I had a wicked cold, but I guess it's mostly better these days, and just in time too, because we finally got our national health insurance cards yesterday. I love this insurance thing. I know that there are many companies in the USA that provide insurance for their employees, and it wouldn't be too difficult for me to hook up with one of those when we come back. But that's not the point. I like that it is a societal value that everyone, regardless of level of education or the careerness of their jobs, or the size of the company they work for, or any other factor—regardless of any external factors, it is a societal value that everyone should have access to a doctor and to medicine. Health lies outside the market economy, and believe me, you can see capitalism in people’s eyes now that they have a taste for it, now that they can finally participate in the good life with the rest of the world after 40 dark years. They are working hard here to get up to speed. It frustrates them to no end that they had been part of the Empire that ran half of Europe for centuries. They were one of the most industrialized nations in the world between the wars, and then they spent 40 years waiting in banana lines while the rest of Europe built itself back up from the ashes of World War II.

It's so strange to be in the place where so much history happened. I am not neglecting American history when I say this, because America has its own interesting patchwork of historical places and moments, but a history much older than I could ever imagine in America marched through these streets, and is still walking around in the shadows today. All that communism stuff that we heard so much about was here, was day-to-day life for everyone. Napoleon is not a funny little man with one hand in his lapel in a painting. He marched right through and conquered Brno on his way to Moscow, in the not so recent past, because really, 1810 was practically yesterday. There is a phrase I have heard a few times since I've been here that really makes the point: In Europe, 100 miles is a long way; in America, 100 years is a long time. A building downtown has a plaque written in Czech near the door: "W. A. Mozart lived here, November 1789 to January 1790." I’m making up the years because I can’t remember exactly. It was only three months, and I can’t help but think that the plaque is is exactly like all those "George Washington slept here" signs you’d see all over New England. But anyway, the Czechs. You can see such fierce pride from them. They are the first to tell you that they live in a small, relatively unimportant country in central Europe. Don’t dare call this eastern Europe. That’s Ukraine and Bulgaria and places like that. Speaking of which, I think Ukrainians here are much like Mexicans in America. Since Ukraine’s economy is only getting worse with time (15% of the national budget every year goes to dealing with the aftermath of Chernobyl, and they’re still having the hardest time getting up to speed with this whole post-communism thing), so the Ukrainians all flood next door to try to find work, sometimes legally, sometimes otherwise. At the foreign police, where we had to go to register after we got our visas, there were six doors: Four for Ukrainians, two for everyone else. The head of the English Department told us that they had a small Ukrainian boy living with them for a while. His mother would call occasionally, mentioning that she’d been paid that month in potatoes rather than cash, and could they please send her some money. Only in the Ukraine would they consider the Czechs rich enough to donate money to anyone. The Czechs know they are not rich. They can afford a modest living, but only if they buy domestically produced things. A pair of Levi’s costs most of a day’s wages for your average worker.

I keep getting sidetracked. I started talking about health care. After communism went the way of the dodo, people wanted to get as far as possible from it. We are told that all of the political science majors and grad students these days are fiercely right-wing, because anything appearing the least bit left is frighteningly close to the c-word (well, here it’s a k-word, but you get the idea). While still very wary of America and American influence and the hyper-consumerism that America represents, they want the free market like nobody’s business. They just want to base it on a European model. And they want nothing to do with political correctness. All my English students know exactly what it is, and they laugh. Americans are not really free, they argue, because they cannot really speak their minds. It seems like Czechs tend to see American left-wing ideas as quaint, because they lived under a hyper left-wing government for so long, and saw the consequences of those ideas taken to their extremes. (See Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron.) You could not own anything, because everything was publicly owned. You paid monthly for your house, but it belonged to the government. If you lived in a high-rise, the residents of the building all owned it as a collective. But that meant that if you moved out, you received nothing for your share. The out-of-town garden plots that I mentioned are so popular precisely because, so I am told, they are the only property that people were allowed to own outright under the old system. Since food was so expensive (many of our coworkers mention the banana lines), people built their little one-room cottages in their garden plot, and planted fruit trees and planted all kinds of not-so-perishable vegetables, and grew their own food because they had to. So now, given the opportunity, and a real taste of the alternative, the free market shines brighter than gold to the Czechs.

And yet, it would be ludicrous to have to pay for health care. That’s not part of the equation. The free market is beautiful because you can finally work hard and make more money. The goal, however, is not the money, but the quality of life it can buy you: a car for the first time in your life, imported produce (cabbage and potatoes must surely get old after a while), a fresh coat of plaster for the outside of your house, a more exciting trip during summer holiday. And while you are pursuing the particular ways in which you want to enjoy high quality of life, one of the government's jobs is to provide you with the means to stay healthy. I thought that, sometime in the late 18th century, we had all agreed that governments are not meant to squander the people's lives. I thought that after WWI and WWII, we had all agreed that diplomacy was surely a better recourse than that most offensive of euphemisms, collateral damage. Apparently I did not get the memo.

The Czechs are a fascinating people, but I guess every foreign culture examined up close like this would be, and mostly because of the contrast provided to your own implicit assumptions about the world, about how it should or does operate. It’s funny, though: the largest barrier to mutual understanding is without doubt the language. If not for that god-damned Tower of Babel, the impediments to world harmony would be a small fraction of what they are now. And granted, I’m only in Europe, of which America by and large is still pretty much but a cultural offshoot. The differences are apparent enough, but it is still not hard to explain yourself to each other, provided you have a common language. Czechs I meet have a lot of stereotypes about Americans (when I say I miss American food, they without fail ask, "oh, hamburgers?"). But with a common language (in this case, mine), you can explain your own cultural values to someone else, and if they don’t agree, they can at least understand. But being able to explain your culture requires a high level of fluency in another language, and if not for their mastery of my language, I would be a mute and incompetent idiot who fails at basic things that everyone knows how to do. For instance, if an elderly or disabled person boards the bus and there is not a free seat, you will get up and offer yours. Often, three or four young men all shoot out of their seats at the same time, each vying to be the one who most quickly demonstrated his respect for his elders. Even rebellious looking teenage boys in black leather jackets jump up, because that’s just what you do. If someone under the age of 15 or so fails to notice the old woman boarding the bus, another passenger will not hesitate to scold him or her. I was scolded the first time this happened, and I only made it worse by failing to understand my admonishment, it being, of course, in a foreign language.

C. and I spent the afternoon learning how to say "my new castle" in Czech. I know, it probably shouldn’t have taken us 3 hours, but it’s harder than it sounds. Allow me to share. There are seven cases in Czech, one each for the seven various grammatical categories a word can fill:

Each of these grammatical roles takes the stem of the word and tacks a characteristic ending onto it. Thus each noun has seven singular and seven plural forms it can assume. But you don’t just put the noun in the appropriate case. All adjectives and other modifiers in the noun clause get put in that case as well. But you can’t forget that Czech has three genders as well (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and every noun falls into one of the three genders. Adjectives and other modifiers must agree in case and gender with the noun they modify, so there are 42 forms (7 cases x 3 genders x 2 for singular/plural) for every adjective. But the 40-letter Czech alphabet is also divided into hard and soft consonants, not to mention hard and soft vowels, and there are different patterns for the case endings for masculine nouns ending in a hard consonant, like hrad (castle) than there are for masculine nouns ending in a soft consonant, like stroj (machine). And you can’t forget about the long and short vowels. These are not like in English, where it’s the difference between the vowel sounds in cat and lake. You actually pronounce a long vowel exactly the same as, but for a longer time than, its short counterpart, and this can have drastic differences in meaning. Mile /me-leh/ means kindly (adv). Milé /me-leh-eh/ means kind (adj). Míle /meee-leh/ means mile. It is quickly becoming clear that a basic tenet of learning Czech is staring at pages and pages of charts until your eyes cross. That’s how we spent the afternoon, and my eyes are in fact crossed.