Heritage is Home

As published at Smirking Chimp, OpEd News, Unz Review and TruthSeeker, 8/24/20:






Our end drifts nearer,
the moon lifts,
radiant with terror.
The state
is a diver under a glass bell.
--Robert Lowell, “Fall 1961”


Even in strange places, you establish routines, so I’ve been going to Dzidzi Midzi to write. Its balcony overlooking the street is calming, and even more importantly, it’s quiet.

It has four bartenders. One is hook nosed, chubby, stubby, glum, swarthy, honest and speaks English quite comfortably. Frowning, he said to me, “This is too much,” when I accidentally gave him a ten-dollar tip, thinking it was just a buck.

I’ve done stupid shit all over, and it’s a miracle I’m still in one piece. Falling asleep on a Polish train, I had to get off at some empty, rural station. Following the snow dusted tracks, I trekked back to my intended destination in the cold. Passing each rare house with its yellow lit windows, I felt like an idiot alright.

Sweating up and down a winding dirt road in the mountainous mist, I finally reached a scraggly, unmapped village of ten dwellings, but before I could step into China, which was right there, right in front of me, a Vietnamese soldier suddenly appeared, “What are you doing, uncle?!” Like everybody else in Candelaria, Texas, I crossed a supposedly illegal footbridge into San Antonio del Bravo, Mexico. I got slapped by a thug in Istanbul, but in the same city, a restaurant owner refused to charge me, so delighted was he to have such an exotic client.

I fell off a motorbike in Luang Prabang, but at least it wasn’t moving. In Munich, I gushed to a new acquaintance, “I’m very happy to be in Berlin!”

Walking around this morning, I heard church bells, because it’s Sunday, but this also means the Dzidi Midzi is closed. Woe is me, but at least I’m not in a locked down city or country, where life itself has been put on hold, indefinitely. How is that possible? It’s just the new normal, suckers, so just suck it up. Sinisterly derailed, entire societies must lie in the ditch, with casualties piling up, from suicides, fights, misdirected anger and anger.

I’m in Hunters. This was actually my first Belgrade bar, where I landed straight from the airport, still with my luggage. Cheap and true, it’s a perfect pub, except for its noise pollution, though sometimes a curious song does come on, such as, just now, Manu Chao’s “Me Gustas Tu”, “Qué voy a hacer / Je ne sais pas / Qué voy a hacer / Je ne sais plus / Qué voy a hacer / Je suis perdu / Qué hora son, mi corazón.” Oh, shut up already! Music should always be occasioned, with actual lungs and fingers. Silence is best.

The Hunters’ walls are lined with horned skulls, and there’s a six-stanza poem praising “John the Hunter” [“ЏОНИЈУ XАНТЕРY”]. In the men’s room, there’s this large message in English on the wall, “How can a MAN who can hit a DEER at 250 yards keep missing the TOILET?” Just a mile from here in 2003, Serbia’s prime minister was fatally shot by a sniper, so I’m guessing folks here have pretty steady nerves and aim.

Their sense of humor is also unflinching. In a satirical article about Serbia’s dreadful international image, Momo Kapor suggested that even its reputation for mass rape could be turned into an attraction, “Maybe that could be used in a positive way, for certain Western women who might want to get to know Serbian macho guys, and in light of the growing gay movement, they might see Serbia as an exceptional oasis of masculinity in an effeminate world. They might come in hordes to be raped in an exotic location.”

Kapor’s love letters to Belgrade and Serbia are translated into English and published as A Guide to the Serbian Mentality. This witty and informative book was given to me by a lovely lady, Jelena, who also paid for my dinner and beer. Now that’s hospitality! A wonderful couple spared hours from their busy schedules to show me Novi Sad. Together, we admired statues of five literary men, all within easy walking distance. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” I told them. “There is certainly nothing like this in Vietnam.”

On the way to The Hunters, I passed a wise yet obvious T-shirt, “MY HERITAGE IS MY FUTURE,” and you can see it here, as evidence I didn’t make it up. I’m too literal and timid to make anything up. To have a future is to possess a home, or vice versa, and heritage as home is also the central message of Kapor’s book

Like any mature love, it’s complicated by disappointment and even distaste, if not hatred. Kapor, “Wherever I go in Belgrade, I see gray people. Gray is our favourite color.” Much less picturesque than Paris, London, Rome, Vienna, Moscow, Berlin, Budapest, Istanbul or Athens, etc., his city is blighted by “a ubiquitous grayness,” with “concrete ramparts of the new architecture, uniform Corbusieresque dwellings deprived of any beauty and any desire to build a house as a work of art.” Repeatedly leveled by foreigners, Belgrade has also been “demolished by pretentious architects eager to wipe out all traces of antiquity.”

So what is there to love, exactly? Your people, of course, and not just because your women are exceptionally beautiful and graceful, “Watching these women on the city streets is like seeing a fantastic modern ballet with no other sound than striking heels! Pale city girls who grow up suddenly, accustomed to city life and the yearning looks of passersby; independent, cynical, audacious and polite at the same time, with the innate elegance of millionaires behind cunningly concealed poverty—it is upon them that newcomers feast their eyes until they disappear from sight, as if upon some secret signal, leaving the streets inconsolably barren and bare.”

Like flowers, these women explode with beauty come spring, so that “bringing your wife to Belgrade in May is like taking rice to China—and sleeping with her is pure incest!” Not too PC, is it? In America, Kapor would be lynched on the nearest college campus.

Even if your homegirls are chimp ugly, you must love them, because they’re your mothers, sisters, girlfriends and wives. You’re an ape, too. They’re your heritage, flesh, language and meaning, what you tumbled out of.

Having endured a million calamities together, each nation has evolved a million customs to assert its distinctiveness, so Kapor rapturously celebrates the Serbian plum brandy, grog-like tea, love of beans, three greeting kisses and šajkača cap, the last of which I’ve seen no evidence of during my one month here. The greeting kisses are in abeyance because of the coronavirus, I’m assuming.

In Busan, I was immersed in an intact society, despite the coronavirus, and here in Belgrade, I’m again among people who proudly, defiantly yet calmly know themselves, and what they must protect. Reading Kapor, I’m reminded of certain Vietnamese writers who infuse readers with just as deep a love for their society. America doesn’t have that.

As the country is torn apart, Stacy Schiff in the New York Times dismisses the statue toppling, media-triggered racial rioting and Main Street looting as no different from, and just as necessary as, what occurred during the Boston Tea Party, “No one was hurt. No gun was fired. No property other than the tea was damaged. The perpetrators cleaned up after themselves. In the aftermath, the surgical strike was referred to plainly as ‘the destruction of the tea.’ To the indignant Massachusetts governor, it constituted nothing less than a ‘high handed riot.’” Only hysterics and reactionaries can mischaracterize such righteous and surgical protests as riots, in short.

Millions of businesses being wrecked will only make for a better strolling and dining experience, claims the New York Post. You won’t be crowded. Steve Cuozzo, “Pre-COVID, restaurant-going had become a chore to endure. Whether at 300-seat Cathedrale in the East Village or at 50-seat Ernesto’s on the Lower East Side, bodies were scrunched together without mercy. And did I mention loud? But today’s expanded al-fresco dining scene with safely-spaced tables is a joyful, high-summer antidote to the ‘dead city’ narrative. It’s less pretentious and less rowdy than scene- and trend-driven indoor eating ever was.”

In Chicago, the self-absorbed mayor sanctions protests everywhere but on her own block. Irony-free, the Honorable Lori Lightfoot explains, “I have an obligation to keep my home, my wife, my 12-year-old, and my neighbors safe.” When an alderman complains about the deadly chaos all over town, she shuts him up with, “You’re full of shit.”

Can’t say I miss being in that madhouse. Another day, I’m sitting outside a Pašino Brdo cafe, just across the street from Obilić Stadium. It’s named after a Serbian knight who’s credited with killing the Turkish Murad I, during or just after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.

Since Miloš Obilić was mentioned in no contemporary account, some doubt he even existed, but Murad I certainly had his neck and belly slashed from a Serbian sword that day. Obilić personifies that inspiring feat. Even during the Serbs’darkest hour, they could vanquish a prized enemy, so they can certainly do it again, and again, whatever it takes.

In 1998, FK Obilić miraculously won the national championship by besting much more storied squads, such as Red Star, Partizan and Vojvodina, etc. On the stadium’s outside wall, a commemorative mural of this team is flanked by depictions of Miloš Obilić and the Church of Saint Sava, for in Serbia, sport, religion, history, myth and defense of home turf are all woven together. Outside Red Star’s stadium, there’s even a tank and a missile launcher.

Though no fan of clear liquor, I order a glass of šljivovica, for when in Rome, you know… Pouring mine from a generic bottle, the white moustached owner decides to join me, but with a glass of vodka. Kapor, “Apart from Russian vodka, šljivovica is the only drink that prompts Serb farmers to piously cross themselves before drinking.” Sure enough, the old fellow crosses himself before pouring comforting heat down his gullet.

Kapor, “When the Turks began to withdraw from these regions, rakija became the symbol of freedom and victory over Islam, which prohibited alcohol.”

When you’re steeped in your own heritage, just about every act has meaning, and for this reason alone, Serbs, Koreans and Vietnamese, etc., will outlast those whose most sacred heroes, symbols and customs have become meaningless, if not despised.

As the American state goes under inside a glass bell, its citizens must sink or swim on their own.







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