Hell

Tipping is one of the most perplexing American traditions for us French people. It's also one of the most confusing, as you never know how much you'll end up paying, and displayed prices mean nothing. Back home, when you walk into a bakery to buy some bread, you only need to look at the label and you know, you can prepare your €1,15 and spin your small change in the palm of your hand while queuing. In the US, you always get had. There's always a tax or something that forces you, rushes you to take out your wallet and reconsider your plan, to throw down the drain the perfect mathematical arrangement that you had lengthily, deliciously calculated.

And there's tipping. As our AirBnB host told us in New York, "If the guy doesn't kill me, I give him 15%." This is what seems us so odd, and what is so sleight-of-hand for Americans. To spend your time giving money to people to thank them for not killing you. Darn country of lunatics. Besides, most of them ignore that tipping is a heritage from the post-slavery era. Black people would be given jobs that were barely paid, if at all, and they were allowed to keep the tips from their patrons. That's still the way things go today, except African Americans no longer hold the monopoly on these low-paid jobs. The hourly wage is actually so low that it is often under the legal minimum, and this is widely justified and accepted by the whole population thanks to tipping. So there's a whole social class of people who make a living out of the relative generosity of their patrons. Taxis, housemaids, waiters, tourist guides, grooms, errand boys, delivery men. What if one day these employees considered themselves wronged and decided to organize themselves and earn some respect from their fellow citizens? What if all these invisible hands delivering essential services decided to put these services on hold, or to deliver them in a way that causes harm to those who enjoy them? You get to the rock n' roll side of the slave-master dialectics with a touch of Karl Marx, a touch of Black Panthers, and a touch of Project Chaos from Fight Club - - you know, that moment you get told with a wink that it's safer to stay off the lobster soup tonight.

You would have to be mad to spend a holiday in that country. A deadland, where everyone is potentially a murderer. Ancient Hell. The thing did strike them who live over there, just take a look at some of the names of places we will go through. Devil's Garden, Dark Angel's trail, Dragon's mouth, Devil's Slide, Black Sand Caldron. We should do like the dead in Ancient Greece and keep a coin under our tongues to buy ourselves a safe journey across the Styx on Charon's ferry. Or we could be like Orpheus and Eurydice, walking hand in hand, trusting each other and walking on without turning around. Or we could combine all this and be like Bonnie and Clyde. We've robbed our own bank, and we've hit the road with our loot in our pockets, and we don't care about the danger since we are together, and as long as we can hold each other's hand, nothing can happen.

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