1 Boring Old Man

Well, we’re back from our trip – marred only by a cold virus that struck me down with a vengence in the Prague airport [that I expect will probably hit all my fellow passengers in a few days – my apologies]. Such trips are always personal epics and take a while to come in to focus. I looked forward to digesting the history and stories from the trip – coming to some new understanding of what feels like the modern Dark Ages of 20th Century Eastern Europe [a story from which they are recovering with a vengence]. One has the sense that the decaying Monarchies, the Nazis, and the Communists are  finally fading, and that they’re coming up for air.

• A car is a magic carpet until it falters. Then one thinks, Do I have gas? Do I have a flat? Is it overheating? etc.
• A computer is a tablet, or an easel, or a news service until it isn’t. Then it’s a quagmire of chips and modems and programs, etc.
• Lights come on in dark rooms until they don’t. Then, Is the power out? Do I need to change a bulb? Is the switch broken? 
• A family takes care of basic needs and the members flourish. When that’s not true, it’s composed of parents, children, mental illness, abuse, etc.

One thing we did was visit a small Franz Kafka Museum in Prague [I’d always pictured him in prewar Berlin, which was very wrong]. He spent his life in the Jewish Quarter of pre-WWI Prague. There, I bought and re-read his Letter to Father – a long letter he wrote to his dictatorial father in 1919 when he [Franz] was dying from Tuberculosis [his father never read it]. The thing that made Kafka Kafka-esque was his articulation of his sense of alienation and being trapped with no escape – trapped in the Jewish Quarter of Prague, trapped in his bureaucratic job, trapped in the deterioration of prewar Europe, trapped in the angst of his existence. In the letter to his father, one has the feeling that being trapped in the shadow of his oppressive father underlies all of the externals. His first novel, Amerika [never finished], was a story of a sixteen year old boy who escapes to America to avoid the dishonor of having been seduced by a housemaid. It’s a humorous story, but it’s about his being recurrently exploited in the land of glitz and promise – ending up captured in some scam in the Midwest. It’s little wonder that the novel was unfinished as there is no possible resolution. It’s more a statement than a story. But, I thought of it as I read the news of the last several weeks. For Kafka, Amerika is a derogatory slang term – a symbol of unfulfilled promise. A harbinger to Satre’s later No Exit.

I don’t believe that – that there’s no way out of this mess. But I do think that we Americans have alway believed that our system would save us from the dips into corruption and power politics that have plagued us from our beginnings – that our system is "self-correcting." I’m not so sure anymore that our system itself is self-correcting. I think our system was intended to allow us to be self-correcting, but it will only work if we rise rise to the challenge. Frankly, I don’t think we Liberal types are the only force that’s needed right now. We’re the ones making the noise, but the Administration has a strong track record of being able to block what we do and invalidate what we say. I think it’s in the hands of right-thinking Conservatives and Republicans [the people who put these fools into power] to throw in the towel. I just returned from a part of the world where they [the powerful] did not see this kind of writing on the wall; where they [the powerful] continued to support this kind of absurd abuse of power; and where they [the powerful] plunged their whole segment of the world into 80+ years of painful darkness.

America is only Amerika if we let it happen. Our Founding Fathers were not Hermann Kafka [Fanz’s dad]. And our history doesn’t have to be Kafka-esque [but it is, unfortunately, possible]…