Lessons at Midnight

In the first chapter of his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Henri Bergson (1856-1941) wrote: « If gracefulness prefers curves to broken lines, it’s because a curved line changes direction at any moment, but each new direction was indicated in the one that preceded it. The perception of ease of movement is therefore mixed with the pleasure of stopping the march of time, as it were, and to hold the future in the present.”

This was part of Bergson’s discussion of the challenge we have of quantifying emotions and sentiments, for they are not potatoes or numbers. How much is “great” sadness, or a “bit of” joy? It was the first step in his consideration of time as “duration” versus quantifiable or spatial time.

Reflecting on his lines, which I included in a chapter about time and watches (Wristwatch Annual 2024), I have often noted that certain moments in time that are connected with feelings, emotions or sentiments do indeed have an effect on time perception. We mostly believe that life/time goes in some sort of straight line, even if we know, rationally, that the road is strewn with bumps and potholes. Nevertheless, we are sometimes surprised dramatically, joyfully, banally, or even lethally, and time disappears, or, better yet, opens a cocoon into which we slip and feel free of that  dimension that is none other than God’s executioner.

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The experience

Bergson’s line shot to my head when I recently stepped out of a train one stop too early. I am sure you know the feeling, you can comment below… I had spent three intense and boisterous days in the Bavarian town of Bad Reichenhall (near the border to Salzburg), where I had been invited to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Kobold Watches and a special project brand founder Michael Kobold was launching and about which I should be writing. My flight back home was on Sunday morning early from Munich, so I had decided to play it safe and take a train at night to get to the airport at about 1.30 a.m. and find some place to nap, along with other stranded travelers.

The schedule was simple: departure at 10:37p.m. to nearby Freilassing, where I’d pick up the Regional train at 11:10 p.m. to Munich East, and then the S-Bahn to the airport, arriving around 1.35 a.m. Obviously, when I heard “Freilassing” announced, I stepped out. The problem was that the sound of the train had muffled the second word that disembodied female voice had said: Hofham…a village just before Freilassing.

Hofham station: Imagine this in the dead of night…

I sensed immediately that something was wrong. I remembered Freilassing train station from having passed through it many times in my Munich days. It was a busy border hub with rows and rows of tracks. But as my train pulled away into the night, all I saw was a single track, a little shelter, dark fields, and the edge of a village (Hofham).

It was 10:55p.m. The schedule posted in the shelter told me: No more trains to Freilassing, where I knew I could pick up the last train to Munich at 1 a.m. Time had just split open and led me into a space where everything seemed to float. Bergson’s “graceful curve” shaped by my absentmindedness – a perfect term, right? – was pointing into a relatively unknown, unplanned moment, 90 minutes of total freedom and disconnect, time elastic.

So, I cut out on foot along a dirt path following my departed train. The nocturnal air smelled a bit of cows and wet grass. It had rained. I veered off into a dark field, splashed in some puddles, heard a dog bark, a train, and the sounds of a Saturday night party, loud voices in the distance. I soon reached the outskirts of Freilassing, passed a big playground, and finally connected back with the tracks that ran to the main station along some uninspiring industrial buildings.

The real Freilassing, a hub on the Austrian border

The waiting room was brightly lit, a 1950s construction with a high ceiling, no-frills, mostly bare walls, a dark tile floor and a vending machine. On a curious oblong bench in the middle sat a big black and white cat. Someone had dumped some tuna fish on the floor, but the cat was not interested. I greeted him, and he stared at me for a moment, then jumped down and sniffed my shoes and suitcase, demanded to be petted, and went back to his perch.

Reality calls

Interrupting the feeling of spacelessness and timelessness, was a nagging voice drawing me back to geometric reality. It said the following – you know the feeling I am sure – not as a string of words in time, but as a single, instantaneous, breathless thought meteorite:

Your phone battery is almost at zero, your train ticket is on that phone, and the train you want to take in 90 minutes is an Intercity, not a Regional, so you will have to purchase a surcharge with your phone, or have an argument with the controller… And if you fall asleep on that train, you might miss Munich and end up in Stuttgart, miss the plane, you have to charge that f***ing phone, it’s your alarm clock.

And on and on, a future full of stumbling blocks.

The curse of the smartphone tying us to the prison of real, planned life. I searched the waiting room for an electrical outlet. Surely someone vacuumed this place occasionally, so where’s the plug? The two vending machine (were there two?) had none visible.  I had to continue my night wandering and find a solution elsewhere. The cat followed me to the door, but thought the better of it and regained his bench.

Some gangly kids were on the stoop outside chatting, probably waiting for an arrival. I greeted them and began my aimless roaming again, through the long, graffiti-smeared underpass crossing over to what seemed to be the center of town, up cement stairs, across empty streets, left turn into a shop-lined street, all dark, then right, the ambient emptiness pulling me along like an eager dog on a leash. The sense of being untethered, alone, in the dark was a balm to the soul. But the word “plug” occasionally hit my consciousness, like an icicle falling on a bald head.  Oh, Bavaria…. Every village had a Wirtshaus, where a few noisy fellows came to drown their troubles on a Saturday night…? Surely Freilassing had one…

It was then that, I spotted a pizzeria with an open door.  Osteria con cucina, La Bottega da Lisa… Yellowish light spilled onto a tiny terrace. I had visions of the manger in Bethlehem. A woman was cleaning the floor. Behind the counter a man wearing a baseball cap backwards was rummaging around, cleaning, too, I guess.

Imagine this in the dead of night….

Standing in the doorway, I greeted the woman and asked if I could order an espresso and charge my phone, quickly explaining my absurd situation. “I am sorry, we have closed already, but you can charge your phone while I clean up,” she said kindly. She had an Eastern European accent, Polish as it turned out. She chatted with the man in Italian, something about food.

She asked me if she could bring me something to drink. My throat was dry, so I ordered a mineral water. As I drank, she mopped. Her husband came out and smoked a cigarette. His name was Luigi, he was from Salerno. He could have stepped out of a canvas by one of those early Baroque Italianate Dutch painters, like Jan Steen. He had strong, working hands, like roots of a tree, probably from kneading so much dough. Radio Italia was playing songs, and he occasionally sang along, the bits he knew…

Lisa and Luigi

The woman’s name was Lisa I assumed. She came outside while waiting for the floors to dry. We started chatting on the little terrace, all three of us, meandering through myriad subjects, from the society’s forced addiction to phones (my issue), to the absurdities of 24-hour pizzerias where robots made and served the pizza. She knew a few, and they repulsed her… “People have to meet face to face,” she gesticulated, “talk with each other.” We jointly condemned our Brave New World, sitting there like Huxley’s savages, speaking, communicating, enjoying a chunk of timeless time, escapees from the horological Diktat. She mentioned the damage she felt it was doing to children “who hardly know what food is anymore, they think it comes off a shelf.”

She and Luigi had had another place previously, she told me, where they had invited children to make pizza. “They used their hands to spread the mozzarella and the tomatoes, and then slid the pizza into the oven and were amazed,” she related, while her hands performed the narrative. Luigi got animated at this point and spoke about fresh pasta.

I told him of the first time I had seen fresh-made pasta was in a shop in Circeo, south of Rome, when I was twelve years old. I, who only knew the hard stuff in boxes, remembered someone cranking spaghetti out of a machine, and another person cutting raviolis. He confirmed my memory by hand-signing “with a rolling cutter,” and said it in Italian. The fresh pasta seemed grayish-white in my memory, whereas the usual industrial pasta was yellow and brittle. “That’s not good for you,” he vigorously explained. “Do you know why pasta is yellow?” I was asked. I had never thought of it, actually, so I said no. “It is dried too hot, and it is bad for you,” was the gist of his excited answer. He then took me into the restaurant, seized a bag of pasta from a shelf. It was white-ish. “This is dried 40° to 50° degrees!” he explained.

The lesson

Somehow, this information – nay, the whole conversation – delivered in Freilassing at between 23:40 and 00:40 elevated my spirits. This momentary world was populated with wonderful people.

The floors were now dry. I had to go, thanked them for the congenial hour, picked up my phone now charged to 75%, and wandered off into the night, light-footed, optimistic, to catch the 1 a.m. train.

When I got back, the cat was still there, and so was his tuna fish. The train was late, but that didn’t matter. I quickly purchased my surcharge, set the alarm clock for 3:20 a.m., a few minutes before it would arrive in Munich East, where I’d catch the S-Bahn to the airport.

The stretch of time between the moment I had stepped off the train at the “wrong station,” to the moment I sat on a cold bench on Platform 8 in Freilassing, seemed like one big lesson. It was not just about pasta. In the-90 plus minutes I had spent in that real estate, I had been as totally in the present as one can be, totally at ease with everything I encountered. Everything else had vanished, the terrifying wars ripping humanity apart, the absurd cacophony of the American election campaign, the daily worries about finances, the endless irritations of our original sin of being born. Sure, narrating it involves slicing up the time span into physical moments as I have done above. But it’s the whole picture that contains the treasure. Ninety minutes of pure duration, ninety minutes of graceful curves given without judgment, taken with a calm heart..

 

Scamerica the Bountiful

Disclaimer: This piece is long, because … Brandolini’s Law. The shortest version is this: To understand the Trump phenomenon, you have to understand that he is a con man who has become political. He saw his opportunity to co-opt the Republican Party by inveigling their very large but malleable, culture-war-tested base, the Evangelicals, who have a strong nativist core. It was a kind of coup, but once that target group was acquired, the GOP fell in line without resisting. Details below. Please subscribe or at least remember how much time it takes to write. I don’t use AI. But I’ll be posting this on Substack in a few weeks)

Since 2016, the legacy media in the United States has been scratching its collective head and waving its arms about trying to understand the strange, toxic, relationship between Donald Trump and the “religious right,” which includes many so-called Evangelicals and a smattering of other denominations mostly found under the Protestant umbrella. Modestly, but frankly, I may have an answer.

How a super-moralist religious community could offer full-throated support to this odd, obviously flawed man, who lies and bullshits about everything, even petty things that really don’t “need” a lie, like the temperature in the New York courtroom, cheats on his wife, defrauds and steals from suppliers, has even had a number of brushes with the law ($25-million fine for Trump University fraud and $2 million for the fraudulent foundation, for example) , is quite fascinating in the way watching a building’s slow collapse after a controlled demolition is fascinating.  The term the legacy media like to use ad nauseam is “unprecedented.”

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That, as the hackneyed expression goes, needs some unpacking, because it is far from true. But the explanation, like all things subject to Brandolini’s Law, does not fit into a few short paragraphs or the tight time slot between television advertisements.

Donald J. Trump is neither a new phenomenon, nor is he particularly original. However, to understand just how “precedented” he is, requires a deep dive into America’s political and religious customs and some basic grasp of the workings of the free market. Many erudite, articulate, and knowledgeable persons, nay, experts, on a thousand TV panels don’t “go there,” because religion is a sacred cow, ironically.

Trump with his Evangelical accomplices: Are they in the White House? Or is he in their bethels?

 The Donald

Donald J. Trump built up a brand based mostly on bombast, and having drawn attention to himself in myriad ways, he used his obnoxious celebrity status to sell shoddy products at high prices. As an “entrepreneur,” who managed to bankrupt a casino, he created a foundation and a university, both of which turned out to be money-making frauds. He could have stopped anywhere on the way in his life as an “impostor-businessman,” taken his money and gotten out of the three-card monte game, and spent the rest of his years playing golf, and slept with whomever he wanted for the rest of his life (as Melania told the world, she doesn’t care, the marriage appears to be for show as well). But Trump is indeed a narcissist and a very bitter one at that. Why? Probably because of his failed attempts at really being accepted by New York’s high society, whose members could smell the vulgarity coming off him in malodorous waves, the cheapness, the arrivé, the slumlord playing baron.

Somewhere on the line, while rubbing elbows with various political and social poobahs, who tend to gravitate towards money real or fake like moths to the flame, because they must, and while becoming a brummagem celebrity himself, the Donald decided to fully unleash his Inner Snake-Oil Salesman that had always accompanied him on his highly litigious pathway to riches, as mentioned, real or fake.

(Chatty aside: I do not believe DJT to be as intelligent as he says he is, and he is embarrassingly ignorant and disinterested, but so are many who earn seven figure salaries and more. However, with a few exceptions (I’ll note Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project), everyone underestimates his feral instinct for people’s moral weaknesses. We all have them, of course, but he spots those who are either born with a weak backbone, or who have been groomed as such over generations), or crucially who are simply venal.)

DJT ultimately chose the Republican Party as his political prey, because, I suspect, the Democrats are usually herding their cats of many political hues under their “big tent,” and they do tend to be the educated class (the “elites,” the “experts”) and reject Trump’s inherent snobbism.  The GOP, on the other hand, was home to very wealthy ideologues with less democratic views of the USA and they often show a willingness to spend their wad to get what they wanted (see the Supreme Court) rather than pay taxes. Also, Republicans tend to follow the leader regardless (John Dean wrote a book about this: Conservatives without Conscience), while the Democrats tend to throw hissy fits if the party isn’t enacting their policy ideals 100 percent.

More importantly, however, was and is the GOP’s fairly homogeneous base that has long included the so-called “religious right” with its many evangelical denominations, run-of-the-mill conservatives (small government, low taxes), the astroturfish Tea Party and other more extreme extremists – from the KKK to the survivalists cosplaying in the wilds with camo garb and big guns or complaining about the ZOG, controlled demolitions, Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and other phantasma revealed in dubious newsletters – who would go along with anything that aided their conspiracy-laden cause. They will balk at paying a few taxes, but don’t mind sending frauds like Alex Jones money for some untested supplements.

But why would a man like Trump want political power? Why would he leave the comfortable life of lucrative bankruptcies, fawning wannabes, golden toilets and golf courses, for the hard world of politicking?  It was a question he, himself, asked rhetorically, as a way to justify his candidacy for the presidency and to suggest to his flocks at rallies that he was doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He was doing it for them. A bold assertion for a man who had, until that point, showed not a single iota of altruism. The shortest answer is this: money. And in his particular case the soothing adulation to nourish his industrial-sized ego. Nota bene: One famous scammer trick is to always make the  target feel it is being given something, being loved, understood. He saw the opportunity to run a kind of national pig-butchering scheme, fattening up a voluminous base, and then getting them to pay up willfully, adoringly, even thankfully.

What he had going for him was precisely that he was not a politician. He rejected that label himself, and it might be one of the rare truths to come out of his mouth. His base liked the idea as well, because they have been trained to think that “Washington = bad,” and that all politicians are the same, corrupt and sly manipulators who were out to get them. What they failed to see, is that Trump is not a real entrepreneur either. He is first and foremost a glorified salesman, which informs everything he does and says, even his road into politics. His non-politician status was overtly expressed at times,  or was hidden behind little inserts into his speeches: I am very rich (subtext: I’m not selling anything, I am incorruptible); I’m not paid as president (oh, I am such an idealist); I’m doing this for you. All, in the definition of Harry Frankfurt, bullshit.

The land of milk and honey and pigs

Consciously or unconsciously, Trump had already tested the political waters on his way to 2016. One milestone was surely his vicious call for the death penalty for the Central Park Five (later exonerated). He spent $85,000 on an ad in the New York Times, in which he wrote: “I want to hate these muggers and murderers.” The ad inflamed the issue and, as one defense lawyer of the five suggested, was in part responsible for the conviction of five innocent men. But it attracted attention from the conservatives and especially rural America dreaming of a time when everyone knew their place and which water cooler to drink from.

Earlier Trump version, the strange prurience of Sarah Palin

No doubt he witnessed the bizarre popularity of Sarah Palin among certain segments of the population, notably religious people. She probably sank the McCain ticket in 2008 with her bizarre rhetorical stew of homey “Main Street” talk, peppered with gun-nuttery and conspiracy theories about “elites.” It made her the darling of a crowd that had already been groomed for by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who was openly racist, aggressive, dishonest, and vulgar. And lest we forget, there was the Fox News agitprop team, which shackled its viewers to a chain of outright lies, fearmongering, and angertainment well before Mark Zuckerberg and other tech bros had even discovered hate and anger as a source of cash.

All together, the GOP and its media mobilized quite a crowd in 2008 and earned a fortune off their captive audiences, mainly by attracting advertisers eager to sell stuff to them. But the GOP was now being wagged by the tail, as conservative columnist David Brooks wrote: “I don’t think he [John McCain] could have known it at the time but he took a disease that was running through the Republican party – anti-intellectualism, disrespect for facts – and he put it right at the center of the party.” And the right-wing ecosystem also turned earlier dog-whistling into a dog-fanfare. The nativists, who had always been in the party, but had been embarrassed into silence by the Civil Rights movement, could now rise and begin spreading, anonymously, their arcane ideas thanks to the Internet.

Trump spotted the potential in this crowd, the slight background tenor of paranoia, the anti-intellectualism, the resentment. He launched the notorious birther conspiracy theory (Obama is really a Kenyan!) as another test balloon to figure out whether he could coattail Palin and pick up the Tea Party support. He had certain assets that Palin lacked, like television fame. She stuck to salt-of-the-earth themes, he managed to project broader American myths from the glory days of the nineteenth century: the brash entrepreneur, the brazen businessman, the superrich ruggedly individualist risk-taker, the man who said it straight. And he projected wealth, always a good thing, even though it would have made old-fashioned Puritans squeamish. With all that fake baggage, he made his tacky entry into the political fray in 2015 and then proceeded to rip up the opposition during the primaries. He was addressing Nativists, so he chose his single issue: foreigners, Mexicans, the “other.” It’s an easy subject, you really don’t have to study much to yell inanities about group X or Y.

The GOP candidates were all horrified, and they saw right through the game. Trump, however, was now like Frankenstein’s monster (and there are lots of real parallels I cannot go into at this point). He made anger, violent rhetoric, lies and conspiracy theories a trademark. When needed, be dissed untouchables of American Mythology, like John McCain or Gold Star families. Nothing was sacred anymore. Moreover, he was also fairly entertaining, what with his quirky nicknames and his repartee. The rivals collapsed one after the other, Li’l Marco, Lying Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Horse-face Florina, Rick Santorum, etc… This was reality TV become hyper-real, and the Republican electorate was having fun, and the media, too. They could not get enough of him, and reported his every Tweet and insult often incredulously, failing to notice that they were giving him enormous amounts of free advertising. They were trying desperately to hang on to an audience segment by being “fair and balanced,” but ended up embarrassing themselves with blatant both-sides dancing. Somehow, this madcap, ranting, vituperous, ignorant man started attracting the support from a segment of the electorate that had been convinced it was forgotten, ignored, and looked down upon, the eternal victims: the religious right, specifically the Evangelicals, who had already chosen the GOP as their political party.

The takeover

Receiving the religious accolade was not difficult,  in fact.  For one, throughout history, religious leaders have been known to keep their flock in a state of fear of something “out there,” Satan, witches, urban con men, Communists and their sexy women (my M.A. thesis was on anti-Communist films in Hollywood, and those Commie women had dangerous sex appeal), atheists, death, the list goes on and on… The Anti-Mason Party of the 1830s achieved quite some power ranting against “elites…” The, the were absorbed into the Whig Party, which essentially became the GOP.  The latest enemy is the Muslim community, which is inevitably  equated with horrifying terrorist acts. Modern life itself, though, the natural progress of human society with science at the helm, is also seen as a threat. This notion, that an “expert” is somehow a bad thing, can be traced way back to the Great Awakenings and the revivals and even further, maybe to the Copernican Revolution that almost got Galileo tortured in the cellars of the Vatican.

The other element Trump understood was the evangelical predilection for great and gaudy shows that have a kind of collective magnetism. Americans of all stamp love pageantry, one that eschews any subtlety, which, in turn, is the trademark of the “expert,” who has to explain everything painstakingly using data and some form of logic. Alternative facts, fallacious short-cuts, pulled out of the ether would do for what is now called the MAGA base. In fact, they seem to revel in  the creation of an alternate reality, which is as comforting as Alex Jones’s supplements, it’s a placebo.

At any rate, thanks to some very patient and simple priming using culture war issues like abortion (Roe v. Wade), the old Moral Majority that Nixon had touted as his support has now morphed into a large confab of grievance-addled voters who were tethered nilly-willy to the GOP for political representation in a politically mutually beneficial, symbiotic or parasitical, relationship . Some of their leading voices were well known, like the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who along with fellow travelers like Pat Robertson, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, had once blamed 9/11 on gays and feminists using some spurious theological justifications. Many of these preachers hollered darker things to their mesmerized audiences and over time created  a kind of dark Jesus Christ twin promoting revenge, anger, violence against enemies real and imagined.  Some might remember the days when the tiny Westboro Baptist Church was an outlier. Now, their message of “God hates fags” and  repulsive  actions at the funeral of soldiers, appear as weak tea and perfectly mainstream in the Trump  fog.

The enemies of this religious community were clearly defined, and Trump easily took up the sword in as God’s chosen agent of retribution. The fact that he was about as religious as a cardboard box made no difference. God moves in mysterious ways, they said, and this is the fellow He’d sent to smite the evil Democrats, the gays, the feminists, mainstream media demons, college professors, and other sinful bugaboos. Q-Anon banshees got in on the game and were welcome. with their bizarre and somewhat revealing obsession with pedophilia, a genuine problem, but not in the way they were presenting it. Trump was the Kulturkämpfer par excellence, and so these people could now boldly show up in large groups, repeat the conspiracy theories he and his acolytes spread, including simple messages delivered by their guru, like “fake news,” “lock her up,” and the nonexistent “deep state,” the latter being one of those  inventions that means nothing but sounds terrifying.

Late-night comedians had a ball with these people, just as journalists like H. L. Mencken ridiculed them in the ‘20s and ‘30s. But humiliation feeds the fires of revenge. When Hilary Clinton, who was already considered a demonic force, referred to them as “deplorables,” she in fact solidified their  allegiance to Trump, who was their tool to tell the so-called elites to f*** off. They were the proud gueux, the downtrodden, the victims of a variegated host of invisible hobgoblins, from Hollywood actors, to East Coast intellectuals, to “swamp creatures.” With their strident leader, imperfect as he was, but who they felt understood them, they could now flex their vocal cords.  Social media gave them a cheap channel to spread their resentment and conspiracy nonsense, thus amplifying their power, but also to commune with their leader and his surrogates. And more importantly, to engage with more rational people, who often expended lots of energy essentially being trolled by fact-resistant individuals. They were drinking liberal tears and enjoying every minute of it, regardless of the impact Trump was having on the country. They could now rant against any fake outrage their media were deciding to whoop up, scientists, gas stoves, certain violent cities, immigrant caravans, civilization in general, secular humanism, modern medicine, Bill Gates, George Soros, all progressives, or, in media shorthand: “the Left.” For the Trump apparatchik (like Steve Bannon, KellyAnne Conway, the talking heads at Fox, Pirro, Hannity, the yappers at OAN, Town Hall, Newsmax i.a.), it was easy to feed this now untethered rage, since they had been neatly isolated from any contradictory or corrective messages. Particularly juicy was the almost prurient need to expose pedophiles all over the place. Even if some don’t fall for these weird messages, getting a rise out of outraged “liberals” was worth the abandonment of all self-respect, an act facilitated by anonymity on social media platforms.*

Needless to say, what passes for the Left in America played right into the Kulturkampf. The uppity woke crowd could be shocked into a fury by simply saying “a man can’t be a woman.” The LGBTQ images harvested on the web made it easy to ridicule the left, which, alas, having turned political correctness into a rhetorical paradigm, have also lost all their sense of humor.

Millionaires by God! The divine Ponzi scheme: Send me money, God will send you more, and if that doesn’t work, send me more…

Trump understands the religious right and especially their peripheral communities. He understands them all too well. The subsequent relationship rapidly became  fusional. Trump needed them for his ego, to keep the buzz going, but more importantly, as a source of easy cash. Any salesman knows that once you have a captive audience, you have to keep them fed with “good products,” and conspiracy theories and provocative ideas can be produced almost ad infinitum without need for manufacturing, design, quality control, or after-sales service. His audience became like Osgood at the end of Some Like It Hot, who, when Jerry takes off his wig and says “I am a man!” simply answers: “I don’t care.” As long as he was loving his “uneducated” flock and trouncing “liberals” verbally, they were happy.

As a political support group, the evangelical rank and file, in particular, for whom I still have some compassion, because they have been suckered beyond belief, were the low-hanging fruit for the Republican Party, and now for Donald J. Trump. They were accustomed to sending money for facile, performative blessings. I’m referring specifically to the myriad televangelists who promote the “prosperity gospel,”  which can be traced back to the Pentecostal movement that flourished in the 1920s, when get-rich-quick schemes were all the rage. The roots of this movement can probably be traced back to the show biz of the Baptist movements and the Great Awakenings and the revivals that periodically tried to inject energy into flagging religious enthusiasm.

The basics of the prosperity gospel are simple and they resemble any of the myriad scams that run rampant on the web, where some young and allegedly cool, badly shaven guy with no visible means of income, standing in front of a (rented) Lamborghini, declares that you can earn  thousands of dollars a day by sending him money and you are an idiot if you don’t. In religious circles, it’s like multilevel marketing on a grander scale and it goes like this: Send the preacher money, it will be returned to you (by God, I gather) ten- or hundred-fold. If it doesn’t happen, send more or consider yourself still unloved by God or unworthy. Same thing with the bizarre healings that might have had the preacher tarred and feathered in another era. If the healing of a very real health problem doesn’t work, consider yourself unworthy again, send more money … It’s a terrifying message for people who are in despair and who then get into a sunk-cost dilemma, like the gambler, who hopes that by putting more chips onto the table, he will get a big break. Meanwhile the casino is raking in his money. These carnival barkers, like Hinn, Copeland, Osteen, Swaggart, Paula White, and many more, live in huge mansions and fly private jets thanks to this rather obvious grift.

Do the math

Conning, like selling any product, is a numbers game and perfectly adapted to a free market. You need a captive audience that is large enough to A) make it worth your while, and B) will produce a snowball effect. This is all the more important in the Online Age, when going viral is the way to success. And to go viral, you just have to be noticeable, even outrageous in some way. It’s especially easy if you are already a celebrity like Trump. In the world of ideas and news, the number of clicks counts more than the quality of the information or product, too. So here is the arithmetic: The USA has a population of about 320 million. There are 160 million eligible voters. If you can somehow convince just 10% of them to buy your nonsense and your merch with it, you’ll be in clover. And if they have been suckered into believing that they are all victims of a Great Conspiracy, or that you are going to fight the forces of evil for them, and that you are a martyr for their hallucinatory cause, they will disburse real fortunes. At an average of $50 per head, and later lots of merch, you can make billions at the game. All you have to do is dump your self-respect while you laugh all the way to the bank in the Cayman Islands: That’s an $800 million pool right there using minimal sums. Scams pay, and the Internet is full of them.

Trump no doubt saw this business model being used over and over again. He saw the charlatans and snake-oil salesmen like Glenn Beck (who only does it for the money, I can safely say thanks to a friend who knows him), or Alex Jones, or Steve Bannon raking in the clicks and cash. He saw the right-wing media like OAN, Newsmax, Townhall, and the Murdoch channels with their totally insulated audience being sold to advertisers as a legitimate product. He started hollering  “fake news,” to show that he could be of assistance in keeping the audience riveted to the channel that guaranteed anger, hatred, outrage, and legitimization of  the most absurd thoughts and theories. His lieutenant, KellyAnne Conway  created the “alternative facts” trope, which was brilliant in its own right. And people like Steve Bannon, who called himself a Leninist once (yes, Lenin, the man who coined the term “useful idiots”) acting as a kind of intellectual guru to the movement.

And now we come to the crux of the matter: Some time in 2016, maybe a tick later, Trump demanded racketeering rights from all these con artists involved in the grift. He had demonstrated his power to out-outrage them all, out-lie, out-bullshit them. He, as a candidate for the GOP and then president, had become a threat to their business model. The GOP had no choice. They had to keep a hold of their key “demographic,” the angry old people with a knee-jerk tendency to complain, the evangelicals who were still not rich or healthy in spite of the praying and sending cash to their gurus, younger crowds who think that being contrarian is a sign of wisdom, or those who just like to burn things down, and of course the conspiracy theorists, who like to think that there are vicious cabals “out there” plotting their demise. It was a well-crafted and perfectly capitalistic business model, and Trump was now in charge, and still is, more than ever. The raw material is cheap (essentially hot air, bullshit, outright lies, stream-of-consciousness ranting, conspiracy theories, incoherent rants, endless whining, and a lot of brazen self-aggrandizement and self-victimization). And the new distribution channels, like Twitter and Facebook, were cheap, too. What a deal! You used to spend a whole lot on paper and printing, which had the disadvantage of sticking around so some people might actually decipher the BS. Also, online info means that what I said a minute ago is already gone, and even if the “Internet never forgets,” it is constantly on “full” so the human mind has to keep deleting data as well.  Imagine a cesspool for all the cities in the USA… Where will you find the diamond ring you accidentally dropped in the toilet?

Anyway, he, Trump,  became the focus of all power, the capo di tutti capi of the confidence economy, the Great Orange Toll Booth through which all the hustlers, fraudsters, fast-talking bull artists, power-seekers, and many a politician would now have to go to reach the Promised Land of free money, where that growing audience waited, anxiously, to drink liberal tears, to exact vengeance on their hallucinations, and, literally, to be conned. Some people who sued Trump U successfully even went on to vote for Trump, a form of Stockholm Syndrome, it would seem. If the GOP would want to stay in power and make a good buck from a huge confab of suckers seething with anger, resentment, and a need for revenge against invisible enemies, they would have to toe the line.

Better than pills… send money, get touched, go home and hope you heal. If it doesn’t work, rinse, repeat.

The evangelicals, the pastors, the televangelists, the ad hoc preachers, and other opinion leaders, also realized, unconsciously perhaps, that this orange-faced city slicker, with his boring suits and absurdly long tie, was better at selling bullshit, fear, anger, self-victimization, and illusions than even they were and was encroaching on their business. So, they blessed him and granted him his rights.

Madness takes its toll

Trump had a special shtick. Many politicians bend the truth or violate any number of logical fallacies when wooing voters. The Germans have a saying “Lies have short legs,” because the can’t run far and fast. Trump has found the solution: He lies and bullshits consistently and always, even about the most inane and easily provable  things, so you can hardly tell anymore whether he is telling the truth or not. He also has his own style.  He did not rant insanely like Jones, or whine like Tucker Carlson, or use Vicks to cry like Beck, or even sound half-way literate like Bill O’Reilly or the late Limbaugh. He is always a bit disheveled, unlike over-groomed Hannity, he doesn’t sound inebriated like Pirro, or true-believer-serious like Ingraham. He’s learned a bit from the televangelist, sometimes sing-songing, sometimes yelling after a long sotto voce passage, always using his hands in the same way. A child of four could caricature him, and that is what he needed. He also likes to have his ramblings accompanied by soppy music. It’s painfully cheap and obvious, but those of us who have studied advertising know that sophisticated and smart doesn’t work too well.

Of course, he embarrassed himself endlessly, barely hiding his ignorance of the Bible, just like he never hid his illiteracy or his absence of any culture. He became on the surface “one of them.” He even Tweeted day in, day out, giving the illusion of being “with the people.” This meant he could be in the consciousness of his base before even Fox News cranked up the their wind machine. And like a good scammer, he made sure he sounded like his audience did. His thoughts pour out of his mouth disjointedly, mantra-like. They are simplistic, even incomprehensible and incoherent. He does not need knowledge, or data, expertise. He doesn’t deliver policy speeches no one wants to hear, he simply feeds the masses with the most binding emotion, genuine Internet fuel: anger, aggression, resentment, grievance. Emotion! Gut feeling. His audience “feels,” it doesn’t think (this is the Frankenstein reference from above). He goes off on strange tangents, talks of Hannibal Lecter, boats, covfefe, makes mistakes, stumbles, crushes words in a foaming mouth, digresses, mixes up Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley. It might be real, it might be all fake. If attention on him seems to be dissipating, he will stoke the outrage machine with some blatantly egregious statement. And the legacy media will react obediently, reporting on it, spending hours every day deciphering and deconstructing his verbal discharges.

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The opposition trying to portray him as demented may be getting tricked as well. The pundits at MSNBC, CNN, ABC, and other more or less serious outlets remain perplexed. They have their overworked panels repeating the same lines over and over again trying to explain this man’s popularity, all the while talking about him 24/7, which, of course, is why he remains popular. They do not dare touch the religious stuff, and if they do, it’s to be nice (Tim Alberta wrote a book about this, but he experienced it differently). Every exegesis of his oafish lines takes days, and seems to prove his point that the media is against him and, hence, his base. Several, like Van Jones, want to “engage the Trump voter,” or listen to their grievances. Have they ever tried? I have. It appears pointless. They confuse critical thinking with dissing and both-sides-ism often aided by obnoxious and stupid conspiracy theories. Then come the ad hominem  statements and some meme, and the conversation dies. Who has time for all that? One of the very few people who manages to talk with the Trump base is comedian Jordan Klepper, but even he, by force, ends up humiliating the “MAGA cult,” not because he wants to, but because they do it to themselves, with statements like “Obama was president during 9/11″ or “Trump was sent by god…” It’s a strange phenomenon called self-stigmatization that was described by Wolfgang Lipp in his book Stigma und Charisma.

The vortex

At first, the Republicans did try to resist. When Trump won the primaries, they entered into an uneasy alliance. They could (should) have dropped him then, lost the election, but cleaned up their act — which they should have done after the Palin disaster. However, they would have lost that key evangelical vote to a new Trump Party. He was going nowhere, now that he had them locked up and expanding. A key moment was the revelation of the Access Hollywood tape. The entire GOP took a deep breath. Because you can shoot someone and get away with it in the USA, but sex? Never. Or so they thought. Many started tiptoeing towards the exit. But Trump, after a vague apology, cleverly chose the “flight forward full steam ahead” path. At which point he forced them into backing him.

They hate the blackmail, I am sure, but they could and can no longer escape it. Not with those venal spirits and gelatin backbones. A few did, later on (e.g., Jeff Flake, Adam Kinzinger, and Liz Cheney), but they are out of politics now. Even powerful Fox News tried after the 2020 election. They dropped him for a moment, realized that they were losing ad sales to the other  grifters on the Trump highway, so they bowed and scraped, and got back on the right road. Even losing the defamation case against Dominion didn’t change their strategy. A “serious” right-winger, Erick Erickson, turned against Trump some time in 2016 and instantly lost thousands of subscribers, so he packed up his self-respect and resumed whooping up the Grifter in Chief. It is now a textbook cult.

It gets real real

Trump did not expect to win the 2016 election. Polling was against him. But none of that mattered. Had he lost, he would simply have continued grifting off the base by hollering against the same bugaboos. Few remember perhaps that he used the “election rigged” conspiracy theory in 2016 just to make sure his base would not drift away from a real loser. This also explains why Trump, as president, suddenly started promoting bleach as a cure for Covid 19 (he meant the industrial cleaner MMS, but that is another story ) and introducing UV light into the body and other nonsense in the midst of a dangerous pandemic. This anti-expertise tactic fit in perfectly with a base that was trained in fear, in particular of something invisible, like a virus. He also ranted against masks, played footsie with the growing online anti-vax crowd, which is led by another segment of scam artists (just look how RFK Jr. demanded his racketeering rights), and somehow blamed the pandemic on the Democrats. After praising Ch-ay-na’s response, he then turned on the country, when he realized they were an outstanding specter to take the buck for his own failings. He caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, according to several studies, just to maintain his dominance over the minds of his base. This shameful fact has led to speculation that Trump might have lost the 2020 election because he literally killed off many of his voters in swing states, where his message was ingested like deep-fried butter.

When he won, surprisingly, he realized that he could now extend his reach globally. He did try to get some “serious people” into his cabinet. Many ultimately left the chaos and the embarrassment of having to support this “president” who seemed to be play-acting a parody of himself in the White House. And the lies and grifting began almost immediately, for example, with the number of people at his inauguration. There was even, I suspect, a bit of hanky-panky with the stock market earlier on, namely in early December 2016, when he attacked the planned  F-35 program and Boeing stock plunged. Great deal for short sellers if you know it’s coming.

The depth and extent of Trump’s corruption is probably going to come out in dribs and drabs in the coming years, if at all. Especially the deals he made with foreign governments. Has anyone thought to explain why this deeply corrupt man goes for dictators and other “strongmen?” Simplest answer: Because the risk of being exposed is too high when dealing with a democratically elected government with its many guardrails against corruption – that don’t always hold — and the pesky journalists cultivating sources. The fewer people involved, the safer the crime. That led to his first impeachment. Dealing with a dictator, on the other hand, means having a mutual back scratch with a single person, one with access to his/her nation’s purse strings and no accountability. In other words, Trump, and by extension his family, is eminently corruptible.

2024

Making predictions is risky. What if, what if not, and what can we learn… The victory in 2016 threatened to force Trump to get to work, which is not his favorite activity, because daily work is constraining. If you read Obama’s Promised Land, which covers his years as president, you can sense the weight of responsibility he felt after the election and how it changed him. He clearly delineates a before and after, the difference between campaigning for his party and ideas, and then suddenly sitting in the Oval Office with the (epistemic) responsibility for ALL Americans and the planet, since the USA has nilly-willy lots of influence. … Trump has none of these “spiritual” problems, apparently. He figures out how to attract media attention, he improvises, says a few outrageous things, and goes to play golf. All reports suggested a disinterested president who hardly read anything, certainly not the all-important daily briefings, seemed eager to play golf whenever he could, and did just a bare minimum. The huge tax cut that ballooned the deficit was easy, since it had long been a GOP wet dream and all he had to do was sign it. His only real task was personal: Maintaining a connection to the hard core of his base, the Evangelicals, the Nativists, the unfettered Booboisie (Mencken) he had liberated from the straitjacket of political correctness. The result was such action like the “Muslim ban,” red meat for the Nativists, as was the “good people on both sides” comment after Charlottesville. Otherwise, no immense wall, no infrastructure week, no perfect health care, nothing. Helsinki was a national embarrassment, so was his encounter with Xi and Kim Jong Un. All the while, the media meticulously counted and reported with loud gasps every lie he and his groupies like Kellyanne Conway uttered and the right-wing media zoo, with Fox News at the top of the roster, amplified the garbage to keep their viewership angry and in fear of all manner of hobgoblin, because that always translates to advertising dollars.

By inviting televangelists and other pastoral ringleaders to the White House, he maintained the connection with the evangelical base, which has simply surrendered any semblance of believing in the core tenets of Christianity in favor of overt hatred and violence against its perceived enemies. Meanwhile, the Republican Party forwent several chances to rid themselves of this con man, but they also knew that they would lose their base if they did reject Trumpism. January 6, 2021, was one of the last opportunities, and they failed, mainly due to the opportunism of Kevin McCarthy, who went on to become Speaker of the House, and the political fourberie of Mitch McConnell.

Since then, more and more Republicans have gone through that Trump-managed toll booth to take part in the bountiful scam that he launched. In Congress, they are mostly paralyzed with fear of losing power. They are monitored and supervised by a small group of Trump devotees, MTG, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and the like. Now, more and more big names are investing their self-respect in this bustling market to profit from the MAGA base, like Russell Brand, and they are not exactly savory fellows. But the base accepts them, because they rile up liberals, and even pseudo-intellectual centrists, like “comedian” Bill Maher, who has no real intellectual background, bring them onto their shows so they can pretend to be politically balanced.

It is quite brilliant, I must admit. Because whatever happens in November, 2024, Trump is not going away. He has set up a grift that is like Nine Men’s Morris. He gets them coming and going. The only way to stop the game, would be a staggering defeat by the GOP up and down the ballot, and that would require the Evangelical base to really turn on him, to see the error of their ways. But they are proud of their achievement of having had one of “theirs” in the White House, even though it is a total humiliation to have given into this city slicker, a type of con artists they have always been told to watch out for… They are in the throes of that sunk-cost dilemma, don’t forget.

I am not optimistic for the moment. The American electorate is, alas, far too disconnected and apathetic and fails to understand how fragile a democratic system can be. It’s not about flag-waving and yelling USA Number One. It’s about the rule of law. As for Trump, while he is still scamming, a part of him is now taking himself seriously as a potential dictator, and his team know that and approve. And that is a genuine threat for the nation and, by extension, the world at large.

(to be continued at some time, thank you for reading.)

*Interestingly, I have heard journalists speak of Trumpism coming to Europe. That, too, is not entirely accurate. Before Trump entered politics, there were men like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Beppe Grillo, founder of Italy’s Five-Star movement in 2009, and Silvio Berlusconi. And in the USA, you had many others throughout history, including Joe McCarthy, who waved papers allegedly listing the names of Communists, though no one ever saw these names.

 

An island of memory

Memories of childhood and youth are often like an archipelago of islands separated by deep sea concealing abysses where dreams and nightmares lurk in a murky wash, with the occasional reef our hearts ran aground on. Surely everyone has thousands of these islands stored in their memory banks. One of mine was a set of three piano recitals.  

Today, Sunday, May 19, rummaging through a stack of old black-and-white portraits, trying to find out who the subjects were, I found the image above. It is from a series of famous people my father shot, and it features Alexis Weissenberg (1929-2012). The Bulgarian-Jewish pianist, who managed to escape the Holocaust by playing Schubert for a German guard, has a  serious but questioning look on his face. The turtle-neck, the neatly cropped hair, and the waggish cigarette, do give him an unconventional quality, this being the early ‘50s, after all. It’s the reflection in the sleek black piano lid, the instrument he was wedded to, and the mysterious smoke, like incense, that complete the picture beautifully with a hint of something spiritual. Weissenberg  was still young, but my father captured the latent intensity in this young man, who would go on to shake up the concert stages in the 1960s, about a decade after this shot was taken.

I salvaged many photographs from my father’s almost pathological need to forget the past, as if photographing so many cultural icons of his time were a sinful act. It was not false modesty on his part.  Something about the past bothered him intensely (I am planning a biography…). Whenever I would visit him in the tiny village lost in France where he had retired to, I would beg him to put some order in the material stored in boxes he had chucked pell-mell into his attic. He would wave me off and say “What do you want to do with all that shit, just put it in the garbage after I die.” He didn’t do it himself, thank goodness…

Alexis Weissenberg (1929-2012), one of the great pianists

Back to Weissenberg. Those who know me are aware that I love what’s known as classical music. It reached obsession level when I was a boy, in my pre-teens. There was always lots of music in our home, and having no television was certainly an enabling factor. Next to a record with songs by Burl Ives, I had one called The Festive Pipes by the  Bernard Krainis Consort. My sisters would organize ballet sessions in our parents’ studio on 65th Street in New York, and that is where I heard Stravinsky’s  Firebird Suite, which still haunts me today. The Chickering grand in the living room was naturally played by my sister (“From the Halls of Montezuma…” remains stuck in my memory) and by my mother playing German Christmas songs and Mozart’s Turkish March. But Ania Dorfman was also on our list of friends, so there was that. Her recording of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words had pride of place in our library.

New York, where we lived

Naturally, I gravitated towards the piano, and particularly  Mozart and Beethoven, and then Chopin, whose music I collected voraciously, both on vinyl and paper. By that time, we had moved to Paris. The first record I purchased on my own dime was of the Chopin Etudes played by Agustin Anievas (10 francs, all fairy-tooth money).  One of my favorite shops was Pugno Musique, then at Quai des Grands Augustins, where I could find second-hand scores to accompany my listening. My piano teacher was not the most rigorous, but we did listen to music together and occasionally played chess (I lost, but learned).

In 1967, age 10, I changed schools. In the new establishment, I found myself a bit isolated as one of only a handful of foreigners, an American at that, and no one missed a chance to remind me of my damnable birthplace, especially the teachers. It was not pleasant, but I managed to retreat into a beautiful space with music in my head and became an expert at “osselets,” a game going back to Roman times involving some dexterity. At home, I would do my devoirs, and then listen to music, follow the scores, time the pieces with a chronograph, and note them down in a book. Our library included the complete Beethoven Sonatas (by Arthur Schnabel, including the scores), the complete solo piano music of Mozart (Walter Gieseking), and my own collection of Chopin, which was missing just a few recordings that were unavailable at the time: the first piano sonata, and three rondos, which I knew existed, because they were at the end of a collection of preludes. There was a recording by Adam Harasiewicz, but it was only available in Poland, I found out later.

School was no fun at all. Except for the last hour of the week, Saturdays from 11 to 12. We learned songs and played recorders. And occasionally, the teacher, Mr. Lesueur, would let me play piano (at home we had a Pleyel baby-grand). I remember a few Chopin Préludes, and Debussy’s first Arabesque. Mr. Lesueur was the only teacher there with an encouraging attitude. When I finally retreated totally and flunked a class, his was the only one with top grades. So that music hour was a delight, as uplifting as a tièrce de Picardie brightening up some lugubrious song in a minor key.

Doing my homework in our Paris kitchen, which was featured in a magazine called Cuisine Magazine

Adventure

Please bear with me… Weissenberg is coming…
One day, after classes in my second year (I was now 11, and we were going to move to London, so… future open and new), I did my usual pilgrimage to the corner épicerie where all kids stocked up on candy, and then  spontaneously turened into Rue Verrier. I discovered a strange shop. In my memory, it was lit in a yellowish light and seemed to be selling nothing. But it had small posters in the window advertising cultural events, including concerts. I went in. It smelled of dust and wintry sunlight (it was in February). A fairly old man was standing behind a large, deserted wooden counter, and I inquired what their business was. He explained that they were a print shop, and, among other things, they made these posters announcing concerts and exhibitions to be put up on doors or in prominent positions in various shops and boutiques. This was common practice back then.  “If you get forty shops to take these posters and get a stamp from each shop, you get two tickets for the concert advertised,” he told me. I immediately selected a recital, and  took two rolls of posters, eighty in all. I intended to take my parents along.

Doors of Paris shops were for advertising. From that moment on, my Saturday afternoons and Thursdays (it was a day off in French schools)  and late afternoons were filled with long walks around my neighborhood, posters tucked under my arm and a sheet of paper in my pocket to collect the stamps.

What a great job it was! The parfumeries gave me little samples (I actually remember the tiny Fleurs de rocaille bottle and that very flowery smell, like butterfly wings in ones nose), the boulangeries, and patisseries, and charcuteries had some little tidbit for the little blond kid with bangs. I never checked whether they put the posters up… I had that precious stamp, and that was all I cared about. Sure, schoolwork suffered a bit, but this was a passion that wiped away all those stern teachers with their scowls, their pinched lips, the endless homework … A few weeks later, I returned to the print shop and proudly came out with FOUR tickets… I couldn’t believe it!

Long story short, I did this three times in all. And these were the recitals: Martha Argerich, who was debuting in Paris, Alexis Weissenberg, and Samson François. The concert hall was an amphitheater at what became the University Pantheon-Assas, on rue d’Assas, if I remember correctly. The thrill of earning those ticket and inviting my parents to a concert was quite overwhelming. I stood with them in the crowd at the entrance, like a proud little pine tree in a forest of oaks, heart beating with excitement.

Somewhere in my papers, I have one of the concert bills… Once I find it, I will post it as well.

Weissenberg was one of my favorites at the time, I knew his work from some records. But I always suspected that the recordings were not 100% authentic. After all, the immediacy was not there. I could not imagine how one could play such complicated works with ease…  Here, at the recital, the music was so alive, so clear, so nervous. The occasional error, a missed high note, a vague phrasing… made it human.  These pianists were like top-drawer jockeys riding great thoroughbred horses. They radiated concentration, power, control, and, yes, passion. Eyes and ears, and indeed body received a clear message: These artists were wedded to their instrument, more, they had become the instrument itself, and they made this huge sound, even in the quiet parts. Chopin was de rigueur, but I suddenly heard Brahms and Schumann, and Debussy, and Haydn, and Bach, and Ravel. My musical horizon was turning into a cornucopia of exalted sounds and textures. You could feel the notes, as they came at you like bees, or birds, or drops of rain, hailstones.

At some point, I decided (in vain, I discovered) that I wanted to be a pianist. But that is another story. You need a lot more than just ten fingers to get up on stage and face the audience and, as Argerich once put it, “the crocodile with 88 teeth.”

All the while, my father never told me that he had actually met and photographed Alexis Weissenberg. He could have just said it… He did, later. But in fact, he had met a host of cultural icons and photographed them, including Ernest Hemingway, John Garfield, Virgil Thompson, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Henri Salvador, Yul Brynner, Rex Harrison, and more.

Hemingway and one of his many cats, photograph by Paul Radkai

So that is the story of my first job, as it were. Finding that photograph was a reminder of that one island in the past. Also, a reminder of my father’s curious lack of genuine ambition when it came to his work. Given time and energy, I may understand more about my parents as I continue digging into their past, a tough job, because they were members of that “silent generation.” They were both very gifted, but they, too, had murky childhoods. The islands in their archipelago were not always pleasant places, from what I gather, and the waters in between were stormy.

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Story of the Red Bear

 

The Story of the Red Bear

Many years ago, at a flea market on the parking lot of a seedy pizzeria next to the highway, my daughter (let’s call her Thalia)  found and fell in love with a little bear dressed like Santa Claus.  She called it Rotbär, red bear, and pronounced it hohtbär (with long dark “O” as in home), because her mouth was still learning those harder, guttural letters. It became her one and only faithful companion, support, savior, friend.

A few months later, disaster struck. On a cold November night, Rotbär got lost somewhere in Basel.  Exactly how is anyone’s guess. We searched for it high and low, made calls, returned to each location we might have been. To no avail. Thalia’s gentle heart, at three and a half years of age, had experienced its first great tragedy, and she was inconsolable. And my heart reached out and tried to pick up the pieces of hers and patch them together.

All is real in childhood.

“Rotbär has certainly gone on vacation for a while,” I told her, explaining, with as much empiricism in my voice as possible, that even bears like to take a break. Winter was on its way, dark, cold, and austere, and he had surely caught a southbound train, to Ticino, to Italy, Spain, later Africa… He wanted to see the world, he would be back, just be patient. In our minds, mine adult and hers basking in the great universe where fantasy reigns, this was all possible and perfectly logical.

It worked. For a while at least. The world is a big place. I had a map in my mind, and it all made perfect sense. I hoped she would slowly  find a new creature to love, or be distracted by the weekly steps a child’s soul makes, but that is not Thalia. Every now and then, she would burst out in tears and say, “Hohtbär is surely, surely lost forever, why would he want to leave?”

This went on for two-and-a-half years, or thereabouts. She did not forget the little bear dressed like Santa Claus. In the meantime, she even pronounced him “rrrotbär,” rolling the “R”s properly.  “He probably found a wonderful place to live for a while,” I told her, “and I am sure he is happy, he must be,” I spoke with genuine sincerity driven by my own emotion.

This worked, too. At least for another while.

But soon after, one quiet night, my usual lucubration was interrupted by a plaintive cry: “Papa, I wonder where Rotbär is right now, I am sure he was stolen by pirates,” and the tears flowed and flowed and flowed, and I felt my own welling up. And so, the story of the traveling red Santa Bear expanded, my imagination driven by the need to console this child. The journey became decorated with touches of real life, train rides, plane trips, seasickness on ships, and joyrides in cars, visits to poor children in faraway lands, who really needed to be comforted by the Miracle Bear, because they had so, so little, and we had so, so much. And Thalia’s little-giant heart of gold, overflowing with a sense of justice, felt this was right and Rotbär was doing fine. So, it worked. For another while. Say a month or two, maximum.

But miracles do happen when we love. And so, one day, I was happy to report that Rotbär had finally phoned me. From England, of all places. It came as a surprise, of course and raised hopes I could not dash.

He told me — so I reported — that he had decided to come back home because he missed Thalia. She was excited. “Really???” Yes, really, I answered, and mentioned in passing that he had probably changed a bit, just like she had changed in all those years. She had become bigger, her language was now almost perfect, and he had been traveling, after all, and had lived rough occasionally. But apparently he still had those clothes on. “He told me he would send a postcard from Hamburg,” I dropped, casually, at the table one day.

I knew other key parts of Rotbär that had “changed,” but I could not tell her. In fact, I will take this secret with me to the next world.

Lo and behold, a few days later a picture came in an envelope – today we’d say a selfie – addressed in heavy, cumbersome letters: A little bear in a Santa suit, looking cocky indeed, and, oddly, sitting on a chair just like the one in our living room. He was obviously somewhere where people also did sporadic shopping at a Swedish furniture outlet. I placed the picture on the kitchen table. At mealtimes, Thalia would look at that bear, and could hardly believe it. Rotbär was really, really coming home. And it must be that bear, she vaguely remembered. He was in Hamburg (“Is that far?”), he is in Hanover (“Is that far?”), he is in Düsseldorf (“Is that far?”), he is taking a ship down the Rhein to Karlsruhe (“Is that far?”), which flowed just a few miles from where we lived. We scrutinized the map of Germany. Once she even asked if he was in Alsace, across the border. “No,” I replied earnestly, “The train line from Hamburg comes through Freiburg, not Alsace…

You have to be realistic, right?

Then came her sixth birthday, on a bright July day. She was having seven friends over. The heat was excruciating. In the afternoon, just as the party was setting off for a treasure hunt (accompanied by our flesh-and-bone cat), after the cake-eating ceremony, heavy storm clouds suddenly stacked up in the sky, menacingly. But they only broke to the north and east of the district, causing floods and all manner of havoc. We just got the dark clouds and wind and a few drops of rain. So, the children could play outside for a while and dip in the inflatable pool and scream.

Thalia was in seventh heaven.  Especially since there was one prodigal guest at the festivities.

This is what had happened earlier in the day:
She had woken up to a festively decorated apartment, with garlands strung from the beams and pink vinyl cloth on a table decked out with fairy cups and princess plates. Suddenly, at 8:20 a.m., the doorbell rang perfunctorily. She ran down the stairs, imagining some present or some well-wishers to be there. On the table in front of the entrance door sat none other than Rotbär, back after so, so many adventures. Exactly, the same as on the postcard. Except in his backpack were some gummi bears. Well, what do bears snack on while traveling?

What a miracle day. It was twelve long hours of fun and games and cake …

Sun was setting, the guests all went home. The day turned to a dusky evening.  Before going to bed, Thalia’s front tooth, which had been very wiggly, finally came out. The tooth fairy would be along as soon as everyone was asleep to round off this magical,  oh-so-magical day. Thalia went to bed, undressed Rotbär, because it is still quite hot out, she pointed out.

Cooler night hours make work easier in summer. I sat down at my desk. And then, after some time of silence, her voice, with those familiar dissonant notes of distress, tore through the now quiet flat. “Papa!” I rise from my desk and amble to her room. “The guests,” – she really called her friends guests – “they said that someone brought Rotbär, he didn’t come by himself.” It’s night now, and the time when our inner voices are often loudest, tiny doubts become raging wolverines eating up our sleep.

Somehow, I had expected this. Or rather, I feared this. The crushing comments of children raised in convenient empiricism…. Like those fragile, pearly little teeth giving way to more stable eating tools, her childhood was ebbing, and with it a power that can truly move mountains. The dreams, the fantasies, were ceding to reason and logic. She knew it. She was proud of those new teeth. Her friends all had Halloween pumpkin smiles already and boasted about it among themselves.

What can we do? We want our children to grow into free and bright individuals. And we want them to keep that secret power of childhood at the same time.

I told her simply they had no idea what they were talking about, and maybe they, too, wanted a magical bear as a friend.

She tearfully, desperately, explained that she had really liked being five years old, and did not want to be six. She couldn’t explain why, but having to go to school suddenly seemed too daunting. “Five is a good age!” she threw at me. I could feel the gate to the Garden if Eden was opening. But we chatted about age, about being six, and fifty-three, and how old grandpa is (seventy-seven) and about why Joni, our neighbor in Hungary, died two years ago at around eighty.

Child that she was, Thalia had few filters. She listened with each cell to what life was telling her and it became experience.  In a few years, no time really, she would be a different person, I knew that. What lesson was there here? Should one obey the harsh laws of 2+2 = 4 and nothing more? Was this a manipulative charade I was playing with her? Would the disappointment be even greater later on? Or was I simply trying to nurture happiness?

I believe in authentic emotion, in sadness, and anger, and joy. We avoid pain, but our wounds are where the light enters, said Rumi. There is so much to say for feeling and expressing our deepest selves. The mind debates the heart, but all its victories are Pyrrhic, because the heart is stronger and will rebel, slip out of the cage of reason, and set fires if it must. Our emotions, and hence our imagination, are what make us whole and real and able to truly communicate in the end.  Her feelings, I suddenly realized, had nothing to do with a little bear in a Santa suit.

“You always knew Rotbär was coming back, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Yes!”
“You believed he would? Truly, in your heart?”
“Yes!”
“Because you really love Rotbär, right?”
“Yes!”
“Well, your friends were not here this morning when the doorbell rang, so they don’t know. He’s here, and that is because you believed it would happen.” This I say in a voice of conviction.
“Yes, and he came back to be with me.”
“Of course,” I answer,” what more do you need to know? Good night, sleep tight…”
“… and don’t let the bedbugs bite” she finishes off.

She fell asleep in minutes, clutching Rotbär. Her dream was still intact, she had all the time in the world to do the growing up bit. She knew a lot anyway, even how to move chess pieces on a board, so I was not worried.

I watched her body breathing quietly, and I keep thinking that it’s true, she actually willed that Rotbär back in some way. She never deviated from the faith in what I, her father, kept telling her.  But it was her faith, her energy, her focus on the dream that did it. The bear was traveling and traveling and enjoying himself and having so many adventures, and she was with him.

This is the genuine power that children have. It’s so unbelievably pure, so surgically precise and in some ways devastating. In the dark room, it took my breath away and released tears of wonder and longing: to be suddenly bathed in this electrifying power of dreams, to feel free of the narrow protective armor needed to survive the daily grind with its inevitable skirmishes,  to just, for a moment, feel the immensity of imagination and the full force of its impact.   She breathed life into any object. This is true strength.   This must be protected and nurtured  at all cost. Not only in our children, but in our own child that we once were.

The house is quiet. I walk back to my desk. Time to get back to work.

 

Note: I published this story a while ago on an old blog. It is personal, and because the Internet is what it is, and I wished to protect my  daughter from exposure to harassment for being a brilliant, well-balanced, dreamy individual, I took it down and replaced it with this. The Internet, for all its benefits, has since been conquered by data-mining feudal lords. It has invaded our erstwhile private spaces and co-opted and stolen our ability to dialogue, our epistemic stability, our focus on important things, our peace of mind, and, worse, the final frontier: our time. This story took place just before that time).

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Easter Meditation

Easter doesn’t end with the egg-search on Sunday. It goes on for at least another week, and so it should, otherwise, why bother? Here some stuff that has been going through my mind for several years. Now it’s on “paper,” I can let go a bit. Have fun and tell me what you think.

It’s no surprise that the Guardian gatekeepers should have chosen Easter Monday to publish an article about the drip-drip-drip decline of religion in the USA (‘Allergic reaction to US religious right’ fueling decline of religion, experts say, April 5, 2021). The high holidays are a perfect time to draw attention to what one might call a “crisis of faith” brought about by a society that is increasingly secular and unwilling to believe in space-based teapots. To quote Bertrand Russell, who is the progenitor of that wonderful analogy: “If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.”

The article, however, does not dwell on any deep epistemological issues, like critical rationalism, empiricism, and the like. Rather, it points to the drift in the USA towards Christian nationalism and bigotry in religious communities as the source of the “allergy” to religion amongst younger generations.

A sentiment that is becoming quite widespread.

Nor does it really mention the glaring contradictions between the leaders preaching water, but drinking wine, living in million-dollar mansions and flying around in private jets from one gaudy show of some stooge being cured of a fake illness or condition, to a revival filled with shouts and shrieks uttered in incomprehensible tongues.

Above all, their embarrassing support of Trump was a gamble, and a bad one. “They are experiencing their loss of prominence in American culture as an unacceptable attack on their beliefs,” says Alison Gill, vice-president for legal and policy at American Atheists, “and this is driving much of the efforts we are seeing to cling on to power, undermine democracy, and fight for ‘religious freedom’ protections that apply only to them.”

It could be called a form of communal reactance. As evidence mounts that would contradict or certain orthodox beliefs (shibboleths) or traditions, a part of the community will inevitably double down and become fundamentalist,  even fanatical. While striving for greater  spirituality, they are in fact becoming classically materialist, since every word in the  Good Book is to be considered true as written, scholars and interpreters be damned.

A different look

For years, now, Christian leaders of many denominations have blamed the dwindling of their flocks on secular humanists, atheists, drugs, Democrats, Communists, liberals, sex and rock ‘n’ roll, and other phantasms. They have a convenient  scapegoat for that, a fellow named Satan, whose origins were brilliantly explored by theologian Elaine Pagels (The Origins of Satan). They rarely examine their own role in the matter. Indeed, any attempts at modernizing the religion are met with a sturdy wall of resistance. Hans Küng, who died on April 6, suggested, among other things, ending celibacy for the priesthood. He was prohibited from teaching! A few years ago, the German Bishops’ Conference also proposed letting women be ordained (please!), and that was ignored. Meanwhile, the church is hemorrhaging cash due to sex scandals involving priests and their superiors.

The famous fig leaf…. covers more than just sexual organs.

Crises, be they of faith, or in one’s marriage, or when deciding what to wear to a party, are usually a sign that something needs changing. And people with questions about their lives will seek guidance. But one thing is certain, young and old don’t want to be yelled at all the time and threatened with eternal hell. Life is stressful enough as is, what with our daily duty to maintain the economic well-being of the collective. People want their religion to make sense in their daily lives today. Not two thousand  years ago.  It would therefore behoove churches to adapt their messaging and attitude to The People, if they want to survive, and not try to convince the people to follow their theology.  This was concisely expressed in a recent interview in  Die Zeit  with a young, Catholic, queer theology student, Chiara Battaglia, who suggests that young people are naturally losing interest in the church (Catholic in this case). “We are so varied in how we are designing our lives, we can make up a patchwork of the best from all religions, we are experiencing spirituality without a church.”

Yet, the solution is simple. The first step for the church (and I am speaking for the Catholic church, but not only), would be to embrace the changes in our society and get back its overarching spiritual message, one shared by most religions, rather than cling to some old, orthodox, materialistic concepts that were always rooted in the maintenance of power. Because the spirituality is still homeopathically present, notably in such rituals as Christmas and Easter.

Search for meaning
Besides economic activity, these holidays offer us a moment of respite in a frenetic social environment. Secondly, we tend to need rituals, because they give both the physical and metaphysical structure to our lives, be that daily, weekly, or annually.

All the better if the ritual in question has a deeper meaning. Like Easter. It comes at after forty days of fasting, for forty days plus six Sundays at the end of winter and beginning of spring. This was a smart idea at one time, since food reserves in our climes could otherwise run out. In our day and age, in the West, our worries are often too much (rather than too little) consumption of unhealthy stuff, be it nicotine or other drugs. But it can also be other bad habits, like doomscrolling, the constant ingestion of divisive, polarizing, and strictly absurd content from the Internet. Even cat videos.

Nothing like the desert to spawn new thoughts and visions. And to reveal our shadow.

And so we want change. The idea of making a conscious, daily effort to enact that change is encouraged and sustained by fasting and by having a mentor. The ideal mentor during Lent is none other than Jesus Christ who went into the desert after being baptized (he saw the light) by John. There, he was surrounded by wild beasts and thrice got tempted by the Devil himself.

Another narrative

The Christian calendar ends this period with the holy week, which, according to Arnold Bittlinger, a theologian and Jungian psychologist (Das Geheimnis der Christlichen Feste) leans heavily on the Roman celebration of weekdays, not a bad idea when trying to graft one theology onto another. It begins with Palm Sunday and the triumphant entry into Jerusalem of the “Conscious I,” the visible world with all its hidden phoniness. It is followed by Holy Monday (lundi -> luna -> moon), in which the unconscious is at work to reveal the truth known to the soul: Jesus withers the fig tree, whose leaves were always used to hide sinful stuff (Genesis 3,7). He also clears the temple of the money changers to restore its spiritual value. In other words, that what the fasting churned up can now be uncovered, and it will inevitably force a conflict, which comes the following day. On Tuesday, the day of Mars for the Romans (Mars, god of visible conflict), Jesus “locks horns with his opponents,” writes Bittlinger. “He destroys his relationship with all representatives of the Jewish people and religion … he delivers a violent end-of-times speech.”

Profound change can mean putting paid to all those who were part of your entourage, to old habits. It must be done with some “violence,” meaning: it must be spoken. The two aspects of Mercury, generosity and pettiness/dishonesty, are observed on Wednesday (mercredi), when the apostles – spurred by Judas – complain about the precious spikenard ointment poured on Jesus’ head. On the day of Jupiter, the god of abundance, Thursday, Jesus gets together with his apostles, and on Friday, we have the day of Venus, goddess of love and, Bittlinger points out, of the cycle of death and rebirth, for she is the evening star when the moon is waxing, and as the morning star when the moon is waning. Death is the essence of change, and while we are in a process, we will feel lonely (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”). And at some point, you will have to let go and simply trust: Into your hands I commit my spirit!”

Jesus, our higher or true self, and the twelve apostles, our quotidian self: part of a single organism.

Finally, we have the day of Saturn, the “Guardian of the Threshold,” the symbol of limitations and constraints, real and in our minds, or conscious and unconscious, such as a cave, where Jesus is placed after death. Saturn, the Roman version of Kronos, also represents hard, persistent work that will bring just rewards. Namely a new beginning, resurrection.

Most of us can relate to this process, even to some of its joys and tribulations. We want change, yet we fear it. The stories told of Jesus can help us objectify the process and make it more understandable. The cycle of life and death, or of creation and transformation, is explained by creating a grand story around it (Brahman, Vishnu, Shiva). It is true in the macro as well as in the micro.

Of course, one could be ultra-scientific about change and set forth the minutiae of molecular structures, the sparking neurons, the flapping dendrites and fascinating quantum leaps in our brains. But at times, a good yarn manages to paint a bigger picture in a more exciting manner, and in a way that everyone can understand more viscerally.

Something to think about

One more point needs elucidating. As in a dream, all the figures are in atomized parts of a single figure. Jesus, an androgynous figure, is the “higher self,” the one who knows the roadmap to the future, while his apostles do not. They are living and working in the three-dimensional world, but they must learn to trust their “crazy friend.” So what is Judas doing there, and why did Jesus love him in particular, knowing he would betray him? Because often

Rehabilitating Judas, the “infamous” apostle. We despise that part of us that will force the process, and yet we need it.

the changes in our lives, be they experienced as positive or negative, are actually brought about by an action we took, or did not take. Without Judas, Jesus would have remained just another soap-box hero. With Judas, he finds his greater calling, his divine self, his peace of mind.

And by the way…. Remember the three temptations of Christ in the desert…. That devil is a part of us. We make the choices. At least most of them.

Aftermath

Holy week and resurrection are not the end of the story. Easter week follows and has Jesus wandering around a bit and testing his new enlightened self. How natural! Isn’t that what we all do, when we have managed to transform something in our lives, when we have come through the crisis? A victory lap to test our new self?

Hanging on to tradition for dear life, i.e., fundamentalism, is a natural response to some change, but perhaps not the right one. The fire and brimstone and the endless harping on about sex, sexuality and snakes and the devil simply does not make much sense anymore in the age of advanced medicine, condoms, psychology, freedom of speech, books, the Internet’s freewheeling culture of criticism. Maybe it’s time to make religion a personal story again. Self-development has become a veritable industry that taps into many different health-related fields. If it has such success, it’s because in a disjointed, hectic world, with its myriad distractions and bullshit jobs, there’s a clear need to “find oneself.” It would be a shame to waste such terrific stories like that of Easter by pretending they are based on some real, three-dimensional, historic reality for which there is very little evidence, if any at all. These stories are universal, they are instructive, they are exciting, and they often explain and encourage our inner processes and help us become better humans.

God (or my higher power), grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference
R. Neihbuhr.

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Lockdown in the rear-view mirror

We’ve become used to economic crises, since they are endemic to our system. And some of us might remember the oil crises of the ‘70s (from which we learned very little) and the brown-outs and black-outs, and the rocketing fuel costs. But the past year delivered a crisis several generations of westerners simply haven’t experienced. Here’s a brief look back at the first months and my experience with remote teaching.

In Switzerland, the state of emergency triggering the lockdown was announced on Friday, March 13. It had been expected. A few weeks earlier, the first cases of covid-19 had appeared in Switzerland (in Ticino), so the Federal Council gradually prohibited  gatherings of more than 1,000 people, then 100, then less. That put paid to the big trade fairs, like the Salon de l’Auto in Geneva, Baselworld (watches and jewelry) and traditional events like the Fat Tuesday revelry in Basel. It was obvious that schools would have to shut down as well. Two weeks prior, in my school, we had discussed the skiing week and whether it would be possible. Some thought, yes. The thought fizzled. Hope still remained for the school outing at the end of the year… Then the axe fell.

As a substitute teacher now with long-term contract, I was in charge of a class of eighteen teenagers in their last year before entering the equivalent of high school. At first, they were thrilled not to have to go to school. Some were a little worried about their grades, which they hoped to improve in the third term that had just started. Some were already eying a professional path and were worried about it being in jeopardy. My co-main-teacher and I had a special duties towards them: Throughout the school year, we were asked to prepare them for the working life, showing them the many possibilities of achieving their dream or, if at all possible, finding that dream.

Leaving the schoolhouse on that Friday had a mystical feeling to it. There was no drama, no suggestive music, no worries. Just a deafening silence. The airport, which is about 500 yards from the school as the crow flies, had fallen silent, and the air had a whiff of spring unadulterated by the usual scent of burning kerosene.

The empty classroom, March 16, 2020.

The following Monday morning, my co-teacher and I got the class together on WhatsApp for a little chat about how we would proceed. Our orders were to use the Gmail platform, which features “classrooms,” a meeting app, email, etc… But my colleague, far younger than I and a scientist, knew about gaming. SHe had the brilliant idea of setting up a server on the Discord platform, which is not only quite easy to use, but was also familiar to many of our students. That afternoon, I went to school for the last time to gather the books the students had left behind not thinking that the lockdown would happen, and to pick up our class plant.

Last year I wrote about this moment, which some suggested was like a vacation. “A vacation is planned, implemented, executed. It comes with “vacation stress,” the unwritten edict that says: “Thou shalt relax and be nice to everyone and not think of work.” Sheltering-in-place, on the other hand, is like having been on a demented carousel one moment, and being yanked off and cast into limbo the next.”

Revving up

From the start, we felt it was important for the kids to see the positive aspects of the situation. I sent around a few paragraphs explaining how the work environment of the future was demanding more independence from employees anyway (a concept called Work 4.0 that I had had to write about for a company, you can read about it here). The lockdown, I pointed out, would be excellent training in self-motivation, in getting things done, communicating properly, staying “with the team,” as it were. This is what freelancers do every day, anyway (see box below).

This little pep-talk, which I repeated several times during the lockdown, had an effect on some. One boy later recalled how hard it was to work for ten minutes in silence, without the noise of the class in the background (these were very chatty kids). They were given enough work to do for half a day. They received the work in one-week batches and could do the work  whenever they pleased, though as a teacher of English and German, I often asked them to be strict about doing a bit every day. Several learned to communicate their questions or problems in a timely fashion and to actually space out  out their work so as to make it doable, rather than wait for the last minute. Some, of course, disappeared and even calls to the parents couldn’t get them to their desks.

For a generation that has grown up with computers and online, their actual skills in this area were often sorely lacking. They could get pics onto Instagram within seconds, but the computer as a tool was in many cases beyond their abilities. It was time to learn by doing, which is probably the best way.

Back and forth

One key to our online teaching was communication. My colleague and I decided to have regular meetings on the platform. Meet (the app) was not a favorite, mostly, we suspected, because they valued their privacy and were probably sitting in bed in their PJs most of the day. So on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we had a conference call at 11.30 a.m. to listen to their questions and problems. Otherwise, they were free to contact us, and we would respond fairly quickly. At all hours, I might add. I remember one evening helping a student with her French reading, a chapter of a book she did not quite understand. So we worked on it together for nearly an hour. Several did their homework after 10 p.m., which is too late.  One morning early – 4:15 a.m., I am an early riser – I found two students chatting away online and had to convince them to get to bed.

Around the second week, I was contacted by a journalist from the Swiss Radio and Television, who wanted to know what was special about the lockdown, what experience people were having that was brand new. As an incurable optimist, I figured she would be interested to know something about the experience of teachers. And so I described how we, the adults, their teachers, had suddenly entered the world where they spent a lot of time. It was a great moment to share their experience, and to give them a bit of guidance in the utility and dangers of the Internet. It bred a sense of familiarity, too, because we were no longer physically present and applying the usual disciplinary methods. They would bicker and joke around just as they did in class, and occasionally we had to remind them that we were still their teachers. It revealed how vulnerable they could become when not seeing who is communicating with them. A physical voice can be very different from the words on a page.

The airport fell silent as well, a blessing for our noses and ears, and lungs, probably, as well

It was probably not a very interesting observation, because the journo was audibly checking messages on the other end and waiting desperately for me to finish my three or four descriptive sentences. I don’t think she even got my name right. That’s perhaps one of the problems with news media, they do need the spectacular to attract attention, and the subtle gets kicked to the curb.

Epilogue

This regimen lasted nearly two months. The kids would struggle a bit with the IT, somehow get the work back to me for corrections. We did one or two classes online with Meet to get some oral work done. Few showed up for these confabs. It was a bit of a struggle, but, in time, a number of the kids started getting a groove. Some even benefited from the occasional one-on-one classes. The bickering (my class had a few high-level bickerers), while irritating, suggested that they were still engaged with each other, and always offered opportunities for learning social manners.

We returned to school in half-classes on May 11. There were to be no exams, the final grades would be those at the end of the second term. The feedback on the nearly two months of online schooling was mixed. Most students in my class were happy to be back in physical contact with their friends. Even seeing their old teach seemed agreeable. The familiarity continued in the classroom, but as an adult and a teacher you have to keep a certain distance. We are not pals, we are not family. Many felt, too, that testing for grades was stressful and somewhat spoiled the fun of learning.  We discussed this issue, and I had to agree with them, but the problem remained in how to evaluate the kids. The idea of no grading is good, but it does need some preparation. The emphasis is on self-responsibility. What do you do with students who are simply different, whose experience has turned them against any organized society?

Soon, we were back at exploring the curriculum, but without the prize and coercion of grades. This held for another month or so. Then, the promise of summer, the balmy air, the brilliant colors, the the glimmering of freedom till September pried their teenage souls from the classroom, the reading, the maths, the grammar, the constraints. It was time to let them go. My colleague and I organized a picknick after the official end of school. Eleven came.

Those I have seen since are doing well.

In the end, the students who already worked well in class, were also the ones who managed the online learning as well. A few did go AWOL. The parents might have helped, but they, too, were probably too taxed by the situation, though some failed to give their children the proper aural space to work in (in one case, I heard a dad speaking loudly into his phone, while his child was trying to read).

The pandemic is over a year old, now, and people are getting sick of it, while many are still getting sick from it.  But the virus doesn’t care whether or not you’re sick of its presence. This too shall pass, as they say, so me must deal with it. Young people are having a hard time with the lockdown. But hand-wringing, moaning or spouting ridiculous conspiracy theories is not particularly helpful. It behooves us adults to remain stable, supportive, encouraging. Remember the film La vita e bella? Roberto Benigni guides his young son through the trials and tribulations of a concentration camp as if it were a game? That may be where we should all be. In all crises, adults must remain adults, and that does not mean being a pill. It means maintaining your humor, your optimism, your reason. Moaning and groaning about the lockdown and cursing at things you cannot change is not adult. To quote Seneca: “Man is affected not by events but by the view he takes of them.”

The Box: (I wrote about this last year already : “First injunction, therefore, is to rein in time, set up a rhythm, and stick to it. Your health depends on good sleep, some exercise, and attention to nutrition. Excellence is habit, to paraphrase Aristotle, and it does apply to surviving confinements of all sorts. Chatty aside: I hear so many people, even friends, complaining about being at home in front of the computer, not seeing anyone during the lockdown… I’d like to say: Now you know what it feels like, welcome to my world!).

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The world outside my window (Part 2)

Settling in, finding the rhythm, absorbing the shock, observing. This is even shorter than the last installment.

Sometimes the weather fits the mood, sometimes vice versa

The week started with weather as appropriate as “pandemic genre” film music. The sun remained hidden behind racing clouds driven by a violent wind that jostled the high rises moored to this part of the city. The bise noire is a Geneva specialty, an icy northeasterner that rips across the lake between the Alps and the Jura ranges. Normally, it brings sunny, but Calvinistically cold, weather. The “noire” version is different, it blankets the sky with menacing clouds that never seem to rain themselves out. It’s a little unnerving, because it raises images of an apocalypse, which is the general mood right now, even though the sun has returned.

The silence that engulfed the city a few weeks ago has started restoring our acoustic keenness. We hear other sounds with more acuity. A car accelerating, the voice of children in the garden, the Vespas that recall chainsaws in the forest. And in the background, ghosting along the larger avenues, is the spooky wail of ambulance sirens. They were always there, but now their fourth interval sings dan-ger, dan-ger…

Monday morning blues, add sirens.

We are waiting. Doing stuff, working, sometimes playing, and hopefully learning all sorts of soft, hard and medium rare skills in this brave new world. The web is full of clever activities, because given time, people are fantastically creative. The memes and fun clips are entertaining. There’s an Italian fellow playing football with a cat. Boredom, I always told my daughter, is the first step towards creativity. No wonder the powers-that-be would like to get us back to work, pronto. It’d be difficult to maintain the old economic system with a society filled with artists. A selection:

But you don’t have to go viral to defeat the virus. Staying home, doing nothing and reading is clever as well. Or practicing an instrument, or painting, or cooking, or just thinking. Maybe we will even shift the paradigm a little more, not towards technocracy (I’ll have a word about that in the next installment), but towards humanocracy. That guaranteed income idea could be gathering steam…

The virus is a great equalizer in many ways. It seems to be stimulating the kind of compassion to wipe away all the artificial barriers that have allowed us to see the “other.” The virus is an equal opportunity killer. It has taken to the shades: the pastor who was convinced it was a hoax, the “resister” who saw it coming, the doctor who spotted it early on, the bus driver, and children, adolescents, young women and men, in addition to the older people, whose lungs are not made for that kind of assault.

It reminds me of something: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself (Matthew 22:29). It has real meaning now, even in the midst of our silo-ized society, as Hermann Hesse once pointed out in his Lektüren für Minuten (Vol. 2), because you/we are now reflected in the other, and the other in you and us, and that irrespective of ethnicity, skin color, religious beliefs, if any.

The others are now your mirror.

Then there are those outside

So we, that is me and my global neighbors, wait at home, hope for the best, and like the human beings we are, we get creative, or neurotic, or, in worst cases, a little psychotic. We wait and create and work and hang out, keeping our spittle to ourselves. Outside the window, a medical army struggles to get a grip on the infections and the other accidents and illnesses that still plague us all, the garbage pick-up continues, postal workers, police, bus, tram, trolley, train and truck drivers keep doing their bit amidst a spreading pandemic. Families or relationships that experience abuse are very vulnerable. So be careful. Listen attentively.

Our ears are our first line of defense and theirs as well. A little vigilance can save lives.


(The next installment will look at work an the things that keep us sane).

The Collapse

The power of people

The sudden collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 followed shortly thereafter by the entire Iron Curtain came as no real surprise to me, and I was not alone. This is not some idle boast with 20/20 hindsight. For a couple of years prior already, the pressure had been mounting on this monolithic razor blade cutting the world in two. It was overly ripe for the fall.

No comment needed

I had been to East Germany several times, birthplace of my now ex-wife, and home to her huge tribe of relatives (her grandmother had married a widower with three children and had then had three of her own with him, who all, amazingly, survived World War Two, if I remember correctly). I had had long conversations with people there, read the local papers, which pretended that everything was fine and all bad things came from the West. Every encounter with an East German involved a liturgy of complaints about the absence of goods … not money. Things. One of my wife’s cousins couldn’t find a replacement car door, for example, because the Five-Year Plan that had been agreed to around then didn’t include passenger doors for the Trabants that year. Another cried after seeing all the East-German wares like those blue polka-dotted Bürgl earthenware cups and the famous “smoke” figures from the Vogtland region  being sold at a Christmas market in Frankfurt on the Main in the west. Those goods were not available drüben, over there, at home, in East Germany

Checkpoint Charlie: a neural point in the world

Fulfilling shopping experiences were not the only problem. A friend had been in the NVA (the National People’s Army) and reported driving around drunken officers all day in decrepit equipment. And you could see the degraded barracks, the quiet rejection of Russia and things Russian ­— most people dislike occupiers, regardless, so don’t think this was just “Communism.” People who grew up learning Russian in school hardly speak a word anymore or refuse to. At any rate, all of what I saw contradicted the apocalyptic vision of ultra-powerful Eastern Hordes often referenced in western media with glee and with proof by grainy black and white photos.

Most revealing, perhaps, was a simple conversation, during which I and my interlocutor compared east and west, a very frequent and productive topic. I casually referred to where I lived as “back in Germany” (bei uns in Deutschland). She interrupted me: “This is also Germany.” In that instant, I realized that Bismarck’s claim that Germany would need a civil war once a century to stay united was no longer applicable. This was a unified country with an impenetrable and cruelly ridiculous border running through it. Impenetrable, but not permanent. Absurdity can only go so far.

One just had to hope that a war would not be necessary to break down that wall…

A bubble was growing in East Germany, that was for sure, a quiet, unspectacular one. A bigger one was beginning to bulge elsewhere, however, namely Hungary, and thanks to my first book contract with APA Guides, I was able to drive there often as a Mr. Nice Guy writing about travel and culture, essentially harmless stuff for the over-political Communists…

The Hungarians had been chomping at the bit for a while already. Crippling foreign debt and palpable weariness at the leaden straitjacket imposed by a stuffy, unimaginative squad of corrupt apparatchiks was creating a kind of mental rebellion. Judging from the many freedom-fighting idols who appeared  as statues, or on the paper money, it would appear to anyone with a moderate sense of observation that Hungarians liked their freedom, and they didn’t like to be told what to do, and if that is the case, they tended to become ornery and uncooperative. Let me mention Kossuth, Deàk, Ràkoczi, the many poets  (Petöfi, Ady, Jozsef…), who are naturally inclined to free thinking, and of course Dozsa György, who led a massive peasant revolt against a corrupt aristocracy and died horribly, in 1514, along with many of his followers. A friend of mine, a simple seamstress out east, could recite the national poet Sàndor Petöfi’s famous “Talpra, Magyar” (On your feet, Magyars) that roused the Hungarians against the Austrians on March 15, 1848. From her mouth, it always sounded suspiciously contemporaneous, and very passionate.

Another snapshot: In August ’88, in a crowded csàrda near Tiszafüred on the Great Puszta, I had jokingly called the waitress “elvtàrs,” which means comrade. She yelled back at me for all to hear:  “The only thing red with me is my dress,” which was indeed red.

The Tisza between Hungary and Ukraine

My contacts in the country were all turning west. I crossed the border five times in ’88 without ever being searched. Unlike my crossings into East Germany, which never took less than three hours. I even wrote to editors in the USA (the big magazines, hoping to get The Scoop) that Hungary was almost out of the East Bloc and the Iron Curtain was now a flimsy, rusting reminder of past failures. I explained why I thought it would happen…. “Dear Mr. Radkai, that is all too speculative” was the standard response. The US media simply loved its cloak-and-daggery East Bloc, with its run-down buildings, barbed wire as a metaphor, the sinister cement posts, so dramatic when displayed in grainy black and white on the broadsheets.

It was not all lucubration. There was some action as well. For example, in late June ’88, a massive demonstration was held in Budapest against the systematization (modernization) project initiated by Ceausescu in neighboring Romania, which would have seriously affected the majority Hungarians in Transylvania (the USA still considered Ceausescu  one of the better guys in Eastern Europe).  After much sending out, the Berkshire Eagle picked up my report on it, bless their soul. A year later, June 16, 1989, with the Hungarian Democratic Forum as a kind of opposition pool, the country re-buried the “hero” of the 1956 rebellion, Imre Nagy, along with Pal Maléter, Miklos Gimes, Geza Losonczy and Jozsef Szilagyi. An empty coffin was added to represent the thousands of Hungarians who had also perished fighting off the Soviet army. It was a huge demo.


But lots more was happening. In May 1989, guards were removed from the border, an open invitation to use Hungary as an escape route from other East Bloc countries, especially East Germany. Also, on June 27, Gyula Horn was at the western border to ceremoniously cut open the Iron Curtain (I have a piece of it). In August and September, East German refugees started entering the country, allegedly to go on vacation: Hungary had always been known as “the country for encounters”…. my ex-wife’s family would come to the Balaton in summers to meet their East German relatives. These vacationers now spawned a refugee crisis that ultimately forced the Hungarian government to do the right thing and let them emigrate westward. The trickle became a flood.

A journalist friend of mine from East Germany, Ingrid Heller, kept a diary of her escape with her two teenagers:

Budapest, August 23

We went straight to the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany. We hoped to get some assistance there. But the embassy was closed. All I could see was the locked gates, the bell, and the guard house and Hungarian sentinel. Four youths came up from behind and stormed the bell. As if it were a life saver, I thought. A member of the embassy staff came out and handed us some flyers through the gate. They pointed the way to the Church of the Holy Family in Zugliget district.

We headed to the church. The embassy had set up a kind of emergency space in a garage in back of the church. They were taking the applications for passports. We had hidden passport in the pages of books to avoid being noticed by the East German customs officers.

Then the East German “tourists” started collecting at the West German embassy in Prag like the birds on Hitchcock’s jungle Jim .  Soon the Czechs had to relent and let them go.  The East Germans at home, meanwhile, were not totally passive. I remember hearing that people wanting to move from Dresden in ’86 were giving the reason as “lack of access to western television,” though I suspect that was apocryphal. But it referred to the fact that western TV signals did not reach the great city on the Elbe, which became known as the “Valley of the Know-Nothings” (Tal der Ahnungslosen).  In September ’89, they began to demonstrate, culminating in a huge march in Leipzig. The SED government had no cogent response, and repression was not an option, most probably because the USSR under Gorbachev was no longer prepared to back violence. So, whether leaving the country or marching in the streets, people were “voting with their feet,” was a popular saying.

The Wall falls

But in October ’89, I still had to order a visa to enter East Germany. I was planning an one of those cultural-lifestyle articles for a magazine, this time on Frederic the Great, who had palaces in what was now West Berlin and Potsdam in the East. My visa for multiple crossings was for November 12. So I reserved a train ticket from Munich to Berlin for Nov. 10, giving myself a few days to do research and visit friends in West Berlin – yes, my young readers, there were days when you could work at a human pace, read books, dig deeply into your subjects, and have a real social life with flesh and blood people… I then went back to my daily routines, writing scripts for the Deutsche Welle, reporting, preparing more guide books, and, of course, listening intently to short-wave radio, as was my wont.

On Thursday, November 9, 1989, I was packing and listening to the news in the evening. There came a really strange report from Dresden. Under pressure, Günther Schabowski, a party secretary, had just suggested that private citizens in East Germany could travel freely to West Germany. It was a somewhat confusing message, which directed people to get emigration visas as usual, and then stating, but permitting private travel abroad with short-term permissions (Die Genehmigungen werden kurzfristig erteilt). History has shown us how precarious the situation really was, even the NVA (the army) was mobilized, which could have produced an unbelievable bloodbath, but the East Germans heard it as permission to cross the border. And after some hesitation, they rushed it, notably in Berlin, while millions of West Germans sat riveted to their TV sets, glued to their radios and newspapers (the good ole days).

By the 10 p.m. news, it was clear that something apocalyptic was under way. East Germans were coming across the border without restrictions. And I stood in my living room listening, packing, mouth open, and  suddenly realized there were tears streaming down my face.

On November 10, I took the night train to Berlin. It slinked and slithered through East Germany, slowing down as it was supposed to when passing stations, but never stopping, giving us an almost eerie sight of dusky platforms crowded with East Germans wanting to just go, go, go. Because the second night was the real one. Until then, there was fear that the border would slam shut behind those taking tentative steps west. Or worse, the regime would suddenly crack down on the people who had exposed themselves in an explosion of euphoria.

Berlin in the morning. It was ice cold. But the sidewalks were bustling, the traffic dense notably with those strange East German cars, the Trabants and the Wartburgs, and the occasional Lada or Dacia (franchises of Fiat and Renault). I deposited by bags at the friends’ place where I was staying and soon joined the thousands of West Berliners and tourists gathered at the Wall. I found a spot not far from the Brandenburg Gate. Climbing onto it was forbidden. It was dangerous, because the other side was essentially a minefield. Many were trying to chip away at it, the so-called Mauerspechte, wall woodpeckers. That, too, was prohibited. In front of me, a Japanese fellow had showed up with a stonemason’s hammer, a huge chisel, gloves, and began whacking away. Bits of painted concrete flew in all directions, the wall shook. I picked up a few pieces. A mounty showed up, confiscated the man’s tool…

East Germans wandered through the city. You could hear them from their dialect. Many wanted bananas, even the KaDeWe had run out, that grandiose department store that was built just to thumb a consumerist nose at the goods-challenged East. I heard that an employee of the KaDeWe had gone into a cheap discounter’s to purchase more bananas … Lines in front of a sex shop… That, too, of course. The East was quite puritanical…

But was this real? It did not feel real at all. It felt more like some magical moment, the kind of über-euphoria that Hollywood likes to conjure with loud music and smiling faces. Some people I spoke to expected the usual cement-heads (it’s German) to bark: “OK, folks, party’s over.”…. That did not happen. The next day, a Sunday, I  headed to the Interior Ministry in East Berlin to get my visa. Two hours at Checkpoint Charlie. The Iron Curtain was open one-way only. I changed the statutory 25 deutschmarks for 25 ostmarks.

The ministry was in chaos. Journos running about, officials, pale and wide-eyed, travelers wondering where to go, what to do …. I found the office I needed, got my visa and asked casually: Should I cross the city again, or can I circle the city and go to Potsdam directly…. I had reserved at the Cecilienhof, the famous hotel where Churchill, Truman and Stalin had met in July ’45… “Uh, no you have to go to Gleiwitz.” I didn’t look at my visa. Trudged back to the Checkpoint, bought some chocolate cake on the way for my friends in the west. Waited another two hours. By the time I got through, the cake was mostly eaten.

The rest of the story is available here. What happened then, namely, is quite strange, since I actually ended up in the eastern zone without a visa. In a nutshell: As it turned out, Gleiwitz was the autobahn crossing, and I had requested a train crossing because I was on foot. Secondly, my visa was not a multiple visa, as applied for, but a single crossing.

Let me just add this: When I reached Potsdam thanks to a kindly pensioner who picked me up on the breakdown lane of the autobahn —after changing another 25 deutschmarks into ostmarks — I asked a young woman for directions to the Cecilienhof. She told me, and then asked where I was from. “The USA,” I replied. She spontaneously hugged me and gave me a friendly kiss. It was quite a surprise. So I trudged, exhausted, towards my hotel. On the way I tried to get rid of all those eastern bills. I found an open book shop, and bought several classic novels, books of poetry, some philosophy. When that historically famous palace hotel appeared before me, a thought crossed my mind: The war is finally over, let the peace begin.

Epilog:

The Kohl government rushed to consolidate the openings and bridge the country’s division. The effort was boosted no doubt by the enormous good-will of people in Germany and abroad, the sheer sense of “Yes!” of optimism, of welcome for this new age of international understanding. The People had ultimately won. The bizarre Communist governments fell one after another, some in blood, like Romania, others just crumbled. In 1990, I covered the first elections in Hungary. The Communist Party was running. I spoke to their reps, and they smiled and said: “If we pass the 5% mark, we’ll be happy.” That would have meant at least representation in the parliament. They reached about 3% if I recall…

Yet, as the curtain fell, new walls went up in people’s minds. In Germany, the westerners got suspicious and snarky about the East Germans, especially the Saxons, whose dialect grated on their countrymen’s ears. The easterners created the “Besserwessi,” the western know-it-all ( a play on the word Besserwisser), a kind of carpetbagger, who came and seduced the womenfolk with charm and money (this strange hallucination is not confined to Germany, by the way, it’s something visceral that one finds in xenophobes and racists of all stamp). Then the westerners started speaking of the nebulae, the NEuen BUndesndern, the new Länder of unified Germany and their bizarre customs. There were also the “Wendehälse,” the European wrynecks, able to turn its head 180 degrees, like the now suddenly former Communist. A cousin of my wife’s, for instance, had been an army officer and had always expressed his anger at “that American” whom he was not allowed to meet, because he was a “holder of secrets.” Suddenly, he wanted to have a beer with me. Then came Ostalgia, nostalgia for the East (Ost). Today, some of those old problems still plague the eastern Länder,

Bit by bit, though, the country did grow back together again. It meant huge investments. There still are differences, and they are always dangerous, because they are visceral. Maybe the jokes were needed to create a bit of excitement and take away some of the raw emotion. But every now and then I will pick up the bit of Wall, or look at my six inches of barbed wire that cut the world in two. And inevitably a tear or two will form as I think of all those people who suffered and continue suffering from the hubris of small-minded men who still use the age-old divide-and-conquer method to maintain their power.

Vacation Interlude in Turkey

Leaving Fethiye bay…

Freelancers and the self-employed seldom go on real vacations. Especially since the advent of instant and frenetic communication, which keeps us in line better than one of Calvin’s egregious ordonnances.  But….

… when I do choose to step out of the daily grind, it’s usually to go someplace where the electronic cookie monster is less active, or at least where the barriers to get online are higher or impossible to surmount. It’s a bit of a risk, of course, clients are impatient, but it’s only for short periods … This year, 2019, thanks to some friends and neighbors, we went on a seven-day boat trip exploring the Gulf of Fethiye on the southern corner of the country’s western coast, near to where the Mediterranean meets the Aegean.

 

Fethiye, a bustling town of about 80,000, is in fact a vacation destination in Turkey, which explains why the plane from Istanbul, a massive 777, was packed to the gills. It landed in Dalaman, after which we took a bus to Fethiye to spend one night in a pleasant hotel by the sea. The next day, we met up with our friends from Geneva, a Turco-Swiss family, and headed to the pier, where the Seahorse awaited, fueled and stocked up with food and water, of course.  The boat is a gulet, a traditional two-master, whose sails, I later found out, are not really used anymore, unless there is an emergency. The boats were used for carrying freight and are therefore quite large and tend to roll easily.

The Seahorse, 100-foot “gulet”

By midday on the 3rd ,  the seven expected families were now all on board, the bags were stashed in the cabins (each with a small bathroom), which were fairly hot and musty. No surprise, since the temperature outside was about 37 °C. They would be air-conditioned twice or three times a day to avoid wasting generator fuel, I guess. As it turned out, hardly anyone slept in the cabins anyway, since the weather was dry throughout…. The teenagers on board rapidly occupied the sea of mattresses over the wheelhouse, which gave a spectacular view of the night skies. Others found space over the cabin section under a canvas an acre in size that kept all protected from the imperious sun. I staked a claim on the generous divan aft, which gave a glimpse of the sky and left enough space for my legs…

In addition to the twenty-one passengers, there were six crew members. The captain and owner of the ship is Mehmet Avcu, a wiry fellow with a deep knowledge and love of the sea and the local history.  A 20-plus year stint with the Turkish Navy left him with a slightly commandeering tone, but whenever we had a question about strange creatures or local lore, we could just pick his brain. He was the boss on board, as tradition has it, and his word was gospel. He not only steered the ship to the right places and kept operations running smoothly, but also turned into a veritable encyclopedia of information about marine life and local history. Spotting that some of us were also interested in the region, he didn’t hesitate to take us on tours onto the land. One day it was an island with a few Byzantine ruins and a few of goats, another time it was to visit a farming settlement on a spit of land sparsely covered with olive trees, Turkish pines, carob trees… .

Kizil Island in the Gulf
Sea and sky in the early morning

We set off. The sea was slightly choppy for the first hour or so, giving all a chance to test their seaworthiness. We soon found a quiet space at the foot of a craggy mountain – all mountains are craggy here – in a pleasant cove, where lunch was served on the deck aft: plates of different salads and vegetables, broccoli in a lemony sauce, a dish of charred eggplant, rice pilaf, a mixed salad, and purslane simply dressed with yogurt (a ubiquitous sauce in Turkish cuisine, it is a little richer than many yogurts available in Europe). The salt and pepper on the table was augmented by a jar of pul biber, crushed red peppers, and a bottle of nar ekşisi, a sticky, sour, fruity balsamico made of pomegranates.

As for activities, well…. swimming, snorkeling, and, for a surcharge, diving with aqualungs. The younger ones quickly discovered the thrill of flying off the taffrail, while the adults usually used the starboard ladder to get down to the sea, which was, as usual, blue and clear, and very warm. Two of the teenagers opted for genuine diving. I chose to snorkel with my 15-year-old daughter, who received her real salt-water baptism in these glorious waters.

A few hours after lunch, we raised the anchor and moved off to another cove for dinner (always around 8 pm) and to spend the night. A few more dives into the dark and inviting waters closed off that first day. Quickly, almost surreptitiously, all made their respective beds and went to sleep. The sea was mirror calm, but with a gentle swell that rocked boat from side to side. It was like being in a cradle again. Other boats could be seen (as every night thereafter) in the night, their position lights vying for attention with the stars, those points of safety that have shepherded mariners across the Seven Seas for eons. At some point in the night, the cicadas went to sleep, apparently all at once.

This established the pattern of the next six days. Three opulent meals shared at the large table punctuated the flow of time. Breakfast with cheeses, jams, fruit, and eggs sometimes hard-boiled, sometimes scrambled or fried; lunch with an array of cold dishes, rice, stews; dinner which sometimes included charcoal-broiled fish or meat done on a curious grill hanging off the starboard rail near the bow. And always accompanied by the delicious Turkish breads also made freshly onboard. One night, after a few glasses of raki loosened the limbs and spirits, there was some singing (Turkish love songs, an old Viking song in Swedish, …) followed by dancing on the forever gently swaying deck.

Time on the Seahorse flowed quietly along, with endless hours chatting, staring out to sea, reading, playing cards or backgammon, and naturally swimming.  The use of goggles to swim made the activity far more interesting than the usual lengths in a pool. The rocky seabed made for particularly clear water, through which one could see small colonies of long-spine sea urchins and strange sea cucumbers resembling bits of rubber hose. We spotted a few small rays, otherwise  there were just schools of minnow-like  fish, who would scamper away when we came near them, glittering in the sun — though one passenger did try angling, without success — but did bring back garbage that others had decided to dump into the sea, plastic bags, empty cans, metal caps, and bits of rope.

The view from Gelimer Island

 

Karacaroen Island….

Every now and then we’d leave our floating home to rejoin the community of landlubbers. One time it was to the diminutive Karacaoren island to stagger through Byzantine ruins and untamed brush in 40-degree heat. The next expedition was to Gemiler Island to explore more Byzantine church ruins and watch the sun go down in a spectacular canvas of warm colors.  One fellow who allegedly walked these rocky, dusty, rugged slopes was none other than St. Nicholas of Myra, the gentleman who later became Santa Claus. While that does sound a little stretched, one does wonder how in earth people back in the 6th or 7th centuries built these fairly large structures, or the spectacular covered staircase that leads up to the highest church?

It was not all Byzantine. Göbün, on the northwestern entrance of the gulf, features some Lycian graves that were up on a cliff side (unreachable in the burning sun) and the remains of a Roman bath now half submerged. The narrow  strip of land is inhabited by farmers in jerry-rigged dwellings. According to Mehmet, they are more or less squatting the land and arguing with the government for official rights to it.

On a more contemporary note: We also stopped at the port of Göcek, a favorite hub of yachtsmen apparently, whose presence spawned numerous chic shops and restaurants mostly with inflated prices. At the entrance of the bay, a long, stern-grey, ship-sized yacht, the 126-meter Flying Fox, allegedly belonging to Jeff Bezos. No one was quite sure. There was some buzz on board about that.

Göcek port

 

Tree-hugging, crafty style…

All in all, it was a beautiful trip. In retrospect, the coves and inlets, bays and beaches flow into one another in memory. The conversations were fun, sometimes rich. I scanned some of the books fellow passengers were reading and found one crew member reading a work by Tolstoy, the title was a question, so it may have been the essay “What Is Art?”. On the crew’s kitchen table lay a book on Latin America. Another was reading Bulgakov’s Master and Margerita.  In fact, I was told that Russian literature is popular in Turkey… By the time we returned to Fethiye on Friday, we had all made friends, created a WhatsApp group, and sworn contact with one another.  Stepping onto the hard pier was not all that easy. The sun, now untampered by the sea breeze, hammered down, and the speed of the small town For days, our blood had been rocked by the sea, and, as if by dint of resonance, our bodies continued to feel the motion for days.

Snapshot: my mother at work

In late 2017, I received an email from the “Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí” in Figueres with a special request: They needed biographical information on my mother, Karen Radkai, for a pending photography exhibition called “The Women who photographed Dalí” based on their collection. They also needed some photographic material.

The request serendipitously dovetailed with my slow, but painstaking work on a biography of my mother and father, both photographers of some note, especially around the mid-20th century. And so, I ultimately wrote the entry to the exhibition’s catalogue. It is not a “private view.” My copious notes and memories are for another time and a fuller publication.

“What doesn’t kill us, makes us harder…” The famous quote from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Gods, appropriately taglined “How to philosophize with a hammer,” rings in my ears when I think of my mother, Karen Radkai. She was not the easiest person to be around or to grow up with. She was, however, someone who left a mark, and lots of photographic material.

Karen Radkai photographed by Paul Radkai
Karen Radkai, 1949, with her trusty Rolleiflex (she also used Hasselblads), photographed by her husband, Paul Radkai.

Brash, brilliant, outspoken and highly opinionated, she could make enemies out of friends within minutes, but could also attract the loyalty of those who were willing to give her space, who recognized the person behind the lens, who saw and appreciated the very fine – and extremely myopic – eye she had. She was also ambitious, had endless energy resources, and a kind of resilience that could drive any normal person to distraction. A large part of the energy came from her passion for her work, as such. She had the great good fortune of living at a time when photography had reached a kind of creative apotheosis and was firmly in the hands and fingers of a small, busy, gifted elite of perceptive editors, publishers, and photographers, of course.

She was born in 1919, in Munich. She once told me that she had already started photographing as a child. It was a hobby she enjoyed, and somewhere amongst her papers, I do hope someday to find some of those old shots. Otherwise, among her earliest memories, was sleeping in a bathtub, because the inflation in the early 1920s in Germany had wiped out the family fortunes. Abandoned by her parents, who separated soon after her birth, she was sent to a convent, where, by her own account, she acquired the discipline that she maintained her entire life.

As a teenager, she left Nazi Germany for the USA, where her mother had moved to about eight years prior. She was working as a stylist in New York in the mid-1940s when she met a dashing Hungarian émigré, who was already a fairly well-established photographer, my father, Paul Radkai. He let her have his studio to work in and experiment – according to him. Her boundless energy and ambition bore fruit. Soon she became a protégé of the notorious Alexey Brodovich at Harper’s Bazaar.

Reared in a convent during the Weimar and early Nazi years made my mother a passionate liberal. She remembered teasing the guards at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich when on breaks in her native Munich.

She was twenty-nine when the magazine sent her on assignment to post-civil-war Greece to photograph Queen Frederica (herself a German granddaughter of Emperor Wilhelm II). While the pictures of that job are unavailable, I do own a stunning vignette from that journey that tells the entire story of my mother’s photographs and perhaps reveals the artistry of photography itself: She found the subject somewhere in the war-ravaged country. A man stands. He is looking down at an elderly woman shining one of his shoes. She is almost prostrate. The man towers over her. My mother, I realize looking at the image, did not actually seize that image. She saw it coming and caught the millisecond of the man’s contemptuous look. It also summed up a deep-seated feeling she had about how men treated women.

Her career was a steep upward curb for many years, despite personal setbacks and a marriage that went south for too many complicated reasons to enumerate. She had in all four children, but her true companion was her work, and that made her a favorite of many VIPs, particularly from the world of film and music. The childhood of my sisters and me was populated by some remarkable people and filled with special memories.

Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in a shot for Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, by Karen Radkai in our apartment in Paris.

Because she rubbed elbows with so many big names in the creative world – may I confess that I played chess with Man Ray some time around 1969? – my mother was rarely in awe of prominent personalities. Her approach to work was quite Germanic: You come, you do it, and when it’s finished, you pack up and left. I would say, this kept her quite objective when photographing, an important point, since she would not let her personal taste get in the way.

At some time in the 1960s, she and Paul, my father, bought a house in Cadaqués, the one behind the church up on the hill. It was a funny idea, a bit spontaneous, as I recall (she was like that: after selling that house, she bought an apartment in a small Austrian village from the billboard announcing the house was being built). The village was full of jet-setters and wannabes, rich people living a life akin to that of the rois faineants, odd-balls, social drop-outs, artists real and fraudulent, and Dali, of course, who used to stride into the Bar Meliton twiddling his mustache – I remember him, because, as a boy, I would play chess there. He’d arrive a little like an archbishop expecting his rig to be kissed by the faithful. I’ll be honest: My mother though him a little pretentious, and being a classic liberal, disagreed seriously with his approval of Franco. 

Meliton, a Dali haunt in Cadaquès

 

Salvador Dalì at the Bal de Bestegui, Venice 1951, photographed by Karen Radkai

But when she was sent to photograph him, she packed her equipment, took her trusty assistant, Vaughn Murmurian, and did the job, and did it well. Her first encounter with Dalì, however, was in 1951 at the famous Bal de Bestegui in Venice, which she and my father, Paul Radkai, attended as photo-reporters. She told me once that Dalí made a few coarse remarks about some of the activities he performed in one of his rooms. On that end, nothing could shock my mother. Especially coming from a man. I asked what she replied…. it was a comment about his age.

My mother also did a lot of advertising, but the photo-reportage was her favorite kind of work. And she was not only an assignment person. She had an unerring eye for what was photogenic, what would fit in a good magazine and so, over the years, she collaborated with many outstanding magazines, notably World of Interiors, a British Vogue publication, which at the time was brilliantly edited by Min Hogg.

As a son, as a freelancer like her, but with not nearly the talent, I find it difficult to separate the private and the professional. For years now, I have been working on gathering information for a kind of biography, not a list of jobs, not a curriculum vitae, but a personal one.  So I’d like to close with a small anecdote.

 

My mother and I did one job together. It was for House & Garden. The subject was the 18th-century Schloss Fasanerie near the archbishopric of Fulda in Hessen, Germany. She landed in Munich and, in spite of a generous expense account, picked up a small car. We drove the 400 kilometers to Fulda and set up shop in a B&B. No fancy hotels. We spent one day essentially walking around the palace, which was owned by Prince Moritz von Hessen, whom she admired for his ability to work and run businesses rather than jetset away the family fortune.

The Imperial Staircase at the Fasanerie (Fulda, Germany)

The next day, she photographed systematically, while I took note of the furnishings in each room, worried details, picked up the history of the castle and the family (with a long pedigree and some tragic events, especially in the 20th century).

A third day’s work was needed. Everything went very smoothly. But there was one little incident that, again, was typical: Throughout the three days, the house- and groundskeeper had stuck with us like fly-paper, opening doors and moving objects around. I tried to keep him out of my mother’s way, because I sensed he was getting on her nerves (as an amateur photographer, he’d keep making comments about photography, which she hated because, as the Germans would say, Dienst ist Dienst, Schnapps ist Schnapps). At one point, my mother asked if we could put some flowers in a vase, because otherwise everything looked too museum-like. The man said casually that vases in the 18th century then were not for flowers, but rather for decoration. And maybe she could photograph it another way… I did my best to distract, to change the subject, to interfere, because I could see my mother’s lips tightening, a slight pallor form along her nose. I knew that behind those sunglasses she always wore, her eyes were sending out 88mm flak shells. She hated anyone interfering with her work. And the gentleman was then subjected to a tongue-lashing that I can only sum up with “You do your work, and I’ll do mine.”

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Thorny delight

A look at a specialty on Geneva’s Yuletide tables.

One cannot help but think that if the Latin influence were not so strong in Geneva, Christmas might not be such a jolly affair in the city. Indeed, when dour and sour Calvin turned the place into a theocracy from about 1541 onward, with his rigid laws and set punishments running all the way to death by burning or drowning, he set a course still felt to this day. Among other things, he made fun and games anathema, and so Genevans had had to find ways to make merry without irritating already naturally irritable ghosts and deities. And his staunch hatred of bling meant that the local jewelers had to find a new way to practice their art: clock-making… But that is not the subject of this post…

From right to left, W. Farel (l.), Jean Calvin (m.), Theo. de Bèze (r.)… The reformers: “Don’t be happy, worry!”

Calvin prohibited anything and everything that could be remotely fun. Carnival is not celebrated in Geneva, for example. Calvin even went as far as prohibiting Christmas as a feast of idolatry and for a few hundred years after, the Genevans did not celebrate the Birth of Christ, Prince of Peace…Tell that to the wind machines ranting on about the fake “War-On-Christmas. What the city does have is the somewhat extreme and boisterous annual celebration called “Escalade,” the commemoration of a skirmish between the (Catholic) troops of the Duke of Savoy and the (Protestant) Genevans came right before Christmas 1602 on the Gregorian calendar. It comes along with fancy dress parties and general rejoicing and chocolate cauldron consumption. I have described this otherwise insignificant event outside Geneva in an earlier post.

All this to say: the influence of Calvin is still felt in Geneva. Ultimately, however, the Genevans did goback to celebrating Christmas. The city gears up in November already with wonderful lighting arrangements in the leafless trees, and shopping becomes more frenetic. But on Christmas Eve or Day, on the festive tables, amidst the smoked salmon, foix gras, oysters, calorie-laden bûches (the French pastry Yule log) and various wines, you’ll find a delicacy whose rewards, like Calvinistic grace, are only revealed and delivered after a long and arduous journey.

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Cardoons prior to preparation

The item in question is the cardon, in English cardoon, in Latin Cynara cardunculus, a thistle-like plant related to the artichoke found occasionally in the wild in Mediterranean regions and elsewhere.

Cardoon character
At first glance, it looks like some irksome and resilient weed requiring immediate annihilation. So, as with the olive and several other labor-intensive foods, one must marvel at the first people who figured out that the cardoon is edible and that it has a wonderful artichoke-like flavor with just a hint of bitterness and a fine texture.

It also has history. The Mediterranean people already cultivated it in antiquity. According to lore, it was Protestants from the south of France who brought it to Geneva following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 that deprived France’s Huguenots of their religious and civil rights. These families settled in the so-called Plaine de Palais (where the Bastions and National Theater is today) and continued cultivating their cardon, refining over the centuries to make it – guess what – even more thorny (épineux). Today, the “Cardon genevois épineux” is actually the only Swiss vegetable with a protected designation of origin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The slothful – Catholics, perhaps… no offense – will buy the vegetable already prepared, cut into short segments, and packed into large jars or in vacuum packed bags for up to CHF 15 the kilo. The self-respecting Genevan will purchase it fresh for about CHF 5 per kilo from one of the famed local market-gardeners (maraîchers) at any outdoor market.

The easy way to get cardons… buy it at the supermarket for about CHF 14,95…

You can’t miss it there: imagine a pale yellowish, oversized celery with a thick root. Occasionally they come stuffed in a plastic bag, not very ecological, but it will protect your hands from the thorns.

Taming the wild cardoon
From seed to table, the cardoon is all about the sweat on your brow.

A few years ago, Pierre Gallay, a gardener, explained the cultivation procedure to me. It’s sown in May and grows quickly in summer. In autumn, the leaves on each plant are folded up to promote natural bleaching. In November each cardon is then uprooted by hand along with some earth and put into cool cellars where it continues to grow and bleach out without risking frosts.

Geneva produces about 130 tons of cardons per year, according to the Association of Plainpalais Interests. These Genevan heritage enthusiasts also point out in traditional Calvinist style, that with its fibers and low calories, it is the perfect counterpart to the prandial “abuses” of year’s end.

To prepare it, shave off the thorny edges. Then peal the stalks as you would rhubarb or celery, pulling off the stringy ridges and skin. Cut up into inch-size pieces and tenderise overnight in a milk-water mixture. Then boil in salty water (about 30 minutes) with a dash of milk. Dress with cream (yes, but double cream from Gruyère) and pepper, or use the liquid for a béchamel to cover the cardons, sprinkle with Parmesan or Gruyère and bake till the cheese is a little crispy. You are now a step closer to being Genevan.

 

 

 

Geneva by night

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Angels in Geneva

This story is entirely true because I imagined it from beginning to end. Boris Vian (1920–1959) Preamble to L’écume des jours (Froth On The Days)

We all seek a measure of security in a connected, networked world, where corporate identity ensures global monoculturalism at all levels and offers the comfort of  familiar space. We can travel the planet without ever really seeing it, enjoy the exact same coffee in Singapore as in New York or Warsaw, buy the same clothes in shops that all look the same, hear the same shallow music with me-me-me lyrics, and even taste the same foods. Our hyper-technology tends to reinforce the uniformity around the globe, creating more safe space, removing all sting and thrill out of the adventure of life. Everything can be seen. And paradoxically, in the flood of images being traded across the globe every second of the day, it’s our imagination that suffers.Angels-05

Throughout their lives, puppeteers Tina and Michel Perret-Gentil chose to sally forth into the great unknown without fear of being disconnected. Their particular art of telling stories through their puppets engages the imagination far more than any movie or series of pictures on Instagram or Flickr. Their life and craft dispense metaphors that trigger chains of thoughts and eureka moments and genuinely slake our minds’ thirst for exploration of mystery and for more journeying.

Here’s the story of two very special people living a different life in Geneva.

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Tina —- life on a string.

When Tina was 19, she packed up her bags, took the seeds of her life’s experience from a childhood and youth in the stark, majestic mountains of the Canton of Grisons in eastern Switzerland, and went down into the lowlands to plant them and see what might grow. The year was 1967; in the western world, a new generation of humans was taking its first hesitant steps away from the social and political straitjacket of a more conservative past. Change was in the air, and it was to break into full-fledged rebellion a year later in Paris and other European capitals. Geneva was not yet the pressure-cooker-like, global maelstrom of finance, oil, real-estate speculation and tarnished money it is today, but the presence of the UN and other international organizations already gave it a distinct stamp, a whiff of distant shores, of exoticism that contrasted with the in the quintessential Calvinist petit bourgeoisie of the city. It was a mix lacking elsewhere in the Alpine Republic.

Tina, née Marianna Katharina Casanova, who had learned French and done some secretarial training, had no ambitious plans for life. She just wanted to work at the post office and get a feel for life in a biggish city. “My aunts and my mother had worked at the post office in Obersachsen (her native village), and as a child I would help them deliver telegrams or express mail for pocket money,” she recalls. “I did that for a few months in Geneva but I realized I did not want to be behind a counter all day, I wanted to get out and deliver the mail, and be with the people.” And so her first seedlings withered quickly under the fluorescent assault of reality.

As time passed, however, she came to realize that the post-office job in itself was just a symbol for the determination and self-confidence bequeathed to her from her mother and aunts well before Swiss women even got the right to vote. The Grisons, that large mountainous Canton in Eastern Switzerland with its stark peaks, eight months of snow, where people still speak a derivative of Latin, Rumantsch, boasted particularly traditional values. “They were different from other women,” she says of those powerful women in her life, “they wore more jewels, they wore trousers, they were the first women to ski up there, they all made music, and I got a diatonic accordion for my ninth birthday,” she points out, a touch wistfully. “I had a wonderful childhood up in the mountains, close to nature.”Angels-07

When I visited Tina the first time to write this article, she was still close to nature. Her home, surrounded by greenery, is unique in and for Geneva, a city plagued by an extreme dearth of lodgings and where rents are astronomical. Almost forty years ago, she and her husband Michel slipped quietly into the nomadic lifestyle of rolling homes “It was not a conscious decision, it just happened,” she says, “but I couldn’t live in a house anymore today. Those poor Romas whom the government was always trying to force into homes, they must have gone crazy.”

They had four trailers, long, dark wooden structures that her life-long companion Michel Perret-Gentil had carefully and skillfully revamped, adding windows, insulation, wood paneling, and the occasional decorative touch. One was for sleeping, one for the office and atelier, there was one for each of their two children, who are now grown up and have children of their own. Her son Jan lived in Uganda for a while, where his wife worked for an NGO. Daughter Anna is in Geneva. For guests or other meetings, Michel put up a large yurt, the tent-like structure of wooden slats covered with felt used mainly in Mongolia.

At the time of the first interview, these homes were located in a garden lot in the Cherpines area of the city, which until May of 2011 had been zoned for agriculture. The two functional homes were placed so the doors face each other. Between the two was a simple picnic table covered in wax cloth and shielded from the rain by a canvas. Often, on warm days and nights, they sit together or with any of their innumerable friends and chat, dream and discuss projects. They are as gentle with the environment as possible, always using biodegradable soaps. The waste from the toilet is compost.

Puppets from Rajasthan live and entertain in Geneva
Puppets from Rajasthan live and entertain in Geneva

In their five years’ residence at the Cherpines, they had planted a wild garden with roses, some vegetables and herbs, dug a small pond, and even planted a willow, using offshoots from a tree at their previous residence. “Everyday I look at the flowers in the garden, I feel they are inhabited each by their own spirit, and that gives me strength as well and confidence.” These two words return in our conversations over and over again. Strength, confidence.

During our interview, we sat in the kitchen, essentially a wide corridor with a gas stove and an old wood cooking stove used on colder days. The walls are covered in mementoes, pictures, notes, drawings, post-its, the eclectic ephemera of a life on the road and with children. A shelf carries a crowd of strange objects, statuettes and, incongruously, an old shoe. The sheer immediacy of the outdoor takes away any feeling of being inside. It’s spring, and a host of sparrows, blue tits and blackbirds are carrying on a lively conversation. The west wind that brought a light rain is also shaking drops off the trees onto the roof above us and making the nearby highway more audible than usual. The cats come in and out of the open door. The air is rich with spices, herbal teas and espresso and a hint of patchouli, an aromatic anchor in Tina and Michel’s lives.

We sit opposite each other. Her eyes are dark aquamarine, almost grey. They take in everything without hunger, as if they could hear. She speaks in clear, emphatic tone, her French has the slight singsong of her native Swiss German, and every move of her long thin arms shakes a parade of bangles. She modulates her voice down to whisper sometimes, or stretches out a syllable beyond its shelf life.

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A touch of theater is an occupational hazard: For nearly 38 years, Tina and Michel have been puppeteers, telling stories, singing, accompanying their little wooden actors with all manner of sounds and instruments. As such, they have become an integral part of the cultural scene in Geneva, appearing wherever there is some manifestation or celebration of the stage arts or children to entertain. They also launched a late spring festival called “Dust of the world” (Poussière du Monde), homage to nomadic culture featuring song recitals from the Maghreb or Colombia, or evenings of fairytales. It all takes place in a in the Parc Bernasconi in Geneva. The theater itself is in fact two magnificent concatenated Mongolian yurts, whose cloth walls are supported by slats intricately decorated with arabesques.

It is there, on a Sunday afternoon, that I picked up one of their shows. This one featured their kathputli puppets – a special type of string puppet originating in Rajasthan – enact vignettes from life and legend presented to the scratchy recordings of folk music taken from old 45s. The program opens with two puppet musicians playing… and very quickly you forget the intricate, perfectly timed pas-de-deux of the two puppeteers operating behind a simple anthracite backdrop. Among the more virtuosic scenes is an acrobatic horseman holding a torch on his galloping steed, a little scene featuring a woman who suddenly turns into a man, much to the disappointment of an eager suitor, and our horsemen joisting. It is a far cry from the flash-bang, often violent drama with which the entertainment industry usually tries to hypnotize spectators. But rows of children up front, some surely hardened Wii, Gameboy and TV users, are wide-eyed in fascination, so much so that they begin moving forward and at some point have to be guided back to their place.Angels-02

Puppeteering is a form of expression in metaphors. The tales always have some didactic or moral goal, or they are reflections of life itself and its sometimes absurd realities. Therein lies the fascination: Like court jesters, the puppeteers can reveal disguised truths for the audience. And after a while, the puppets themselves come alive, a little like Pinocchio, only less schoolmarmish: “The most extraordinary exchange occurs between them and us,” Michel once wrote. “We give them life, and in return they give us the possibility of living. Some are thirty years old. They don’t age. They wait discreetly, always ready for our hands to seize them. The wait is never very long, and when our hands take them it’s not just our hands doing the work, but our hearts are present as well.” By his own admission their creations avoid caricatures, sentimentality, irony and the spectacular, leaving “receptivity and imagination” in Michael’s words.

He is not just venting theory. The puppets are what sparked the couple’s unusual, nomadic lifestyle. They became “the means of transportation for a journey without a goal… Like the horizon, the goal is always escaping me,” he wrote.Angels-09

That journey began in the early 70s. After the post-office debacle, Tina learned to type and found work at a bank. It was then that she met Michel, a young man with curly hair, opaline-blue eyes, and the wild creative vein of an extramural philosopher. He liked his job washing windows. It gave him time to cultivate and expand his tangled web of thoughts while peering into opulent shops, thoughts that got him thrown out of the military within a week of passing muster. “He was filed as ‘socially not adapted’” Tina says with a broad laugh. “You should have seen his demeanor, plus he had a bunch of psychological reports. But we did have to pay a military tax after that.”

Inspired by friends who had visited India, they put money aside and, in 1971, bought a VW bus and drove to India by road. “It was a magnificent journey,” Tina recalls. There were adventures – such as people shaking their car at night – as they wended their way through the Balkans, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The beauty of discovering the world remains, tinged with the occasional thrill. “Afghanistan was simply marvelous, the people were hospitable, friendly,” she recalls. “Michel and I used to say that no one talked about the country because it was in peace, and look what happened, the Russians, oil, money.” They even stayed with smugglers near the Khyber Pass — “Guns, ammunition and Camel cigarettes! All over the place!” — who offered them an evening of music, dinner, and a night in silk sheets.Angels-05

They spent nearly a year in India and Nepal discovering a brand new culture. When it came time to return, however, war between India and Pakistan had broken out, so they abandoned their car and flew home with the help of wired funds.

Back in Switzerland, life continued, but their paradigm had shifted. One day they went to see a puppet play directed by a fellow named Michel Politti. It was a classic coup de foudre, love at first sight, when all the disparate parts of life seem to gell into a full-blown affirmation, a single, vibrant “yes!” They wanted to return to India anyway, so Angels-10through the Indian Tourist Board they found a center to learn how to make and activate the kathputli puppets of Rajasthan, one of the oldest forms of the art. They gave up their jobs and hit the road again, this time in a small, two-cylinder Ami 6 Citroen station wagon customized for camping. There followed six months of toil, learning to carve, sew and string up the kathputli, and create small, eye-twinkling, moving tales to entertain people.

Their return to Europe was not auspicious. The car’s engine froze up in Belgrade and they had to leave a large case filled with their freshly made puppets behind to take the train. Nevertheless, back in Geneva, at a little house rented from the city near the airport, they began rebuilding their stock. “We practiced a lot, and a woman saw us and asked if we would like play at the annual meeting of the Swiss puppeteers,” she recalls. “And would you believe it? Suddenly everyone wanted us. People would ask us how much money we wanted, we had no idea.”

The tours began. First to France, then Germany, later to Eastern Europe and England. Soon, they were able to live from puppeteering and decided to buy a big 1947 Saurer bus to save themselves the cost of hotels. Ironically, the vehicle had originally been used by the post office to transport people as well as mail. They travelled about 12,000 miles a year. When the children came (born in 1976 and 1980 respectively) the trips became shorter, or Michel’s mother had to step in as a baby-sitter. Their shows evolved and expanded as new puppets were created and new tales added. Michel had found his calling in the creation of a string of “circuses” with special puppets. In Pécs, Hungary, they won a prize for his “Cirque philosophique,” which combined music (Tina on accordion) and Latin texts. They performed at festivals and in schools, for Christmas and Easter.

Meanwhile, in 1982, the city of Geneva wanted their cheap little house back to turn it into lodgings for flight attendants. Tina and Michel decided to make a deal. Rather than accept alternative accommodation, they asked whether they could use some municipal land and put a second bus on it. The city let them use a plot in the Malagnou section. Soon, real-estate developers started ogling that plot, so they moved to a new place lent by friends, and then when the developers reappeared again, like locusts in neckties, these urban nomads moved again. And again… Each time they came to a new spot, they cleared the grounds, planted gardens, created a paradisiacal human biotope. As the children grew, they added the rolling homes, long, simple structures that had been abandoned by workers or other similar nomads.Angels-06

Like many gentler flowers, the Cherpines location was long coveted by predators as easy prey. On May 15, 2011, after an acrimonious campaign, the people of Geneva voted to have this  rural section of Geneva rezoned for building. It may have been necessary, since the city’s growth needed to be accommodated. Overnight, the price of land exploded and the speculators moved in with deals that were tough to refuse. They offered local property-ownerss staggering sums for their plots. Tina had always maintained a friendly relationship with her landlord. She also kept the plot impeccable, beautifying it with a garden. At the time of the referendum, he was recovering from an operation. Tina visited him as to wish him well and was greeted by a vicious “When are you moving out?” Money talking.

It was time to pack again.

In the six years since the Cherpines were delivered to speculators, not a building has been built. Why should it? You can sit on fairly cheap land while the rest of the city squeezes into small and often dumpy apartments, and the price of the land will just go up. No investments needed, except for some taxes and a few good lawn mowers.  The misery of some, make the happiness of others, an old French saying goes. While Genevans waited for more apartments, Tina and Michel had to move. They found a place in the Lignon area. It is not as idyllic, but wherever Tina and Michel “drop anchor,” their space always radiates care, beauty, calm.

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January 2017. Outside it’s cold. The damp comes off the river Rhone nearby, it’s like the Erlkönig’s voice. We sit in the warmth generated by the wood stove and talk about the next puppet show. The city is cutting back on funding for artistic pursuits, maybe the deficits will come down, but while economic woes can be corrected, cultural poverty is a downward spiral that eats at the foundations of human society. There is some anger in her voice at the way the world is becoming increasingly polarized. She notes the neighborhood, young people who have chosen to live in their campers to save money, not necessarily idealists. They go to work like everyone else. Then there are the punks, who, she notes, are developing self-sufficiency and engaging in different crafts.

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And there is the ever-lengthening past she speaks of as if it was the present. That is the gift of nomads, and it is their essential melancholy. They carry their entire lives in their baggage, in their minds, in their souls, in their homes, tents, on the backs of their camels and horses, or in their old vehicles. Those of us who have moved around a great deal know the value of human beings, of other people and peoples. Our consumer society demands that we fill cellars and attics and try to be reconcile ourselves with an unpredictable future. The nomad collects and keeps mostly weightless stuff around, thoughts, dreams, philosophies, ideas, and sanctifies human to human contact.

Michel sits beside her in the kitchen. His clear blue eyes are opened wide by overarched eyebrows; his look is a mixture of admiration, love, gratitude and amazement. He seems at peace. Those who knew the old Michel speak of his great intellect and ready conversation, his fast mind and love of life. Three years earlier, while packing the stage after a Christmas play, a massive heart attack struck him down. He recovered, essentially, but death’s had struck and its claws raked a part of his mind, taking his treasure of thoughts, his memories and many puppet adventures away forever. Today, he handles the puppets literally by heart, which was always his way. He is a man of the heart, friendly, resolute, creative and a touch mysterious, without being obscure.

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Dangerous angels in Geneva fire the imagination (with thanks to Hugh Schofield for kind permission)

Wherever Tina and Michel go, they are approached by acquaintances, friends, admirers. It’s more than just the attraction of the theater. It is the single-mindedness with which they lead their lives and their belief in the importance of the human creative impulse and the power of the individual. Michel came up with a clever, double-edged name for them, “des anges heureux,” (happy angels), which is almost a homonym for “dangeureux” (dangerous).

After our first interview, still in the Cherpines, she took me back to my car back. On the way, she showed me the lovingly tended garden. She is a long, lithe woman, with stunning poise. Her hair is always pulled back in two thin braids that reach almost to her knees. At 62, she moves with the grace of a ballet dancer, be that while walking through the market shopping, receiving gifts, or giving life to the puppets. And the rhythmic sound of a tabla, or djembe, a tombak or any other live percussion will set off a languorous swaying dance like that of a field of wheat caressed by a breeze. The beauty of her being radiates from an inextinguishable inner fire. At night a lighted candle always flickers near their home, “to signal that we are here, we are still burning,” she smiles. As I drove away in the luke-warm spring drizzle, I could see their home in the rear-view mirror and another quote of hers echoed in my ears:

“We are on wheels. When we go, we will leave no traces.”

The Geneva run

L’Escalade: the run of your life

In a confederate system as diverse as Switzerland, it is hardly surprising to find that Cantons and cities occasionally engage in very local celebrations that no one else has ever heard of. There is the Chalandamarz and the Pschuuri in the Grisons, or the Bloch at Mardi Gras in Appenzell. Not to be outdone (especially by its Germanic co-confederates) , Geneva has the “Escalade,” The Climb, which has evolved into one of the main participatory spectacles in town.

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Geneva is Geneva, of course, and stringent logic often seems absent from the organisation of local urban life, so the climb actually involves horizontal rather than upward mobility. Much of the event consists of people running, Marathon-like, through the city on the first Saturday in December or, if Saturday falls on the 11th, then on the second Saturday. In 2014, it was on Saturday December 6. The date, like the hare-brained configuration of the city’s public transportation, needs some clarification.

The event that spawned The Climb took place on a wintry night of 11-12 December 1602, the longest night of the year, since Genevans still used the old Julian calendar at the time. Duke Charles-Emmanuel I of Savoy had coveted the Calvinist city north of the Alps, and was hoping to force it back into the Catholic fold for religious, strategic and economic reasons. On that fateful night, a band of mercenaries managed to scale (escalader) the walls at around 2 a.m. When two sentinels ran into them, all hell broke loose. Reports say that civilians joined in, throwing heavy stuff out of windows, tables, chairs, barrels, stones, and real weapons like halberds.

The Genevans got the better of the attackers. They lost 18 men in the skirmish, 54 of the attackers were killed, 13 taken prisoner, tortured and executed. Ultimately Charles-Emmanuel signed a treaty with the city and peace was restored once and for all at the Treaty of St. Julien (a town just beyond the border in France).

Memories are made of this

A year later, the whole battle and its political setting were set to music to an epic ballad in 68 strophes in Provencal dialect, Cé qu’è lainô. The event was also immortalized in a poem, Genève delivrée, by Samuel Chappuzeau. In 1926, an association called Compagnie de 1602 started a parade to celebrate the victory. Participants come in gaudy period costumes; there are drummers, fife-players, weapons-bearers, a hangman and other period figures. Today, the parade, which is held on Sunday after the races, ends at the door of the Cathedral St. Pierre in the old town with speeches exalting the Republic, freedom, and so on.

The Escalade races were started in 1978. They now last almost all day, with participants broken down into different categories running set courses in a staggered schedule. Ages range from the “Poussins” and “Poussines” (literally chicks, boys and girls born in 2005-6) to Hommes VI or Femmes VI, men and women born before 1942. The length of the run goes from 1.8 km for the youngest runners, to 7.2 km for the older ones. This year drew 32,150 participants. All races begin and end in the Parc des Bastions right under the walls of the old town.The ladies' run

Walking and Nordic Walking have also been introduced for more comfortable sportspeople 10 years of age and above. The 8-km course begins in Veyrier and ends in the Parc des Bastion. The final race is the Course du Duc (the Duke’s Course) and is the toughest, naturally, since the Duke lost the battle: 17.5 km.

There are fees for the runners, and those running the longer itineraries will have to get medical certificates. For more details, please visit www.escalade.ch. The money paid goes to maintaining the costumes and organizing the events.

Marmite74 The final race on Saturday is simply called “Marmite”, or Cauldron and comes in two categories, youth and adult. The runners complete their nearly 3.5-km itinerary in crazy garb. There are no real winners here, but whoever comes first in this fantastical dash, will have their name and pictures published in the local paper, the Tribune de Genève (along with the serious runners).

What’s in a cauldron?

The chaudron is ubiquitous in Escalade season. Throughout the festivities, spectators and participants are regaled with vegetable soup cooked in great cauldrons sometimes on an open fire. It’s a very pleasant and fortifying dish in the damp and frigid days of early December. Escalade parties are held during this time to which children come disguised and singing a ditty that gives a blow-by-blow account of the “battle”. They will occasionally do something resembling trick-or-treating, i.e., knock on people’s door, sing that very same ditty, an request candy or coin. On one evening, children, parents and staff are invited to contribute vegetables to a big cauldron of soup, which is enjoyed usually with bread and some sweets.

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Eat your (marzipan) vegetables for the sake of the Republic

And for a few weeks prior to the Escalade, pastry shops, confectioners and supermarkets sell chocolate cauldrons decorated with the coat-of-arms of the city and filled with marzipan vegetables. The way to eat them is to break the cauldron with a stick or a knife while hollering valiantly: “Ainsi périssent les ennemis de la république!” (”Thus perish the enemies of the Republic!”)

Those raised on Asterix may get the wrong idea. The brave and independent Genevans did not beat back the Savoyards intruders by dint of a magic vegetable soup. Somewhere on the line a story emerged from the mists of history, that one Mère Royaume, living near the city gates was in her kitchen cooking a cauldron of vegetable and rice soup. Hearing the enemy in the streets, she carried the heavy pot to the window and heaved it onto the hapless invaders.

Mère Royaume was a real person. She was Catherine Cheynel, born in Lyon. She and her second husband, a maker of tin pots, were Protestants and escaped to Geneva soon after the massacre of St. Bartholomew (August 1572). By 1602, she was 60 years of age and had given birth to 14 children, few of whom had survived. The idea of her dumping hot soup on an enemy apparently comes from Verse 29 of the epic Cé qu’è lainô mentioned above. But history has many such modest heroes, like the women of Eger in Hungary who threw boiling fat on the attacking Turks.

Let them eat soup

As a journalist, I must wonder: What was she doing cooking vegetables soup at 2 a.m.? And would she, as a Protestant Genevan, waste food that way? Really? It is difficult to imagine. I suspect that on waking and hearing the ruckus, she grabbed the first thing at hand … under, or close to, her bed and hurled that out the window. So whosoever came up with the marmite idea has done us all a great service in Geneva. Imagine thousands of Genevans screaming: “Ainsi périssent les ennemies de la République!” while standing around steaming chamber pots.

Real or not, it’s a nice story, and it gets everyone out and about eating healthy soups. In an interview with Le Temps in 2009,  Catherine Santschi, state archivist pointed out a more reasonable explanation for the victory, one that has repercussions to this day: “It wasn’t Mère Royaume and her cauldron of soup that protected Geneva, but rather the fact that the citizens kept their weapons at home. They woke up in the middle of the night and were able to fight right away. If they had had to go to the arsenal first, the battle would have ended differently.”

Whatever the history, Geneva loves its Escalade, and for good reason. It’s a heart-warming, belly-filling feast, with so many parties, no one has to have a bad conscience for having fun. People from all walks of life have a chance to rub elbows in a congenial atmosphere. In some ways, too, it celebrates the victory over Catholicism in what was then a strictly Protestant-Calvinistic city. Paradoxically, it now serves to conveniently condense and celebrate Carnival, St. Nicholas and other religious/profane festivities that Calvin and his dour and sour successors had wiped off the calendar.

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Memories from another world

Part I: East Germany

(The Iron Curtain held the world hostage on both sides of the infamous border for decades. For the Germans, the hostage situation was a little different because entire families were divided — as are Korean families, I understand. Many Westerners also experienced the East Bloc and were horrified or fascinated or both. My own experiences were mostly in East Germany and Hungary in the late 80s. The following is a series of memories and comments on the situation back through my own eyes both as a journalist and as a plain citizen visiting my then wife’s family. It is important to be detailed and clear, because this is my tiny contribution to the subject I once studied: History. My only tiny feeling of personal pride was having seen early on that the curtain would break open soon (after my first trip in ’86) and that the break would come in Hungary. No editor at the time was interested, the comment was “too speculative.” One East German colleague I met in Budapest thought I was nuts. I was happy to publish one little piece in the Boston Globe, finally, on November 9, 2009.

I will publish this in several installments and at some time in the future will add some photographs from my own collection (it is in storage far away), so please feel free to check back or subscribe.

Final crossings

On November 13, 1989, I entered East Germany illegally and in full knowledge of what I was doing. It happened on the Glienicker Brücke that connected East and West Berlin over the Havel river. This pretty little cantilever bridge was a neural spot between the then moribund East Bloc and the preening Western Democracies, an almost legendary construction that had been used for spy exchanges between East and West. It was a crisp, cold day, almost blinding. My visa for the German Democratic Republic, GDR, had just been stamped out by a curt border guard who had informed me that in order to return, I needed a new visa. “But I left my belongings in the hotel in Potsdam,” I stated politely. “Well, you’ll have to get a new visa,” he said with finality, punctuating a visible disinterest in an American citizen by turning to the next fellow in a fairly long line of people wanting to cross the bridge.

Glienickerbrücke-Source unknown

I set off as in a daze, my mind crunching the possibilities available to me to get my belongings back and, above all, to complete my job, which was perfectly unpolitical: I was writing an article on the particular baroque style of Frederic the Great of Prussia, whose palaces at that point in time stood on either side of the Wall: Sanssouci in Potsdam, Charlottenburg in West Berlin, with a number of other architectural testaments spread liberally around the area. My mother, Karen Radkai, was doing the photography. It was one of the few times we worked together — alas, for she was a terrific person to work with — and we were freelancing. House & Garden, where she published often, had registered interest in purchasing the article.

A lot has been forgotten over the past decades, a lot has been buried under the more egregious or absurd aspects of the East Bloc in general and East Germany in particular, the Orwellian control mechanisms in place, the prisons, the shoddy manufacturing (not all of it), the inefficient economy, the drab housing. In addition to all the spying, including preposterous attempts to gather people’s odors, the system had generated a few very pedestrian inconveniences. For one, if you wanted a visa as a westerner, for instance, you had to apply at least a month ahead of time and you had to know exactly where you were going to go and when, since the authorities, obsessed as they were with control, did not really take to spontaneous travel. Secondly, to phone the GDR from the West, you needed a healthy dialing finger, plus about a day’s worth of time. A special operator would register your call early in the morning and then connect you at some time during the day, it could be three, eight, or ten hours later. You just waited and waved away any other incoming calls (this was before all the sexy communication systems we have today).

That is the information that shot through my mind as I sauntered towards West Berlin on the Glienicker Bridge. That, and my rather innocent mother and her assistant wandering around Potsdam enjoying the somewhat dreary sights. Even though I had warned her this might happen, as a native German from the unified country, she simply could not conceive that there was this long, spooky, insurmountable wall cutting Germany and the world in two. So I did something inconceivable: I stopped before reaching the West Berlin side of the bridge, turned around and started walking back, trying to look as casual as a 6’3” man with a mop of unruly blond hair and wearing a trench coat (finest spy garb…) might be able to. A pebble on the beach and all that. There was not that much traffic, and what there was, was coming toward me from the east. In my peripheral vision, I caught the border guard dealing with someone’s papers, and I willed him to keep looking away from me at whatever he was doing. “I’m just a little grey mouse, as grey as the tar,” I mantraed to myself, heart beating like a loose wheel on a roller coaster. … I passed under a small East German banner. And suddenly, like a baby out of the womb, I was reborn in the GDR. But without a visa.

As I mentioned above, I knew what I was doing. I had found out the day before that I only had a one-time visa, care of an East German misunderstanding. But in those heady days after the now famous announcement by Günther Schabowski, I could not believe it, even though the opening of the border was only one way at the time, from east to west – and West Berliners were still not permitted to cross the border. And secretly, I did want to beat that bizarre system just once. I guess everyone did at some point, some with more risk than others. My own risk would have probably been a few hours at the custom’s house or police station. Some people I knew risked more. And I hope to unveil some of their stories in the following narrative. They are not the prominent folk, people whose quotes are famous and repeated like gospel. They are just everyday people with their struggles and tribulations. East Germany Part II continues…

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