Mickey Kaus (no permalink):
"And it turns out, if you read far enough into Cowell’s piece, that a) even if there are few immigrants in Schirmeck, there’s a "large immigrant population" in Strasbourg, which is all of 25 miles away, according to the crack kausfiles cartographic unit; b) established industries in the region (textile, autos) are threatened by import competition, so it’s not true that there’s no insecurity, and c) citizens of Schirmeck are well aware of "hooligan"-led violence elsewhere in France, including the widely publicized brutal beating of a 72-year old man in Orleans, south of Paris. … So Cowell’s thesis (that there’s some sort of creepy, brooding "pessimism" afoot) turns out to rest on the idiotic, condescending assumption that voters of Schirmeck can’t see or think beyond their own little town, that they’re unaware of conditions in the rest of the country, including the regional hub a 45-minute drive away — that it’s so strange for them to be concerned about violence in the big cities that we need to find a dark, hidden explanation."
Thanks for pointing out the utter stupidity of the numerous "reports" of "totally secure and calm remote villages where Le Pen vote is unexplainable" that we had to bear with on French TV lately. They might be remote, but amazingly, even these crass, backward people (as seen from Parisian ethnologists) own cars and TVs. Mickey Kaus also shows there’s more of this kind of thinking (about supposedly irrational anger and fear), and points out that displaying foreign flags (as the Moroccan and Algerian ones waved on Sunday night in Paris), is a bit counter-productive.