The third member of the Polish Triumvarate

Chopin is Polish, Copernicus is Polish, ....is Polish. Whenever I try to establish the intellectual superiority of the Poles a I am always left with a blank space in my triangle. As we all know the triangle is the strongest geometric shape known to man thus one must be able to rattle off three significant intellectual figures as a basis for cultural greatness. Having been "educated" in the United States for most of my life 'Polish' was a synonym for big dumb guy with an enormous cock. Although the 'dumb' part was the only aspect that ever bothered me it always chagrins me to learn of all the towering intellects from Poland who were kept hidden from my developing mind.

Leave it to a fellow central European to rescue me. Kundera (may peace be upon him) loves to tell us who his favorite authors are. He has singlehandedly introduced me to more great literature than any teacher I have ever had. The latest holds special sway over my heart as he is not only a fellow Pole but wrote the following:

Memories, memories! My head tucked under my pillow, my legs under the covers, tossing about between fear and laughter, I took stock of my entrance into the adult world. There is too much silence about the personal, inner hurts and injuries inflicted by that entrance, the grave consequences of which remain with us forever. Men of letters, those men who have a God-given talent to write on the subject as such remote and indifferent matters as, for example, the grief in the soul of Emperor Charles II caused by Brunhilde's marriage, shudder at the thought of mentioning the most important issue--the metamorphosis into a public and social being. They prefer, it seems, to have everyone think of them as writers inspired by the grace of God, not man, and to imagine that they have dropped from the sky, talent and all; they are too embarrassed to shed any light on the concessions they had to make as individuals, on the personal defeats they had to endure in order to acquire the right to expound on Brunhilde or, for that matter, on the lives of beekeepers. No, not a word about their own lives--only about the lives of beekeepers. Indeed, having produced twenty books on the lives of beekeepers, one can be immortalized--but what is the connection, where is the bond between the king of beekeepers and the inner man, between the man and the youth, between the youth and the boy, the boy and the child that, after all, he once was, what comfort is the king to the little brat in you? A life unmindful of these bonds, a life that does not evolve in unbroken continuity from one phase to another is like a house that is being built from the top down, and must inevitably end in a schizophrenic split of the inner self.

Memories! Mankind is accursed because our existence on this earth does not tolerate any well-defined and stable hierarchy, everything continually flows, spills over, moves on, everyone must be aware of and be judged by everyone else, and the opinions that the ignorant, dull, and slow-witted hold about us are no less important that the opinions of the bright, the enlightened, the refined. This is because man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot. I absolutely disagree with my fellow writers who treat the opinions of the dull witted with an aristocratic haughtiness and declare: odi profanum vulgus. What a cheap and simplistic way of avoiding reality, what a shoddy escape into specious loftiness! I maintain, on the contrary, that the more dull and narrow-minded they are, the more urgent and compelling are their opinons, just as an ill-fitting shoe hurts us more than a well fitting-one. Oh, those judgments, the bottomless pit of peoples judgments and opinions about your wisdom, feeling and character, about all the details of your personality--it's a pit that opens up before the daredevil who drapes his thoughts in print and lets them loose on paper, oh, printed paper, paper, paper! And I'm not even talking about the heartfelt opinions so fondly held by our aunts, no, I mean the opinions of those other aunts--the cultural aunts, those female semi-writers and tacked on semi-critics who make pronouncements in literary magazines. Indeed , world culture has been beset by a flock of superfluous hens patched-on, pinned-on, to literature, who have become finely tuned to spiritual values and well versed in aesthetics, frequently entertaining view and opinions of their own, who have caught on to the notions that Oscar Wilde is passe and that Bernard Shaw is a master of paradox. Oh, they are on to the fact that they must be independent, profound, unobtrusively assertive, and filled with auntie kindliness. Auntie, auntie, auntie! Unless you have ever found yourself in the laboratory of a cultural aunt and been dissected, mute and without a groan, by her trivializing mentality that turns all life lifeless, unless you have ever seen an aunties critique of yourself in a newspaper, you have no concept of triviality, and auntie triviality in particular.

The innocence of habit is inevitably solidified by the malice of the law.

Carlos Fuentes Terra Nostra

This is somehow related to Dawkin's ideas regarding the malice of indoctrinating children into religious belief. Perhaps the malice of the law in such a case being the unwritten societal law that all children are in fact indoctrinated into the hocus pocus of their parents.

Children are taught to believe the backward cult traditions of their parents, such is the malice of the law. An eight year old child can be programmed to hate Jews and aspire to martyrdom, a 10 year old can be taught to carry a sign in the street opposing abortion but do either of these traditions consider simply teaching a child how to think logically and then allowing that child to come to an independent conclusion?

The Amish turn their children loose at a certain age, allow them to experiment with sex, drugs, and the modern world for years. The vast majority of those children return to their Amish communities. I would postulate two hypotheses to explain this.

1) The Amish way of life is the true and only way of life.

2) By the time these children are set free in the world it is far to late for them to think independently.

Dawkins states that only one in 12 children break with the religious traditions of their parents. If the parents have differing beliefs from one another then the child by definition must break with one to join the other. Or is this lucky one in 12 children breaking with the traditions of both parents?

I am especially intrigued with Dawkins idea that indoctrination of children is a form of child abuse. We are all appalled at the sight of the 6 year old child aspiring to be a suicide bomber but is this not simply the idea of indoctrination in its most pure and therefore obscene form? Would that Orwell were alive to write a brilliant exposition of the hypocrisy of this judgment by those who would have children of the same age condemn all who differ from them in belief to eternal torture.

I have been working on dialogue between my Poish grandmother and me when we first met in Germany in the 70's. I have also been considering a conversation with my Dad about dead gook babies and how much bounty he receives each month per baby as part of his military pension. perhaps the converation would be more effective if it took place between Tyotya Galya and dad directly.

Archived Polish film of American bombing in Vietnam spawned my thought about the DGB dollar value in military pension terms. The traditon of land for 20 years of military service dates back to ancient Sparta and later Rome (fuck off if I am wrong) so collecting post mortem bounty on enemies of the state is a venerated historical tradtion for empires.

The concept of a child as a state enemy was certainly not invented by the Americain Empire. If we can trust the film 'Gladiator' as an accurate historical reference (and lets face it most of us do) then the concept of killing kids as a preeemptive measure goes back at least to the time of Marcus Aurelius.

Of course the Americains took it to it to a new level when they started bombing civilian targets but lets not split hairs, if one can cut the throat of his adversary's seed as a precaution why not wipe out a whole city of children. Morally speaking these crimes carry equal weight.





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character sketches:

dad: dead gook babies, father robbing tobacco money
Bulgakov's devil: "mmm cancer...no, your head will be cut off!"
Kundera himself
the prostitute and the brain surgeon
Polish grandmother in germany
KGB plant child
Tieber
Kolodesh]
Hofac re
Raynor
Jones

Delillo's rambling style, characters enter and exit without apparent attachment to the story

Musil's Man Without Qualities aspect of philosophical rambling as a privilege granted to one male and one female character

Temporal: cold war cul;ture, displacement of american-eastern european son,

political- neo fascist american state
revolutionary - Chavez, Chomsky, the hollow media juggernaut, thought control as enforced apathy, Winston Smith as an epithet in Circumference of Darkness.

culture and it's discontents: shitty writers drifting to the top:Grisham, Clancy, Steele, Patterson

Will Smith's I robot compared to Asimov's: the reality of the former being more entertaining than the latter and the pretension of pretending otherwise

characters:

lovable criminal
detestable liberal
terrifying reactionary
philosophical fundamentalist


childhood: learning to say the expected thing "Ican't even understand the words"

jargon and technology laden writing :circumference of darkness, James Patterson, Clancy --

Orwell, Huxley - Brave New World Revisited : PR industry, Soviet propaganda, the death of democracy with the rise of big media

alternate universe - shirley Macclaine, Stanislav Grof,

research trip to Auroville

responibele jobs and why they seem to preempt creativity, reading, and free thought
re: working for Alex and how it moved me to the right, BMW legal and how I couldn't see my day to day work until i was gone

previous blog post the enforced conformity, no make that the rewarded conformity that passes for education

the Underground History of AMerican Education

application to Penn and edgar Rice Burroughs, cultural elite? no one to ask abut a decent author, why not Lustbaderm why didn't I consider Hemingway? Football recruiting of SAT 1300 and higher

character sketch 1300+ SAT score linebacker cum killer cum criminal, Al Queda, Chechnya, Hemingway and teh Spanish revolution, South African PR ads in 1970's magazines.

Put Kundera and Delillo together - philosophy without preaching, thinking (Musil) without condescention. The characters must be taken seriously in their moments of levity and looked at askance when they are being serious ie. musil's Clarisse and her crusade for Moosburger.

Foucault, mental illness and identification with patients instead of colleagues, Skalifasovskaya, kindness, suffering, snappiong of something internally

The dream of all the music in the world in one place - this might be a good opening, late 70's miox tapes and record clubs, tower records and dreams of having all the music at your fingertips now Limewire. Reading in Russia, James Fennimore Cooper with Russian footnotes to explain American history of Indian massacres, how Soviet censors were a healthy antidote to American schools skipping over the ugly parts.

why war and peaced is a shitty book

Maxim Gorky - Mother and my sentiments while reading it as a young communist, the letdown of Gorky when he is exposed by Solzhenitsyn years later.

Rebelling against the Socialist party hierarchy and speaking the truth about the prospects for changing American reality through Socialist campaigns in elections

french and algerian girlfriends, Egypt, servants, the competition of cultures and how America makes everyone a whore

Vadim felt joy at the thought of Armageddon. Post apocalyptic stories always held his attention. When he saw people scrambling around in the grocery store to load up on provisions he is happy. Mobilizing Soviet armies, American warships under fire, alert sirens, pilots scrambling, missiles flying hallelujah.

He used to scan the sky for missiles, or planes. He thought of ways to cripple infrastructure. Oil refineries, dams, powers plants, bridges, highways. He wondered if this was a product of conditioning. A mind constantly preparing for war is a mind that cannot conceptualize anything but war. An entire culture directing itself toward such an end… how can any other outcome be possible?

Perhaps this is why it is so much easier to be a soldier. He held out as long as he could. The books on Marx, the peace marches, Chomsky, Kant, Foucault, theory. Theories about how to prevent the inevitable. But theory is theory and human nature is shit. As Col. Killian used to say, the two biggest kids on the block, sooner or later they gotta fight. Or one day the bully opens the door to his Camaro and...boom.

So all our achievements as a civilization, the art, the science, the beauty, it all boils down to this.

In Iran they used human waves. Screaming boys charging the Iraqi machine gun positions, plunging headlong to their glorious death for the Shia Allah. The Iraqis that mowed them down bringing glory to the Sunni Allah. He envied those boys for a while, they got their day. Running and screaming, abandoning all thoughts but their cause, single minded devotion, charging to their death. Divine wind behind them, bullets and blood in front. They say Muslims that die in combat go to paradise, Martyrs have the eternal company of seventy virgins, he wouldn’t have card about that, death on the battlefield is enough.

He studied reincarnation for a while. But he knows better now. He came from a religious ulture.

(need transition to first person)

We worship Mars and Aries and Thor and weapons. Combat is our church, death is our religion and victory is nice but not all that important. Teach us edged weapons and hand to hand combat, small arms weapons and small unit tactics, strategic deployment and psychological warfare, the way they think and the way we should think. We drill and polish our boots, hone our skills and watch our enemies, watch them multiply and grow stronger and still we do nothing.

War is religion. Like all religions it requires unswerving and unthinking devotion. Devotion to principles and ideas, codes and credos. But above all there must be heroes, martyrs and gods to worship. Lenin and Trotsky, Hiro Hito and the Ayatollah, Washington and Jefferson, Stalin and Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, Bush and Cheney, Saddam and … well Saddam.

Thumbing your nose at the biggest power on earth and living to tell about it is always a good start. Or taking on the biggest army and winning. Castro and Ho Chi Minh, Che and Mao, Gandhi and Vaclav Havel, Nasser and Kim Jong Il.

War fighting is the brilliant amalgamation of the two spheres on the human mind: the logical and technical side, all blue prints and strategic theory, troop movements and supply lines; and the religious and fanatical side, red flags and heart pounding victory, ideology, conquest, domination of your fellow man, tearing out the jugular of your enemy with your teeth.

(Musil) 931 : …in every head, alongside the process of logical thought, with its austere and simple orderliness reflecting the conditions of our external world, there is an affective world, whose logic, insofar as it can be spoken of at all, corresponds to feelings, passions, moods. The laws governing these two bear roughly the same relation to each other as those of a lumberyard, where chunks of wood are hewn into rectangular shapes and stacked ready for transport, bear to the dark tangled laws of the forest, with its mysterious working and rustlings.

This brilliant juxtaposition of two seemingly contradictory parts of human consciousness creates a force so strong that logic is powerless against it. A man who rains bombs on women and children and incinerates civilians is given a medal and a military pension for life while an agitator who scrawls graffiti on the side of a missile is sent to prison for 20 years.

Death and destruction is celebrated, held in the warm embrace of family through endless parades, graduations, holidays and media events. A baby with its innards spilled into the street still clinging to the incinerated breast of its dead mother is labeled as collateral damage and chalked up as a necessary inconvenience in a valiant struggle toward a bright and prosperous future.

And once the population’s logical faculties have been anesthetized by an endless stream of death images, the governments and corporations of the world begin waging war on their own populations and workers. Standards of living are decimated for the lions share, wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer and those who question the logic of this are marginalized, imprisoned or killed.

But precious few question the logic of this system. The logical faculties of the mind having been brutalized and repressed for so long that they are unlikely to stir even when the jack boots are crunching through broken glass in the very living room of the rabbit himself.

Solzhenitsyn coined this term: rabbit. Used to refer to the hapless victim of state terrorism who when seized by the strong hands of the security apparatus could muster only the impotent bleat “me, what for”? And as Alexander points out, in the history of all the arbitrary arrests of subjects by their governments that question has never been answered.

As the mystical side of our mind is awakened and then left to languish unfulfilled we find ways to appease it. Patriotism for some, religion for others, often the same people find comfort in an unhealthy mix of both.

(p. 948) Then the Archbishop’s carriage drove by, a gently rocking heavy carriage, whose dark interior showed red and purple. It had to be the Archbishop’s carriage, for this horse-drawn vehicle that Ulrich followed with his eyes had a wholly ecclesiastical air, and two policemen sprang to attention and saluted this follower of Christ without thinking of their predecessors who had run a lance into his predecessors side.

States are deified, loyalty to the state is held up as a virtue, children are referred to as future soldiers, educated to respond to a ringing bell by moving to another room, where they will sit for another useless hour learning only to unquestioningly obey whomever has been appointed their master for that hour.

Institutional learning facilities such as schools, colleges, universities and professional schools reinforce one simple principle in perpetuity: if you follow you will be rewarded. With the exception of the few dullards who are actually incapable of grasping the basic tenets of the subject being taught the grading curve is a measure of loyalty more than anything else. Did you attend class and pay attention as asked? Did you allow the leader to remain unchallenged throughout the indoctrination period? Did you perform your lessons at home as asked? Did you regurgitate the material on the exam in the manner expected? Yes, yes, yes, yes = A+.

Law school was very traumatic for some. The absolute subjectivity of the grading system coupled with a strictly enforced curve brought to light the painful truth that we were not the geniuses we had been led to believe we were by all our education up to that point. Someone had to be better, someone best, someone worst. Creativity, if discouraged mildly by our education up to that point, was strictly forbidden there.

It makes perfect sense that top law school graduates are well paid and given access to the highest levels of privilege in corporations and government. Over the course of three years these select few have demonstrated their willingness to pour countless hours of reading, writing, rhetorical exercise, debate, analysis and meticulous regurgitation of massive amounts of information from memory for no actual purpose. They have demonstrated that they can toe the line of, lick the boot of, amorally reason for, and/or defend and uphold any one who stands in front of them and says “I am your master”.

Their professional oath requires amorality above all else. If a secret is told to them in the capacity of an attorney-client relationship they may not divulge it for any reason. “Hi will you be my attorney, here is a $10,000 retainer?” “Yes? Great. I am responsible for the death of 20,000 people and I have illegally confiscated all their property. I need a way to reap the benefit of this theft and murder and maintain my reputation as pillar of the community, and I need you to make it happen, fast, thanks”.

“Yes, sir, as you can see by the diploma on my wall behind me I can be trusted with this type of information so you need not fear anything from my conscience because that was surgically removed as part of my legal training”.

Perhaps the slavish devotion to amorality is another way of fulfilling the needs of the mystical side of consciousness. There must be an anchor, a basic idea, a founding principle. The client is your God, when he stops paying you find another, while he pays you are free to devote all your intellectual capacity toward protecting his interests without fear of moral reproach.

((Musil) 831 : Ulrich began by speaking of the mischief of interpreting the kind of experiences they were talking about not as if what was going on in them was merely a peculiar change in thinking, but as if superhuman thinking was taking the place of the ordinary kind. Whether one called it divine illumination or, in the modern fashion, merely intuition, he considered it the main hindrance to real understanding. In his opinion, nothing was to be gained by yielding to notions that would not stand up under careful investigation. That would only be like Icarus’s wax wings, which melted with the altitude, he exclaimed. If one wished to fly other than in dreams, one must master it on metal wings.

He paused for a moment, them went on, pointing to his books: “Here you have testimony, Christian, Judaic, Indian, Chinese, some separated by more than a thousand years. Yet one recognizes in all of them the same uniform structure of inner movement, divergent from the ordinary. Almost the only way they differ from each other comes from the various didactic superstructures of theology and cosmic wisdom under whose protective roof they have taken shelter. We therefore may assume the existence of a certain alternative and uncommon condition of great importance, which man is capable of achieving and which has deeper origins than religions.

“On the other hand,” he added, qualifying what he had said, “the churches, that is, civilized communities of religious people, have always treated this condition with the kind of mistrust a bureaucrat feels for the spirit of free enterprise. They’ve never accepted this riotous experience without reservations; on the contrary, they’ve directed great and apparently justified efforts toward replacing it with a properly regulated and intelligible morality. So the history of this alternative condition resembles a progressive denial and dilution, something like the draining of a swamp.

(943) “A puddle” he now thought, “has often made a stronger impression of depth than the ocean, for the simple reason that we have more occasion to experience puddles than oceans”. It seemed to him that it was the same with feelings, which was the only reason commonplace feelings are regarded as the deepest. Putting the ability to feel above the feeling itself—the characteristic of all sensitive people—like the wanting to make others feel and be made to feel that is the common impulse behind all our arrangements concerning the emotional life, amounts to downgrading the importance of nature of the feelings compared with their fleeting presence as a subjective state, and so leads to that shallowness, stunted development, and utter irrelevance for which there are innumerable examples. “Of course,” Ulrich added mentally, “this view will repel all those people who feel as cozy in their feelings as a rooster in his feathers and who preen themselves on the idea that eternity starts all over again with every separate ‘personality’!” He has a clear mental image of an immense perversity of a scope involving all mankind, but could not find a way to express it that would satisfy him, probably because its ramifications were too intricate.

Culturally Detemined Absolutes

Michel Foucault's writing on the history of sexuality sheds a great deal of light for me on a much broader area of human behavior. Foucault begins with the basic premise that deviance and normality in human sexual behavior are both determined, quite arbitrarily, by culture. Isn't the very idea of right and wrong arbitrarily determined by culture? Perhaps the reason that spiritual texts have endured as moral baselines is that there are so few culturally specific rules that make sense as a universal truths. We can agree across time and geography that killing is wrong but imagine how absurd it would appear to the 31st century cultural anthropologist to dig up a few stone tablets with some of the eminent truisms of my short lifetime.

"Communism is evil, capitalism is good"
"Christianity is a religion of peace"
"Islam is a religion of peace"
"Religion is an important part of a child's upbringing"
"Torture is wrong"
"Every human being has inherent rights"
"Killing civilians is acceptable collateral damage"
"Habeas Corpus is an inalienable right for US citizens"


Are any of these statements true? And if true are they True? Would they make sense to someone from another time and culture.

Dostoevsky's famous maxim 'without God anything is possible' serves as a reminder that a moral framework is all that stands between the inhumanity of man and his fellow man. But in our history the moral frameworks have been repeatedly cited as justification for horrible atrocities. A deviant interpretation of Islam justifies 9/11 a deviant interpretation of Christianity justifies the Salem Witch trials and the Inquisition, nationalisms and patriotism yield massacres in Armenia, El Salvador, and The Katyn Forest.

I have never been completely clear on the definition of moral relativism but it seems to me that it should be defined as such: a moral relativist is one who advocates that an action is morally wrong when undertaken by one party but morally correct when undertaken by another. If killing civilians is wrong then it must always be wrong. It cannot be abhorrent when undertaken by those who are classified as terrorists but acceptable when undertaken by those who are classified as conventional military. Everybody thinks they are fighting for the greater good, that the sacrifices of the few are necessary for the good of the many, but that is of little relevance if you are one of the 'few' who are killed in the struggle.

This of course assumes that death is a bad thing. Death in combat has been venerated by a myriad of cultures as the highest aspiration in life. The Roman centurion, the Teutonic Knight, the Samurai, the Kamikaze pilot, the mujahadeen, and the suicide bomber have all sought death in battle as a great reward.

But what about those who believe in reincarnation? If one has lived according to the rules of cosmic ascendancy should not one look forward to death as a release from the tortures of their present life? Assuming for a moment that suicide of any kind is considered a black mark on the reincarnation record the kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers are out of luck but it seems that the major religions which have reincarnation as an underpinning, Hinduism and Buddhism, are fairly hostile toward violence in general. So would a worldwide conversion to these two religions end all wars?

Sometimes I think that if religion can possibly have any value it is in its ability to change a person's behavior for the better. A criminal who discovers Islam or Christianity in prison and changes from a petty thug into a brilliant leader is a testament to the value of religion. I read somewhere once that there are atheist rabbis who continue to do their work in the synagogue and in university because they believe in the inherent value of religion even though they do not believe in God. This idea completely fascinates me. A person is willing to pretend to believe in something that they secretly believe to be false for the benefit of their fellow man. Ironically this is the type of thing that makes me believe in God. Atheist rabbis lead agnostic to belief...film at 11.

And then there are places like Auroville, India. I almost moved there a while back. It was mentioned in a few books by Stanislav Grof and I found their website and started researching the place. I wonder if that is where Steven King got the idea for "the Mother" in The Stand, or the Wachowski brothers for "the Oracle".

A monastery should not have a flag. A monk friend of mine told me about a beautiful dream he has in which the angel Gabriel comes down in the night and takes all the flags in the world away. But religious symbols are flags too. In my dream he takes those as well.

Duvall in Apocalypse Now and Giovanni Ribisi in The Postman. They would be opposed to the removal of the flags of the world. They both defined their identity by the wars of which they were a part, without flags, symbols and ideology wars seem even more pointless.

star wars rebels

David was seven when terrorists blew up the officers club at Rhein Main. Until then he had eaten dinner there with his family on Fridays. It blew up on a Friday. For some reason the image of a terrorist in his mind always included a Volkswagen van, the round bubbly kind with the big VW logo stamped in the metal of the nose. He wanted to know what the terrorists were, beyond their long black beards and dark glasses. Why did they do what they did. His parents explanations seemed groping and insufficient. As if their answers were based on what they should say and should think but rooted completely in ignorance. And fear.

They took the London subway to see Star Wars not long after the attack. When the subway stopped and the lights went out he wondered if the terrorists had done that too. But mostly he thought about the movie and whether or not they would get there in time.

The rebels were fighting the empire. They launched a daring strike at the heart of the enemies fortress, they risked their lives, some of them died, but they struck a mortal blow. It took a great many years for the empire to recover. The empire was forced to become even more ruthless.

There were real life rebels a couple years later. They were called mujahadeen and the CIA was helping them fight the Soviets. They even lived in the desert and dressed like Luke Skywalker and his family on Tatooine before the stormtroopers killed them. They came up with innovative tactics to make up for their inferior numbers and lack of technology. There was an article about mujahadeen dropping rocks onto the blades of Soviet Hind helicopters as they flew through canyons and bringing them down.

The Palestinians were using rocks against tanks, but there weren't any articles about tanks being destroyed by rocks. It seemed like their were lots of rebels. Some were fighting us, some were fighting the Soviets, some were fighting the Israelis. In Nicaragua the rebels were fighting the Sandinistas who were bad because they were Communists. In Angola the communists were the rebels and they were fighting the Portuguese. In South Africa the communists were fighting the Afrikaners and they were bad because they created apartheid.

One time when David was in the waiting room at the hospital he saw a magazine ad for apartheid. It was glossy with beautiful pictures of South Africa and it explained why apartheid wasn't really racism and why South Africa was being unfairly sanctioned. He wondered if the communists and the apartheid people were fighting which side the US was on.

His mom said it was hard for the South Africans because they had to make everything from scratch since no one would do business with them.

In 1980 they moved to California form Germany. David and his brother were so excited to be home. The next time a Star Wars movie came out they could see it right away instead of having to take the London subway or wait until it came to the base.

The Empire Strikes Back started out in a far off planet that was totally covered in snow. The rebels had to hide after their daring attack on the Death Star. It was so awesome to be able to see the movie without waiting in a huge line.

When David was in eight grade a special guest visited their classroom. She had just returned from a trip to the Soviet Union and she had lots of slides and souvenirs to share with the kids. In Moscow there was art in the subway and big gold statues in the parks that no one ever sprayed with graffiti or tried to steal. David was so excited about this place and he went home and told his mom all about it.

Mom was not excited, she was mad. She yelled at David and said she was going to call the school. David did not understand this. When they lived in Germany they visited lots of countries and admired their art and even bought postcards to put in a big scrap book. Sometimes they showed slides of their travels to friends and talked about how beautiful it was there or there and how nice this or that place was.

Then mom explained how the Soviet Union was evil and that if you disagreed with the government they would say you were crazy and then lock you in a mental institution and pump you full of drugs until you really were crazy and then no one would believe anything you said. Dad explained how their elections weren't real because there was only one person on the ballot so you had to vote for who they said and that wasn't really an election.

David's grandparents had visited the Soviet Union back when David's family was still in Germany. Grandma brought back a hand carved bear that lifted a barbell when you pushed a button. Grandpa never said anything about mental hospitals or elections. They showed their slides and mom and dad didn't even get mad.


-----

When David was nineteen he went to the Soviet Union. He had studied Russian for a year. They were in the south of Russia, there were even palm trees. They took a boat to Georgia and he thought about staying there forever. The KGB tour guide thought he was a spy but he was still pretty nice. The American tour guide was mad when he went to Georgia with Arden and Inna but it was worth it.

When he got back from the USSR all he could think about was how much he missed it. His Russian had improved he thought maybe he could work there. He had taken all the Russian classes in the catalog, he started studying Arabic.

It took him a year and three months to get back to Russia. It wasn't the Soviet Union anymore. He married a Russian girl, then got divorced, married another one, came home. The University of Maryland gave him a graduate assistantship to study for a Master's in Russian Linguistics. He had to teach second year Russian in return for his tuition and stipend and live in the Russian speaking dorm in return for his room.