"The Ford Foundation has terminated its Soviet/East European Fellowship
Program at Columbia University." - wrote Barbara Singleton of The
Harriman Institute at the Columbia University to me on October 14, 1994. So,
yet another foundation has terminated its Soviet/East European program
following the demise of Soviet/East European 'evil empire'. It seems that only
Soros keeps up with it. However, his Open Society Fund promotes a different
agenda: anti-nationalism comes in place of anti-communism. But this is unfair
to us who finally got the wall down crumbling. Nobody gives any credit to my
generation of Soviet/East Europeans. Programs that paid some fun college time
in the West to previous generations of Soviet/East European non-conformists
are terminated, and new programs do not recognize the victims of old regimes
as -well - victims. So, those who came here right before communism suffocated
are fucked, because they cannot prove their victimization in the new,
nationalist, regimes. Ironically, their civil disobedience, for which they
were fervently persecuted, ultimately brought the wall down and now they have
to go back, get themselves beaten and thrown in prison AGAIN. Get their
passports taken away from them AGAIN. Go through all that shit yet AGAIN, and
then, when they finally make it back here, they can count on some help. Of
course, if the new nationalist regime doesn't collapse in the meantime, giving
way to some other totalitarian monstrosity. Then it's their bad luck.
Another application. Name. Last name. Address. Daytime phone. Nighttime phone. Social security number. Last three employers. Educational background. References. Numbers. Are you a U.S. citizen? By birth? By naturalization? By choice? By life? By the method of elimination of all other choices? More papers. More dull applications, lame forms, exhausting questionnaires and tons of useless papers to file. Same information asked. Why don't they just ask each other about me? Every day the same. File it. Write another letter. Would I make it if I deliver it crawling? I am not important anyway. Therefore, the way how I deliver the application is not important, either. What the papers say about me, THAT is important, since they trust papers. Nobody trust me. Nobody trust in me. Because I write the truth about myself in those damn papers. Then the papers are no good. They don't satisfy guidelines. So, I should lie. Then I'd be trusted. Then I'd satisfy the guidelines. I should just give one or two hundred dollars bribe to any university in Croatia to quickly write me a diploma, so that those nauseating bureaucrats at Columbia's School of Journalism might chew on something.
At one point, when I already had an admirable collection of various rejection
letters, wether they were from prospective employers, eucational institutions
or scolarship providers, and when I just decided that I didn't care if I would
receive any more of them, I received a letter from Beka Vuco, administrator
for the former Yugoslavia at the George Soros's Open Society Fund. OSF and
George Soros have shown an unmatched profound understanding of the events in
the Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia. However, George Soros do not
really oversee OSF's dealing with any street schmuck, like me. He has his
Harvard speeches. Beka is the one who takes care of everyday pains in the ass.
I have never spoken to a person who would tell me how she or he liked Beka Vuco very much. My only previous contact with her was when I tried to get OSF to give some money for Croatian Monitor -the radio programm in Croatian language I run here with a friend on the multiethnic station. She spent two hours explaining me to the last minusculous detail why that was impossible under the OSF holly guidelines. From my friends that have been dealing with her more extensively I got the picture that she has a heart size of the eye pupil under heavy dose of heroin, and the compassion of an average New York subway car. Well, maybe Soros wanted her just like that: cheap, strict, nagging, unflexible - to better guard his money. Her fiscal philosophy of this year is the same as the one of the previous year: I reject, therefore I am.
Since, reportedly, she is unmarried and without kids, and, honestly, I doubt if she has even a cat to care about, those who were more malicious would say: "Yeah, who would live with her, anyway?!" But I don't think she is an evil kind of person. Her "goodness" is merely channeled in a different way. She belongs to a well defined group of American women: overzealous activist type leaning left of centre, mesmerized by the liberal guilt, dedicating their lives to civil rights or human rights or homeless or poor or AIDS or animal rights or whichever other collective tragedy happened to plague our ugly little planet. In their universal care they do not want to be bored by the individual tragedies.
They want to develope a policy, a set of rules, that would envelop the problem itself, providing fixed guidelines that would then be used to deal with the individual beholders of the problem. It is the same unfortunate mistake, modern doctors do: trying to cure the disease instead of helping patients. It is easier that way for care-providers: they can shield themselves from individual suffering behind their rules, behind their corporate offices, their elaborate voice-mail systems, and, at the lunch break, or at the tea chat, they can still assert themselves as non-for-profit-do-gooders to their peers.
It is so noble to care about many at the time, and to be able to come up with
a smart solution that would apply to entire group. The problem is that the
individual is forgotten. And every individual is different. And no individual
is "an average individual" which fit the gudeliness remainlessly.
And some individuals are even very special. They are different from the
"many". Although they are malaised by the same disease, they are an
exception to the rules the do-gooders developed to take care about that
disease. Under present system based on an impersonal "object
approach", they, no matter how clever or beautifull otherwise they are,
have no future. They are convicted without ever being found guilty, just
because they do not fit the rules which were devised precisely to help people
like them.
Of course, such a paradoxical situation is a very frustrating one. Also it is a clear case of hypocrysy among the do-gooders. They, supposedly fighting discrimination, designed guidelines that left some people on the sidelines, thus creating another, tho more subtle, discrimination. I am discriminated against by Beka Vuco and her alikes because I am not a stencil of their perfect refugee from Yugoslavia. In their fantastic world of an American human rights activist, that's as far from Yugoslav reality, as Matterhorn mountain in Disneyland is from mortared ski slopes on mountain Bjelasnica above Sarajevo, they created US as they wanted US to be. If we do not fit that projection, FUCK US. That's the policy. Those are the guidelines. And they consider themselves humanists and human rights champions. Fuck them.
Oh, certainly, I had to ceremonially add Beka's letter to my gala collection of "thank you for your interest...but unfortunately we don't need you...so, have a nice day" letters.
Nevertheless, this steadily narrows my options to the Final Solution. I don't really complain. I had an interesting life. In my thirty years I lived maybe sixty or seventy average years, so I may as well consider myself to be really 75 years old, and then, if I, too, like Beka Vuco, create my own fantastic reality, I may even die now without remorse. Although I do have to complete the sky-diving first. Sky-diving at seventyfive should be the ultimate fun, shouldn't it?
And then I see that elderly couple removing flyers, offering the one-man-with-the-van moving service, from the lightpost on the corner of 83rd and Park.
Grandmother takes the flyers off, while the grandfather stands guard.
Defenders of the revolution. Apparently those flyers were being an eye-sore to
the overwhelmingly aging neighbourhood. On the other hand, some younger guy,
eventually a guy of my age, spent probably entire day to post those fliers
around the hood in a desperate attempt to get some work in our more & more
depressed society, only for those old farts to come in around early evening
like hyenas to remove the fliers. He did not vandalize any of their precious
cultural landmark facades -just the freaking light posts. Suddenly I wished
for Mickey and Mallory to be around.
But, they couldn't. They can't cross to our world. So, I should go to theirs. There is nothing good in our world. All that is good is in dreams, in the virtual world. Our world is fighting against that good. Our world actively and maliciously impedes dreams of coming through. So, I should, I shall go.
Then, occasionaly, in a world so devoid of justice, an
impulse of justified anger unfolds in a desperate, unjustifiable act, like
in movies. After midnight, a day before my thirtieth birthday, Frank Eugene
Corder, a man who had recently suffered multiple losses in his life, crashed a
stolen Cessna into the White House, two stories below the presidential
bedroom. He was dead on impact. Mr. President did not sleep at home that
night, and White House is not really vulnerable to Cessnas. But, what a way to
go!
Corder is from Aberdeen. Aberdeen, Maryland. Aberdeens seem to be cloudy, rainy and plagued by bad luck. Kurt Cobain was from Aberdeen, too: Aberdeen, Washington.
