Bastille Day in Brooklyn
Brooklyn is a strangely good place to be a Francophile. A few weeks ago, we celebrated Bastille Day at a street fair in our neighborhood. Why not?
How great that over 200 years ago, in 1789, the angry citizens of Paris got it together long enough to take over the government’s artillery and pulled something off that it seems no modern citizenry would ever dare – a true class-based revolution. And how great that we get to celebrate it here, in Brooklyn?
If there were going to be a class-based revolution in the U.S. (our own effort in 1776 to dislodge the colonies from the British was hardly a people’s revolution – it was all about new wealth wanting out from under the old), why couldn’t it start here? 
Not that many of our drunken neighbors on Smith St. that afternoon were thinking about overthrowing the ruling class – many of them were probably members of it, and most of the rest were thoroughly of the bourgeoisie. But on any given day in the heart of this borough, if you walk around downtown, the downtrodden are in abundance. Pushed right up next to one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city – Brooklyn Heights (median apartment price in 2006 = over $3 million) – is a place where a lot of people look like they’re struggling even to walk down the street.
As we plan a trip to Paris for Thanksgiving – my birthday, my first time to go to Europe, my dream come true to visit France – I think of the irony. Paris for me is a symbol of resistance and true revolution as much as it seems a magical place of art and beauty, and we are spending years’ worth of savings to get there for one week. That we can do that makes me feel bad and excited all at the same time. And like the rest of us walking around downtown Brooklyn every day, which of those two emotions I’ll choose almost answers the question of why nothing like Bastille Day may ever happen again.
shelly
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