Американский Бродяга

Tough Choices

Still following the news from Georgia obsessively…wondering what’s become of the poor family I lived with in Gori and where it’s all going to end. The administration is dithering, of course, but so is everyone else: I winced when Barack Obama called for a Security Council resolution, the emptiest of empty gestures, even if Russia didn’t have veto power.

It’s time to get real. Instead of Condi Rice mouthing platitudes about Georgia’s “territorial integrity,” it’s time to face some hard truths. Saakashvili rolled the dice and crapped out. The never-terribly-compelling argument that Abkhazia and Ossetia belong to Georgia in perpetuity, just because they did during the reign of Queen Tamar, has become completely untenable. Lasting peace in Georgia can only be achieved if it relinquishes its claims. The thrust of American diplomacy should be to persuade them to do so with serious aid—not the chump-change we’ve given them thus far—and security guarantees with real teeth. Any other scenario just restocks the tinderbox. The Russians will eventually withdraw this time—when they’re good and ready—but if the Georgians ever were to try anything in Tskhinvali or Kodori again, re-annexation looms as a real possibility.

À la recherche du temps perdu

It’s been a weird summer of searching for lost time: 1986, 1990, 1996, 2006. I’ve journeyed hither and yon, 5000 miles and more, occasionally jarred by my own discordant notes. Yes, this is who I was…but is this who I am now? Not always. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t great to see everybody that I managed to see.

The highlight was certainly the dreamlike days on the shores of Lake Michigan. This is a credit to A. and H.’s live-and-let-live parents, the eerily perfect weather, and the mellow harmony of a rambling, old, supremely comfortable house where everyone is more or less left to their own devices…except for the gourmet meals served on cue, as if by house-elves, to the sound of a dinner gong. Small wonder P. and I extended our stay again and again. I felt a little as though I were acting out To the Lighthouse, with all its molten-golden summer-house grace notes, but  none of the dreary, overwrought, familial angst. But which character am I? Augustus Carmichael, perhaps.

If all this was a trip into the past, though, I’ve dug deeper over the last few days, rereading My Ántonia, a book I last read when I was all of fifteen. Fifteen! Would I even tolerate the 15-year-old version of myself if I encountered him in the street? I think not. I’d want to slap some sense into him in so very many ways.

And yet…I respect that boy’s devotion to literature, his enthusiasm, his heart. That’s long-time gone.  But if Cather’s novel was less than I’d remembered in some ways, in other ways it was more. I doubt very much that at 15 I really understood that it’s all about memory—a flawed, but ultimately moving, paean to the durability of “auld lang syne.”

The last lines of the novel struck me powerfully:

I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is…Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

The March of Folly

Very distressing to read about the bombing of Gori, a city in which I lived for several months in 2005. There is a Georgian military base in Gori, but what’s been bombed today are ordinary Georgian apartment buildings. The Russian objective is clearly to instill terror in the civilian population. They are succeeding. Vile. Evidence, if such were needed, that “terror” is part and parcel of any war, not something one has a war against…any more than one has a “war against violence.”

Sad, but entirely predictable that it would come to this pass. The Georgians would be far wiser to have long ago washed their hands of Ossetia—a Rhode Island-sized sliver of mountainous territory that is of no practical value whatsoever. But Georgians are the last folks on earth to turn the other cheek and let bygones be bygones. And in this I empathize with them entirely: I, too, never forget a slight. Nor do I have any truck with the Ossetian “government,” a tribal kleptocracy founded upon ethnic intimidation and contraband.  

But that doesn’t give the Georgians license to wash the streets of Tskhinvali in blood. And rising to the Russian bait was bound to send them up shit creek no matter what. Son of a military man, I have to ask what the hell were they thinking tactically. If the Georgians were to have any chance of holding S. Ossetia for more than a single night, then the very first thing they needed to do was cut off the Roki tunnel to North Ossetia. Duh.

So idiocy all around. The Georgians are committed to putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, and the Russians are committed to using this as a pretext to shatter all the fragile gains the country has been able to make since the Rose Revolution. And the Russians will do so purely out of spite, not out of any military or political necessity, in the demented belief that a weak, chaotic, divided Georgia is somehow better for Russian interests. Sickening.

Jing! Jing! Jing!

Much, much water under the bridge since my last post: Ballakeyll, Moose Jaw, Craters of the Moon; blueberry pie and nightswimming; sturm und drang and summer idylls. Oh, and the shit has just hit the fan in South Ossetia. Boom.

But at the moment what I really want to say is there no French ‘j’ sound in Chinese. It is NOT Beizhing, with a sound like the ‘s’ in ‘pleasure’ or the ‘J’ in “Jaques.” Repeat after me, Bob Costas and every single other American talking head: “Jing” like “jingle bells”! “Jing” like “jingoism”! Which is exactly what the Olympics are all about, so it should be easy to remember.

Thank you, and back to your regular programming.

Signs You've Spent a Long Time in Asia 2

• When you find it incredibly irritating that you’re expected to bus your own fast-food detritus.
• When you have to remind yourself to actually throw your used tp into the toilet.
• When you find yourself thinking “Old women really should wear quilted jackets…not hot pants.”
• When mixed salad seems a revlelation. Especially if it includes avocados.
• When the “smoke-filled” skies of California seem amazingly clean and clear compared to what you’re used to breathing.
• When you’re still automatically wary of tap water.
• When even supermarkets seem eerily “empty” compared to what you’re accustomed to.
  

Signs You've a Spent Long Time in Asia 1

When you think how very unfortuate it is that the public bathrooms at Vancouver Intl. Airport don’t have squatters, and how vastly superior in every way squatters are to Western toilets, which are a perversion of nature and unhygenic to boot. Call me crazy, but I don’t want to have to park my arse anywhere that hundreds of other people have parked theirs on any given day. 

[Note, this is Day 2 for me at YVR. And therein lies a painful, if banal, travel tale.]

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us

I’ve spent the last couple weeks somewhat wearily tramping around the Chinese heartland like a superannuated acetic —not 老子, but 老林, perhaps —or a latter-day Marco Polo. In fact, I was largely in Polo’s old stomping grounds: Hangzhou, Suzhou, Nanjing, Tunxi, Shanghai, Huangshan, and a number of other places more difficult to find on a map. Alas, I doubt Marco would be very pleased what the intervening centuries (or, more to the point, the past 15 years) hath wrought, and Hangzhou, his fave, is now far from “the most beautiful city in the world” (though 西湖,West Lake—the mere mention of which makes any Chinese go goo-goo-eyed— still has its charms).

If MP wouldn’t find much familiar in 21^st century China, though, any American would. The further I travel here, the more convinced I become that, so far from being “mysterious,” China and America could well be “separated at birth.” To answer a question I asked myself when I first arrived, there isn’t now anything remotely “communist” in any meaningful sense of the word about China. (“Communism,” note, is not a mere synonym for “authoritarianism.”) Having enjoyed a robust mercantilism when Europe was enjoying feudalism and the Black Death, there is almost no evidence today of the 30-year collectivist hiccup in China’s 5000-year history. Americans may have invented the modern shopping mall, but the Chinese have perfected it (though “perfected” isn’t quite the word…) The man selling the fake Rolexes and Omegas stands outside the swish boutiques selling the real thing, inviting you to compare and contrast.

And this is a problem. 300 million Americans consuming as if there’s no tomorrow is one thing; 1.3 billion Chinese is another. With few exceptions, pump-shocked Americans don’t understand that it is the very success of the American model—Buy! Buy! Buy!—that is feeding their pain. From a selfish standpoint, it’s actually a saving grace that so many Chinese are still so poor, since if the hundreds of millions of country mice had the purchasing power of their city cousins, Americans could well be looking at gas that costs $10 a gallon.

爸爸 in Oz

W came by last night to sort out a “summer reading” assignment for the incoming MA students. I wasn’t keen on the idea at all—grad students are grown-ups and should be free to spend their time off reading any damn thing they please—and, what’s more, we had trouble agreeing on an appropriate text. (W’s tastes in Eng. Lit are as rigid as his tastes in everything else, gravitating toward anything vaguely Jamesian. In fact, there’s something very Jamesian about everything connected with W.)

Having exhausted various other possibilities, W eventually brought the discussion around to children’s lit, and the possibility of assigning The Wizard of Oz or The Wind in the Willows. I was skeptical—these same hip young things into “Young Anguish” are going to warm to Anglo-American tales about talking animals?—and I must have pulled one of my patented faces, which W was quick to misinterpret: “Have you even read The Wizard of Oz?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” I hastened to correct him, “my father read us all of the Oz books. I love them. I just don’t think the students would.”

W.’s tone changed immediately: “How wonderful to have such a father!”

Well, yes, indeed…though I can’t say I gave it much thought at the time. Reading bedtime stories is just what fathers do, isn’t it? What kind of father wouldn’t know a Wogglebug from a Glass Cat (Hint: one “has pink brains, and you can see them work”)? Who else but a dad could get the voices of Eeyore and Piglet right? And who could ever think of going to sleep without a story? If this isn’t they way things are, “Udger, Budger I’m a Mudger.”

But, as W has noted on many occasions, he has no such father; their relationship, one gathers, has never been warm. How sad. A timely reminder, a few days after Father’s Day, that fathers—rather like Pooh’s bees—come in the “right sort” and the “wrong sort,” and that I’ve been blessed all along to have the right sort.

(W, it turns out, is the merest Oz dilettante…not even knowing a Quadling from a Gillikin, forsooth!)