Nostalgia for Tito in North Macedonia--former Yugoslavia

Dozens of statues in every direction in the center of Skopje

In Skopje I met a very funny guy named Ferdinand. "Call me Ferdi," he said when I asked his name.

He asked me how I liked the statues in the center of Skopje. When I hesitated he said,  "I hate them. It's ridiculous." He began winding up toward a speech.  "We have no trains, the buses are old. The bridges are crumbling. But we have statues everywhere. Who needs them? I don't!"

He went on about the corruption and stupidity that has dogged his country since the fall of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. "Under Tito we had the best two decades in that past century. Maybe ever.  Tito falls. Capitalism is not so good for us.  Under Tito, the government worked. Now....." he shrugged.

Then he straightened up, his blue eyes flashed, he smiled and said, "But you guys elected Trump. At least we did not vote for someone who bragged about being corrupt. He showed you who he is, and you elected him."

I could only agree.  In "On Tyranny" Timothy Snyder recommends making friends in countries that have suffered under authoritarian rule.  They know what's coming. Ferdi's words echoed the Russian emigre writer Masha Gessen who said we should believe the tyrant when he says what he will do.

We talked about Bernie Sanders. As with other people I have spoken to in Europe, they all think Sanders is Trump's ticket to life rule. "If Trump runs against Sanders, democracy ends. Maybe it already has."

As I left I passed a lot of statues and some very old buses.

"If You Share A Room with A Monk in Jerusalem, You Have to Expect An Early Wake Up"

My recent ten-nation trip began with a week in Jerusalem. I met my old friend and roommate from our Cold War military service, Cliff Almes, in Darmstadt, Germany.  He has lived there since we both left the military in 1979, becoming a brother in a monastery there. He is Bruder Timotheus. 

We stayed in a German Guest House in the middle of the Old City of Jerusalem just 100 meters from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. For a monk of 40 years, being that close to the most holy site in Christendom was a blessing of the first order.  The Church is open between 4am and 6pm each day and mobbed with tourists and pilgrims every hour except 4-5am. 

So, Cliff awoke every morning at 3:30am, dressed and spent an hour at the Church.  Then came back. I was glad we could stay at a place that delighted Cliff so much.  I seldom go to sleep before midnight. Even if I weren’t an iconoclast, there is nothing that interests me enough to get up at 3:30am. 

Mostly I got back to sleep and stayed asleep through Cliff’s return, waking for the communal breakfast at 8:30am. 

Cliff stayed in Jerusalem a few more days as I went off to the Republic of Georgia. Two weeks later we went to Dachau and Nuremberg together.  We met in Darmstadt in the evening and drove to Dachau. At one point I asked if he had any reason to set his alarm before 7. He smiled and said, “No, but if you share a room with a monk in Jerusalem, you have to expect an early wake up.”

"Go Take a Flying F#ck at a Rolling Doughnut!" -- Kurt Vonnegut

  

In a touching scene in the movie “Ford v Ferrari” Carroll Shelby, a Texan, tells a boy who lost his father in a racing accident, “Your Daddy thought you was finer than fur on a frog.” I was watching the movie in France in English with French subtitles. The translator said something like “Your father thought you were a very good boy.”

Metaphor, like poetry, does not translate easily or well.

The moment brought me back to trying to figure out military metaphor when I first enlisted.  The American military is more than 60% southern and western, so for a Boston Yankee like me, I had trouble understanding what some of the sergeants were saying. 

One of the first metaphors that confused me was hearing a sergeant say of a soldier struggling hopelessly with the wrong wrench for the job, “He looks like a monkey trying to fuck a football.”  I have a literal mind, so I could picture what he was saying, but could not understand why he was saying it.

But those ten words hold lots of meaning. A monkey, at least in popular culture, is extremely sexually active and so might try to have an erotic relationship with almost anything.  The monkey is presumed to have great energy which it will use even in pursuit of an impossible goal. So, a soldier trying with great energy to do something impossible is like that monkey. 

In that era, the American military was trying to reduce the amount of swearing by sergeants. When one soldier was disagreeing with and rejecting another soldier, he could say, “Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”  This, like suggesting intercourse with one’s self, is an impossible task, and one that would be peculiarly painful in the likely event it failed or even if it succeeded. This insult had been in circulation at least since World War II. Many years later, I was reading “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, and smiled when I read the rolling doughnut metaphor.

But before I heard the traditional version, I heard my crew chief use the non-swearing variant using bureaucratic language to say the same thing. He said: “Please attempt aerial intercourse with a motivated, perforated pastry.”

After a while, the Army use of metaphor came easily to me. You could say I caught on, “quicker than chicken on a June bug.”

The French Unaware Americans Think French Only Surrender in War

Freedom Fries in the Congressional Cafeteria. 

Talking with French friends, I mentioned visiting the War Memorial at the center of the town of Foix in the Pyrenees.  The small town had memorial for war dead from both World Wars, Indochina (Vietnam) and Algeria.  As I walked around the memorial, I remembered the Republicans who started the “Freedom Fries” campaign and poured out bottles of French wine.  The draft-dodgers and never-servatives at the center of the campaign said the French were afraid to fight in Iraq.

The truth was, the French understood the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld lies behind the war and its ill-conceived plan and refused to be part of it.  The French view was the correct view.  Worse still French troops were on the ground in Afghanistan from the beginning of that war, because fighting the war that made sense. They fought and died in Afghanistan from the beginning of what has become America’s longest war.

I mentioned that the Republican cowards were using the stereotype common in America that French only surrender in war; my friends were surprised. They knew about the Freedom Fries foolishness but did not know that it was a stereotype with a 70-year heritage. 

When their protests began: “Lafayette; Napoleon; a million dead, five million wounded of 66 million population of France in World War I…”  I said this stereotype was as ubiquitous as the stereotypes of Russians, Germans and Brits that were part of their culture. 

The anger I feel when I remembered Freedom Fries is both because I have trained with and respect French soldiers and because the Republicans in question were and are such manifest cowards: now led by their Draft-Dodger-in-Chief.  When I hear that stereotype, I see cowards like Trump, Limbaugh, Cheney, and hundreds of other Pansy Patriots who send Americans to war and death and never served themselves, the worst letting another man take their place. 

Although a few more French intellectuals now know the low esteem in which the French military and French manhood is held by Americans, most residents of our allied nation are blissfully ignorant.  Which is certainly for the best.

Evangelical Escapees Around the World

When I travel, one of the categories of people I meet are Evangelical Escapees. Sam fits in that category.  He grew up in central Ohio in a family that was in Church twice on Sunday, Wednesday, and his teens youth group on Friday put him in Church at least four days per week. Three times a year, the big Church had a weeklong salvation event. In the summer, the whole family traveled around the south. His father was teaching and preaching at Camp Meetings. 

Sam, of course, had no choice about attending any or all of these services. For him, childhood was managing boredom attending events he had no interest in.  He was interested in science. His dad was a high school principal for a day job, but Sam was walled off from advanced studies because he had so many commitments outside school. “I never had time to really do homework. I did okay in school, but I wasn’t like the kids who took advanced classes.”

Sam left home after high school and eventually became a professional mountain bike racer. He married a researcher with a PhD in bioinformatics who got a job at French pharmaceutical company. Sam opened a bike shop in Paris.  He has a clientele of amateur athletes and some professionals on the French national team. He is a perfectionist who does bike fitting for people who want top performance. 

Sam is in his early fifties, tall, thin and fit. He is a strong rider who is very much part of the cycling community in Paris.  He speaks French with an American accent. He has a strong voice and speaks slowly. When I have heard him speak to clients, I can understand him a lot better than the native French speakers he is interacting with.

Sam says his parents really lived the faith they proclaimed. His problem was with nearly everyone else in his Church life. He learned racial epithets at Church before he heard them in “the world.”  And in the kind of Church he grew up in, Creation Science, the arrogant lunacy of asserting the earth is 6,000 years old was the only science. 

Better than Brainwashing--a convoy leaving Camp Adder, Iraq.

Sam is very far from his childhood: physically, spiritually, culturally, but not as far as a soldier I served with in Iraq. David heard me arguing with some Creationists in the mess hall before we deployed. He came up to me later and asked, “Can you really be a believer and not believe all that [Creationist] shit?” He had been told the opposite all through his childhood. He enlisted because he wanted to get away from home and Church, but he could not to a secular college. So, he turned 18 and headed for Iraq.  War was better than brainwashing. And after deployment he went to college with the GI Bill. 

David went back to his childhood hometown after serving in the Army, but got the secular education he wanted. Sam keeps in touch with his family, but is happily staying quite far from home.

   

SIXT is My Favorite Car Rental Company in Europe

When I rent cars in Europe, I try to rent from SIXT if I can. It’s not always possible.  Sometimes they cost more than the competition, sometimes they have no availability, and most recently they had a mileage limit when no other competitor did. 

But my best car rental experiences have been with the bright orange German brand.  I first rented from SIXT in the Frankfurt Airport on a business trip to Germany in 1999.  I had rented a plain vanilla Opel. I greeted the guy at the counter in my barely remembered German from 20 years before. He smiled, spoke English noting my horrible accent and offered me an upgrade. 

He said, “For an additional $10 per day, you can have a BMW 750i.” I blinked. “Really?” I said. “Yes. No problem. Silver. Would you like to upgrade?” I would and did. I went to the lot and there was a silver BMW with a 5.4-liter, 322hp V12 engine. It had a five-speed automatic. I usually get stick shifts in Europe, but I was too happy to care about the transmission. 

On the A5 Autobahn at 2am I verified that rental cars have a governor or speed limiter set to 250kph (155mph). The two-ton sedan was glass smooth at that speed.  Twenty years before I drove that same autobahn in a $400 ten-year-old 1969 VW Beetle with a 40 hp 1200cc flat four. With a tailwind I could get that car just over 100kph.  Everything passed me in the Beetle. In the BMW, I passed everything. It was awesome. 

The next time I went to Germany, I again reserved a plain vanilla Opel with SIXT. I asked for an upgrade and for roughly $10 per day, I got an Audi A6 Turbo.  And that night I checked the speed limiter. 

In November at the end of my last trip, I rented a from SIXT. No upgrade, but very friendly service.  It was a day trip from Paris to Le Mans. After seeing Ford v Ferrari in Paris, I was jazzed to see the site and museum of the most legendary 24-hour race. 

I have rented with Europcar more than SIXT because they tend to have the cheapest cars, and some of the places I go, like Latvia and Georgia and Israel, no SIXT cars were available. 

But the orange logo of SIXT will always be my favorite.

Visit to the Museum at the Site of the Nuremberg Rallies

Hitler at Nuremberg

On the same day my friend Cliff and I visited the Dachau Concentration Camp, we also visited the museum of the history of the Nazis in Nuremberg. 

This Bavarian city was the site of several Nazi rallies before Hitler took power in Germany and became the spiritual center of the Nazi cult (Fuhrer cult) after the Nazis took absolute power in Germany. 

Fuhrer Cult 

Our visit began at a museum build inside a semicircular, multi-story building that was to be the site of meetings for thousands of Nazi leaders.  Nearby are the fields that were once the site of the infamous Nuremberg rallies.  The tens of thousands of Hitler worshippers who crowded this huge field were not enough of an audience for the Nazi cult, so they enlisted Leni Riefenstahl to make the award-winning film “Triumph of the Will.” 

The film focuses solely on Hitler, the one man who embodies the Reich.  Watching the film reminded me of a guest speaker in media class I took 40 years ago.  The videographer who addressed the class talked about his work and his career path and mentioned some of his clients. One client in particular caused a few of the students to catch their breath—a particularly loathsome politician. 

One of the students asked, “What about values? How do you pick your clients?” His answer, “Whoever the client is, I maintain the highest production values.” The class was over at that point.  Riefenstahl did the same on a much grander scale.  Whether she was a true believer or an opportunist, she made an award-winning film. She maintained production values promoting one of the most evil men that ever lived. 

After we saw the film about “Triumph of the Will” and the images and film of the Nuremberg rallies, Cliff said, “The Trump rallies really are sad events compared to these.” I agreed. Ten thousand racists yelling “Lock her up!” are hardly the grandeur of Nuremberg. But the spirit is there.  The American President call the press the “Enemy of the People” (Hitler’s lugenpresse or lying press is much the same) and calling Americans who oppose him human scum, another echo of Hitler’s calls for extermination of the Jews, really are in the Nuremberg spirit.

There are differences besides scale. Unlike Hitler, Trump whines like a baby. “Witch hunt!” he says declaring himself the biggest victim in world history. Whining will not lead to a hundred thousand Seig Heils.

America First Nazi Rally in Madison Square Garden 

on February 20, 1939

The echo of Trump in the 1930s American Nazi phrase “America First” looks very ominous when touring the spiritual home of the Nazi empire. But Trump is a coward and a bully who slinked away from service as a young man when Hitler volunteered for the most dangerous duty in the terrible trench warfare of World War I. No one will make the movie “Triumph of the Whine.”

In the area surrounding the museum are places that would have been developed into imperial sites for larger and more elaborate rallies as the Nazis conquered the world.  The conquest failed and when the war began, money for lavish parade sites dried up. 

Now one of the main rally sites has some massive blocks surrounding what is now a soccer pitch.  The sites are incomplete, grown over and inhabited by people walking, hiking and playing games. 

Because Nuremberg was the spiritual center of the Reich, the Allies chose it as the site to put the Nazi leaders on trial for war crimes. It is strange to think that even at the end of their wretched lives they were given the justice they denied to millions.