Avuncular American

Citizen's Arrest!

Today I longed for the America of Mayberry NC, that imaginary Sixties town where even as dumb a citizen as Gomer Pyle could shout "Citizen's Arrest!" at law breakers and hope that justice would be served.  Even though the Andy Griffith Show is long over, apparently the notion of citizens reporting traffic violations continues in Rockville, Maryland, a Washington D.C. suburb where we once lived.   There, citizens - hopefully public-spirited and not mean-spirited - can W.R.I.T.E. (Witness Report in Traffic Enforcement) their local police, filling out an online form, which covers everything from excessive speed to reckless driving.

Reckless driving - I guess that's what you might call my encounter this morning while walking back home from the bakery.  On a busy two-lane Brussels street, I chose my crossing point judiciously.  A "zebra" crossing, where, in Belgium, the simple placement of a foot from sidewalk to pavement is supposed to result in traffic coming to a halt to let the pedestrian cross.  In this case, it was even better: a city bus had stopped to pick up passengers immediately before the crosswalk.  I needn't even look left - the bus was in that lane - and the car in the other lane was slowing down.

But skeptic that I am, I did look left, and lo and behold, a big black 4 X 4 with two testosterone-laden young men out to prove that they can pass a stopped bus - a violation - and run down (almost) a pedestrian in a crosswalk - another violation - is bearing down on me.   Luckily, they weren't willfully homicidal, and they did stop at the sight of a bespectacled fifty-something holding up his hands in what - a Gomer Pyle gesture?  I noted down the license plate, the place, the time, and proceeded to walk home.

Now, I realize that I am in the land of 7 parliaments, 3 geographic "regions" overlaid with 3 linguistic "communities," with 10 provinces and their governors and 589 communes with their bourgmestres, and that English common law and its notion of "citizen's arrest" carries no weight.  But I wasn't prepared for the answer to my phone call to the local police station.

"No, monsieur, only a policeman can report an infraction of the traffic code."  Oh, I see.  What if I had been run over?  How about the bus and tram drivers, who daily witness multiple "incivilities" that run the gamut from blocking their route to running red lights?  "No, only police can note violations."  As the lady said, just shoot me.

Napoleon and his Code did rule Belgium before it became Belgium, but even in France, the authorities appear to encourage local initiatives for road safety.  Not here: my police station call desk person wasn't even interested in knowing about a major intersection where just posting a cop would result in daily or hourly or minute-ly red light-running tickets.

Aren't they even interested in a little revenue generation?

In Memoriam

This year we are not making our usual pilgrimage to an American military cemetery for Memorial Day (the photo at left is from Flanders Field a couple of years ago).  But I did get to see the next best thing, the PBS documentary Hallowed Grounds, which shows again on PBS stations in the US next Monday May 31, the official Memorial Day holiday.  The film shows every American overseas cemetery, and provides context to the battles that led to the soldiers' final resting places.

Last weekend we were in Luxembourg, and if any country honors US war dead as much as their own, it is Luxembourg.  Its American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) cemetery outside the capital is home to General George Patton, buried with his troops, many of whom fell during the Battle of the Bulge.  Whether it's Luxembourg, France, Belgium or elsewhere, count on local citizens to adorn each American grave with the Stars and Stripes and their own national flag.

This particular Memorial Day comes at a time when Europe is remembering that 70 years ago, in May and June 1940, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France were reeling under the onslaught of the German blitzkrieg that ended the Phony War.  The Maginot Line, Dunkirk, and all that.

Today, another reminder of wars past and veterans present.  The highest French judicial body, the Cour Constitutionnelle, held that "colonial" veterans from places as far afield as Algeria, Morocco, and Senegal cannot be given second class status in terms of pensions.  Veterans groups hailed the move as a victory for equal treatment.

To the veterans, wherever they are from, and to the fallen, wherever they lie.

Medal of Honor

EuroCine27, on May 9th's Europe Day, presents a dilemma to the cinephile.  Which one(s) do you go see, with a film from each EU country to choose from?  Easy choice, given the day's big WW II commemorations in Moscow: Medalia de onoare - Medal of Honor - about an aging Romanian vet who is notified that he's about to get a medal for something he did in the Second World War.

That "something" is shrouded in more than just the fog of war.  Set in 1995, in the first years of the post-Ceausescu post-Cold War era, Medal of Honor is a subtle, wry, touching look at the transition of a Balkan country from Communism to something else.  But what is that something?

The heat either doesn't work at all or turns buildings into steam baths. Wounds inflicted by the Securitate still figuratively bleed.  And the bureaucracy - as brilliantly depicted by a heavily pregnant Ministry of Defense receptionist, all-powerful behind her glass booth - is still capable of wreaking havoc with people's lives.

Ion, the pensioner played by veteran actor Victor Rebengiuc, hasn't given much thought to the war since his service in the Romanian Army a half century ago.  His blunt bayonet sometimes serves to cut a roast, but once he gets a mysterious letter from the Ministry, things change.  He plunges back in time to an incident towards the end of the war, when the Romanians started to turn on their former German allies (or was it occupiers?).  Maybe he was heroic after all...

Ions abound.  Was our man mistakenly singled out for honor, something destined for another Ion?  Then there's Ion Iliescu, Romania's actual President at the time, who has a cameo role as himself.  But which Romania is being honored?  Surely not this Romania:

In a morbid competition with Hungary to curry Hitler's favor and hoping to regain northern Transylvania, Romania mustered more combat troops for the Nazi war effort than all of Germany's other allies combined.

(From the Country Studies series, Romania in World War II).  All those monumental bronzes of Romanian soldiers couldn't have survived the Ceausescu years in honor of the fascists, no.  Ion concludes that it was his act of shooting at retreating Germans - his moment of glory that even he forgot, reminded of it in an old letter written to his wife - that is finally getting recognition.

The knowing snickers from the back of the cinema - Brussels has plenty of Romanians, here at NATO or the EU - told me that director Calin Peter Netzer must have gotten his context and atmospherics right.  Bittersweet is the flavor of Medal of Honor, and the value of the piece of shiny metal is weighed against what really counts - love, family, friendship.

Medalia de onoare has won almost a dozen international awards.  Romania was well-represented among yesterday's 27 European films.  After Medalia de onoare and Tales From a Golden Age, I'm beginning to better appreciate what kind of world Romanians are emerging from.  They probably all deserve a medal.

WW II + 65: Say It With Stamps

It's fitting that former enemies and inheritors of former regimes got together today in Moscow for what may be one of the last big World War II commemorations that can include numbers of walking veterans.  Quite right, too, that the country that suffered the greatest number of casualties be the host.  It's hard to see how Germany could have been defeated without the Red Army's determination.  Click on the stamp at left for an example of the Soviet-era heroic gigantism prevalent in the USSR (from StampRussia).

That other Ally that withstood alone on the Western Front, Great Britain, is of course personified by its wartime leader, Winston Churchill.  His voice, his profile, his very pugnaciousness, stood for so much in the years before the US entered the war.  From the British Postal Museum Archive.

Marching in Moscow for the first time today was the United States, which not only saved the Brits from the Germans, but had to fight off the Japanese throughout the Pacific.  The cartoonist Bill Mauldin, beloved of the foot soldiers but mistrusted by the brass for the scruffy image he gave to GIs, is portrayed in this US Postal Service stamp. Rounding out the Big Four was China, but not the China of Communist Beijing.  Nationalist China, under Chiang Kai-Shek, was at the table with its Soviet, American, and British allies.  No more Soviets at the Kremlin these days, and the Nationalists had to watch the ceremony from Taiwan.  From StampsOfChina.

Finally, France, which though not a member of the wartime Big Four, did manage to stay in the big power league thanks to the sheer will power of then General De Gaulle.  Thanks to French postwar leaders managing to overcome their hatred of Germany for outrages like Oradour (hundreds of men, women, and children killed in cold blood, the entire village burnt to the ground), we have a united Europe today.  Stamp from Timbres-de-France.

Okay, world leaders, well done in the war memorial category.  Now please work together on that even bigger goal: saving the planet from its multiple non-military threats.  It's a much harder target to zero in on.

Cheer Up, Europe: The War's Over

You wouldn't know it, by the looks of the headlines:

"Gloom across Europe as crisis shadow intensifies" Financial Times

"Zeal and angst: Germany torn over role in Europe" Wall Street Journal

"AMB. JOHN BOLTON: We shouldn't rescue Europe" FOXNews.com

Thanks, Ambassador Bolton.  Glad you weren't around during World War II.  And I don't think the Europeans have actually asked the US to rescue them this time.

No, you wouldn't know that today really should be a day of celebration.  65 years of peace across a continent ravaged by two world wars last century.  VE Day - Victory in Europe - never was much celebrated in the United States, which preferred to lump its commemoration of its dead of all wars in May's Memorial Day.

But on this side of the Atlantic, as the BBC On This Day website reminds us, Britons lost no time in celebrating the end of hostilities in Europe on May 8, 1945.  They cheered PM Winston Churchill, "for he's a jolly good fellow."  Didn't keep them, two months later, from voting him out of office.  Gordon Brown shouldn't feel so bad.

VE Day on May 8 is a public holiday in many European countries, though at places like NATO HQ, where some of the losing countries of the war are now major players, it doesn't do to mention the war.  So we have instead the celebration of the postwar peace, embodied in Europe Day, May 9, celebrating 60 years since Robert Schuman sketched out what has since become the European Union.

If only the general mood matched the upbeat Euro-phoria of the Europe Day poster gallery.  It's hard to find committed Europhiles, especially in places like the British Conservative Party, which just may be poised to take over the helm of what is already a Euro-sceptic nation.

Even on the continent, the angst and gloom is general: in Greece, the epicenter of the latest financial-fiscal crisis, it has erupted into violence.  Here in Brussels, a city whose name is synonymous with the EU, not even Europe can appear to help a country seemingly bent on endless separatism in a slow "death of a thousand cuts."

Too bad Europeans don't see the BIG PICTURE.  Which is, 65 years of peace, the product of an alphabet soup of interlocking institutions: NATO, EU, COE, OSCE, OECD.  These "supranational European bodies" might bore you to death with their endless diplo-speak of collective security, single currency, subsidiarity... but these weighty words keep the swords from being rattled.  If you can't make out the Euler diagram (click on image below) of these overlapping institutions, check out this excellent Wikipedia graph.

"Jaw-jaw is better than war-war," Winston Churchill is reputed to have said.  The European Union does talk to excess, at times, but 65 years of jaw-jaw is better than 6 months of war-war.  Europe, count your blessings, do the necessary, and keep that stiff upper lip in the face of a little currency crisis.  It's important, but seen in perspective, pales when the alternatives to collective security are considered.

There is strength in numbers.

Ageless, Boundless Energy

Vicarious thrills, courtesy of friend Liam, pictured here with a dozen friends atop Machu Picchu (who got there hiking the 4 day Inca Trail, not your touristy train/bus ride).  It was, by the way, Liam's 67th birthday.

Yet another piece of evidence, if we needed any, of the increasingly elastic definition of - how can I put it? - "old."  Liam would probably shoot me if I used his name and that adjective in the same sentence.

I'm in Washington this week, attending the first board meeting of the foundation that just hired me - a spring chicken in my late fifties! - to head an institute in Morocco.  I'm thrilled.

In the 8 years since I retired from the US Foreign Service, all of my employment experiences have been with US-based organizations.  I mention this because the matter of retirement age, employment for seniors (or people older than the 35 that is sometimes listed as the outer age limit for EU jobs), and lifetime employment is seen differently in Europe.  85 year old baggers in supermarkets have not yet appeared in Europe.

Nor would I wish that on societies that generally appear to bequeath a right to a decent life to their elderly.

But Europe simply must find ways to emulate what appears to be a matter of course in the US: considering the resource that the recently-retired represent.  If you can schlep up Macchu Pichu, you can probably manage a program for an NGO.

Little Church In the Wilderness

God is silent, now if only we can get Man to shut up.

Woody Allen*

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No doubt the Pope is wishing his household priest had quoted Woody Allen in his homily instead of the anonymous Jewish friend whose mention of antisemitism has caused such a firestorm within a conflagration.  But then humor is kind of hard to insert into an Easter service at a time of deep humiliation and hurt in the Catholic church.

At least we still have Maureen Dowd writing about "unholy week," keeping up the drumbeat despite the Vatican 's attempt to exorcise her.

The "little church" I'm thinking about is not, obviously, the Vatican, which, despite its loss of the Papal States centuries ago, despite the anachronism of a religion endowed with a Secretary of State and a legion of nuncios (priestly diplomats) and other trappings of temporal power, still invokes the Pope's "head of state" status.  Usually this is good for protocol purposes, though it's unlikely that, as the head of a church of a billion or so people, the Pope would ever get anything less than regal treatment when visiting foreign leaders.  Now, though, the head of state moniker will serve to avoid having to be discomfited by lawsuits.

No, the "little church in the wilderness" is figurative, my way of commiserating with the millions of Catholics out there who would feel rather uncomfortable amidst the gilt, the crimson, the ever-so-worldly ostentation of Vatican City.  I've pictured above, for literal purposes, a church we once found while hiking in the Dolomites, but my "little church" is everywhere and anywhere, with normal people whose good priests and nuns tend to their parishes.

Beyond the current furor over the pedophilia, and whether or not you think that the priestly condition of celibacy has ceased to be viable, there is the general direction of the Vatican under this Pope.  Consider what an eminent Egyptian Jesuit has to say:

The great progress made over the last half century is on hold at this time. Facing this almost devastating situation, the church's leadership... minimize[s] the seriousness of the situation and console[s] themselves by focusing on a resurgence of the most traditionalist factions...

Father Henri Boulad wrote the above in July 2007.  If the situation was already "devastating" then, what would he say now?

The progress he's referring to was the great liberal reform of Vatican II, over which Pope Benedict has the same reaction as right wing cultural warriors in the US over the Sixties.  Just like conservatives in the US would like to erase the Kennedy-Johnson era and start history with Ronald Reagan, so too would Pope Benedict XVI overturn the work of Pope John XXIII (Vatican postage stamp, right).  As Father Boulad wrote, in the early Sixties Pope John XXIII "tried to reverse four centuries of stagnation, but there is an impression that the church is gradually closing the doors that it opened at that time."

When Father Boulad refers to "traditionalist factions" encouraged by Pope Benedict, he's referring to such reactionary organizations as Opus Dei, whose heroes include Spanish fascist leader Francisco Franco; the St. Pius  X Society and its Holocaust deniers; and the Legionaries of Christ, recently caught up in its own sex scandal and whose list of American apologists, according to Tim Rutten's recent article in the Los Angeles Times

reads like a who's who of the conservative Catholic intellectuals who, in recent years, have insisted that Catholicism and membership in the Democratic Party are all but incompatible.

This is the world of "traditionalist factions" beloved of Pope Benedict.  Beyond concerns over tone-deafness on pedophilia, Catholics in "little churches" around the world must be sick in the stomach over where the Pontiff is leading them.  Back to pre-Vatican II?  That's much too recent.  How about back to the Middle Ages?

* Woody Allen in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations

The Expatriate Condition: Potentially Permanent

Note to readers: this is an abridged version of an article appearing in the current issue of Together Magazine, a glossy Brussels bi-monthly catering to the Anglophone expatriate community.  Sheet music cover from "The Singing War" of Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries.

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Some of us have made this expat business our life’s work.  In public service (I’m most familiar with diplomats and the military), multiple postings abroad are often the norm.  And Brussels is brimming with semi permanent expats whose professional lives revolve around the EU institutions.  But I’ve known lots of private sector people too for whom a life overseas is the culmination of a dream, and who have trouble going back.  It’s an old problem.

How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm? (After They’ve Seen Paree) put to song the dilemma facing American soldiers who’d been sent to France in the Great War, survived the trenches, then met a pretty Parisienne on a weekend pass.  Some, like Ernest Hemingway, stayed on for a while, and a similar thing happened after the Second World War.  Less dramatic, but no less of a quandary for today’s HR department: how 'ya gonna send ‘er back to Baltimore, after she’s seen Bruxelles?

This expat thing gets into your blood, and it may be hereditary.  Ever notice how many expats are children of expats?  It comes from going to school with classmates from every continent, and from growing up with a different – if not downright confused – sense of nationality.  There are strident nationalists in every grouping, but as a class expats are probably more inclined to see at least two sides to every question.

“Far away fields look green” goes the adage, which makes almost every destination potentially appealing.  Born and raised in the United States, I’ve spent most of my adult life outside my native country.  Mine is a conscious choice, a sort of “reverse migration” for someone whose parents came to the US from County Mayo, Ireland.  But I know a Frenchman, an interpreter, who chose to settle in the US because he finds it “exotic.”  And he lives in suburban Washington D.C.!

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe,” reminisced Rutger Hauer’s dying replicant in Blade Runner; “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”  You don’t have to be an alien to feel like you’ve come in from outer space.  Just be a typical expat returning home to family or old neighbors, who feign interest in your international life for a few seconds before changing the subject back to local matters.  They probably don’t share your reverie about the good life abroad.  Which is why many expats befriend other expats, who can at least relate to a life lived outside the boundaries of “home.”

Oh yes, Home.  Many of us have a clear, unequivocal notion of where that is.  Others aren’t so sure.  Where home is, when home was a certain house, who was at home… home can be, as another old saying goes, where the heart is.  Expats don’t necessarily live out of a suitcase, but they often have a more flexible idea of what “home” means.  When I consider Brussels as home, it doesn’t mean I reject my Pennsylvania upbringing, and feeling “at home” in Ireland is more an emotional link to the memory of my parents than anything territorial.

All of this is not to build up the expatriate condition as a universal solution.  After all, not everyone can or should leave the land of their birth – you might not really want your embarrassing younger brother to show the flag abroad, at least not in your presence.  I remember puzzling over some of my fellow diplomats who persisted in living abroad when their time there was spent largely in the company of their countrymen.

That can be a challenge, mind you – not just getting to know some locals, but actually befriending them.  In a place like Brussels, people have seen scores of expats come and go, and may shy from establishing friendships that risk being broken by a subsequent transfer.

And if it’s hard on the locals, it’s also hard on the itinerant foreigner.  Just listen to the BBC World Service program “From Our Own Correspondent” and you’ll hear the occasional heartfelt goodbye to a place a journalist has called home for years.  Hard as it is to say farewell to foreign places and people, it shouldn’t keep us expats from making local bonds, as the whole experience of living in another country is so much richer with the knowledge that host country friends and neighbors can provide.

So, is there a cure for the expat bug?  I’m in my sixth decade, living in an adopted country, married to a French woman, with a dozen countries I’ve called home, and the siren song of foreign fields still beckons.  Is that living the dream or postponing reality?  Not sure, but it’s in my blood.

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Governance: Trying Times in Eunomia

Eunomia, as defined in the blog of that name, means "the principle of good order."

It's well worth a look - The Economist calls its author Daniel Larison "a thoughtful paleoconservative."  Appropriate enough, given his role as contributing editor of The American Conservative, where his blog appears.  After years of equating conservatives with the messianic "neo" variety, it's refreshing to consider that their "paleo" precursors had many common sense attitudes, especially as concern US imperial tendencies.

As opposed to that other Greek word, utopia, eunomia is more attainable, at least intermittently.  Oxford's definition - "a political condition of good law, well administered" - at least gives politicians something to aim for.

"Governance" is one of those euphemistic (those Greeks again) words that you might have come to dislike from their overuse, a bit like "wellness" (thank God we're not debating "wellness reform").  Governance is usually preceded by the adjective "good," for you wouldn't want the opposite.  Development circles are awash with jobs for governance advisers, where professionals from aid-giving countries spread their knowledge in places with a need for better government.

But wait a minute: as with many such well-meaning efforts, isn't this often a case of "do as I say, not as I do?"  Many of these governance advisers hail from places like the US and Europe, where there are numerous examples of governance gone astray, of eunomia tending towards dystopia.  Just look at the craziness reigning in the US Congress.  Which brings me back to the old time conservatives.

Might country club Republicans, paleoconservatives, and realists of all sorts have more in common than we think with pragmatic Democrats and moderate progressives?  Might they be equally appalled at the rise of the Tea Party and the resurgence of extremists like the John Birch Society, as described yesterday in Frank Rich's NYT column "The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged."  If anything, Tea Partyers will steal Republican votes, as we are starting to see in places like Texas.

On this side of the Atlantic, while sane European leaders attempt to deal with the economic dystopia of non-eunomic Greece, out surges a loony from the British UKIP Party, Disparaging Farage, crudely attacking the EU leadership and the countries from which they hail.

It's a bit too Pollyanna-ish to see the upside of all this, but the whole point is that the UKIPs and the Tea Parties are not really interested in governance.  They revel in their capacity to outrage.

In the US, it should be evident to serious Republicans that to get too close to the barn burners threatens their own ability to govern.   Does it help or hurt their cause that a Republican Senator is single-handedly holding up unemployment compensation, including his own constituents'...?

If eunomia is too highfalutin' a concept of governance, how about these two: civility, and civics?

Tales From The Golden Age

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

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

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

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

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

Oh yes, the Tales, or urban legends:

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

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

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

Mungiu has plenty of material from which to choose:

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

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

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

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