I look from afar

And behold, man, it's unreal

In France there’s the real thing; in the US, you only get the AI version :)

Here in the 19th, one of the storied arrondissements of Paris, all is calm two days before Christmas under a cold, cloudy sky. At the local street market, which springs up on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays at the nearby Place des Fêtes (or, as I like to think, Party Place), a squashed-looking “square” on a shallow slope, Christmas carols crackle from portable players. Dark-clad customers press up against vendors’ tables displaying 30 or 40 types of fish, or pans filled with warm fried rice and pad thai, or cherry tomatoes on the branch, or dried figs strung on cords, or blood oranges blushing crimson. Sellers keep watch over their stocks of slippers, socks, gloves, hats, scarves, wallets, multipacks of underwear, vintage timepieces, inexpensive sweaters, and (by Parisian standards) drab overcoats. Blue, yellow, red, white, and purple African violets are going for for 2 euros a pot, about $2.30. I buy a purple one in honor of my hometown and university.

From here in France, the cracks that are forming in the American Empire seem unreal. Life goes on, even with a brutal war actively being waged only 2,000 miles away in Ukraine (about the distance from Philadelphia to Houston). I can walk two blocks and have my choice of every kind of produce I can think of. Cafés are crammed at lunchtime and after dinner with people chatting and drinking their wines of choice. The tourist industry is thriving; visitors follow their guides around the major tourist attractions like ducklings. Although many French worry about the next government being a far-right one, and about Putin’s saber-rattling against Finland, Poland, and Lithuania, the trumpet player down the street was strolling along this morning just the same, tootling along with his recorded backing track before heading to a subway to busk.

But my mind is never far away from my home in rural Tennessee.

I hear today that Jim Beam whiskey, made in Kentucky but owned by a Japanese conglomerate, Suntory Global Spirits, has halted production at its flagship distillery for the entirety of 2026. In nearby Tullahoma, Tennessee, a distillery that produced George Dickel whiskey paused production last September. The maker of Jack Daniels and Old Forrester whiskies laid off about 650 employees last January. Why? Well, for one, Canada has cut off imports from the US, so it’s no longer importing Kentucky bourbon. Across the market, exports of distilled US whiskey have dropped by 9 percent since 2024.

I read also that domestic fruit and vegetable harvesting collapsed this autumn in California and other states because workers didn’t show up to pick crops, afraid of being detained by ICE. American soy, corn, and wheat farmers in 2025 also faced tens of billions of dollars of losses due to Trump’s tariffs and retaliatory action by China.

Today’s hottest news is about the 60 Minutes documentary about CECOT, the El Salvadoran prison, and the hundreds of migrants sent to it by Trump. Although Trump-allied editor in chief Bari Weiss stomped on it just prior to publication, she neglected to stop it being sent to Canada. It has gone viral today across the internet. Americans and everyone else can now see how we set human beings up to be beaten and tortured in a third country. Trump has signed other bargain-basement deals to send detainees without trial to poor countries with prison space for rent.

Also in today’s tidings, Trump again has threatened Greenland with military annexation against international law, waving aside Denmark’s ownership of the vast island.

And finally, according to new polling, a majority of Canadians and a plurality of French and Germans now agree that the US is an “unreliable” and “destabilizing” nation. Way to go, USA!

Not in the news, probably due to sheer exhaustion across national newsrooms, were many stories about the loss of health insurance for millions of Americans beginning in a little over a week, Trump’s plans to attack Venezuela, or the vast majority of the Epstein files that are being illegally withheld from public scrutiny.

Meanwhile, I read that Trump is slapping his name on a line of battleships that may never be built; a crypto game; our national arts center (now struggling) that will tear it off before his body comes to room temperature; National Park passes that may never be printed due to lawsuits; a gold-colored $1 coin that would be illegal if minted, savings accounts for babies, and a $1 million-dollar golden visa that labels wealth an “extraordinary ability.”

From the rainy marketplace, this all seems unreal, an early-morning nightmare I’ve already half forgotten.

Some of it will be. Despite all Trump’s efforts to gild his legacy projects, they’ll be torn down, canceled, renamed, bulldozed over. His allies are squabbling about where to take the party: full racist? full antisemitic? full anti-woman? Christian-ish authoritarian? full-on fascist? (So many choices!) The wannabes who are jockeying to follow him to power are unkempt, unshaven, unsavory, uncharismatic, un-credible, or a zombie combination thereof. If they succeed, it won’t be because they’re popular.

But some of the harm can’t be undone. Trump has opened the gates to a league of vandals and is burning the place down as we too passively watch.

We can only hope that from the ashes of this time a new generation will manage a renaissance of something better.

This afternoon, I’m going to eat my way through a batch of ginormous cherries, and later I’ll go out to see the boulevards dance under Christmas lights.