In 1622, four years after the battle of White Mountain sparked the Thirty Years War, Austrian troops burned down the tiny farming village of Slavošovice while trying to suppress the rebellion in Bohemia. The Herda family, who had lived is Slavošovice for some unknown number of generations prior to 1622 but were displaced by the burning and the years of war, returned home when the village was rebuilt. Since the village was most likely rebuilt in a slightly different location using the stones from the original houses, it is difficult to determine the original location precisely. The Herdas moved into a small house, Slavošovice 14, and farmed the land there throughout the remaining years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, into the early 1800s, until some great-great-great-grand-descendent of the man and woman who first returned to the newly rebuilt village chose to migrate to a town called Lišov, about 6 kilometers away.

After spending a couple of days in Vienna with my brother, who is visiting from the US, the three of us took a train to southern Bohemia to visit our ancestral homeland. My brother is an avid amateur genealogist and has for the past two or three years been employing a professional Czech genealogical researcher named Jaroslav to visit the Czech archives in South Bohemia to find the birth, marriage, death, and land ownership records that have helped us to sweep a bit of our lineage free from the accumulated dust of history. Jaroslav met us when we arrived in Lišov in our rental car and gave us a guided tour of certain select parts of South Bohemia. He led us through the churchyard graves in Lišov and pointed out our ancestors' headstones. He took us past the house where they lived for some number of generations after leaving Slavošovice. He knocked on one door in town in order to introduce us to Mr. Kovařík, an 82-year-old man with one leg shaped like a waning crescent moon who shares with us the common ancestors who lived in the house at Slavošovice 14. Mr. Kovařík showed us some pictures of his house when it was still a farmhouse, and he shared the old yellow documents that dispersed the possessions of some unknown Herda or another who had died without a will. He then pulled from his cupboard a lovely State of Minnesota baseball hat, obviously unworn, the brim still fresh, flat and rigid, which had been given to him by a member of the Dale Pexa band when they visited Lišov from New Prague, Minnesota (pop. approx. 5100) two years ago. He donned the hat with a mighty and sparsely-toothed grin. "Just like an American," he proclaimed.

The next stop, we were told, would be the small castle that used to protect the villages near Slavošovice before the Thirty Years War. It turned out to be a small two-story stone building, about twenty feet on a side, that the family currently living in the adjoining house used as a storage shed. When we pulled up in our rental car, a young blonde girl, maybe nine years old, stood at the gate with a curious stare. Jaroslav jumped out of the car to introduce himself and us. "Hello, ladies," he called out to the middle-aged women who were enjoying their afternoon tea in the courtyard, one of whom had obviously stopped by while walking with her stroller and a couple of kids of walking age. "I have brought some American tourists to see the castle." We took some pictures, trying not to step on all the chickens in the yard, and stepped inside the castle for a moment to see the boxes and old garden tools kept inside. One of the women, who had stepped into the house, returned with an old laminated pencil sketch of the castle as it had looked a few hundred years ago, namely, exactly the same but without their house attached. A young boy, maybe ten, followed her out wearing only his underwear.

Jaroslav expressed our many thanks, and we returned to the car. Some of the children followed to watch us drive away. We sped on to the next stop, the ornate neogothic crypt that houses the remains of the members of the Schwarzenberg dynasty who ruled the area for hundreds of years and owned several South Bohemian castles and chateaux right up until the last descendant fled the country in 1947.

C. and I usually try to be the kind of travelers who observe silently from the sidelines as inconspicuously as our huge backpacks will allow, but Jaroslav had volunteered to be our tour guide In fact, he hadn't really given us much choice, and since we had so many remote places to visit in such a short span of time, the renting of the car made sense. Nonetheless, pulling up in our shining silver Peugot, interrupting tea-time with the chickens, snapping some digital photos and disappearing in a cloud of gravel dust—all at Jaroslav's arranging—had made us look like the worst kind of culture consumers, swooping down into these villagers' lives for all of ten minutes, to documents in our scrapbooks the quaintness that constitutes their everyday lives before we moved on to the next hurried item on our itinerary.

That next item was the house at Slavošovice 14, where for centuries my Czech ancestors lived life as peasants on lands owned alternately by various barons, monasteries, and princes, ancestors whose names are known now only because of the hours Jaroslav has spent deducing the salient details of their lives from the remnant bureaucratic paperwork of the lost centuries between us. We didn't knock on this door, because Jaroslav has tried before to gather information from the people who now live there. They are not interested in genealogy and do not like foreigners. While taking a couple of token digital pictures of the house, I tried to imagine generations of Herdas being born, growing up, choosing a husband or wife from the eight or ten other teens in the village, bearing children, hoping for a male child so the land would stay in the family, dying and being buried in the same church yard, for hundreds of years on end. The oldest son in each family, Jaroslav tells us, didn't have to worry about choosing a wife, as he was usually constrained to wed the daughter of the neighboring farmer, in order for the families to be able to merge their farming rights—not the ownership of the land, because that belonged to the prince, but merely the right to farm a piece of it. I tried to imagine all these scenes played out a dozen times or more over a dozen lifetimes or more in that house on that piece of land, and the similar scenes played out on every other farm for hundreds of miles around, but I just couldn't manage. It's just too far away.

While packing up the last of my things, after living for almost exactly twelve months in the Czech Republic with very little else in the way of material possessions to speak of (though of course the house in which we lived was furnished) I note for posterity the sum total of my possessions:

I should admit that there are several boxes of my possessions—including but not limited to hundreds of CDs, cassettes, and LPs; two sets of speakers; various digital and analog entertainment devices (though no TV); boxes of dishes, including Pfalzgraff service for eight which is rendered for all intents and purposes unuseable by C.’s violent reaction to the sound of silverware on it; a Juiceman Junior electric juicer; a Braun coffee pot that brews coffee directly into a thermos, which effortlessly keeps it hot for over eight hours; hundreds more books; back issues of various magazines; gardening implements; furniture; a Trek bicycle; a car stereo, amplifier, and speakers; more clothes; and various other things I can’t even remember anymore—awaiting me in an undisclosed location in New Mexico. It is clear to see that I am hardly an ascetic. Nonetheless, may I humbly recommend purging your life of possessions periodically, whether it be accidentally or deliberately, as a satisfying way to remind yourself of how disposable most things really are?

On that note, I hereby sign off for a while. C. and I will be traveling with my brother through Vienna, České Budejovice, Český Krumlov, Prague, Kutna Hora, and various of our ancestral Czech villages for the next 10 days, after which I will be meeting in Prague a very old and dear friend of mine who I haven’t seen in 10 years, and then C. and I will be flying to the Mediterranean coast in Croatia with her sister for 12 days. (I’m not the kind of guy who very often jets down to the coast for some R&R, so this part is actually fairly exotic and exciting for me.) Subsequently, I will fly to the Chicago area to visit my family for three days, then fly to Santa Fe for a week to visit some friends, grab the previously mentioned boxes of crap, throw them into a rental van, and drive them across the country to my new home to start my new job in an undisclosed location on the east coast. Hold all my calls. I will try to post some interesting travel stories in this forum, or I might just unplug and relax in a completely non-digital fashion. There’s no telling, really. I’m like the wind.

My friend Kas just sent me this: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. I’m honestly not sure whether the results are more or less funny than the fact that such things are studied in the first place. You tell me.

That’s it. Time’s up. During the next couple of days I will pack. I will run last-minute errands. I will sell things. I will pick out real Czech souvenirs for folks back home. We’ve already said goodbye to everyone but the closest of our friends. Lucie and I had a lovely bike ride to the lake just north of Brno this afternoon. I didn’t have a crown on me when we left, so she bought me a beer and a fried cheese sandwich at the lakeside beer garden. It was a beautiful and warm sunny day. The wind was calm. The fish were biting at bugs on the surface of the water. People were not wearing shoes.

I will miss fried cheese sandwiches. When C. first visited Prague in 2001, she later told stories of the “heart-attack special.” When I first visited Prague a month or so later, I discovered the deliciousness of which she spoke. It’s a specialty, and at some pubs it’s the only vegetarian option on the menu. It consists of a loaf of cheese which is deep-fried in oil (because cheese is not fatty enough by itself) and served on a roll with tartar sauce, which as far as I can tell is basically a big pile of mayonnaise with pickle relish mixed in. My fried cheese sandwich today also came with french fries, which I ate with a fork, because that’s what you do here, and I don’t like to be stared at while I eat.

When I say that fried cheese is sometimes the only vegetarian option, I actually mean that it’s the only real vegetarian option. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.) Often there are several items listed in the vegetarian section of the menu, but many of them include ham. From a certain point of view, you are correct when you object that ham is not vegetarian. But try not to think inside the box all the time. Ham can also be a condiment. If you were to beckon to the waitress and inform her that your vegetarian dish had ham in it, she would look at you with a slightly pitying expression. “Oh honey, it’s just a little ham.”

Non-vegetarian dishes, on the other hand, can consist of meat, stuffed with meat, with a side of meat. Maybe a little meat on top for a garnish. One of my favorites is chicken stuffed with ham and leeks with cheese and a slice of ham on top, but I also like dumplings stuffed with ham and creamy sauerkraut. Our friend Petr, the one who saved us from the landlady, likes to make giant trays of hors d’oeuvres when the four of us (Anne, Petr, C., and I) are hanging out. We’re talking about square feet of little sausages and cheeseballs neatly arrayed, accompanied by slices of bread smothered with cream cheese and blue cheese with slices of raw onion on top, and Olomoucký Sýr (which is a kind of stinkier-than-thou cheese whose legal status is in limbo given certain food safety concerns on the part of the EU). I don’t know if feet are involved in its manufacture, but it smells like they might be. Nonetheless, fry up a slab and slap it on some bread with some chunks of raw onion, and you’re on a rocketship straight to heaven. (I should be fair: Only pub food is so notoriously fatty and heavy, but most Czechs don’t eat out very often. At home, they also eat very good bread and a lot of vegetables with their meat and cheese.)

When you are walking down the street and you notice other guys—the kind who don’t already have beautiful girlfriends—watching the 6'2" blonde women with impeccably-toned everything from head to toe walk by, you expect that those guys are probably trying to figure out exactly what those women are doing to keep from showing the effects of the exclusively meat-and-cheese-based diet. It must be hard for those guys, because, well, it’s not just an occasional 6'2" blonde woman who walks by. It’s like every third woman is over six feet tall, and even if she’s not blonde, she has jet black hair and sky-blue eyes, or perhaps the ubiquitous Eurgundy dye and has applied eyeliner inspired by lioness eyes; but the woman’s particular coloring at some point becomes irrelevant for those guys, who in general look far less like a nation of supermodels than their better halves do. It must be somewhat of a curse, I think, to be a woman from this Slavic gene pool, because there are very few alternatives on the menu of prominent noses and foreheads and eyes ever-too-slightly close together. Need I mention the healthy, healthy selection of beer guts in every size and shape?

This is not a nation of anorexic women. It’s a nation of people who don’t own cars. In fact, many of the ones who do own cars now are starting to look a little, well, American. Like me. And I don’t even own a car. I sold my last car for $25, and I figure I got a pretty good deal for it, considering the shape it was in. You should have seen it. It was in worse shape than my van, which I let get towed away because it was cheaper than paying someone to tow it away. I miss my van, and the whole van lifestyle. It used to be that I knew it was time to throw some stuff out when I had more stuff than would fit in the van. One is not as portable as one would like when one owns more than fits in the vehicle that takes one to the next place. Throw all your stuff in your van, fill up your 44 oz. trucker mug with Amoco coffee, and the world is yours for the taking.

Have I mentioned what a fan I am of the Czech menu of disabilities? You’ve heard of dyslexia, I’m sure. I have met a couple of people who suffer from it, and it seems real enough. Though I don’t claim to understand it’s mechanisms, I can easily believe that such a disorder exists. I can even imagine how awful it must be to have the disorder called dysgraphia, which is a physiological or neurogical inability to write properly. I imagine it must be some sort of noise in the feedback loop between brain and hand. Fine so far. But then we have dysorthographia which, if you parse it, could only be a medical diagnosis for people with bad penmanship. And then there’s dyscalculia, for people who have difficulty in math. I actually do believe in dyscalculia: If dyslexics can somehow reverse the letters in a word, as strange as it sounds to someone who is unafflicted, why should it not be possible for others to reverse the digits in a number? Of course, discalculia need not only refer to such a specific condition; I can imagine the term as a blanket diagnosis that refers to people, some of whom I’ve met personally, who have inordinate difficulty with mathematical reasoning. If dyscalculia is simply a label applied to people who are medically sensitive to math, however, I remain skeptical.

What surprises me is the Google ratio for these terms:

In the country where the rigorous study of penmanship begins at age 6, it is not surprising that dysorthographia is almost as commonly mentioned as dyslexia. Of course, I do not claim to have presented an airtight case proving anything except my own surplus of free time, but it is an interesting discovery nonetheless. Thanks, by the way, to Larry and Sergey, who apparently are still keepin’ it real.

I have been orally examining my students all week long.

I’m pretty sure that phrase used to sound naughty to me, but in recent weeks it has come to sound perfectly natural. In fact, it is the most common way in our department to refer to the administration of oral exams. I haven’t yet figured out whether the phrase is proper in British English or if it is a Czechism but, either way, I’ve heard it so often that it no longer sounds strange and only occasionally makes me snicker.

My ability to use my own language has really suffered during the year I’ve lived abroad. My colleagues are for the most part phenomenally fluent, and several speak with impeccable British RP accents, to the point where I cannot tell they are not British by birth except when they switch into the z-zh-s-sh-v-k-rich consonant-fest they call their mother tongue. My students, however, are another matter. Except for C., almost everyone who speaks my native language to me during the course of an average day butchers it to some degree or another. Since language is merely convention, I sometimes find it necessary to butcher it in return to make myself understood. Even when such extreme steps are not necessary, though, I still find that strange phrases have crept into my vocabulary. Most of these are British phrases, which are much more common here than American ones. For instance, I rarely say “lorry‚” instead of “truck,” but it has happened. I’ve even talked about the high petrol prices these days. I have completely switched over to talking about my colleagues, never my co-workers, and I don’t even blink when someone mentions stopping at the store for some nappies (those are diapers in britsky, in case you didn’t know). I don’t even mind anymore when I hear someone say that X is different to Y (this is actually the preferred preposition in British grammar, believe it or not). And those are just the British ones. Czechisms are wrong in any language, yet it no longer sounds wrong to me when someone asks “Can I have a question?” I have grown perfectly happy with people’s discussions of the best way how to do something or another, and anymore I cannot honestly tell you whether it is more correct to say “I don’t usually wear plaid” or “I usually don’t wear plaid.” If you can’t tell the difference, you’re perfectly normal, but consider a similar case (“I probably won’t call her” vs. “I won’t probably call her”): Despite your ignorant bliss, there are rules for these things, which foreign learners of the language you can so glibly mumble even in your sleep have to memorize. The end result? My language has been contaminated, and I fear it will never be pure again.

As far as the orals are concerned, everyone has been doing pretty well for most of the week, although I was offered a direct contrast to what I’ve heard referred to in America as “grade inflation.” My experience in school tells me that an A is to be strived for, a B is acceptable but reveals that you never did the homework, and to receive a C is practically as embarrassing as failure. I won’t even mention the D or the F, because high school weeded out the people who get grades like that; they’re happily spreading tar on some highway these days. We are so intent on making everyone feel special that giving a poor grade hurts us as much as the student. We don’t want to label anyone a failure out of fear that it will hurt his self-esteem, so we give him a C at least for trying, even if he didn’t. I noticed this tendency in myself last week as my students waltzed in pairwise for the round of orals that C. and I administered. We gave As to the good students and Bs to most of the rest, which left Cs for only the really poor ones. We gave nothing lower.

In the Souborná Zkouška (“Qualifying Exam”) committee I’m sitting on this week with three Czechs, however, the scale is noticeably different. There are no unique and delicate snowflakes here. Only the three or four exemplary students received As, a few very good students received Bs, and the bulk of the bell curve received Cs. My Czech colleagues were not afraid to hand out Ds, and their system even has an E to better specify exactly how sub-par some students really are.

The thing that surprised me was how the students took the news. I felt just a little embarrassed for the first student when the head of the committee revealed that she would receive a C, but she didn’t seem to mind at all. She was content to be average. The D students took it in stride; some even seemed relieved. The eyes of the select few, though, those shining diamonds among the coal-dark masses, lit up to hear that they’d been awarded the much-coveted A; it was as if Don Pardo was announcing that they’d won a BRAAAAND NOOOOO CAAAAR! or that a donor kidney had finally been found for their dying mother.

At one point today, the opinion of the committee was overwhelming and I was forced to fail a student for the first time ever. This girl, who has some sort of disability—perhaps cerebral palsy, though I can’t tell for sure—started sobbing when we called her back into the room to announce her failure. I genuinely felt bad for her, because she had applied herself quite diligently throughout the year and was actually one of the harder-working students I’d had. Her English pronunciation simply sucks, and the committee agreed that she should spend the summer working on it. We failed another girl shortly thereafter. She took it much more stoically than the first, but she still ran out of the room without a word as soon as she could.

I began to enjoy the strange feeling of power I felt surging in my veins. I hadn’t felt such a feeling of power over someone’s life since my mom made a late-night call to the house of a girl I saw briefly during the summer after my freshman year at U of I. I had driven into Chicago to hang out with her one night, and we stayed out until early in the morning. At some point, my mom became worried and called the girl’s house to see if I’d left. The girl’s parents were pretty old school and viewed that phone call as such a public humiliation that they grounded the poor girl for the rest of the summer. That might explain why we had only two dates (though a contributing role may also have been played by my failure to live up to the expectations about my personality engendered in her by the Joy Division tee-shirt I always wore back then). Regardless, in much the same way that poor Eva will curse our names all summer long as she practices softening her final consonants and eliding her word transitions, Jodie must have cursed my name every night she spent watching TV with her iron-fisted parents. This isn’t the kind of power that most people dream of, but it’s more than some people ever get. I have hardened my heart against the suffering of others, and the tears of my students no longer arouse my compassion. I look forward to failing more students tomorrow, just because I can. I am now drunk with power. Nothing can stop me.

Looking for housing in a country where you don't speak a word of the language is not easy. Early last July, when we first arrived in Brno and needed to find an apartment, we had no choice but to enlist the help of Petra, the English department secretary. After making a trip to the bulletin board downtown where landlords post available housing, she made some phone calls and arranged a couple of visits for us. She had to accompany us in order to translate. (Czech is not an easy language to learn. After a year of practicing, we can successfully make our wishes known to waitstaff and shop clerks, and not much more.) So we made a couple of appointments, and Petra took us around to see the places, talking to the owners for us. They would chat for a few minutes, laughing, agreeing, and nodding. Petra would ask a question, they would talk and laugh some more, and then she would turn to us and assume a hushed, official tone. “She says that utilities are included.”

At one place, a shabby little flat on the ground floor of a panelák, one of the countless prefab communist high-rise housing blocks that ring the city, Petra stood listening to and commenting on what must have been the realtor’s detailed description of every misstep her husband had ever taken before she finally kicked his ass to the curb, and then turned to us. “She prefers not to rent to foreigners.”

So we left that place and went to our last stop of the day, a place she warned us was “just a little out of town.” The owner, a woman in her mid-50s, met us at the door in a pink bikini bottom and a bra. She chatted on and on. She really liked to talk. She didn’t stop talking while she went around the corner to put on a shirt. She’s a very lonely woman, we figured, whose children never visit, who’s just dying for someone to talk to. She showed us to the apartment, a basement that had been converted into a little two-room furnished apartment. The far room was the bedroom, with two twin beds pushed together, a free-standing wardrobe, and a little china cabinet. The near one was the everything-else room: kitchen, dining room, guest bed, and shower. Kitchen, in this case, meant a veneered plywood counter atop some utility cabinets, a bathroom sink, and an electric hot plate. The refrigerator was an old 1950s model whose brand name was printed in Russian. It looked like a dorm fridge on steroids, but when we opened the door we could see that it would keep exactly one loaf of bread, and possibly an egg, cozy and cool.

But there were certain advantages to this place, we told each other. There was a huge backyard garden, and we rightly guessed that the pink-bikini-clad grandmother might share with us some of the rows and rows of tomatoes, peppers, kohlrabi, parsley, and carrots. We might even get to taste the plums, apples, and pears from time to time. We would have our own entrance, Petra said. The place was only about half an hour by bus from the university. It’s at the edge of a small village, with open green spaces and fields all around, much better in this respect than any place in town. That, and you didn’t have to walk all the way to the bathroom to take a shower. To top it off, this place was by far the cheapest of anything we'd hoped to see. We said thank you, and returned with Petra to the university.

We wanted to look at more apartments, knowing that between a room in some obviously crazy lady’s basement and a panelák, we had probably missed some of the other options. We felt bad, knowing that Petra had other work to do, and we didn’t want to take up all of her time. She was, after all, the English department secretary, not our tour guide and translator. C. and I talked about it on the bus on the way back to the university, and by the time we reached our stop, we had decided to take the out-of-town place. We made certain stipulations, however. We told Petra to tell the lady that we wanted a larger refrigerator. We also wanted an oven but we knew that, since there was no gas hookup or a place to put one, we’d probably end up with a glorified toaster oven. This is exactly what we got. We managed to adapt. By December, we were roasting whole chickens (45 minutes at 6) and making pizza (12 minutes at 9, if you like a nice crispy crust). C. even managed to coax several loaves of wonderful bread (35 minutes at 7) from it.

As summer crested and then dwindled, the apartment turned out to be more than we'd hoped. A fifteen minute walk took us into the little red-roofed villages that surround Brno, up the narrow streets past roadside chapels and neighborhood pubs that don’t turn on their signs at night, or out among the wheat and alfalfa fields. The landlady did bring us produce, almost more than we could eat, and she told us to help ourselves to the contents her potato cellar. She kept pet rabbits in a row of cages in the back yard, and the picnic table and the swing strung from the walnut tree kept us entertained in the after-dinner hours during the last summer days before the school year started.

By early October, the evening temperatures had dipped into sweater weather. One evening, I was boiling some pasta water on the hot plate when a knock came on our door. C. was still at work. I could see through the barely frosted glass pane that it was the landlady standing on the other side. Whenever she knocked, I tried out a new word that I thought might indicate the equivalent of what I wanted to say in English, which was simply, “Come in.” Nothing worked, and I always had to walk the ten feet and personally open the door for her. I didn’t mind, but I always hoped to achieve the kind of informality that would allow her simply to enter at my request. After all, she didn’t care if I saw her in her bra, so I thought we might be able to forge a new, more casual relationship, while still strictly adhering to the formal personal pronoun, of course.

She scurried in before I had even removed my hand from the door handle. “May I?” she asked after she had already passed me and headed over to the window, which I now noticed was fogged up from the pasta water steam.

(I must ask for the reader’s patience as I introduce here a brief parenthetical remark about what I consider to be one of the greatest feats of household engineering since the dishwasher: The European Window. This is an ordinary-seeming arrangement of two adjacent glass-paned doors, one of which locks into the frame and to which the other in turn can be fastened. The genius lies in a sort of magical double-action hinge, which allows, when it is in one position, for the door (or optionally, doors) to swing open as one would expect. A turn of the handle, however, simultaneously disconnects the top hinge while sliding a bar into place through the base of the locking door and the bottom hinge of the other, so that it is now anchored at the bottom and opens inward a few degrees at the top, just enough to allow air to circulate without letting in, for instance, rain. If the reader has ever seen these windows before, he or she has surely marveled at them as I have.)

So the landlady was in our apartment, picking up the box of herbs that we kept on the window sill and taking it outside onto the back porch, which really is just a dark room with one small window and a door into the back yard. Then she returned and opened the window in the standard fully-open-door way, indicating to me in simple Czech words and gestures—water, pfff, pfff, [pantomimed billowing motion], water IN THE AIR (though here she substituted luft, the German word for air), pfff, do you understand? water, pfff, pfff, in this luft, it is not good—that there was too much steam in our apartment, and further, that opening the window in the slightly-open-at-the-top way would never be enough to disperse it. Thus the removal of the window box and the fully open window.

I must admit that my Czech is not very good, and that the only reason I could understand her was because she was expressing herself in ludicrously simple words and gestures like this. I was thankful that she had small grandchildren, and that she enjoyed talking at length to her pet bunnies, whose cages were right outside our bedroom window, in the tone of voice whose particular pitch only grandmothers can get away with. It was clear she was well practiced at getting the point across to ignorant creatures. It wasn’t until several minutes had gone by, and she was still rubbing the moisture off the window and showing me her wet finger—wah-ter, it is not good—that it dawned on me that the method and manner of her communication was not calculated to span the language barrier, but simply because it was clear to her that I’m a moron.

Having opened the windows, she stopped on her way out at the shower doors, which we always kept shut to hide the fact that we never cleaned it. She slid them open, which I would normally consider rude behavior in a guest, but then she said some things and gestured down to the floor of the shower, which I could only assume meant that she was worried about the accumulation of hair under the drain. Since I had almost flooded the everything-else room the previous morning, I had in fact recently cleaned all the slimy, stinking, soap-scum-greased hair out of the drain assembly, a process that had made me gag several times. Realizing that I had actually performed the maintenance in question—and actually afraid that she would begin doing it herself—I hurried into the shower, lifted the drain assembly, and proudly showed off my work. “Yes? Clean,” I managed.

“No, no, no,” she replied amidst some other sounds, one of which I’m pretty sure was “stupid.” She stooped down and ran her finger along the floor of the shower.

“Do you know how?” she asked. I had just learned the verb to know how in Czech class the day before, and proudly I showed off not only my understanding of that verb, but my newly acquired ability to put things in the future tense.

“I know how, but not yet it me do. Soon I will it do.” This was enough to satisfy her, I thought, because she nodded and scurried back upstairs. The curtains moved slightly in the breeze. I looked at the dead thyme branch that had fallen down behind where the window box had been, and at the faint rectangular outline in the dust on the wide sill. C. and I had noticed the wide window sills on the day we first came to look at the apartment, and had talked to each other about how nice it would be to have a little box of herbs in the everything-else room. We would put fresh herbs into the meals we cooked in our pot, we said, and it would be like home.

We had run out of cereal, so the next morning when we woke up before the slightest hint of daylight to finish our last minute preparations for the school day, I fried a couple of eggs for breakfast. We were seated at the table eating and talking, C. still in her pajamas, my hair plastered to the side of my head, my mouth still tasting like yesterday's potatoes, when I heard the knock at the door behind me. For a moment I considered running to the bedroom to brush my hair, and C. thought about running in to change into pants, but then we noticed the landlady's clear silhouette through the barely frosted glass, and we realized that she could see us just as well. I tried to consider it a pre-dawn opportunity to forge a new, more casual relationship. I walked over and opened the door.

“Good morning,” she said. “May I?” she asked, pushing past me and heading straight for the window, which I noticed was becoming fogged up. After the dissipation of the prior day's steam, I had returned the herb box to the window sill, so once again she carried it outside. She again opened the window, rubbing the glass with her finger, showing us both this time the moisture on her fingertip and explaining all over again that this—water, pfff, pfff, in the luft—was not good. She talked as if we had never discussed it previously, as if I were a poor animal, as stupid as a rabbit whose memories were lovingly erased each night by blissful dreams of alfalfa and hopping. She patiently explained to us that all this steam was nothing but tiny drops—very small pieces—of water in the air, that it collects on the windows when it is cold outside, that it is not good. We agreed with her, and demonstrated our understanding by pointing to the open window and saying, “Yes, we understand—open is good—no water—air.” She opened the shower doors for us on her way out.

Our interactions with the landlady centered around steam for a span of several days, and we began to dread hearing her footsteps in the hallway. Since she only visited us when the windows fogged up, the fear of moisture on the windows soon became our guiding principle. We began to check for the presence of moisture on the windows whenever we moved in the kitchen. We washed dishes in lukewarm water, removed the teapot from the hot plate well before boil. We developed carefully choreographed operations to minimize the moisture. When one of us showered, the other spearheaded the ventilation responsibilities, throwing open both sets of windows, even the one without a screen, as well as opening the door to the dark room with one small window. While one cooked, the other dutifully wiped away the translucent patches from the glass as soon as they appeared. We soon kept a dedicated window-wiping rag stationed near the bedroom window.

Opening the screenless window hurt the most. For a couple of weeks we had been plagued in the pre-dawn hours by mosquitoes in the bedroom. We couldn't figure out how they were getting in. After checking the screen for holes and gaps a few times, never finding anything, we noticed that the gaps under the doors were large enough for insects to slip through. Like dorm room bong aficionados, we began stuffing a towel into the crack at the bottom of the bedroom door at night, but still the mosquitoes came. Then we noticed a gap at the top of the bedroom door and introduced the nightly ritual of stuffing a dishrag into that, but still the mosquitoes came.

Even one was enough to ruin the night. We often stayed awake far too late into the night, planning the next day's lessons and working on the seemingly endless stream of paperwork for the school year. C. and I were both fresh out of college, first year teachers who had no training but who, by some fluke and a little luck, had found jobs teaching English at the same Czech university. As a result, we were learning the ins and outs of teaching university students by making daily mistakes and trying to learn from them before we had to face the same group again. This task took an embarrassing amount of time, which we tried to hide from our students and colleagues by attending to it at home. Not until the wee hours of the night would we finally climb into bed, stick out our thumbs, and immediately hitch a ride on that most seductive of highways, craving the five or six hour hour ride into the next morning. And then, but a couple of hours into the journey, the sound would appear, the buzz of such specific frequency that it is both directionless and omnipresent, rising in pitch and volume as it approaches until it fills the room, subsumes even the darkness, and then—silence. What can the victim do, freshly awake in the silence, eyes still closed, room still dark, but begin slapping blindly at his own exposed cheek and ear and neck in hopes of seeing the tiny telltale smear of blood black on his palm in the night?

Mosquitoes are smarter than you think. The self-slapping session rarely succeeded. The buzzing, the silence, a perfectly timed pause . . . and then the slapping. My drowsy mind would be convinced by the ensuing silence that it had succeeded in outwitting the insect, that it could drop its defenses and relax again into sleep. I'd brush my cheek a couple of times with the back of my hand. But invariably, soon after I had settled back into my pillow, that insistent buzzing would return.

After a few nights of this torture we adopted the experimental methodology of the most rigorous scientists. We had sealed off their only means of entering the room at night, so we began to suspect that they were coming in during the day and hiding, perhaps in the folds of our clothes in the closet, perhaps elsewhere. We began keeping the door to the bedroom and the door to the back porch closed at all times, turning the everything-else room into an effective airlock. We made rounds before we went to sleep, slapping the clothes in the closet, sneaking up and ripping the sheets off the bed, examining the lace curtains, peering at the walls from various angles to make sure the shadows in the stucco offered no asylum. We developed mental checklists of possible entry points, augmenting and decreasing the factors in our various hypotheses in hopes of stumbling upon anything statistically significant.

After a few nights, knowing at the first distant buzzing that the damn thing would keep at it until the alarm went off, I began leaping out of bed and turning on the lights. Had any of our neighbors been watching, they would have been witness to my systematic naked movements around the bedroom, blindly slapping the walls and ceiling, bending indecently to slap the pile of laundry in the corner, then returning upright to peer at the walls and ceiling from all angles. What’s the crazy foreigner doing now? they would wonder.

Luckily, when the lights went on the mosquitoes almost always landed immediately on the nearest white wall, where they were quite visible. Often it happened that one or two would settle on the wall, and we would grab the dedicated mosquito-thwacking map and set to work. Sometimes, though, it was three or four, and the killing of the first couple would send the others up into the air against various dark backgrounds, where they were quickly lost. No matter how diligently we studied their behavior, we could not penetrate the depths of mosquito psychology. But in the end we gained at least a rough ability to predict their behavior. Without necessarily understanding their operating principles, we were able to draw correlations between our actions and their responses. We compared our observations of the sample population and discussed our latest theories over our bleary-eyed breakfast. Through our untiring efforts, the mosquito problem was eventually downgraded from intolerable to manageable.

That was when the landlady began her daily visits to insist that we open the screenless window too, and we knew if we buckled now, all our work would be lost. We tried to explain, looking up the words for fear and mosquito in our pocket dictionary, and coupling them with a carefully developed pantomime: we mimicked the two-thumbs-and-a-finger hand posture used to grasp a needle, flying it around in the air near our heads while making a high pitched buzzing sound. Then, ensuring through eye contact that she was with us so far, we would bring the needle-grasp hand into contact with the forearm slightly below the elbow, abruptly ceasing the buzzing sound at the precise moment of contact. Surely she would understand, we thought. And she did. “But, silly foreigners, you need not worry,” she gestured. “In the wintertime, it will become cold and the mosquitoes will die—winter, outside, yes? Winter, frozen, do you understand? No mosquito—no buzz-buzz—in winter.”

We were defeated. We opened the screenless window, bared our flesh, and beseeched our unseen assailants at least to make it painless. The weather was in fact cooling down, she was right about that, but the network of green algae-filled ponds not far from our neighborhood, in combination with the unseasonably warm weather that autumn (the first snow finally fell a couple of days before Christmas), meant that lone mosquitoes would occasionally infiltrate our bedroom even in late November.

For weeks we tried to figure out why moisture was such a problem in the first place, but it wasn't until months later, when we put the landlady on the phone with our friend Petr, that we learned her fear of moisture was in fact a fear of a rare type of toxic mold which she was convinced would start growing on the walls of the basement. The communication breakdown that led us eventually to put her on the phone with Petr happened one day when a crew of men in royal blue overalls were working with various high-wattage power tools around the exterior of the house. At some point we suffered a house-wide electrical outage and, instead of investigating the actions of the men with power tools, she rushed in a panic into our apartment, unplugged our hot plate, and took it away. She explained, through simple words and elaborate hand gestures, that month after month of all that pernicious steam, pfff pfff, had corroded the circuitry inside the hot plate and caused a very dangerous short circuit. She wrote down the address of the shop where she'd bought the hot plate, and told us that we would have to pay for the repairs. The technician at the shop kept the hot plate for two weeks, but couldn't find anything wrong with it. After bringing it back home, we called Petr so he could try to explain to her, in as many ways as he could think of, that it was very unlikely that steam had caused this problem.

Time has passed, and both the mosquitoes and the steam are now a distant and scarcely-mentioned memory. We have came to an unspoken arragement with our landlady, wherein she continues to bring us fresh produce from the garden, but she leaves it on the kitchen table when we are not home. She even does our laundry now (in fact, we are forbidden to touch the washing machine). When we are away, she takes our laundry hamper, washes the clothes, hangs them on the line outside, and returns them folded to our table. We live parallel and unconnected lives, interacting in this way because we have both learned that it is best if we don't try to communicate except through the evidence of our actions in each other's absence. In a family, of course, this would be a textbook example of disfunctionality; in our present circumstances, however, we like to call it, at least for the next week or so, “home.”

Anne, who has been living in the Czech Republic for about 10 years, has some more ideas about the differences between Czech and American views of alcohol consumption at Lost in Transit, a blog by and about being a foreigner in foreign lands.

It surprises me how quickly our year in this strange land is coming to an end. With less than three weeks left, we’ve already started making the rounds to say our good-byes. Our colleagues at the university took us out for lunch and a couple of beers yesterday. Today, the head of the English department and her husband had us over to their flat for lunch. Světlana prepared the “Czech national dish,” which consists of a pork cutlet, creamy sauerkraut, and dumplings. It was delicious as usual. Perhaps my preference reveals my origins and inclinations, but I’d take peasant food over nouvelle cuisine almost any day.

As we approach the end of our stay, it is natural to look back over the past year to take advantage of the abrupt discontinuities in the past and future—which normally form such a smooth continuum that it is difficult to make out the more remote moments distinctly—to catch a glimpse of how our Czech adventure has changed us. I’m a virtual voyeur trying to spy on my memory without being noticed—peering in through the train window to watch C. and I on the day we first enter the country, on a train from Dresden after a failed attempt to secure our work visas, speeding through a narrow river valley on a clear blue day, the names of the tiny villages abruptly switching from German to Czech—trying to listen to the naïve conversations in which we try to figure out what we’re getting ourselves into, how long we might stay, what our jobs will be like, what kind of friends we’ll make, how well we’ll manage to learn the language. The trouble is that I can only imagine what the topics of conversation must have been, and since I know the answers to the questions I am writing into the little white word bubbles next to our heads, I am unable to capture the very real sense of not knowing by which we were overwhelmed at the time.

Today we stopped at the store to buy flowers on the way to Světlana and Jiři’s flat, because we have become used to the custom by which a guest always brings flowers when invited to someone’s home. I call it a flat because they do, and that’s the word my mind now sometimes grabs when it needs the next word in the sentence I’m in the middle of. It happens to be advantageous as well, because I find that word much easier and faster to say than apartment and it sounds completely normal to speak of someone owning a flat, whereas it sounds strange to talk about someone owning an apartment (and the only other choice I have, condominium, surely misrepresents what it’s like to live in a panelák), but I will have to remember that it will sound strange and will perhaps even sound like an affectation when I return to the US. Regardless of what you call it, though, they live in one of the paneláks at the far northern end of town, and although their gray building is one of several tall imposing and mostly featureless buildings in a long straight row of tall imposing and mostly featureless buildings which in turn constitute a parallel series of such rows, their apartment itself is very nice.

When we first arrived in town last year, they were renovating their flat (though even Světlana, who has been studying English for more than 20 years, spoke of “reconstructing” it, under the influence of the Czech noun rekonstrukce, in much the same way our students have sometimes mentioned the ticket “controllers” on the trams because the Czech verb kontrolovat means “to inspect.” Of course, I should be calling the trams by their American name, but I haven’t heard that word once since we’ve arrived. I have noticed, however, the good fortune Tennessee Williams had in being born an American, because I have a hard time imagining anyone on any continent lining up to see “A Tram Named Desire”). They had just bought it, though the nature of the transaction was closer to a swap-plus-cash, which is somewhat common in the housing market here but so uncommon where I’m from that we don’t even have a word for it. They had formerly lived in a smaller flat on a different floor of the same building, and their current flat had been occupied by the buyers of their former flat, who needed a smaller place. They simply swapped, with some amount of cash thrown in to compensate for the difference in size. Most panelák flats 15 years ago probably looked a lot like cinder block dorm rooms, but many, like this one, have benefitted from the installation of new hardwood floors, bathroom fixtures, and kitchen appliances.

When we walked into the apartment this afternoon, we immediately removed our shoes at the door, and Světlana provided each of us with a pair of slippers, because we have become used to the custom in which it is inconceivably rude to wear shoes indoors. It now seems perfectly normal to change into an anonymous pair of guest slippers which have been worn by who-knows-how-many other guests who have also removed their shoes at the door, though I remember that it was a bit disturbing at first to share foot-sweat with strangers in that way.

It turns out—although I didn’t know it until a few months into our stay—that Světlana and Jiři are both devout Catholics. Jiři is a historian whose specialization is the underground Catholic church that sprang up during the communist years, the membership of which was so secretive and so paltry that women were ordained as priests. There is now quite a controversy about it, because the Catholic church in Rome refuses to recognize the official existence of the underground church, largely because accepting the ordination of women, even under extreme political conditions, would threaten and undermine the official church tradition, even though those women and all the rest risked their lives and sacrificed unimaginably to keep the church alive during those 40 years.

I must admit that I do not know many Catholics in the US, but I grew up in the socially conservative bastion of Wheaton, Illinois—where the religiously-affiliated college erected an enormous center dedicated to the history of evangelical missionary work and named it after televangelist Billy Graham; where students of the college were made to sign a pledge upon acceptance that they would refrain from drinking, smoking, dancing, and all public displays of affection. It was a completely dry town, where alcohol could not be bought or sold in any establishment until just a few years ago, and even then bars were strictly forbidden in favor of restaurants that, coincidentally, as if by oversight, also happened to serve alcohol. Cable TV was banned for several years after it became available elsewhere in the area because of its tendency to arouse prurient interest in viewers of certain channels (such as Satan’s own MTV). According to the original genus edition of Trivial Pursuits, there are more churches per capita in Wheaton than in any other town in America.

As a result, I have known many evangelical protestants of various colors in my life, and I had always thought that one fundamental tenet of devout religion was temperance. It seemed perfectly natural that intoxicating substances interfered somehow with moral virtue by weakening and obscuring man’s godliness and making it more difficult to withstand the temptation of, for example, the long-legged, long-lashed, loose-bloused lady blinking and posing provocatively at the other end of the bar. But perhaps that is but one more example of America’s famous puritanical streak showing its colors.

For instance, our devoutly Catholic hosts served bottled beer with lunch today. It is as integral a part of the traditional Czech meal as any other. Perhaps, however, it is an unfounded leap to assume that temperance is strictly an American trait simply because our Czech hosts poured us a couple of tall cold ones. Beer drinking is, after all, a defining Czech cultural trait. They are as proud of their beer as they are of their national hockey team.

When the students in several of my classes asked me what I enjoyed most about the country, I gave various answers about the character of the people, the history, or the free education and medical care; inevitably someone would raise her eyebrows hopefully and ask, “And what about the beer? Don’t you like Czech beer?” Here it is not inappropriate to have a beer at almost any time of the day. I’ve seen businessmen stop for a half-liter as early as ten o’clock a.m. At our hotel in Olomouc in January, a perfectly nice and respectable-looking grandmother in her mid-60s was having a glass with her breakfast at just past nine. Today, at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, I saw a group of guys down at the pub in our neighborhood hard at work on what I’m sure was not the first glass of the day.

In fact, it underlines the cultural difference that some of the Americans in the audience right now may be squirming a bit in their seats, objecting silently that these are clearly alcoholics we’re talking about. But that’s the curious thing. This country certainly has its share of alcoholics; many spend their days hanging around near the train station, belligerantly and unapologetically trying to stand upright and insult one another coherently. I wouldn’t venture to make guesses about the proportion of alcoholics in the population here versus in the US without access to some statistics, and even then, the criteria by which alcoholism should be defined may very well turn out to be culture-dependent.

For instance, I have heard it said in the US that drinking to excess, even if it only happens once a year (say, on New Year’s Eve), equals alcoholism, period. While it may be true that alcoholics will drink to excess even if they drink only once a year, it is not at all valid to deduce that everyone who drinks to excess once a year is therefore an alcoholic. In fact, it might well be argued that there is no point to drinking at all unless it is just a bit excessive. After all, it is in the nature of a drug to be administered until it has an effect; there’s no point for a dentist to use novacaine unless he actually uses enough to stop the pain.

It would be difficult to convince me, and much more difficult to convince most folks here, that there is anything flagrant about having a couple of beers now and then. In fact, there is something about the Czech approach to alcohol that in some ways seems much healthier than the American one. In America, we have declared it illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to imbibe intoxicating liquors, but no one is silly enough to believe that this law is actually obeyed. Our legislators have fallen under the same misconception that leads religious conservatives to prescribe abstinence until marriage as the only acceptable way to convince horny teenagers to control their roving hands, leaving those teenagers with absolutely no tools to deal responsibly with the consequences should they accidentally lose control. This is the same misconception that led Nancy Reagan to believe that the “Just Say No” campaign would do anything other than leave children unprepared to exercise any kind of restraint or responsibility once giving into a very natural temptation as a result of a very natural curiosity. One simply cannot legislate human nature to be how we wish it to be, no matter how badly we wish it. And so it is in our underage temperance laws: Despite our best wishes to be able to mould human nature through moral imperatives, we are simply telling our teenagers not to get caught.

In the Czech Republic, on the other hand, the legal drinking age is 18, but most kids enter a pub for the first time when they are 13 or 14. This is in line with most of the rest of Europe. With parents or without, it is apparently very difficult to get turned down for a beer at any age. As a result, kids who are inclined to go through the drinking-til-you-puke stage do so when they are young teenagers. They soon realize that it is not very fun, and they stop. (If we are being honest about American culture, we realize that many people go through such a stage, regardless of the law. The laws we have at best delay it for a couple of years, and our unspoken imperative not to get caught is actually a command to drink unsupervised, whether by waiting until John’s parents go to Lake Tahoe for a week, or by driving to the woods behind the Gas’n’Sip. In fact, we make it illegal for responsible parents to try to supervise their children’s drinking.)

Drinking is a very natural part of Czech life, and teens are initiated into a society of responsible alcohol consumption at a very young age. When the group of Americans showed up in Pilsen last summer for the TEFL program, and adults 21 or 22 years old ended up puking in the dorms on Friday nights after spending the night in a pub, the Czechs were absolutely incredulous! How on Earth can a 21-year old not know his or her limits, they wondered. They should have learned ten years ago! Public drunkenness is largely taboo, and there is a 0% legal tolerance for drunk driving; the social tolerance is not much higher. It’s quite simple: one sip of beer, and you don’t drive. Period. How much sense does this make? If it turned out that the rate of alcoholism here is lower than in the US, I would attribute it directly to the fact that it’s not taboo for young people to drink. As a result, they learn to assimilate moderation into their lifestyles while their lifestyles are still evolving.

This week, having no responsibilities at the university, we went with our friend and officemate Lucie to her cousin’s cottage in northern Moravia, a three-hour-long series of rides on two trains and a bus from Brno, in a tiny village called Suchá Rudna which lies a half-hour walk from the tiny village called Andělská Hora (Angel Mountain), where the bus line ended.

(In Czech, a cottage like this is called a chalupa, but it has nothing to do with the Taco Bell entrée of the same name: the ch at the beginning is pronounced like ultralingual precisionists say the sound at the end of Bach. I should mention that ch is actually a letter unto itself in Czech. It comes after h in the alphabet, like this:

and when shops print their name descendingly down signs by the door, those letters refuse to separate, like this:

which means “showers.”)

I remember reading about these chalupas while we were still in the US and wondering, if Czechs were as poor as they are described, how nearly every Czech family could afford to have a second home out in the country. The reason actually requires a bit of explanation. First of all, under communism, every family was allowed to own a cottage or an out-of-town garden plot, even though they weren’t actually allowed to own the apartments and houses in which they lived in town; these belonged to a collective. So, given a chance to own a bit of private property, everyone who could do so jumped at the chance. The gardens that people owned are almost exactly like the one in our landlady’s backyard, long narrow meticulously-ordered patches that people spend an inordinate amount of time plowing, weeding, planting, tidying, pruning, and otherwise tending in the long slow evenings and on the weekends, whenever possible. Second only perhaps to beer and hockey, it’s the national pastime.

Secondly, since food was in such short supply under communism, and the variety of available food, from tales we hear now, was often restricted to not much more than potatoes and cabbage, people had little choice but to grow some of their own food. The cottage industry, so to speak, sprang up partly to compensate for the lack. C. and I have at times lamented that the Czech garden aesthetic insists on tiny orderly rows of rectanges with little fences, not to mention the sporadically-placed inverted plastic bottles on steel pipes thrust into the ground which, when the wind rattles the plastic against, the pipe, frighten away moles. C. is especially bothered by this, since her father is a landscape architect who prefers sweeping curves and staggered terraces to right angles, and for good reason.

This rectangular aesthetic is transferred to people’s front-yard gardens as well, which usually consist of nothing but rows of rectangles: a rectangular patch of daisies next to a rectangular patch of tulips next to a rectangular patch of marigolds. Although it is not necessarily attractive to Americans raised in luxury, Americans who have never had to grow their own food, who would spend a couple of years lean on the learning curve if times suddenly forced them to fend for themselves vegetable-wise, this rectangular practicality maximizes the productivity of the small garden plot. Our landlady’s garden could feed a person for months on potatoes, carrots, kohlrabi, leeks, herbs, parsley, celery root, cabbage, peppers, not to mention a few carefully-pruned plum, apple, and apricot trees and, of course, the rabbits. Her neighbor, in addition to such a selection, keeps a few beehives. It is already June, and our landlady’s potato cellar is still half-full from last fall’s harvest. Although she must be fairly affluent now (her monthly rent income from her three tenants alone is more than most people’s salaries), she spends almost every afternoon bent over in the back yard, on hot days wearing a pink bikini bottom and a bra, tending to one area or another of what will be this fall’s harvest. Her love of gardening may well serve also to fill the empty hours her husband and children used to occupy, but nonetheless, it stands as evidence that old habits die hard.

The fact that spending time at one’s cottage in the country is still so popular, half a generation after the fall of the communist regime, attests also to the Czechs’ love of what my students refer to in their essays as “the beautiful green nature.” Although it is changing quickly, Czech village life still seems to encapsulate a part of the national identity that the city never will. People live in the city because, after all, it’s the 21st century now, and they have embraced their new freedom to earn and buy, but a large part of the heart is still reserved for the village.

Lucie’s cousin’s cottage had a kind of rustic luxury that I wasn’t expecting. I was expecting something only slightly larger than the huts in the out-of-town garden plots that line the railroad tracks. (On our first train ride into the country last summer, before we knew better, we wondered if we were passing through a lace-curtained shantytown, if times were so hard that whole families really lived in these little one-room peaked-roof houses along the tracks. Now we know that they serve as a place to sit and sip lemonade while taking a break from gardening). Instead of such a hut, we were led into an old stuccoed farmhouse with a large yard and a quickly flowing creek running along one edge. On the right side of the central low-arched-roof hallway (anyone over 5'6" would have to stoop) were a kitchen heated by an old tile-stove and a couple of bedrooms; on the left, another bedroom and a sitting room with a fireplace, deep leather chairs, and several boar skins on the walls (no, that’s not a typo; think tusks). At the end of the hallway was a knotty-pine-paneled sunroom with an attached jacuzzi/sauna complex. A recent issue of Chalupář (“Chalupa Owner”)—a monthly magazine for young chalupa-owning professionals, dedicated to decorating ideas and simple low-maintenance improvements to modernize your chalupa while maintaining that country feel—revealed the inclinations of Lucie’s cousin.

Some of the wall hangings in the cottage included pictures and maps of the village of Suchá Rudna, back in the days when it had a German name. When I asked Lucie about these, I learned that we were right in the middle of the Sudatenland, the strip along the Polish-Czech border that before the Second World War had been heavily populated by Germans, which fact Hitler used to justify claiming it as a part of Germany and annexing it prior to his invasion of Poland (if my sparse knowledge of history has things in the right order). We spent a while the following day, during our four-hour hike through the beautiful green nature in the mountains, talking about the unfortunate period in the late 1940s when the newly communist government forced almost all of the Germans living in Czechoslovakia to leave, took away their houses, and reassigned them to Czechoslovak families.

When we innocently asked if the German families who had inhabited all these homes, such as the one we were staying in, had ever been compensated in any way, it was clear that we had stumbled upon a sensitive subject. Lucie pointed out that, after the war, Germany had paid war reparations to every country in the region except Czechoslovakia, and that the combined value of what the Czechs owe the Germans in terms of lost real estate is absolutely trivial compared to what the Germans still owe the Czechs in terms of war damages. Further, because there are no longer any Germans living in the area, the children of the people who were evicted cannot possibly want the houses returned to them so that they can move back to the area. They just want the money.

All in all, despite the touchy politics and the unending rain, we had a wonderful time and learned a bit about another aspect of Czech life that we would otherwise have remained ignorant of. It’s funny how many rocks you have to turn over in order to discover the more interesting things.

We have good motives. We have a grandiose vision of the ideal society: poverty has been abolished and racism is a bad memory of the distant past; everyone has free access to as much medical care and education as they want; there is plenty of leisure-time for everyone; exploitation has been eradicated. It is the noblest of dreams.

Yet we find when we try to take steps to bring this dream to fruition that people sometimes do not live up to our expectations. When we try to broaden the social safety net, there are complaints that the lazy people would take advantage of the welfare system, collecting money at home when they could work. When we try to make medical care available to everyone, there are complaints that the unhealthy people would have little incentive to take care of themselves, since the cure for their unhealth would cost them little or nothing out of pocket. When we try to ensure that people of all races, cultural backgrounds, and sexual orientations have opportunities to exercise their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there are complaints of many sorts.

So we begin to admit that we need to tweak things a little bit. First off, we start with the complainers, and we try to enlighten them. In doing so, we find that we must first remove many of their ignorant preconceptions about people of other races and sexual orientations. We explain how cycles of poverty and discrimination lead to conditions that make it appear that minorities are lazy or stupid. We explain that the complainers’ own revulsion at people of the same sex loving each other is just a cultural preconception, or if we’re brave, we explain that the revulsion is based on another example of culture-dependent ignorance that was written into an old book which, no matter how much they cherish it, may well have been written and/or perpetuated by people who wanted to systematize that oppression. We address their complaints about the lazy people and the unhealthy people by saying that, yes, we’re working on them too.

And so we are. We are busy explaining to the lazy people of color that their laziness is the product of years of poverty and discrimination. We try to teach them how to break those cycles. We explain to lazy people who lack color that their laziness is at least the product of poverty, and perhaps feelings of powerlessness. We try to convince them all to work hard to educate themselves in order to break those cycles, but we find that those who are not still children have had bad habits and preconceptions instilled deeply into them already. We find ourselves saying the same things to some of the same people over and over again, and they seem not to be trying to change. So we turn to their children instead, and we try to raise them up to higher standards. We teach them good values, like tolerance and ethics, even if those values put them at odds with their own parents and culture, even if it sometimes requires drastic steps such as forcibly removing them from the bad influences of their own homes and environments. We try to teach them to ignore the temptations of gangs, drugs, and teenage sex, while those same forces try very hard not to be ignored.

It soon becomes clear that the problem is deeply-rooted and web-like. Whenever we try to put our finger on the cause of the problem, we find that cause to be the effect of some other problem. So we turn to the more primary problem and find that it, in turn, is also an effect of something else. Sooner or later, we find a more primary problem that turns out to be reinforced by the effects of a problem we have already investigated. These problems are causing each other in a chicken-and-egg kind of way. It is very frustrating.

Yet we have so much faith in human nature, faith in the ability of humans to exceed and transcend their limitations. After all, we are the species who rose above the animalistic constraints of kill or be killed; through our ability to reason, we have developed keen faculties of morality and justice, faculties that have become so honed that they now dominate single individuals, perpetuating themselves through us and guiding our further development as a species. Who could imagine it to be impossible for people to succeed who set their hearts and minds to the task of eradicating the baser parts of our nature? If we lack the means, no one can deny that we have the desire.

But we also acknowledge that the individual is a very impressionable unit of the species, and that sometimes an individual can learn very unhealthy habits and unhealthy views when he lives in unhealthy surroundings. It soon becomes clear: The way to elevate those wayward individuals, to help them rise to the potential inherent in their nature, is to elevate the society in whose shadow they live. If the society is healthy, the impressionable individuals that constitute it will absorb the ambient good from their surroundings, and they will be healthy in turn. If we think about it further, we realize that a healthy society is not just a means to an end, though; it is a desirable goal in its own right.

Such lines of thinking give birth to social engineering. I was talking a while ago about social engineering in the context of communist Czechoslovakia and asking in what way communism—which began as a noble experiment firmly rooted in the belief that humans, through education and force of will, can completely reforge themselves and their society according to rational principles of social justice—went so horribly awry. This is based on the assumption that communism, as it was put into practice in the twentieth century, bore almost no resemblance to the Marxist vision that spawned it. It seems difficult to believe the alternative: that it began as a passionate vision to dominate the world through totalitarianism, in order that a few men with consonant-riddled surnames could crush the hopes and dreams of millions of people in order to maintain their slippery grip on absolute power. It may have grown to fit that description later, but it did not begin so.

The late 1800s were filled with many such Utopian movements in every part of the world. It was the heyday of the International Workers of the World, of populist politics in the US, of Mother Jones and Eugene Debs, of the Haymarket Riot. Most of these movements in Europe and America were reactions to the injustices and abuses of the unchecked rise of industrialism. Yet it was in Russia where the ideas actually gained enough momentum to foment a revolution, in a Russia that was still largely a feudal agrarian aristocracy with almost no industrial capacity. You can see passing references in both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who were largely concerned with issues other than social justice, to the socialists, communists, and anarchists whose ideas were starting to percolate into Russian society 30 or more years before the revolution in 1917.

Why communism degenerated from the most ambitious experiment in social justice in the history of mankind into such far-reaching totalitarianism is left to be answered by the historians who understand these things far better than I do. The interesting question for me is the pale shades of such thinking that lie at the base of the agenda of political correctness in the US.

Marx became a very popular political philosopher in the US in post-’60s American academia, probably because his vision of human civilization’s inevitable march toward justice meshed so well with the American left-wing intelligentsia’s own attempts to purge the nation of racial and economic inequality. (His popularity also attests to the size of the divide between him and totalitarianism; it has been perfectly safe to revere Marx without anyone assuming you endorse Stalin.) I seem to remember that Marx ranked very high (slightly below Jesus?) a couple of years ago on some well-circulated list of the most influential people in history. To people who have never read his writings, Marx’s ideas are very compelling, for they allow idealists to anchor an elaborate and majestic vision of the potential of human civilization on their faith in the malleability of human nature by means of education and proper upbringing. (This in turn owes much to Locke’s notion of the Blank Slate; for a very interesting discussion of the ecological relationship between this philosophy and modern conception of human nature, I whole-heartedly recommend the book of the same name by Steven Pinker.)

People who have read Marx’s writings, on the other hand, find him slightly less compelling, not because of any shortcomings in his ideas, but because he would also rank very high on a list of the most long-winded and tedious writers in history (just slightly below his ideological arch-nemesis, Adam Smith, who tops the list because he would often spend pages on end discussing the advantages and disadvantages of various ways to calculate, say, the value of a barrel of nails). I’m not droning on about Marx because I think the entire political correctness movement is pinned on his ideas. He merely seems like a good place to start when talking about the dangers of social engineering. One could just as easily begin with Orwell. (Not that I’m going to begin with either of them, though.)

The architects of our representative democratic republic were not just designing a fair and workable government when they donned their wigs and waistcoats in Philadelphia. The philosophical debate that led to the ideas they were trying to implement in a robust constitutional framework had been raging for centuries. The ideas that were penned into the constitution hinged on a wide range of assumptions and philosophical beliefs about human nature. After all, only if one considers people to be basically good and just creatures, capable of agreeing on and instituting laws for the common good, even if they must necessarily limit their own freedom in the process, can one even begin to imagine such a thing as democracy.

What about morality? I bring up the founding documents of the US only because the values expressed therein form such a cornerstone of how Americans view the web of relationships between the individual, society, and government. It’s actually a bit strange if you think about it: The Declaration of Independence was written 228 years ago by a group of men who were trying to justify that the King of England no longer had sovereignty over a certain group of his colonies. And yet we quote that rhetoric to this day when we talk about issues of right and wrong in both public and private spheres, in addition to such seemingly esoteric notions as unalienable rights bestowed upon individuals by their creator, rights that are somehow so bound up with our existence as human beings that they cannot be stripped away in the temporal world, except in Guantanamo Bay.

So wait a minute. . . am I to understand that there is an authority that can supersede the right of my government to legislate over me? and that this authority, without so much as a wave of its hand, can emasculate the vast power structure of the government, any government, when the government tries to overstep its bounds? Where is this authority? I would be honored to meet it.

Oh, my naïve little one, you say, you will never meet this authority. It is an abstract concept, an absolute morality, a philosophical argument—couched in the judicious use of the term “Creator” in that document because, as conventional wisdom has it, those men did not want to weave into the moral fabric of this new country any particular theological doctrine.

So wait a minute. . . you’re telling me that there is a philosophical argument with more power than my government with all of its guns, policemen, jails, litigation, procedures, and paperwork? And were my government to try to make a decree that contradicts that unseen and esoteric authority, channels exist by which I, a puny and insignificant individual, can triumph over such a vast and incomprehensible power structure because, you say, there are ways in which I have more power than the government, “power” in a far more fundamental sense of the word than simply that I elect certain people to office? that in fact the government only has a right to exist as long as I give it my consent? Nonsense.

But we have internalized the rhetoric that argues for that system; it sounds completely natural to think that way. The philosophical arguments of the founding fathers have insinuated themselves into our individual moral beliefs—to such an extent, in fact, that they form the framework on which many of our beliefs as individuals hang, without which many of those beliefs mean nothing—whether we realize it or not.

But the notion of absolute right and wrong is a beautiful and very dangerous idea. The founding fathers walked a very narrow path: They built a country on the notion of an absolute morality, but they did not enunciate its nature or its source. They merely plucked bits and pieces of it from the air and made those pieces axiomatic (“We hold these truths to be self-evident”): the equality of all individuals; the notion that government derives its power from the consent of the governed; the notion of unalienable rights.

There arises a difficulty, which is inherent in basing a government on a framework of notions rather than on a list of specific ordinances: When new issues arise that must be answered but have no precedent in the constitutional laws of the country, we can only hold these new issues up to the light and peer at them in order to try to figure out how they fit into the extant framework. This process turns a democratic republic into an ongoing philosophical debate about what is right and what is wrong, about the ultimate extent of the abstract moral authority that rules us.

I’ve been slicing and carving away at this amorphous problem for many paragraphs now, and I know you’ve been hoping I would get around to the point eventually. Lucky for you, I think I’m finally able to state the nature of the problem as I see it. There are two parts:

(1) The part of our individual moral framework that stems from internalizing the founding American rhetoric, arguably the system of beliefs which unites us as Americans, addresses the macroscopic scale of the government and the microscopic scale of the individual, but ignores everything in the middle (except the matter of the 50 states, but I’m lumping them in with the government). Thus it remains silent on the subject of social movements, which can gain far more momentum (power) than individuals, but are quite different in nature from government, though there are times at which social movements (women’s suffrage, civil rights, etc.) by virtue of their scale can approach that of government in their pervasiveness.

But recall also (2) the unenunciated nature of the absolute morality on which the nation is built. Since we have that assumption subtly built into the country’s structure, it is possible for you and I to agree on the rightness of the enunciated principles, but to disagree emphatically about their source. That of course is directly in line with the integrity of personal belief. However, depending on the extent to which we believe we have access to that source, it is possible for me to believe that my convictions are “righter” than yours. Since the nature of the underlying absolute morality is not explicitly stated, but only alluded, you with your Bible, for instance, can appeal to an absolute system and claim it to be the proper one to inform decisions about issues that are not explicitly addressed in the documents, while I with my liberal biases can appeal to a different absolute system and claim it to be the authority, and even she with her seemingly relative morality of multiculturalism, where no one has the right to undermine someone else’s own personal beliefs, even she can appeal to an absolute system. But because we disagree about the undelineated moral framework of which the particular laws are merely shadows, no one can prove that his or her system is in fact the absolute underlying authority.

Into this nebulous region between axioms and consequences, between macroscopic and microscopic, spring social movements which try to amass enough popular support to influence the government to legislate according to their beliefs on the similarly nebulous matters that occupy that region. The NAACP gets organized, the ACLU, NOW, the Moral Majority, and so on. As corporations have become global in scale, some of them amassing incomes that surpass the GDP of many small countries, we can even throw corporate and industry lobbyists into that group. Some groups, instead of lobbying the government, try to lobby individuals, in order to convince them that a certain belief, and hence a certain resultant action or choice of candidate, is the only morally defensible one. Each of these groups seems to work through channels inherent in the democractic system—by convincing people to vote a certain way, often by convincing them to hold a certain opinion; or by trying directly to influence the government to legislate so that galvanizing popular opinion is not necessary. (It doesn’t matter, for instance, if the majority of people in the country believe that abortion should be legal. If you can influence the lawmakers directly, you can see to it that your own moral beliefs become the law of the land, and popular opinion becomes largely irrelevant. To be fair, though, a parallel example on the other side of the political spectrum would be that of directly influencing lawmakers to legalize gay marriage, even though a majority of Americans finds it unpalatable.)

So sometimes, recalling the little parable that began this diatribe, we find ourselves unable by logical persuasion to convince people that we are right. But we are so certain of our convictions (how could it be otherwise?) that we find ourselves unable or unwilling to live in a society that doesn’t reflect them. And we are so certain that our beliefs are cut from the same cloth as the moral framework that clothes the society that we view contrary beliefs as unenlightened somehow, or prejudiced, or sinful, or backward.

So the problem seems to arise when one group views its social model as morally superior to another group’s, and tries to subvert the democratic process in bringing about a society that reflects their model. When we are arguing about ideas on their own merits, the better idea usually has a habit of rising to the surface. (The truth is its own best defense, after all.) But when we have a collision of conflicting moral frameworks, each with different assumptions built in, then there is no common ground on which to argue about ideas on their own merits. We instead, and often without realizing it, switch to arguing about the rightness and wrongness of axiomatic frameworks. Faggots are sinful, you say, because the Bible has decreed it, and so you cannot willingly live in a society that allows them to marry. But I don’t believe literally in the Bible, especially in the words of Paul, so I can’t accept your argument. But if I don’t believe in the Bible, you say, then I have no moral framework from which to argue; I have only a thorny briar of lies.

So what does it mean when you (more properly, your social movement) have a vision of how society should be, but many of the constituent members of that society seem not to share your ideals or, worse, even reject them? What does it mean to embark on a mission to change the individuals for the sake of a better society? In a pure idealized democracy, the kind that never actually exists except on paper, the society goes in the direction of the majority of the people. Even if the people are wrong, misguided, or stupid, they and no one else have the right to decide for themselves the nature of their society. One might argue that it was precisely to protect against such mob rule that our country was constituted as a representative democracy. In fact, only such reasoning can justify the existence of, say, the electoral college.

But consider whether or not a group of reformers who become frustrated at the ignorance of so many others—and thus deem it necessary to try to mould them in order that the sociological changes they have in mind can be pursued—seem inherently undemocratic somehow. For example, if 70% of the people in my town hate faggots, but I am a member of the 30% who respect the rights of homosexuals, what do I do? I can accept that I am in the minority and accept that the majority should have their way. But I am also educated and open-minded, so clearly I see that those 70% are closed-minded and prejudiced; in order for the society to reflect the set of values I know to be more enlightened, I work to convince those 70% that they are unenlightened and need to elevate their moral code.

To keep the example simple, let’s follow this route: When they refuse to listen, I decide to become a teacher, and I try to impart my wisdom to their children before the children fall into their parents’ bigoted and prejudiced ways. Those parents, for their part, decide to home-school their children, in order to instill in them the proper moral underpinnings and protect them from being corrupted by my vacuous and hedonistic non-beliefs. We both believe we have right on our side, and we both have a vision of society toward which we are working, but we are both subverting the democratic process by using education as social engineering. While far more extreme examples of this exist (the Hitler Youth in Germany and the Young Pioneers in Czechoslovakia come to mind), using education as a means to indoctrinate young people into a given moral framework is a very dangerous practice, no matter how well-intentioned.

For example, to bring the matter to an issue of current significance, consider the example of the US government working to foster the development of the mujaheddin in Afghanistan in the 1980s to resist the Soviets The US, through USAID and the University of Nebraska, spent millions of dollars developing and printing textbooks for Afghan schoolchildren. The textbooks were filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of a covert attempt to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation. For instance, children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines. Lacking any alternative, millions of these textbooks were used long after 1994; the Taliban were still using them in 2001. In 2002, the US started producing less violent versions of the same books, which George Bush said would have “respect for human dignity, instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.” Bush failed to mention who created those earlier books (paraphrased from cooperativeresearch.org; see also The Washington Post, 3/23/2002 and CBC, 5/6/2002.) It was justified at the time because we were working to thwart the efforts of the Soviets, who were most likely being similarly underhanded. In the name of spreading freedom and democracy, we subverted both. It wasn’t the last time.

I was confronted by the same issue (though admittedly in a less insidious form) when I was studying to be a teacher at U of I several years ago, when in Educational Policy Studies 201 we read excerpts from the primers for school children that were put into wide circulation in the US at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The primers superficially taught seemingly apolitical skills such as counting, reading, and writing, but the examples they used subtly communicated a certain value system: industriousness, loyalty to an employer, the dependence of the nuclear family on a one-wage-earner/one-care-taker model, and so on. The schools were in effect being used to circumvent the dominant social model of the day. When the industrialists found it difficult to convince enough adults to work in the factories—after all, they were used to being self-employed craftsmen in the old-world model—the industrialists turned to the schools in an attempt to engender the value system that was most conducive to the social order they envisioned.

Nonetheless, I earlier mentioned the possibility that we are united as Americans by our common belief in the founding American rhetoric. (It’s either that, or that we happen to inhabit the same landmass; I don’t know about you, but the latter doesn’t arouse much patriotism in me.) A necessary part of citizenship, then, a necessary part of having a functional society at all, is the communication of moral standards from one generation to the next, and between individuals laterally, all with a conduit to the legislative body who can make laws that reflect the values of the people. There is no other way to have a coherent society. So part of the process to which I’ve been objecting so emphatically is in fact a necessary part of living among people. A society simply cannot exist without it. I freely admit that it is unavoidable to indoctrinate children into some moral framework, unavoidable to try to influence your peers and contemporaries to see the world the way you do. But which moral framework should be taught in the schools? Which should influence the laws? Which should we pledge allegiance to? Which should we fight to defend? I have had these questions for years now, even before my EPS class put them into words for me, and I still have no answer.

But I do know this: Whether it’s an attempt to breed an army in Afghanistan, an attempt to build a worker’s utopia in Russia, an attempt supposedly to breed ignorance and bigotry out of children in America, or an attempt to protect children from the dangers of the secular world and raise them in a good Christian value system in which the parents wholeheartedly believe—despite the extent to which I agree or disagree with the particular motives of any particular group of people who would use social engineering as a means to an end, I cannot help but to find the whole thing creepy.