Pave: The Sexennial

Le jour 681 de Sarko

HUH?
Six Years Of Paving, Clueless France Still Clueless

The third of this month was the sixth anniversary of Pave France. Today is the fifth anniversary of my joining Pave as an editor.

Pave originally launched under editor-in-chief Mike Krempasky. The site published a mock-fest of French ingratitude, anti-Americanism, policy ineptitude, multipolar fawning, government corruption, strikes, riots, misplaced hauteur, bad hygiene, and the flailing génie gaulois. There were several contributors, some quite good, some quite funny -- Carine and Valerie went on to found E-Nough!; Josh Mercer is at Fidelis, where he is the Communications Director. But social and political France has not held much fascination for Americans since the 19th century, and one by one -- sometimes in clumps -- Pave's editors -- and readership -- fell away.

The busy Mr. Krempasky quit Pave in 2004 for RedState, leaving me, the last active editor, in charge. [Pause.] The only remanent of the Pave collegium is the editorial "we".

The Chirac years were great for Pave, not so great for France. The clueless Douste-Blazy, the too beautiful for government Villepin (scourge of America), and feckless, corrupt, bumbling, hapless Then-Jack, Now Ex-Jack -- most days the mock wrote itself. But the Jack pack is gone (more or less) and with it Pave's best source material (more or less).

Pave of late has lost much of its vim. With Mr. Obama bankrupting America, well, France does not loom large in the important things to keep an eye on. [Hard sigh.] Mr. Obama's transformation of America into Canada South has taken a good deal of the edge off mocking France.

I often mused, what is to become of Pave? Recently the legacy site's domain name was let lapse and the site taken down. [Pause.] I think it is time to end Pave and do something entirely from scratch. Something I own and control from the get-go. Something a little bigger than France. Pave will be hard to put down, but the legacy site gone dark was a fell blow and my heart is no longer in it.

If you are a Pave reader or skimmer, thank you for your patronage. If you are a complainer, a socialist, a multiculturalist, a globalwarmist, or a whiny franchouille, well, it is a mystery to me that you read Pave at all.