Raoul was a revolutionary. He‘d been fighting for almost 10 years. That‘s how old we all were. Almost 10.He arrived in my primary school class like a Molotov cocktail through the window of a bank. He made it clear that the rules of polite, bourgeois company were not for him. He swore. He smoked. He gelled his hair to look like Michael Jackson. He kissed girls. With tongue.On the playground he was magnetic; a small, handsome boy animated by a current of discontent. These days he would probably be diagnosed and drugged by the medical-industrial complex, but back then he just seemed compellingly raw.In the classroom, he practised both active and passive resistance. School was an oppressive regime and he fought it with everything he had. Arriving late was a moral duty; a calculated act of sabotage targeting one of the pillars of the school system. Homework was a yoke to be thrown off. Sassing the teacher wasn‘t rudeness: it was revolution.Like the great demagogues, he combined stormy o...
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