Wrong Side of the Border

     

In the year 2010 if you step into a train in Slovakia, it is likely a train built 30 years ago. A train that squeaks and is so noisy that the gentle rocking won't work you to sleep. Each window opens, or is at least supposed to open. The seats often stick to your skin on hot days and chill your clothed skin with a hard vinyl on cold days. Still upholstered with the original materials of 30 years ago and mended with duct tape-like material here and there. If the lights work they are harsh, but can be switched off in each six- or eight-passenger compartment, each coupé, as the Europeans are fond of calling them. The toilets have ages of wear on them that are indecipherable from filthiness. When you flush, a trap door in the toilet opens to reveal the sound, sight, and draft of the tracks below. There is no pretense of there being a storage tank on this train.

This train is the superior train in Slovakia, a train you are lucky to be on if you have the opportunity. Every passenger on that train can control the temperature, the level of draft that reaches him or her, the amount of light, out of politeness by first asking the six other people in the coupé if they wouldn't mind and then opening or closing a window, door, drapes, hanging a head or arm out into the breeze, switching on the heat or air-conditioning, turning the lights on or off. This is the communist built train that surprisingly exemplifies and recognizes the freedom of the individual, a responsibility to people immediately around him, the ability to change things immediately around him.

When walking out on the street or on the sidewalk, you can never be certain of who sees you. In a coupé, you can make it more private. You can actually close a curtain if you don't want passengers walking by to be able to look into your coupé. You can close other curtains if you don't want to be stared at by people standing on the platform as your train sits at a station. You can even lock the door. Yes, you can lock the door to your coupé built during the days of the intrusive seemingly omnipresent communist government. Sometimes the conductor will use his key to open it when coming for tickets. Sometimes he or she will just knock and wait patiently for you to open it.

Some trains are crowded, others are not. On some lines, at certain times of the day, even when just riding second class, you can quite literally read a book in peace and quiet, entirely on your own, not a person in sight or earshot. Even on pretty full trains if you're travelling with a bigger group of friends, you can get a coupé or two to yourselves. If you are with family, travelling four or five in a group, often other passengers will allow you a coupé to yourselves, especially with little kids in tow.

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And in contrast, we have another type of train in Slovakia – new and shiny. It sometimes even smells new, fresh out of the factories of the Western democracies. It's at times a hand-me-down from a country of the West, fallen below Western standards, but of high standards for a post-communist country, so it's often a welcome hand-me-down. This is the inferior type of train that you can step onto in Slovakia.

It's created with a love for sameness and for identical behavior and wants throughout a community. A train created in one of the Western democracies. A train that doesn't let you open a window. If everything's working properly, a train where every room, every car, every seat has the identical temperature, the identical amount of fresh air.

Of course, everyone is able to put on a sweater or take one off, but beyond that very limited option you have on this train no greater control over yourself and your surroundings. Nor does any other passenger. In that respect it is equal. Nor, would it seem, does anyone else on board have that ability, as you would learn from an attempt to change the atmosphere on the train on those 43 degree days in late September when someone left the air-conditioning on or those 87 degree days in April when someone forgot to turn down the heat.

You can always ask the conductor to turn down the air-conditioning in September. He might even do that for you. Or there's a list of surprisingly familiar options to anyone who's gone to an overseer (aka public servant, aka government employee) and begged for something.

He might tells you "yes," and not do it. He might tell you "no" and walk away. He might tell you he can't because he's not allowed to. It's "the rules" that it must be at that temperature and the person/people who make/s the rules is/are not even on the train, nor do/es he/she/they have a phone number, but "will get in touch with you promptly if you send him/her/them a letter to an address that I can provide for you."

Or he just doesn't know how to turn down the A.C. It's outside of his pay grade and in a need-to-know world, it's not his business. In the end, in order to ensure some modicum of comfort, and to stop your travelling partners from shivering, you are likely to have to open a window on that chilly September day in order to warm up the air conditioned train. Or in April to cool down that superheated train. Except the windows simply don't open. They're all bolted shut.

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On these trains there are no barriers separating compartments. There are no compartments. Entire trains composed of entirely undivided train cars. Everyone can see and hear everyone else. Sure, there are plush seats, big windows, the things around you feel new and a little cleaner. It's well-lit, consistently well-lit regardless of how light or dark it is outside.

If you happen to find a car that has a coupé, it will be a coupé with entirely glass walls. No hiding behind curtains or locked doors in there. No momentary privacy. No small groups. No isolated family units. This is the train of the Western democracies.

On this "up to Western standards" train, you can't even do one of the most beautiful things there is to do in Slovakia: to open the window any of the four seasons and to take in the fresh air as you run through the countryside, along rivers, past mountains dotted with castles, at 90 miles an hour, allowing Slovakia to whip through your hair.

No, on this up-to-Western-standards train you can't do that, but you can view your country through tinted windows, to see a green-hued or maybe a blued-hued or brown-hued or gray-hued Slovakia.

Perhaps a color of window designed in a country that does not have its own colors. For here, in a country like this, with such a rich palate of rural colors, clear is the preferable color of the glass manufactured. And why is the glass tinted? Because the designer/design committee1 didn't trust you to look away when the sun shone, to cover your eyes from the UV rays. It might be dangerous for you if you act irresponsibly, so all people get the same tinted view.

It's one of the paradoxes one encounters in skirting the border between East and West. In repressive regimes you find these surprising ways that individual freedom pokes out. It seems there will always be people with a desire to not have every aspect of life centrally controlled. The design of the communist-era Slovak train being but one small example in a constant flood of them, a constant flood of them that are apparent to the keen observer. A constant flood of ways that people (most often quietly) allowed for the individual, himself, herself, or another, to be the boss of oneself in some aspect of life.

And that same paradox is true as you move West of that border. You see things you would never see East (especially pre-EU-acquisition of the central European post-communist nations aka "Eastern Europe"); the train being but one small example. In nations that are, relatively-speaking, considered to be some of the freest countries in the world, you can find a virtually endless supply, really virtually endless to the keen observer, of ways of controlling other people. It's fascinating how it always seems to be there, this underlying idea of "I know what's good for you, better than you know what's good for you." Behind political faades of freedom, you always find this in places you don't expect to find it. Not the idea of "individuals choose for themselves," but the idea of "I will choose for myself, and for you as well."

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Just as a sense of decreased political freedom in the US has brought out a sense of rebelliousness in me, I wonder if a guise of increased political freedom brings a willingness to tolerate less freedom, a willingness to tolerate more central planning where one worker, or more often a committee decides for all with limited avenues of recourse.

"1,000 years without a king makes the heart free" reads a Slovak t-shirt. But I wonder if it's really years of those failed (usually foreign) repressive regimes that made so many Slovaks so beautifully apolitical. So apolitical that not once, but twice they had the worst voter turnout in EU elections for any EU member state. Politicians simply don't have the fertile soil here for widespread voluntary political hero worship.

In 2004, W. visited the Slovak capital of Bratislava to give a well-attended public speech. In an image captured by many cameras, a group of approximately 10 Slovak thirty-somethings were engaging in the uncharacteristically Slovak act of holding placards with George and Laura Bush's photos on them and showing fervent vocal support. Cheering, jumping, clapping, chanting. They weren't in the easy-to-enter VIP section, but were suspiciously in the "everyone else" section. Shocked by what I was seeing I asked a few of them which of Bush's policies they liked most. The answer was something like "WE LOVE GEORGE BUSH!!!" I tried again, to which I received a substanceless answer. So the third time, I pulled one person off to the side, tried again, and she said to me "Don't tell anyone, but we work for the Prime Minister. We have to be here today doing this."

The lack of widespread voluntary hero worship seems to allow for this tremendous distrust of government. Seldom can individual politicians be mentioned at a table full of people without someone at the table laughing aloud about the politician. Frequently what follows is the latest joke going around about that politician.

In a country where government has so consistently failed the people, it's an attitude one should expect. (After all, if failure is marked by instability, the last century saw six different officially acknowledged currency changes with four different officially acknowledged implosions of government in Slovakia. Any person on the street of a certain age can tell you that.) Freedom might be more precious to a Slovak who knows his government failed him than to an Austrian who believes in his government. To a Czech more than a Frenchman.

It seems we notice our freedom most when that precious freedom feels most keenly threatened. But what is it that brings out the central planner in men, that moves one to force his will on others, and more importantly that allows us to acquiesce to the planning of the minutia of our lives by fiat? Is it the veil of political freedom? If we believe we are free, will we consent to anything? If we simply feel free, will we consent to even more?