Tempus ends to fugit whether one remarks on it or not, so no point really. Time has passed, things happened, blog posts did not.

One of the things that did happen was Paris and yes, I was there, on Friday the 13^th, in the 11^th arrondissement, on the Right Bank of the Seine, Blvd Voltaire, hash-tag Paris attacks. I found out several days later that one of the attacks had been closer to me than I’d known; I was sipping Cote du Rhone, listening to jazz, oblivious that quite close by there were gunshots at the Comptoire Voltaire (where the only casualty was the somewhat, er, inept gunman who blew himself up without hurting anybody else).

It’s rather bizarre being in the centre of history as a friend puts it.

The trendy area around the Place de la Republique is not my natural habitat;; I was never especially young and trendy even when I suppose I was. But this one time, weirdly, I had made my way to the 11^th to the café Aquarium where a friend, Benoit Gil, was playing.

Things were normal until half past nine or so when – perhaps in retrospect – things seemed a bit tense and, uncharacteristically, café staff made it clear they were closing. Seemed a bit early but as they were starting to mop under our feet we left. We heard some murmurs about an “explosion”. A bomb perhaps? We made our way to my friend Minnie’s car; in the street two passers-by told us something was going on at the Bataclan. (This was completely unenlightening to me as I had no idea what Bataclan meant; it was only later that I realized it was a theatre. I am a Left Bank person.)

In the car we did see the Blvd Voltaire cordoned off and a lot of police cars and SAMU (emergency vehicles) but nothing especially alarming. Still, we turned on the radio, talk was of the Stade de France and nobody knew what was happening. President Hollande had just been whisked out. Later, on TV, he seemed a tad rattled which was understandable under the circumstances.

It was, I admit, altogether a bit surreal.

Since then the attackers’ provenance has been traced to Brussels, specifically Molenbeek. A former resident Teun Voeten, cultural anthropologist and photographer, clearly knows more about this area of Brussels than I do (though I think I have wandered through on the odd occasion) and his take is dead on I think. I suspect that many young men (and perhaps a few young women) fall into terrorism for banal reasons: boredom, a desire to belong, the usual preoccupations of the young like heartbreak or being in with the in crowd. And becoming a martyr provides purpose and a higher calling, structure even, that the boring and commonplace does not. (And what one does not realize at that age is that much of life is neither dramatic nor extraordinary or that youth in general – contrary to the cultural myth  –  is an anxious, difficult time for most.)  Alas, at the moment too many conflate that discomfiture into violence or the Caliphate.

“To be willing to die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture.” Anatole France *

At the Place St. Sulpice on the other side of the Seine, just after 10, all was quiet and the man at the hotel desk knew nothing. I told him what I knew, which wasn’t much but turned out to be more than BBC World which told me the sky was falling and the end was nigh. Oh good. It seemed that all of Paris was burning, even though I had just seen it was not. I checked Twitter (unhelpful) then, just in case the news made it to Vancouver, sent a few messages and went to bed to the sound of sirens and helicopters. The next day Paris became the nexus of a terrifying news cycle (for about five days) and I woke up to some 40 concerned texts and mails. I then did something I’d never done in my life, I changed, my “status” on Facebook, which had obligingly provided a phrase along the lines of “safe in Paris” for me to tick.

I had always known but never experienced first hand the parallel universe(s) of reality and news but here it was. The next day Paris was essentially fine, though subdued; quiet for a Saturday. By afternoon reaction had set in and museums closed though metros and buses ran and people milled about in cafes and elsewhere.

Context is best found, I think, in poetry, in art, in history and narrative.  Auden, in the poem Musee des Beaux Arts wrote: “About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.” In the Brueghel painting Icarus: even as the young man falls from the sky with a large splash, the ploughman, head down, keeps working, the sun shines and “dogs go on with their doggy life”. It was “something amazing, a boy falling from the sky” but to most people it was “not an important failure”. Paris, of course, was hard to miss; but that ploughman of Brueghel’s had no smart phone.

Speculation (and heavy police presence) continues and no doubt will continue for a long time. A few days later it was Mali. What a world, what a world, as that great philosopher, the evil witch in The Wizard of Oz, said. On a side note, I have to say I have wondered about those small cafes, especially le Petit Cambodge. I’ve seen small Asian cafes like that all over Paris and it seemed like an odd target. Call me crazy but that one felt personal to me. Being fired or a former girlfriend working there? Too often the political is personal even if we don’t realize it at the time.

However. The City of Light recovers, the news cycle has moved on – and next week there will be jazz again at the café on the Blvd Voltaire. Tout passe. That is the nature of it all.

*etre pret a mourir pour une idee est de fixer un priz assez eleve sur des conjectures

“I read somewhere that Mitt and I have a storybook marriage. Well, in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once. And those storybooks never seemed to have chapters called [multiple sclerosis] or breast cancer,” offered Ms. Romney, who has battled both diseases. “A storybook marriage? No, not at all. What Mitt Romney and I have is a real marriage.”

That was a quote from Ann Romney speaking at the Republican Convention; apparently she is meant to humanize her husband who is perceived as wooden and clinical.

I did like the photo of her in the Globe – however much my evil twin wonders if that smooth forehead of hers has something to do with Botox some other cosmetic filler. (hey, we should all look this good at 63)

It is ironic, though, that she brings up having been ill, when her husband’s party so demonizes government spending, in particular anything that might benefit the less fortunate, namely programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

But, I suppose when you have a gold-plated health insurance plan it doesn’t occur to you that not everyone has the means or the employment (private insurance being so tied in with work in the U.S.) to afford breast cancer treatment or long-term therapy for MS. Or can get any care outside of an ER.

I am of course sorry that she has been so afflicted; one would not wish those diseases on anyone. But they happen and it certainly helps if you can get reasonable care. As a friend of mine used to say, money may not buy happiness but it’s a easier to cry yourself to sleep on satin sheets.

Meanwhile, a rather good piece in a recent Archives of Internal Medicine plaintively asks why nobody is questioning the “multiple examples of overdiagnosis that arise when technology, rather than clinical findings, are the catalyst for finding disease”. The authors, Jerome Hoffman and Richelle Cooper, both MD’s, point out that incidental findings of “disease” that will never lead to anything are both a waste of time and money. Not to mention turning people into patients. Their italics. (Arch Intern Med/Vol 172 (No. 15), Aug 13/27, 2012, pp 1123-4)

I thought of this article because of what Ann Romney said about having had breast cancer. Mea culpa but whenever I hear the word “cancer survivor” my first thought is: was that a real cancer (the kind that would actually kill you) rather than one that you would die with. An  incidental finding when you went to have that mammogram everyone assures you is part of good, pro-active care? Simply having a handful of cancerous cells in your body (or “pre” cancer) is no indication of anything. As you age, some cells mutate. Doesn’t mean anything. My grandmother had colon cancer for the last 25 years of her life; she died at 92. Wasn’t the colon cancer what did it, just old age.

But Americans are staunch believers in the power of technology, in the predictive power of science and the ascendancy of good old American know-how in controlling disease just as they have tried – with such success – in controlling various countries in the Middle East.

One of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, was a physician. He, like many of his ilk at the time, genuinely believed that American diseases were meaner and tougher than their effete European cousins. Rush’s claim to fame was treating the yellow fever (which was said to have killed more enemy soldiers in Panama a century later than the enemy did) by using humungous doses of mercury which, presumably, if it didn’t kill the patient effected a “cure”. Historians later questioned Rush’s prowess, suggesting that the individuals he was said to have cured actually weren’t that sick (hence were able to withstand his toxic treatment). Rush and his contemporaries, nevertheless, were convinced that massive purging, bloodletting and strong dosing were key to good medicine.

A handful of physicians like Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had studied in France (the French were much admired at the time for their diagnostic prowess), disagreed with Rush and his ilk. Holmes felt the American penchant for aggressive cures had more to do with cultural constructs than science. But it was Rush’s perspective that prevailed; it fit better with how Americans saw themselves.

Women were particular victims of this “heroic” ideology of strong medicine – starting from pregnancy and childbirth, where the use of forceps, episiotomies (cutting the perineum in childbirth) and later Caesarians became increasingly common to midlife and menopause when  hysterectomies and oophorectomies (removal of the uterus and ovaries, respectively) became the norm, as these organs were no longer considered “useful” once the woman could no longer bear children. Ah yes, now we know what women’s utility consists of …

Oh, and thank you sociobiology so much for keeping that swell idea alive.

Hubris, children, hubris. How the hell do you know what’s useful and what’s not? Tonsils were routinely yanked out until we realized that they were actually part and parcel of natural immunity. We have an unfortunate tendency to dismiss any organ or part we can’t figure out – a case in point being the large junk of genetic material we call “junk” DNA.

“An aggressive approach, of course, implies that the doctor can do something for the patients, and this ‘can do’ attitude is as much a characteristic of American medicine as it is of the American character in general,” writes Lynn Payer in Medicine and Culture.

You’d think by the 21st century we’d have evolved somewhat but no. Romney, Ryan and the Republicans hang on to these nonsensical notions. Zero clue  that today’s globalized, cyber-connected, micro-blogging world is hardly the same as the one Rush knew in the 1800’s. (He died in 1845.)

I shan’t delve too deeply into the right-wing perspectives on women’s reproductive rights, abortion, rape and so on lest I self combust. I will simply quote an old line from a Whoopi Goldberg one-woman-show that I always loved. Her character, a wise-cracking, foul-mouthed former drug addict, walks past a group of marchers – men – holding anti-abortion signs. She (playing a he) pauses, thinks for a minute and says: Hey, you want to stop abortion? Shoot your d—k.

Many years ago when I was young, idealistic and – not to put too fine a point on it – an idiot, I truly believed that ideas, beliefs (like democracy) could drive action, states, life. I thought that if you had the right attitude then, by golly, the right institutions and governments would follow. As I said, I was an idiot. Most 17-year-olds are.

I now know that it is lives and who we are, how we are, how we live that drives the systems we adhere to. What does that mean? Well, it means that the Bush Doctrine of heading into Iraq post 9-11 to bring democracy into the region – democracy deprived as those poor Iraqis were – then all would fall into place, like a jigsaw puzzle opening up into its full splendour of a sunset over the Rockies.

But it’s not like that.

People’s lives, whether they have enough to eat, a place to live; whether their children can go to school, safely, and come home after without being blown up; it is having decent work under reasonable conditions, living in a place where you can make a life for yourself: it is these that then give rise to political and moral beliefs.

Years ago a psychologist by the name of Kohler (I think that was his name, my lamentable memory) spoke of the slow process through which true moral understanding develops. Another psychologist, Maslowe, spoke of the hierarchy of needs and how it is only after the fundamentals are satisfied is one able to concern oneself with abstract concepts like ethical societies or an ecological metaphor for life. One can only become a person with genuine global, ecological concerns required living in a world where one’s other more basic needs like food and shelter are met.

But we don’t talk much of development or developmental processes these days. Early education is under attack (no matter how much the school day is extended) and our reverence is focused on the gene and its so-called blueprint. Well, if you believe that it’s all there, ready to go, in your genes then why the hell would you even think about development, learning, the ways in which an individual evolves into that wonderful Jewish notion of a mensch?

To care about things larger than oneself one needs to have the basics and the knowledge that more is out there if one applies oneself. This is what the Arab Spring is about and this is what the guardians of terror and nitpickers at airports do not get. As long as entire regions of the globe only see the good life in movies downloaded from the internet or from satellite television – never in their own lives – there will be terrorism and people willing to die because they have nothing to lose.

That was the real lesson of 9/11. Or ought to have been.