Backpedaling in Budapest

The afternoon i arrived here, waiting for the crosstown bus to leave Keleti station, an old man oozing alcohol pheromones saw my suitcase and decided to flush out my nationality (while making pathetic attempts at slobbery hand kissing). We began with a brief exchange in Russian (unusual for an East European), then Italian, French, Deutsch - he just couldn't figure me out. He admitted not knowing any Spanish so i suggested in Hungarian that he sit down and talk with his (also quite inebriated) friend instead, which completely caught him off guard - he literally stumbled backwards and fell into a seat.

'Ah, so you are Hungarian!'

No.

'But only Hungarians know Hungarian.'

Wrong again (but thanks for the compliment on my pronunciation). 'Nem magyar vagyok.'

The bus started to move and since by then he was resigned to the fact that i wasn't going to allow any kind of welcome back foreign harlot smooching, he finally left me alone, burrowing into his friend and their dark green bottle of booze. i turned my attention to keeping my bag upright as the trolleybus rattled down Budapest's cobblestone streets and experienced a moment of light epiphany: no matter how much Hungarian i speak (that i know this language at all always seems a hilarious miracle), no matter how much time i spend here (6+ years seems like a relatively long time, for me), the truth is that i will never overcome those three simple words: Nem magyar vagyok. I'm not hungarian. How totally strange it is to have thought i was 'coming home' for a brief respite and immediately realize that home is the one thing this city - country - could never possibly be for me. Enter through the Fortress Europe Gate and epiphanies abound. Yesterday an Israeli told me, 'You don't come from an ethnic country, you'll never understand the world they way the rest of us do.'

The concept of backpedaling: if you're in motion, you'll keep going forward but without gaining any momentum. If you're at a standstill, the arm muscles have to work harder than the legs in order to keep the bike from falling over; you remain upright, but it can feel like a helluva lot of effort compared to just putting your feet on the ground until whomever you're with catches up and you're ready to move on. Figuratively, backpedaling is all about retracing words/ideas back to some point where you can diverge from the direction they first took and try another road of reason. i passed a guy on the street wearing a t-shirt that showed the borders of Hungary in 1914 with '100% Our Nation' written underneath - obviously an extreme, poorly reasoned form of backpedaling since it would involve taking control of 1/3 of poverty striken Romania and what currency conscious, sane Hungarian would possibly sanction that? The point here is that while it is possible to gain momentum when the backtracking involves a recast of historical time, in most cases this only happens in the realm of fanaticism - nationalist, religious, pick your poison - and leads to human behavior we'd all rather not dwell on. Better to not move at all than to push people forward by shoving them backward into a chimerical past.

Since i left last December, the government here has be engaged in a fair amount of historical backpedaling, changing place names everywhere i look. Moskva tér has been renamed after Széll Kalman, a man of mysterious origins since nobody i've asked has a clue about who he is, though they're all sure he at least wasn't a fascist (yes, one has to ask such things). Baross tér is now the 32nd ter, though again nobody's sure what event in '32 this is meant to commemorate and one friend couldn't even say for certain which century is being invoked. The new Ronnie the Raygun statue was placed in the shadow of the Soviet soldiers memorial, 1945 (a big of Bitburg backpedaling?), but the sad truth is that as political art, it really doesn't work without Iron Maiden Maggie standing by his side. There's also a newly unveiled memorial to victims of the Roma Holocaust, which is a good thing to remind Hungarians and others of, except that it's located in a place where very few people are actually going to see it. Oh well, it's the honest revisionism that really counts, right?

As it is with countries, so too is this usually the case with individual life histories. 'Starting over' only works by remembering which door got you into your personal hell the first time around. To come to Budapest and not get lost in the maze of what's workable for everyone else compared to what's workable for me remains a palpable challenge. If ever i've felt like a trapped little rat, a tightly leashed slave, it's been at intervals during the period i lived in this city of - ahem -

beautiful bridges. People can end up in places they never even knew existed for all sorts of reasons, some manage to carve out a place for themselves and others decide it's better to move on while they still can. Evidently i needed a solid dose of Greek sunlight (figuratively more than literally) to finally shake me free of all those shackles, escape my personal labyrinth of pointless existence: do not get comfortable, do not imagine you belong here. One thing that has become profoundly clear about my own story - especially after a few days here - is that i will probably never be as connected to any geographic location as i am to a somewhat specific array of chronological ones, mostly accessible vis a vis enduring friendships across many time zones and the explorations of different times/eras i've so often shared with these friends, from the Nevada Nuclear Test Site to the ash-covered streets of Pompeii, floating in the Dead Sea, drinking palm oil wine in a lantern-lit Lamu shack. Six months ago, i would have described this as a ridiculous, meaningless life; now i can (almost) comfortably say that it's just my life, for better or worse.

Channeling Tyche, Goddess of Fortune, it's easy at this moment to evanescently embrace the solitude that living on an island in the Danube affords, to standstill for a bit and catch my proverbial breath, electronic thumping of a saturday night in storybook party town wafting through the air as unintrusive as the currents swirling beneath the river's reflective surface. Budapest is, surely, a great city for any traveller to land in, particularly during the summer when the music industry goes utterly beserk and sidewalk cafes fill every bit of exterior pavement. i'll be starting off next week with Prince and ending it with Cheikh Lo -a heavy dose of momentum seems appropriate given that i've then got to get myself all the way to Ulaanbataar (GMT+11?? Facebook is definitely going to give me a hard time about that). We were listening to Gil Scott-Heron earlier today, who says that 'home is what's inside you' (or something like that) which, if true, is a great stress-reducer for someone like myself. Welcome to Planet Earth: wherever you go - forward, backward, inward, outward - there you are, along with the rest of us, pedaling along on the road to tomorrow.

Ready, set, drink!

For reasons that always baffled me, Hungarians have an apparent obsession with getting themselves into the Guinness Book of World Records. While i was living there, it seemed like efforts to perform remarkable, often ridiculous feats, were undertaken with regularity. Among their 44 listings are 'fastest car window opened by a dog' (i kid you not), 'largest garlic string' (take that, Gilroy!), 'most people belly dancing simultaneously', and a number of Rubik's cube titles, probably due to the fact that last year's championship was held in Budapest. Considering that by population Hungary ranks 83rd, 44 listings is actually quite small. Norway ranks 117th but holds 78 world records, many related to the North Pole (take that, Denmark!) and one split four ways, 'most sword swallowers to swallow the same object simultaneously' (who comes up with these categories?). This month, Magyars are making another play for global best, though i'm not entirely sure the title, if won, would be totally legitimate.

Demotix - 8 June 2011: A crowd calculated at 4717 gathered in Bekescsaba, Hungary in an attempt to set the world record for the most people drinking tap water in the same place at the same time.

Wouldn't large events like Woodstock, held in the pre-bottled water era, or any normal workday circa 1960 in the Empire State Building have surpassed this effort? How about a GM plant before the company started moving its operations to other countries (often where potable tap water is still a dream)? It all goes to show that self-awareness is everything; any Grateful Dead concert could surely have gotten into the Guinness book for 'most joints smoked simultaneously' if only Deadheads Synonymous had taken that little extra effort needed to fill out the application form. At any rate, i wish the group in Békescsaba the best of luck and congratulate them on having tap water so many people feel comfortable drinking - sadly, this may well be the more significant facet of the big group drink.

Peakwater.org has a counter on their website for waterbourne disease deaths this year and the current number is approaching 1.6 million. According to UNICEF, over 450 million children lack access to safe drinking water, by which i assume they are not referring to Evian, Slavyanka, et al, but rather tap water delivered from local wells. An article about tugging icebergs to places like the Canary Islands to make up for freshwater shortages indicates the extent to which more extreme (aka insane) measures for supplying water to humans are being pursued. Campaigns to reduce bottled water consumption, ergo plastic waste, are spreading globally, but these will only work if tap water supplies are a viable substitute.

Since i left the US 10 years ago, i can think of only one restaurant/bar which was willing to give me a glass of water from the tap - a moderately upscale place in Krakow - i assure you, the request was treated with no small amount of wonder: not in a bottle? why on earth would someone ever prefer that? In Baku, i boil tap water only because i haven't found anyone else here who drinks it straight from the faucet; who knows for sure whether it would make me sick, some risks are simply not worth taking. i know people here who've installed filters on their taps, but they still buy bottled water for their refrigerated supply.

W.H. Auden wrote, 'Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.' My friend and teacher Corbin Harney never stopped reminding us that we all drink the same water, just as we all breathe the same air. Fresh, potable water supplies are both essential and increasingly fragile. It's good to celebrate them, even if the overt purpose is self-congratulatory :-) As much as some might like to posit otherwise, natural resources are really all about us humans now, so i say drink up and hope that in the next town or country you visit, you'll be able to do the same.

Gratulálok Magyarország! Hála istennek!

Catching up with Spiegel Online this evening, i scrolled past all the radioactive wastelands articles to learn that the Hungarian parliament, under Viktor Orbán's inspired tutelage, has finally voted on a new constitution. On Kossuth tér these days, it is 2011 going on 1935. The Germans and various EU others are not very pleased. Spiegel quotes Süddeutsche Zeitung:

"The constitution enshrines a spirit of ideological, ethnic intolerance, both externally and domestically. Some are being reminded of the fascist rhetoric in Europe between the world wars. Neighboring countries are getting unpleasant memories of the cultural arrogance and power of the Hungary of old, whose Magyarization programs they were subjected to. The new constitution claims that the state of Hungary represents all other Magyars, meaning the three million living in neighboring countries."

Orbán's spokesmen responded to the barrage of criticism coming from Germany with true freedom fighter spirit. "Hungary had to tolerate being instructed what to do or what to include in its constitution from the capitals of other countries for long decades. That era is now over." We have to give the Hungarian political establishment high marks when it comes to never learning from their own history. The purgers later become the purged. This new constitution is so heavily laden with nationalist rhetoric that one can't help but wonder if the motivation is not so much to pat themselves on the back for being Europe's most outstanding race as it is to convince themselves they didn't need papal payouts to set themselves up as an independent kingdom in the first place. Hungarians, in my experience, are even more schizophrenic than Americans when it comes to their identity.

The Fidesz party constitution takes a deep bow towards hefty domestic breeding and enshrines marriage as a solely heterosexual union, which inevitably means the Budapest police can stop whining about traffic obstruction and just ban the annual gay pride march on the grounds that it is unconstitutional. Yet the principle points of contention that have got the Hungarian left-center oppostion and all the centrist EU politicos up in arms involve the extent to which the ruling party will be allowed to cement their economic, judicial and social policies for years to come by making it virtually impossible to change them, even if Fidesz falls out of polling favor in the next elections (2014?). Thankfully, the media law enacted earlier this year should go a long way in ensuring that radical, aka 'anti-Hungarian', opinions are kept out of the public sphere, at least for as long as Fidesz remains in power.

i'm sure i'm not alone in thinking there is serious irony here, considering the circumstances at the root of King Viktor's re-ascension to power. i've been saving this video link for just the right moment... The names of liars in residence may have changed some, but the perversion of truth remains ever constant. Spoken word by Henry Rollins.

Went to the Budapest 350 climate event on Saturday, which essentially turned into a kind of poolside rave. My friend and photo critic M liked this shot best, so that's the one you get. Someone was complaining about the event not being well-organized, as demonstrated by a chaotic beer line; given the local pro-bike, anti-car movement, what surprised me most was that the turnout wasn't larger. No big deal, though, as it's fair to say a good time was had by all.

The one thing which did disappoint me was that the bicycle rickshaw companies were totally absent to pedal people out of the park. They would've done some good business, but instead there were a line of taxis... urggggh! Gotta learn to think ahead, people.

Kharmic histrionics, or, Tom Waits railed against zionism and i missed it?!

More conscientious of late about reaching further out into the blogosphere, i'm thinking the best way to maintain a daily rhythm (and readership) might be to write long, snappy titles and then key out a couple of unassuming sentences or add an image, just so there's an actual post to go with them. More people do this than i would have guessed and it generally works. For example: X, Y or Z. Still, i'm a ridiculously wordy person so long titles are easier to generate than concise to the point of mute postings. Once i had the idea that the best strategy for writing a book would be to generate about 20 chapter titles and then fill in the spaces between them. If you try it and land a publishing deal, please let me know.

The other night i was talking with RM in the great state of Wisconsin and mentioned that i'd been up to the castle earlier that day to see a retrospective exhibit of 20th century Hungarian artist Lajos Vajda. My august attempt to impress her with alliterative nonsense on constructivism was interrupted by her chiding me for mentioning a jaunt to the castle as if it were a perfectly normal, everyday kind of thing. In Wisconsin, they have dairy farms handed down over generations from people who fled Europe to get away from the perversions of royalty, and even in SF, where RM and i both used to live, there are mansions in the city, forts on the cliffs, and nouveau estates over the bridge in Marin - but castles? Not a one. Back in our day, that would've required first a massive handover of cash to Ticketron and then a long drive down the coast to San Simeon; the Hearst Xanadu is a notable paean to excessive wealth, but it's also not the same thing as having a castle in the center of town, its lights reflected at night in the glassy veneer of some european river well-known for inspiring concertos and revolutions. Leave it to a mid-westerner to remind me that one woman's neighborhood castle is another's 'let them eat cake' holiday tour fantasy.

Having been thus jostled, i brought the camera with me to A38 the other night, one of my fave clubs in BP as they seem to have about the best program manager in town. As you can see from the photo, the other trés cool thing about A38 is that it's a boat, anchored on the Buda bank of the Danube not far from the National Theatre, which is visible in the background (behind it the audaciously neon Budapest Palace of the Arts). So not only do i live in a city with a castle, but where people go to concerts on boats - all year round. Sure as hell can't find that in Wisconsin! I don't think you could even find it in Prague. Yet, living here on and off for several years now, the party boat scene has sort of melted into the blur of tattered kiosk posters and palinka binges. Thanks to RM for reminding me not to take the frills of Magyarland for granted, and to N who told me Braindogs were playing and made sure i didn't miss them.

The show happened to be on the night of the only major snowstorm we've had in the city this winter. i'm not a winter person anymore and spend november-march in 3 pairs of socks, in sync with the upper layering of shirts, scarfs and sometimes gloves. i truly believe that if i have to suffer through several months of subzero temps, then it's only fair nature coughs out one of its most magical meteorological perks so that i may at least reap aesthetic pleasure from an otherwise horrid season. Walking in the middle of a down-covered street at night listening to the arythmic thud of snowflakes landing and the airy whoosh as feet displace powder is a virtual reality experience without the gadgets. i know decorative urban lighting is a total waste of electricity, but this particular church on Raday utca looks great at night, snowfall effect creating the impression of an (almost 2-dimensional) Time Burton movie set.

Being a night of cold cold ground, the soundtrack was a perfect fit. Braindogs are a one-show-a-year band who jam so tightly you'd think they'd been touring together for almost as long as the Grateful Dead (ok, Franz Ferdinand). Bluesmen Ian Siegal and Ripoff Rashkolnikov are complemented by a large mix of hungarian musicians who were obviously all born to crank out the indiosyncratic tunes of one of music's most gifted minstrals.

True confession: i actually lost track of Tom Waits in 2005, when i moved to Palestine and went a bit bonkers over George Wassouf and Souad Massi. So i was extremely surprised to hear 'Road to Peace', which is on Waits' 2006 Orphans: Brawlers album. Talk about hitting the nail on its head:

The fundamentalist killing on both sides is standing in the path of peace
But tell me why are we arming the Israeli army with guns and tanks and bullets?

Full lyrics here. The song tells the story of kids who turn their bodies into bombs and makes an a propos reference to Kissinger's real politik... it was bold of them to do this, given the significant number of young israelis filling out the club scene here (generally) and mostly not to hear commentaries on the problem of Israel and America against the world. Even more kudos to Tom Waits for penning these lyrics, and although ironically i've been looking for Souad's last album, that's going to have to wait until after i've caught up with Mr. Waits. My friend M and i used to lament how working full-time in the Palestinian hinterland made it difficult to participate in the kind of on-going direct action resistance that we're genetically programmed to do. So too, it's ironic that with all the anti-occupation music being passed around there, this one fell through the cracks. i'm close to half a century old, i really shouldn't have a problem multi-tasking this sort of thing. Give me Ska-P, give me Waits! Once upon a time, i realized that good things would happen if i just made a point of showing up... another instance of prescient slackerism. Guess it took a few cm's of snow to yank my head out of the counter-kharmic sand.

Le Monde is reporting that the body found in the Danube yesterday here in Budapest may be that of Ophelie Bretnacher, a 22-yr-old french student who disappeared at the beginning of December. The central districts of the city have for weeks now been covered with flyers bearing her photo, looking for information about her, etc. and sadly, DNA tests will be required to determine if this is, in fact, her body. Bretnacher's disappearance spawned an interesting thread here about attacks on foreign women in the city; i gotta say that based on what my hungarian friends and students say about safety - especially at night - this is hardly a novel phenomenon. Though i am not a particularly paranoid person when it comes to this kind of stuff, i do keep my doors locked when i'm home. Too many tales of break-ins, even in broad daylight. i'm guessing that when Taken comes to the theatres here, it will do well at the box office.

Hungarians and expats alike joke about the little language glossaries found in the back of tourist guides, which invariable contain inquiries like 'Can i have your phone number?' 'Do you have any condoms?' and 'How much does a room cost per hour?' Indeed, the reputation of hungarian girls as aspiring porn queens is well-established throughout Europe and beyond; i've had more than a few escapees from the Iraq war zone comment that the best thing about this country are its uninhibited females (yes, definitely paraphrasing). i also hear over and over how low salaries are for public employees and especially teachers, probably because, being a teacher myself, i tend to meet people involved in education. Put these two things together and it's hardly a surpise to discover that teachers are advertising their sexual talents on the internet. Is this a scandal? Should teachers be fired for using sex to augments their measley incomes? It may be tasteless, but as long as it's not illegal... if schools start patrolling the internet in search of naked educators, how far away are we from seeing them fired for being gay or recreational drug users or whatever else doesn't fit the prevailing social norms?

Nemzeti Vágta - National Gallop

This past weekend, the Hungarians resurrected the traditional Vágta - best translated as 'gallop' in English - in the hopes it will find a place on the EU's list of not-to-be missed summer events. All the counties in Hungary had stalls promoting their wines, crafts, etc., and on Saturday evening the Horseriders Theatre presented a fine production of some hungarian tale which lots of folks seemed familiar with... definitely took us back at least a 100 years to Hussar love triangles, village witches and jesting town criars. One truism about this country is that people are expert in organizing large events and aim for as much grandeur and innovation as possible... ok, putting a cow-on-spit in Kids' World was probably a bit over the top.... In the riding sequences, you'll see the parading of the jockeys (6 per race) as well as a bit of race action, all under the towering bronzes of Arpad, founder of the nation, with his band of pagan horsemen who came here from Central Asia. These cultural roots are more than obvious in some of the costumes and in the yurts.

i've created 2 slide shows, once from Saturday (i got there in the late afternoon) and the other from Sunday (it was hot, crowded, impossible to see the races if you weren't right up on the fence, so i left around 16h). Click on the individual slide show, it will open up a new window, then click on gallery>slideshow/diarama and you should get a full screen show. Right now, there are no captions; i'll try to write some as time permits, but likely only if people ask for them - I have been away from the blog and there are many, many other things i want to rant on now that my focus and energy for it have returned. In the meantime, enjoy the visuals!!!

My Own Private UN

Tomorrow night i start another 8-week segment of Hungarian language classes, so i figured it was time to finally write about the last one. This has been one of the most interactive multi-cultural experiences i’ve had in BP – interactive because of the nature of the situation (obviously), but also on a very personal level, as everyone has been fairly interested in everyone else’s national or ethnic orientation to living and working here. We were ten people from ten different countries, four different continents. After English, which everyone spoke to some degree, the second most common language was Arabic; the two Hungarian teachers – Agi on Mondays, Ildiko on Wednesdays – were sometimes driven to tell us “Stop speaking Arabic!” at times of vocabulary crises, which i found rather hilarious. We also had two Russian speakers, and two of us spoke French.

Left>Right: Ahmed (Palestinian Jordanian), Dave (Belgium), Richard (UK), myself (CA), Mohammed (Egypt), Tatyana (Russia), Sasha (Ukraine), Reza (Iran), and Kursat (Turkey). Missing: Omar (Somalia).

Imagine the UN without headsets - that’s pretty much what this was like. The teacher writes something on the board and it’s immediately recorded in 7 or 8 different languages. Together we formed a giant web of alphabets, diacritical marks and phonetic near-equivalents. What we most had in common is that everyone is figuring out how Hungarians put their ideas together, which is at times non-translatable (depending on your language) even while being culturally comprehensible, since we’re all living here and see it in action every day. Mohammed and Omar, who come from cultures with strong oral traditions, definitely picked things up faster than the rest of us; a gentle reminder to me that academic educational levels can have little importance when it comes to communicative abilities (particularly vocabulary retention).

On the last day of the last session we had, two weeks ago, Reza gave everyone holiday cards on the occasion of the Iranian New Year, Nourouz, along with print-outs about the holiday in Hungarian and Arabic (for half of us). When people ask me whether i ever plan to return to the US to live, this is one of the reasons at the heart of my resounding NO. There is something about translating from one second language into another second language, on a regular basis, that makes me feel plugged into the multicultural transmigrations of the modern era like little else can. It’s such an integral part of life in Europe; Hungarians may be cynical about any of us reaching a fluency level in their language, but nearly all of them are engaged in learning a 2^nd or 3^rd language as well. Sure, it’s economically driven, people want to be able to word abroad, or work here, and so you’ve got to be able to communicate. About a week ago, i was at a friend’s flat and among 6 people, there were 4 different native tongues (Hungarian, English, Spanish and Italian). In my European experience, this is normal; reflecting back on my years in the US, it was far from the norm.

Tomorrow, it’s back to the Hungarian post-position grind: post-positions are little tags that give prepositional meanings to words and they are quite difficult to master (as prepositions in every language tend to be). i don't know how many of these individuals will be in my next class, hopefully all of them, but it'd be great to add people from eastern Asia and South America, just to grow the web a bit. We may not be able to solve the world's problems, but it's the flipside of the cultural clashes motif, which has got to be good for something.

Terror and Loyalty

A few years ago, the building which served as Hungary’s version of Lubyanka was officially opened as a museum: the Terror Haza (House of Terror). That it’s situated on lovely Andrassy Avenue in the heart of Pest somehow makes even more repugnant what went on inside. Like if Guantanamo were underneath Lincoln Center or the Eiffel Tower, a place where, years later, visitors would wonder how such things could be going on right under everyone’s noses. Yet it wasn’t a case of people not knowing what was happening there; blacked-out basement windows were insufficient cover for the torturous madness within. It was also, in the main, something of an officers’ club. The vibe inside is mostly grey, a very dull grey, except in the club rooms which are all red, as in Red Star, or Gestapo-esque cabaret veneer.

The Terror House offers these succinctly captivating (no pun intended) themes: Nazi occupation, Soviet occupation, deportation, internment, gulag, surveillance. In the dungeon one enters the cells and torture chambers, a few with victims’ photos lining the walls, some of whom went from torturer to tortured as the needle of power swung awry in the years following WWII and Hungarians struggled to get their communism right. (Szabo Magda called it “the circus” and the more i learn the history, the more on the mark she seems to be.) A few years ago, i met a British diplomat who’d attended the opening and said that by the end of it, many photos had walked. The history of totalitarianism remains fresh here, and there may well be former interrogators ambling down the streets with silver-tipped canes whose families would prefer the past stay buried in the realm of historical immunity... or perhaps that of irreparable pain. Tényleg,egy cirkusz volt.

In what initially struck me as a nice example of Orwellian doublespeak, the head of the fascist Arrow Cross had called 60 Andrassy the House of Loyalty. This is a side of the terror cube that i don’t normally think about, although the connection now seems obvious. It brought to mind Tali Fahima’s account of how, during her interrogation, Israeli Shabak tried to recruit her as a spy using the loyalty card... Do you want to be responsible for your people dying? Then there’s all the rhetoric spewed out since 9/11/2001 about being with the terrorists if you’re not against them. We’ve got candidate for change Obama announcing that he’d bomb Pakistan if there was actionable intelligence: give us your loyalty or we’ll give you death. The same model, recycled over and over again. Anyone who rejects torture on the grounds that it doesn’t produce useful information anyway is not necessarily rejecting the paradigm (which in my humble opinion, is no way to run the world in this or any other century).

Is loyalty an essential component to terror? No, i wouldn’t say that. Yet it does come into force in a number of nationalist struggles today, such as in Kosovo, Palestine, Pakistan, where we find psychological terror vis a vis national or religious loyalty used as a precursor to internal violence. This is the dangerous road down which many believe the US is now travelling, and brings me to the final thing i want to say about the Terror House and it’s current exhibit on the deportation of Hungarians from Czechoslovakia in 1947. Specifically, the use of terror against ethnic minorities as a way to cement nationalist fervor for whatever other insanities those in power want to actualize.

A Hungarian friend recently pointed me towards the continuing question of safety for the Hungarian community living in Slovakia. This stuff is like a vignette out of an early Woody Allen film in its preposterousness: putting up giant crosses to remind Hungarian-Slovaks which country they live in? A Christo vision run amok. Can anyone in their right mind actually believe that Hungary is mobilizing to threaten the sanctity of Slovakia’s borders, starting with the arming of its little ethnic enclaves in the south? More to the point, does an ethnically pure Slovakia offer the Slovaks some intrinsic benefit they can’t currently wrap their arms around? Of course not. Yet the terror of deportation is hardly a distant memory in European history. People here, i’m learning, take this kind of politics quite seriously, even though it comes from a minority. i’ve had otherwise reasonable Hungarians tell me they think Chinese-living here should be kicked out, and i won’t even get started on the things i’ve heard said about Roma, who aren’t treated well anywhere in Europe.

So, i left the House of Terror more viscerally convinced that internationalism is a dream hanging out there in the far distant future. Too much divisive baggage still being carried around, not enough people willing to look honestly at history’s replicating nature. However, i must add that with all the fervor being given to Naomi Wolff’s current stomp speech, the US seems far away still from the kind of fascism that swallowed up Europe in the 1930-40s. You wouldn’t find as many people at the Super Bowl as there were at Hitler’s super rallies. The zombie factor in America remains small, by comparison. A tinge of hope mixed with a bit of fear? Ok ok, i know the rap: we must remain ever vigilant.