by | 9 February 2005 · 6:09 am

When Vicksburg was the Frontier, and Grant a Frontiersman

This post is for Geitner Simmons, of Regions of Mind, who’s writing a book about the South and the West.

“Gettysburg changed the war less than Vicksburg did,” explained Chris Gabel, a military historian [at the School of Advanced Military Studies] at Fort Leavenworth, who led one of the four seminars into which the large group of captains and majors was divided. Gettysburg was an accidental, set-piece battle. After Gettysburg, the Union field commander, [General George G.] Meade, kept doing what he had always been doing. The Confederate commander, [Robert E.] Lee, kept doing what he had always been doing. Little of strategic importance happened. But Vicksburg cut the South in two, and it brought Grant east, to take control of the Union Army.”

Though situated in the Deep South, in 1863 Vicksburg was considered “the West,” just as Leavenworth was during the later Indian Wars, and just as the Rockies and the Cascades are today. Grant, the Union commander at Vicksburg, was in every respect a westerner. He grew up in Ohio and lived in Illinois, both part of the original “Northwest,” the first territorial possession of the young United States and in the early nineteenth century–the time of Grant’s youth and early adulthood–a frontier, with its own Indian wars. Grant had also served in California and Oregon. This experience of the Pacific may have steeled his commitment to a united union, which he shared with Lincoln.

As a general, Grant was blunt and practical, lumbering ever forward, risking what he had achieved in the knowledge that standing still means failure. And because he considered himself no better than his men, he was the ideal democratic leader. For Grant, war was never heroic: like everything else in America, it was business. Grant exemplified the serviceable engineering education at which West Point excelled: so American, so unlike the more theoretical “chessboard” curriculum of European war colleges. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, written at the end of his life, is the archetypal American narrative, perhaps more so than Thoreau’s Walden or Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, to which Edmund Wilson favorably compares it. With rough austerity, it tells of its author’s struggles, setbacks, and ultimate rise, through sheer practical application in the course of extraordinary events. If I could boil America down to a single, exemplary personality, it would be Grant. For me, Grant, in his rough-hewn, unsophisticated ambition, was America. I was taking this bus journey on a hunch that learning more about Grant and what he had accomplished at Vicksburg might allow me a final insight into this country.

At Vicksburg, Grant truly came into his own, pulling the Union and the coming Industrial Age nation along with him. Vicksburg is about process: the little-by-littleness of change. Though Grant’s victory there gave Union forces strategic control of the settled part of the continent, the exact moment of that victory is obscure; for Vicksburg was not so much a battle as a complex campaign of several battles and skirmishes. The turning point in the dense malarial marshes of the lower Mississippi Valley occurred in the midst of bloody weeks of drudgery, between Grant’s seventh, failed attempt in late March 1863 to cross to the east bank of the Mississippi (where the Confederate fortress was) and the Confederates’ final surrender on Independence Day, the same July Fourth when the guns stilled at Gettysburg.

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 341-343

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by | 8 February 2005 · 6:55 am

Studying the Soviet Union in the 1960s

Siberian Light has dawned upon a blog by longtime Russian translator David McDuff entitled A Step at a Time, which describes itself as “Reflections on the world post 9/11, by a writer and translator who engaged for many years in the debates of the Cold War, and who tends to see the world’s present troubles as a continuation of the old common struggle with tyranny and oppression.” Here‘s his Normblog profile.

McDuff was an exchange student in the Soviet Union during the 1960s and has written a fascinating, serialized essay entitled “Going Back” about his experiences during those years. I’d like to excerpt a paragraph or two from each installment–except the introduction, which I’ll quote in its entirety. (Perhaps it will incite me to set down a few of my memories of life in Ceausescu’s Romania.) So here goes:

Going Back

In writing the entries about “Dissidents” [link added], I’ve begun to realize that for me the issues in this subject go back a long way – probably to the beginning of my involvement with Russian studies in the early 1960s. In those days, such an involvement also inevitably entailed a prolonged encounter with the Soviet Union. Since for someone from a Western democracy it’s almost impossible to understand cognitively the reality of the fabric of life in a totalitarian state, a Westerner’s memories of contact with that fabric are almost always bound to be selective, personal and subjective to an extent that may make them irrelevant in terms of historical truth. Yet I believe that since part of the legacy of the Cold War has been a consciousness of the old divide between East and West, and the barriers it created between human beings on either side of it, it’s perhaps important for those in the West who did have first-hand experience – however partial and “cushioned” – of life in the Soviet reality, to talk about it and discuss it. For it was a world that was not merely physical and geographic, but also extended far into realms of thought, morality, political awareness, aesthetics, and other regions, while at the same time functioning as a kind of reversing mirror of Western social and intellectual norms.

“A man cannot bear the thought of being crushed by a physical compulsion; therefore he deifies the force that rules over him, investing it with superhuman traits, with omniscient reason, with a special mission; and in this way he saves a bit of his own dignity. The Russian writer Belinsky, for instance, made use of Hegel during a certain phase of his life, to deify czardom.” This is how, towards the end of his autobiographical work Captive Realm, the great Polish-Lithuanian author Czeslaw Milosz illustrates the choice between “madness” (the refusal to recognize necessity) and “servility” (the acknowledgment of one’s complete powerlessness), which he saw as a defining characteristic of life in a totalitarian society. I think it was a dawning consciousness of this choice – or rather, of the fact that in certain conditions of social and political development such a choice might have to be made – that eventually made clear to me, somewhere around the end of the second year of my studies in Russian literature and history, the essential difference between Russian culture and the culture of the West, and made me want to understand it further.

In future postings under this heading, I’ll try to describe how that process of discovery and understanding developed for me.

Going Back II

I’d grown up in Edinburgh, Scotland, far away from the complexities of East European politics, but had had at least some small experience of “physical compulsion” at the school I attended, which in itself in those distant days of the 1950s was probably not unlike a totalitarian entity of some kind, with its cult of obedience, its prefects, its canings and beatings, and its assertion of a monolithic, corporate identity….

Occasionally the Russian department received visits from Soviet writers and public figures, but these were nearly all rather obscure – no one had ever heard of the “poet” who arrived one day, accompanied by two “minders”, with a slim volume of verse in written in the most austere and conventional social realist style. He was an engaging man, who had taken part in the defence of Moscow in 1941, and had later fought in tank battles – he told us that all the skin had been burnt from his body, and had had to be re-grown. As a military man, he was interested in the technical problem of how best to scale the rock on which Edinburgh Castle stands, and I remember that we students spent a long time discussing the logistical details of this with him, as it was good practice for our knowledge of Russian.

Going Back III

I visited the Soviet Union for the first time in the summer of 1966, travelling with my girlfriend in a white Morris Minor convertible which we took aboard the Soviet ship Mariya Ulyanova (named after Lenin’s sister) from London’s Tilbury Docks, via Copenhagen and Helsinki, to Leningrad….

That summer we didn’t stay in hotels, but slept in a tent we’d taken with us, striking camp at official State campsites whose locations were entered on our visas, together with the obligatory time of arrival at each site. We started with a week in Leningrad, then drove to Novgorod and Kalinin, followed by a week in Moscow, then to Kharkov and Kiev, and finally out of the USSR via Vinnitsa and Chernovitsy, into Romania – four weeks in the Soviet Union in all. In general, at first we were surprised at how “normal” everything seemed – the weather was warm and sunny, the streets and thoroughfares of Leningrad looked much like those of any European city, and it was only when we got out of the car and gazed at the actual texture of the place – the strangely rough, unmodernized surfaces of the roads and buildings, the dust that blew everywhere, the absence of commercial advertising, the old-fashioned look of people’s clothes – that we realized we were in another world from the one we were used to. Even so, during those first days I think we were so pleased to have reached our destination that we didn’t really notice much of this – my memories are mainly of visits to the Hermitage and other museums, to the Petergof Palace and park, of walks along the Neva embankment, and so on. For us, it was almost like being back in Vienna or Copenhagen – or even Edinburgh….

Engaging as some of these encounters were, we were, I think, glad to leave Soviet territory. At Chernovitsy, after the car had been searched for nearly 2 hours by Soviet border guards, who extracted every single piece of paper from it, we crossed into Romania, where we underwent the ritual of having the car sprayed against foot-and-mouth disease, and washing our hands in disinfectant by the roadside. We were then told by the Romanian personnel that we could pitch our tent “wherever we liked”, as long as it wasn’t in a forestry zone. The year before, Nicolae Ceausescu had been chosen first secretary of the central committee of the Romanian Communist party.

Going Back IV

The drive through northern Romania, Hungary and Austria, back through West Germany to Ostend and the United Kingdom, was fairly uneventful. We didn’t go down to Bucharest, but stayed in the foothills of the Carpathians, where we were treated almost like royalty by the staff of the local tourist office in Suceava, the first town over the border, which didn’t appear to have seen many British tourists in a long while. We tried on local national costumes, let the tourist office director’s twelve year-old cowherd son drive our right-hand drive Morris Minor round a field, much to the boy’s delight, experimented with speaking Romanian, had our photographs taken, drank fruit cordial, had our palms read by the local gypsies, ate in a really nice restaurant, and in general had a pleasant time. It all seemed light years away from the Soviet Union – more like being in France or Italy. Moving on westward the landscape soon become rather more industrial and sombre, and when we entered Hungary there was something of the Soviet ‘feel’ again, especially along the shore of Lake Balaton, with its organized groups of vacationers and their mostly Soviet-made cars. In Budapest I remember the blackness of the uncleaned buildings, and the bullet scars from 1956, which still lay everywhere on the street facades and masonry. Also the incredibly dense and tall barbed-wire fortifications on the Hungarian-Austrian border, just after Sopron….

In January, I had an interview in London with the British Council, in connection with the Moscow visit I was planning to make. The British Council’s offices on Davies Street seemed quite unassuming, and very British, with cups of tea and copies of the Times. One was therefore slightly unprepared for the rather East European nature of the interviewing panel, which consisted of a row of dark-suited personnel, some academic but others very definitely from the Foreign Office, who fired questions at one about one’s plans, intentions and reasons for visiting the Soviet Union. Some weeks later, I received a letter telling me that I’d been accepted as a postgraduate exchange student. Later, there was a briefing session, where all the accepted candidates were gathered together in a room at Davies Street. We were given demonstrations of bugging devices that had been found in university, diplomatic and business premises in the Soviet Union, and then received an illustrated lecture on the workings of two-way mirrors, with a real “live” two-way mirror. We were sworn to secrecy, and told that we must not on any account divulge anything of what we’d seen and heard to the press, or in writing of any kind. Somewhat taken aback, and slightly amused, at the end of the session we emerged on to the street, wondering if this had been a rehearsal for some spy drama.

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by | 7 February 2005 · 6:49 am

Free to Protest, and Nobody Cares

In 1997, Robert Kaplan found the boundary that divides Cascadia into two nations to be a fading anachronism.

YET WHEN I went to dinner at the Portland home of an Iranian immigrant, Jim (Jamsheed) Ameri, it was as if Sousa’s patriotic march music had jumped in volume, as if mid century Industrial Age America had never receded. Jim is a real estate developer and lives with his wife, Goli, in Tigard, on the southwestern fringe of Portland, in an opulent home at the head of the Willamette Valley. From their impeccable lawn, punctuated with majestic Douglas firs in a fine, pellucid mist, the valley, its homes and its gardens, unfurled. This was the bountiful Pacific Northwest as seen by the first pioneers, now savored by this latest migration of Oregon settlers. Jim and Goli had invited a number of their Iranian friends to dinner to discuss their experiences as very successful immigrants in America.

Sipping drinks on the porch in the sunset, Farsheed Shomloo, an immigration lawyer, pointed to a book on the patio table and told Jim, “You should read this new book about Iran, it’s really interesting.” Jim replied:

“I don’t want to read it. I know the outcome already. In Iran, there is beautiful poetry and everything turns out a disaster. Here the poetry is not so beautiful, but people are free to discover the best in themselves; that’s why America has happy endings. Here it’s a negative system: there is no entrenched depotism, no will to dominate. We immigrants can remake the whole country if we want to. It’s ours for the taking, as if there is a perpetual clean slate where nobody is ever owed anything. I’ll tell you, the Iranian revolution was a disaster for Iran and a success for America, because it brought a lot of talented, ambitious Iranians here. Every time there is a disaster in the Third World, it’s a good thing for America, since the best of the middle class finds its way here.”

Farsheed agreed. “What is this country that sucks you up and draws out the best in you, and allows you for the first time to be yourself?” he asked passionately. “Periodically I reread the Constitution. I am amazed. What is this incredible system built by pessimists, yet built so as to unleash the human spirit? You know why I chose to live in Oregon? I looked in a book and saw that there was no sales tax here. In Iran I was oppressed by taxes and everything else. At the University of Oregon in Eugene I used to participate in protests against the shah [in the 1970s]. Then I realized that nobody in Oregon gave a damn about the shah or about me protesting. I was free to criticize U.S. government policy, and nobody cared! You cannot imagine what a revelation that was for somebody from Iran. That’s when I stopped focusing on Iran and truly became an American.”

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 336-337

But look at it from the point of view of someone whose principal involvement in politics is to participate in protest demonstrations and political fund-raising. How discouraging is it to stage more demonstrations and raise more money and still lose elections? Free to protest, and nobody cares!

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by | 7 February 2005 · 6:19 am

Sleepless in Garden City, Kansas

Quang Nguyen owns the Garden City Specialty Cleaners. At night, he prepares federal tax returns for Vietnamese and Mexicans who do not know English well. He files the returns electronically on his laptop computer. I met him for breakfast at a franchise restaurant. In a part of America where people dress informally, he wore a pin-striped shirt and tie and had a collection of newspapers under his arm.

Nguyen was born in 1959 in South Vietnam, the son of a businessman. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, he escaped with hundreds of others on a rickety fishing boat. They drifted with little food or water for three days in the open sea before an American vessel rescued them. Nguyen and the others were sent to a refugee camp in Thailand. In 1981, after years of delay, he arrived in Oakland, California, then flew to Wichita, Kansas, where he knew a Vietnamese family. He soon learned that the new pig-raising plant in Garden City had jobs to offer. “So I came here and never left.

“I came with a friend, another Vietnamese I had met in Wichita. I was young, thin, and short. I was one of the first Vietnamese to come here. The people at the plant wouldn’t hire me. They said I was too small to hack pig meat all day with a knife. My friend and I slept in an old car we had–we had no money to rent a room. We slept all winter of 1981-1982 in the car, by the highway and in the park. We came back to the plant every few days, begging for work. Finally, one of the foremen felt sorry for us. I started working nights at the pig plant and immediately registered for school during the day. I had studied electrical engineering in Vietnam. but I knew that I was not in a position to continue that here: I had to learn proper English.

“I saved money to sponsor my sister to come, and I always studied. I tried never to sleep. I got together with some other Vietnamese to start a restaurant. and I worked there for two years after quitting the job at the feeding plant. But the restaurant was not really a success. So I read manuals about fixing cars and in 1985 opened a body shop. In 1987, I sold my share in the body shop and bought the Rainbow Laundry, then the Specialty Cleaners. After I became a citizen. I studied the U.S. tax system and started preparing tax returns for the other Vietnamese. In 1991, I married a Vietnamese. My wife and I met at a bowling alley.

“My youth was all work and struggle and cold and heat and lonely with a strange language. In this country, if you don’t work hard you either sink or stand in place, which is just as bad. You always have to calculate to get ahead. You know, I have to pay $250 each month for health insurance, and then there are the mortgage payments. I have four children; two are in Head Start programs. If I didn’t have to sleep, I could make more money, though.” He smiled.

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 259-260

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by | 6 February 2005 · 3:22 pm

Bournemouth-on-the-Pacific: Victoria, B.C.

The Britishness of Victoria, the main city on Vancouver Island (and the official capital of British Columbia), seemed exaggerated to me. With its red phone booths, wrought-iron pavilions, pubs, Wax Museum, Crystal Garden, afternoon tea, and kilted bagpiper playing Christmas tunes out of season, Victoria was a Busch Gardens version of England. But the cloying atmosphere was not wholly invented; there were historical and social reasons for it. Though the Canadian Pacific had hoped to extend the transcontinental rail line to Vancouver Island, the railway had never gotten this far; it had terminated in the city of Vancouver, on the mainland. From that point onward, Vancouver projected itself into the future, as the rail bridge across the continent is now being reconceived as an air bridge across the Pacific. Meanwhile, Victoria, in its isolation, clung to the comfortable colonial past, redolent of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the British Navy. By the turn of the twentieth century, Victoria was a Bournemouth-on-the-Pacific, a clubby haven for “remittance men,” the unemployable sons of wealthy English families.

Elizabeth Archibald, a medieval scholar from Cambridge, England, who teaches at the University of Victoria, told me that when she had been at Yale, “Everyone was enchanted by my English accent. In Victoria it’s not even noticed. The flights between London and this part of Canada are full. Many Britons come here to live.”

The abundance of Britons in Victoria, along with the nicely cadenced speech of English Canada, has produced a wonderfully clear local accent. The words slip from people’s mouths like springwater vectored by rocks in a stream. This, at any rate, is what I thought when I met Douglas Homer-Dixon, who has spent his life as a forester on Vancouver Island. He escorted me for a walk along the coast in East Sooke Regional Park, pointing out the western cedars with their fanlike, matronly branches, the gnarled, sienna-hued arbutus trees, and the Pacific yews, whose coat of carbohydrate-rich lichen deer feed on. A gentle wind blew through the fog and ash-blue Strait of Juan de Fuca, connecting Puget Sound with the Pacific; it had been named for a Greek explorer who had sailed for Spain and adopted a Spanish name. Unlike the eastern fog, weighted with heat and humidity, the fog here is a silken lacework, draping the hillsides. I watched a Steller’s jay, described by Meriwether Lewis, land silently on a branch, its fabulous midnight-blue color clashing with the green background. Each rain droplet seemed to have hardened in the cold air, as if millions of glass beads rested upon the leaves.

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 324-325

And, speaking of Vancouver Island, the Dictionary of Received Ideas alerts us to an online exhibit of the Virtual Museum of Canada entitled Graveyard of the Pacific: The Shipwrecks of Vancouver Island. The South Pacific has quite a few nautical graveyards as well.

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by | 6 February 2005 · 10:48 am

Covering All Religious Bases

My maternal grandparents were buried in the Philippines. Our rites for the deceased ancestors are half Filipino and half Chinese. My mother, sisters, and I were converted to Catholicism when we were in school. Following the Catholic feast of All Souls Day, November 2, the Chinese Filipinos would go to the cemetery and stay there all day. They would bring food and games to play, as for a picnic, and even books to read. My mother would bring fruit, burn paper money and incense at the grave, and make us bow. I remember my grandmother’s funeral. At a certain hour, the Catholic priest celebrated Mass. After that a Daoist priest came and said some prayers. That was followed by the Buddhist monks performing some ceremony. There was the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the side. Over at the end was the statue of Kuanyin, the bodhisattva of mercy. My father said that this way everything was covered.

SOURCE: “All Bases Covered,” by Deanna Li, in Being Chinese: Voices from the Diaspora, by Wei Djao (U. Arizona Press, 2003), pp. 119-120

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by | 6 February 2005 · 9:50 am

Part Chinese, Part European, Part Latino

MY GRANDMOTHER, my mother’s mother, was born in China. Her name was Lee Chung. She came to Peru in 1905 or 1906, at the age of 18 or 19, to work on the coffee plantation in the jungle of Peru. At that time many people came from Europe and Asia as the government was giving free land to immigrants willing to go to the eastern side of the Andes Mountains. She came with about twenty families, altogether more than a hundred people, from the same province in northern China. They lived together like a family because the government provided housing for people working in agriculture. But they were really not one family, and she was by herself. She told us that she had some brothers, and their families were living in China and Hong Kong. She did not have much education.

She married my grandfather, an Italian. It was funny because my grandfather from Italy did not speak Chinese. She did not speak Italian. But they communicated somehow. They got married in 1907 or 1908….

My grandmother never spoke Spanish. She only spoke Mandarin Chinese to us. When I was small, it was easier to communicate with her. Then when we grew up, we began to speak Spanish. She only spoke Chinese throughout her life, although she understood a lot of Spanish.

My mother speaks some Chinese because she lived with my grandmother all the time. My mother speaks Italian too. My Chinese was not good because I learned it by ear, listening to my grandmother. As a kid of six or seven, I would speak with whoever that was there. In Peru, it was mostly my grandmother. She lived to sixty-four or sixty-five years of age.

In Peru, there are still some old Chinese families that have been there for generations. And the Japanese too. We have many Asians in Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. In all these countries the Asians and their cultures are very strong. The Asian cultures are very respectable in South America. If you are part of an Asian culture, people respect you more because they think that you are more trustworthy. The Chinese who were born in South America act like Latinos in their manners. They look Asian but they speak Spanish. They are very integrated.

The last time there were Chinese immigrants to Peru was in 1968, I think. They stopped coming because the economic situation in the country was not good. Most Chinese went to Argentina and Venezuela. I have met a distant aunt in Venezuela. Most of the Chinese there came from Hong Kong, from around 1984 to about 1995. Venezuela is the only country you can pay for your residency and work. The people from Hong Kong learned Spanish very fast.

My uncle has been in Australia for forty years. He lives in Sydney now. He is the nephew of my grandmother. I met him several times in the U.S. He did not speak Spanish. We communicated in English, but sometimes he spoke to me in Chinese, and I had a hard time understanding him because I was out of practice and hadn’t spoken Chinese for a long time.

I see myself as part Chinese, part European, and part Latino. I feel that way always. I like Chinese culture, as I do European and Latino cultures. Chinese culture is part of my background. I went to the U.S. for my university education. I made friends with students from Hong Kong and Taiwan. We would get together and play soccer. We discussed about things, and we enjoyed ourselves. We talked about things in Peru and how the Chinese came to Peru. Some of the Latino students from South America who saw me then did not think that I was a Latino because I was always with the Asians. When I am with my friends from Hong Kong or Taiwan, I feel Chinese. I feel I am part of that group. I feel that I belong there.

SOURCE: “San Ramon the Coffee Town,” by Juan Miranda, in Being Chinese: Voices from the Diaspora, by Wei Djao (U. Arizona Press, 2003), pp. 131-134

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by | 5 February 2005 · 11:08 am

A Navajo Uprooted, Then Rerooted

“I was born in 1952 on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona,” Boone said. “I was part of the generation of Navajo young people torn from our traditions by the federal government. We were made to feel ashamed of everything Indian–of our language and tribal identity–in a failed attempt to make Indians like white people.” Boone said he had been forcibly sent to an American boarding school at an early age, then placed in a foster family of Mormons from Malibu, California, a painful irony given that the Mormons and Navajos had fought a protracted guerrilla war in the second half of the nineteenth century. “I was baptized into the Mormon Church. I rebelled and went through four foster homes. I did not complete high school. It was often hard for me to talk as a kid. What I remember most about my youth is silences and embarrassments. Eventually, the Mormons excommunicated me. In 1980, I went back to the Navajo reservation, where I lived in a hogan. I asked my grandfather, a medicine man, Dan Chee, to teach me everything he knew before he dies.

“I built the sweat lodge here in 1992. According to strict Navajo tradition, there are no co-ed sweats, but we’ve made concessions to modern life. About fifteen of us, men and women, some Indians, some Mexican Americans, some Anglos, sweat together. We wear light clothes, of course; it’s not a commune. While the fire purifies us of negative energy, each of us talks about our past, where we come from, who our parents are, what our home lives as children were like. Many of us don’t want to remember our home lives, and at a certain point we stop talking. I’ve heard awful stories inside this lodge. And when I do, then would come the silence.

“Too many of us are hovering off the ground with no firm foundation beneath us. Take my own family, for instance. Half of my relatives died from alcoholism. I grew up with nothing, in a desert, with no running water, with family problems followed by a series of foster homes that completely alienated me from whatever traditions I had. But I’ll tell you something: compared to the white trash I encounter in the places where I go to install cable TV, I am pretty well rooted, actually.[“]

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 180-181

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by | 5 February 2005 · 10:24 am

A Navajo Veterans’ Cemetery

The veterans’ cemetery in Shiprock sprawled across a long hillside that overlooked the High Desert. The [Veterans Day] ceremony was over by the time we had arrived. It didn’t matter. I was moved in a way that I had not expected to be. There was no fence, no landscaping, just tufts of gama grass and tumbleweed amid some hundred or so graves scattered beneath a vast curvature of blue sky. The graves were not orderly, and there were no stone markers. The raised dirt mounds were decorated with red plastic pinwheels and empty beer cans arranged in rectangular or circular patterns. American flags of many sizes had been stuck into each mount: some were plastic, some wooden and painted red, white, and blue. More flapped in the stiff wind. Over a few mounds where family groups stood in silence, full-size American flags had been laid out. Chili explained that each flag had been wrapped around a coffin on the day of burial; the families unfurl them once a year on Veterans Day. “Indians serve in the military in greater proportion than other ethnic groups,” Chili said, “because we’re defending the land itself more than just the abstract idea of the U.S.A.”

Chili’s wife and children drove up in a truck to meet us, and we all walked through the cemetery together. Because of his missing arm, Chili hadn’t served in the military. He told me he felt bad about that. Otherwise, none of us said much. Looking out over the sharply defined, high-altitude hillside crested with snapping American flags–planted amid beer cans and pinwheels on mounds covering dead soldiers–I thought that whatever America’s destiny, it had already been incorporated into the native religion of these Navajo. Those cheap plastic and cloth flags had a permanent, mythic feel that sent a chill up my spine.

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), p. 207

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by | 4 February 2005 · 8:44 am

Volga Germans Steer for Home

The invaluable Argus notes a story about Volga Germans in Kazakhstan.

ALMATY, 1 February (IRIN) – For Irina Geisler, a young ethnic German in the Kazakh commercial capital of Almaty, ‘returning’ to Germany, couldn’t be more natural. “I feel German. It’s my dream,” the 19-year-old linguistics student told IRIN. Her application for German citizenship currently awaits approval.

“All my life I’ve heard about Germany. It’s part of my life,” she said with a German accent heavily influenced by the Schwabian roots of her ancestors. Such dreams remain strong for thousands of such ethnic Germans in today’s Kazakhstan, with many of Irina’s friends torn between both countries. “Half of the young ethnic Germans would like to return, the other half don’t want to leave Kazakhstan,” Geisler conceded, describing it as an individual decision many young people like her still face.

“I’ve thought about going to Germany but I’ve finished my education already,” 29-year-old Evgenija Mayer, an employee at the Fredrich Ebert Stiftung in Almaty, told IRIN. “I worry I would have to start all over again.” But starting again is precisely what hundreds of thousands like her have done already. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, more than 900,000 ethnic Germans and their families have emigrated to Germany, the German Embassy in Almaty told IRIN.

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