153. Balkans: Checking for Cool.

You don't want to know what the professors are saying in their books and lectures.  You don't want to know what the pundits are saying in their columns.  You want to know what the students are saying in their drinking places.

That's what will determine the future.  Politicians and wise men can talk up something all they want but if the next generation of college students doesn't think it's cool it's dead.  A zero in the historical force column. 

I had heard this said but was suspicious until I heard a man, a successful modern poet, tell of his literature classes at Vanderbilt in the twenties.  The Mighty Romantics and the Great Victorians were still all the rage then with the profs, but the students, even as the room resounded with Tennyson's mighty lines, were passing around mimeographed copies of "The Waste Land."

Can you feel that, the cool of it?  If you can't, picture one of those graduate seminars in Southern universities attended after the war by second-tier New York intellectuals squeezed south by the GI competition for Eastern schools.  CCNY types.  Deliver your opinion and they say, "You sure of that?"  Then they're there with the goods.  Out of Morris Cohen (Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method), who taught at Columbia.  Those guys are cool.  Over beer afterward one of them, about to say the word "God," pauses and says, "if you'll pardon the expression."   Atheism becomes cool.  Marxism and Freudianism follow.

That's what I mean by cool and that's what it was in 1947 Louisiana.  It doesn't have to be subversive and it doesn't have to be outside the curriculum.  When Cleanth Brooks arrived at Yale with the New Criticism the students greeted him warmly ("Mistah Brooks, he come" headlined the student newspaper) and ate up his teaching.

What's the equivalent of that now in Ljubljana and Zagreb and Belgrade?  Sean O'Hagan says that Slavoj Zizek is now "the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard."  Is that true?  Could I confirm it by listening in on student talk?  I, a two-week tourist?  Not a chance.

But I know what I'd be looking for.  First, the student who says what students (or anybody, really) can say in a hundred different ways in a time of crisis: "Are you with us in the movement?"  Second, the student who says, "Are you sure of that?"  I'd look at the listening students.  If they think the first one is cool they (and their country) face one kind of future; if they think the second one is cool they face an entirely different kind.

It's not obvious which one is better.  Everything depends on where you are, when.  You're marching for civil rights in '63 (or for independence in '76) you want to know who's with you and who isn't.  You want them charged up.  You're sword-fighting in a phalanx you want your buddy on your left to be super-charged.  That's your unprotected side and your life depends on it.

Those who have been in those situations will tell you: you're not going to do a Ph.D. oral on what did the charging.  The British spin experts doctor a picture of Hitler to make him more hateful.  It fires us up and we fight harder to defeat his armies.  Anything that gets us home quicker is cool.

Academic cool can be ugly.  Picture the places where it's most easily maintained: in America with 3,000 miles of ocean on each side and 1500 missiles securely in their silos; in Scandinavia, with all that water around and a homogeneous population. It's easy to look at the Balkans and forget the mixed-up population and close, over-the-mountain borders — with wall-mounted rifles on the other side of them.

What kind of cool is the right kind is always going to be a close call there.  Times and situations change so.  Outsiders, even when they're willing to risk ugliness, can hardly ever speak positively.  "Let's just quit talking about cool.  We'll never be able to say anything helpful.  Forget the whole category."

At this point I hear one of my profs breaking in.  Sam Monk.  "You think there's no cool any more.  You want to know cool?  I'll show you cool.  My period.  Early 18th century.  England is looking back at a bad religious war.  The Western continent is looking back at worse ones.  The Holy Roman Empire, with its little states, has torn itself into Protestant-Catholic shreds.  Here's Jonathan Swift's Gulliver explaining it to the leader of the Houyhnhnms:

Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best color for a coat, whether black, red, white, or gray; and whether it should be long or short, dirty or clean; with many more.  Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance, as those occasioned by difference of opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.

That's cool.  Enlightenment cool."

Is it always and everywhere cool?  It doesn't have to be, not for anybody who feels sorry for the sweet people locked into those Balkan situations.  If it's occasionally helpful that's enough.

143. Balkan Tour (9)

9. Belgrade

First a guide, Djina Dostanic, making the Serbian case, or slipping it in, as she took us to the largest Orthodox Church in the world and then to Tito's tomb.  "It’s not true that only military targets were hit in the bombing.  A hospital was bombed, a moving train was hit."

"How do you feel about Americans?"  (Asked off to the side.)

"At the time of the bombing I was very angry.  But that's past now.  You are not guilty but you were badly informed, as we were" — presumably by Milosevic.

About the start of the war: "The Croats (I guess the Ustashe) used the Nazi symbol."  She said Serbs were deathly afraid of that.  "250,000 Serbs fled Croatia in one night, fearing for their lives.  I know.  I was teaching near the border.  I saw their children in school the next day."

"Is that the reason the Serbs invaded?"

"Yes.  The Yugoslav Army invaded."

"To protect them?"

"Yes.  The Yugoslav Army was made up of all Yugoslavs.  The Croatian Army was just Croatians." 

She said nothing about leaving the bombed buildings in Belgrade as memorials (Julia's story).  Her explanation was that no buyer could meet the conditions set by the government: that they be restored to their original condition.  They were left unrepaired because repair was too expensive.

Then to lunch at the Dorian Gray restaurant with, at our table, two recent graduates of the University of Belgrade, Sonia (major in "technical translation") and Tanja (liberal arts).  Both very open and friendly and (I think Mary Anne would agree) beautiful women. 

How about dislike of Americans for the bombing?

"That's the older generation.  I [Sonia] remember being very frightened as a child.  But that's past.  We think it's not people, it's politicians."  Sonia admitted that the Kosovo invasion had to be stopped but was unwilling to see bombing as the only way to stop it.  What was the alternative?  I couldn't bring myself to ask.  Their hearts were for peace and good will, and their minds were set against the "politicians" who had to find the means.

They had some questions for us.  "I understand that you can put people in jail indefinitely on suspicion of being a terrorist.  Nobody will know."

"Ah, I think they will.  Our press will find out."

"You think you can trust your press?"

We tried very hard to get across our reasons for trusting our press but I'm not sure we succeeded.  They had the ingrained suspicion of media and government that we have noticed in so many, including Shura, who have come from Communist countries.  Mary Anne explained, as best she could, the Freedom of Information Act.  They came to the table assuming that the obvious could never be true.  "That belief is what's behind most conspiracy theories," I said. They laughed in agreement.  "Oh, conspiracy theories.  You should live in Serbia!"

"Were your families involved in the war?" 

"My father hid from the draft," Sonia said, "but he couldn't get a job.  My mother worked as a nurse."  Like the young women we met in Pskov they were working hard toward careers they had little hope of ever entering.  Jobs are so scarce.  Sonia, with a specialty, has the better chance; Tanja's humanities can lead only to teaching, where the outlook is bleak.  "But," she said, "the learning is good in itself."  (I thought of Zoran's complaint about Serbia's attachment to the humanities: "We educate our people to be unemployable.")

It was great to meet such young people after seeing so much that made us despair.  We loved them, and will remember them every time we get down on the Balkans, or (as people in their eighties do) get down on the human race.

Tonight it was dinner in a dark-wood restaurant in the Bohemian quarter with Serbian plum brandy, phylo-dough pastries, and a six-man string band playing eclectic jump tunes, including a German one and "Oh Susanna" (for our benefit), though it was the native Serb stuff they riffed on.  They came to our table and played leaning over the ladies and we loved them.

Tomorrow it's back to Croatia, the heart of it, where, being among them, we'll probably love the Croatians too.

141. Balkan Tour (8)

8. Belgrade, Novi Sad

Since the Belgrade museums are closed on Monday we went to Novi Sad on the Danube (northern Serbia) and had a normal (in the old sense) day's touring — magnificent Roman Catholic cathedral, ornate Orthodox church, big, solemn synagogue, austere monastery on lovely grounds — led by a guide who sounded like the passionately patriotic Serb we were hoping to hear from.  Sounded like.  If there were complete sentences we couldn't understand them.  We did learn, though, that he was Orthodox and his wife was Croatian Catholic and Novi Sad was a multicultural triumph.  He was busting his buttons over everything Novi Sad.  And Serbian. And we learned that he had studied "art and museum curating" in the U. S. for a number of years.

I took a short pre-breakfast walk around the hotel that did show me part of Belgrade, a pretty depressing part: a lot of grey Soviet-era buildings going to seed, old streetcars, few smiles on the faces of those going to work, ubiquitous graffiti.  Also showed me, again, how easy it is to misunderstand.  I see some heavy-duty barriers blocking a street, start to take a picture, and get growled at by two of the many uniformed guys standing around.  I think "Soviet-era goons" and then find out when I get back to the hotel that they are dutiful policemen protecting my countrymen.  It was the street to the rear of the American embassy — the only embassy that needs such a guard, or such barriers.

By the end of the day I was walking around with a feeling more appropriate to my position — as an enemy.  Yes, Americans are the enemy here!  Strange feeling.  It came to me when our guide said that when he came back from America in 2005 he was removed from his curator job.  Apparently he had been associating with the enemy, the people who had bombed his country six years before.

Then Julia, talking about the coming walking tour, said we will visit the bombed buildings the Serbs have left in ruins as memorials, and reminders, and statements: "This is what you did to us.  This is what we will remember. " Keep the old resentment going.  In the Balkan way. (Remember my mention of the shell-gouges with frames around them, preserved in a gallery?  In Dubrovnik?)

Well tomorrow we see Belgrade up close, and the great thing, the great, typical Elderhostel thing, is that the managers of the tour have set up lunch for us with local people, one at least at every table, many of them university students.  "Ask them anything you want," said Julia.  We can hardly wait.