Comrades,
I note that the wildly popularly elected President of the Republic of France, Emmanuel Macron, has embarked on a Tour du Monde.
And who can blame him trying to escape that stinking old dump Paris, where he's not that extremely popular at all at the minute, almost exactly a year after his extraordinary landslide victory in the Presidential election.
The natives are restless, as usual.
He's got the workers offside with his proposed labour law reforms - they're just not having it, never will - with the most militant union, the train drivers leading the way with mass anti-Macron rallies and pulling the loco's off the tracks, and bomb throwing students from the most prestigious lycée chucking Molotov cocktails at the riot cops
Macron's probably thinking that generations of French President's have tried and failed with the labour laws, and what day of the week is there when there isn't a violent demo somewhere in Paris?
So, he pops on over to D.C. to see the DJ!
A State Visit, including a State Dinner of course, no less.
It's customary for French President's to be offered a State Dinner in any new US Presidency [you know, the Statue of Liberty thing and all that], and even though the Trumpotus is the first in a century not to hold an official chow-down in his first year in office, Macron could hardly refuse, could he?
Not with a goat's cheese gateau, with tomato jam, buttermilk biscuit crumbles and young variegated lettuces, followed by a rack of spring lamb with Carolina gold rice jambalaya and burnt cipollini soubise, with nectarine tart and crème fraîche ice cream to finish, served on the "Clinton China", accompanied by vintage Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from Oregon and a Napa Valley demi-sec crémant sparkler for desert and the after dinner entertainment provided by the Washington National Opera.
The pundits say Macron was in town to try and cut a new deal on a keeping the Iran contra-deal alive...no nukes, no sanctions...nothing went down there...shit happens.
But the pair do certainly make an odd couple; a suave, highly educated and sophisticated 40-year-old Frenchman embracing a 71-year-old crass vainglorious ignoramus, but really, Macron was just there to play The Donald like a harp.
Never mind that DJ! was trying to brush some typically French dandruff off Emmanuel's immaculate shoulder - Trumpy was just trying to help.
Then he took his peculiar accent of fluent English to Congress, and later told people that the wildly oscillating flip-flopping completely-hopeless foreign policy being pursued by Le Imbecile was "insane" and "ridiculous", cleverly parroting Trump's own words, as he departed.
The Kid President reckons it was a good first stop as he tries to position himself as the new Leader of The Free World, now that Pax Americana is dead, buried & cremated.
There's no election for it of course, just a matter of grabbing enormous power by both hands when you see it.
Macron is due in Australie next week [May 1-3], for another State Visit, so he will do the required pleasantries with the assorted grandees & dignitaries around Canberra, but you'd reckon he'd also want to have a little lookie at how the $US50B project to supply the RAN with short-fin barracuda submarines [or whatever they're called] is getting along.
His scientists and engineers have worked the things out, but gawd help 'em trying to communicate the idea to Adelaide shipbuilders - who've been accused in the past of not being able to be trusted to "build a canoe" - given the management of the 25 year program is apparently "incredibly dense", according to the submersibles folk in Cherbourg who've got the contract.
They'd rather build them there, but that's a very long time to sort out any bugs, and tack on enormously expensive "variations" and over-runs.
Politics? Bah-humbug.
They can even nuclear-arm these subs if you want.
Then the President drops in to say bonjour and wave a happy wave in the colony of Nouvelle-Calédonie, another place close to my heart with a long-running independence insurgency.
Macron is making a very brave step indeed by going on May 5 to Ouvéa - an island way out there in the remote Loyalty Islands north of the Grande Terre - to mark the 30th anniversary of the killing of 19 militant Kanaks that prompted the signing of the outrageous 1988 Matignon Accords a few months later [a one-sided peace deal if ever there was one - dangle the carrot of promised independence sometime down the track as Paris's leisure while continuing to screw over the original inhabitants].
There were widespread claims that the gendarmerie murdered execution-style some of the insurgents of the Kanak and Socialist Liberation Movement in Ouvéa after they had released their hostages and given up, in an act of utter utter French bastardry that's still a weeping sore to this day.
It was a very tawdry affair all 'round with 25 people from both sides dead.
Why is he going?
Apparently, he wants to see the graves.
Is Macron going to say "sorry"?
Surely, Non?
Three decades on, and there are still fringes of armed extremists in both the pro and anti-independence camps who won't have anything to do with each other except down the barrel of a gun, and Manuel Valls - a former PM under Hollande - has been in Noumea for weeks now trying to get the two sides who occupy the the middle ground talking, without much success, because they're both hopelessly splintered.
The fact that the journey has taken 30 tortuous years - 30 years! - to get to a binding independence vote, le référendum sur l'indépendance, which has now been set in stone for Nov. 4 this year, is simply astonishing.
He wants to cast himself as a peacemaker - The Kid President does not want to be seen interfering with the referendum in any way, [apart from this casual goodwill tour, of course] - but that's only because he knows well enough it's very likely to be a NO vote...a "stay in France" result.
I went to Noumea five years ago, and the Kanaks had occupied a small corner of central park Place des Cocotiers and built a stockade-like fence around the patch with pointed sharp poles, and were protest marching down the main drag every day for independence, but I saw more French flags flying in Noumea than I have ever seen anywhere else in the world, even in France itself.
They might as well hang THIS IS FRANCE! banners from the ornate art deco balconies, and probably will.
And there's yr dichotomy.
With the electorate roughly split between those who identify as Kanak or other South Sea Islander, and those who are European, and very largely French by descendance - and where French is the lingua franca - it's expected the status quo will remain by a fair majority after the vote; to have their Deputies and Senators in Paris left alone, and hope to continue to keep the Kanaks quiet with desultory hand-outs while ripping their nickel out of the ground as fast they possibly can.
Unlike every other French colony, from Africa to Indo-China, that were just given up as a bad loss, the French really still want New Caledonia; bugger the locals, it's a huge tract of real estate and the original colonists came from prison stock and Frenchmen who were sent there in exile - in other words crims and cowboys, the detested Caldoche - and to this day robber land barons and horses and beef cattle range far and wide over the 400km long island, while the Kanaks live in poverty-stricken villages.
The last colony the Frogs begrudgingly gave up, along with the Poms, was the Condominium of the New Hebrides [now Vanuatu], in 1980, so little wonder the bureaucrats in Paris - almost 17,000 kms from Noumea - have spent all that time throwing their hands in the air crying "le problème est beaucoup trop difficile".
The local Kanaks don't want Macron in Ouvéa; he's a symbol of conquering domination, a modern-day Napoleon, and that's not the way the Melanesian's operate.
If the referendum goes against independence, nothing will change and the UN will really start to lose their shit and run out of patience and immediately put it back on the drawing board as they are fed up to here with colonialism in this day and age, and who isn't?
Amid the shouts of "vive la France", I'm entirely sure that Pres. Macron will also hear the battle cry "Kanaky pour la Kanak! Kanaky pour la Kanak! Kanaky pour la Kanak!"
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