Home to roost:

Utterly devoid of self-awareness, the French cherish their image of America as racist. But minorities in the United States have opportunities for which their French counterparts would risk their lives. Our problem is that demagogues convince the poorest of our poor to give up on getting ahead. In France, the non-white poor never have a chance of any kind.

France has no Colin Powell or Condi Rice, no minority heading the equivalent of a Fortune 500 company, no vibrant minority political culture. When Americans who adore la vie en France go to Paris (the intelligentsia’s Orlando), they don’t visit the drug-and-crime-plagued slums. If tourists encounter a Moroccan or a Senegalese “Frenchman,” he’s cleaning up the sidewalks after the dogs of the bourgeoisie.

Continental Europe has no model for integrating immigrants into the social and economic mainstream. Instead of creating tomorrow’s jobs, Europe protects yesterday’s. Talented young Europeans struggle to come to the United States to work (but they’ll settle for Britain). And “Old Europe’s” prejudices go deeper than those in our Deep South of 50 years ago.

So much for the “egalitarian” embrace of the all-powerful State:

There is, in speaking with its people at its cafes and on its streetcorners, a sense of malaise these days in Paris, which I think you could probe further by juxtaposing the despair of the banlieu rioters with the stories of the increasing numbers of graduates of Paris’s leading business schools who go to Britain upon graduation, or those of postgraduate degree holders working as postmen. All have in their way given up on the French dream, a comfortable lifestyle sheltered by an extensive and humane welfare state. The Dalrympean take, I suppose, would be to say that in both cases it’s the unproductivity of the French economy that’s partially to blame, particularly after the massive explosion in the size of the state during the early Mitterand years. People who during their days at Science Po took easily for granted the superiority of the French model, with its educated technocracy and comfortable standards of living, now despair over it.

The Russians learned years ago; the French are learning now; wonder how long it’ll take the Democrats? From the sound of this, their willing accomplices in the MSM are nowhere close to even figuring out the nature of the problem:

Clichy-sous-Bois has the feel of an artificial town, parachuted at bureaucratic behest into the featureless fields northeast of Paris and left there to rot. In the 1960s, planners chose this spot for a “Grand Ensemble” of public housing to lodge workers who came from North and West Africa in droves to do the dirty, boring and dangerous jobs shunned by the native French. Today, isolated from the capital, Clichy is a Lego landscape of bland apartment blocks, their windows broken and concrete walls defaced by graffiti and stained by November drizzle.

Everyone is dismayed, but no one is surprised that this has happened. For years, local politicians, community workers, the police, teachers and residents themselves had been warning about the worsening problems in the powder-keg towns in the Seine-Saint-Denis region. Poor housing, mediocre education, rampant crime, drugs, crumbling family structures, joblessness: All have helped turn these places into pits of boredom and despair where angry, drifting immigrant youths become prey to hooliganism, gangsterism and radical Islam.

At least she’s willing to acknowledge the inevitability of the Islamists’ moving in to take advantage of the chaos, which is definitely unusual amongst mainstream journos; where she falters, however, is here:

The violence has hammered France on its faultlines of race and poverty; on the decades-long failure of all governments, left and right, to embrace integration with more than lip service.

Bold mine. Astonishing, isn’t it? Tell me, does anybody remember the last time France had a nonsocialist, “right” government?

Fixing such problems requires major changes. People must accept that it is simply not enough to claim that all those living in France are equal and therefore have equal chances. For Clichy and other sad towns, this means better housing, better schooling, smarter policing and support for parents, community associations, moderate religious organizations, teachers and neighborhood cops.

As Field says, “fixing” things means “major changes.” Problem is, for the Left “major changes” just means plenty more of that good old-time socialist religion: that blind, unyielding faith that Government Knows Best that produced France’s moribund economy which, in its turn and exacerbated by official French racism, produced these hellish ghettos in the first place. They think and hope, as our own homegrown collectivists do, that they’re buying a certain amount of peaceable docility with their nanny-state bribery. But all they’re really buying is time, and not nearly as much of that as they’d like to think. The fateful reckoning is always lurking out there — waiting. And every so often it’s going to rear up and collect its due.

I wish I could be optimistic about this writer’s call for “community associations” as at least a grudging nod towards a non-government solution, but given what I know already about the MSM, I just can’t. I’d guess that for Field, “community associations” means just another from-the-top-down government bureaucracy, specially formulated — New! Improved! — to lead the poor benighted sheeple to the Promised Land. And truth to tell, I doubt any sort of free-enterprise, non-government solution will do for France anyway; as with Russia, the populace’s long, comfortable familiarity with the Almighty State has become so established that any facility for self-reliance was probably sucked out of them long ago.

As for our own pack of nanny-state ostriches, they’ll never, ever learn. Or if they ever do, they’ll never admit it. To the libs, failure means never having to say “enough already.” But no matter how bleak the situation, there’s always a laugh to be found somewhere, and Steyn does so:

According to its Office du Tourisme, the big event in Evreux this past weekend was supposed to be the annual fête de la pomme, du cidre et du fromage at the Place de la Mairie. Instead, in this charmingly smouldering cathedral town in Normandy, a shopping mall, a post office, two schools, upwards of 50 vehicles and, oh yes, the police station were destroyed by – what’s the word? – “youths”.

Over at the Place de la Mairie, M le Maire himself, Jean-Louis Debré, seemed affronted by the very idea that un soupçon de carnage should be allowed to distract from the cheese-tasting. “A hundred people have smashed everything and strewn desolation,” he told reporters. “Well, they don’t form part of our universe.”

Maybe not, but unfortunately you form part of theirs.

Mr Debré, a close pal of President Chirac’s, was a little off on the numbers. There were an estimated 200 “youths” rampaging through Evreux. With baseball bats. They injured, among others, a dozen firemen. “To those responsible for the violence, I want to say: Be serious!” Mr Debré told France Info radio. “If you want to live in a fairer, more fraternal society, this is not how to go about it.”

Oh, dear. Who’s not “being serious” here? In Normandy, it’s not just the cheese that’s soft and runny.

Ahh, la vie joyeux! Anybody know if there’s un mot français for “schadenfreude”?