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to it.
    A few days after the demonstration, I went back to the rotisseur to see how the turkey was getting along on its way into town. "It does not look good," he said. "The strike prevents him from moving."
    "Was he planning to take the TGV?" I asked.
    Although workers and students are striking throughout France, the strike is chiefly a Parisian event. That doesn't make it any less national, since France is a completely centralized country. To achieve in America the effect that the strikers have achieved here, it would be necessary to shut down simultaneously the New York subway, the Washington post office, and the Santa Monica Freeway. These weeks have been unusually cold, and that has made the troubles of the strike more difficult. The strike has even produced an iconography of endurance: lots of pictures of bicyclists and Rollerbladers and sailors, carrying on. But in fact the iconography is a little misleading. More typical sights are the endless bouchons, or traffic jams, which have made a twenty-minute trip from the E toile to the place de Clichy last four hours. On the great boulevards and avenues there is a constant press of cars and people, marches one day and solid, immovable traffic jams the next. But if you walk only a couple of blocks away in any direction, the city looks especially beautiful, and you can have it to yourself. Despite the strike, all the Christmas decorations are up, shiny red and gold ribbon and green garlands draped like bunting around the display windows of the boutiques. Since almost everyone is busy not getting anywhere in a car, you can be all alone with the gleaming glass storefronts and the Christmas garlands and the sight of your own breath.
    The motorcyclists have solved the traffic problem by giving up the streets and simply driving on the sidewalks. As you stroll along the boulevard, you suddenly discover a Harley-Davidson bearing down on you at high speed from among the plane trees. The motorcyclists, who would rather run over a few pedestrians than give up their Hogs, are more truly Parisian than the wan inline skaters, since the French attitude toward any crisis is not to soldier through it but just to pretend that it isn't happening. (It was in Paris, after all, that Picasso and Sartre sat in a cafe for four years pretending that the Germans weren't there.)
    A deeper and more dramatic version of this national habit of pretending that things haven't happened is what has shaped the strike. What the French strikers want to ignore, at least according to their critics, are the economic facts of the end of the twentieth century: "global capital," the "modern service-based economy," the "tough new competitive conditions of the twenty-first century," all of which, the critics say, can be dealt with only by a more "flexible" labor market. When are these people going to grow up and face reality? seems to be the exasperated question that others in Europe are asking. What the French feel is that for the past half century they have done pretty well by not facing reality—or, anyway, by facing it for one moment and then turning their backs on it for another, in a kind of endless inspired whirl through history. France is a uniquely lovely and supple place to live, and there is a reasonable suspicion here that the British and the Americans and the Germans are trying to hustle the French into what is called a liberal paradise, but what no one here is quite convinced is so paradisiacal. Among the nonunionized, petit bourgeois strike sympathizers, in particular, there is an intransigent and rather admirable level of temperamental resistance to the notion of "reforming" France to suit the global economy. Even Bernard Thibault, the secretary-general of the chemmots' union, said not long ago that he was willing to negotiate but that his bottom line was "Citizens must never be transported like merchandise."
    In France, of course, not even the merchandise is transported like merchandise. When the turkey