With the Paris Olympics over, the countless controversies unleashed could be traced to one key reading: what was staged on the banks of the Seine was a clash between magical thinking and the principle of reality.
From the opening ceremony, to the sex of the boxers, to the issue of the Seine's swimmability, attempts were made to impose magical thinking, the power of the word, as the only yardstick of reality. The most obvious case the failed attempt to make the Seine swimmable not only for the Olympics but to make it a new tourist attraction in the capital.
Swim in Paris and die
Easier said than done: the Seine has been a non-swimmable river since 1923 (at the 1924 Paris Olympics they had limited themselves to rowing) over 700 km long and with a flow rate of 500 cubic meters per second, running through a city of over 2 million inhabitants. Who have to coexist with the rats that infest it. An attempt at “good neighborliness” strongly desired by the same city administration of Anna Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, who in 2022 and 2023 explained how with rats the city had to learn to live with them.
The Olympic competitions then had the results that everyone knows. So much so that even the compassionate Guardian regarding the condition of triathletes after swimming in the Seine paraphrased the Olympic motto with a headline to make Free envious:Citius, altius, antibioticus: Olympic triathlon a triumph of optics for Paris. It should be noted that in July, despite the media spin of Hidalgo's swim in the Seine, when swimming was at its limit, there was speculation that the triathlon should become a biathlon by abolishing the swimming event. This would have been the best solution for the health of the athletes.
As was to be expected, the principle of reality defeated the magical thinking of Hidalgo and Macron, and the 1.5 billion euros invested to make the river swimmable did not help much. Including the Austerlitz reservoir capable of storing 50,000 cubic meters of sewage in case of rain to slow its spillage into the Seine: the equivalent of a dozen Olympic-size swimming pools, which is equal to the amount of water that passes through the Seine in 8-9 minutes...
The problem is not only fluviological; the Seine is obviously a complex system of 700 kilometers, with a major tributary like the Marne flowing in close to Paris. Complicating the issue above all is the nature of a city like Paris. As Il Post wrote before the Olympics, all the hydraulic and technological paraphernalia had been put in place to make the river swimmable. From the classic separate hydraulic principles of the sewer system for clear and waste water to the ever-present new technologies based on performic acid or ultraviolet radiation to the aforementioned new settling basins. A panoply of elements whose Plan B in the event of rains leaching into the Seine the... city's humors simply had the classic “let's cross our fingers”: let's wait and hope that the bacterial level will decrease.
Of Mice and Men
After all, we Italians are used to play the odds only hoping in the help of God. But there's more here: the absolute paradox of a city administration that wants to coexist seaside ambitions with third-world situations such as the thousands of homeless (mostly immigrants) who at the last minute were thought to be deported from the streets of Paris just before the Olympics or the invasion of bedbugs in Paris in 2023 (of course, blame climate change). Also, rats. Living with rats while trying to make the Seine swimmable is yet another example of a struggle against reality and an exercise in magical thinking.
Both for the rat pathogens (no need to bother with the Black Death, just leptospirosis, which is among the risks faced by Olympians in the Seine) and for the rodents themselves, before whom the white flag has been raised. Here is what Politico wrote in June 2023:
“With guidance from the mayor, we have decided to form a committee on the question of cohabitation,” announced Anne Souyris, the city’s deputy mayor for public health, during Thursday’s meeting of the Council of Paris. She added that the group would be tasked with finding the method of dealing with the rats that proved to be both “effective” and “not unbearable” for Parisians.
And suddenly, jokes from the audience about the deputy mayor's last name, given the assonance with souris, rats....
This capitulation is the epilogue of a 1.7 million euro investment initiated in 2017 to try to curb the proliferation of rats. An unconditional surrender that the Hidalgo administration initiated as early as 2022, putting its hands up with “fox and grapes” statements: “you have to coexist with them....”
But the chickening out of the Parisian administration has gone further. Because in the struggle against reality one must first “deconstruct” people's prejudices so that a politically correct (in the broadest sense of the word) narrative can be constructed. In fact, according to Parti Animaliste city councilwoman Douchka Markovic, Seine panthers would be “victims of prejudice” and it is necessary to start calling them by correct terms: better to speak of surmulots (brown field mouse) instead of rats, because “rat has a negative connotation” (“moins connoté négativement”) as Le Figaro reported in 2022.
Knock, knock.C’est qui?”. “La réalité”
Again the magical thinking, perception problem, deconstructionism applied: just “change its name” and magically the pantagana will become a cute country mouse worthy protagonist of a Disney-Pixar movie. But reality always knocks at the door with the brutality of a postman carrying you a tax bill: shortly after the councilwoman's announcement, the Académie Nationale de Médecine felt compelled to issue a press release to restate the obvious: rats are a public health hazard and cases of leptospirosis are on the rise.
Is it possible to make a river swimmable while being forced to live with one of the main symptoms of a city's hygienic malaise? This is obviously an open contradiction. Regardless of the budget used and the technology deployed, only magical thinking is being applied: unless all the city's problems related to public hygiene are organically solved, reality will win out. And the river at the edge of swimmability will be a risk for athletes.
The woke Wizards of the Words
The cautionary tale of the Seine's balneability and coexistence with rats is not only a symbol of the contradictions we are forced to live with since good administration has given way to the magical thinking that is the practice of wokeist ideology. There is another interesting observation that starts from the very statements of the animal councilwoman: the problem of language and perception.
“Perception” is the key word of those who want to deny reality. Better “country mouse” than “rat” if you want to “improve” citizens' perception of the problem. Better “mpox” than “monkey pox”, better “migrants” than “clandestine”, and on and on the whole chain of euphemisms that political correctness has set up for us in an attempt to magically reconstruct reality by the sound of words. The pattern of citizens and their perceptions is easily found in many of the hot domestic issues that political witch doctors try to govern: thus the issue of micro-crime and decay in Milan is just a problem of “perception”. A political witchcraft that can only take place because the bulk of the mainstream press is mobilized to dismiss or conceal security issues and to brand as “social panic” the spread of news and videos that prove otherwise. This is what they tried to do with the “perceived swimmability” of the Seine: the spin of Anne Hidalgo's swim was functional to reassure citizens and athletes. Here is what Il Post wrote in the aforementioned article:
“In addition to continuing to clean up the river and monitor water quality, the hard thing will be to change common perceptions and convince people that the Seine really is clean and safe. Actions on bacteria will be joined here by actions on visible pollution such as litter, mainly plastic, through floating barriers and litter-catching boats".
The power of image
All it took was a viral photo of a swimmer emblematically puking right on the Paris 2024 Olympic logo to derail the propaganda harangue of a swimmable Seine. And the story of the city administration that wanted to live with rats while trying to clean the city river will remain in the annals of violations of the principles of reality and non-contradiction as a warning against all deconstructionism.
In the meantime, we note that we have more than one difficulty in commissioning the AI to come up with an image of the Seine with rats (string: “the Seine with mice” or “the Seine with rats”) that does not make the quaysides of the Ville Lumiere look like a branch of Sylvanian Family. If ordinary people did not drink the clean water of the Seine, the AI fell into it with both feet.
“Paris, Seine with mice”, AI on canvas.
The bottom line is this: be wary of those who think that problems can be solved by changing their names, rather than by materially intervening. And especially of its propagandists, in the flesh or virtual.
An essayist and popularizer, his publications include "Alessandro Blasetti. The forgotten father of Italian cinema" (Idrovolante, 2023). And with Emanuele Mastrangelo "Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia and the Hegemony of Information" (Bietti, 2013) and "Iconoclasm. The contagious insanity of the cancel culture that is destroying our history" (Eclectica, 2020).
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