Albert Durfort was full of the milk of human kindness. (Machefer would have used a rather more vulgar expression. He always said the professional do-gooders turned his stomach. A little too harsh, perhaps, for Durfort, not a bad sort, really.) Constant crusader, he would gallop through radioland to the rescue, looking for supposedly desperate causes, barely taking the time to change horses between two campaigns, always panting for breath as he came on the scene just in time to deliver the downtrodden victim, expose a scandal, and lash out at injustice. A Zorro of the airwaves. And the public adored it. So much so, in fact, that some—the most obtuse—saw each nightly editorial as a serial installment: Durfort on skid row, Durfort and the Arabs, Durfort vs. the racists, Durfort and the police, Durfort against brutality, Durfort for prison reform, Durfort and capital punishment, etc., etc. But no one, not even Durfort himself, could see that our Zorro was flogging dead horses, flying off to the rescue ‘of issues long since won. Something else, strange but true: he was looked on as the model of the free, objective thinker. He would have been shocked and surprised to learn that he was, in fact, a captive of fashion, bound by all the new taboos, conditioned by thirty years of intellectual terrorism; and that, if the owner and general manager of the station that employed him entrusted ten million good Frenchmen to his care each night, it certainly wasn’t to use his talents to tell them the opposite of what they supposed they believed in. As for the plush publicity that surrounded Durfort and flanked his little gems of moral indignation, it brought truly awesome results, though no one was awed in the slightest anymore, so long had the public soul steeped in this system of self-contradiction, like a turd in a toilet bowl, rotting away. All the press, or almost, played this curious poker, and won every hand. And Dio’s paper led the pack, with its glossy, full-color spreads. … Men, get into the swing, wear suede this season! Your banker is your friend, invest with confidence!…
In this world of ours, clearly, opinion-mongers the likes of Durfort, Dio, Orelle, Vilsberg and Co. have to live on their ideas since that’s all they have. But if they seem to be sawing the limbs where they’re sitting, egged on for some senseless reason by the man who owns the tree, please don’t worry! They’ve already got their eyes on another nearby branch, one they’ll grab at the very last moment, because surely you don’t think the new world can come into being without them, after all! Their kind doesn’t work for nothing. In the stew they’re churning up before our eyes, you can bet they’ll keep afloat, decked out in leather, with their Riviera tans… And so, as he spoke of the armada, sitting astride his branch already sawed more than halfway through, Durfort was his most convincing self, finding just the right words to hit home, to sink into the muck of each heart with a soft little plop. With appropriate variations, he played out the same master hands that had made him famous: the case of the Greek deportees, and the more recent one of the Algerian laborer accused of the rape and murder of a little girl, and victim—perhaps—of a miscarriage of justice. With relish and talent, Durfort reenlisted his Greeks, and pressed the miscarriage of justice back into active service…
At the very same moment thirty-two thousand seven hundred forty-two schoolteachers hit on the subject for the next day’s theme: “Describe the life of the poor, suffering souls on board the ships, and express your feelings toward their plight in detail, by imagining, for example, that one of the desperate families comes to your home and asks you to take them in.” Irresistible, really! And the dear little angel—all simple, childish soul and tender heart—will spread four pages’ worth of infantile pathos, enough to melt a concierge to tears, and his paper will be the best, the teacher will read it in class, and all his little friends will kick themselves for having been much too stingy with their whines and whimpers. That’s how we mold our men nowadays. Because even the tough, hardhearted little brat, the one with all he needs to succeed in this life, is forced to take part, since children abhor standing out from the crowd. So he’ll have to play along too, and work himself into a hypocritical sweat over the same philanthropic rubbish. And he’ll probably write just as brilliant a theme, clever child that he is, and he may even wind up believing what he writes, because youngsters like this are never really bad, just different, that’s all, just untapped potential. Then he’ll go home, like his classmate, both of them proud of their fine compositions. And father, who knows what life is all about, will read the A-plus masterpiece, terrified (if he has the slightest imagination) at the notion of that foreign family of eight coming to live in his three rooms and kitchen, but he’ll sit back and keep his big mouth shut. Mustn’t frustrate the little angels, mustn’t shock them, mustn’t sully their innocent thoughts and risk turning them later into hopeless prigs. No, he’ll wallow, ensnared, in his gutless affection, and chuck his little angel on a cheek flushed with pleasure, telling himself that he’s really a dear, and besides, “out of the mouths of babes,” isn’t that what they say? … The mother will snivel in her handkerchief, eye moist with maternal affection rewarded. But let the famished Ganges horde show up some morning at their door—assuming, of course, that such a thing could happen—and there’s one damn family that’s bloody well had it! Perhaps instead of an open-armed welcome, despite the prophetic prose of the little remote-controlled angel, they’ll take to their heels. The Western heart, down deep, is all sham. In any event, they’ll have lost the strength and the will to say no! Now, multiply that by a million mindless themes, applauded by a million milksop fathers, and you get some idea of the climate of total decay. Could that be one explanation? …
