Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1503087
...WITH the small difference, I suppose, that there is no his- torical evidence that the soon- to-be-headless Marie-Antoi- nette ever actually uttered those infamous words (which – just in case your French is as lousy as mine – are usually translated into English as: 'Let them eat cake!') Emmanuel Macron, on the other hand? He has no such excuse, as far as I can see. And unlike Marie-Antoinette: it doesn't even look like he's go- ing to pay any form of price, whatsoever – still less, 'lose his head' – for such outra- geous (and ill-informed) 'inso- lence'... But let me not rush too far ahead, as usual. Fact of the matter is that I'm actual- ly quite grateful towards the French President, for having finally given me the opportu- nity to write about a subject that – for a change – I might actually know a thing or two about, myself. Video games. That's right: the same 'vid- eo-games' that my own gener- ation became the first to actu- ally experience, while growing up in the distant 1980s – with- out, it must be said, too many of us ever developing overtly 'sociopathic' or 'homicidal' tendencies, as a direct conse- quence (or at least: none that I'm aware of....) But also – and the contradic- tion that is about to emerge, is known in gaming circles as a 'compatibility issue' - the same video-games that Ma- cron himself somehow seems to hold responsible (along with the parents of French teenag- ers, naturally) for the fact that around two-thirds of his entire country happens to be quite literally ON FIRE, even as we speak. But in case you missed it, this is how it was reported by the [French] news agency AFP yes- terday: "President Emmanuel Ma- cron called on parents to keep child rioters off the streets on Friday, while saying [...] that video games played a role in the riots, which followed the fatal shooting of a teen by po- lice on Tuesday. "It's the responsibility of par- ents to keep them [teenage ri- oters] at home," he said. "It's not the state's job to act in their place." [...] "You get the impression that for some of them, they are experiencing on the street the video games that have intoxicated them," he added. Got that, folks? So if literal- ly tens of thousands of French citizens – including, but not limited to, the 1,300 '14-15 year olds' who have already been arrested – have spent the past week rioting, looting, pillaging, and setting police cars ablaze, in practically every major city and 'banlieu' in France... ... it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that they had only just witnessed mem- bers of their own country's Police Force, cold-bloodedly murdering a 17-year-old boy - of North African extraction, please note (important de- tail, that) - for the grave crime of 'failing to stop, at a road- block'... Nor does it matter in the slightest (to Macron, any- way) that the circumstances of said 'cold-blooded murder' were not just similar, but al- most IDENTICAL to the 2020 murder of George Floyd in the United States... that is to say: also by the police; also against the backdrop of institutional racism, and social inequality; and also resulting in instant race-riots, spreading like wild- fire across the entire country... But of course, all those re- semblances can safely be put down to mere 'coincidence'. Because according to Ma- cron, this latest re-enactment of the 'French Revolution' is entirely unrelated to any of the usual causes of social unrest (you know: racism, poverty, in- equality, ghettoisation, police brutality, systemic injustice... that sort of thing). Instead, it is simply down to the fact that an entire gen- maltatoday | SUNDAY • 2 JULY 2023 10 OPINION "It's the responsibility of parents to keep them [teenage rioters] at home. It's not the state's job to act in their place." [...] "You get the impression that for some of them, they are experiencing on the street the video games that have intoxicated them," Video games, to blame for French riots? That's like saying: 'Qu'ils mangent de brioche! Raphael Vassallo