[6] Darkness As Seen Through Tiresias’ Eyes (3)

The Backyard Theatre opens with "This is my birthday"

If the reader takes time to review “Meltdown” (click on link) http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/meltdown/2011/09/2011914105518615434.html , a series of four 40+ minute clips about the mindset and events on the cusp of the 2^nd to 3^rd millennium of “our era” on Wall Street, he-she should have a pretty good reference from which to reflect not only on the arrogance prevailing in the financial markets in America and the world, but be able to correlate it to and have a ‘feel’ for the arrogance of the political leadership of the Latvian government from the moment of its renewal in 1991 until its collapse in cynical amorality and financial disaster in 2008. The disaster is of course ongoing.

In a peculiar way, the events on Wall Street were echoed in Riga, Latvia, not to mention all over Europe.

I am queen for a day.

Strange as it may seem, during the first twenty years after the rebirth of Latvia as an independent nation, its government has been little more than a squirming bundle of former Soviet apparatchiks confessing the sins of a failed Soviet economic system by kowtowing to the alleged wisdom embodied by the Harvard Business School and its alumni, the ‘Harvard boys’ http://www.thenation.com/article/harvard-boys-do-russia . No doubt, the hubris of Latvian-Americans smoothed the way of all things American slipping into Latvia without analysis of what the results of it could be.

Thus, like it or not, Latvian-Americans (and of course Latvian-Australians and Canadians et al) facilitated Latvian post-Soviet apparatchiks buying into the liberal neo-capitalist system. For their part, the apparatchiks did so not because they had any idea what the capitalist system was about, but because they were at the levers of power and, so it appeared, could leverage into their and friends accounts a great amount of unattached (not yet privatized) wealth.

My daughter-in-law is cook today.

The kolhoznic-apparatchics were left to their own devices. As a result of their acquisitiveness and lack of communitarianism http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/communitarianism/ (no less lacking in Latvians abroad, except as memory of utopia), something like 300,000 to 500,000 Latvians left Latvia and sought economic refuge in other countries. Large areas of Latvia now stand empty or half-empty of people as a result.

My husband is cook today.

As one who once worked in a brokerage house in Boston and noted the cynical behavior of people in the business as early as the mid-1960s, this writer is not astonished by the sense of Armageddon that now accompanies the system’s collapse. The amorality and prevalent cynicism that came with the free market system astounded the writer even then.

If World Wars 1 and 2 had destroyed millions of lives in Europe and Asia, America had gone largely unscathed by them. While soldiers returning home from the battlefields abroad brought their psychic traumas with them, the American population as a whole knew of the violence only by way of newsreels. When the “iron curtain”, the “cold war”, Senator McCarthy and his communist witch hunts, and prosperity all took hold of the consciousness of America at the same time, violence was forgotten and replaced by a “never again” philosophy for the holders of which violence became a rhetorical device. In short, America was no longer cognizant of violence in real terms, but as something that happened elsewhere to others.

Latvians who arrived in America as refugees of war, at the same time as they fled Soviet occupation of their country, soon joined the American rhetorical war against violence. Though the Latvians had seen and experienced the violence of war first hand, they soon took advantage of the American dilemma of being entrapped in a perception of violence as a vicarious phenomenon.

We make a nice couple, don't we?

The Latvian-Americans, too, were soon fans of cowboys and Indians ‘bang ‘em up’ movies. And though they did not forget their experiences of war or lost memory of their lost loved ones, the Latvians abroad relatively soon became former refugees, American (or other) citizens, and their countrymen under the Soviets increasingly became a fiction. Idealized as more than real, the Latvians in Latvia http://www.flickr.com/photos/58596345@N04/5382738196/  became to the Latvians abroad http://www.weeklyvolcano.com/events/werecommend/2011/08/wingman -brewers-beer-fest-at-pastiche-in-tacoma/uploads/articles/15291-banner-pastiche625.jpg  a pastiche, and also more virtual than real.

It was during this time that the Latvian “populists” were lost to view and were presumed to have gone out of existence. A contemporary Latvian populist, an antagonist of the corrupt government in existence in our day   https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSmQTVLcoPbCri_piINHuzabAOB-RebagqcmCbIa3wYib6SzcsXitebnUpPkbnsRRm1BD1m1-SZwELMrvdjaULu3NDirWKbLpaHn7T3OGnEvdgPUhFcTzRqi_9Lp0TtZ4Oub9XTPL9u-Q/s1600/Riga19%252C2011+050.jpg is never shown but as a vandal or worse. That is to say, according to the Latvian media, government, and most Latvians abroad to be a populist is to be un-Latvian in Latvia. To agitate for the populists “not [to] vote” is condemned as unpatriotic. Populists are presumed not to exist. Just a few days ago some Latvians from the North  American continent were calling on all Latvians to do their “It’s a Latvian thang” as if there are no populists who would resist the call.

This is my day to enjoy. No one can say "no".

In spite of the ‘heavy’ opposition to them , the populists in Latvia have actually been not in the background, but very much in the foreground as émigrés to Ireland, England, China, and all kinds of countries the world over. For most part, these populists are the poor of Latvia.

My son thinks he was born in Argentina.

Is this why the populist Latvians do not exist? Or is it that they are populist antagonists to the Latvians abroad, the very ones who bring them the delights of the West in ways that literally chases the natives out of their country? Do the post-Soviet politicians and media deny populists because these are the true not-voters from day one?

Today the piggy is the queen's!

Which of course leaves the question: What is the validity of the political coalitions currently being formed to take over the Latvian government if it and they do not recognize, let alone represent populists?