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- Because it's a vulnerable zone.
- But why?
- Because there's a nursery school.
- Is it a special nursery school?
- There could be some Jewish kids.
- So it's a Jewish nursery school?
- No. There could also be some Muslim kids.
- So it's a normal one.
- [Nod.]
- How long will you be here for?
- We don't know.
- When will you know?
- We don't know.And I believe that's the truth: they don't know the answers any more than I do.
During the first Iraq War, an anthropologist named Emily Martin conducted a study of how we think about immunity. Her research showed that "popular publications depict the body as the scene of total war between ruthless invaders and determined defenders."As Eula Biss points out in her recent book, On Immunity, many scientists even deny that this military imagery is a metaphor. It is, they insist, simply "how it is." Biss continues: "The body employs some cells as 'infantry' and others as the 'armored unit,' and these troops deploy 'mines' to explode bacteria, while the immune response itself 'detonates like a bomb.'"If we imagine the immune system as a war zone, how do we imagine a war? It seems clear that the soldiers have been stationed across the city largely for show. The French government understandably wants to display that it's doing everything it can to protect its people, though it is a risk to make it seem as though the people need protecting.
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For weeks, it seemed as though the soldiers just transformed from one pair to another. I never saw how the handover happened. Then, in the early hours of pre-dawn when my partner was getting a taxi to the airport, I saw it go down. The whole thing was so swift, so sudden, that by the time R had taken the elevator from the sixth floor to the first, the camo-print truck had come and gone. The soldiers finishing their shift had climbed in the back of the covered pick-up and the new ones had taken their place."Did you see that?" I called down to R."See what?"The next time I saw the truck was several weeks later, in the middle of a weekday afternoon. The truck stayed for several minutes this time, and the group of soldiers talked for a while. A few were sitting in the back of the truck, two were leaning against the side of it, and the pair stationed on the stoop had adopted a casual attitude. An elderly man with a cane and a white flat-cap walked by slowly, not even looking, as if this was the sort of thing he saw every day.
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