Dear Aunt Susan,
I'm waiting for news of the Roberts-Freeman Christmas gathering. While I'm certain y'all had a grand time, I'm also panting for some details. I was a little bit heartsick at missing it, and wanted very much to be there with Adam and let y'all get acquainted with him. I'm hoping for next year, or the year after that at the longest. I really hope that Christopher and Alison got to riffing jokes with each other. They are two of the funniest people I have yet met in life. I'm sure I'll get some story from Mom and Dad in the next while.
Now, because I'm me, and this is us, my report on Christmas traditions begins with a political observation I don't expect you to share, but have a compulsion to express anyway.
I used to find those loose associations of "Keep the Christ in Christmas" people a kind of irritating minor element in the culture wars. Like Christmas is the only holy day at this time of year. They seemed to have problems with abbreviations and with consumerism (many fewer with consumerism, which is what I think is actually sucking the life out of the holiday spirit) and with people like me who think a cresh on church property is great and warms my heart, but in front of the county courthouse they're a serious Constitutional problem. Now I find these people pathetic and laughable.
That's not a real friendly way to open a letter about Christmas traditions in Old Europe, but hang on, it gets friendlier and I'll explain myself.
Stalin, that souless ass, and his political descendants would jail/exile to the Gulag/kill people for keeping the rituals of their faiths, and the USSR covered turf full of many faiths: Catholics and Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, and probably a few of the remaining Zarathustrians. People of faith here were not insulted by the abbreviation "Xmas," they were insulted in their being by the brutality of a government violently hostile to any form of social organization that did not consist of, well, it. And people lived like this for a good chunk of the last century. Hungary fell under Soviet control in 1956 and became free again in 1989 along with everyone else.
Christmas in the US has nothing at all to fear for its well being and continued celebration in the US. Of this we can be sure.
No one here forgot how to do Christmas, or what it's about, or why it's good. Even after not being allowed to celebrate it for 40-odd years. In Hungary, because the dominant faith is Roman Catholicism, it's not just Christmas. Every public calendar is marked with the season of Advent and a host of ceremonies and public caroling and performance events run all the way up to Christmas Mass. Small towns like Papa have a tiny Christmas Market, but cities like Budapest, or Prague, or Vienna have huge markets with vendors selling religious and merely decorative ornaments, foods of an astonishing variety, gluwine (mulled wine, we call it), gifts, the whole bit. It is Very Christmasy. The vendors are a mix of local restaurants, individuals with their one-food shops, artists and so on. It's amazing.Towns all decked out in lights and festoons of tinsel and fir branches. Saints are celebrated, like Saint Lucia (especially the Swedes are fond of her) who is the bringer of light in the darkness of winter -- a saint who folds the old solstice celebrations in with Christianity. People eat dinner with their friends a little more frequently, and there's also a good deal of shopping. Adam and I trekked up to the mall in Gyor to do some of our Gift shopping together (great fun learning each others' tastes there), and it was as busy and as much a place to display social status as any mall in the US. It has a Burger King, but also two cafes with good espresso and a couple of gellato shops, a good sandwich shop, lots of places to sit and people watch so the mall is an indoor version of a city square and walking streets. Europe if just fine by me.
As to Hungarian Christmas day traditions, I don't know because we had dinner with some Romanian friends. So, I can tell you about that. This is a big meal. Makes the feasts we typically put on look a little puny. There's a course of cold meats, cheese, bread and veg like olives and tomatoes. A course of salads, usually a kind of cole slaw and an eggplant puree (divine!) and a mixed veg salad with mayonnaise I know from Mom's French version, and a couple others that I've forgotten. I brought Grandma's spinach ring, which also came out perfectly, much to my amazement given that oven and total absence of saltine crackers from this country. Turns out that this oven only cooks at speed when set on convection, and then it cooks things F A S T. Then two meat courses, one of pork and one of fowl. In this case I brought the duck I roasted, which worked after much giggering in this infernal oven that I'm still learning to run. The pork dishes were cutlets mostly, and served with spiced potatoes. Then there was coffee. This after several rounds of whiskey (the 8 of us put down fifth of that), rum that our house had encased in ice that held fir twigs and oranges in it and kept the rum cold (a trick he learned from Jamie Oliver on TV), and a famous Romanian wine called Lacrima lui Ovidiu (Tears of Ovid) which is completely amazing and tastes a bit like a white port but more complex. Then desserts, plural, and about six of them, with coffee and digestives (read more port). These were a chocolate and sourdough bread, a sour cream cake in which are hidden little fortunes for the new year for everyone are folded tin foil and hidden in the cake (mine was an Emerson quote: "A hero is just as brave as a normal man, only for five minutes longer."), and last but not least a kind of cinnamon crumble cake with candied fruit in it. In short, our hostess informed us, that many Easter Orthodox fast during Advent, eating mostly vegetables and milk, and then feast like mad on Christmas and wind up in the hospital. I believe her. We learned that the Romanians of Transylvania like sugar, and Moldovans like salt, and this is a source of much amusement gentle cultural ribbing.
After dinner, because we're all about the same age, we used the TV and a laptop to watch 80s music on the TV, so that was Madonna and Depeche Mode, and some Satchmo because one of the guests loves Louis Armstrong, and a recently famous Romanian sheep herder (I am not making this up) who recorded a song about long memories and regrets that Romanians love for a chance to think back over the hardness of life and appreciate the joy they're having now. Adam and I have lots of Armstrong's music in our collections, so we're making that guest a CD or two. We talked about our various traditions and the vagaries of the Hungarian language (no verb for "to have," possession and various past tenses just work differently here) and how Ovid lived in Romanian, in Costanza where our hosts are from, when the Roman's exiled him for publishing some rather gossipy stories and having a affair with the wrong man's wife.
In short, it was fantastic.
New Year's will be interesting because for two days sales of fireworks are legal and everyone and their uncle shoots them off at midnight. There are parties to which one buys tickets at the local restaurants and hotels for dinner and drinks. It is rumored that people don't go home until 4 or 5 in the morning. Given the ZERO tolerance for drinking and driving here, I suppose the two cab companies in town make a mint that morning.
Other than that, we found a mutt at a shelter we might adopt. It's a mix of German Sheppard and Hungarian Viszla (a pointer), so he's marked like a Sheppard with a pointer head and ears. Ridiculous and adorable (on this page, he's the 19th or 20th picture down the page). He's six months old. We're giving this serious thought as we're keeping the colonel's Viszla now, and she's fabulous but a very "be with the humans" dog. These Viszla look like Wiemarnars, but they're red. Smart as whips, fast as light, and this one we're dogsitting hunts shadows because she hasn't figured out yet that they're attached to other real things. Better than television. Anyway, if this mutt has more of an independent Sheppard personality, then he's for us. Because I can tell from the size of this dog's legs in the picture that he's going to be humongous. I can't deal with a humongous needy dog. I'm sure all his commands are Hungarian, so we'll have to get a list of those!
That's the news, Susan. I send masses of love and heaps of goodness for the new year to you and all my cousins.
Huggin' your neck from Hungary!
M
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Hugo Went Home: A Meditation on Otherness
In the back garden we have a stone fireplace with little stools around it, a fire pit really. Having no idea where to get firewood at a good price, and this being Hungary one should be able to find some, I asked the question on my military/ex-pat community's Facebook page, and Hugo said that there was good cheap wood at the Home Depot down the street, easy peasy. "Home sweet home," he said.
What Hugo is experiencing is the expansion of self that comes with familiarity, belonging, with not being the other.
In a moment when we're turning our attention to the needs of capital and away from the needs of humans, I think this is a good point on which to meditate -- because we are all other-marginal-instrumental from the point of view of capital as we experience it for now.
I'm an Anglo, a Celt, a white chick, so I don't look like a person who can't speak Hungarian. Nothing marks me other until I and a Hungarian try to have even a simple conversation like, "Thanks," and "You're welcome, here's your change." It's the clause"here's your change" that screws up my face and causes either an indulgent smile or a closure of expression.
So, the contraction of self that comes with being other doesn't have anything to do with being spotted, as does the contraction that comes with being othered racially. It's in my head. I know I'm lost and confused and a bit of an interloper and asking people to work harder than they otherwise would have to just to help me buy flour (of which there are 6 or 7 types and grades, bread being serious business in Europe). I feel contracted with confusion and humility and a whole aura of apollogetics. I do not fit, am capable of making a huge social mistake at any moment just by doing what comes naturally (by which I mean culturally) to me. I am marginal.
(Don't worry, I'm having a lovely time in my ex-pat adventure, it's just that there's this layer too, this sharpening of my awareness of this phenomenon coming to me thanks to being way outside my comfort zone, as people say.)
What this feeling reminds me of is those moments in being a woman when I feel endangered or just really alienated in very male spaces or in a world that still runs itself on their worst logics and wants no room for me other than as slut or wife-mom--no room for girl or professor or CEO. In that world I can be smart, but I had better be prettier than I am smart in order to get away with it. And if I'm too pretty, I can be fired for distracting the men from their work.
Which, by the way, masculine zeitgeist, would you just make up your damn mind?
Muslims in America and Europe, Roma in Europe, Hispanics and Latinos in America, immigrants of all stripes feel this, this contraction of self that comes with being other. Blacks in America can tell you long, interesting, heartbreaking, hilarious, and very detailed stories about this contraction. So can GBLT people. As other you have two roles: instrument or threat.
And the thing about that contraction is that the attempt to expand the self and relax into one's cultural space can happen like any other very energetic expansion -- it can become explosion. That is its natural-cultural form. It can be peaceful, it can be loving and gentle and insistent, but that is very hard work, as all the non-violent social movements demonstrate in their discipline.
The students and professors in the UK have just very actually learned what it feels like to be other of capital. That there have been little explosions in otherwise weeks and weeks and weeks of peaceful and very creative demonstrations is no surprise. There's money. It's just that 80% of current budgets for the humanities will be cut, and student tuition will triple all at once to $14,000 USD. There's money. Just not for education in meaning.
And not knowing how to mean, or what something means, or how to engage with the meanings that surround you, that are created by science-math-business and are very technical -- that is the contraction of self that comes with being other.
Welcome to the world of women, of non-whites in white nations, of immigrants, of fungible workers. It is not a comfy fit, being human in a wholly technical world. You'll see.
What Hugo is experiencing is the expansion of self that comes with familiarity, belonging, with not being the other.
In a moment when we're turning our attention to the needs of capital and away from the needs of humans, I think this is a good point on which to meditate -- because we are all other-marginal-instrumental from the point of view of capital as we experience it for now.
I'm an Anglo, a Celt, a white chick, so I don't look like a person who can't speak Hungarian. Nothing marks me other until I and a Hungarian try to have even a simple conversation like, "Thanks," and "You're welcome, here's your change." It's the clause"here's your change" that screws up my face and causes either an indulgent smile or a closure of expression.
So, the contraction of self that comes with being other doesn't have anything to do with being spotted, as does the contraction that comes with being othered racially. It's in my head. I know I'm lost and confused and a bit of an interloper and asking people to work harder than they otherwise would have to just to help me buy flour (of which there are 6 or 7 types and grades, bread being serious business in Europe). I feel contracted with confusion and humility and a whole aura of apollogetics. I do not fit, am capable of making a huge social mistake at any moment just by doing what comes naturally (by which I mean culturally) to me. I am marginal.
(Don't worry, I'm having a lovely time in my ex-pat adventure, it's just that there's this layer too, this sharpening of my awareness of this phenomenon coming to me thanks to being way outside my comfort zone, as people say.)
What this feeling reminds me of is those moments in being a woman when I feel endangered or just really alienated in very male spaces or in a world that still runs itself on their worst logics and wants no room for me other than as slut or wife-mom--no room for girl or professor or CEO. In that world I can be smart, but I had better be prettier than I am smart in order to get away with it. And if I'm too pretty, I can be fired for distracting the men from their work.
Which, by the way, masculine zeitgeist, would you just make up your damn mind?
Muslims in America and Europe, Roma in Europe, Hispanics and Latinos in America, immigrants of all stripes feel this, this contraction of self that comes with being other. Blacks in America can tell you long, interesting, heartbreaking, hilarious, and very detailed stories about this contraction. So can GBLT people. As other you have two roles: instrument or threat.
And the thing about that contraction is that the attempt to expand the self and relax into one's cultural space can happen like any other very energetic expansion -- it can become explosion. That is its natural-cultural form. It can be peaceful, it can be loving and gentle and insistent, but that is very hard work, as all the non-violent social movements demonstrate in their discipline.
The students and professors in the UK have just very actually learned what it feels like to be other of capital. That there have been little explosions in otherwise weeks and weeks and weeks of peaceful and very creative demonstrations is no surprise. There's money. It's just that 80% of current budgets for the humanities will be cut, and student tuition will triple all at once to $14,000 USD. There's money. Just not for education in meaning.
And not knowing how to mean, or what something means, or how to engage with the meanings that surround you, that are created by science-math-business and are very technical -- that is the contraction of self that comes with being other.
Welcome to the world of women, of non-whites in white nations, of immigrants, of fungible workers. It is not a comfy fit, being human in a wholly technical world. You'll see.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
A Post by Way of Explanation to a Friend Unlikely Ever to Read It unless I Email It to Him
So, it keeps coming up, doesn't it? What you think of as my failure, my moral failure; or when you're calmer and feeling kinder, my infection -- which implies weakness rather than laziness.
You track some deep change, a growing unrecongnizability, a listing toward being "an ugly American" and a lack of seriousness that rattles your cage but good. You're disappointed and angry. And I know how hard it was to write that last email because I know how angry you were. Which tells me how much you respected me before (which had not really registered with me for complicated psychological reasons most people take for a charming humility), and so prompts this reply.
My reply email to you did not take several tries, it came fast and sure, and expressed mostly my exhaustion with the whole thing. I had in fact been waiting and waiting to write it. I tried for an explanation. I missed. I defended rather than explained myself, and I did that because the real explanation is so much worse than the one you're thinking of.
That I am supported now by a lover paid by the US DOD is not the problem, the source of my months of dark humor, bad jokes, and generalized laissez-faire-ah-fuck-it attitude. I have no trouble at all with my lover's employer, current or previous assignments. I have always had massive, insurmountable, trenchant problems with the policies and their makers that have determined the course of history for the last, it seems to me now, ever.
You liked the me that had a lot of fight in me. The obstreperous me, the oppositional and defiant me. You read that, my faith with Adorno and Marcuse, my company with experimental poetics, with feminist philosophers of a very difficult and visionary stripe, as a kind of intellectual integrity. I had a lot of fight in me.
And for the last little while, and still now, I don't, and you think me intellectually compromised by my relationship because of my lover's employer. You think I'm feeling stuck because this good person has killed people in two wars, and yet I get angry that world class football treats young players as disposable humans. You think that I have blinded myself to the presumed disposable of the people killed in these wars so that I can have some security of my own. You suspect that I'm making too many compromises, have traded my obstreperous integrity for love and a roof.
If only it were that simple, that easily changed.
The gig really is that I have been toying with the idea of decadence, of giving up, getting high, indulging myself dangerously, and letting that stubborn stupid world eat itself alive like it clearly, and dearly wants to.
That's what the real trouble is. I have been having a very hard time shaking off the cynicism, the bleak, near total certainty that my good work and integrity, or yours -- or that of all the brave and shining souls who still inspire me -- is all for fucking naught because the sheer inertia of the complexity of the proliferating, I'll be frank, intentional meanness of the administered-military-industrial-society with which we all live is inexorable, perfected, and utterly disinterested in any outcome other than its own self-annihilating satisfaction. I mean have you seen the stock markets? There is no real reason for those numbers.
I'm not intellectually compromised by having the DOD for a patron indirectly and unawares. I'm tired, and scared, and pissed at myself for even being remotely tempted to just go get seriously stoned and forget it all. Because the shining souls are still there, inspiring and perspiring and generally kicking ass and many of them are my dear friends, and how, my word, how can I let them down?
So, what you have read as selling out, and that's what you mean to say, is not that exactly. It's a soul-cleaving ambivalence, and I haven't even resolved it enough to sell out.
That's the thing, the unnamed quake that has rattled your cage and made you suspicious of and worried for and so angry at me. And that's why all my apologies have rung false. I can apologize for saying asinine things, even if I said them ironically. The irony was inaudible because of this that I can't apologize for: I am struggling, very hard, not to give up.
You track some deep change, a growing unrecongnizability, a listing toward being "an ugly American" and a lack of seriousness that rattles your cage but good. You're disappointed and angry. And I know how hard it was to write that last email because I know how angry you were. Which tells me how much you respected me before (which had not really registered with me for complicated psychological reasons most people take for a charming humility), and so prompts this reply.
My reply email to you did not take several tries, it came fast and sure, and expressed mostly my exhaustion with the whole thing. I had in fact been waiting and waiting to write it. I tried for an explanation. I missed. I defended rather than explained myself, and I did that because the real explanation is so much worse than the one you're thinking of.
That I am supported now by a lover paid by the US DOD is not the problem, the source of my months of dark humor, bad jokes, and generalized laissez-faire-ah-fuck-it attitude. I have no trouble at all with my lover's employer, current or previous assignments. I have always had massive, insurmountable, trenchant problems with the policies and their makers that have determined the course of history for the last, it seems to me now, ever.
You liked the me that had a lot of fight in me. The obstreperous me, the oppositional and defiant me. You read that, my faith with Adorno and Marcuse, my company with experimental poetics, with feminist philosophers of a very difficult and visionary stripe, as a kind of intellectual integrity. I had a lot of fight in me.
And for the last little while, and still now, I don't, and you think me intellectually compromised by my relationship because of my lover's employer. You think I'm feeling stuck because this good person has killed people in two wars, and yet I get angry that world class football treats young players as disposable humans. You think that I have blinded myself to the presumed disposable of the people killed in these wars so that I can have some security of my own. You suspect that I'm making too many compromises, have traded my obstreperous integrity for love and a roof.
If only it were that simple, that easily changed.
The gig really is that I have been toying with the idea of decadence, of giving up, getting high, indulging myself dangerously, and letting that stubborn stupid world eat itself alive like it clearly, and dearly wants to.
That's what the real trouble is. I have been having a very hard time shaking off the cynicism, the bleak, near total certainty that my good work and integrity, or yours -- or that of all the brave and shining souls who still inspire me -- is all for fucking naught because the sheer inertia of the complexity of the proliferating, I'll be frank, intentional meanness of the administered-military-industrial-society with which we all live is inexorable, perfected, and utterly disinterested in any outcome other than its own self-annihilating satisfaction. I mean have you seen the stock markets? There is no real reason for those numbers.
I'm not intellectually compromised by having the DOD for a patron indirectly and unawares. I'm tired, and scared, and pissed at myself for even being remotely tempted to just go get seriously stoned and forget it all. Because the shining souls are still there, inspiring and perspiring and generally kicking ass and many of them are my dear friends, and how, my word, how can I let them down?
So, what you have read as selling out, and that's what you mean to say, is not that exactly. It's a soul-cleaving ambivalence, and I haven't even resolved it enough to sell out.
That's the thing, the unnamed quake that has rattled your cage and made you suspicious of and worried for and so angry at me. And that's why all my apologies have rung false. I can apologize for saying asinine things, even if I said them ironically. The irony was inaudible because of this that I can't apologize for: I am struggling, very hard, not to give up.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Roma: Un-Fashionable
It's not just the US where some growing up needs to happen. France's Sarkozy could use a dose of adulthood himself.
No one wants gypsies, travelers, Roma around, but many don't mind dressing like them even if they don't like the idea of the stubbornly other others.
Where the US is having a spasm of religious suspicion (you know, as kind of side dish to its constant ethnic tension), here it's gypsies and a couple governments stomping on the hornets' nest. It's easy to do because these are peoples who deliberately do not integrate, or assimilate, and frequent don't cooperate. They pretty much want to keep to themselves and do take care of their own. Independence is the key stone of their culture. They are not usually thieves and kidnappers of children (that's organized crime), but it's easy to think so since the odds that the average European is friends with a traveler or Roma are kinda slim. The contemporary gypsy is a slow moving nomad in a mobile home or a camper van, and Europe is a place where nomadic cultures settled down in one place a L O N G time ago. So, figuring out the legal status, which settled nations base on citizenship, of a nomad who moreover does not want to be a citizen is really hard to do.
But, it's grown a bit nasty again in the recession. All the people on a nation's soil cost money, and money is thin on the ground for the world's governments these days. So, where the American public is being childish and mean; France and Italy are leading a controversial push to make it easier to kick people out of their countries. Many of the Roma in France come from Romania, which Sarkozy argues, receives about 4 billion euros from the EU, but spends just .04% of that on their gypsy minority, which results in that minority moving off to other countries. The UN, Human Rights Campaign, the Vatican, about half of Sarkozy's cabinet and lots of Europeans think this policy is bad, wrong, and generally mean.They deplore it, loudly, on behalf of the Roma and against the precedent this move sets.
Sarkozy is in a tough fight for re-election, and he's running to the right. As he is wont to do, and as many US conservative politicians do (flags, guns, gays, god, immigrants, ....) when they feel a real challenge. It's a reflex. It's as dangerous and boring as most mental or cultural reflexes. What bothers me is that Sarkozy is flirting with cultural policies that are very close to those of national socialist groups in Europe whose economic policies would appeal to US conservatives, but whose cultural programs are openly reminiscent of those infamous national socialists. (Though, lately, it seems that those darker policies are developing some appeal as well.)
England is taking a slightly different tack. Here, the trouble with travelers is that they tend to set up camp on undeveloped land that doesn't belong to them. Not surprising, that's what travelers have always, for centuries (maybe millennia) done. Here, the government recognizes traveler communities, and is in a pickle over where to let them set up camps and how to balance that living space against local town's needs, taxes, green belt space, and other concerns. There's even work on making sure their children are decently educated. I'm not sure of the communities in France, but one factor that may ease some (certainly not all, hating on travelers is tradition here) of the friction between these margin dwellers and established society is that they share a language. French (the government I mean here) really don't like people who don't speak French.
So, what's going on there with the fashion trend right in the same season France and Italy are getting in snit over gypsies? Why do people like the food, the music, the style of this or that other-group (gypsy style and guitar, gansta rap, soul food, jazz, gospel, Tex-Mex, ...) while despising the people who create it? The connection isn't that these others are all criminals, since they aren't or only pretend to be, or their criminality is a rather passive even a secondary effect of social forces other than their own will to break a law.
I am guilty of indulging in the identity appropriation of gypsy fashion, have been for a long time. A good chunk of my wardrobe is still gypsy-esque and "bohemian." This has a great deal to do with my antipathy for offices. And that's the link to my sympathy; well, that and the fact that gypsy guitar turns me on. In high school, I loved the aura of gypsies not for their nomadism, a little bit for the romantic image of them, and a lot for their deliberate alienation. I felt pretty darn alienated in the age of "greed is good," and was looking for ways to increase that feeling and status. I figured, the farther out of the current, the fresher the waters. Every Halloween, gypsy costume. J-Lo's Roma-inspired dance-centric video and that movie about chocolate with cinnamon and cayenne pepper ground in it, the one with Johny Depp and Juliet Binoche and the low key ultra sexiness of Depp's gypsy, those had not been made. So, it was mostly the travelers' ability to build a whole culture (I didn't know there several) outside/alongside the dominant one--their choice of the margin over the center, their willingness to do what it takes to live Out There. I admired that and their general talent for not being destroyed (shooed away, sure, and then the Nazi's really went for them, but mostly not destroyed).
What's interesting, I think, to America from the France vs. England approaches to these others is that it links to our issues and debates over migrant workers in the US illegally. They're not gypsies--not people who would prefer to roam--but economically dispossessed folk looking to feed their kin. The consequent effects of their presence in the US is not their goal. And like them, the gypsies over here are not interested in doing harm, they're just interested in getting by and doing right by their families and culture. France wants to throw them out, now, and finger print them so they can't sneak back in. England wants to work out what the British call "reasonable accommodation." They see these people as people, not problems and political pawns.
There's a surprising lot of good information about the Roma and British and Irish travelers here at the BCC, and much coverage of the current debates over at The Guardian. It's fascinating stuff.
Ok, so, next post: cabinetry. I promise. Time to lighten up a bit around here.
No one wants gypsies, travelers, Roma around, but many don't mind dressing like them even if they don't like the idea of the stubbornly other others.
Where the US is having a spasm of religious suspicion (you know, as kind of side dish to its constant ethnic tension), here it's gypsies and a couple governments stomping on the hornets' nest. It's easy to do because these are peoples who deliberately do not integrate, or assimilate, and frequent don't cooperate. They pretty much want to keep to themselves and do take care of their own. Independence is the key stone of their culture. They are not usually thieves and kidnappers of children (that's organized crime), but it's easy to think so since the odds that the average European is friends with a traveler or Roma are kinda slim. The contemporary gypsy is a slow moving nomad in a mobile home or a camper van, and Europe is a place where nomadic cultures settled down in one place a L O N G time ago. So, figuring out the legal status, which settled nations base on citizenship, of a nomad who moreover does not want to be a citizen is really hard to do.
But, it's grown a bit nasty again in the recession. All the people on a nation's soil cost money, and money is thin on the ground for the world's governments these days. So, where the American public is being childish and mean; France and Italy are leading a controversial push to make it easier to kick people out of their countries. Many of the Roma in France come from Romania, which Sarkozy argues, receives about 4 billion euros from the EU, but spends just .04% of that on their gypsy minority, which results in that minority moving off to other countries. The UN, Human Rights Campaign, the Vatican, about half of Sarkozy's cabinet and lots of Europeans think this policy is bad, wrong, and generally mean.They deplore it, loudly, on behalf of the Roma and against the precedent this move sets.
Sarkozy is in a tough fight for re-election, and he's running to the right. As he is wont to do, and as many US conservative politicians do (flags, guns, gays, god, immigrants, ....) when they feel a real challenge. It's a reflex. It's as dangerous and boring as most mental or cultural reflexes. What bothers me is that Sarkozy is flirting with cultural policies that are very close to those of national socialist groups in Europe whose economic policies would appeal to US conservatives, but whose cultural programs are openly reminiscent of those infamous national socialists. (Though, lately, it seems that those darker policies are developing some appeal as well.)
England is taking a slightly different tack. Here, the trouble with travelers is that they tend to set up camp on undeveloped land that doesn't belong to them. Not surprising, that's what travelers have always, for centuries (maybe millennia) done. Here, the government recognizes traveler communities, and is in a pickle over where to let them set up camps and how to balance that living space against local town's needs, taxes, green belt space, and other concerns. There's even work on making sure their children are decently educated. I'm not sure of the communities in France, but one factor that may ease some (certainly not all, hating on travelers is tradition here) of the friction between these margin dwellers and established society is that they share a language. French (the government I mean here) really don't like people who don't speak French.
So, what's going on there with the fashion trend right in the same season France and Italy are getting in snit over gypsies? Why do people like the food, the music, the style of this or that other-group (gypsy style and guitar, gansta rap, soul food, jazz, gospel, Tex-Mex, ...) while despising the people who create it? The connection isn't that these others are all criminals, since they aren't or only pretend to be, or their criminality is a rather passive even a secondary effect of social forces other than their own will to break a law.
I am guilty of indulging in the identity appropriation of gypsy fashion, have been for a long time. A good chunk of my wardrobe is still gypsy-esque and "bohemian." This has a great deal to do with my antipathy for offices. And that's the link to my sympathy; well, that and the fact that gypsy guitar turns me on. In high school, I loved the aura of gypsies not for their nomadism, a little bit for the romantic image of them, and a lot for their deliberate alienation. I felt pretty darn alienated in the age of "greed is good," and was looking for ways to increase that feeling and status. I figured, the farther out of the current, the fresher the waters. Every Halloween, gypsy costume. J-Lo's Roma-inspired dance-centric video and that movie about chocolate with cinnamon and cayenne pepper ground in it, the one with Johny Depp and Juliet Binoche and the low key ultra sexiness of Depp's gypsy, those had not been made. So, it was mostly the travelers' ability to build a whole culture (I didn't know there several) outside/alongside the dominant one--their choice of the margin over the center, their willingness to do what it takes to live Out There. I admired that and their general talent for not being destroyed (shooed away, sure, and then the Nazi's really went for them, but mostly not destroyed).
What's interesting, I think, to America from the France vs. England approaches to these others is that it links to our issues and debates over migrant workers in the US illegally. They're not gypsies--not people who would prefer to roam--but economically dispossessed folk looking to feed their kin. The consequent effects of their presence in the US is not their goal. And like them, the gypsies over here are not interested in doing harm, they're just interested in getting by and doing right by their families and culture. France wants to throw them out, now, and finger print them so they can't sneak back in. England wants to work out what the British call "reasonable accommodation." They see these people as people, not problems and political pawns.
There's a surprising lot of good information about the Roma and British and Irish travelers here at the BCC, and much coverage of the current debates over at The Guardian. It's fascinating stuff.
Ok, so, next post: cabinetry. I promise. Time to lighten up a bit around here.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Mosque-a-pa-looza
So. The first post of this latest in the venerable tradition of ex-pat blogs was going to be on the theme of cabinetry. We will have to wait for that. Some friends encouraged this blog into existence, and I thought, "OK, I'll do a third millennium woman-feminist American abroad with the mechanisms of empire Mark Twain in Europe kind of thing." And, Dear America, you are making it way too easy.
One of the essays I used to teach in Comp 101 at several universities was by Twain who, after reading his recently delivered newspapers in Paris, implored the good people of the state of Missouri not to engage in the popular sport of lynching humans. This was somewhere around 1905. The good people of the state of Missouri did not listen to the famous son, and I don't expect you to listen either, America, for all the same reasons Twain was pretty sure humans were irredeemable as a species. Because, you know, you (we) keep doing unbelievably stupid and cruel things, it seems, for the fun of it.
Let's talk about Islamophobia, mosques, the flood in Pakistan, and the winning of hearts and minds. If you think the peoples of Middle East and Central Asia are not paying attention to your shenanigans, you are frighteningly naive. If you think that burning piles of the Qu'ran and a mosque here and there are turning moderate Muslims into the kind of friends abroad who trust the American people and consequently believe that American foreign policy might do the right thing -- you are patently out of your minds. I know you want to feel better, and that in America feeling better often means making someone or some group you don't know much about feel really awful and afraid of you, but it is time to grow the hell up.
Twain asked the good people of Missouri to be more morally righteous than the good people of Georgia and Mississippi and California. He appealed to their much vaunted Christianity. I am going to ask you to be adults. Just adults. Not morally righteous, or good examples of Christ's love for the needy and the stranger. I ask merely for grown ups who handle fear and confusion by learning a thing or two and who can handle the responsibility of living in a religiously plural society by honoring the very pluralism that allows each of you to practice your faith, build your houses of worship, and generally not fear a mob or sneaky coward of some other faith are going to drive you into the proverbial desert. It's called courtesy, and it is a basic American value we haven't talked about in a long, long time.
I realize that this opening salvo will not make me many friends among the camps and hordes who enjoy their fear and anger. I don't really want your friendship. I don't like you. I just want your ear, for just a sec. I'll thank you for your patience, as I am not the subtle subversive that Twain was.
These gestures of economic frustration (they're more common in recessions than when we're feeling flush), these acts of violent suspicion, this blanket assumption that a Muslim is a terrorist in the offing -- is a self-fulfilling prophesy and a play right into the closed fist of our real enemies who practice bad faith. The real bad guys are not good Muslims, as most good Muslims will gladly tell you. They're angry, power hungry, murderous, destroyers of the very possibility of a thriving, happy, contented Muslim world. The bad guys are sowers of chaos fed with rage.
And they are highly organized. Remember that.
In the absence of charity for the 20 million odd people of Pakistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are stepping right in with food, medicine, relocation, and protection for the people they can reach. They have learned a lesson or two from Hammas,* which does a great job of providing for the people of Lebanon, thereby securing their loyalty. And, not being the sorts of civilized folk who need a lot of the much missed infrastructure to get around, the bad guys in Pakistan are helping quite a few. Also, they can afford the $8 USD it costs to buy a water purifier that would let Pakistanis drink right out of the Indus river and not die a slow death from dysentery. And so, my fellow citizens, can you. But you're not, not in a way that will get the attention of the good Muslims suffering and watching the suffering.
This is bad news for us geopolitically. It's bad strategy to let this happen.
Now, tell me: to whom, after the devastation of your tiny farm that barely supported your family as it was, do you transfer your loyalty? The person or group who saves your kid from cholera and malaria. The person or group who brings you water, or a mule, or some bedding. That's who. That group should be us--along with the British and French people who are doling out money they can't spare in the recession either at a really holy and grown up rate. But the US, our good citizens seem to be punishing the people of Pakistan for the hypothetical mis-actions of their government. Nice. Real grown ups we.
We should have the facts on the mosque/community center in NY, on its creators, on their vision of its purpose. It's to be an interfaith center, is being established by exactly the kind of moderate Muslim we've been wishing would be more active in the US and abroad, and is in fact not even visible from the former site the World Trade Center. We should be grown up enough to know that, and to know that whenever you hear only what strokes your ego or confirms your fear from your leaders ... you are being distracted from the truth if not lied to outright. That's what grown ups are supposed to know.
We are also supposed to be grown up enough to remember that the Constitution does not apply to some of us, but all of us, and that if it were to apply only to some of us then some of you would be on the wrong side of it, too. And that thought, if no care for your fellow citizens, should be enough to scare you away from burning other people's holy books or their houses of worship or letting them starve after nature stomped all over their lives. It would seem that to many of us, that thought is not occurring.
More's the pity. Here's our collective chance to do some citizens in the US a good turn, to be bigger than our pain and fear, like grown ups. Here's a chance to give an unforgettable gift of charity to millions of Muslims and thereby prove to a billion people that we just want to get the bad guys, not all of the of Muslim world, and thereby get more of them on our side. Which is winning hearts and minds, which is good strategy in this situation, which is what grown ups do. Because doing so gets you lots and lots of good press all over the world, and lessens the chance that the bad guys can lie about us to frustrated, angry, scared people all over their corner of the planet.
But, if you prefer to throw your tantrum, don't be surprised when it blows up in your face in two, or ten, for twenty years.
One of my sharpest memories after 9-11 was of being in a bar in Dallas with some friends after dinner. Two strapping young men near us were getting a little sauced and smack talking slogans like, "Get those terrorists!," "Let's kick their ass!" I turned and looked at them and asked one question, "Are you going to join up and go fight?" They informed me that they had no intention of signing up to express their patriotism. My response, "Then shut the fuck up. Other American's will be over there dying for you."
And that's the other reason I really want America to grow up. These little fits of childish anxiety will not make the sacrifice of our citizens one bit less necessary or unlikely. For the love of country, people, grow up.
Update: This from the New York Times notes the mourning and alienation of the very kinds of people we need and should want to be neighbors to, to work with, to welcome.
*Note: Two days later, my mind reminds me that I was not thinking Hammas in the West Bank, but of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Rather a crucial difference. My apologies.
One of the essays I used to teach in Comp 101 at several universities was by Twain who, after reading his recently delivered newspapers in Paris, implored the good people of the state of Missouri not to engage in the popular sport of lynching humans. This was somewhere around 1905. The good people of the state of Missouri did not listen to the famous son, and I don't expect you to listen either, America, for all the same reasons Twain was pretty sure humans were irredeemable as a species. Because, you know, you (we) keep doing unbelievably stupid and cruel things, it seems, for the fun of it.
Let's talk about Islamophobia, mosques, the flood in Pakistan, and the winning of hearts and minds. If you think the peoples of Middle East and Central Asia are not paying attention to your shenanigans, you are frighteningly naive. If you think that burning piles of the Qu'ran and a mosque here and there are turning moderate Muslims into the kind of friends abroad who trust the American people and consequently believe that American foreign policy might do the right thing -- you are patently out of your minds. I know you want to feel better, and that in America feeling better often means making someone or some group you don't know much about feel really awful and afraid of you, but it is time to grow the hell up.
Twain asked the good people of Missouri to be more morally righteous than the good people of Georgia and Mississippi and California. He appealed to their much vaunted Christianity. I am going to ask you to be adults. Just adults. Not morally righteous, or good examples of Christ's love for the needy and the stranger. I ask merely for grown ups who handle fear and confusion by learning a thing or two and who can handle the responsibility of living in a religiously plural society by honoring the very pluralism that allows each of you to practice your faith, build your houses of worship, and generally not fear a mob or sneaky coward of some other faith are going to drive you into the proverbial desert. It's called courtesy, and it is a basic American value we haven't talked about in a long, long time.
I realize that this opening salvo will not make me many friends among the camps and hordes who enjoy their fear and anger. I don't really want your friendship. I don't like you. I just want your ear, for just a sec. I'll thank you for your patience, as I am not the subtle subversive that Twain was.
These gestures of economic frustration (they're more common in recessions than when we're feeling flush), these acts of violent suspicion, this blanket assumption that a Muslim is a terrorist in the offing -- is a self-fulfilling prophesy and a play right into the closed fist of our real enemies who practice bad faith. The real bad guys are not good Muslims, as most good Muslims will gladly tell you. They're angry, power hungry, murderous, destroyers of the very possibility of a thriving, happy, contented Muslim world. The bad guys are sowers of chaos fed with rage.
And they are highly organized. Remember that.
In the absence of charity for the 20 million odd people of Pakistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are stepping right in with food, medicine, relocation, and protection for the people they can reach. They have learned a lesson or two from Hammas,* which does a great job of providing for the people of Lebanon, thereby securing their loyalty. And, not being the sorts of civilized folk who need a lot of the much missed infrastructure to get around, the bad guys in Pakistan are helping quite a few. Also, they can afford the $8 USD it costs to buy a water purifier that would let Pakistanis drink right out of the Indus river and not die a slow death from dysentery. And so, my fellow citizens, can you. But you're not, not in a way that will get the attention of the good Muslims suffering and watching the suffering.
This is bad news for us geopolitically. It's bad strategy to let this happen.
Now, tell me: to whom, after the devastation of your tiny farm that barely supported your family as it was, do you transfer your loyalty? The person or group who saves your kid from cholera and malaria. The person or group who brings you water, or a mule, or some bedding. That's who. That group should be us--along with the British and French people who are doling out money they can't spare in the recession either at a really holy and grown up rate. But the US, our good citizens seem to be punishing the people of Pakistan for the hypothetical mis-actions of their government. Nice. Real grown ups we.
We should have the facts on the mosque/community center in NY, on its creators, on their vision of its purpose. It's to be an interfaith center, is being established by exactly the kind of moderate Muslim we've been wishing would be more active in the US and abroad, and is in fact not even visible from the former site the World Trade Center. We should be grown up enough to know that, and to know that whenever you hear only what strokes your ego or confirms your fear from your leaders ... you are being distracted from the truth if not lied to outright. That's what grown ups are supposed to know.
We are also supposed to be grown up enough to remember that the Constitution does not apply to some of us, but all of us, and that if it were to apply only to some of us then some of you would be on the wrong side of it, too. And that thought, if no care for your fellow citizens, should be enough to scare you away from burning other people's holy books or their houses of worship or letting them starve after nature stomped all over their lives. It would seem that to many of us, that thought is not occurring.
More's the pity. Here's our collective chance to do some citizens in the US a good turn, to be bigger than our pain and fear, like grown ups. Here's a chance to give an unforgettable gift of charity to millions of Muslims and thereby prove to a billion people that we just want to get the bad guys, not all of the of Muslim world, and thereby get more of them on our side. Which is winning hearts and minds, which is good strategy in this situation, which is what grown ups do. Because doing so gets you lots and lots of good press all over the world, and lessens the chance that the bad guys can lie about us to frustrated, angry, scared people all over their corner of the planet.
But, if you prefer to throw your tantrum, don't be surprised when it blows up in your face in two, or ten, for twenty years.
One of my sharpest memories after 9-11 was of being in a bar in Dallas with some friends after dinner. Two strapping young men near us were getting a little sauced and smack talking slogans like, "Get those terrorists!," "Let's kick their ass!" I turned and looked at them and asked one question, "Are you going to join up and go fight?" They informed me that they had no intention of signing up to express their patriotism. My response, "Then shut the fuck up. Other American's will be over there dying for you."
And that's the other reason I really want America to grow up. These little fits of childish anxiety will not make the sacrifice of our citizens one bit less necessary or unlikely. For the love of country, people, grow up.
Update: This from the New York Times notes the mourning and alienation of the very kinds of people we need and should want to be neighbors to, to work with, to welcome.
*Note: Two days later, my mind reminds me that I was not thinking Hammas in the West Bank, but of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Rather a crucial difference. My apologies.
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