It wasn’t until I began planning European travel extravaganzas during the Ronald Reagan era that the name Václav Havel meant very much to me. Once it did, the contrasts in chosen theatricalities between the privileged, incumbent Hollywood actor and the imprisoned, dissident Czech playwright seemed to handily encapsulate the decade. They still do.
For more than a year prior to my spending five weeks in Czechoslovakia in 1989, I had a job writing abstracts of articles in periodicals, and enjoyed the good fortune of being deemed my department’s unofficial “expert” in deciphering foreign publications written in English. There was much to read in British magazines about Eastern Europe in general, and Czechoslovakia in particular. Among other topics, I learned much about Havel’s role in Charter 77. Overall, I was far better informed while visiting in ’89 than I’d been in ’87, which made quiet, substantive conversation such a joy.
In the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution, there was enough time to read Havel’s plays, essays and letters. For obvious reasons, my personal favorite piece of Havel’s work always will be the two-person play called “Audience.” It’s about an artistic, city-dwelling enemy of the totalitarian state (in essence, the author himself, based on his real-life experience) abruptly sent as punishment to the hinterlands for a term as manual laborer in a brewery. He must endure the ramblings of his boss, who cannot refrain from sampling the fermented wares, sinking into comic inebriation while haplessly pretending to interrogate the urban exile.
I’ve seen frequent parallels between the “battered city” syndrome (GC's apt usage) in New Albany, which we’ve also referred to quite often as the New Albany Syndrome, and Havel’s wide-ranging thoughts on the nature of a civil society. It reminds me of the post-communist adage that goes something like this: “It’s easier to make fish soup out of the aquarium than the other way around.” I wrote about it in a newspaper column in 2009.
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Pogo and the New Albany Syndrome
“We have met the enemy … and he is us.”
According to Pogo’s Axiom, most societal ills are firmly, fatefully localized, as in New Albany’s enduring disregard for shared purpose and social cohesion.
Hereabouts, there’s always something or someone else to blame, from immigrants and property taxes to the outside world and insider corruption, and mirrors are perpetually short of supply.
Consequently, if you’re looking for absolution, you’ve come to the wrong column. We’ve all acquiesced in perpetuating the New Albany Syndrome, permitting the city to devolve and deteriorate, and the best hope of reversing this accumulated weight of bad habits and poor decision-making is unity via a grand coalition that concedes the task’s immensity, suspends partisan wrangling, formulates clear strategies, and gets down to work.
Moreover, we need to find a kennel for Pavlov’s dog, which is keeping us all awake at night. Maybe we can ship the mutt off to Central Europe.
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Communism in Czechoslovakia began with a questionable election in 1948, and ended in 1989 with “Velvet Revolution.” Shortly thereafter, the dissident writer and playwright Vaclav Havel was chosen president.
It was a stunning development. Less than a year before the unraveling, Havel had been imprisoned by the seemingly impregnable regime. A humanist and intellectual, he had been denied the opportunity to work in his field, theater arts, and during the 1970’s was subjected to internal exile by being sent into the countryside to work in a brewery.
The inexperienced government faced a hitherto unprecedented task. The process of socializing a country was well documented, but what about the job of reconverting it? How do you set about reversing four decades of stagnation brought about by an outgunned, undercapitalized and outmoded state-owned economy?
The intrinsic absurdities of the Soviet-style system were evident to all, and yet ordinary people were accustomed to them. True, the system had to change quickly lest Czechoslovakia fall even further behind, but how to manage change without exacerbating human misery and risking societal chaos?
President Havel actually offered few concrete ideas as to how the country’s economy might be reinvented. However, others did, and a program of privatization was designed to quantify the value of Czechoslovakia’s state-held assets through vouchers (shares) that could be bought, sold and swapped by citizens.
The jury remains out. Posterity likely will judge the reform effort as middling in the overall context of the Warsaw Pact, and what’s more, Havel’s country split into two entities in 1993. Today the Czech Republic and Slovakia both belong to the European Union, and the ex-president is long since retired.
So, why focus on Vaclav Havel’s role in Czechoslovakia’s post-communist history when he played only a minor part in the country’s economic restructuring?
Because this isn’t about the economy, comrade.
Throughout his unforeseen political career, Havel focused his interpretive powers on matters of conscience and consciousness, which he perceived as vital at a fundamentally human level. He persistently reminded his countrymen that any reform program would have little chance of succeeding without an examination of the society’s daily psychological assumptions.
Havel theorized that the chief legacy of Communism was a trauma at the grassroots core of Czechoslovak society, something that had despoiled the very nature of daily interaction between friends, lovers, neighbors and co-workers. Persistent indoctrination in the ideology of class warfare had turned all human relationships inside out, and the cynicism of everyday reality as it operated far apart from the panaceas of official propaganda subverted all aspects of trust, caring and hope.
Havel offered a consistent, firm, but gentle remonstrance: Before post-communist revitalization could have a chance of success, a “civil society” would have to be redefined and rebuilt virtually from the ground up, and without exclusive recourse to the unfettered mercantile self-interest preferred by capitalism’s victorious adherents.
Admittedly, two decades further along, it remains unclear what effect Havel’s thoughtfully humanistic leadership had on the course of affairs in his homeland. His position was largely ceremonial, and he had neither substantive political power nor accumulated wealth to back up his words.
But, sometimes, it really isn’t whether you win or lose in the traditional all-or-nothing sense. Rather, it’s how you characterize the game, and to me, an imbibing humanist, habitual contrarian and profoundly spiritual (albeit displaced) European, Havel’s analysis applies foursquare to New Albany in the year 2009.
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Truly, it isn’t about the money.
In good times or bad, the New Albany Syndrome is displayed in mistrust, inertia, secrecy and contempt on the part of those who fear the unknown future more than the dilapidated past, and who regard any sign of communication and cooperation with others as a sign of weakness that somehow provides succor to the cultural or political enemy of the moment.
From the subsequent vacuum oozes the politics of fear-mongering. Once during a heated debate, 1st district councilman Dan Coffey inadvertently revealed the obstructionist’s target, spluttering at “them people,” although in reality, “them people” want a livable city just as much as “his” people.
Havel provides the answer: We must remove ourselves from the cycle of blame and vituperation, and get on with the process of building a civil society – a civil city – with a sustainable foundation that prefaces future progress.
Who among us wishes to abandon his or her laboriously crafted straw man first, and get on with the task of reconstituting New Albany’s lost civility?
