cheese it, the cops!

genocide tourism

well, i am in krakow. an amazingly lovely city, with astonishing medieval and after architecture, great street life, etc. i have never felt so jewish as when i was contemplating this journey, however. and it strikes me that this whole region - which includes auschwitz, the schindler factory, and so on - is dependent on holocaust tourism. the jewish quarter, which i just walked in the surprisingly blistering heat, was crowded; tours everywhere.

the holocaust sucked for some folks, of course, but it has turned out to be quite the cash cow. perhaps this is what hitler had in mind in the long run: an economic development plan for a united europe. i wonder if this is true in other genocides: take the killing fields tour; hey let's go visit some mass graves; here's the forced collectivization of agriculture conference center and golf course. alright there are very good reasons for this and we should never forget, etc. (as a matter of fact i live 15 miles from gettysburg, where it seemed like the whole nation gathered a few weeks ago.)

on the other hand the tourists look the same as anywhere: germans and americans and japanese snapping pictures and buying holocaust souvenirs. up in the square or in the antique shops, there is much much antique nazi and soviet merchandise: well, we're all nostalgic for non-squishy totalitarianism, when someone would really tell you what to do, even if it was just die.

now on the other hand, the anarchy 'a' is ubiquitous, indicating that there are people here who might actually have drawn the obvious conclusion from this deranged statist history.

 

yesterday, we came over from cumberland/benham/lynch, kentucky, to appalachia, virginia on the vertigious switchback road rt 160. this is the very epicenter of american coal country ("it's a long way to harlan/it's a long way to hazard, just to get a little brew": "nine pound hammer." no: it's not far at all.) coming into virginia, you see a whole ridge chopped away, collapsing into the hollows in heaps of infinite slag. everywhere here trucks are hauling coal, the trains run often and full. i think this story is really complicated, as you can see from the simultaneous sense of trauma and nostalgia that surround the coal industry here (e.g. at the coal mining museum in benham, where the most moving little piece was probably about trapped miners' last words; but of course also in the music of the region etc). but the idea that we're literally going to blow these mountains apart: that can't be acceptable, can it? one would think that coal can't really be the solution anyway. but what would happen, even now, to the tenuous economies of this region, without it?

i'm on a kind of coal-country/bluegrass music road trip with my mom (the indominatable joyce abell, 83) in far southwest virginia, west virginia, and eastern kentucky. we've been staying, believe it or not, at the ralph stanley museum and traditional music center in clintwood, va. jim and jesse, the stonemans, the carter family are all from this region of virginia, and we've been listening to all of them on the drive. ma is being generous about that: probably, all things considered, more into beethoven. we visited the appalshop in whitesburg, ky, which produces important documentaries about appalachia and runs a wonderful bluegrass radio station. ma taught a course on appalachia in 1974 at kennedy high school in montgomery county md, partly based on the classic book night comes to the cumberlands, by harry caudill, and they went through this area, including the appalshop. we did some amazing drives through these astonishing hills, which are as beautiful as any land i have ever seen, and we saw devastating evidence of strip-mining and mountain-top removal. i'm going to do more on that later.

phat

yo i'm heading down to norlins today, and i'll be blogging mardi gras.