But now I am speaking about Paris, dear friend—a city still at the heart of Western Civilization, one would think, and not at its extreme periphery. Yes, it may even be considered its throbbing heart; still the center of its cultural life, the termite queen of Europe. Yurop, sir. How do you spell it? Why-You-Are-Oh-Pee-period. Yurop—a remote American province, as we now all know, as everyone knows, down to the last sneering oil sheikh, but nevertheless a province that is said to have been the cradle of this renowned Western Civilization, the homeland of our fathers, mothers, all our blindly self-assured, dynamic, expansive forebears. Of course you and your fellow bearers of stars and stripes know it in another way. For you it became an integrating component of the world only recently, as the theater of WWII—a vile abbreviation for a collective suicide, by the way. A world the half of which always belongs to America: half of Korea, half of Vietnam, half of Germany. . . and believe me, it makes quite a difference if you think of a continent as homeland or as a theater of operations. The European Theater, as it is rather characteristically known in the (military) trade. Enter at your own risk, albeit with a guarantee of an honorable funeral—even if your body parts are scattered and far flung during the spectacle—on so-called V-Days (Vee for Victory, mon cul).

For you, sons of the New World in your youthful freshness, masters of one half of the globe—for you, the charm of this unhealthy, sporadically iron-filled part of the world probably consisted in the liberating dynamics of the landscape of catastrophe: the panorama in which fields and forests, marshes and meadows are wasted by storms of fire, battered by hailstones of iron; shacks and castles, churches and privies are equally smashed to rubble, and dead cattle and household goods drift in the yellow rivers—half a roof and perched on it a cat that fled up the chimney, for instance; and so it makes no difference whatsoever where you shit cook screw play with an orphaned puppy for a short while puke up your booze or kick the bucket.