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Reply-To: Conference "zamir.chat" 
From: Ivo Skoric 
Subject: SCARY THINGS
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From: Ivo Skoric 

So, the U.S. gets ready to deploy 20,000 troops to Bosnia., and of
course they want Russians

on their side.  Russian involvement is crucial: Russia would be
less likely to supply weapons

to Serbs, if Russian troops are on the ground exposed to those
weapons.  But who would

command such a "bipartisan" force of two former cold war enemies?
Americans favor NATO.

But Yeltsin can't possibly sell that to his army: they'll see that
as an ultimate defeat.  Nobody

favors UN, because UN showed to be bad at military stuff with its
redundant bureaucracy.

And, well, it is obvious that there has to be a single command if
the operation is to succeed.

Either Americans or Russians should command the force, then.  But
are they ready to accept

each other's command?  No. The illusion that cold war ended may
break over Bosnia.  Few

events however show the way: Russia behaves uncivilized, kind of
barbaric, in Chechenya,

and nobody seems much to bother; World Bank actually endorses a 6
billion dollars loan

program to Russia...

America might want to buy the command of joint Bosnia task force.
This is a typical

American way of doing things.  So, we'd have American officers and
Russian and American

(preferably minorities) foot soldiers, and Russian military is
going to get paid off.  They

desperately need money, which Russian economy can't provide.  The
only problem is that

American economy can't provide that money, either.  But isn't it
so American to buy things

with money that you don't have?  The U.S. will do some
fund-raising in Western Europe,

which is kind of paralyzed with never-ending war in Bosnia, so
close to home, and which is

scared to death of hungry Russian army and all the Plutonium they
have.  I guess if Germans

don't agree immediately to foot the bill, there will be some more
Plutonium discovered on

Frankfurt airport.

This is the American way of doing peacekeeping that would I
believe actually be acceptable to

Congress: Russians risk their lives, Germans pay for that, and
Americans keep the command.

Victor's spoils.

 -/-


Yesterday I was at Halloween bash at the Croatian Center.
Croatian Center in New York is

adjunct to the Croatian Catholic church (near Port Authority)
which is maintained by

franciscans.  Huge Roseland-ish barren dance hall with prevailing
grey and franciscan beloved

dark brown colors, a huge Croatian coat of arms chandelier and
frescos of Croatian (and

Bosnian) cities that ador the walls, was decorated with paper
scelethons and other Halooween

paraphernalia, and my friend Boris appeared in full drag wining
the third costume prize.

Obviously our priest skipped all the upheaval in the news about
Halloween being proclaimed a

Satanic holiday by some Christians. I guess we could safely invoke
Satan there.  The Center is

also a place of freedom from certain restrictive laws for younger
kids.  Who would ever think

that the church would have to resort to cheap beer to keep the
community from dissipating in

the American mainstream?  Yet, secretive are the ways of our
Lord.

There is something that Croats and Irish have in common: no party
is a good party if it doesn't

end in a good, though senseless, fistfight.  Probably, this is the
way how we get rid of excess

calories accumulated by too much beer.  D.J. and the local wedding
band kept music upbeat

and contemporary until around midnight.  Then they played some
songs of Croatian rock

bands, and then, inavoidably, they played some Croatian nationaist
folk songs (like "Evo zore,

evo dana, evo Jure i Bobana"), knowledge of which is a kind of
rite of passage to any Croatian

teenager in the U.S. Those with more "guts" would climb the stage
and grab Croatian flag

(which of course is at hand in a Croatian Center), or if they want
to show how high their

testosterone levels really are they'll give a stiff-armed salute.
This is bound to piss-off their

elders, who try hard to rid Croatia of its Nazi-past image.  But
also this makes their elders

proud, because it confirms that kids are defiant, ready to do
anything for "the cause", that they

belong to "the cause".  And kids sense that ambivalence. That's
why I call this a rite of

passage.

Controversial songs and gestures however always produce upsetting
situations.  And now with

Croatia winning the war "over there", a lot of people here started
to believe that rite of passage

is stupid, needless, useless, ultimately harmful for "the cause".
This antagonism nevertheless

just fuels the kids rebellion - because after all for a teenager
this is a kind of rebellion against

"the system" without an ulterior motive.  This creates an absurd
situation in which cool kids

will fight to protect what they believe is their right to perform
basically a disgusting ritual (a

reverse example of the "message from the messenger dividing" from
the Farrakhan-March).

At one point around 2 am some pushing started on the edge of the
dance area, then a punch

flew and one guy was suddenly lying on the floor, and the "all-out
war" broke out, which

resulted in dozens of bloody heads and some damaged property.  I
felt weird, surreal, standing

in the middle of that fight, like in the eye of tornado.  Nobody
touched me.  I guess those

hours in the gym paid off.  Nobody also seemed to have a grsp of
the reason why the fight

brought up.  More they fought by inertia, you know, situation is
heated, you say a wrong

word, you get hit, then you have to punch back, and then your
friends and his friends get

involved and somebody fall on the floor and then the rest of the
crowd gets involved to kick

the shit out of him (this particularly cute habit has its own term
in Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian:

"cipelariti" - which means to kick somebody with your boots while
he is lying on the floor; our

language is full of very specific language to describe various
fighting practices, god knows

why).

The fight went on and off for about twenty minutes.  Then finally
adrenaline levels dropped

and everybody calmed down.  The original perpetrators disappeared
(they got more bloodied,

too).  So, I went around to talk to kids who seemed to be the
target of the original attack.  The

oldest was born in 1973.  The one who got kicked first, Vanja, is
a tall, lanky, kind of guy

you'd not be afraid to hit.  He thought I was on their side.  Good
for me.  It seems that other

side thought the same.  So, I asked him what precisely was "his
side", because I find hard to

be on somebody's side if I don't know either who he is or which
side is he on.  He was the

"ustasha" side, he said.  Fantastic: here I have a regular
American high school kid with his

baseball cap turned backwards, baggy pants, zits, and all,
slurring through consonant-intensive

Croatian language, still hyped-up that he was the first guy to get
hit, and he is an "ustasha."

So, what were the other guys?  "Chetnicks", he said.  But they
weren't.  They were Croats,

too.  But they were the ones who started the fight.  I told him
that I was not exactly on his

side, but I didn't get hit.

Vanja's friend, in process of tending to his fresh head bump, said
that fight was over

"ustashtvo", too.  Another of his friends said that the other guys
stepped on Croatian flag (I

didn't have another side available at that point to cross-check,
and I did not witness stepping

on flag event). Finally I could see the core of the attacked group
of kids.  The actually fared

better than attackers.  Two punks, judging by haircut and
dresscode, one guy with a joker hat

and heavy make-up and few other kids.  They were calmed and
consoled by Hrvoje and Kreso

and few other a little older guys there.  The older guys actually
tried to stop the fight and call

to reason, but it simply did not work until the fighters exhausted
their hormonal high.  More

interesting, girls fought, too.  Trying to get their boyfriends
out of the frying pan.

Hrvoje and Kreso did not fight.  Which is highly unusual,
particularly for Kreso, widely

known to fight all the time and who even got in the fight on my
birthday party.  He eventually

put his nature to "good" use by joining the Croatian Army.  Now
with the war over, he is back

and he just put through the post-trauma disorder stuff, he got
himself a beautiful wife and he

seems to be much more tempered, now.  He was never really a bad
guy.  Kind of raw and

rowdy, though.  Girlfriends of my girlfriend, p.c. Barnard college
graduates, despised him, I

remember.  So, he found his wife in Croatia: actually in Zagreb
few blocks away from the

place where I lived when I went to college and worked on Radio 101
there.

Tanja is beautiful and two years younger than my younger brother.
She said that she was

relieved that she found Kreso.  I bet.  Green card and stuff, huh?
But not only that.  Kreso,

who might be mucho macho for American college standards, is well
bellow obnoxious

machismo of contemporary post-war Croatia.  She said that all of
the cool guys of her

generation from our city (Zagreb) either left the country or died
(or lost a leg or something) in

the war, and that all of the Zagreb downtown clubs are crowded by
irritating guys, so-called

refugees from Hercegovina, who somehow escaped the war while boys
from Zagreb and Split

were dying to liberate their villages, who have plenty of money
from their relatives working in

the Germany and in the U.S., and who behave, in her words,
"primitive" and "intolerable".

Also, there are no more fistfights.  They all carry guns.  Zagreb
kids are sometimes afraid to

go out at night in their own clubs in their own capital city of
their own free, independent and

sovereign country, she said.  My friend Sasa, just called me from
Croatia a minute ago and

confirmed that Hercegovci-bashing is talk of the city in Zagreb.
He also said that they

dominate the Zagreb's main square (Trg Bana Jelacica), while
"real" Zagrebans meat at the

south-west corner known as "Spica", which was a place where
usually Dalmatians from Split

would hang-out before the war.  There are no more Dalmatians,
now.

Curiously, there was a group of Bosnians at the party.  Kids from
Sarajevo.  Muslims by

names. Fortunately, nobody pointed to them when the fight brought
up, and they did not fight.

Good for the bad guys.  Ibrahim, who came to the U.S. with his
sister, still did not hear of his

parents who were lost somewhere in the ethnic cleansing.  He
played waterpolo for his high-school and won a second place in
sit-ups championship in Queens, being the only white kid in

the first fifty. They figured out correctly that, since Bosnia and
Croatia are now a con-federation, and since Croatian Center
carries frescos of Sarajevo and Mostar (with the bridge,

of course) on its walls, it is their center, too.

Later my friends took me to Village Idiot to get drunk the redneck
way and forget the

embarassment of the stupid fight (I was really pissed). Village
Idiot smells like the bottom of

the beer barrell, and its bartenders dressed in jeans and bras
will spray you with Coca-Cola or

other non-alcocholic beverage if you dare to order it.  The beer
is cheap, the setting is sipmle

(you know, the pool table, juke box and a pinball; odd chairs).
Likeable.  Pabst Blue Ribbon

beer is also available for connoisseurs of real white trash
ambience. Boris had bigger breasts

than any of bartenders and they joked about it.  Still he failed
to extort free beer from them.

Andrew raved up the juke-box with some Merle Haggart.  He told me
to listen carefully the

words of "Okie from Muskogee".  I was pleased to hear that
American entertainment industry

was able to produce something even worse than "Evo zore, evo
dana".  Then I had to wait

forever for Andrew who wanted to pick up a bartender, which he
failed.  Well, better luck

next time.

-/-

Being at the redneck place:

Fuhrman moved to Idaho, where his protective neighbours obviously
don't think that he is

some kind of new Adolf Hitler, or maybe, given the preponderance
of White Aryan presence

in that state, they don't care if he is. And Nation Of Islam
didn't hesitate to provide

bodyguards for the attorney of their fallen brother, suddenly
reborn to his blackness. It seems

that it is enough to define yourself just by the simplest belief -
like "niggers are bad", or "jews

are bloodsuckers" - to gain acceptance in certain communities.
Like in former Yugoslavia at

some point at the end of eighties suddenly became chic to be a
nationalist radical, and we all

know how that turned out.

This is the biggest problem with so-called humanist left: they ask
too many questions. They

are politically correct to the point of uselessness. Like most of
the foundations that give grants

for art or scholarships or stuff like that are run either by left
of center p.c. guys or by

mainstream corporate right, and their agendas, mostly aimed to
preserve status quo, are

already dangerously close. If you want to get anything from them
you must carefully study

how to present yourself as to fall right into their fantastically
narrow guidelines: like you have

to be a black, female eskimo from south Kamchatka who came to the
U.S. before 1991, but

not before 1989 and who love skunks.

That's where the radical right comes in: they offer acceptance to
a broad range of people who

satisfy just one single condition. So, it is no surprise that they
have such a strong appeal. Only

system on the left which was so marketable was Stalin's communism:
raw, simple, no

nuances, succesful. Of course, simplest ideas are usually ideas of
hate, which is natural: since

when we desire something we are usually ambivalent and we have all
sorts of complex

thoughts analyzing pros and cons, etc. - and when we don't want
it, we just don't. Since the

principle of appeal is negative and exclusive, and range of
audience is broad, inclusive, almost

universal (given that all applicants satisfy the only principle),
it assures for all sort of shady

sick characters to join, which eventually brings any such radical
left or right system down. But

their appearances through history are nevertheless naturally
warranted by the inability of

humans to build a sincerely compassionate political system: once
they get tired of usual

bureaucratic crap, they go for the extreme for few years, and then
it' again the usual crap.

I am really curious about how would that turn out in the U.S.


Ivo Skoric