America

I am an American. That feels more like a confession of guilt than a celebration of my national identity. I was born tainted with original sin, or at least original jingoism. We still pay Marshall Islanders for nuclear fallout to which they were exposed. There are revolutionaries in central America whose faces were burned off with acid bought with tax dollars. Men are being drowned to coerce information from them, drones are murdering children, and we have been at war in Afghanistan for longer than both World Wars together. It seems to me that those who say they're proud to be American have not been paying careful attention.
Moreover, those who tout America's greatness invariably seek to demonstrate that the rules don't apply to us. International law, the rules of war, even the Geneva convention, all of these are mere bagatelles in the face of American Exceptionalism with a capital E. Demagogues, crypto-fascists, war profiteers, and their ilk are keen to spread the idea that America stands above such petty concerns. I am deeply suspicious of patriotism, and I tend to see ulterior motives.

I love my country

By which I mean

I am indebted joyfully

To all the people throughout its history

Who have fought the government to make right

Where so many cunning sons and daughters

Our foremothers and forefathers

Came singing through slaughter

Came through hell and high water

-Ani Difranco, Grand Canyon

All of this is not to say that I am not patriotic. I am deeply proud of a culture of resistance to the status quo. Those who have fought to make my country more just, and in places even succeeded, marginally. I am proud to live in a country where the right to vote is not contingent upon sex, race, ethnicity, or religion. I am proud to live in a country with strict laws about child labor, weekends, overtime, and a minimum wage. I am proud to live in a country where people have a right to write, publish, and disseminate works of controversial genius like Alan Ginsberg's "Howl":

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, 

--Alan Ginsberg, Howl

It is this great current of counterculture, as American as obscenity trials, that speaks to my soul. To me, this is what it means to be an American: to feel lost, contemptuous, and disgusted with the way my country operates, and to have the optimism to believe that something better is possible. This is not the counterculture of other countries, and in rejecting Americanism, I cannot do so without exercising a sort of Americanism of my own. Rejecting American jingoism is a proud American tradition. The idea that "traditional values" means a return to a fictionalized 1950s or Victorian nuclear family, an affirmation of patriarchy, and a specific brand of protestant theology, is anathema to me. These values are no more traditional, than the break with England. 

It is more interesting to go against the grain, and usually everyone is better for it. So if they outlaw sex-toys, we will sell them on the black market, because we support perverts and the persecuted (and there's good money in it). If they ban liquor, we will open speakeasies, because the freedom to decide what we put in our body is inalienable (and there's good money in it). When the government sets limits on what will be tolerated in print, we will fill bookstores with poorly-written lesbian pulp novels, and poems about anal sex, because we will write what we damn well please (and there is good money in it). When our parents ban jazz records, rock and roll, death metal, or trance, in each generation, we thumb our noses at them and kick up our heels at sock-hops, mosh pits, and raves.

This is who we are, and this is what makes me proud to be an American. When people ask me where I am from, I can say "America. I know. I'm sorry. We're working on it."

Where are you from?

"A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.

--By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that's so I'm a nation for living in the same place for the past five years.

 So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:

--Or also living in different places." -- James Joyce, Ulysses

Bloom's equivocal answer to the question "What is a nation?" is vexing. It is vague and impractical, but it is about the best I can do. So for this week I have set the question of nationhood aside, to handle something more personal: where am I from, and what makes me from there?

I was about six years old, and my mother was going through our old documents. Birth certificates, savings bonds, a few medical records, and mostly I was very bored. However, I had agreed to help, and I was determined to tough it out. I wanted to act grown-up, and as far as I could tell acting grown-up meant tolerating extremely boring things. We had just finished sorting the savings bonds, when she pulled out the gem: a certificate from Ellis Island. Not a proper record, but a print sold to tourists. The sort of thing that looks official enough to con the descendants of immigrants out of $20. To my six-year-old eyes it was a priceless artifact; a material connection to a family history that I didn't really understand.

The certificate had our family name, Lemke, some information about my great grandfather, and our nation of origin Bessarabia. This would definitely beat out Michael O.J.'s squirrel skull at show-and-tell. I ran to our globe (we had a computer, but we were not yet online), and I searched for Bessarabia. I knew my Grandmother spoke German, so I searched around Germany first, but to no avail. I combed through Europe, but it just wasn't there; this was a somewhat easier task than it would be today, because our globe still showed a united USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. I consulted with my mother, and she didn't know exactly where it was, but suspected that it was probably hidden in the Eastern Bloc. However at school, even the most up-to-date globes lacked a Bessarabia. Where had it gone?

Having lived through Soviet dissolution, I was dimly aware that a country could break up, but I thought there would be evidence. No one I knew had heard of Bessarabia, though admittedly my first grade class was pretty shaky on European geography. This was not helped by the fact that none of the maps seemed to agree, and the borders seemed to change regularly. Some years later, I worked out that Bessarabia was part of modern Moldova, Ukraine, and Romania, and my grandmother and her parents had likely left via Tiraspol or Akkerman (now called Bilhorod-Dnistovskyi) in modern Transnistria and Ukraine respectively.

You may have noticed that I threw in another country there

Transnistria is a semi-autonomous region of Moldova.

Transnistria is a an independent country that borders Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus. 

Transnistria is a Russian puppet state, bolstered exclusively by Russian arms in exchange for Russian access to oil and natural gas pipelines.

It very much depends on who you ask.

This is what sparked my interest in breakaway regions, balkanization, and frozen conflict zones. It begins with something important to who I am; where am I from? If the answer to that question is a place that no longer exists, what does that say of my heritage? Perhaps the just the names and the sovereignty changed, but the place is still culturally my "homeland."

What do I know of my culture?
My Grandma was a very sweet, very religious woman. My mother tells the story of nearly having our family ejected during a stay with her, because my father rented a movie that contained a sex scene. Religion also colored the cuisine we received from her, because she was an Adventist, the recipes were mostly from her peers in the church. Seventh Day Adventists are predominantly vegetarian, so the blood sausage, meaty cabbage wraps, and beef-stock soups were all abandoned in the old country. Though I did not know it at the time, one thing carried through, a love of corn. To this day, I will pour hot milk over day-old cornbread and relish the resulting gruel. Corn bread and mamaliga (that is Romanian polenta) is a foodstuff I can point to and say "this is my heritage." Gruel, war, and oppression are the birthright of all eastern Europeans.

Maize as the gruel-staple of choice supplanted millet in the 18th century, under Hapsburg rule. Like much of South Europe, my people cast off the Ottoman yoke, to exchange it almost immediately for an Austro-Hungarian one. Maria-Theresa, as a part of her benevolent despotism, encouraged the replacement millet with maize to combat the famine that was endemic to the region. Millet crops produce big yields, but it is prone to molding in the field and produced boom and bust years. Maize was a life-saver, and it has become a central feature of many Southern European cuisines. As with the tomato in Italy, paprika in Hungary, or the potato in Ireland, maize, and particularly mamaliga has become a staple of cuisine in the Romanian-speaking world.

Grandma, though, was abandoned by her husband when my mother was about seven. She had three children to feed, clothe, and raise, and mamaliga takes at least 40 minutes of stirring, and perhaps an hour of attention all together. Something practical for a housewife became an extravagance. Fortunately, America had the answer:

A box of Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix

Just the image is instant nostalgia; I can taste the muffins from here. This is as much my heritage as mamaliga, if not more. I decided that I'd had enough pondering the intricacies of material culture, and the time had come to do some practical research. I bought some polenta and a box of Jiffy corn muffin mix, and I roped the children in my house into a taste test. 

The recipes are simple and straightforward, but pretty different. The polenta was a ton of work, the water for it began to boil at about the same time as the muffins went in the oven, but they were out of the oven and fully cooled before the polenta was even halfway done. It's no easy job either, the polenta needs to be stirred constantly, whereas the muffins take hardly any mixing at all. The polenta was much easier to clean up though. I tasted them myself, and the jiffy muffins were much less pleasant than I remembered; more like a cupcake than a cornbread. The polenta, by contrast was chewy and rich, and much more to my taste. Fortunately, there were two children on hand to consult. Finn is 11 and Stella is 6, and they are both fairly adventurous eaters, as kids go. While both corn products went down pretty well, the corn muffin was a runaway favorite. 

So there it is, a little window into my grandmother's world; the children prefer the corn muffin and it is much easier to cook. She also probably hadn't considered that her 21st century grandchild would get all sentimental about "heritage" and wax romantic about mamaliga as a cultural connection to the past. As with so many people who are just trying to get by, food to her was just food, and the chief measure of its cultural significance was price per pound. I cannot tell you where my grandmother was from, or what it means to have a culture or a country, but I can tell you one thing: tomorrow morning I will form a gruel with the leftover cornbread, and honor her memory. 

Works Cited

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1984. Print.

The Case for Kosovo

What is a nation? When considering the developed world, the evidence seems clear. The institutions, and material effects of nationhood are all around us, and there is no ambiguity with regard to what government is in control, and certainly no question as to whether or not the government has the power to rule.

In Kosovo however, the situation is substantially less clear. Questions linger about what government is in control, what ethnicity and religious group that government (or those governments) represent, and what the relationship is between the current community and the historical Balkan province.

Animation of the Historical Borders in the Balkan Peninsula
imgur user "john_andrew_smith101"

History

An independent Kosovo is a historical novelty. While the memory of five centuries of Ottoman rule is still a real and painful memory for all Balkan people, unlike many other former Yugoslavian states, Kosovo had not been self-ruled since the Roman conquest of Dardania in the first century A.C.E. (Papazoglu 131). Prishtina was of prominent importance in the movement for Albanian independence, but in the collapse of the Ottoman empire Albania was nearly partitioned between Greece, Italy, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. While the US intervened on behalf of Albania, the tiny independent country only held about half of ethnic Albanians. The others found themselves exiled on their own land and ruled by Greece and Yugoslavia (specifically in Montenegro, Macedonia, and Kosovo) (Jelavich 100). Despite Communist promises to unite all workers, ethnic tensions in Kosovo grew under Tito, and even during the Economic boom of the early 70s, intermarriage between Serbs and the Albanian majority were very rare; rarer than interracial marriages per capita in the 1950s. While the Balkans balkanized, Kosovo remained a part of Serbia, and the ethnic tensions became civil war (Botev 32). Two projects of genocide followed, one by the Serbs and one by the Albanians. Roma, Turk, Gorani, and Egyptian minorities suffered heavily in both. Kosovo became a UN protectorate following the Kosovo war ("UN Resolution on Kosovo"), and about a decade later it declared independence, and it has been recognized by over 100 countries, about half of the United Nations ("International Recognitions Of The Republic Of Kosovo")

Countries Which Recognize Kosovo's Independence
Wikimedia Foundation

Controversy
Serbia does not recognize Kosovo's independence, and their claim to to sovereignty in Kosovo is backed by Russia and China. That means despite its widespread recognition, any bid for United Nation's membership would be vetoed. The Serbian position is that Kosovo is an semi-autonomous province called Kosovo and Metohija (or Kosmet for short), and that its government institutions are legitimate even if their claims to independence are not ("Adopting A Consensus Resolution"). Given the history of "ethnic cleansing" (i.e. genocide) in the region, there is a feeling on the part of some ethnic Serbs in Kosovo that Serbian rule, however insubstantial, is the only thing keeping them from oblivion, or sharing the fate of the Roma (most of whom still live in refugee camps throughout the former Yugoslavia). Moreover, Kosovo, while of little economic importance, is deeply important to Serbian nationalism and national identity (Anscombe 759). Based on the conversations I've had with Kosovars, Serbians, and Albanians on the internet, most people feel their governments are corrupt. I recognize that internet message boards are not a perfect sample of citizens, but I would say I have substantial anecdotal evidence that young people on the internet everywhere feel their governments are corrupt. Perhaps this is part of the nature of young people, or the nature of governments. In the case of Kosovo, their have been a few scandals involving government officials having social and financial connections with the Albanian mafia, and Several prominent political and military leaders at the time of the first Kosovo War were charged with crimes against humanity, but almost all were exonerated. Given the UN protectorship and NATO intervention in the conflicts in Kosovo, many Serbs feel that their exoneration was an example of international, Western, and NATO bias against Serbia. There is also a religious element to this conflict, as ethnically Albanian Kosovars are almost entirely Muslim, while the ethnic Serbian minority (or majority if one considers Serbia and Kosovo as a whole) are almost exclusively Eastern Orthodox Christians.

Grappling with Nationhood
A united "Greater Albania" is a 19th century dream. People's dreams of a united homeland for their ethnicity and group are always moving. It conjures images of home, community, and pride in identity. However, what counts as an ethnicity or a nationality is malleable, and any passing demagogue can make innocuous "pride in identity" and "right to self-determination" into powerful weapons to disrupt the social order and consolidate their power. As we have often seen in the Balkans, that power can then be used to commit atrocities. Even in Albania proper, there are those who would further divide the country between Ghegs and Tosks, or between Muslims, Christians, and nonreligious. I am deeply sympathetic to the suffering of the Kosovar people, and not least the ethnic Albanians. They have demonstrated their capacity to rule themselves, and Serbian rule is essentially a political fiction, I would be the last to propose re-Yugoslavization. Kosovo is a country, but our recognition of Kosovo should not merely be an acknowledgement of the political reality. How can a country move forward on a foundation of ethnic strife and genocide? (Actually historically nations have been very successful building on a foundation of ethnic strife and genocide; there is nothing like an oppressed class to bolster a ruling majority.) So in sum, there is the question of whether a nation is a political reality, and whether a nation is ethical to acknowledge.

"Adopting Consensus Resolution," UN News Center. UN, 9 Sept. 2010. Web. 07 Apr. 2016. <http://www.un.org/press/en/2010/ga10980.doc.htm>.
Anscombe, Frederick (2006) The Ottoman empire in recent international politics II: the case of Kosovo. The International History Review 28 (4), pp. 758-793.
Botev, Nickolai. "SEEING PAST THE BARRICADES: Ethnic Intermarriage in Yugoslavia During the Last Three Decades." Anthropology of East Europe Review 11.1 (1993): 29-38. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
"International Recognitions Of The Republic Of Kosovo." Republic of Kosovo Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Web. 07 Apr. 2016. <http://www.mfa-ks.net/?page=2,224>.
Jelavich, Barbara. History of the Balkans. Bd. 2: Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.
Papazoglu, Fanula. The Central Balkan Tribes in Pre-Roman Times: Triballi, Autariatae, Dardanians, Scordisci and Moesians. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1978. Print.
"UN Resolution on Kosovo" BBC News. UN Security Council, 10 June 1999. Web. 07 Apr. 2016. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/371562.stm>.