Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part Twenty-Six: From a 1990 portal, Sportstime Pizza to Rich O’s BBQ to NABC.
Editor’s note: The black and white photos appearing in this chapter were taken by Viktor Kolář (born in Ostrava in 1941), who is considered “one of the most important exponents of Czech documentary photography. In his works, Kolář focuses mainly on depicting urban life in the Ostrava region.” Most of these photos date to the rough period of my visit in 1989, and they depict reality as I saw it.
It never ceases to amaze me that Americans tend to focus so obsessively on the phenomenon of immigration; specifically, as it pertains to those people elsewhere on the planet who seek to come to our country, whether their movement occurred 200 years ago or yesterday, but ignoring the plain fact that throughout the centuries, the vast majority of human beings have chosen to live their lives right where they are.
My countrymen seem collectively prone to weird, masochistic delight in thumping their chests and loudly proclaiming we’re the greatest country to ever exist (why does this even matter, anyway?), and then, when someone somewhere else agrees and wants to come over and join this lovely party, we become petulant, make their arrival as difficult as possible (or exclude them outright), and lose our damn minds in the process.
During the 1980s I chose to travel beyond the Wall, inside the then-communist nations of east-central Europe, and it seemed to me that most of the people living in these places wanted to stay there and improve their own homes. What’s more, by no means all of them were unhappy with the systems they inhabited, as repressive as Americans might have found them to be.
But it was complicated, and when communism came to a close, the geopolitical experts set forth their verdicts: there was ample experience concerning the way a capitalist society becomes communist, though not the other way around. Beginning in 1990, in places like Czechoslovakia, the laboratory experiment of mass reversion began, with the citizenry serving as human guinea pigs.
As late as the spring of 1990, it hadn’t occurred to me that I might find myself witnessing the changeover up close, but that’s what happened. The thought process began serendipitously in 1989 when I was introduced to a man named Ladislav for our first and only meeting.
Ladislav was a trim, polite, vaguely aristocratic older...Read more
