Yo, Caroline, Whachu Got Against da Bronx?

Last week, in connection with some research I was conducting for a possible book, I took the IND up to the Bronx--specifically, to the corner of the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road. (Not my first time in that vicinity, by the way.)

That part of the Bronx is primarily African-American and Latino. It's a lower middle-class neighborhood with a lot of hard-working people. Not far from that intersection is Fordham University. A little further away is the old Italian enclave whose center is on Arthur Ave. To the west is Riverdale, where many of the borough's Jews live.

There's a lot of energy on the Grand Concourse: national chains as well as local enterprises along the storefronts; guys hawking things on the sidewalks; the bustle of thousands of people racing from one place to the next.

My point is that the Bronx is New York City through and through.

So I was somewhat startled to see that according to a recent post by Caroline Fourest, Nicolas Sarkozy's endorsement of the religious yearnings of the general public would result, five years hence, in the French president's being sworn in on the Bible, while "our suburbs will look like the Bronx."

I don't know if Caroline Fourest has been to the Bronx--I'd be delighted to take her to lunch on Arthur Avenue should she like to visit--but no doubt she is thinking of the urban blight of the South Bronx of decades past, symbolized by vacant lots and burning slums.

The Bronx of today, a place where people from different backgrounds, of different faiths and no faith, live and work together, more peacefully than not, might well be a model towards which the French banlieues should aspire. It is hardly the "social desert" that she thinks it is.