At this very moment my neuroplastic consciousness believes that God is an octopus and that his name is Paul. Because that’s what happens when you’ve more-or-less become an Internet junkie. I spend hours watching the YouTube video, over and over. I watch Paul’s supple tentacles open the box with the Spanish flag. Why the one with the Spanish flag? I ask myself. Then I quickly remember that it’s not my place to ask questions—God knows. And then I foggily remember the cry from the stands at village fairs—“The white mouse shows his nous!” A small fee to the owner and the white mouse would pull a scrap of paper from a hat, each scrap bearing a suitably portentous message, just like the ones hidden in fortune cookies.
In English God and Dog are inextricably linked. In my search for God my life has become that of a Dog. Google has drilled a dog’s loyalty into me, and with tongue dangling out, I obediently toddle around after my master. My master’s hand beckons me with a divine bone, but it’s one he never lets go.
So here I am, back at the beginning. God is a trickster. And God’s son, Jesus, is a trickster too (after all, isn’t he the one who turned water into wine and fed thousands with just a couple of sardines?!). But the creator of the Internet is the biggest trickster of them all. He took two things—panem et circenses—and joined them in an unshakeable union: in a game as vital as our daily bread, a game that really is our bread.
July 2010
CANS OF TUNA FISH AND THE EUROPEAN CLASSICS
I’d be hard-pressed to claim that Europe is coming apart at the seams. All I know is that a friend of mine, a Dutch writer, decided to put aside his career as a writer for a while and actively stand up to the imminent crisis. He opened a how-to-survive-the-recession advice center. Work is booming, and the newly minted “crisis coach” has no complaints. Except that his own transition, he says, sounds like a bad joke.
Another Dutch friend of mine, a journalist, lost her job. She turned the living room of her apartment into a kitchen. She makes pâtés and sells them to fine restaurants and specialty food stores. Her work is going well, and she has no complaints. The only thing is, as she remarks with a tinge of melancholy, she is up to her elbows in meat.
Seen from without, everything seems to be in its place. Venice hasn’t sunk; the tower in Pisa stands firmly aslant. But every now and then a seam rips open somewhere: immigrant youths go wild in Paris suburbs and smash everything in sight, the young of Athens are in a frenzy, and then the northern dominoes topple: Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn. For the wild and embittered players in these incidents, the media word is hooligan. This word, by the way, was in lively usage during communist times. Back then they called boys who sported Elvis-Presley haircuts hooligans. European hooligan outbursts are treated in the media almost as if they are meteorological phenomena, like a sudden hurricane, for instance. Once the hurricane has passed, the media stitch up the seams as skillfully as if there had never been seams at all — until the next hurricane strikes.
Internet sites about the world recession have the drawing power of porno sites. I can’t say the recession has much to do with pornography, but I do know that Charlotte Roche’s book Wetlands has had a Botox-like effect on the European masses: The worry lines have been smoothed on German faces. Every country has its Charlotte Roche. This is how ordinary people forget for a moment that they have been, or will be, laid off; they forget their worries about their children and how to get them through school, about evaporating welfare funds and the future, which no one, besides the blessed who have drowned in denial, imagines in the form of tourist ads for travels in the southern seas.
Ordinary Europeans ooze solidarity. The circulation of human cargo — thanks to the fall of the Berlin wall (Europe is celebrating the 20th anniversary this year!) and the benefits of globalization — is greater now than ever. First Polish plumbers went off to fix plumbing from Dublin to Madrid, then Romanians flooded European train stations with their accordions. Young Moldovan teachers joined the western European prostitutes who were soliciting on every corner of Europe; Bulgarian women are fine maids in the homes of western Europe; Albanians are clever traffickers and pimps; Serbs and Croats are trusty drug smugglers; Croatian women are sought as caregivers for the Italian elderly, while Slovakian women tend to the elderly in Germany and the Netherlands. Ordinary people, the Wessies and Ossies, have struck up a dialogue.
If Europe is not coming apart at the seams, the idea of European multiculturalism is showing its cracks. Romanians pelt a Gypsy (because he is a Romanian just as they are); Hungarians flog a Romanian (thinking he’s a Gypsy). Dutchmen trounce a Moroccan; Moroccans thrash a Dutchman. Italians clobber a Romanian, an Albanian, or whomever they can grab. The number of Europeans complaining that Jews are getting the cushy jobs in banking and politics is mushrooming. Apparently this is because of Gaza and the recession, they say (history clearly is not the teacher of life!). The young, self-appointed champions of national values, in some places called street gangs, elsewhere (as in Hungary) called the young guards, go after someone every other minute: The Russians go after people with non-Russian faces, Croats thrash a tourist (thinking he’s a pedophile), Serbs clobber a Gypsy (claiming he’s gay), Bulgarians beat up a Turk, Austrians a non-Austrian, the Italians a Moldovan, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian master of life and death, has forbidden people to die. People are edgy, but for now, as far as the analysts are concerned, these are merely incidents.
Ordinary people in the West and the East are sinking slowly into the underclass, according to the sociologists. They’re losing their faith in banks, courts, institutions and politicians, though a majority of them gave their free votes, what a paradox, to those same politicians. Indeed, some western European politicians, (those transitional leaders of the people who thumped the nationalist drums, the semi-criminals and criminals, the profiteers, smugglers of cigarettes and guns, the liars, compromisers — don’t offer much hope. Political apathy and a deficit of social imagination are on the rise.
Europe is holding on tight despite it all, and even if seams were ripping, all were magically re-sewn on the day of Obama’s inauguration. Many Europeans roused from their political lethargy, put down their bottles of beer, and listened to Obama’s address with rapt attention. Obama (briefly or not?) united millions of legal European citizens of non-European origin; he united the French, the Moroccans and Dutch, the Walloons and Flemish, the German Turks and Germans, the Serbs and Croats, the Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims. Even the Slovenes momentarily forgot their quibbles with Croats over the Adriatic on the day of Obama’s inauguration. What was the trick? Obama succeeded in doing something not a single European politician has been able to do. People believed him. Obama gave the word change back its credibility; he gave solemnity to the word hope; he made the word future real. Obama brought back forgotten values. One of them is decency. With Obama, many not only feel better, they have, at least for a moment, become better.