The Punishment of Virtue Read Free Page A

had a long and rich stint in the Balkans, watching as the splintered peoples there tried to get out from under the wreckage of their savage post-Communist downfall. I covered the evolving international consciousness that grew out of that trauma, including the proceedings of the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. When this run came to an end in 2000, I found myself back in Paris, reporting on food. Perfect, no?
    Not for me. I had never felt entirely at ease in Paris. I was always struggling over the sense in what I was doing.
    For some years, I went for the lowest common denominator. I convinced myself—in the desert of international coverage that the U.S. media had become—that just being a foreign correspondent was a kind of salutary subversion. I followed issues in France that had resonance in the United States: labor conflicts at a time when globalization was displacing industrial jobs, struggles over society’s investment in public services like railroads and the post office, day care for working women, a big protest by undocumented immigrants in 1996. I wanted to show how the solutions that Europeans reached to these familiar problems differed from America’s. I told myself that just convincing some Americans that the United States was not the only country in the world would be a service.
    But once I was plunged into the center of the Kosovo conflict in 1999, reporting day and night from NATO headquarters and later from the ground among the devastated refugees, questions about the value of my work were suspended for a time.
    I stayed in the Balkans, crossing and recrossing the Serbia/Kosovo divide, later adding Bosnia to the territories I explored in my rented Yugo. At length, I returned to Paris and spent a year covering ethnic conflicts that I could not take seriously, like Basque separatists or Corsican politico-mafia insurgents, and filing a seemingly endless series of food stories. I chronicled how bakeries were turning into fast-food joints, serving sandwiches to lines of Parisians who no longer took two-hour lunches—a story that was at least ten years old. I did a piece on a three-star restaurant that had switched to an all-vegetarian menu, a sacrilege in carnivorous Paris. And then the mad cow crisis. I went to a slaughterhouse for that one.
    But all the while I had a sense of foreboding. I felt I was marking time as the world was heading toward a perilous turbulence. It seemed the precepts I believed in, the principles I thought my society was founded on, were fading. Instead of the struggle for justice, knowledge, good neighborliness at home and abroad, we seemed to be taken up with entertaining ourselves and amassing fortunes, no matter what the cost to the planet or human dignity. America and Europe seemed to be missing something basic. Something was wrong, and nothing I was doing was helping to right it.
    Then September 11 crashed into the world. It snapped everything into a shocking light. This was it, I thought. Like so many others, I was instantly sure the moment was a watershed. As I joined millions of people watching those Manhattan buildings sink down in a horrendous, helpless, inexorable curtsy, it was clear we had come to a turning point. This was one of those moments that define their century. It was as though the plate tectonics of history were shifting.
    September 11 shattered me, in ways that took me by surprise. Reporting on the ceremony at the centuries-old headquarters of the French National Police, with the great, booming bells of Notre Dame Cathedral throbbing in the background, I found myself weeping, out in the open, unable to wipe my eyes because I had to hold my microphone. I was so grateful to the French for just dropping all the contentiousness that has characterized our peoples’ long and intimate partnership. For days, they waited in line outside the U.S. embassy to pay their respects. Conversations struck up during those days between Frenchmen and-women and