The trip to Eger on Sunday was an educational one even before we arrived, in that I learned how the main roads work. Turning into an exit, we encountered highway patrol parked there to check whether drivers had paid the fee to use the highway. Luckily my friends had, because I think it's similar to the hit-or-miss enforcement of the metro. Speaking of which, the subway is slightly less enigmatic now, and I bet Hungarians have figured out how to cheat the system because it's not difficult over time to get a sense of where guards will be checking tickets - the exception being the one time I came across a guard who actually hopped onto a train to see our tickets.
Anyway, the highway procedure should not be so surprising, I'm just used to U.S. tax policy. What my friends did on the other hand was buy a day pass at a gas station. You can buy passes for any range of times, and by SMS as well, which is funny because you could theoretically have to keep your confirmation SMS for a year to show as proof.
The remaining enlightenment that I derived from Eger was similarly not direct nor immediate, creeping up on me days later.
I was glad to have known about Egri Csillagok, the nationally required reading about Eger's uniquely successful defense against the expanding Ottomans in 1552. It means Stars of Eger, but is for some reason translated as Eclipse of the Crescent Moon, and the writer Geza Gardonyi's grave can be found at the castle in Eger. I didn't learn much from the Hungarian tour guide, depending instead on what my friends could translate. While deciding on the obligatory wine (the city is known for it), one friend insisted I buy Egri Bikaver, i.e., Bull's Blood of Eger. The legend goes that in the days preparing for the Ottoman attack, Hungarians drank this red wine, which dripped down their lips and convinced the Ottomans that they had drank bull's blood, and that was why they were strong enough to defeat them.
The story, along with the history as a larger context, joins other sources of national pride (the unsuccessful 1848 rebellion against the Habsburgs, the disastrous 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, the smooth 1989 shedding of communism, etc.). These, in turn, have their part in the even larger context of the overall idea of any country's national legacies, which I have started to wonder about lately. Brainwashing is just the extreme form of a universal practice in national education systems of conditioning citizens to understand and support their countries. At least at a basic level this means emphasizing achievements over mistakes as proof of greatness. Doesn't a country founded on liberty sound better than one founded on tax evasion?
It's true that the events of 1989 and 1956 and 1848 durably shape the Hungary we see today. And if anyone is to inherit these legacies, mustn't it be the Hungarians? But my problem, or at least what I question, is whether and how much anyone has a right to claim these legacies. Yesterday I read this in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure."
The Spain of today is not the Spain of the conquistadors. That is to say Prime Minister Zapatero's government had no say in the country's colonization decisions in the 16th century. What fidelity, then, do Latin Americans owe Spain? What accountability, then, does Spain owe them? I thought of this in more recent history when hearing that a French court blamed the country for deporting Jews during the Holocaust, and (in an Eastern/Central European class) that Polish people in the town of Jedwabne killed the Jewish half of their neighbors. In class my professor distinguished between guilt (as Sarkozy should not feel guilty for the choices of de Gaulle) and responsibility (as the Polish should admit historical accuracies).
If we take it for granted that, indeed, Belgium is liable for its colonial past or that Italians rightly take pride in the roots of the Renaissance, I think this implies some credence to Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. It divides the world and much of its history into seven main civilizations, which define conflict along cultural lines. It's not the best way to examine the aforementioned legacies, but in my mind there's a relevantly deterministic outlook. His theory has generally met resistance (including from me), probably because we dislike the idea of simplifying cultures so much that we say Germans behave that way because they're German. In this way it's 'wrong' to stereotype peoples, and yet right to identify them according to histories dating back decades, centuries, or millenniums. I'm still trying to reconcile this.
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Listening to: Dru Hill, "We're Not Making Love No More"
Reading: Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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