science fiction