Avuncular American

Tales From The Golden Age

And the Conducator* said his was a "Golden Age..."

Monty Python's weaponized "killer joke" may have been used for offensive purposes, but under the Ceausescu regime humor was mainly in self-defense:

Humor is what kept Romanians alive, and TALES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE aims to re-capture that mood, portraying the survival of a nation having to face every day the twisted logic of a dictatorship.

So go the notes to the official English-language site of Cristian Mungiu's latest film, where he scripted the work of four separate directors in a very cohesive and funny parable on life in the last years under Nicolae Ceauscescu (the dictator was executed in December 1989).  These were Mungiu's formative years, and they've left their mark.

We just saw Tales From the Golden Age on the wide screen, but if you happen to see it at home, rustle up some Eastern European-type snacks while you enjoy this cultural history morsel.  Some sausage, pickles, dark bread, brandy or vodka.  Get into the mood.  Food, as you'll see - its scarcity, its centrality to the struggle for survival, its civilizing influence (sometimes) - is a recurring theme in Tales.

Oh yes, the Tales, or urban legends:

• The Legend of the Official Visit
  
• The Legend of the Greedy Policeman
  
• The Legend of the Party Photographer
  
• The Legend of the Air Sellers
  

Each of the urban legends rings true, whether it's the depiction of party apparatchiks vying for favor, or the advantages of using your position vs. the inherent risks of playing in the black market.

Though I've only spent short periods in former East bloc countries, the "legends" brought back memories from the absurdities of life in other autocracies:  the tar macadam still steaming from a road paved within hours of a ministerial inspection; the octogenarian president's trademark scarf heroically - magically, in the absence of any wind - billowing in the daily front page photo; the array of telephones (whether they functioned or not) on an official's desk as an indication of his relative importance...

Mungiu has plenty of material from which to choose:

Newspapers were required "to mention his name 40 times on every page" and "factory workers spent months rehearsing dance routines for huge shows at which thousands of citizens were lined up to form the words Nicolae Ceausescu with their bodies"

So writes Alina Stefanescu in Romania Revealed, in an excellent blog post on the importance of humor in Romania and other Communist bloc countries during the Cold War.

Tales from the Golden Age is definitely not a Romanian version of Germany's "ostalgie."  Far from it.  Indeed it is criticism at its best - through black humor, which is not far-fetched, just absurdly real.  Too bad you can't watch it on an old pirated VHS tape, just like in the film...

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*"Conducator" (the Leader) was the title Ceausescu chose for himself, equivalent to il Duce, Caudillo, Führer... You get the picture.

Memo To Washington: Try Burying Power Lines

It's not just Washington, and it's not just electricity cables.  Everywhere in the United States, whether the prevailing weather extremes are winter storms, fall hurricanes, or intermittent tornadoes, the answer is the same: plant wooden telephone poles along the street, run your critical infrastructure wiring over them, and hope for the best.  19th century technology at its best.

This weekend in Washington, it's same old, same old: hundreds of thousands of people deprived of heat, electricity, and communications.  And it doesn't have to be that way.

This winter in Brussels has had its share of snowfalls, though nothing like Washington's current blizzard.  But one thing we didn't have to worry about on our street (photo), or for Brussels as a whole, was power lines collapsing under the weight of snow or ice.  They are buried, you see, along with other utilities like telephone cables, water and sewage pipes, etc.

Belgium's no poster boy for governance, what with its multiple parliaments, record-breaking numbers of civil servants, and yearlong gridlock in forming governmental coalitions.  But on such matters as the permanence of basic infrastructure, they have thankfully reached the conclusion that streets might just as well have conduits for power lines that are put there to stay, rain or shine.

I fear that in the US, we live for the present, and the notion of investment for infrastructure is as quaint as Dwight Eisenhower's potholed Interstate system.  Investment is now equated financial instruments therefore with Wall Street, and we know where that took us.  Just look at the appalling state of the State of California, where Peter Schrag in the September 2009 Harper's painted a picture of a citizenry that has voted its way to ungovernability, starving even education - talk about investment in a critical area - of tax funding.

This may not be the weekend to rub it in, but hell, Washington, it's been like this ever since we lived there more than three decades ago, when I wondered how the underground Metro system could break down because of snow (of course, I learned that it's the above-ground parts that are the problem).  And another period of Washington residence in the late '90s, when power outages during snow/ice storms had us heating thawed food on a camp cooker inside our frozen apartment, probably in violation of a bunch of city ordnances.

As with so much else, couldn't Washington show the country that there's another way to organize urban living?  By amortizing, maybe, part of the annual billions of dollars of storm damage that is due to downed power/phone lines by simply burying them under Washington's pretty tree-lined streets.

So, after the big dig-out is over, how about trading snow shovels for the other kind, and maybe creating some employment for sustainable infrastructure of the most basic kind?

Tancredo the Tea Party Crusader

We really do have a culture to pass on to our children: it’s based on Judaeo-Christian values.  This is our country.  Let’s take it back!  Cultures are not the same. Some are better. Ours is best!

Former Congressman Tom Tancredo in "Tea Party Turns Nasty," Times of London 6 February 2010

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His 11th century namesake Tancred used to enjoy torturing his Muslim captives.  Today, Tom Tancredo is all for carrying holy war to the Saracens.  Except that Tancred's 21st century flag-bearer sees the war starting at home, fearing "Islamification" in "Barack Hussein Obama's" America, stress on middle name.  Tancredo's anti-Islam shtick dovetails nicely with his trademark anti-immigration nativism.  And he calls the President an "ideologue."

Though the Crusades ended about a millennium ago, Tancredo has found plenty of willing conscripts for his battle with non-Judaeo-Christians among the Tea Partyers gathered in Nashville this weekend.

When their opening speaker's official biography takes pride in being labeled the leader of the "House crazies," you know that the Tea Party has an appetite for red meat.  They were apparently well-served.

So, on to the main course, with Tea Party keynote speaker Sarah Palin, who, among her apocalyptic beliefs, thinks that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was "God's plan."  Fellow Americans, please do not let any of these messianic crazies with a mindset in the Middle Ages get anywhere near the Middle East.  Just remember where Tancred's Crusaders wound up - in the sea.

Image: Project Gutenberg

Les Barons - Nabil Ben Yadir

Driving a BMW While Arab...

... is no problem in downtown Dubai, where wealthy Arabs own the place, and driving anything less flashy would be suspect.

In Brussels, however, where Arabes are largely relegated to buses and the metro, people might get the impression that the car's either been stolen or bought through drug deals.  This cliché-overturning image is at the heart of Nabil Ben Yadir's understated comedy.

In the case of "Les Barons" (official site), this group of mostly unemployed guys from the "ghetto" (variously known in French as le quartier or la zone) just want to show off and pick up girls.  So they've chipped in with 8 unequal shares from their welfare allowances or black market jobs to buy the upmarket car.

This good-hearted story of underdogs who might just do well was not the broad, obvious comedy that we sort of expected to see.  Much of the humor consists of inside jokes, often dealing with the delicate territory of relations between first and second generation Moroccan Belgians, whose parents have high hopes for them to follow in their footsteps: blue collar job security, filial loyalty, semi-arranged marriage followed by grandchildren.

But what if you want to be a standup comedian?  Is browbeaten Hassan, played with subtle grace by Nader Boussandel, going to stick with his dreams or obey his father, a salt-of-the-earth immigrant who wants his son to get an honest job?

Some of the brothers and sisters from the hood do well, especially Malika, Hassan's childhood sweetheart who now presents the evening TV news.  The impossible dream?  Well, not really: here in Belgium, both of the main francophone channels' TV news programs are anchored by women of maghrebi origin.

Director Nabil Ben Yadir has fun with other insider references, both to films and to Belgium's complex mix of languages, ethnicity, and regions.   His casting of veteran Flemish actor Jan Decleir (star of the excellent 2003 thriller The Alzheimer Case) is a nice touch: here he plays greengrocer Lucien, whose vegetable stalls make a nice lounge for our Barons with time on their hands.  This time, it's not Alzheimer's but Parkinson's disease that afflicts the actor.

Likewise, Baron-wannabe Franck is played by non-Arab Julien Courbey, who wanted to be an Algerian in the 2005 comedy Il était une fois dans l'oued.  Poor Franck, he just wants some "respect" from his maghrebi friends, but it's just like Steve Buscemi's hangdog "Donny" in The Big Lebowski - everything he says is dissed.

Les Barons comes at an interesting time, when Belgian media are contrasting the relatively benign (or at least laissez-faire) attitude of Brussels' francophones on the question of urban security with an alarmist (some might say racist) view among many in the country's Dutch-speaking Flemish majority.  In truth, as a 2008 article showed in Le Monde Diplomatique, many of the young immigrant-origin Belgians - even though born and raised in the country - are "foreigners inside their own city" and rarely leave le quartier.

This is also Nabil Ben Yadir's own story - he knows how difficult it is to take that step away from the confines of the urban immigrant ghetto: "If you leave le quartier, it's a bit like treason... the first step is complicated... for me, it was making my first feature film."  Read his entire interview here (.pdf, in French).

Ben Yadir's first step is no baby step.  This is a very subtle, funny, and touching film.  One that deserves wider international distribution than it's likely to get as "the first comedy on Belgium's immigrant neighborhoods."

(Poster from Films.ma) 

In the World, Like It Or Not

FYI, fellow Americans: Europeans who care about maintaining close ties with the US administration are starting to get worked up over the likelihood of a no-show by President Obama at the May EU-US Summit in Madrid.

There may be many reasons for the White House to consider skipping this pow-wow, but most of them are probably purely domestic - reinforcing among populists that the President is totally focused on economic matters, job creation, etc.  None of which are unimportant matters.

But as the New York Times' David Sanger reminded us today, there is a direct correlation between American economic standing and its ability to wield power in the world.  "In the world," that Vietnam era GI phrase to mean everywhere other than their soggy rice paddy, is where we live, and everything from deficits to crude oil to climate change links Americans to everyone else, whether they are Chinese, Africans, or Europeans.

Yes, by all means cancel the Bush era Moon/Mars boondoggle, where money was to be borrowed (more deficits) on a whimsical return to manned Moon exploration, leading perhaps to Mars "colonization."  Meanwhile, back on Earth, the colonization that we really need to be concerned about is that which is going on in the West Bank.  Which brings me back to the US-EU Summit.

Here's what I wrote in Euractiv today:

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When Israel-Palestine merits not a word from a president, you know the United States is turning inward.

Roger Cohen on the SOTU, New York Times, 28 January 2010, “Exit America“

The same Cohen op-ed indicates that only nine minutes were devoted to international affairs in President Obama’s first State of the Union message last month. And now we hear about how intra-EU wrangling over which of its several “Présidents” will shake Obama’s hand first at the US-EU Summit may mean that none of them will get to do so - if the US President doesn’t attend.

Sorry, folks, this just won’t do. Adult leadership is required on both sides of the Atlantic if the warring parties on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean are ever to be encouraged to make peace.

It’s not a problem that needs more time - Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its siege of Gaza have lasted the better part of a half century. 90 years ago this month, in February 1920, the “powers” were meeting in the Conference of London - one of a series of conclaves to divvy up the defunct Ottoman Empire - and we know how that turned out.

Last month, a few days before the SOTU speech that ignored the Israel-Palestine situation, I chaired a panel in Brussels that looked at the unsatisfactory state of Western efforts to bring about a lasting peace. Despite the hope this time last year (Inauguration of Obama, his appointment of George Mitchell), the anniversary of the Israel campaign against Gaza reminds us how little has changed, except that Israel now has a government bent on expanding its settlements throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem. But in our conference, what was clear was that both sides of the pond needed to keep each other engaged.

The United States remains Israel’s primary security guarantor, and the European Union’s financial assistance allows the Palestinian Authority to remain in business. It would appear that the US and the EU have many things to talk about, and might want to better coordinate their use of what should be considerable leverage with both parties to the conflict.

What better way than to end the “egotistical wrangling” over lining up to shake hands? And for the US, to use the EU-US Summit to show Europe that the Obama Administration is not going to “go local.”

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