ON THE AVENUES: Ladislav's language, 1989 - 1990 (Part 2).

Ostrava, 1989.

Having resolved to resume contact with my Czech acquaintance Ladislav in the post-Velvet Revolution, pre-Internet winter of 1989-90, I counted myself fortunate to still have his postal address. It had somehow survived unscathed when most of my belongings were stolen in Madrid the previous November. In January, I took pen in hand to congratulate him on the wonderful transformations in Czechoslovakia.

In those archaic times, mail could take ten days or more each way, back and forth across the Atlantic, and so it wasn’t overly alarming when no immediate response was forthcoming. Perhaps the seismic shift in Czechoslovakia had impacted the recovering country’s mail carriers, or more likely, Ladislav’s obvious connections to a now discredited ruling order were such that he wasn’t in a good position to answer.

Granted, there’d been almost no violence during a remarkably peaceful, orderly changeover in Czechoslovakia, hence the revolution’s “velvet” descriptive tag, and yet … who really knew? It was a long way off, scores were being settled in various ways, and communications were not instantaneous like today. Even phone calls could be difficult to place to a country where the totalitarian structure had routinely monitored them only a short time before.

Twice more in early 1990 I wrote to Ladislav, each time enclosing souvenirs from Indiana and Kentucky, including American beer coasters for use in his Tiki Bar, but still there was only silence in return. Soon an entire year had passed since our chat, and the usual stressors of everyday living gradually displaced the glories of my 1989 journey to Europe. Back into the workaday grind I sank, and memories of Ladislav grew increasingly dim.

One day in July, my roomie phoned to announce that the mail had included a letter from Czechoslovakia. Upon closer examination, the return address was mysterious, and the message inside, written by an English-speaking friend of Ladislav’s daughter from a small town near Ostrava, was unexpected.

She thanked me for the letters and gifts, but regretted to say that Ladislav had died of a heart attack, aged 65, in July – of 1989! Remarkably, his sudden death had come less than a month after I departed Ostrava for a wedding in Prague, and then to Moscow.

I was crestfallen to realize that he had been denied the chance to witness the change he’d been so sure was imminent. With sadness, I drove to Sportstime Pizza for a few rounds of Pilsner Urquell as an impromptu memorial.

---

Still reeling from the bad news, I arrived home the very next day to find yet another letter for me. This time it was a big manila envelope from an organization called Education for Democracy (EFD), and inside was the information I’d supposedly requested, which was fine, except I’d never, ever heard of EFD and assuredly had not asked for anything to be sent to me, but just the same, quite soon my heart was racing with excitement.

This unsolicited letter described the outline of an unprecedented opportunity for Americans to volunteer for placement in Czechoslovakia as conversational English instructors. No licenses or credentials were required, although previous teaching experience of any sort was a plus. It was a development made possible by the cooperation of American and Czech academics, who sought to take advantage of the Velvet Revolution’s opening by bringing people together ... to learn and speak English.

The words, the ideas, the sentiments – all of it had been discussed with Ladislav that night at the Tiki Bar in Ostrava, with shots of Havana Club in hand. Now with the providential mailing spread before me on the table, my immediate reaction was to thank Ladislav profusely for referring me to the organization, and yet there was a small, nagging problem: He was dead.

Not only was he dead, but he had died five months before the abrupt success of the Velvet Revolution made the EFD program and others like it possible. He could not have known, and yet there was no rational explanation for the unsolicited mailing. It made me pause. I’m not the sort to believe in ghosts, but there are exceptions for everything, and this one handily fit the bill.

My lethargy jolted, I wrote back to Ladislav’s daughter, thanking her for telling me about his death, and then phoned the EFD office (in Mobile, Alabama, of all places) to put my name on the list. Planning immediately began for teaching English in Czechoslovakia in 1991. It was to be the fruition of a dream for me, and in my addled mind, albeit irrationally, I knew Ladislav was the man to thank for it.

---

In the end, rationality was restored, in the form of a telephone call a week or so later from a Floridian with whom I’d stayed in touch after we traveled together in a group to the USSR in 1987.

A teacher himself, he remembered that I’d been a substitute and had an interest in the East Bloc, and when he caught wind of the EFD program’s advent, he’d taken it on himself to send the organizers my address. In turn, they’d forwarded me the manila envelope, and its arrival a day after learning of Ladislav’s passing was a mere coincidence, nothing more.

But as you can imagine, it always will be more than a simple fluke to me. These events rekindled my fighting spirit, and for the following twelve months, working two jobs and saving as much money as possible, an expedition took shape.

In early September, 1991, I was on the ground in Košice, the second largest city in what now is independent Slovakia, almost the farthest point east in what was then Czechoslovakia, and a very long way from both Prague and Ostrava. My assignment was to teach English to medical personnel in the city’s university hospital.

And so, Ladislav, here’s a tipple to your memory. It’s a shame you didn’t live to see it, but the plot worked out just the way you predicted.

Thanks.

(This story was originally published in October, 2011. This winter I'll be digitizing the slides from the time of the teaching gig in Košice)

---

Recent columns:

November 28: ON THE AVENUES: Ladislav's language, 1989 - 1990 (Part 1).

November 21: ON THE AVENUES: Rest in peace, Kevin Hammersmith. Eight years later, you're very much missed.

November 14: ON THE AVENUES: The famous mishap in Madrid, November, 1989.

November 7: ON THE AVENUES: Pay attention, students, because voter turnout went UP in New Albany.

ON THE AVENUES: Ladislav's language, 1989 - 1990 (Part 1).

Ostrava, 1989.

Ladislav was a trim, polite, vaguely aristocratic older gentleman who lived in a peculiarly oversized flat amid a modern suburb of Ostrava, the epicenter of communist Czechoslovakia’s steel making and coal mining industries. If I correctly recall the circumstances, he was a retired educator, discretely moonlighting as an English tutor for my immigrant Czech friend’s mother.

We had been invited to his place for a social evening, perhaps because in that particular socialist neighborhood, visiting Americans were rather rare in 1989.

Knowing there would be drinks served, we didn’t dare drive, choosing instead to board the handy tram, and wind through the industrial landscape of the municipality. Ladislav answered the door promptly, and after pleasantries and the ritual exchange of small gifts, he escorted us back outside and downstairs, to a semi-detached building with garage doors.

Right there in landlocked, socialist Central Europe, taking up precious square meters normally reserved for a Czech male’s single most prized possession (his Škoda automobile), Ladislav had constructed a genuine Tiki Bar, complete with bamboo and plasticized tropical plants. But his equatorial showplace, while initially puzzling, actually made perfect sense in the Bloc’s skewed international scheme of things.

Ladislav had traveled to Cuba as part of a cultural exchange program, and the journey made a deep impression on him. Cuban “guest” workers lived and worked in Ostrava; one afternoon, I drank beer with one of them. Like most Czechs, Ladislav grasped the irony of the enduring blockade that kept Cuban goods, which were available throughout both European geopolitical camps, safely out of American hands, and so a bottle of Havana Club rum was sitting on his back bar alongside an array of Cohibas, all earmarked for the occasion of my visit. It was a reverse black market, and a much appreciated gesture.

Sufficient storage space remained in the garage for Ladislav’s bicycles, for he was an avid cyclist. Apart from his set of metal dentures, and what appeared to be a rather hopeless nicotine addiction, he looked the lean and ruddy part of an athlete. The countryside was hilly and rolling, with mountainous areas nearby: Jeseniky to the west, and Beskydy to the southeast. Apart from Ostrava’s wretched air quality, it appeared to be appropriate terrain for challenging riding.

Specific memories of this long evening at Ladislav’s Ostrava Cubano Tiki Bar are fleeting. The revel extended so far into the cool, wet June night that we came very close to missing the last tram to the Motyčka home, located all the way across town, adjacent to the sprawling Nové hutě Klementa Gottwalda – the steel mill named for Czechoslovakia’s indigenous, long-dead, personal Stalin.

However, one part of our conversation never left my mind in all the years to follow, because after all his other guests except for my escorts had offered their goodbyes, it emerged that Ladislav – whose lifestyle plainly suggested an access to privileges of the sort enjoyed by party members – was disinterested in the past. Rather, he wanted to talk about the future.

He engaged me at length about hope, openness and reform, and about Mikhail Gorbachev’s “new” USSR, with glasnost and perestroika breaking out within the bastion of Czechoslovakia’s imperial overlord to the east. He was highly complimentary about my desire to visit the remainder of his country outside the boundaries of Prague, and thought that when westerners did so, and were able to meet normal working Czechs and Slovaks, artificial political barriers irrevocably fell no matter what his or any other government might say about it.

Ladislav, who of course spoke perfect British English, passionately believed language aptitude to be the key to furthering the fall of impediments to good relations between the diverse peoples of the world. He described his vision of the coming time when Americans exactly like me would come to Eastern Europe as English language instructors, and by doing so, further the process of reform and regeneration.

Granted, it was 1989, and the rigid and toadying Husak regime would never permit such linguistic and cultural incursions, but Ladislav was certain that Gorbachev’s revitalization movement eventually would spill out from the Soviet Union, into the satellite nations, and when it did … well, when it finally did, he fully expected to see me again, this time as a fellow teacher, working alongside him in his homeland.

I enthusiastically agreed, dumbstruck at the ease with which Ladislav, a complete stranger, managed to read my mind. While never an accredited teacher, I’d dabbled in education as a substitute. Back home in a file cabinet was a bulging folder of information on various ways to get “English as a second language” teaching certification. My long-held fascination with East-Central Europe was a given. How did he fathom my innermost thoughts?

We said our goodbyes, and a few days later, it was time to depart Ostrava on a roundabout journey to Moscow for Russian language instruction of my own. Weeks passed, life and travel went on, and by late November, I was home again in Indiana, watching CNN with amazement as the last bits of the Berlin Wall fell, and shortly thereafter, tearfully gladdened when the Velvet Revolution swept Czechoslovakia.

The playwright and intellectual Vaclav Havel, whom Ladislav had described to me in glowing terms as the impetus for Charter 77 and a hero of the opposition, suddenly became president of Czechoslovakia. It was incredible to imagine that Havel had been imprisoned as recently as April of 1989, just before I entered the country. Truly, all things seemed newly possible, and as a new year of 1990 dawned, I started wondering what Ladislav had to say about it.

I’d write to him, and find out.

(Part 2 next week. This story was originally published here in October, 2011)

---

Recent columns:

November 21: ON THE AVENUES: Rest in peace, Kevin Hammersmith. Eight years later, you're very much missed.

November 14: ON THE AVENUES: The famous mishap in Madrid, November, 1989.

November 7: ON THE AVENUES: Pay attention, students, because voter turnout went UP in New Albany.

October 31: ON THE AVENUES: In which Team Gahan's looming appointment with unemployment is examined.

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Wednesday) The shopping cart mayor's cartoonish veneer of a personality cult. Where do we tithe, Leader Dearest?

Last week was Harvest Homecoming, and my city's favorite amok time kept me pinned to the tarmac, but now we're back to what passes for normal here in New Gahania, where "We're All Here Because We're Not All THERE."

This week as a run-up to Decision 2019, I'm headed back into the ON THE AVENUES archive for five straight days of devastatingly persuasive arguments against four more years of the Gahan Family Values™ Personality Cult. I've already made the case for Mark Seabrook as mayor. Now let's return to the voluminous case against Gahanism in five informative and entertaining installments.

It is likely that posterity will view May, 2017 as the period when Jeff Gahan's ludicrous cult of personality spectacularly jumped the shark.

Gahan had only recently seized the New Albany Housing Authority with a publicly stated vow to bulldoze half the units, and now he was encouraging us to shop at just one bloated supermarket chain to the exclusion of others -- unless the city eventually might choose to pay for his re-election ad placements at Aldi and Wally World, too.

What's next, Big Lots?

Maybe the ads were free, intended as barter for the perfectly functional fire station the city razed (at a loss to taxpayers) so as to facilitate Kroger's ginormous enlargement.

Two years later, some of the Kroger shopping carts still bear the mark of the Anchor King.

Shopping cart worship portals weren't the first manifestation of Jeff Gahan's "inspired by Pyongyang" personality cult. In the grand tradition of failed watercolor artists, seminary students and cobblers, this middling veneer salesman concluded early in the game that destiny was clearing a path for his brilliance -- and we've been reminded of it on a daily basis ever since. 

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Monday) The Reisz Mahal luxury city hall, perhaps the signature Gahan boondoggle.

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Tuesday) Gahan the faux historic preservationist demolishes the historic structure -- with abundant malice.

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Wednesday) The shopping cart mayor's cartoonish veneer of a personality cult. Where do we tithe, Leader Dearest?

---

May 14, 2015

ON THE AVENUES: Take this cult of personality and shove it.

Human psychology is a nuanced and often bewildering topic, but it’s probably safe to assert that to some vague extent with respect to interpersonal relationships, most of us want to be liked, and prefer being liked to being feared.

(Note that in this digression, I have no intention of trying to fathom what it means to be “liked” on Facebook)

Meanwhile, as always in the real world, the devil resides fully within the details.

Getting along with people and being liked are two very different issues. To get along with someone requires that you figure out how to balance meeting your needs with that of another person until the two of you arrive at a resolution. Your best chances of being liked occur when you go along with the desires of other even if it means sacrificing your personal goals. To be liked means that other people have positive associations to you so that when they see or think about you, it's with a mental smile.

What about if you don't particularly care about being liked? You have a job to do, for example, that involves your making tough decisions that possibly cause other people to resent your or, at best, prefer to stay out of your way. When they think of you, it's with an active sense that being with you will cause them more pain than pleasure.

If human psychology is a tangled wilderness of conditioned responses and primal screams, consider the genre of politics.

Politics (from Greek: πολιτικός politikos, definition "of, for, or relating to citizens") is the practice and theory of influencing other people. More narrowly, it refers to achieving and exercising positions of governance — organized control over a human community, particularly a state. Furthermore, politics is the study or practice of the distribution of power and resources within a given community (a usually hierarchically organized population) as well as the interrelationship(s) between communities.

In the context of politics, which pertain to invasive concepts like power, control and authority, what does it mean to be liked?

Are our likes and dislikes personal, or professional?

Can politicians be inspiring, totemic figures, or do we merely tolerate them as a regrettable but necessary evil?

---

Longtime readers already know about my youthful travel experiences in Europe, and how these wanderings dovetailed with previous university studies in history, geography and philosophy, producing the opportunity to witness, albeit it briefly, the phenomenon of 20th-century communism in places like Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland.

At my point of debut in the mid-1980s, this political system didn’t have very long to survive, but of course this couldn’t be known at the time. During the post-war period in these places I visited, the theory and practice of communism actually was subject to change, though most often for reasons of ideology (and international power politics) rather than any natural evolutionary process.

I’ve told the story of Ladislav, with whom I became acquainted in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia in 1989. He was 65 years old, and had observed his country’s period of hopeful interwar democracy, then a devastating conflict, to be followed by the imposition of communism by the occupying Soviets and a subsequent four decades of historical entrapment.

Ladislav would have been just shy of 30 years of age when Joseph Stalin died in 1953, a termination which led to a brief period of communist reform and softening under Khrushchev.

Czechoslovakia’s own indigenous version of Stalin, a nonentity named Klement Gottwald, died of his excesses shortly after Stalin’s funeral and was replaced by Antonín Zápotocký, who gifted Prague with a huge statue of Stalin on a hillside overlooking the Vltava River.

Interestingly, the sculptor was so filled with remorse that he committed suicide prior to the unveiling, and the statue was dynamited in 1962 after one shifting of socio-political breezes, and just prior to the next.

It would be very hard to maintain the illusion than any of the men mentioned here were “liked” in ways we might fathom -- not even by their wives and children, although perhaps by their dogs. And yet, they were obeyed, venerated and even worshipped in a political-cum-religious sense, surely out of fear, but also because they had erected and encouraged personality cults to reinforce their positions.

Khrushchev the successor pilloried Stalin for his cult of personality. Ironically, the philosophical father of them both, Karl Marx, disdained the notion.

Cult of personality is a pejorative term implying the concentration of all power in a single charismatic leader within a totalitarian state and the near deification of that leader in state propaganda. Totalitarian regimes use the state-controlled mass media to cultivate a larger-than-life public image of the leader through unquestioning flattery and praise. Leaders are lauded for their extraordinary courage, knowledge, wisdom, or any other superhuman quality necessary for legitimating the totalitarian regime. The cult of personality serves to sustain such a regime in power, discourage open criticism, and justify whatever political twists and turns it may decide to take.

Many Americans will scoff, dismissing these examples as unique, arising from diseased ideals amid peculiar historical imperatives, and taking place in the lives of other people, elsewhere.

Unfortunately, cults of personality are American, too, and can exist in a democracy just as easily as in a totalitarian system of government. George Washington was resistant, and Huey Long obliging. No matter the locale, certain themes in a cult of personality are constant.

The political platform has no independent existence apart from the leader, and the political process is utterly dependent on the leader for guidance.

Manifestations of activity on the part of government also are promoted as inseparable from the leader’s benevolence, and while the leader may have utilized resources theoretically shared equally by his or her subjects, the results must always be portrayed as stemming from the wisdom of the leader.

Mistakes never occur, and when they do, they’re never, ever acknowledged even as minions pay the price.

The leader’s pre-eminence is reinforced by the constant repetition of mass marketing, including the leader’s name and image as attached to almost anything lacking the good sense to move out of the way.

Contemporary electronic media surely assists the cause of building a leader’s cult of personality, but it must be remembered that the Roman Catholic Church was adept at pursuing the same strategy for its papacy long before electricity and the outsourcing of Twitter feeds.

---

Often during the course of my own beer business, there have existed the temptation to indulge in precisely this sort of self-deification. I wouldn’t have been the first, and regrettably, I wasn’t immune to periods of relaxed vigilance, which are characterized by reading one’s press clippings (especially his own) and believing what they say.

What kept me grounded most of the time was the simple realization that I was part of a team, and the daily efforts of the team resulted in satisfied customers, who returned and made possible the survival of the business. I played one role, and it was just that: One part among many, inter-related, and meaningless when separated from the whole.

Perhaps politics works somewhat like this, and perhaps it doesn’t, but either way, the very notion of a personality cult is deeply offensive to me. What’s more, the greater our proximity to it, the more indefensible a cult of personality becomes.

If functioning as an elected official means a stock photograph behind everyone’s desk, daily laudatory references, names on plaques and a ceaseless perpetuation of peerless wisdom, then the wheels have jumped the track.

Those of Ladislav’s generation in Eastern Europe and the USSR had no say in the personality cults inflicted upon them. Those of my generation in America have a ballot box. It’s an interesting tool, and when used properly, acts as kryptonite to the cult.

Just remember that, because very soon, you’ll have a chance to act accordingly.

ON THE AVENUES SPECIAL: Take your cult of personality and shove it, Dear Leader.

ON THE AVENUES SPECIAL: Take your cult of personality and shove it, Dear Leader.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Four more years?

So off went the Emperor in procession under his splendid canopy. Everyone in the streets and the windows said, "Oh, how fine are the Emperor's new clothes! Don't they fit him to perfection? And see his long train!" Nobody would confess that he couldn't see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool. No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success.

"But he hasn't got anything on," a little child said.

"Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?" said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, "He hasn't anything on. A child says he hasn't anything on."

"But he hasn't got anything on!" the whole town cried out at last.

Jeff "Tsar of the Shopping Cart" Gahan has been branding the city in his own image and using our money to do it, but we need collective thinking, not the shoddy veneer of a personality cult.

Far more so than anchors, our foremost branding effort has been devoted to slapping Gahan's cherubic chihuahua image on every last advertisement purchased with taxpayer dollars. An anchor keeps the boat from moving. Gahan keeps the city from moving, while grandly lubricating his own pockets with pay-to-play dollars from special interests.

And yet the absurd personality cult veneer is what we keep getting, again and again. Here's a sampling.

December 16, 2018: Cult of personality: Jeff Gahan's face appears on doggie calendars and in newspaper inserts. It's blatant electioneering at the taxpayer's expense.

August 13, 2018: Earache My Eye: Check out Deaf Gahan's full page Anchor Marriage ad in Extol's wedding issue.

August 10, 2018: Shameless self-aggrandizement as Gahan invites 1Si to provide career counseling to local students.

June 13, 2018: Jeff "Look at Me" Gahan's aquatic cult of personality: He brings us health, all by himself.

February 3, 2018: Inflatable Date Night is ultimate proof that Deaf Gahan seeks to emulate Rev. Moon with a hip new campaign finance baby boom.

January 18, 2018: ON THE AVENUES: During our State of the Gahanaissance Address for 2018, feel free to resort to hard liquor. I did, and will.

September 10, 2017: Adam polishes Jeffrey's personality cult, and yet Dickey's Floyd County Democratic Party still hasn't embraced Gahan's public housing putsch.

June 11, 2017: CARTOON: Gahan Mach III ... or, daddy needs a brand new logo.

June 4, 2017: Scraping rock bottom: Jeff Gahan brings his cult of personality to Kroger shopping carts. But who paid for these political ads?

June 4, 2017: Shopping cart blurbs, magazine ads, billboards ... and now the NTSPY Awards. How much of your money is Jeff Gahan spending on all this?

Let's briefly re-examine the state of Gahan's cult of personality with the assistance of actual facts from history. This column originally was published on May 14, 2015.

Always remember and never forget: #FireGahan2019

------

Human psychology is a nuanced and often bewildering topic, but it’s probably safe to assert that to some vague extent with interpersonal relationships, most of us want to be liked, and prefer being liked to being feared.

(Note that in this digression, I have no intention of trying to fathom what it means to be “liked” on Facebook)

Meanwhile, out in the real world, the devil resides fully within the details.

Getting along with people and being liked are two very different issues. To get along with someone requires that you figure out how to balance meeting your needs with that of another person until the two of you arrive at a resolution. Your best chances of being liked occur when you go along with the desires of other even if it means sacrificing your personal goals. To be liked means that other people have positive associations to you so that when they see or think about you, it's with a mental smile.

What about if you don't particularly care about being liked? You have a job to do, for example, that involves your making tough decisions that possibly cause other people to resent your or, at best, prefer to stay out of your way. When they think of you, it's with an active sense that being with you will cause them more pain than pleasure.

If human psychology is a tangled wilderness of conditioned responses and primal screams, consider the genre of politics.

Politics (from Greek: πολιτικός politikos, definition "of, for, or relating to citizens") is the practice and theory of influencing other people. More narrowly, it refers to achieving and exercising positions of governance — organized control over a human community, particularly a state. Furthermore, politics is the study or practice of the distribution of power and resources within a given community (a usually hierarchically organized population) as well as the interrelationship(s) between communities.

In the context of politics, which pertain to invasive concepts like power, control and authority, what does it mean to be liked?

Are our likes and dislikes personal, or professional?

Can politicians be inspiring, totemic figures, or do we merely tolerate them as a regrettable but necessary evil?

---

Longtime readers already know about my youthful travel experiences in Europe, and how these wanderings dovetailed with previous university studies in history, geography and philosophy, producing the opportunity to witness, albeit it briefly, the phenomenon of 20th-century communism in places like Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland.

At my point of entry in the mid-1980s, this political system didn’t have very long to survive, but of course this couldn’t be known at the time. During the post-war period in these places I visited, the theory and practice of communism actually was subject to change, though more often for reasons of ideology (and international power politics) rather than any natural evolutionary process.

I’ve told the story of Ladislav, with whom I became acquainted in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia in 1989. He was 65 years old, and had observed his country’s period of hopeful interwar democracy, interrupted by a devastating conflict, then followed by the imposition of communism by the occupying Soviets, and a subsequent four decades of historical entrapment.

Ladislav would have been just shy of 30 years of age when Joseph Stalin died in 1953, a termination which led to a brief period of communist reform and softening under Khrushchev.

Czechoslovakia’s own indigenous version of Stalin, a nonentity named Klement Gottwald, died of his excesses shortly after Stalin’s funeral and was replaced by Antonín Zápotocký, who gifted Prague with a huge statue of Stalin on a hillside overlooking the Vltava River.

Interestingly, the sculptor was so filled with remorse that he committed suicide prior to the unveiling, and the statue was dynamited in 1962 after a hopeful shifting of socio-political breezes.

It would be very hard to maintain the illusion than any of the men mentioned here were “liked” in ways we might fathom -- not even by their wives and children, although perhaps by their dogs. And yet, they were obeyed, venerated and even worshipped in a political-cum-religious sense, surely out of fear, but also because they had erected and encouraged personality cults to reinforce their positions.

Khrushchev the successor pilloried Stalin for his cult of personality. Karl Marx, the philosophical father of them both, disdained the notion; after all, in a communal system, how could there be just one great leader?

Cult of personality is a pejorative term implying the concentration of all power in a single charismatic leader within a totalitarian state and the near deification of that leader in state propaganda. Totalitarian regimes use the state-controlled mass media to cultivate a larger-than-life public image of the leader through unquestioning flattery and praise. Leaders are lauded for their extraordinary courage, knowledge, wisdom, or any other superhuman quality necessary for legitimating the totalitarian regime. The cult of personality serves to sustain such a regime in power, discourage open criticism, and justify whatever political twists and turns it may decide to take.

Many Americans will scoff, dismissing these examples as unique, arising from diseased ideals amid peculiar historical imperatives, and taking place in the lives of other people, elsewhere.

Unfortunately, cults of personality are American, too, and can exist in a democracy just as easily as in a totalitarian system of government. George Washington was resistant to the notion, and Huey Long obliging. No matter the locale, certain themes in a cult of personality are constant.

➜ The political platform has no independent existence apart from the leader, and the political process is utterly dependent on the leader for guidance.

➜ Manifestations of activity on the part of government also are promoted as inseparable from the leader’s benevolence, and while the leader may have utilized resources theoretically shared equally by his or her subjects, the results must always be portrayed as stemming from the wisdom of the leader.

➜ Mistakes never occur, and when they do, they’re never openly acknowledged even as minions pay the price.

➜ The leader’s pre-eminence is reinforced by the constant repetition of mass marketing, including the leader’s name and image as attached to almost anything lacking the good sense to move out of the way.

Contemporary electronic media surely assists the cause of building a leader’s cult of personality, but it must be remembered that the Roman Catholic Church was adept at pursuing the same strategy for its papacy long before electricity and the outsourcing of Twitter feeds.

---

Often during the quarter-century course of my own beer business, there was the temptation to indulge in precisely this sort of self-deification. I wouldn’t have been the first, and regrettably, I wasn’t immune to periods of relaxed vigilance, which are characterized by reading one’s own press clippings and believing what they say.

What kept me grounded most of the time was the simple realization that I was part of a team, and the daily efforts of the team resulted in satisfied customers, who returned and made possible the survival of the business. I played one role, and it was just that: One part among many, inter-related, and meaningless when separated from the whole.

Perhaps politics works somewhat like this, and perhaps it doesn’t, but either way, the very notion of a personality cult is deeply offensive to me. What’s more, the greater our proximity to it, the more indefensible a cult of personality becomes.

If functioning as an elected official means a stock photograph behind everyone’s desk, daily laudatory references, names on plaques and a ceaseless perpetuation of peerless wisdom, then the wheels officially have jumped the track.

Those of Ladislav’s generation in Eastern Europe and the USSR had no say in the personality cults inflicted upon them. Those of my generation in America have a ballot box. It’s an interesting tool, and when used properly, acts as kryptonite to the cult.

Just remember that, because very soon, you’ll have a chance to act accordingly.

---

Recent columns:

February 19: ON THE AVENUES: I'd stop drinking, but I'm no quitter (the 2019 Gravity Head remix).

February 12: ON THE AVENUES: If it's about learning and knowledge, then by definition it's a Gahan Free Zone. You're welcome.

February 5: ON THE AVENUES: Our mayor hates non-elected boards -- except when they're his own, which is why "hypocrisy" is spelled G-A-H-A-N.

January 29: ON THE AVENUES: How has the 3rd district councilman fared since this question from 2015: "Et tu, Greg Phipps?"

January 22: ON THE AVENUES: Democrats should judge city council incumbents in districts 2, 3, 4 and 5 by their regressive deeds, not their progressive words.

ON THE AVENUES: Take this cult of personality and shove it (2017 remix).

ON THE AVENUES: Take this cult of personality and shove it.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

This column originally was published on May 14, 2015. The pendulum swings back to relevance today because Mayor Jeff M. Gahan is approaching a decision.

The Green Mouse says there was a period of uncertainty following the 2016 election cycle, but now the rumorama is back on track, with Gahan apparently close to seeking Ron Grooms' State Senate seat in 2018; if he loses, there'd be another mayoral run in 2019.

Recent propaganda photos released by the city show a nattily attired David Duggins, cleaned up nicely and striking bizarre mayoral poses in case he's needed to succeed State Senator Deaf in 2019.

Duggins would need to establish residency to run, but post office boxes are cheap. He'd have to do something about Bob Caesar, who wants to be mayor so badly that he's taken to arming himself with Depends during council meetings.  

Then there's Adam "Aging Boy Wonder" Dickey, who the Green Mouse believes to be contemplating a challenge to Ed Clere in 2018. Speaking personally. I think party chairmen should be more demure; besides, it's hard to imagine Mr. Disnee giving up his Redevelopment Commission seat.

Any way the bologna gets cut, and as this video indicates, we're about to be deluged with a fresh surge of Gahan's "never wrong, always right" cult of personality -- hence this timely refresher course.

Are you ready to help topple the tinhorn? The time draws near, so let's work together, okay?

---

Human psychology is a nuanced and often bewildering topic, but it’s probably safe to assert that to some vague extent with interpersonal relationships, most of us want to be liked, and prefer being liked to being feared.

(Note that in this digression, I have no intention of trying to fathom what it means to be “liked” on Facebook)

Meanwhile, out in the real world, the devil resides fully within the details.

Getting along with people and being liked are two very different issues. To get along with someone requires that you figure out how to balance meeting your needs with that of another person until the two of you arrive at a resolution. Your best chances of being liked occur when you go along with the desires of other even if it means sacrificing your personal goals. To be liked means that other people have positive associations to you so that when they see or think about you, it's with a mental smile.

What about if you don't particularly care about being liked? You have a job to do, for example, that involves your making tough decisions that possibly cause other people to resent your or, at best, prefer to stay out of your way. When they think of you, it's with an active sense that being with you will cause them more pain than pleasure.

If human psychology is a tangled wilderness of conditioned responses and primal screams, consider the genre of politics.

Politics (from Greek: πολιτικός politikos, definition "of, for, or relating to citizens") is the practice and theory of influencing other people. More narrowly, it refers to achieving and exercising positions of governance — organized control over a human community, particularly a state. Furthermore, politics is the study or practice of the distribution of power and resources within a given community (a usually hierarchically organized population) as well as the interrelationship(s) between communities.

In the context of politics, which pertain to invasive concepts like power, control and authority, what does it mean to be liked?

Are our likes and dislikes personal, or professional?

Can politicians be inspiring, totemic figures, or do we merely tolerate them as a regrettable but necessary evil?

---

Longtime readers already know about my youthful travel experiences in Europe, and how these wanderings dovetailed with previous university studies in history, geography and philosophy, producing the opportunity to witness, albeit it briefly, the phenomenon of 20th-century communism in places like Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland.

At my point of entry in the mid-1980s, this political system didn’t have very long to survive, but of course this couldn’t be known at the time. During the post-war period in these places I visited, the theory and practice of communism actually was subject to change, though more often for reasons of ideology (and international power politics) rather than any natural evolutionary process.

I’ve told the story of Ladislav, with whom I became acquainted in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia in 1989. He was 65 years old, and had observed his country’s period of hopeful interwar democracy, interrupted by a devastating conflict, then followed by the imposition of communism by the occupying Soviets, and a subsequent four decades of historical entrapment.

Ladislav would have been just shy of 30 years of age when Joseph Stalin died in 1953, a termination which led to a brief period of communist reform and softening under Khrushchev.

Czechoslovakia’s own indigenous version of Stalin, a nonentity named Klement Gottwald, died of his excesses shortly after Stalin’s funeral and was replaced by Antonín Zápotocký, who gifted Prague with a huge statue of Stalin on a hillside overlooking the Vltava River.

Interestingly, the sculptor was so filled with remorse that he committed suicide prior to the unveiling, and the statue was dynamited in 1962 after a hopeful shifting of socio-political breezes.

It would be very hard to maintain the illusion than any of the men mentioned here were “liked” in ways we might fathom -- not even by their wives and children, although perhaps by their dogs. And yet, they were obeyed, venerated and even worshipped in a political-cum-religious sense, surely out of fear, but also because they had erected and encouraged personality cults to reinforce their positions.

Khrushchev the successor pilloried Stalin for his cult of personality. Ironically, the philosophical father of them both, Karl Marx, disdained the notion.

Cult of personality is a pejorative term implying the concentration of all power in a single charismatic leader within a totalitarian state and the near deification of that leader in state propaganda. Totalitarian regimes use the state-controlled mass media to cultivate a larger-than-life public image of the leader through unquestioning flattery and praise. Leaders are lauded for their extraordinary courage, knowledge, wisdom, or any other superhuman quality necessary for legitimating the totalitarian regime. The cult of personality serves to sustain such a regime in power, discourage open criticism, and justify whatever political twists and turns it may decide to take.

Many Americans will scoff, dismissing these examples as unique, arising from diseased ideals amid peculiar historical imperatives, and taking place in the lives of other people, elsewhere.

Unfortunately, cults of personality are American, too, and can exist in a democracy just as easily as in a totalitarian system of government. George Washington was resistant, and Huey Long obliging. No matter the locale, certain themes in a cult of personality are constant.

The political platform has no independent existence apart from the leader, and the political process is utterly dependent on the leader for guidance.

Manifestations of activity on the part of government also are promoted as inseparable from the leader’s benevolence, and while the leader may have utilized resources theoretically shared equally by his or her subjects, the results must always be portrayed as stemming from the wisdom of the leader.

Mistakes never occur, and when they do, they’re never, ever acknowledged even as minions pay the price.

The leader’s pre-eminence is reinforced by the constant repetition of mass marketing, including the leader’s name and image as attached to almost anything lacking the good sense to move out of the way.

Contemporary electronic media surely assists the cause of building a leader’s cult of personality, but it must be remembered that the Roman Catholic Church was adept at pursuing the same strategy for its papacy long before electricity and the outsourcing of Twitter feeds.

---

Often during the course of my own beer business, there was the temptation to indulge in precisely this sort of self-deification. I wouldn’t have been the first, and regrettably, I wasn’t immune to periods of relaxed vigilance, which are characterized by reading one’s own press clippings and believing what they say.

What kept me grounded most of the time was the simple realization that I was part of a team, and the daily efforts of the team resulted in satisfied customers, who returned and made possible the survival of the business. I played one role, and it was just that: One part among many, inter-related, and meaningless when separated from the whole.

Perhaps politics works somewhat like this, and perhaps it doesn’t, but either way, the very notion of a personality cult is deeply offensive to me. What’s more, the greater our proximity to it, the more indefensible a cult of personality becomes.

If functioning as an elected official means a stock photograph behind everyone’s desk, daily laudatory references, names on plaques and a ceaseless perpetuation of peerless wisdom, then the wheels have jumped the track.

Those of Ladislav’s generation in Eastern Europe and the USSR had no say in the personality cults inflicted upon them. Those of my generation in America have a ballot box. It’s an interesting tool, and when used properly, acts as kryptonite to the cult.

Just remember that, because very soon, you’ll have a chance to act accordingly.

---

Recent columns:


May 25: ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to wherever you are, and come to think of it, Ljubljana will do nicely.

May 18: ON THE AVENUES: Are dissidents born or made? A humanities major examines his life and locale.

May 11: ON THE AVENUES: Would a Canon candidacy compromise Deaf Gahan's and Mr. Dizznee's shizz show? A boy can dream.

May 4: ON THE AVENUES: Under the volcano in Catania, Sicily (Part One).

ON THE AVENUES: Take this cult of personality and shove it.

ON THE AVENUES: Take this cult of personality and shove it.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Human psychology is a nuanced and often bewildering topic, but it’s probably safe to assert that to some vague extent with respect to interpersonal relationships, most of us want to be liked, and prefer being liked to being feared.

(Note that in this digression, I have no intention of trying to fathom what it means to be “liked” on Facebook)

Meanwhile, as always in the real world, the devil resides fully within the details.

Getting along with people and being liked are two very different issues. To get along with someone requires that you figure out how to balance meeting your needs with that of another person until the two of you arrive at a resolution. Your best chances of being liked occur when you go along with the desires of other even if it means sacrificing your personal goals. To be liked means that other people have positive associations to you so that when they see or think about you, it's with a mental smile.

What about if you don't particularly care about being liked? You have a job to do, for example, that involves your making tough decisions that possibly cause other people to resent your or, at best, prefer to stay out of your way. When they think of you, it's with an active sense that being with you will cause them more pain than pleasure.

If human psychology is a tangled wilderness of conditioned responses and primal screams, consider the genre of politics.

Politics (from Greek: πολιτικός politikos, definition "of, for, or relating to citizens") is the practice and theory of influencing other people. More narrowly, it refers to achieving and exercising positions of governance — organized control over a human community, particularly a state. Furthermore, politics is the study or practice of the distribution of power and resources within a given community (a usually hierarchically organized population) as well as the interrelationship(s) between communities.

In the context of politics, which pertain to invasive concepts like power, control and authority, what does it mean to be liked?

Are our likes and dislikes personal, or professional?

Can politicians be inspiring, totemic figures, or do we merely tolerate them as a regrettable but necessary evil?

---

Longtime readers already know about my youthful travel experiences in Europe, and how these wanderings dovetailed with previous university studies in history, geography and philosophy, producing the opportunity to witness, albeit it briefly, the phenomenon of 20th-century communism in places like Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland.

At my point of debut in the mid-1980s, this political system didn’t have very long to survive, but of course this couldn’t be known at the time. During the post-war period in these places I visited, the theory and practice of communism actually was subject to change, though most often for reasons of ideology (and international power politics) rather than any natural evolutionary process.

I’ve told the story of Ladislav, with whom I became acquainted in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia in 1989. He was 65 years old, and had observed his country’s period of hopeful interwar democracy, then a devastating conflict, to be followed by the imposition of communism by the occupying Soviets and a subsequent four decades of historical entrapment.

Ladislav would have been just shy of 30 years of age when Joseph Stalin died in 1953, a termination which led to a brief period of communist reform and softening under Khrushchev.

Czechoslovakia’s own indigenous version of Stalin, a nonentity named Klement Gottwald, died of his excesses shortly after Stalin’s funeral and was replaced by Antonín Zápotocký, who gifted Prague with a huge statue of Stalin on a hillside overlooking the Vltava River.

Interestingly, the sculptor was so filled with remorse that he committed suicide prior to the unveiling, and the statue was dynamited in 1962 after one shifting of socio-political breezes, and just prior to the next.

It would be very hard to maintain the illusion than any of the men mentioned here were “liked” in ways we might fathom -- not even by their wives and children, although perhaps by their dogs. And yet, they were obeyed, venerated and even worshipped in a political-cum-religious sense, surely out of fear, but also because they had erected and encouraged personality cults to reinforce their positions.

Khrushchev the successor pilloried Stalin for his cult of personality. Ironically, the philosophical father of them both, Karl Marx, disdained the notion.

Cult of personality is a pejorative term implying the concentration of all power in a single charismatic leader within a totalitarian state and the near deification of that leader in state propaganda. Totalitarian regimes use the state-controlled mass media to cultivate a larger-than-life public image of the leader through unquestioning flattery and praise. Leaders are lauded for their extraordinary courage, knowledge, wisdom, or any other superhuman quality necessary for legitimating the totalitarian regime. The cult of personality serves to sustain such a regime in power, discourage open criticism, and justify whatever political twists and turns it may decide to take.

Many Americans will scoff, dismissing these examples as unique, arising from diseased ideals amid peculiar historical imperatives, and taking place in the lives of other people, elsewhere.

Unfortunately, cults of personality are American, too, and can exist in a democracy just as easily as in a totalitarian system of government. George Washington was resistant, and Huey Long obliging. No matter the locale, certain themes in a cult of personality are constant.

The political platform has no independent existence apart from the leader, and the political process is utterly dependent on the leader for guidance.

Manifestations of activity on the part of government also are promoted as inseparable from the leader’s benevolence, and while the leader may have utilized resources theoretically shared equally by his or her subjects, the results must always be portrayed as stemming from the wisdom of the leader.

Mistakes never occur, and when they do, they’re never, ever acknowledged even as minions pay the price.

The leader’s pre-eminence is reinforced by the constant repetition of mass marketing, including the leader’s name and image as attached to almost anything lacking the good sense to move out of the way.

Contemporary electronic media surely assists the cause of building a leader’s cult of personality, but it must be remembered that the Roman Catholic Church was adept at pursuing the same strategy for its papacy long before electricity and the outsourcing of Twitter feeds.

---

Often during the course of my own beer business, there have existed the temptation to indulge in precisely this sort of self-deification. I wouldn’t have been the first, and regrettably, I wasn’t immune to periods of relaxed vigilance, which are characterized by reading one’s press clippings (especially his own) and believing what they say.

What kept me grounded most of the time was the simple realization that I was part of a team, and the daily efforts of the team resulted in satisfied customers, who returned and made possible the survival of the business. I played one role, and it was just that: One part among many, inter-related, and meaningless when separated from the whole.

Perhaps politics works somewhat like this, and perhaps it doesn’t, but either way, the very notion of a personality cult is deeply offensive to me. What’s more, the greater our proximity to it, the more indefensible a cult of personality becomes.

If functioning as an elected official means a stock photograph behind everyone’s desk, daily laudatory references, names on plaques and a ceaseless perpetuation of peerless wisdom, then the wheels have jumped the track.

Those of Ladislav’s generation in Eastern Europe and the USSR had no say in the personality cults inflicted upon them. Those of my generation in America have a ballot box. It’s an interesting tool, and when used properly, acts as kryptonite to the cult.

Just remember that, because very soon, you’ll have a chance to act accordingly.

---

Recent columns:

May 7: ON THE AVENUES: In Havel I trust.

April 30: ON THE AVENUES: Until philosophers become kings.

April 27: ON THE AVENUES MONDAY SPECIAL: Et tu, Greg Phipps? Or: Anger and the electoral variability of transparency.

April 23: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Anachronisms and intellectuals, here and there.

April 16: ON THE AVENUES: Say a prayer for NA Confidentialas it conducts this exclusive interview with Councilman Cappuccino.

ON THE AVENUES: Ladislav's language (2).

ON THE AVENUES: Ladislav's language (2).

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Having resolved to resume contact with my Czech acquaintance Ladislav in the post-Velvet Revolution, pre-Internet winter of 1990, I counted myself fortunate to still have his postal address. It had somehow survived unscathed when most of my belongings were stolen in Madrid the previous November. In January, I took pen in hand to congratulate him on the wonderful transformations in Czechoslovakia.

In those archaic times, mail could take ten days or more each way, back and forth across the Atlantic, and so it wasn’t overly alarming when no immediate response was forthcoming. Perhaps the seismic shift in Czechoslovakia had impacted the recovering country’s mail carriers, or more likely, Ladislav’s obvious connections to a now discredited ruling order were such that he wasn’t in a good position to answer.

Granted, there’d been almost no violence during a remarkably peaceful, orderly changeover in Czechoslovakia, hence the revolution’s “velvet” descriptive tag, and yet … who really knew? It was a long way off, scores were being settled in various ways, and communications were not instantaneous like today. Even phone calls could be difficult to place to a country where the totalitarian structure had routinely monitored them only a short time before.

Twice more in early 1990 I wrote to Ladislav, each time enclosing souvenirs from Indiana and Kentucky, including American beer coasters for use in his Tiki Bar, but still there was only silence in return. Soon an entire year had passed since our chat, and the usual stressors of everyday living gradually displaced the glories of my 1989 journey to Europe. Back into the wage slave grind I sank, and memories of Ladislav grew increasingly dim.

One day in July, my roomie phoned to announce that the mail had included a letter from Czechoslovakia. Upon closer examination, the return address was mysterious, and the message inside, written by an English-speaking friend of Ladislav’s daughter from a small town near Ostrava, was unexpected.

She thanked me for the letters and gifts, but regretted to say that Ladislav had died of a heart attack, aged 65, in July – of 1989! Remarkably, his sudden death had come less than a month after I departed Ostrava. I was crestfallen to realize that he had been denied the chance to witness the change he’d been so sure was imminent. With sadness, I drove to Sportstime Pizza for a few rounds of Pilsner Urquell as an impromptu memorial.

Still reeling from the bad news, I arrived home the following day to find yet another letter for me. This time it was a big manila envelope from an organization called Education for Democracy (EFD), and inside was the information I’d supposedly requested, which was fine, except I’d never, ever heard of EFD and assuredly had not asked for anything to be sent me, but just the same, quite soon my heart was racing with excitement.

This unsolicited letter described the outline of an unprecedented opportunity for Americans to volunteer for placement in Czechoslovakia as conversational English instructors. No licenses or credentials were required, although previous teaching experience of any sort was a plus. It was a development made possible by the cooperation of American and Czech academics, who sought to take advantage of the Velvet Revolution’s opening by bringing people together to learn and speak English.

The words, the ideas, the sentiments – all of it had been discussed that night at the Tiki Bar in Ostrava, with shots of Havana Club in hand, and with the providential mailing spread before me on the table, my immediate reaction was to thank Ladislav for referring me to the organization, and yet there was a small, nagging problem: He was dead.

Not only was he dead, but he had died five months before the abrupt success of the Velvet Revolution made the EFD program and others like it possible. He could not have known, and yet there was no rational explanation for the unsolicited mailing. It made me pause. I’m not the sort to believe in ghosts, but there are exceptions for everything, and this one handily fit the bill.

My workaday lethargy jolted, I wrote back to Ladislav’s daughter, thanking her for telling me about his death, and then phoned the EFD office (in Mobile, Alabama, of all places) to put my name on the list. Planning began for teaching English in Czechoslovakia in 1991. It was to be the fruition of a dream for me, and in my addled mind, albeit irrationally, I knew Ladislav was to thank for it.

In the end, rationality was restored, in the form of a telephone call a week or so later from a Floridian with whom I’d stayed in touch after we traveled together in a group to the USSR in 1987. A teacher himself, he remembered that I’d been a substitute and had an interest in the East Bloc, and when he caught wind of the EFD program’s advent, he’d taken it on himself to send the organizers my address. In turn, they’d forwarded me the manila envelope, and its arrival a day after learning of Ladislav’s passing was a coincidence, nothing more.

But as you can imagine, it always will be more than a fluke to me. These events rekindled my fighting spirit, and for the following twelve months, working two jobs and saving as much money as possible, an expedition took shape.

In early September, 1991, I was on the ground in Kosice, the second largest city in what now is independent Slovakia, almost the farthest point east in what was then Czechoslovakia, and a very long way from both Prague and Ostrava. My assignment was to teach English to medical personnel in the city’s university hospital.

And so, Ladislav, here’s a tipple to your memory. It’s a shame you didn’t live to see it, but the plot worked out just the way you predicted. Thanks.

Previously: ONE THE AVENUES: Ladislav's language (1).

ON THE AVENUES: Ladislav's language (1).

ON THE AVENUES: Ladislav's language (1).

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Ladislav was a trim, polite, vaguely aristocratic older gentleman who lived in a peculiarly oversized flat amid a modern suburb of Ostrava, the epicenter of communist Czechoslovakia’s steel making and coal mining. If I correctly recall the circumstances, he was a retired educator, discretely moonlighting as an English tutor for my immigrant Czech friend’s mother.

We had been invited to his place for a social evening, perhaps because in that particular socialist neighborhood, visiting Americans were rather rare in 1989.

Knowing there would be drinks served, we didn’t dare drive, choosing instead the handy tram, and winding through the industrial landscape of the municipality. Ladislav answered the door promptly, and after pleasantries and the ritual exchange of small gifts, he escorted us back outside and downstairs, to a semi-detached building with garage doors.

Right there in landlocked, socialist Central Europe, taking up precious square meters normally reserved for a Czech male’s single most prized possession (his Skoda automobile), Ladislav had constructed a genuine Tiki Bar, complete with bamboo and plasticized tropical plants. But his equatorial showplace, while initially puzzling, actually made perfect sense in the Socialist Bloc’s skewed international scheme of things.

Ladislav had traveled to Cuba as part of a cultural exchange program, and the journey made a deep impression on him. Cuban “guest” workers lived and worked in Ostrava; one afternoon, I drank beer with one of them. Like most Czechs, Ladislav grasped the irony of the enduring blockade that kept Cuban goods, which were available throughout both European geopolitical camps, safely out of American hands, and so a bottle of Havana Club rum was sitting on his back bar alongside a brace of Cohibas, all earmarked for the occasion of my visit. It was a reverse black market, and a much appreciated gesture.

Sufficient storage space remained in the garage for Ladislav’s bicycles, for he was an avid cyclist. Apart from his set of metal dentures, and what appeared to be a rather hopeless nicotine addiction, he looked the lean and ruddy part of an athlete. The countryside was hilly and rolling, with mountainous areas nearby: Jeseniky to the west, and Beskydy to the southeast. Apart from Ostrava’s wretched air quality, it appeared to be appropriate terrain for challenging riding.

Specific memories of this long evening at Ladislav’s Ostrava Cubano Tiki Bar are fleeting. The revel extended so far into the cool, wet June night that we came very close to missing the last tram to the Motycka home, located all the way across town, adjacent to the sprawling Nové hutě Klementa Gottwalda – the steel mill named for Czechoslovakia’s indigenous, long-dead, personal Stalin.

However, one part of our conversation never left my mind in all the years to follow, because after all his other guests except for my escorts had offered their goodbyes, it emerged that Ladislav – whose lifestyle plainly suggested an access to privileges of the sort enjoyed by party members – was disinterested in the past. Rather, he wanted to talk about the future.

He engaged me at length about hope, openness and reform, and about Mikhail Gorbachev’s “new” USSR, with glasnost and perestroika breaking out within the bastion of Czechoslovakia’s imperial overlord. He was highly complimentary about my desire to visit the remainder of his country, outside the boundaries of Prague, and thought that when westerners did so, and were able to meet normal working Czechs and Slovaks, artificial political barriers irrevocably fell no matter what his or any other government might say about it.

Ladislav, who of course spoke perfect British English, passionately believed language aptitude to be the key to furthering the fall of impediments to good relations between the diverse peoples of the world. He described his vision of the coming time when Americans exactly like me would come to Eastern Europe as English language instructors, and by doing so, further the process of reform and regeneration.

Granted, it was 1989, and the rigid and toadying Husak regime would never permit such linguistic and cultural incursions, but Ladislav was certain that Gorbachev’s revitalization movement eventually would spill out from the Soviet Union, into the satellite nations, and when it did … well, when it finally did, he fully expected to see me again, this time as a fellow teacher, working alongside him in his homeland.

I enthusiastically agreed, dumbstruck at the ease with which Ladislav, a complete stranger, managed to read my mind. While never an accredited teacher, I’d dabbled in education as a substitute. Back home in a file cabinet was a bulging folder of information on various ways to get “English as a second language” teaching certification. My long-held fascination with East-Central Europe was a given. How did he fathom my innermost thoughts?

We said our goodbyes, and a few days later, it was time to depart Ostrava on a roundabout journey to Moscow for Russian language instruction of my own. Weeks passed, life and travel went on, and by late November, I was home again in Indiana, watching CNN with amazement as the last bits of the Berlin Wall fell, and shortly thereafter, tearfully gladdened when the Velvet Revolution swept Czechoslovakia.

The playwright and intellectual Vaclav Havel, whom Ladislav had described to me in glowing terms as the impetus for Charter 77 and a hero of the opposition, suddenly became president of the country. It was incredible to imagine that Havel had been imprisoned as recently as April of 1989, just before I entered the country. Truly, all things seemed newly possible, and as a new year dawned, I started wondering what Ladislav had to say about it. I’d write to him, and find out.

(Part 2 next week)