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Alive in Paris
I’m alive and so is my family. I’m not “reporting live,” however, because I saw none of this and haven’t left the apartment since my brother called to tell me what had happened.
Here’s what I know. It’s probably close what you know. At least 127 dead. Eight terrorists dead, of whom seven blew themselves up. A state of emergency has been decreed. I’m trying to figure out what this means. Among other things, it seems — although I’m not an expert in French jurisprudence — that the state now has the authority to toss what we’d consider First and Fourth Amendment rights into the toilet:
Le décret déclarant ou la loi prorogeant l’état d’urgence peuvent, par une disposition expresse :
1° Conférer aux autorités administratives visées à l’article 8 le pouvoir d’ordonner des perquisitions à domicile de jour et de nuit ;
2° Habiliter les mêmes autorités à prendre toutes mesures pour assurer le contrôle de la presse et des publications de toute nature ainsi que celui des émissions radiophoniques, des projections ciné-matographiques et des représentations théâtrales.
My translation:
1. Gives the administrative authorities referred to in Article 8 the power to order house searches day and night;
2. Empowers the same authorities to take all measures to ensure control of the press and publications of all kinds as well as radio broadcasts, cinema projections, and theatrical performances.
After 12 days of this, parliament must agree to it; but for now, the executive has more power than one would wish, ideally, in a democracy. Then again, these are not scenes I would wish to see, ideally, in a democracy, either: particularly in my neighborhood:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vToc7N6r5pI
Most of my friends have checked in and are okay, physically. It seems 78-79 of the dead were at the Bataclan, about six minutes away from my apartment. I assume that a much greater number have been maimed, mutilated, and traumatized permanently.
ISIS has officially taken credit for the attack, although they would, wouldn’t they? That said, my instinct says it’s so. (Fred, not kick you when you’re down, but today might not be the best day to argue with me about threat inflation: We’ll have to come back to that when I’ve got a bit of distance from this; I’m very literally too close to be fully rational about it.)
We’re still advised to stay indoors, apparently. But it’s just advice; we’re not forbidden to go out. Schools, museums, libraries, gyms, pools, and open-air markets are indefinitely closed. Demonstrations have been cancelled, city halls are closed except for the permanences État Civil and Mariage.
Many metro stations are closed on lines 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 11, but traffic is normal on the other ones. That’s good because it means I can visit my father, although when I spoke to him he said the thing we could do to most make him feel better is stay home. (Of course he said that. He’s my father. I’ll wait for more news before figuring out what to do.)
The authorities say the situation should be under control from now on, but they don’t know the exact number of assailants or their movements, so nothing’s ruled out, either. In other words, “Take the chance if you want, but we’re making no promises.”
This part confuses me: I’m not sure whether we’re in “plan blan” (the white plan) or “plan rouge alpha,” but I think for hospitals, it’s now Red alpha plan:
Le plan « rouge alpha » est le niveau de réponse à une série d’événements dramatiques simultanés. Il est différent du « plan blanc » qui concerne les hôpitaux, le « plan rouge » se concentrant sur la coordination des soins sur le terrain, donc autour de la protection civile, de la Croix-Rouge, ou des ambulanciers.
Dans le secteur hospitalier, c’est un plan blanc qui a été activé au niveau de l’Assistance publique-Hôpitaux de Paris. Il organise le secteur hospitalier, et permet la réquisition de personnels, de lits et de blocs opératoires.
My translation:
“Red alpha” is the level of response to a series of concurrent emergency events. It is different from the White Plan. For hospitals, the “red plan” focuses on care coordination in the field, that’s to say on civilian protection, be it through the Red Cross or the ambulance service.
In the hospital sector, the white plan was activated at the Public Assistance Hospitals in Paris. It allows the requisitioning of staff, beds and operating theaters.
I don’t think this should affect my father. When I called, no one was requisitioning his staff or bed, which is good.
I haven’t quite had the emotional reaction to this you’d expect. It’s not because I’m a psychopath; it’s just that physiologically I don’t have it in me. Human bodies can’t stay in a state of constant stress; they go back to equilibrium, and I used up all my ability to be terrorized these past few days worrying about my father. I pretty much only have the bandwidth right now to be grateful that he got through that surgery.
So what I’ve seen over the past few days hasn’t given me any insight into the news you’ve all heard about. But I’ve learned so much more about cardiac surgery in France. So I’ll report what I’ve seen, since it’s all I’ve got to report.
For those of you uninterested in French cardiac surgery, you can stop now.
***
The year 2015 is lamentable in many ways, but there’s never been a better time in human history to have cardiac surgery. Paris is one of the best places in the world to have it. Did you know the first surgery on the aortic valve was conducted in 1912 by Theodore Tuffier in Paris? The most important surgery on the aortic valve was recently conducted by Stéphane Aubert in Paris. That’s the one that saved my father’s life.
The French tradition of cardiovascular surgery is a magnificent one. The French surgeon Alexis Carrel was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques. He invented the first perfusion pump, too, along with Charles A. Lindbergh. He was the first surgeon to take a direct operative approach to bypassing diseased segments of coronary arteries. In 1910, he performed the world’s first aorto-coronary bypass graft, on a dog. (May God bless the animals who have unwillingly given their lives for this research, including the pig whose arterial valve is now part of my father’s beating heart. In its merger with a human heart, it became completely kosher, by the way.)
So what should one think about the year 2015? We live in a time when it’s so routine for suicide bombers and men with AKs and grenades to kill hundreds of people in an evening that it’s only news because it happened again, not because they’ve used a novel, pioneering technique in mass murder.
Yet 2015 is a time when it’s so routine to replace a diseased human aortic valve with that of a pig that his odds of the human surviving this procedure are outstanding. In 1936, there was no known surgical treatment for congenital or valvular heart disease. In the beginning of 1952, there was no open cardiac surgery. In 1959, there were no satisfactory prosthetic valves, nor implantable pacemakers, nor even closed chest massage. My father, whom I love so much, would have died of his illness within a year.
But here we are in 2015. We’re now routinely slaughtered by terrorists. We’re just as routinely able to render a 73-year-old man totally insensate, cleave his chest from his neck to his belly, separate his breastplate, attach tubes into his heart and blood vessels to mechanically circulate and oxygenate his blood, shut off his heart and lungs without killing him (usually), cool his heart, stop his heartbeat, remove his diseased aortic valve, replace it with the chemically-treated valve of the heart of a pig — and these even come off-the-shelf, in standardized sizes, like shoes — suture the pig’s valve to his human heart, take a few healthy vessels taken from his leg, arm, chest or abdomen and connect them to the other arteries in his heart, restart his heart using a series of electric shocks, sew him back up, then reanimate him — and this is so normal that it doesn’t even make the news. They do four or five of these a day, said the wonderfully reassuring nurse at the clinic, “and we never get it wrong.” Ne vous inquietez pas.
Having seen what they did to my father, I might have said, “Astonishing though this may be, it is still a barbaric procedure,” but I’m not going to use the word “barbaric” lightly on a day like this. It’s painful and horrible and brutal. But no, it’s not barbaric. The difference is obvious: The doctors did it to save his life. It’s unfortunate that humanity hasn’t yet figured out how to do that in a gentler way, but barbaric, no.
I never want to go near a hospital again.
Back to Carrel. I’m so grateful for the research he did that it seems almost churlish to bring it up, but he was an enthusiastic eugenicist, and while his relationship with the Nazis is unclear, it doesn’t sound good:
Because of his relationship with Nazi-supported Vichy, as well as certain distinctly undemocratic statements he had made during the late 1930s, Carrel was widely regarded by his countrymen as a Nazi collaborator. After the liberation of France in 1944, he was relieved of all duties related to his institute and was placed under surveillance. An investigation began to evaluate the extent of his collaboration with the Nazis and the Vichy government, but no conclusions were reached. Unremitting attacks by the press left Carrel deeply saddened, embittered, and depressed. He was a broken man when he died on November 5, 1944.
At any event, France has a glorious tradition of cardiac surgery. It still does. It has an inglorious tradition of political violence, and still does.
A complicated country.
By the way, if anyone’s wondering whether medical innovation can happen in a country with socialized medicine, I assure you it most certainly happens in France, although whether medicine here is truly socialized is another subject. Alain Carpentier, for example, is the father of modern mitral valve repair; French surgeons recently performed a ground-breaking artificial heart implant. Didier F. Loulmet, Carpentier’s collaborator, performed the world’s first robotic mitral valve repair with in Paris in May 1998, and the world’s first closed-chest robotic coronary artery bypass grafting in June 1998.
I could go on at length about the French cardiac surgery tradition. It’s remarkable. It was the last thing I wanted to learn so much about, but when you find out your father needs surgery soon or he’ll die (maybe: the imminence of mortality given his condition wasn’t entirely clear from the literature) — you do read the literature closely.
So my father was alive when I saw him yesterday evening. I don’t have enough emotion left in me to be anything but grateful for that. I saw nothing unusual on my way home from the hospital. When I got home, I fell deep asleep: I’ve been exhausted for days. My brother woke me up to ask if I was safely at home. From his voice I knew something was wrong, but God help me, when he assured me that nothing was seriously wrong — there had just been a massive terrorist attacks all over Paris, that was all — I was relieved. I know that’s not a normal response, but I won’t lie; that’s what I felt.
My father thanks all of you who sent your good will and your prayers. I spoke to him this morning. He is doing even better today. He was well enough to be angry and depressed, and well enough to find the word that best describes what happened in Paris: disgusting.
As for immigration and France, let me pre-empt the comments I expect. This is too complex for slogans. A good third or perhaps half of the surgical and nursing team taking care of my father were immigrants. I wasn’t counting them or asking where they were from; obviously, my mind was elsewhere, but I could tell because they looked like it.
Whatever your feelings about immigration, I haven’t much patience for unkind words about Muslim immigrants in France today. I’m sure you’ll appreciate why. I have immigrant friends here. I’m an immigrant myself — now of a kind that no one fears, but I’m the grandchild of the kind whose children are now nothing more than the plaque you saw in this photo. I just spoke to one of my friends. She was Algerian. Now she is French. I called to check that she and her family were okay. She told me to be strong and not to cry. “We’ve seen worse,” she said, speaking of both herself and of me. She’s right.
President Hollande, who convened a special security meeting this morning, vowed to be “pitiless” with the nation’s enemies. “We know where these attacks come from,” Hollande said, without naming anyone. “There are indeed good reasons to be afraid.”
The newspaper headlines say, “This time it’s war.”
There are good reasons to be afraid; but I don’t have it in me. I am all for being pitiless on this nation’s enemies. Kill them all, and do not dither. Do it soon, and do it right.
But if anyone mistakes my formerly-Algerian friend for an enemy of France, it would be quite a mistake. I don’t say this out of bravado, I just say it because she is my friend — a victim as much as anyone in Paris who wasn’t killed or close to someone who was.
My father is so fond of her. He’s gone through enough as it is. His heart doesn’t need to be even more broken. Let there be no persecution of innocent immigrants. This country needs no more shame.
Don’t forget the Madrid train bombings in 2004 which killed 191.
Thank you as always Claire for your wonderful writing. I will respect your appeal to avoid discussing my disagreement with you on immigration for awhile and just wish you the best, I’m sorry I vented in prior postings.
About Garland, it could have been much worse. I was there. Had the event planners, security, and local authorities not been so well prepared, many could have been killed.
Absolutely right. We would be negligent here if we did not pay homage to that remarkable retired cop who managed to take out both the shooters while laying on his side, in extreme pain with his ankle having been shot, using only his side arm. I can’t even imagine such proficiency and discipline. We were so lucky to have that kind of professional shooter on site when it counted. Kudos to the “security guard” who took his profession and target practice seriously, and saved many lives because of it.
I remember after 9/11 that there were a number of attacks in this country on Sikhs, for God’s sake. And on Arab store owners, people who looked like Arabs. How short our memories can be.
Um, it was not that bad. There were angry people but there was not a mass wave of attacks.
Please point to specific events.
This has been a good lesson for me. I send my thanks to you and HVTs. I did a Google search to back up my statement, and almost all of the “data” came from Muslim groups or others that I don’t trust: CAIR, The Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU. Guess I’ve been duped. I apologize.
That said, as Claire has commented based on her own experiences, it’s hard to make generalizations about Muslims. It’s a complicated religion and these are complex times, and I find myself wanting to simply condemn them all. But living in a “modern, industrialized democracy,” conclusions have to be reached thoughtfully.
When “peaceable” Muslims hang ISIS types from lamp posts. In Paris.
Well, thanks for that self-reflection and correction . . . I’ll try and emulate you when (inevitably) circumstances warrant it.
Of course in a nation of some 330 million people someone, somewhere may do something horribly stupid and criminal due to misguided passion over the mass slaughter in Paris. I assumed you meant something larger: that somehow our nation (or any modern democracy) would encourage or condone an ‘attack them all’ policy. That’s leftist tripe. It’s never happened, yet “concern” it might is trotted out every time there’s an act of unbearable inhumanity committed in the name of Allah. In my view, this reaction is a symptom of the cultural suicide many of the West’s intellectual and political elites have foisted upon an unsuspecting public. It should be called out and denounced when it happens.
Hence it was originally called “the Long War.” Changing the name, unfortunately, does not shorten it. Choosing to ignore it or only half-heartedly to engage in it, just prolongs it.
Well said. I find myself in the same bent as you.
Claire,
I was very relieved to find out you’re O.K., and am amazed you can write such a clear and compelling post under the circumstances.
Also glad that your father’s surgery went well. By the way, The Devil’s Delusion was great, much needed, medicine for me when I read it. It’s one of my favorite books, and I’ll always be grateful to your father for writing it.
We are praying for you and your family.
I think what Claire’s comments reflect is how difficult the issue becomes on an inter-personal level, where generalizations fade out and eyeball-to-eyeball realities fade in. But we flatter ourselves to imagine that the underlying issues, which have persisted among human populations in one form or another from the dawn of humanity, are in our time more complicated than in the past. They were never easy and will never be easy. Arguably, we are advantaged in ways now that humanity never was before: the aid of technological means to engage with and comprehend ‘others’ that simply did not previously exist.
Of course, we are less isolated from one another now too, also a consequence of scientific and technological development. With contact comes friction. So, modernity is a mixed bag, but it’s folly–in my view–to think we have greater challenges now than clashing civilizations of the past. There’s no a priori reason to think so, at any rate. Horrible as 11-13 was, it’s merely one entrant in a vast parade of horribles stretching back to the origins of mankind.
I say all that because of my belief that imagining ourselves uniquely challenged hampers us in finding solutions, encouraging us to think old solutions can’t work, when often they can.
Hi Claire,
How come something crazy always happens when I’m off-line for shabbos. Don’t answer that. I’m so glad you are OK. I’m glad that your father is getting better.
After the last few days I thought you might like to see something totally silly. Of course, I’m just the guy to provide it.
My dear Dr. Berlinski.
Regards,
Jim
Claire, I thought weapons were relatively easy to get in France. How is it that no civilians were armed?
In Paris on a Friday night? How many would you expect to be armed in, say, NYC, Boston, San Francisco, etc? Maybe if you went to wherever gangstas hangout, but not restaurants for the upper middle class and at rock concerts. And the way these attacks went down, even if you had a concealed-carry culture in urbane Paris, who’s drawing on guys squeezing out AK rounds like it’s Mosul?
I don’t know that none were. Many of the deaths were caused by suicide bombers. Thus far the forensic reports haven’t been made public — as far as I know* — so I have no idea whether any of the citizens were armed, and if so, whether they fired their weapons.
*I’ve been busy, so it’s possible there’s been news I’ve missed.
Well, there was that retired cop in Garland, TX.
Obviously, this was some time after 9/11 and his immediate motivations are not absolutely clear — but if I recall clearly, there was evidence the suicide attacker at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, WI in 2012 seemed to be under the impression he was attacking Muslims. Hardly a mass movement, but it can happen.
One need draw no moral equivalence to note that there are a handful of people floating around the West who can be motivated by this kind of event to work their own evil. Just enough that one can also understand why a truly moderate Muslim — or even non-Muslims of a Middle Eastern background — might feel the fear and anger the rest of us do with an extra twist.
Thanks, Bryan. And HVTs, too.
Claire, I wish the best for your dad and all of you during these difficult times. And, thank you for sharing your thoughts on all this. It really helps to hear from someone like yourself with your experiences, on the ground there, for someone like myself who does not have the same set.