Covid Feuilleton #11

As published at SubStack, 1/18/22:

[Klos, 6/6/21]

Land of Albania! let me bend mine eyes
On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men!
The cross descends, thy minarets arise,
And the pale crescent sparkles in the glen,
--from Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”

In May of 2021, I received an email from an American who said he wanted to go to a Tirana bar I had mentioned in an article. On a shelf, there were five wine bottles with labels showing a portrait of Mussolini, JFK, Lenin, Hitler or Stalin. After I had given him the address, I thought, What if he’ll go there to raise a big stink?

In 1987, the Gestapo Bar in Seoul had to change its name after an uproar, and in 2000, the same fate met another Seoul bar, Third Reich. Although Nazi glamor is certainly not kosher, Communist chic is ultra cool. In Manhattan, for example, there’s the KGB Bar in the Bowery, right on the edge of the Ukrainian Village. Who cares if more Ukrainians were murdered by Communists than Jews by Nazis? There is only one Holocaust.

During the 2016 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, dozens of tattooed white hipsters paraded down Broad Street, with many waving red flags, some with a hammer and sickle even. Who cares if Little Cambodia was just seven blocks away? Only one Holocaust matters.

In 2006, Gavin Newsom appointed Jack Hirschman as Poet Laureate of San Francisco. A Stalinist freak, Hirschman could only talk about Stalin or himself when I met him at Caffe Trieste in 2008. Among Hirschman’s books is Joey: The Poems of Joseph Stalin.

Entering Tirana’s Bunk’art, a museum of Communist crimes, you’re immediately greeted by a Primo Levi quotation, “ALL THOSE THAT FORGET THEIR PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO RELIVE IT.” Again, the Holocaust, in a memorial to victims of Jewish thinking! In a country where no Jews died during World War II, there’s a Holocaust Memorial. Even post-Communist Albania, then, has been jewjacked. Soros and his son have been busy there.

The American, let’s call him Jonathan, turned out to be very well-traveled, erudite and politically astute. I met him and his wife several times, and not just in Tirana, but Gjirokaster, that stone city like some prehistoric creature clawing its way up a mountainside, to paraphrase Kadare. Before Jonathan left Albania, we talked about how fine a country it was, with the sweetest people, so a great refuge from all the Covid madness roiling nearly everywhere else. We agreed, though, that Albania would not be near the top of any list of European countries to visit, but this has long been the verdict. Even before it was sealed for 45 years by Communists, almost no one went there.

Smack in the center of Europe, Albania was remote. In 1788, Gibbon wrote, “A country in sight of Italy is less known than the wilds of America.” Exploring it in 1809, 21-year-old Lord Byron congratulated himself for being just the second Englishman to advance “beyond the capital into the interior.”

So enamored with the Land of Eagles, Byron cosplayed as an Albanian warrior in his most famous oil portrait, though with a soft, white hand showing. Writing to his mum, Byron admitted that Ali Pasha, “The Lion of Yannina,” clearly saw him as an overcivilized and pampered pup, “He said he was certain I was a man of birth, because I had small ears, curling hair, and little white hands… He told me to consider him as a father whilst I was in Turkey, and said he looked on me as his son. Indeed, he treated me like a child, sending me almonds and sugared sherbet, fruit and sweetmeats, twenty times a day.”

[Tirana, 4/25/21]

In the 21st century, Albania is very much on the mass tourist itinerary, though most visitors favor its beaches, naturally, over its austere mountains. In Kukes, for example, I got startled second looks from adults even, while several kids couldn’t hide their glee at encountering such an alien.

To be higher is to be more inaccessible, thus safer. In Italy, you have all these hill towns that are walled, with their fields outside, so at night or during an attack, you’re safely walled in, up the hill. Though the term “running for the hills” is attributed to the Johnstown Flood of 1889, it makes sense literally, in countless cases. In 1995, I heard a man in Sapa, Vietnam describe his survival of the Chinese attack in 1979 as, “We just ran into the mountains.”

Many folks have been up high for centuries. Unlike us effeminate or beer bellied lowland wimps, mountain men are seen as more savage and tougher. They’re better warriors, too, as testified by the legendary martial prowess of the Gurkhas, Highland Scots, Rifians, Swiss and Hmongs, etc.

Here’s Norman Lewis on the Hmongs, whom he encountered in Laos in 1950, “It was a long, slow climb up to the village, although the [Hmongs], as they skipped along by our side, seemed in no way to notice the slope, nor their huge burdens.” Though small, they’re strong, with incredible stamina, like other mountain men.

Like them, Hmongs also had a revulsion against alien rules, that bureaucratic jungle us more civilized tolerate in exchange for comforts and goods. Lewis, “They are utterly independent and quite fearless. Their passion for freedom compels them to live in the smallest of villages and, apart from such rare events as the invasion of 1860, they will not tolerate chiefs or leaders […] They are normally pacific, but if compelled to fight are apt to eat the livers of slain enemies.”

There’s a paradox here, of course. If these elevated wildmen were so powerful, they wouldn’t have been chased up dem hills in the first place, where everything is so difficult, from agriculture to just stumbling home (uphill) after a bout of drinking. Plus, there are only so many chicks available in your steeply inclined village, not that the lowland incels are getting any.

Mountain men have generally been historical losers, but history isn’t over. Only pompous goofballs can even think it has an end. There have been many paradigm shifts in six million years.

In any case, mountain men have been the least contaminated by any dominant culture throughout history. Byron, “No nation are so detested and dreaded by their neighbours as the Albanese; the Greeks hardly regard them as Christians, or the Turks as Moslems; and in fact they are a mixture of both, and sometimes neither.” Unlike others who had been better converted or assimilated, Albanians retained more of their stubborn native selves, and this core integrity would show up again, in their emergence from the harshest Communism.

[Gjirokaster, 5/25/21]

In six months in Albania, I barely heard prayer calls, and most times, only indistinctly, from a distance. Almost no women covered their hair, and most men drank, with cheap rakia a favorite, even in the morning. Albania’s Orthodox Archbishop is a Greek.

As for Covid rules, they mostly ignored them. Unmasked, I traveled on packed vans all over the country. In crowded restaurants, I ate grilled meat and drank beer while looking at all the beautiful people walking by.

Fringe populations, then, are less susceptible to prevailing strains, so if the entire world goes mad, like right now, they’re not as hypnotized into looniness. Consider Covid “vaccination.” The most jabbed countries are generally ones with the most byzantine rules, strictly enforced, thus the most civilized, loosely speaking.

As of 1/17/22, the 20 most jabbed nations include, as expected, higher-income, well-organized countries like Singapore, South Korea, Canada, Denmark, Australia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Iceland, Malta, Spain and Italy, but also totalitarian Cuba and China, though they’re only using homegrown jabs. Aberrations, thin-walleted Cambodia and Ecuador are also included.

In Germany, I would see a man standing alone at an intersection at 3AM, with no traffic in any direction, waiting for the light to turn green, so he could cross. Most likely, he’s jabbed and boostered. Germany’s Covid “vaccination” rate is 73%, compared to just 37% for Albania, one of the lowest in Europe.

Though the Covid scamdemic is a global assault, it has not hit all populations equally. Primarily a psychological operation, it terrifies the long domesticated, easily cowed or simply foolish into not just wrecking their own lives, but even killing themselves.

As the self-congratulating “civilized” do themselves in, the less correct survive by doing nothing.

[to be continued, of course and unfortunately]

[Klos, 6/8/21]