Europe in Sepia

CIRCUS

EVERY DAY THE world we’re living in is increasingly turning into. . a circus. Yes, I know, the comparison’s a dull one. It’s what people used to say in ancient B.G. (Before Google). It’s a complete circus! My life has turned into a circus! Politics is a circus! The word circus was an analogy for chaos, madness, unbecoming behavior, for events that had gotten out of hand, for life’s more grotesque turns. It’s possible, though, that the word might soon regain currency. Let’s remember P. T. Barnum for a second, father of the circus and American millionaire, and his declaration that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Barnum’s cynical declaration naturally doesn’t only apply to Americans. The circus is global entertainment.

My next-door neighbor is in the habit of not taking his trash directly out to the big garbage bins on the street, preferring to leave them outside his front door for weeks. He dumps his wastepaper in a cardboard box, and when the wind blows it goes flying everywhere. I can’t work out why he finds it so hard to part with his trash, but I’m afraid to ask.

I spoke to the building superintendent.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you. You know, lately people have become very sensitive,” he said.

Sensitivity — there we go, another old-fashioned word. Really, every day people are more and more sensitive. Recently, a hypersensitive passerby elbowed me aside just because I was daydreaming and heading down the left and not the right side of the stairwell. Sensitivities vary, have various causes, and take various forms.

Some poor Dutchman bought a TV, but it turned out that it didn’t work properly so he spent a year trying to sort things out. In the end, when his sensitivity hit overload, he packed a revolver and went back to the store where he bought the TV, with the obvious intent of shooting the boss. At the last minute he changed his mind and put a bullet in his own temple instead. Today even his children won’t visit his grave, which is perhaps understandable. How do you honor the memory of a father who killed himself because of a television?

More recently, a twenty-six-year-old Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, got all sensitive, lost his nerve, and set fire to himself on a main square somewhere in the Tunisian provinces. Since then heaps of stuff has happened, and a few more sensitive people have set themselves on fire. There was an Egyptian, then an Algerian. . all in all, people have been catching fire like matchsticks.

In little Croatia, where out of sensitivity people punch each other’s face in every now and then, a construction worker turned up on site and put a few rounds into his boss. Apparently he hadn’t been paid in months. The media didn’t show the slightest sensitivity toward his case.

And Đurđa Grozaj, she got all sensitive too. For thirty-five years the fifty-four-year-old single mother was employed in a Croatian clothing factory. Today the factory is in receivership and Đurđa is unemployed. Đurđa has joined the ranks of the aforementioned almost four hundred thousand unemployed. Together with her colleagues, as a sign of protest Đurđa went on a hunger strike. The public played the statue of the three monkeys. OK, well, not quite everyone. Đurđa and her colleagues were honored with the symbolic “Pride of Croatia” award and invited for coffee with the Croatian President. As she explained, that didn’t mean much, because not having any money she’d already given up coffee. In December 2010, the bank decided to seize all Đurda’s movable assets because of a debt of about seven hundred dollars. Đurđa had been a guarantor for a friend, who then didn’t repay the loan, and so Đurđa made the repayments for as long as she could. The bank’s writ was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and Đurđa Grozaj decided to throw herself in front of a tram. The tram driver braked at the last minute. As she told reporters: “Even the tram didn’t want to run me over.”

Sensitivity, for better or for worse, isn’t solely a human trait. Animals also display well-developed signs of sensitivity. At the same time the unfortunate Mohammed Bouazizi successfully self-immolated and Đurđa Groznaj unsuccessfully threw herself under a tram, dead birds fell from the sky all over the globe; in the city of Beebe, Arkansas, the Swedish town of Falköping, and in the Italian town of Faenza. On the English coast not far from Kent a heap of crabs washed up on the beach. Nobody’s quite sure why. There’s a kind of monkey (Macaca fascicularis), whose form of social organization is very similar to that of humans, which apparently has suicidal tendencies. Then there are claims that dogs often suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder and have self-harm tendencies, like birds in cages that nervously pluck out their own feathers. The life of the sap-sucking insect known as the Pea aphid, parasitic on various forage crops, is also very sensitive. When attacked by ladybugs they’re self-programmed to explode. Little suicide bombers.

Croats are yet to collectively give themselves up to suicide, although they’ve got all the reasons in the world why they should. The state is in complete collapse, people are hungry and depressed, and the government’s been making asses of them for years. Croats, however, aren’t united as a result of these major injustices suffered upon them, but because of the “injustice” suffered upon on a pair of Croatian generals at the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague. A former Croatian president currently sitting in jail facing corruption charges, he’s unusually sensitive too. He’s constantly whining that his human rights and dignity have been violated. The government is also very sensitive at the minute. Over the past couple decades the ruling party has spent billions, not only on itself, but also on the defense of its criminals, and now it’s steadfastly refusing to produce the receipts. That would be the fatal blow to its oh-so-sensitive dignity.

So, what to do, the circus has encircled us. Our lives are also a circus. What’s more, it often seems that there’s no exit to the tent. But whatever the case, sometimes one needs to pull one’s socks up, head out to the park, sit on a lonely bench somewhere, open one’s ears to the sweet song of the birds, and get down to reading a literary classic. A good book, they say, can save lives. I mean, Quirk Books, for example, offers an enviable range of classics, from Android Karenina to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. They recently published Kafka’s The Meowmorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa is transformed not into a giant bug, but into a cuddly little kitten. I’m sure the little kitten will warm your heart. With a sly grin on your face, just remember the millionaire P. T. Barnum, father of the circus, and his other reassuring declaration: There’s a sucker born every minute.

FATAL ATRACTION

1.

An acquaintance of mine was into fly-fishing. I wouldn’t have had a clue what it was all about had he not showed me his resplendent collection of flies, their miniature beauty enchanting. I could easily imagine a dazzled salmon in a shady Scottish stream, an alluring fly and jazzy feathers dancing before its eyes. Fly-fishing is a particularly expensive hobby. You can’t just wade out into a Scottish stream willy-nilly wearing any old thing. Flies don’t come cheap, either. But a gentleman is always willing to put his hand in his pocket for a spot of fishing. God knows how many times the money invested in the ritual exceeds the value of the fish caught. The satisfaction, quite obviously, isn’t in the catching. Getting back to my acquaintance though, at some point his life changed and the accumulated years dulled his fly-fishing fervor. He packed on the pounds, his heart grew weak, and his spirit dissipated. All until recently. Out of the blue he got in touch while on a trip through Asia. He was with a guide fishing a pristine river in some kind of island jungle. Fly-fishing had literally brought him back to life. The passions of others are the most mysterious things in the world.

2.

My acquaintance sent out his sudden electronic life beacon around the same time an online article caught my eye. A new consumer obsession has caught on among moneyed young men between the ages twenty-five and thirty-five. The majority of wealthy men in this age bracket are either soccer players or oligarchs. They’re not spending their money on yachts, women, or art (bye-bye artists!) anymore, but on their sublimate — on aquariums. From Singapore to London a whole network of professionals has popped up to service this well-heeled clientele: aquarium designers and architects, underwater lighting experts, underwater gardeners for the aquarium ecosystem, suppliers of rare aquarium fish, ichthyologists, even fish therapists. Aquarium maintenance alone costs around a hundred and sixty thousand dollars annually. And aquarium fish are another matter entirely. At between eighty and two hundred thousand dollars a specimen, the platinum arowana is the most-highly priced, and prized. Its lack of pigment gives it a platinum-like color, making it a kind of albino among fishes, an apparent bearer of wealth and good fortune.¹ The platinum arowana is unusually sensitive, its optimal life expectancy around ten years. In order to test water quality, temperature, and a bunch of other water-related things, people put tester fish — known as “clown fish”—in first, the majority of whom die so that other fish may lead happy aquarium lives. “Clown fish” perform the role of slaves throughout history, offering the same suicidal service, one akin to tasting whether the czar’s, the emperor’s, the king’s, or the master’s food has been poisoned.

The possible explanations for this trendy new obsession among flush young men are almost endless, and all are as right as they are wrong. The most straightforward can be found in language. In a number of languages, including a few Slavic languages, the equivalent of the word chick (i.e., an attractive young woman) is, believe it or not—fish. Is the aquarium a realization of the infantile dream of underwater worlds (and absolute control over them)? Or is it a symbolic substitute for a harem, one with “little sirens,” with whom every touch is impossible and therefore all the more desirable? Or is it about a space of contemplation, a home temple in which the divine world swims around indifferent to the lives of mortals? Whatever the case, the fatal attraction between men and fish is fertile ground for psychoanalytical and other interpretive acrobatics.

3.

On the island of Kiribati the relationship between young girls, fish, and men is as clear as day. The Pacific Ocean feeds the world with fish, more than half the global tuna catch (two million tons a year) hauled up there. And it’s not just European fishing fleets; Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Russian, American, Thai, Indonesian, and Filipino boats are all there too. Kiribati waters swarm with fishermen and fish. From the age of twelve upward the little Kiribati girls slink around the fishing boats like cats. Prostitution isn’t illegal on Kiribati. It’s how the local girls earn a bit of pocket money to buy a few drinks, or get a few pounds of fish to feed their hungry families. The young prostitutes are called korakorea girls, korakorea meaning “cheap fish.” The girls fall ill to venereal diseases, just like “clown fish” do from fishy ones. Here the reciprocal relationship between men and fish really is fatal.

4.

At the end of June this year I traveled via Vienna to Graz in Austria. The flight from Vienna to Graz was canceled so I had to take the bus. The young guy sitting next to me was a Russian from Ukraine, a soccer player, traveling to Graz for a two-day training camp.

“But why Graz? Aren’t there any spare fields in Ukraine?”

The young guy shrugged his shoulders. Although he seemed to me barely seventeen, it turned out that Pavel was twenty-six, his club owned by a rich Ukrainian. A mafioso? A Ukrainian oligarch? No, no, a businessman, Pavel defended his boss.

“And how much do you earn?”

“Not much. Twenty thousand dollars a month.”

In the world of major league soccer players, twenty thousand dollars a month is like beer money, Pavel explained. Pavel obviously wasn’t interested in talking about soccer, or about oligarchs, or about his “wages,” or about anything else for that matter.

“Tell me, is Vienna at the seaside?” he livened up.

“It’s not.”

“And Graz?”

“Graz isn’t either.”

Pavel quickly sunk into sleep. And while I looked at the sleeping boy on the seat next to me, a general sense of resignation came over me. He was on his way to Graz to train for a couple of days, and I was off to a literary evening. A barely literate Ukrainian was using his enviably nimble pair of legs to bring in twenty thousand dollars a month, while I, highly literate, for my “intellectual services” was bringing in incomparably less. With his monthly salary a soccer player like Pavel could buy four Hawaiian yellow tang, a popular aquarium fish, at five thousand dollars a pop. Pavel might be barely literate, but as opposed to me, he was born with an innate knowledge. He knows all too well that he’s only a little fish in the aquarium. He knows he’s replaceable, and that he only costs his boss one, two, or three platinum arowanas (the price of which has apparently fallen lately) a year. I on the other hand, who drank “arrogant” ideas about the rights of all to equality with my socialist milk, haven’t been able to shake the thought that I’m irreplaceable, although the wages that await me in Graz for the provision of intellectual services equal a portion of fried sardines. In a better restaurant, of course. Yes, I am a korakorea-girl, a cheap fish. And with that thought for comfort, and my young fellow passenger having mistaken my shoulder for a pillow, I too sink into sleep.

1The belief that albino children bring bad luck lives on in parts of Africa. Every now and then a witchdoctor kills a pallid-looking child in order to prepare a voodoo potion. The child’s organs are usually removed while he or she is still alive, so the child bleeds to death.

BAD PUPILS

A glance at the faces of those who in this society are someone can help understand the joy of being no one.

(The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection)

I’M SITTING IN a Zagreb café and, as is my custom, I’m eavesdropping. Spying on the everyday is half a writer’s job; the rest is creative filtering of the information gleaned. Maxim Gorky would be happy to hear that. And in any case, it’s more than time we gave a thought to the unjustly loathed classics of socialist realism.

There are two girls at the table next to mine. One is like a rocket: taut, firm jaw, cleavage pumped out, aerodynamic. The other is like pudding: soft, stoop-shouldered, down in the mouth. .

“Every morning I make myself a juice and eat a plate of cereal. I mean, sometimes it happens that I nibble on this or that too, but I don’t start the day without juice and cereal. No way!” says rocket-girl.

“Really?” asks the other, enchanted.

“For me it’s written in stone. And when you write something in stone, there’s no way anyone’s gonna get one over you.”

“Truly?”

“I was at my pedicurist’s the other day, and the chick says to me, hey, how about I round your nails off a little, those straight ones of yours are so out. Not a chance, I tell her. Why, she asks, they’d look better on you. I know what looks best on me. Where would I be if I didn’t know that?!”

“On one hand you’d have round nails, and on the other you’d have straight ones,” says pudding-girl timidly.

“You know what I’m saying?”

And while I listen to the self-confident girl, she who is incapable of being thrown off track, it occurs to me that Maxim Gorky and his slogan “Humankind — how proud that sounds!” are to blame. In time the slogan won over a good part of the world. This big idea about the pride of humankind was adopted by democratic societies, parents, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, self-help gurus and trainers, priests and thieves, children and killers with children’s faces, politicians and voters, bankers and traders, spin doctors and the kindlers of human self-confidence, and — look at that — we all entered a new time as a result. We all have the right to happiness, we can do anything (anything we want), we all have our opinions, we all know what we want, and we deserve to have it all. Self-confidence, self-worth, self-respect, self-integrity, self-regard—they’re all ladders to climb on the road to success. Doubting oneself, whether it’s low self-esteem or procrastination, has been declared a dysfunction, perfectionists are mental patients, contemplation a deferral of action. Even the Wikipedia entry on procrastination is accompanied by an image of Rodin’s The Thinker. Thinkers are dysfunctional persons in need of expert help.

What has happened to society as a consequence? While murderers murder, procrastinators dilly-dally about whether to pull the trigger. While good artists spend time getting intimate with their doubts, the bad take over the galleries. While good directors lose their minds working on film, the films of the bad flood the cinemas. While serious scholars are blocked by “academic procrastination,” the bad storm the department. While good pop and rock musicians inevitably die young, the bad haunt the stage well into their eighties. While good journalists spend time studiously researching the facts, the bad usurp their places by selling lies. While the rare honest politician is wracked with doubts, the irresponsible govern without a care in the world.

There’s a video clip on YouTube that functions as a visual metaphor of the society of spectacle at its peak. In the clip, Russian President Vladimir Putin struggles to bang out a few notes on the piano, and then sings the old standard, Blueberry Hill. It’s painfully bad. America’s finest musicians accompany Putin’s performance, and out front, in the audience, the country’s entertainment elite rises to its feet. Famous actors and actresses mouth the words and sway in rhythm, all in a show of support for Putin. Putin is a child with worryingly high self-confidence, the actors and actresses parents lovingly watching their progeny.

An innocent joke remains lodged in my memory from the time of Yugoslav communism, coincidentally the only joke in circulation immediately following Tito’s death. A father catches his son smoking the crappy local Drava cigarettes.

“Bad cigarettes are dangerous for your health, here’s some money, go buy yourself those expensive Marlboros.”

The next day the father catches his son swigging hooch.

“Hooch wrecks your liver, here’s some money, go buy Johnnie Walker.”

The third day the father catches his son reading Start, a local lads’ magazine.

“Don’t waste your time, here’s some money, go buy Playboy.” A short time later, the kid asks his father excitedly:

“Dad, who gets to sleep with the playmates?”

“The best in the class, my boy, the best in the class!”

Let’s rewind the tape. The father said: The best in the class. And until society rehabilitates the father from the joke and his message that only the best in the class win the right to advancement, the world will continue its slide toward its — beginnings. Because bad pupils have gained control over all of us. They’re who we vote for, who we listen to; they’re all we see. Bad pupils have usurped the government, political forums, and the media; they produce the food we eat and the drinks we drink; they design our clothes and our surroundings. Bad pupils color our mental landscape; they’re the teachers in our schools, they write the books we devour. Bad pupils are our media idols, establishing the values we accept as our own, modeling us to their standards. Bad pupils employ us, determining the amount we are paid — they are our lords. And lorded over by bad pupils, we’re all gradually becoming dunces. That’s why governments are so happy to cut education funding.

A little rake with an outstretched hand approaches the table next to mine. Rocket-girl takes a note from her handbag and gives the kid twenty kuna.

“Isn’t that a bit much?” pudding girls inquiries.

The kid vanishes.

“And a thank you?!” rocket-girl yells after him. “Jesus, have you noticed how many beggars there are in Zagreb lately?!”

Pudding-girl is silent.

“Before it was just the gypsies. Now everyone’s got their hand out,” says rocket-girl, frowning with worry.

Taking a cigarette from the packet on the table, she lights up and lets out a long drag.

LIQUID TIMES

A BICYCLE-EYE view is a view out on the world. When you ride a bike your gaze doesn’t linger long on your surroundings, but neither does the world exactly flash by, particularly when you ride as leisurely as I do. The elevated position and nonchalant circling of the pedals allows you register things, but doesn’t give you time for empathy. Here I need to add that the view out from my bike is always of the same restricted space, of a park in my Amsterdam neighborhood.

The park has changed a lot over the past decade, it’s a long while since it was a space for urban escapism. Today, particularly on the weekends, it’s crawling with joggers, cyclists, and walkers of all ages and nationalities. Before you’d only see young men out jogging, now you see tubby middle-aged women wrapped in hijabs. People used to cruise around on their bikes. Today, little mobility scooters barrel down the bike paths, unruly old folk at the steering wheel. Sometimes you even see an entire Turkish brood heading off to do the shopping on them. Then there are the kids on Vespas, the invalids in their wheelchairs, and the increasingly wary cyclists.

My gaze settles on a small posse bounding toward me. There’s a young man chugging along pushing a twin-size baby stroller. A young woman with a boy in tow follows close behind. A girl and a dog bring up the rear. This family out for a morning jog would be fantastic material for a pro-life propaganda video, that’s if — dog and baby twins excepted — they weren’t all clenching their jaws. There isn’t the slightest trace of pleasure on their faces. They might as well have stayed home and cleaned their teeth.

Actually, no one’s cheerful anymore. Not the scowling old fellow, plastic bag in one hand, grumpily hurling clumps of dry bread into the lake with the other. Not the young couple with a child who’s watching the angry old boy, and not the teenager sauntering past totally indifferent. It’s a sunny Saturday morning, little sailboats and winsome ducks gently glide across the lake. The trees and grass exude a calming shade of green. So why the general anxiety dimming the glow of this Amsterdam park life idyll?

According to demographers and the newspapers, life on earth is getting a little crowded. The number of earthlings has just topped seven billion. India, currently with a population of around 1.2 billion is soon to overtake China as the most populous country on earth. The developed countries of today are projected to experience future depopulation, while developing countries such as Nigeria are expected to see population explosions. Some 1.5 billion earthlings live on less than a dollar a day, and huge numbers perish from hunger. People with a planetary view of the world are worriedly wondering if in the near future we’ll all be hungry, and whether there aren’t simply too many of us. Perhaps this accounts for why more and more people are asking themselves how to die. I mean, when there’s no answer to the question of how to live.

Demographers suggest that the demographic picture of little Croatia is currently in a bad way. More people are dying than being born, and Croats no longer believe in church or state. The raging procreational passion that erupted with the birth of the Croatian state has long since fizzled. These days, potential parents don’t have jobs and so live with their parents, not in any position to rent, let alone buy an apartment. And they’re a curse on the homes of their parents, who themselves are barely surviving on miserable pensions. Unofficial statistics suggest than every second Croat is a thief. This dirty little detail helps sap the procreational impulses of potential parents. It also helps explain why young Croatian women down contraceptive pills like sedatives.

But even death is an expensive solution. The price of cemetery plots has gone through the roof. With thieves, gangsters, murderers, and politicians all desperate for their deeds to outlive their mortal coils, there’s a mad scramble on for prime plots at Zagreb’s main cemetery. The Catholic Church in Croatia granted (not without a fee of course) deceased Croatian president Franjo Tuđman pole position at the very entrance, where hitherto there had only been a chapel. Today, Tuđman’s majestic grave stands almost buttressed behind the chapel, the new layout like a symbolic sentry box surveilling the entire cemetery. In this new order of things it’s immediately clear who rules the Croatian dead, present and future. Tuđman’s devotees among the living quickly started scrapping for the first row. The heirs to old graves never dreamed of selling out their great-grandmothers’ and fathers’ final resting places. But the ambitious buyers are generous to a fault, which is understandable. They’re buying a spot in the eternal gallery. And in this respect a new social order is taking form in the graveyard. Wealthy dead folk squeeze out poor dead folk.

“Resomation” or “green cremation” is a new invention in corpse management, a natural process for the speedy decomposition of the body. The deceased is fed into something called a “resomator” (which looks like an elongated washing-machine) and at high pressure exposed to a water and potassium hydroxide solution. After three hours the machine spits back out around 200 gallons of mineral-rich liquid. Dental implants, crowns, pacemakers (which don’t explode like they do during cremation!) and other remains are ground into a fine ash and given to the family, the volume of ash being much less than that remaining after cremation. Resomation also consumes eight times less energy. The deceased’s liquid remains can be used as fertilizer, or just tipped down the sink. The process even erases any DNA trace of the deceased’s identity.

Resomation is currently legal in a handful of American states and several European countries. The Scots, incidentally, have the patent on resomation. Given the lack of cemetery space in Switzerland, resomation might soon be the only available burial option. And those who care about the environment can breath easy: Resomation is eco-friendly. “We are all dust and it is to dust we shall return” could soon be: “We are all liquid and it is as liquid we shall end.” For the many people who felt their lives worthless, posthumous transformation into this truly liquid form could be of some comfort (Water the lettuce with Grandma! We’ve never had such tasty lettuce before! Spray the geraniums with Granddad!)

What happens to the soul in the process of resomation — whether our soul is hydrophobic or water-resistant; whether on hitting the water it turns into a little submarine and rides the storm, or simply dissolves; whether at high pressure it is catapulted into the air like a miniature rocket, or simply evaporates — these are questions best left to wise men of theology. One thing is certain: Zygmunt Bauman is right. We live in a liquid era.

JUMPING OFF THE BRIDGE

I WAS GLUED to reports on the recent riots in the London boroughs of Tottenham, Hackney, and Brixton, stunned by the images of seething youth smashing shop windows and making their grab for street wear and electronics. Expensive mobile phones apparently topped their consumer desires, a detail that disappointed many commentators (If only they’d stolen bread and milk we’d understand!). I became fixated on something else though: A Waterstones bookstore the kids passed by might as well have been an undertaker’s. But they didn’t miss a beat in cleaning out the backpack of another dazed and confused kid who obviously needed medical attention, leaving him bloodied and lost in the street. On our television screens, shocked, we all saw what we wanted to see. Each of us projected our own fears onto the Rorscharchian stain of the London riots.

Around the same time, the beginning of August 2011, a Serbian news portal carried a witty article about the opening of a new bridge. In Belgrade, the capital, there’s an old bridge called Branko’s Bridge. Although named after the Serbian poet Branko Radičević, it’s better known for the fact that another Branko jumped from it, Branko Ćopić, a fellow writer. The author of the article noted that among terminally morose Serbian writers, the opening of the new bridge had been greeted with rare delight, and that a kind of competition was on to see who’d christen the bridge with a jump, thus winning naming rights. The bookies were already taking bets on the next writer-suicide. Among the many comments on the article, someone made an appeal that these things not be joked about; someone else observed that others might also like to think about jumping (Why only writers? What about single mothers?); a third person suggested that politicians should take a jump (Jump Tadić!¹ We’ll call it Boris’s Bridge, for sure!); a fourth person remarked that a lot of people in Serbia unfortunately seemed to have no idea who Branko Ćopić was; a fifth suggested that a list of candidates for pushing be prepared.

Why did I single out this particular episode? I could have equally mentioned Anders Breivik, the Norwegian “anti-Islamic crusader,” who just a few days previously had killed seventy-seven people, the majority of them teenagers. Or the band of thieves who robbed a handful of people in a Budapest suburb and then buried them alive in a nearby forest. Or the story of a pack of Zagreb hooligans who bashed a pair of French tourists simply because the pair refused to buy them a round of drinks. I could have mentioned falls on the stock exchange, the soaring Swiss franc, the global recession, and the bankers impunibly running the show. I could have brought up the numerous demonstrations against “the swine of capitalism,” the messages of which haven’t reached the pudgy ears of those with their snouts deepest in the trough. Because all of this, and a lot of other stuff too, happened within more or less the same timeframe.

The devastating fact is that the majority of the young English rioters were barely literate. The research and the terrifying statistics are there. The reading ability of sixty-three percent of fourteen-year-old boys from the white working class, and more than fifty percent of their Afro-Caribbean peers, is at the level of the average seven-year-old. The majority of these kids leave school and continue their education on the streets. “Other kids go from school to university. We go from school to prison,” said one of them. Their “girlfriends” get pregnant early. In comparison with other European countries, Great Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy. At best semi-literate, left to their own devices, and with few chances of finding any kind of job, these kids form an angry, disenfranchised mass whose futures have been stolen. They have absolutely no reason to believe in social institutions, and vandalism is the only means of articulating their fury. “I didn’t want this kind of life. It just happened to me,” said one boy.

The image of the life they desired is one that their society served them up as desirable (I want to be rich, I want lots of money / I don’t care about clever, I don’t care about funny). In an ideological package such as this, the system of values in operation in everyday life doesn’t assume literacy, education, responsibility, or work (Life’s about film stars and less about mothers / It’s all about fast cars and cussing each other). That’s why confronting one’s own loser status is, for all intents and purposes, just another form of self-deceit (But it doesn’t matter cause I’m packing plastic / and that’s what makes my life so fucking fantastic), in exactly the same way that vandalism is a mute form of conceding one’s own defeat (And I am a weapon of massive consumption / And it’s not my fault it’s how I’m programmed to function).

Years have passed since the clearing of the utopian fog and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In spite of the many warnings, the piles of books written sounding the alarm, the multitude of demonstrations that have pointed to ever-increasing social stratification, in spite of institutional and extra-institutional attempts to resolve or attenuate the worst of the consequences, society, deaf and blind, has marched on. In the meantime grandmothers and grandfathers, those who lived with full faith in the system, have gone into hard-earned retirement and then died of hunger. In the meantime their children have had children and discovered with horror that they aren’t in a position to support either themselves, or their children. In the meantime, their children have also had children, the penny dropping that their futures have no future. And in the meantime, a heaving mass has been born, a tribe of millions, déclassé and inured, incapable of remedying their position, because they don’t know who their real enemy is anymore. All their lives they’ve had it drilled into them that it all comes down to their personal choices and individual ability. And today, looking at its “feral” children, society, stupefied by the mantras of democracy and free choice, continues to try and convince these kids that they’re cutting off the branch on which they’re sitting. They might be barely literate, but the children know that the branch has been rotten for years, and can’t hold their weight in any case. The only weapon they possess is their rage.

And I, who by all accounts should be on the opposite side, am at this very moment much closer to these kids than any of them could imagine, and much more than I would have ever imagined. I didn’t want this kind of life either, but there you go, it happened to me. If nothing else, the kids and I are bound — by fear (I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore / I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore / When do you think it will all become clear? / ’Cause I’m being taken over by the fear).

And while day and night I flagellate myself with the news, while my heart pounds like a beat-up dog cowering against a wall, I extinguish my fears with fantasies about them, about the kids who will soon (yes, soon!) in their millions crawl from their ghettoes, and fists raised descend on Wall Street, or wherever they’re needed. My fantasies, however, don’t hold out for long, and soon burst like a polychrome bunch of birthday balloons. (Forget about guns and forget ammunition / ’Cause I’m killing them all on my own little mission / Now I’m not a saint but I’m not a sinner / Now everything’s cool as long as I’m getting thinner).²

And as far as jumping off the bridge goes, good taste keeps me from being so predictable. I’m not going jump, no way! Unless it makes me thinner. And if it does, then it’s goodbye, Weight Watchers! Hello, Revolution!

1A reference to Boris Tadić, president of Serbia at the time.

2All cited lyrics are from Lily Allen’s “The Fear.”

A MOUTHFUL

Who’s there?

Hunger!

Ooh, hunger!

(“Money,” Cabaret)

BLESSED WERE THE times of totalitarian dictatorships and information blockades! Today, thanks to the information revolution, barely a day goes by without a disturbing piece of news unnerving me. If every revolution eats its children, then this one, the information revolution, is the bloodiest of all. I mean, who ever really knew what a tsunami was, let alone had heard of the region where it hit?! In the old days, who knew who had mugged and robbed whom? These kinds of stories nibble away at my hard won reserves of internal peace. In communist dictatorships people lived longer and healthier lives. Promised a brighter future, many were convinced they’d live to see its dawn. The reality is that excessive information exposure is more harmful than radiation. The fall of communism, globalization, the incontestable hegemony of capitalism, and Francis Fukuyama with his end of history have ruined the health of millions.

Bubba, my countryman, spends most of his day voluntarily hooked up to every available source of information. Bubba’s daily phone calls raise my drowsy consciousness to a state of emergency.

“Hello, you there? Get yourself to the bank, quick.”

“Why?”

“Withdraw the lot.”

“There’s nothing to withdraw.”

“Christ, you must have something!?”

“Loose change.”

“Take it out!”

“But why?”

“Buy provisions.”

“What kind of provisions?”

“You know, food.”

“What kind of food?”

“Flour, oil, tinned stuff, dough, zwieback, definitely zwieback. . Didn’t you ever do the weekly shopping with your mom?!”

Actually, I do remember. On the first of the month Dad would fetch a canvas satchel and we’d all go grocery shopping together. Mom would buy just enough to see us through to the next payday: oil, flour, rice, pasta. Mom’s pantry was a place of wonder: lined up in neat orderly rows were jars of preserves, jams, pickles, paprika, beetroot, sacks of potatoes, small casks of sauerkraut, smoked bacon, crackling, and ham, jars of lard and honey, little boxes of cookies. .

“Don’t forget the garlic.”

“Why garlic?!”

“In case of riots and a police crackdown.”

“What’s garlic got to do with the police?!”

“If you’re out and about and there’s a riot you can rub the garlic into a scarf and cover your mouth and nose. Garlic’s great against tear gas.”

“What are you on about?”

“Buy batteries, a transistor radio, a torch, a pocketknife, and a few essentials from the local camping store.”

“But why?!”

“Haven’t you heard of nine meals from anarchy?”

The phrase “nine meals from anarchy” was apparently coined by Lord Cameron of Dillington in the hope of rousing shopping drunk British consumers from their slumber. Let’s imagine, for instance, that one day there’s no petrol at the pump. Trucks wouldn’t be able to make their daily food deliveries to the supermarket. And given that almost no one keeps provisions at home, it’s estimated that the food on supermarket shelves would go in three days. At three meals a day, we’d only have nine meals before total anarchy. Things are, of course, much more complex. It’s a matter of chain reactions. Every increase in the price of petrol increases food production costs, and increased production costs increase the price of the product. Chaos would ensue if cash machines crashed for a day. Nobody keeps cash at home anymore. But things are, of course, much more complicated still. Today the crisis is all pervasive, and unemployment is all pervasive, and this means that hunger is crouching at the door of millions of people — those who don’t have the faintest idea what hunger is. Because until now hunger has always been somewhere else. On television reports of starving African children covered in burly flies.

A few years ago I was in Sofia, Bulgaria. The acquaintance I was staying with lived downtown in a typical East European apartment block. Thirty years ago they were pretty apartments, that much is apparent from the spaciousness and the detailing. The apartment was now in a desperate state of disrepair. We went out onto the balcony for a cigarette. On the neighboring balcony I noticed an unusual wire contraption.

“What’s that?”

“Ah, that’s our ingenious neighbor,” said my acquaintance. “He hunts pigeons with it. He made it himself.”

“What does he want with pigeons?”

My acquaintance laughed tartly and shrugged her shoulders.

“A lot of people are struggling here. .” she said.

It’s been a few years since that conversation on the Sofia balcony, but at this very moment I remember that resourceful Bulgarian with respect. Things have changed in the space of several years. Even I’ve wised up recently, in every respect. I’ve honed my consumer instincts, and for the first time in my life I’ve started comparing prices and am more than willing to travel a little farther if it means saving a few pennies. I recently bought a load of Dutch cans of condensed milk at about a dollar and a quarter a can. The cans are identical to the old Soviet ones, Russians called the contents zguschenka. From a single can of zguschenka you could make a liter of milk. As opposed to the Dutch cans, the Russian cans didn’t have an expiry date, edible for eternity.

And as far as pigeons go, I’m resolute there: no way, ever. Pigeons are plain revolting.

“You’re right,” says Bubba. “Set limits. It doesn’t matter how hungry you are, don’t ever ingest what revolts you.”

Thank God I’ve got a copy of the Croatian translation of the famous Apicius cookbook. Flamingo was one of the greatest delicacies on the ancient Roman table and luckily Amsterdam Zoo is full of the elegant pink birds. Flamingo needs to be boiled a little first, then you flavor it with spices, douse it with white wine, and put it in the oven. Pheasant doesn’t hold a candle to flamingo.

Amsterdam’s parks are hopping with hundreds of thousands of rabbits, and numerous flocks of plumpish ducks paddle the canals. For now, it seems, there’s no reason for concern. The Dutch were long kind to immigrants. They’re not anymore. But there are some exceedingly cunning fauna that manage to flout the strict legal controls, sneaking their way in undocumented. That’s what happened a year or so ago when, tired of the long south-north flight, a gaggle of Egyptian geese landed on Dutch soil and decided to set up camp. The feathery Egyptian felons would have gone unnoticed had a few articles not appeared in the tabloids about how these brawny Egyptian geese were threatening their autochthonous counterparts with extinction. I’ve got no idea what an autochthonous Dutch goose looks like, but I’ve clocked the Egyptian geese sauntering around the neighborhood tram stop. Egyptian geese are unusually chunky, so as you approach the tramlines it’s as if there are big clumps of snow lying there. Yes, things have changed: Today immigrants are good to the Dutch.

Like I said, I’ve honed my instincts. I run the scenarios in my head. I’ve got a Plan B up my sleeve and a Plan C under development. Apart from the kidnapped flamingos, rabbits, and ducks of unidentified origin, and renegade Egyptian geese, lately I’ve been eyeing up my Chinese next-door neighbor. He’s youthful, compact, shortish, has supple joints, toned, tanned calves (he wears shorts in the summer!), a cute face and smooth skin. My Dutch neighbor on the other side I don’t even give a second look: He’s my age, gone to seed, has big ashy eyelids and an unhealthy complexion. All in all, more sausage than steak.

SOUL FOR RENT!

I think it’s just elegant to have an imagination, I just have no imagination at all. I have lots of other things, but I have no imagination.

(Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch)

SHORTLY BEFORE THE whole world slid into financial crisis a Dutchman, the head of some kind of association, contacted me explaining that he was a fan of my books, and that he’d like to organize a literary evening.

“And you’d be the moderator?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a literary critic?”

“No, I’m a physical education teacher.”

“So you’re into sports then?”

“No, cultural exchange.”

“And where would the literary evening be?”

“In Poland.”

“Where exactly?”

The Dutchman mentioned the name of a village. As it turned out the Dutchman had a holiday home there, where he spends most of the year. Other Dutch also had houses in the village. Then it came out that the physical education teacher actually organized group tours for Dutch tourists, accompanying them around the surrounding countryside and introducing them to authentic Polish village life. His mission wasn’t just to enlighten Dutch tourists about Polish culture, it was also about enriching the everyday lives of the local population. I was supposed to be the enrichment. The physical education teacher’s benevolent enterprise had already received accreditation for its innovative embrace of European integration.

“Who are you accredited by?”

“European Union agencies. We get some funding from them, the rest comes from membership dues.”

“And this is how you earn a living?”

“One has live from something,” he said meekly.

Irrespective of the fact that I was and remain wholeheartedly in favor of initiatives supporting European integration, not to mention intercultural communication, I declined the invitation, which only goes to prove my arrogance and worrying deficit of visionary imagination. Let me repeat: This was all before the crisis. Today I’d no doubt be more receptive to the offer.

Yes, we live in a time of crisis. Many are thinking about means of survival, yet most suffer failures of imagination. For example, in Croatia a couple of middle-aged women (one of whom was educated as a political scientist) went to jail after botching a bank robbery. For my part, I appreciate an imaginative approach. I think it’s elegant when someone, even in times of crisis, has an imagination. Perhaps I have lots of other things, but I have no imagination.

That’s why I was thrilled to read about a little Croatian start-up. Buying pigs’ ears from a local slaughterhouse (cheap, of course — pig’s ears rarely make it onto anyone’s menu), a guy figured he could grind them into prime dog food. Crisis or not, there are plenty of buyers. People obviously figure that even if their own lives aren’t up to much, they can at least try and give their pets a decent one.

I was equally taken by the example of well-known gourmet chef, Daniel Angerer, and his wife. The pair had a young baby, and in case her milk dried up the wife put some away in reserve. With the fridge soon overflowing with breast milk, the pair decided to make cheese from it. Angerer launched the new venture by approaching volunteer tasters with little cheese, fig, and pepper sandwiches. Many turned up their noses. Angerer’s wife maintained that the prevailing skepticism toward mother’s milk cheese stems from the fact that most people “associate breasts with sex,” instead of accepting the fact that “women’s breasts exist to produce food.”

Angerer’s idea was taken up by artist Miriam Simun in the installation The Lady Cheese Shop. Visitors were offered breast milk cheese, the goal being to examine “the relationship between ethics and modern biotechnology.” London restaurateur Matt O’Connor has a dish called “Baby Gaga” on his menu, breast milk ice cream. It’s around twenty-two dollars a portion. O’Connor maintains that “no one’s done anything interesting with ice cream in the last hundred years,” and pays his donors well. One wet nurse shyly explained that given she has excess milk, the extra income was very welcome in these recessionary times. The woman is right. If people sell their kidneys, blood, and children to survive, why wouldn’t women sell their milk. I mean, if they’ve got it to spare.

Some people’s imaginations really take the cake. It isn’t just breast milk that brings in the punters, nostalgia works a treat too. Lithuanians, for example, figured out that there was a dollar to be made in commercializing their traumas under the terrors of Soviet communism. As part of the project 1984: Survival Drama in a Soviet Bunker, visitors crawl down into an authentic six-meter deep Soviet bunker in a Lithuanian forest somewhere, exposing themselves to the risk of physical and mental torment. Visitors are happy to put their hands in their pockets to hear (for a first or second time) Soviet guards yelling: “Welcome to the Soviet Union! Here you are nobody and nothing!”

Hungarian director Péter Bacsó’s 1969 film The Witness (A tanú) features a communist amusement park. There’s a scene in a funhouse in which Marx’s, Lenin’s, and Stalin’s heads leap out of the darkness, prompting general shrieking in the audience. The scene inscribed the film in the memories of my generation as a brilliant and emancipatory satire on the absurdities of communism. Of course the film itself spent some time in a bunker, and is today almost forgotten. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, communist theme parks have sprung up in a number of post-communist countries, but as there’s no risk, they’re no longer entertaining, and least of all emancipating. Viliumas Malinauskas is a wealthy Lithuanian farmer (mushrooms and snails) and the owner of Grūtas Park, a sculpture garden located in a forest next to the village of the same name, the park home to socialist realist statues scavenged from the ruins of Lithuanian communism. Visitors can have their photo taken in the embrace of tons of bronze — Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and Engels are all there — or if they prefer, with living sculptures, performance artists impersonating the same crew. In Lithuania, a land of Catholicism and former communism, a battle for market share is raging. It remains to be seen whether dead communism or living Catholicism will win the day.

Incidentally, let’s not forget that from a commercial perspective, communism still appears to sell amazingly well in the country of its former rival, America. Every now and then a new literary star emerges from the undergrowth to testify about his or her communist trauma due to lack of bananas and toilet paper. The reality is that these stars are getting younger and younger (and cuter and cuter!), so can’t have had any real personal contact with communism in the first place. But yeah, genes and a place of birth are always solid guarantees of purported authenticity. The marketplace knows that the inauthentic recycling of trauma always sells better than authentic experience from first-hand.

Some people really do have great imaginations. The London culinary expert assured us that there had been nothing new in the ice cream world for the past hundred years. But there’s no way that’s the case with tourism, where they’re innovating on a daily basis. Hence the appearance of so-called dark tourism and its specific sub-genres. There’s grief tourism (tourists visit concentration camps, infamous prisons, historic graveyards, battle sites of mass slaughter, or the small town of Soham, England, where two ten-year-old girls were once killed); disaster tourism (tourists visit places struck by natural catastrophes, post-Katrina New Orleans, post-tsunami Thailand, etc.); then there’s poverty tourism (tourists visit infamous shanty towns such as Soweto in South Africa, or the favela of Rio de Janeiro); and then there’s doomsday tourism (tourists go to places threatened with disappearance, the Galápagos Islands, Greenland, tiny coral islands such as Great Barrier Reef in Australia).

The newest branch of tourism on offer is political tourism. It’s all about educational visits to political hotspots. Tour operators organize both group and individual trips to countries such as Turkey, Georgia, North Korea, Northern Ireland, Ethiopia, Kosovo, and Bosnia. The tour guides are always experts, acclaimed historians, diplomats, academics, respected commentators, and journalists. The clients are whoever is prepared to pay. The cost of an eight-day trip to Bosnia is just over four thousand dollars. The tour is led by a well-known British journalist and involves meetings with local politicians, NGOs, religious leaders, regular people, and authentic victims of the Bosnian war. Surviving victims, naturally.

For many of these troubled hotspots, the potential windfall from political tourism could be a saving grace. The Balkans has a lot to offer. It’s perhaps only a matter of time before ethnic cleansing and detention camps inspire theme parks. Tourists could get their ethnic chips (Serb, Croat, Bosnian, Albanian, etc.) with their entry tickets and then chase each other around the park ethnically cleansing one another. Communism could be a starter too. Goli otok, the Yugoslav gulag, has a mild Mediterranean climate, and given its accessibility, incomparably better tourist potential than Siberian camps. In short, if there’s a growth market for anything in the states that have sprouted from the former Yugoslavia, it’s definitely for tourism. It would naturally be unfortunate if the industrious residents of these impoverished backwaters were to only participate in political tourism ventures as waiters and supporting actors.

I admit that there’s also a personal dimension to my interest in the human imagination in times of crisis. I’ve been mulling over how to earn a dime too. I once met an unusual old woman who asked me a sly question.

“And where do you fit in: among the vampires or the donors?”

“I’m with the donors,” I shot back in jest.

Today my off-the-cuff response turns out to have been the correct one. Because as the old woman explained it, people divide into two main groups: “vampires” and “donors.” Being a donor doesn’t automatically grant one the moral high ground, and neither does it relegate one to the loser category in advance. Maybe you’re just lazy, and exposing your bulging veins to exploitation is easier than baring your teeth and getting down to work.

As someone with a donor’s psychogram I’ve decided to try my hand as an entrepreneur. My idea is perhaps a little exclusive, but luckily for me it’s not original. Originality, say marketing experts, only increases the risk of bankruptcy anyway. I’ve decided to rent out my soul. I’m well aware that the soul’s value has fallen catastrophically, and that my business venture doesn’t have much hope of success. But you never know. I’m inspired by the bright example of the Croatian businessman who with his dog food really has made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. My soul is flexible and displays strong regenerative properties. Its powers of absorption are as good as any old school blotter. Potential clients should provide a short biography. Perverts and smokers are out of the question. Payment in advance and in cash. Send contact details to the editor.

THE CODE

YOU NEED TO know how to talk to small nations. At the recent Bosnian and Croatian premieres of her film In the Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie gave a master class in how it’s done. As a film star Jolie could’ve done as she pleased, yet she acquitted herself with exceptional humility, declaring with complete sincerity that she’d fallen in love with Bosnia; that Bosnia had suffered terribly in a war started by the Serbs; yes of course, she added, the whole region had suffered too, in its own way. But she really got them when she said that she made the film (one not without cinematic merit) to showcase Bosnia’s suffering to the world. Her words cooled the still gaping Bosnian wound like a balm.

She was a hit with everyone, the men in particular, so much so that no one noticed her deferential manner was the kind you put on when talking to children. With an unfailing human instinct, Angelina Jolie unlocked the code. She kissed the finger slammed in the drawer, gave the naughty drawer a good smack, naughty, naughty drawer, and the evil spirits slunk away. The Croats and Serbs waited in line with outstretched pinkie fingers, and I’m pretty sure that at least in their heads, the Slovenes, Macedonians, Albanians, and Montenegrins were all lining up somewhere too. Angelina Jolie blew them an air kiss. The Serbs were pissed and beat their fists in the dung heap: They’d expected more than just air.

If the rules of political correctness prevent us from abusing ethnic, national, racial, gender, and other types of differences — all unreliable in any case — and we’re looking for something to fall back on, there’s always the code. Social groups, tribes, sects, gangs, religious communities, mafia structures, families, Internet fan clubs, they’re all characterized by codes of behavior — written and unwritten, conscious and unconscious, enduring and susceptible to change, respected and disrespected. If not by a code of social behavior, how might we explain why Americans — just for example now — almost never bellyache when meeting an acquaintance, but rather portray their lot in life as shiny and good, while Croats and other Yugozone¹ residents can’t wait to start bitching the second they clap eyes on someone they know. If they’re not whining about their personal problems — a toothache, a bad haircut, the long line at the post office that morning, a neighbor who turns his TV up too loud, a relative who landed in hospital, their kid who got an F at school — then they’ll be bitching about rising prices. There’s an authenticity to the bitterness there, because prices seem to go up every day. The thing is, however, the bitcher-in-question gives you the impression that the price rises are directed at him personally. His bitching and our attendant commiserations work like morphine on him. It’s like Yugozone residents spend their lives wandering around with a little finger outstretched, just waiting for someone to blow on it and give it a kiss. And when someone does, presto, the pain disappears as if it’d never been there.

Yugozone residents, the men in particular, all behave in a similar manner toward their leaders. The genius of Slobodan Milošević wasn’t that he said c’mon, let’s go smash some Croats, Bosnians, and Albanians, but that with an unfailing fatherly impulse he put his finger on the code and promised Serbs: No one will dare beat you again. The genius of Franjo Tuđman was not that he created the Croatian state, but the way he delicately positioned himself among the Croats, the very same way Milošević positioned himself among the Serbs. And Tuđman could even boast the advantage of a doctoral title. Yugozone residents love “doctors” and “generals” (it’s in our ganglions is how my former countrymen like to put it, just because they like the word ganglions), because only “doctors” and “generals” can decree — sorry, I meant guarantee — that everything will be as it should. This explains a square in downtown Zagreb being called Dr. Franjo Tuđman Square, the doctoral honorific probably making the square a world first. Although a number of doctors and generals, beloved leaders of the Yugozone peoples, have met inglorious ends — one currently languishes in a jail in the Hague (Dr. Radovan Karadžić), another in a Zagreb jail (Dr. Ivo Sanader) — their political successors rely on the same code. Current Croatian President Dr. Ivo Josipović recently encouraged the almost half a million unemployed and disenfranchised Croats with the following: “Look after your health and fight for your rights.” While this sort of tripe would sink anyone else on earth into a deep despair, Croatian workers took solace and comfort.

The consequences of behaving in accordance with the given code are as one might expect. Yugozone residents frequently elect doctors to represent them, and on a regular basis these doctors drag them into armed conflicts and other sundry financial and moral dead ends. And so the circle remains unbroken. It explains why in everyday life, for example, our “Yugozonian” will always stop the first passerby to ask for the street he’s after. It wouldn’t cross an American, German, or Englishman’s mind — he’s got his map, his guide, his iPhone. And I’m sure about all this, right? Absolutely! I myself am an exemplar of “transition,” I’ve got my maps, guides, and iPhone, but I still prefer stopping the first passersby in the street. What’s more, I get a vague sense of satisfaction in doing so, like I’ve outfoxed all the crap “other dumbasses” use.

Don’t Yugozone residents, the men in particular, behave like children? For chrissakes, no way, that’d be an inadmissible colonial prejudice in our postcolonial time, a politically incorrect claim in these politically correct times. But the thing is, any observer, any Freudian amateur, might well hit upon the thought that Yugozone residents, particularly the men, are stuck in the cozy anal phase. What’s more, it might occur to such an observer that Yugozone men don’t want to grow up, which perhaps explains why they give their all to reduce those who have to their own height.

It was wise of Angelina Jolie to not linger longer in the Yugozone. Why? Because if she had hung around, the Yugozonians would’ve gnashed their teeth and bared their fangs. Naturally, they’ve got the softening-the-foreigner-up act down to a fine art. First of all you drown him in local wine (which is of course the best in the world), and then you stuff him with local food (also incidentally the best in the world). In the process you invent tribal customs (guests aren’t allowed to refuse food or drink lest the host take offence), whistle local songs, pluck your tamburica, and wander around showing the alienated foreigner your region’s natural beauty and miraculously weed-free local ruins. Finally you adopt and domesticate him: You turn Jeroen into Janko, John into Ivica, Angelina into Angie.

The Yugozonians will indulge in hearty backslaps with our foreigner, con him into partaking of imaginary local customs (we kiss five times here!), all until his muscles relent and soften, until he’s pliable. And when they’ve finally reduced the foreigner to their own height, when they’ve got the foreigner well-marinated in their toxic slime (and Angelina’s become Angie), it’s only then that the symbolic mastication begins. Yugozonians hate everything foreign, they down only what’s theirs, and if they do manage to get something new past their tonsils, then oh boy do they give it a mauling first. Albert Einstein, for example, to them he’s just “our Bert,” the guy who had a Serbian mother-in-law. That’s the only way they can take him.

Yugozone residents, the men mainly, hate pretty much everything and everyone, yet stubbornly and irrationally insist that others love them. To the common sense question of why anyone might thus love them, and whatever happened to reciprocity in matters of the heart, oh don’t worry, they’re not lost for words, they’ve got a ready answer. They remember well those moments of unconditional love. They remember their mothers burbling—“Who did a big poo for Mummy? Who did a big poo for Mummy?” They remember their joyous kicking little feet and gurgling confession—“Gu-gu-gu-I-did-a-poo.” The magnificence of this moment is forever fixed in their memory. And consequently, they delight in dumping everywhere for as long as they might live.

1The Yugozone is my coinage for the region encompassing the disintegrated and disappeared former Yugoslavia. Someone recently came up with the term “Yugosphere,” and although the meaning is the same, I still prefer Yugozone.

THE DREAM OF DORIAN GRAY

SHE SHOWS ME a photograph. In the photo are children from her class, the image taken at the end of the school year. She points to a sweet little face.

“Dora’s the prettiest in the class,” she says.

Dora’s a little girl with long blond hair. My eight-year-old niece has short brown hair. She’s staring at the photo, but she’s all ears. I wonder what I should tell her. I know that responding with questions like “but is Dora smart?” or “is she a nice person?” won’t help any in getting my message across. It won’t help if I say, “no, I think you’re the prettiest.” There’s some kind of consensus in her class that Dora is the prettiest and there’s no disabusing her of this. The virus of insecurity has already wormed its way inside her.

“You’re right, Dora’s got pretty ears,” I reply, though you can’t see her ears in the photo.

Lookism is a widespread and devastatingly powerful prejudice based on a person’s physical appearance. There have been attempts, unsuccessful of course, to have it placed in the same category as racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and ageism. It’s a word with plenty of synonyms — aestheticism, physicalism, appearance discrimination — all signifying the same discriminatory practice: Fat people, short men, tall women, the elderly, the “ugly,” are to be rounded up and herded into one of life’s dark corners.

When I was my niece’s age other little girls seemed more beautiful to me, too. Lidija had auburn hair and bushy eyebrows. Zlatica a light, translucent complexion, with tiny bluish veins below the surface. Jasminka full lips and oval baby teeth, shiny like silky candies. It was back then, in elementary school, that we all got it into our heads that the prettiest girl in the class was also the best little girl. With time the grind of everyday life bumped the painful subject of physical appearance from our list of priorities. The dream about the frog that turns into a princess, and those thousands of before-and-after photos that we absorbed like thirsty sponges, they worked in parallel, shunting our unconsciousness toward a hazy future in which we’d leave the miserable before far behind, and the desired after would last forever.

In the meanwhile, small women’s sizes have become smaller, skinny women skinnier, cosmetic surgery more popular, and clothes for the fuller figure both harder to find and more expensive. If the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen, luxury Italian fashion designer Marina Rinaldi would’ve had to shut up shop. Today her clothes are all the rage with Europe’s “Easterners,” women whose husbands have made a quick mint in the intervening years. Rinaldi has boutiques all over Eastern Europe, even in Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital, where Russian women shop on their summer vacations, alongside the odd solvent, and more corpulent, Montenegrin woman. Weight is a class marker. Only poor people are fat. Fat is ugly because poverty is ugly. While the poor pack on the pounds, the wealthy remain elegantly hungry. Research suggests that every second American man would have no qualms about divorcing a fat wife. There’s no mercy anywhere for the fat. Bloomingdale’s in New York recently amalgamated their clothing section for plus-sized women with the one for baby clothing: Fat women are either pregnant, or losers who don’t manage to wiggle into size Victoria Beckham the day they waddle out of the maternity ward. Saks Fifth Avenue is closing its plus size section Salon Z, formerly a temple of solace for the well-to-do fuller-figured woman. The message is clear: Being fat — right there next to being a smoker — is an intolerable social evil. Sometimes you see the fatal fusion on New York streets. The smoker will be the fat girl.

Let’s be straight with one another now, ever since beauty stopped lying in the eye of the beholder and the marketplace began enforcing its own normative standards, the world has become a boring place. There are fewer and fewer unique faces around, all the interesting “honkers,” “beaks,” and other factory defects have pretty much disappeared. Gone are the men who stink of cigarettes, garlic, and sweat; hairy chests, beer bellies, and black vodka bags under the eyes have gone the same way. It’s enough to cast a cursory glance over the gallery of new Russians making waves at home and abroad. Former KGB man, Alexander Lebedev, an oligarch who in 2010 bought the English Independent newspaper, is a well-read gentleman with stylish thin frame glasses on his nose. He looks more like an intellectual than an ex-spy. Punching a fellow guest on a Russian talk show and declaring that anyone who doesn’t have a million dollars deserves to burn in hell hasn’t harmed Lebedev’s domestic or international reputation in the least. Alexander Mamut, a former Yeltsin adviser who not so long ago bought the bookstore chain Waterstones, well he looks like a learned post-perestroika man of letters. Vladimir Doronin (Naomi Campbell’s boyfriend), Roman Abramovich, even Mikhail Gorbachev, once the brains behind perestroika and today mascot for Louis Vuitton travel bags — these guys have all repositioned themselves. Not one of them looks how we might expect. Dorian Gray can rest easy; his dream has been realized. Even Mikhail Khodorkovsky, another Russian oligarch (albeit one who’s languishing in jail for apparently no reason), has a pretty face adorned by thin frame glasses. He’s become such an inspiration and icon of compassionate capitalism that celebrated Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya has published a book of correspondences with this most capitalist of all martyrs, a fledgling saint. An Estonian composer has even composed a symphony dedicated to this most innocent of oligarchs. A Croatian taxi driver, a former Gastarbeiter, returned to his homeland, fiddled his way to an overnight million, managed to usurp public space for a private parking lot, killed three people (one with a car, two with a yacht), and yet still walks the streets a free man. He’s svelte, has a permatan, and wears those smart glasses on his nose, too.

Today everyone is beautiful. Successful female tennis players are beautiful, and beautiful female tennis players successful; successful classical musicians are beautiful; violinists and cellists are beautiful; opera soloists give supermodels a run for their money; high-jumpers are beautiful; soccer players are sex symbols; Nadzeya Ostapchuk aside, even shot-putters have been going in for a makeover. Because aesthetic capital is critical for success. Beauty Pays—that’s the unambiguous message of Daniel Hamermesh’s book. Catherine Hakim, author of the bestselling Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital, argues the same. And research confirms it: Beautiful people earn more than ugly people, beautiful women are more likely to find a wealthy provider. Statistics suggest that our annual spending on cosmetics is enough to end global hunger, yet the question remains as to who’s willing to give up their face cream for a noble cause. No one, I suspect. I wouldn’t either. In any case, let the men first give up their weapons, much more is spent on them.

On the map of the body there are no zones outside the jurisdiction of aesthetic arbitrage. Enchanted by the charms of the surgeon’s knife, and having modified their breasts, faces, eyelids, double chins, lips, jaw lines, stomachs, you name it, women now don’t just want any old vagina, but a tight one, a neatly-mown one. There are plastic surgeons specializing in transforming everyday vaginas into pretty ones, tired old ones into rejuvenated, youthful ones. And with the standards of physical beauty clear and generally accepted by all, everyone can, if they want to, be beautiful. Boredom might yet prove the only resistance factor to this mass bodily beautification.

Maybe all this explains why women are presently so obsessed with their rears. New York women seem to love wearing teenager tights. A pretty ass in elastic, skintight leggings (let’s forget for a second that they look like diving gear) gets way more attention than a pretty face. I spotted this kind of ass near Central Park and promptly joined a small throng who had stopped to let their admiring eyes glide along after her. Stylish in body-hugging tights and a snug leather jacket that barely made it to her waist, the ass’s owner paraded Central Park like royalty. It was a Saturday, and the young woman was taking her dazzling erotic capital out for a walk.

A MIDDLE FINGER

I OFTEN GO shopping in Amsterdam’s Osdorp district, mainly because I enjoy the long bike ride through the park on the way there. But the chance to head out on my bike isn’t the only reason. I sit there in a café surrounded by drab residential buildings and shops, my gaze set on a sculpture of an ugly stone coil simulating a gush of water into a perennially dry fountain. There are countless Dutch housing estates built in the sixties like this one. Today they’re home to immigrants and to elderly Dutch who in a distant time swallowed the line about prosperous, functioning social housing, and all the rest that goes with it. We eventually come to love our own poor choices, particularly if righting them requires too great an effort.

I sit there in a café with a depressing view, with a dishwater coffee, and waiters like you don’t even get in Montenegro anymore. There’s a lovely café with a calming view of the lake barely a hundred meters from here. Why then, do I slouch in this one? I do it for the three, four, or five specimens I encounter here; it depends on the anthropologist’s luck. I imagine that I’m here on a secret research mission, that I’m on a periodic follow-up visit to confirm previous results. The men are all around my age, my “countrymen”—a word that makes me wince. Every morning they descend from their apartments in the surrounding tower blocks, landing here like paratroopers. My ear, a keen hunter for spoken nuance, remains bizarrely tone-deaf, unable to discern the region they’re from. Maybe because they’re too much from there, from some former Yugoslav backwoods. Their garishness and stubborn typologies eliminate linguistic or ethnic specificities; they’re simply sons of the culture in which they grew into the men they are today.

Their clothes and gait give them away. Their faces are sponges that have soaked up the faces of the men they grew up alongside, one imprinted on the other. These faces bear the traces of fathers and grandfathers, maternal and paternal uncles, men from the neighborhood or village, from their army days, from their local bars, from their workplaces, the faces of their countrymen, friends, men you see in the newspaper, on the TV screen, the faces of politicians, generals, soldiers, murderers, criminals, thieves, the faces of all those who brought them here, to Amsterdam’s Osdorp, where every day they descend from their apartments like paratroopers to drink their morning coffee among their own, because they don’t have anyone else but their own. This is the ground they’ve been allocated, it’s a rare occasion they make it downtown; they’re not that keen in any case, curiosity’s not their strong point. So they sit in their chairs, legs spread wide, faces radiating sovereignty over the territory conquered, bodies suggesting they’ve planted their flag. “Historically” settled, they liberate their hands from their pockets and gesticulate wildly. They rarely smile, but snigger often. A snigger is their defense, it’s how they get one over each other, hide a momentary defeat; they’re not capable of engaging in conversation of any length or depth, not even with their own, they’ve never learned. A snigger is a reprieve, an eraser with which they wipe clean what’s been said, their own speech or that of another; a snigger turns everything into a josh. They frequently let out an eee-he-hee, hee-eeh-hee, spurring each other on, approving or condemning, a backslap and circle jerk. Ehee-heee. .

They know everything, they’ve always known everything, no one needs to explain anything to them; they know it all too well. The first phrase out of their mouths is: I’ve always said. . They talk about money, politics, sports. Sometimes they lose it a little, and sniggering as they go, exchange information about the horrors of health checks, prostate and rectal exams and the like. They rarely mention women, and if they do, it’s to take the piss out of each other, like schoolboys. Eee-he-hee, hee-eeh-heee. They don’t know what they’re doing here, but they’ll be going back, they’ve got a share in a house, an apartment, a bit of land somewhere, it’ll be enough to survive on. The Dutchies will throw them a crumb or two, which by God they deserve, having blessed this country with their presence.

They drink coffee or slurp beer from the bottle, swap what they’ve read in the papers from down there, pick over the bones of Milošević, Tuđman, the present, Karadžić, Mladić, the future. . When’s down there getting into Europe? (What the fuck do you care? You’re already in Europe!) They’re the real victims of the war, and adding insult to injury they messed up their choice of country — they went from a small one to a smaller one, Christ, you can’t even see the sun or moon from here. The Poles get ahead better than they do (Goes without saying. Poles are like Jews), even the Bulgarians are doing better (Maybe so, but only the Bulgarian Turks, don’t you know the Turkish mafia runs everything here?), only Bulgarians would clean Dutch toilets, they wouldn’t do it dead. They’re the ones sucking the big one, sifting about here not knowing why, and down there everything’s going for cheap, everything’s been stolen or sold, foreigners have bought up the coast, and now they’re schlinging their schlongs, raving and partying, polluting our ocean (Whaddaya mean “ours” bro? Uh yeah, I meant the former “ours”. .). Down there foreigners are multiplying like Gypsies, that’s what you get for not respecting your own — others start living it up. . Eee-hee, hee-eh-hee, the whole world’s gone crazy, and those fags have been breeding too, you don’t know who’s a man and who’s a woman anymore (You don’t even know who’s a Serb and who’s a Croat! Look at that little shit on the Hema billboards. . Who? You know who I mean, the little fucker’s everywhere. That fag kid from Tuzla! Paić! Nah, it’s Pajić, Nah bro, it’s Pejić! If he was my kid I’d drown him with my own hands!).

The trio of my countrymen wouldn’t have heard of the “fag kid from Tuzla” if he hadn’t been plastered all over sumptuous billboards for the Dutch chain Hema, advertising a push-up bra. But who is Andrej Pejić? Andrej Pejić was born in Bosnia the same year Yugoslavia fell apart and the war machismo and thievery began. Andrej Pejić, the child of a Serb mother and Croat father, immigrated to Australia, emerging from the slimy Balkan darkness as a new human species, as a brilliant unicorn, a divine lily, a god and goddess in a single body, a miraculous metamorphosis, an enchanting transgender beauty, the world’s most famous catwalks falling at his feet. Pejić is a middle finger flipped at the land where he was born, a divine error to take one’s breath away, a middle finger to Balkan men, and Balkan women, too. Pejić is a symbolic figure who at this very moment is tearing down cruel gender barriers faster and more effectively than all the gender activists, academics, and advocates combined. Pejić is a middle finger to Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam, a middle finger to myths of Balkan heroism, to macho-martyrdom, a finger up the snouts of commanding officers, police, thieves, and politicians. Andrej Pejić is a boy with breasts, or a girl with a penis, or worse still: He’s a Croatian woman with a penis and a Serbian man with breasts, in a single body. Having gotten as far away as one could ever get, Pejić has become a dazzling ray of light for the tens of thousands of Yugoslav children dispersed to the four corners of the world by the wars. I often run into them on my travels: a smart girl from Pirot, hustling her way into an academic career in Berlin, a lesbian; a finely-etched young man (the son of a chest-beating, big rig-driving Serb and a cowering Croatian mother) conscientiously studying at Harvard, a homosexual; a young guy from Banja Luka, a receptionist at the Hilton in London, a Thai son-in-law and passionate reader of Hannah Arendt; and many, many others. .

My three from the café (just like their numerous male countrymen down there) are still crapping on about politics, dribbling, gulping their morning coffees or beers, sniggering away. Finally they get up, thrust their hips out, linger over their goodbyes, let out an eee-he-hee, hee-eeh-hee, just to carve their names into the indifferent surface of the surrounding concrete, just to leave some kind of scrape to mark their existence. Then they go their own ways, it’s lunchtime. They depart not understanding that they’ve been dead a long while already, that the morning encounter with their own has been but a brief outing from the grave.

WHO IS TIMMY MONSTER?

SOMEONE IN MY building in otherwise docile Amsterdam has been terrorizing the rest of us. How? Simply. Late at night and early in the morning the mystery man (or woman?) starts shunting furniture around his apartment. That’s our best guess as to what’s going on, we’ve got no way to be sure. There’s just this ghastly scraping that penetrates every floor and apartment, its effect like an electric shock. We all think the racket’s coming from the apartment directly above us. We suspect each other, and the more vociferous among us knock on doors, wag our fingers, and leave warning notes. We all plead innocence — no, it’s not us. When the mystery man cranks up his racket, we vent our distress on the central heating pipes that connect all the apartments. The scraping falls silent for a second, as if it’s received the message, and then the torture erupts again, more brazenly than before. We’re at war. And what drives us most insane is that we don’t know who our enemy is. For months we’ve been walking around with cupped ears, leaning against walls, none the wiser as to who’s behind the damn scraping.

Yes, we’re at war. Our fears multiply from one day to the next. They arrive as a scraping that makes the walls of our apartments quiver, they arrive via the television screen, the telephone, the Internet, Facebook, Twitter; the more we’re wired together, the more our fears are fuelled, like gas balloons. We’re all there on an invisible psychiatric couch.

I meet up with an acquaintance. She’s approaching sixty, two adult sons. She and her husband are modest Dutch folk. For a time she worked as a teacher, and then she starting doing charitable work teaching young Moroccans Dutch. She does so firm in her belief that the cultivation of neighborly relations, a smile on the dial, and small interventions make life on planet earth a little more bearable. She was telling me about something new she’d been working on; touch therapy, something between tapping therapy and haptonomy. She does it with Moroccan kids, boys mostly, the kind who mark the territory out front of their tower blocks until late into the night, brawling and stealing, dishing out beatings and dreaming up childish ways of making others’ lives hell. Sometimes it’s defecating on a neighbor’s doorstep, other times it’s peeing up the door.

“What do you do with them?” I ask.

“I tap them a little, give them a hug, like a mother would her baby. Touch reduces aggression, you know that.”

I look at my acquaintance — her face radiating a somewhat unhealthy enthusiasm — and I’m not sure what to make of it all.

There’s definitely something not right with humanity. Some psychopath from Belgrade bought a little girl from her father for a thousand euro. Why? So he could rape her on a daily basis. In Texas a twelve-year-old strangled a four-year-old with a skipping rope. Senior high school students from Karlovac raped a classmate with a chair leg. A fifty-year-old from Zagreb garroted his seventy-seven-year-old mother with a piece of wire. In a Croatian village a grandson twice set fire to his grandfather’s house, and eventually pummeled him to death. A husband and wife with a three-year-old jumped from the sixth floor of a Belgrade hotel. A Frenchman bundled his three-year-old son into the washing machine and turned it on. Why? The kid had been naughty.

Yes, there’s definitely something not right with humanity. We each haul an invisible psychiatric couch along with us. We seek understanding, yet few are ready to understand others. There’s only the market, ever ready to offer comfort. With every new year that rolls around more and more people have started wishing each other Happy New Fear. The words fear and stress have entered our everyday lexicon, like bread and milk. Fear of an itch, fear of the dark, fear of noise, fear of madness, fear of pain, fear of open space, fear of enclosed space, fear of the road, fear of crossing the road, fear of sharp objects, fear of cats, fear of the opinions of others, fear of dust, fear of driving, fear of insult, fear of looking up, fear of people, fear of anger, fear of floods, fear of touch, fear of bees, fear of amputation, fear of numbers, fear of fire, fear of falling, fear of thunder, fear of asymmetrical objects, fear of ruins, fear of failure, fear of filth, fear of loneliness, fear of flying, fear of microbes, fear of steps, fear of depth, fear of change, fear of mirrors, fear of bats, fear of money, fear of food, fear of theft, fear of sleeping, fear of the grave, fear of sweating, fear of glass, fear of animal fur, fear of crowds, fear of knowledge, epistemophobia, fear of ideas, ideophobia, fear of speech, laliophobia, fear of words, logophobia, fear of memories, mnemophobia, fear of everything new, neophobia, fear of everything, pantophobia. . In a long ago episode of The Muppets the forgotten comic Zero Mostel recites the Jerry Juhl-penned poem “Fears of Zero.” Mostel enumerates his manifold fears: fear of spiders, fear of dentists, fear of baldness. . Fear muppets appear from somewhere in the darkness and crawl all over Mostel, threatening to swallow him up. Although terrified, Mostel insists that he needs to count his fears, confront them, overcome them, and that they’ll then disappear of their own accord (Once they are counted and compelled, they can quickly be dispelled!), and miraculously, they really do vanish. The fears were figments of Mostel’s imagination. Having dissipated his lesser fears, Mostel senses that a new, greater fear is to come. And indeed one does come along, in the form of Timmy Monster, and this time Mostel’s magic formula proves of no help. Mostel disappears and from Timmy’s stomach we hear his voice. Mostel admits that he’s just a figment of Timmy’s imagination.

Humanity has never been more terrified than it is today. We each haul our psychiatric couch along with us. People cry as if hit by tear gas and withdraw into their safety zones. Computer screens are our bunkers, the virtual world offering security, a place no one can reach us. People hang out less and less frequently, they avoid relationships, avoid touching, are scared of one another, intolerant of one another, get along only with the greatest of difficulty. Of course some men make appropriate arrangements and buy “real dolls,” “boy toy dolls,” “love dolls,” perfect silicone partners. They sleep with their “babies,” clothe them, bathe and comb them, take them out for walks, on little adventures, spend the weekends with them, and occasionally take them in for repair. The wealthier are collectors and have multiple partners. Some, like Kevin, are in complex relationships: He keeps “real dolls” at home, and goes out with organic women. Some claim the dolls are “perfect listeners,” others that “they can’t get pregnant,” others that a doll “improves quality of life,” others are enchanted by their “beauty and stoicism,” others maintain that only a doll is able to “love them in spite of everything.” Gordon from Virginia dreams of joint burial (“We’ll be turned into dust together, and it’ll be a beautiful thing”). Matt, a doll maker, claims his handicraft is therapeutic, because it’s better “to have sex with a piece of rubber than not have it at all.”

Some women are also taking appropriate steps. The marketplace has provided them with “reborn dolls.” At first glance it’s hard to tell the difference between the artificial and the organic. Sharon Williams has a collection of forty-one such “babies,” all one of a kind, totally unique, each sleeping in his or her own idiosyncratic way. Maybe these “baby” owners, these weirdoes and sickos, are the moral avant-garde of our time. Instead of shoving their children in the washing machine, or waiting for someone else to, it’s possible these women have worked out that it’s better they cradle and coddle hyper-realistic silicon surrogates. Perhaps the many aging mothers who have raced out to buy reborn babies are acutely conscious of the fact that they’ve given birth to potential monsters, who tomorrow might rape a classmate with a chair leg, so these women buy a comforting ersatz, a simulacrum. Reborn dolls, they say, “fill the emptiness in your soul,” they don’t scream, don’t pee, don’t let out a squeak, they don’t grow up, they sleep an eternal sleep. Family life with them is straightforward, just sometimes you need to wipe the dust off them, position them, reposition them. Simulacra are simultaneously our defeat and our solace.

Manufacturers try their hands at making all kinds of stuff “lifelike,” from chocolate-scented USB sticks to strawberry-scented earrings. Autumn Publishing, for example, is preparing a collection of children’s books, which they’re going to call Smellescence. At the touch the books are to release the scents of chewing gum, berry fruits, and the like. “This advanced technology and the smells it creates are so real they take children’s reading to a magical new level. We wanted to inject some fun into the reading experience and this is a powerful way to do just that,” said company director, Perminder Mann. Given that farting has recently made inroads into children’s publishing (Walter the Farting Dog; The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts; The Fart Book; Doctor Procto’s Fart Powder, and many, many others), Autumn Publishing is having a go with its own picture book, The Story of the Famous Farter, which on the last page is to smell like a lowdown, dirty ripper.

Yes, there’s something not right with people. Whether with our voluntary acceptance of the virtual world we are to mutate into different people — just as pet kitties that play with artificial mice eventually turn into different kitties — it’s hard to say. One thing is certain: We’re all volunteers in a mega-experiment. We’re all the figment of someone’s imagination. And just as no one in my building knows who among us is making that hellish scraping, humanity doesn’t actually know who the Timmy Monster is. Or it’s pretending it doesn’t know. What if Timmy Monster is all of us?