Trouble at the Tower - Paris in July

(Here's an excerpt from Adam Gopnik's "Paris to the Moon" since I really couldn't have said it better myself - enjoy!)

Paris in July is pretty much left to the tourists and the people who look after them, while everyone else goes south, or west, or, in any case, away. An incident at the Eiffel Tower - which left a tourist sore, the tower closed for a couple of days, and an elevator operator out of a job for awhile - told you everything you needed to know about what happens when you leave the tourist and his handlers alone to sort things out. What happened, if you missed it, was that a lady tourist got on the "up" elevator of the tower with a ticket for the second platform and then decided to get off at the first platform (because she felt dizzy or because she didn't, or just because she was exercising her fundamental right to get on and off an elevator whenever she felt like it). She was kept from getting off the elevator by a French elevator operator (who either gently dissuaded her or handled her a bit roughly, or else launched into a Joe Pesci-in-a-Scorcese-film attack). The woman? (an American? No, a Brit! Finally the French papers settled on calling her an Anglo-Saxon) was, it turned out, a successful writer with a profound sense of indignation and a lawyer. She complained, and the company that runs the tower - it's a private business - had the elevator guy fired. But then the rest of the tower employees went out on strike in solidarity, closing down the tower and leaving a lot of indignant American and British tourists on the ground, furious at being denied their chance to be manhandled by the elevator operators.

The incident produced a certain panicky, just discernible exchange of meaningful glances for the rest of the week between the tourists and the touristed. Naturally, sympathy in France gathered quickly around the wronged operator and his striking friends, while sympathy on the Anglo-American side gathered around the roughed-up lady. This distribution of sympathy wasn't merely tribal, though. The Eiffel Tower Incident of the Summer of '97 illustrates a tempermental and even intellectual difference between the two cultures. Most Americans draw their identitites from the things they buy, while the French draw theirs from the jobs they do. What we think of as "French rudeness," and what they think of as "American arrogance,' arise from this difference. But she was just trying to have a good time, we think. But he was only doing his job, they think. For us, an elevator operator is only a tourist's way of getting to the top of the Eiffel Tower. For the French, a tourist is only an elevator operator's opportunity to practice his métier in a suitably impressive setting.

The elevator operator dreams of going to the top of the tower alone in his elevator, while the Anglo-Saxon tourist, in her heart of hearts (and he knows this; it's what terrifies him most), dreams of an automatic elevator. When the two ideals - of absolute professionalism unfettered by customers and of absolute tourism unaffected by locals - collide, trouble happens, pain is caused. Americans long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World. The French dream of a place where everyone can practice his métier in self-enclosed perfection, with the people to be served only on sufferance, as extras, to be knocked down the moment they act up. This place, come to think of it, is called Paris in July.