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There’s something strangely calming about a civilization that, while drowning in debt, rioting over budgets, and preparing for livestreamed executions, still makes time for axe throwing.
In Paris, where bond traders are liquidating the Republic, citizens can visit The Hatchets or Wildness and hurl sharpened steel at wooden targets under professional supervision. Closed-toe shoes are mandatory. The collapse of Western civilization, apparently, has no dress code.
The Ottoman Turks once used the formidable tabar battle axes to build an empire. Their descendants eventually opened axe-throwing parlors in Besiktas, Ayazaga and Sariyer. The French and the Americans shadowed the logic of the Sublime Porte, except that their realms are now being dismantled by the merchants of debt.
Welcome to It's The End Of The World As We Know It, sponsored by the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Congress and whichever pharmaceutical company makes the tranquilizers required to get through the morning newspaper.
France, that magnificent nation which gave humanity Voltaire, the guillotine and the 35-hour workweek, has discovered that arithmetic is a reactionary conspiracy.
Its public debt approaches 120% of GDP. Annual deficits hover around 5%. Pension spending devours national resources while the young demand functioning schools and the elderly demand retirement benefits that cannot be disturbed without bringing several million citizens into the streets.
The bond market, traditionally an institution of extraordinary dullness, has responded by behaving like a diseased mongoose.
French borrowing costs have approached 5%, and investors have begun treating Paris as a worse credit risk than Athens. This is roughly equivalent to being refused a drink by the bartender aboard the Titanic because your credit card was declined.
The French government faces a delicate choice: disappoint the pensioners, disappoint the students, or disappoint the creditors. Naturally, it has elected to disappoint mathematics.
Across the Atlantic, America watches this spectacle with the serene superiority of a man whose own house is burning three blocks away.
Uncle Sam’s national debt has crossed $40 trillion by most estimates. President Donald Trump remains confident that artificial intelligence, entrepreneurial vigor and the sacred American tradition of borrowing from one’s grandchildren will deliver the country from perdition.
Social Security faces a financing reckoning. Politicians have therefore adopted the bold bipartisan strategy of refusing to discuss it until the actuarial tables begin issuing subpoenas.
Up on Capitol Hill, Congress has advanced to a more sophisticated stage of democratic evolution: elected representatives are being asked to promise that they will permit other elected representatives to become elected representatives.
Representatives Don Bacon and Josh Gottheimer are circulating a pledge to honor valid election certificates and seat the winners of November's elections.
After 250 years of constitutional government, the American republic now requires written assurances that an election will be followed by the installation of the people who won it.
One imagines the Founding Fathers receiving this news with the enthusiasm they might have reserved for discovering that the Supreme Court had been converted into a miniature-golf course.
But even this constitutional vaudeville must yield the spotlight to the Pentagon.
According to the reported plan, the military intends to execute convicted Fort Hood mass murderer Nidal Hasan by firing squad, publicly, at the site of his crimes, with a livestream available for the viewing public.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly admires the symbolism. The execution is to occur at the same hour and on the same weekday as the killings, as though justice were a theatrical production whose artistic director had developed an unhealthy obsession with historical re-enactment.
One need not possess the slightest sympathy for a mass murderer to wonder when the United States government decided that the proper response to barbarism was to hire a broadcast crew.
Public executions were once considered an embarrassment to civilized government. Now they are apparently a programming opportunity.
The Ancient Romans had gladiators. MAGA Americans have high-definition streaming and a defense secretary who misses World War II.
And yet, in this grand international carnival of fiscal insolvency, democratic uncertainty and officially sanctioned spectacle, I keep returning to those Parisian axe-throwing establishments.
They may be the last institutions in the Western world operating according to a coherent moral philosophy.
There are rules. There are instructors. Dangerous objects are handled under supervision. Participants are told where to stand, what to throw and, crucially, what not to throw.
Compare this with the French Treasury, the American Congress or the Pentagon's emerging entertainment division, and the axe-throwers begin to resemble Plato's philosopher-kings.
Hmm … maybe the end of the world will not arrive with a nuclear flash or the trumpet of an avenging angel. Perhaps it will come as a polite announcement that the national pension system is insolvent, the election results are under review, and tonight's execution is available on your preferred device.
In that case, I recommend Paris.
One hour. Three people per target.
And for God's sake, don't wear flip-flops.
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