After the Rain : how the West lost the East Part 19
"I have gone into the outer darkness of scientific and philosophical transactions and proceedings, ultra-respectable, but covered with the dust of disregard. I have descended into journalism. I have come back with the quasi-souls of lost data."
(Charles Hoy Fort in "The Book of the d.a.m.ned")
"Let me have the three major American networks and three leading newspapers for a year and I'll bring back public lynchings and racial war in the US."
(Charles Simic quoting a Belgrade journalist)
"We do not have censorship. What we have is a limitation on what newspapers can report."
(Louis Nel, Deputy Minister of Information, South Africa)
In the country of ex-n.a.z.i officer Kurt Waldheim and current n.a.z.i-sympathizer Jorg Haider, the xenophobic and anti-Semitic offering of local media come as little surprise. Austria, after all, contributed disproportionately to the n.a.z.i death machine. But what seems to be a unique Austrian phenomenon is not. The media outlets in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe are easily interchangeable. In the same week of Austrian derision and paranoia, "Start", a trash weekly in Macedonia attacked the British Amba.s.sador and the Americans for conspiring to dismantle Macedonia with the collaboration of its local, disloyal and haughty Albanian minority.
The media in the countries in transition is taxonomically not dissimilar to its brethren in the West. It, too, can be divided to five categories of ownership and agenda. What sets it apart, though, is its lack of (even feigned) professionalism, its venality and its tainted ulterior motives. I wrote about it elsewhere, in "The Rip van Winkle Inst.i.tutions":
"And then there is the media - the waste basket of post communist societies, the cesspool of influence peddling and calumny. Journalists are easily bought and sold and their price is ever decreasing. They work in mouthpieces of business interests masquerading as newspapers or electronic media. They receive their instructions - to lie, to falsify, to ignore, to emphasize, to suppress, to extort, to inform, to collaborate with the authorities - from their Editor in Chief. They trade news for advertising. Some of them are involved in all manner of criminal activities, others are simply unethical in the extreme. They all have pacts with Mammon. People do not believe a word these contortionists of language and torturers of meaning write or say. It is by comparing these tampered and biased sources that people reach their own conclusions within their private medium."
The commercial media - the likes on "Nova" TV in the Czech Republic - are poor people's imitations of the more visible aspects of American ma.s.s culture. Overflowing with lowbrow talk shows, freaks on display, malicious gossip which pa.s.ses for "news" and glitzy promos and quizzes - these TV stations and print magazines derive the bulk of their income from advertising. While ostensibly politically innocuous, they exert a subtle and c.u.mulative influence on the numbed and dwindling minds of their spectators and readers. By conditioning their consumers to ever lower fare of pulp common denominators, they set a standard of no holds barred and no standards observed. They are the opium for the ma.s.ses that religion once was, diverting potentially dangerous attention from real events and personalities to the staged alarms of public enemies and the artificial crises of bingo lotteries. No less persecutory than any totalitarian regime, these ma.s.s media are ominous symptoms of the social malaise of disillusionment with the realities of life and with more inst.i.tutionalized modes of expression. They are escapism embodied, a dreamland, a scape of fantasy, the vale of telenovellas. Whole nations are in thrall. In Macedonia, the protagonist of a servant's saga, "Ka.s.sandra", was given a hero's welcome upon her visit to this impoverished and bitter land. Whole families consume hours of this visual Ritalin, hypnotized by cheap scenery built to resemble unattainable riches.
Then there is the mercenary media. These are groups of hired pens and keyboards - so called journalists who offer their services to the highest bidder. Their price is often pathetic: a lunch a month, one hundred deutschmarks, a trip abroad and a dingy hotel room. They collaborate with their editors and share the spoils with them. They are the wh.o.r.es of the profession, ever the hungry look, ever the hat in hand, ever the submissive and furtive glances of the serfs of capital.
They often publish other people's self-serving communiques without altering a word. I, myself, provided them with "interviews" which I, solely, have auth.o.r.ed, questions and all. Too lazy to or embittered to invest in their profession, consumed by self-loathing and by general disdain - they let themselves be pa.s.sively abused in the dirty intercourse of money and of influence.
The mercenaries often work in brothels known as "business-backed media". These are TV stations, daily papers and periodicals owned by the oligarchs of malignant capitalism and used by them to rubbish their opponents and flagrantly and unabashedly further their business interests. This phenomenon is most p.r.o.nounced in this land of depredation and depravity, in Russia, where virtually all the media is now identified with and digested by business, mafia-like interests.
Despite their infamous one-sidedness, they still claim neutrality and objectivity but these spurious claims are met with revolt by a hostile population, long trained to distrust the printed word and even the broadcast image. Thus the art of "reading between the lines" is flourishing again and the very language is distorted by its media rapists (see: "The Magla Vocables"). This - the abyss opening between the people and their language, the demise of true communication and the ensuing rupture in the social fabric - are the veritable damages of enlisted journalism.
Political vehicles are less pernicious in that their masters are well known and their itinerary clear. Always one sided, always half truthed, forever the righteous - these rags produce no riches and they preach to the converted, serving as bulletins and message boards rather than as media in any known sense. A rallying point, a flag, an emblem, a collective memory, the group's unconscious and conscience - these papers and TV channels are often widely read, even by rivals and adversaries. They are so self-absorbed, so narcissistic, so sickeningly partial that they make for fine amus.e.m.e.nt in dreary times. There are the coalition papers and the opposition papers, the left wing and the right wing and the centre ones. It is a colourful admixture of indignation and triumphalism, veiled threats and promises, trial balloons and drama, the daily equivalent of the romance.
Thus, Central, Eastern and Southern Europe do have daily papers and magazines and periodicals and television. What they do not have is media even remotely resembling the Western ideal. In some countries, this ideal is disparaged as a Western manipulative ploy or, worse, naive idealism. In others, it is a kind of holy grail to be pursued only in myths and narratives. Yet others view it with envy and aspire to it, but without much hope. To them, it is an ever-receding mirage.
Perhaps that other phantasmagoria, the Internet, is the solution. In it, budding, fresh beginnings of irreverence and courage seem to coalesce into recognizable - though virtual - media. The small number of web surfers currently limits both their outreach and their survivability. But if Western trends are anything to go by, this is a temporary state of affairs. The Internet, this immaterial and ethereal medium might yet sp.a.w.n the first real media and a return to reality. It might yet liberate the prisoners of all the telenovellas, foreign and domestic. It might yet win.
(Article written on February 5, 2000 and published February 21, 2000
in "Central Europe Review" volume 2, issue 7)
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The PCM Trail
It is a typical bar in a typical Balkan or East European country in a typical yellow haze, air-polluted, very late evening. The din of raucous and numbingly repet.i.tive music reverberates through the smoke-enshrouded joint. It is an external pandemonium intended to silence internal ones and to obviate the silences of solitude. Sofas with shabby, mutilated upholstery in bordello scarlet. A dim, bawdy luminescence. Huntresses and prey study each other wearily over oily drinks. The former scantily clad in cheap imitations of haute couture, lips enclosed in heart shaped, provocative, lipstick, their make up invitingly gross. The latter - foreigners, owners of coveted pa.s.sports, cars and money (PCM), a ticket out of h.e.l.l, a path to paradise, a promise.
In the near and paranoiac past of most countries in transition, terror-filled xenophobia was both a wise survival tactic and an indoctrinated instinct. Self-insulated and psychotically suspicious regimes quarantined their populations and portrayed all foreigners as carriers of the malaise of social disintegration and the perpetrators of espionage and sabotage. In a cla.s.sic cognitive dissonance, foreigners were denounced by the people and women who befriended them were p.r.o.nounced wh.o.r.es. Only a select few could interact with the capitalistic plague and these were especially trained to prevent contagion.
These prejudices and perceptions changed fast with the dawn of the post transition purgatory. Economic collapse, ma.s.sive unemployment, social dislocation, growing disparities between rich and poor, the educated and the unskilled - led to societies increasingly permeated by crime, drugs and prost.i.tution. A grey cloud of hopelessness and neglect descended upon vast territories populated by zombie-like herds of people, eyes with extinguished light, adrift in the uncharted waters of a new, ominous reality. The physical deterioration of infrastructure and public services reflected the inner state of its ever more desparate consumers. Venality erupted like a giant suppuration.
Everything was on sale, especially one's self.
In this increasingly whorish atmosphere, the perception of foreigners was dramatically re-cast. With more of them around and with most of them on generous income - they const.i.tuted a tempting target, a prize, salvation embodied. Women everywhere made it a point to meet them, to work with them, to a.s.sociate with them, to know them biblically and - above all other goals - to marry them and leave their country. All means justified these ends. Women studied foreign languages, applied to work for non-government organizations, hung out in the appropriate watering holes, learned to dress and talk a.s.sertively and to make their availability - their complete obtainability and accessibility - beyond doubt.
Some set about securing the desired trophy methodically and scientifically, calculating each step in a tortuous and highly compet.i.tive environment. They invested years in graduating from the right faculties and in mastering the right languages. They watched films intently, read books, clipped magazine articles, surfed the internet, questioned well-travelled relatives and acquaintances, emulated more senior and more seasoned stalkers. Others relied on their good looks, their make up, their ruthlessness, their promiscuousness, their connections, or the exotic allure of their very differentness.
But all of them pursued their prey doggedly and commitedly, with the quite perseverance and patience of the dejected, with the unflagging determination of the terminally ill in tracking a wonder drug. Often, they got pregnant, which in many local cultures would have brought on a marriage. Sometimes, they got raped, or dumped, or worse. But none of these dissuaded them - such was the ejecting power of the wretchedness of their lives. They knew that the foreigner they aspire to acquire will finally go away and carry them with him, a (sometimes white) knight on a shining vehicle. Vehemently committed to securing the future of their children and the present of their extended family - they ploughed on, ignoring diversions, never digressing, never wavering in the face of setbacks and defeats.
Some of them grew old and bitter in their refusal to countenance a local, inferior, brand of husband. It time they so identified with their purported quarry - that they held their own kind in contempt.
They disdained their kin, derided their customs, haughtily dismissed their own culture as backward and oppressive, worthy only of discarding. In their unmitigated effort to be worthy of their future saviours, they disowned their very selves, their society, their upbringing, their mores and their relations. Thus uprooted, they lost both worlds - rejected by those they rejected so condescendingly as well as by foreign men who found them to be embarra.s.sing, clunky imitations of B-movie characters.
But others went on to marry foreigners, to give birth to their children and, in time, to travel to far, affluent lands. They keep in touch, sending home photographs of sumptuous houses and shiny cars and of suburban lawns. From time to time, they wire some money or deliver gifts. They visit once or twice a year, clad in new, faddish clothes, their accents strangely inflected, their speech suffused by foreign words. They made it, the envy of their sisters, the objects of much adulation and emulation, lean and l.u.s.trous proofs that dreams come true. A sigh and then the chase goes on. Meticulous dressing, hours of make up, the right shine but not too vulgar, the flesh exposed but not repulsively, both offered and withdrawn, a little exercise of English and to the bar. The hunting grounds where smoke and alcohol and the occasional lascivious look or comment should do the trick. And often do.
(Article written on February 8, 2000 and published February 28, 2000
in "Central Europe Review" volume 2, issue 8)
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The Mind of Darkness
"The Balkans" - I say - "is the unconscious of the world". People stop to digest this metaphor and then they nod enthusiastically. It is here that the repressed memories of history, its traumas and fears and images reside. It is here that the psychodynamics of humanity - the tectonic clash between Rome and Byzantium, West and East, Judeo-Christianity and Islam - is still easily discernible. We are seated at a New Year's dining table, loaded with a roasted pig and exotic salads. I, the Jew, only half foreign to this cradle of Slavonics, four Serbs and five Macedonians. It is in the Balkans that all ethnic distinctions fail and it is here that they prevail anachronistically and atavistically. Contradiction and change the only two fixtures of this tormented region.
The women of the Balkan - buried under provocative mask-like make up, retro hairstyles and too narrow dresses. The men clad in sepia colours, old-fashioned suits and turn of the century moustaches. In the background there is the crying game that is Balkanian music: liturgy and folk and elegy combined. The smells are heavy with musk-ular perfumes. It is like time travel. It is like revisiting one's childhood.
The Serbs - a family - are tall and ruggedly handsome. He was a soldier in the para-military Serb militias that sprang from the ashes of the JNA (Yugoslav National Army) in 1991. As the disintegration of the uneasy co-existence that once was Yugoslavia became more painfully evident, he and others seized the weapons in the depots of the JNA. In the administrative twilight zone that ensued they fought in JNA uniforms against a growing army of Croats (wearing initially the same uniforms) and Moslem Bosniaks. It was surrealistic, a Bosch nightmare.
"We were near victory in Bihac" - he says, his voice a wistful admixture of melancholy and anger. "Politics" - an old spark in his eyes and, for a moment, I can see the erstwhile fighter - "All politics. We lost the war because of politics, because our leaders sold themselves to the West." This myth has a familiar ring to it, the ring of knife-stabbed backs and war. It is the ground being prepared for the next round - the war was nearly won had it not been for the traitors and their Western masters. The sound of clicking heels and marches and creaking gates of concentration camps.