A delicate subject

Today I am writing about a delicate subject, one which I cannot quite get my head around.  I may say something false.  I trust my readers to be charitable.

It seems to me that among Czechs there are two possible polar and opposed attitudes towards Americans, and, I speculate, foreigners in general.

When I need to wash my clothes, I have to deal with a sort of oppressed class, the door-keepers of the University's dormitories.   I know their job is boring, and can't be well paid.  And I suspect that they may have a supervisor who is not always kind.  But to me they often seem cold, indifferent, or even sour.  In the past, some were overtly friendly--so long as one didn't ask too many questions.  In my first three months, I did manage to achieve a sort of friendship with one lady, in a building where I then lived.  She has been the exception.

Of course, it is a pain in the ass to put my name on a waiting list for washing machines.  And it is a nuisance to spend time walking across a busy street with nervous, impatient cars that may or may not slow down to allow you to cross ( an obscenity) to the enormous dormitory which houses students, and request the keys to the (a) washing machines, (b) laundry room.

Not only are the machines behind a locked door.  Each machine requires a key to use.  That seems like excessive paranoia to me.  Who thought up that sort of idiocy?

Is the University so short of funds that it must extract every last crown from every visiting scholar, teacher, and student?

Just as in the city buses--with their proud labels telling us to thank the EU for funding--use the latest technology to monitor passengers and make sure no one rides without paying.  In fact, the large boxes which allow a passenger to prove that he or she has paid take up an inordinate amount of space on the grab bars in the bus---which would otherwise be useful for the passenger to grab hold of and prevent falling over. When I ride those buses, by the way, I don't feel grateful to the EU. On the contrary, the buses are nothing special.  They are high off the ground, and bounce around like an amusement park ride--but there is nothing amusing about a bus ride.  And I won't even mention the fact that the buses  today are routinely over-crowded just as were the buses in Bratislava in 1996 when I rode them then.  So much for the great progress represented by EU membership.

I suggest, hypothesize, dare to suggest that among Czechs there are two contradictory attitudes toward Americans:  either naive admiration or a kind of cold discomfort  That's been my experience.  I wasn't surprised that a dishonest American had managed to go to a local film festival pretending to be a famous actor.  When I heard that story, I am sorry to say that my reaction was to say that this was not surprising.  

Those who admire America (the USA)--often on the basis of dubious and incomplete evidence--are aware of the xenophobes among them, and regard them with disdain.

I am caught in the middle.  My country is not democratic but plutocratic, imperialist, and racist.   Those words cannot be said or heard.  If I say them, my audience typically scoffs at me in a tone suggesting I am an idiot or a fool.  

There is much to say here, but I think the essential problem was described in the well-known book that (I am told) no one reads, in Hašek's adventures of Schwejk.  And that must be the ultimate irony.  Here's a book which pre-dates Communism, and which diagnoses the problem.  It is a book which political leaders bestow upon foreign visitors, while they indulge policies which illustrate the madnesses described by Hašek.  (Why should membership in NATO, to take an example any more serve the interests of the Czech Republic than participation in the army of the Austrian Emperor?)

I hear a voice saying:  You shouldn't complain; it's better than communism.  (This is a locally opular universal retort, a universal conversation (and thought) stopper.)

And another voice says:  Yankee go home!---But, then why am I here?  Well, I have something here I wouldn't have if I did return home:  health insurance.....