Tavisuplebi

Greetings once again from Tbilisi! The picture included here will surely inspire a throb of sentimentality. Stalin, of course, was born in Gori, just 50 km from here, where his statue and museum, along with his personal railway car, continue to dominate the city center. On one visit to Gori, a Georgian construction worker asked me what I thought of Joseph Stalin. I perceived that I must choose my words carefully, and hesitated for a moment. Then he answered the question for me: "He was a great man. Maybe good, maybe bad--but he was a great man." And so he was.

Last night, a friend told me that while Lenin's challenge to the Proletariat was Uchitsa, uchitsa, yeshcho raz uchitsa! ("Study, study, and again study!"), Stalin modified it somewhat: Rabota, Rabota, yeshcho raz rabota! ("Work, work, and again work!"). And when I look upon the massive construction of everything here, it becomes quite evident that Stalin's views prevailed.

The Georgians are very interesting people, and I am extremely fond of them. This morning I saw a young man waiting for a bus, and he had finished the last cigarette in his packet. As he sat there, he calmly set fire to the empty packet and held it in his fingers, watching it burn. Now that is something! If I did that out in front of Starbuck's at La Mirada & Imperial, probably the police would come and take me away.

And now I will share with you a secret: in the U.S. and in Europe, we think we enjoy freedom but we do not. Rules and restrictions and regulations proliferate month by month, so gradually that we hardly notice. We are like the proverbial frog sitting in the pot of water that is slowly coming to a boil. We have come to a tacit acceptance of such things as "hate speech," "wetlands crimes," and "sexual harrassment" (which everyone carefully mispronounces as HAIR-assment in order to avoid saying "her-ASS-ment," which would itself probably constitute some obscure crime or other). Well, here in the Republic of Georgia (Sakartvelos Respublik'a) they have FREEDOM (tavisuplebi), and everybody can do exactly as they like!

Ghmertma daghlocos Sakartvelo! [God bless Georgia]

BELTRANO

[posted by OLD HAT]