Nearly 3,000 Frenchmen are dead due to the unprecendented heat wave sweeping Europe this August. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people, you think. True, but as usual, many of the casualties are the elderly – probably the only folks in France who remember the friendship of the United States and what the past glory of France (such as it was) really was like. Be nice if the young would die off, less blathering about the third way, unilateralism and the like. But, alas, it is for the old and better to die and the rest of us to carry on.
Funny, in the United States when it gets hot we take precautions: ease off the coffee, drink more water, stay in the shade, wear sunblock. Why is it that in nanny-state Europa I envision all these people waiting patiently in their homes, slowly baking to death as sure as if they were sitting in an oven, expecting some kind social worker or at least a gendarme to stop by the house with a government supplied fan? Maybe they can use the hundreds of pages of the proposed Euro-Constitution to make fans. Best use I can imagine, unless they can find the subsidized cooling apparatus amendment somewhere amongst the beaureaucratic legalese.
It just all seems appropriate somehow.