Pacific Standard asks: Can fact-checking defeat (LePage's) demagoguery?

A writer from Pacific Standard Magazine gave a call the other day asking about Governor Paul LePage, who is currently in the midst of the greatest of his long chain of self-inflicted scandals, this one over a chain of racist statements regarding drug dealer arrests, violent and profane threats against a lawmaker who called him out for these, and other sundries. The question at hand: can fact-checking -- by the media, or the ACLU or whomever -- put a demagogue in check?

My answer is probably not, at least in regards to such a person's supporters, and I say this from the experience not only of covering Paul LePage, but also of living and reporting in Viktor Orban's Hungary, Franjo Tudjman's Croatia, and the mess that was (and is) post-war Bosnia. Supporters back such people because they believe them to be on "their side" against a wicked internal enemy ("liberals," Serbs, what-have-you), not because the justifications the demagogue comes up with for their policies actually stand up to scrutiny. That's why they've been so dangerous throughout history: they lead people down a fact-free path of resentment, and in some times and places the more polite sectors of society are temperamentally unable to muster a vigorous enough response to the threat until it's too late.

Fortunately the stakes are relatively low in Maine, where the chief executive doesn't have an army, nuclear arsenal, or security state at his or her disposal. Not true of the Presidency of the United States, though, which is why our European allies -- who have far more firsthand experience with demagogues -- are so concerned about Donald Trump.

This long answer isn't in the article, but you can hear takes from the ACLU, Maine progressive activist Mike Tippng and conservative activist Lance Dutson.

Hungary's slide from democracy, Part II

For those not sure how to spend the rest of the spring solstice and Father's Day, let me suggest a review of the memoir of the former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, Eleni Kounalakis.

Kounalakis served in Budapest for the first three years of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's rule, a period in which he's turned Hungary away from liberal democracy and towards something closer to Russia, Singapore and China. Her book is surprisingly frank and paints a disturbing picture of the direction of the Hungarian state.

The review, which appears in today's Sunday Washington Post, is my second piece this week on the situation back in Hungary, where I lived for more than four years between 1989 and 1996, and where I returned recently. The previous one -- on Orban's construction of what he calls the "illiberal state" -- appeared in Politico Magazine a few days ago.

My most recent review for the Post was of former Rep. Barney Frank's memoir.

Hungary's slide from democracy, Part I

I was recently in Hungary, where I lived for some five years between 1989 and 1996, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been making good on his promise to construct an "illiberal state" inside the European Union. In Politico Magazine today you can read my dispatch on the situation there.

A teaser: most worrisome is that the only effective opposition to Orban comes from the extreme right Jobbik Party, which are on the ascent despite not long ago maintaining a jackbooted paramilitary group that marched through Roma neighborhoods wearing uniforms and symbols reminiscent of the Nazi-era Arrow Cross.

A sad state of affairs for Hungary, which when I first moved there was leading the drive for democracy and independence in the Eastern bloc.


For those with a focused interest in Orban's rhetorical argument, reading his full "illiberal democracy" speech is clarifying.

More on Hungary coming soon.... [Update, 6/21/15: That was a reference to this review of former US Ambassador Eleni Kounalakis's memoir of her term in Hungary, which ran in today's Washington Post.]

In Salzburg

I'm in the midst of a trip in Central Europe, the first in several years. I lived in this part of the world for the better part of the 1990s and it's good to be back.

A few observations after five years' absence.

1. The region has discovered "take out coffee." This is a good thing. I wonder if Starbucks, a relatively new arrival, is responsible for this long-delayed innovation.

2. The Austrians still hold the Post-Imperial Area title for motorway engineering. If we Americans spent as much as they must have to build sound barriers in even the most rural of areas, I suspect it would have paid itself back in improved property values alone. It's still jarring to go from limping across southern Moravia or south Slovakia to the meticulously engineered, tunnel-intensive autobahnen, where the original 1967 Mission Impossible television soundtrack is required driving music.

3. In Budapest, the trend has continued, and it is now nearly impossible to find good Hungarian food in restaurants. The best gulyas I've had so far in the region was in Štúrovo, an ethnic Hungarian community in South Slovakia. Somebody needs to give Budapest's chefs some remedial education in the old ways.

4. If you want to see a town defy Rust Belt-ism, go to Zlin in the Czech Republic, the former Bata shoe factory town-cum-Capitalist worker's utopia. I wrote about the city five years ago in the Christian Science Monitor and the trend has only continued. The old factory complex -- largely empty last I visited -- is now a thriving neighborhood of hipster lofts, university expansion buildings, and business start-ups. And if this rural corner of the Czech Republic can build a rapidly expanding public university -- with new buildings popping up every year -- why can't Maine manage to keep the University of Southern Maine from imploding? I suspect this has to do with leadership, municipal, academic, and state.

5. Hungarian politics are as bad as they say. One could ask, "Who votes for this guy?" But I'm from Maine, so I don't need to.

Republic of Pirates, now in Hungarian

I'm especially pleased to announce the Hungarian language edition of my third book, The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and The Man Who Brought Them Down, as I called Budapest home for nearly five years between 1989 and 1995.

The new edition, Kalózköztársaság, is from Könyvmolyképző Kiadó in that most paprika-worthy of cities, Szeged. At this writing it's even on sale at their website -- just HUF 2764. I gather the official release date is February 24, but it seems to be available now.

Republic of Pirates, the inspiration for the NBC drama "Crossbones", is also available in US, UK, Spanish, Portugeuse, Polish, Danish, and, shortly, Taiwan Chinese editions.

WGBH's "Beat the Press": DEP series "just the most unbelievable investigative thing I’ve ever seen"

WGBH, the Boston-based public television super-station, has a media discussion program called "Beat the Press," and this week they discussed my investigation of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and Gov. Paul LePage's "gag order" against the paper.


Like all other commentators to date, the panelists all think the governor is doing himself a disservice, but host Emily Rooney also had effusive praise for the series, which I will shamelessly repeat here.
“This Portland Press Herald piece…it is unbelievable it’s eye-rolling, just the most unbelievable investigative thing I’ve ever seen," Rooney says. "It’s right out of Chinatown with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway.”

(They start throwing the word "Pulitzer" around too, which Google says is some sort of prize founded by one Pulitzer József of Makó, a town south-east of Budapest which I'm pretty sure is where I gave myself heat stroke while trying to hitchhike my back from the Romanian border during a general strike by the Hungarian State Railways. But I digress....)

Thanks to the station for their interest, and to all of you for reading.

Things to Watch, Hear, and Read, New Year's Editon

Welcome to 2011, and to the second anniversary of World Wide Woodard. To kick off the New Year, a few items of interest from the wider world.

Wikileaks - The Documentary: My blog got its start in Reykjavik, where Wikileaks made its first big pitch for sanctuary. I'm wondering if they'll be increasing their presence in Iceland if things get too hot and heavy in Sweden for founder Julian Assange. The most comprehensive documentary on the group's "history" -- if one can use that word for something so young -- aired on Swedish television last month. Friends and foes alike will learn something from setting aside an hour to watch. (The "Collateral Damage" helicopter tapes are still chilling.)

Ruins of Detroit: The Guardian has this arresting slide show of images from a dying American city. It provoked a lengthy capital vs labor blame game discussion when I posted it on my Facebook page. See what happens when you post it on yours. [Update, 1/5/2011: a friend-of-a-friend created this engaging video documentary, Detroit Lives, offering a second, more optimistic take on the Motor City,.]

Borders on the Brink: Speaking of Detroit, Ann Arbor-based Borders Books & Music is also in trouble. Publishers Weekly reported on Dec. 31 that the retailer has been cut off by one of the big six New York publishers after it stopped paying its bills. The Detroit News has this sobering follow-up, suggesting the firm may not survive.

Books on the Brink?: Will the Kindle and Amazon destroy the book industry or revive it? The Boston Review has an excellent and wide ranging article on the state of publishing, and what industry consolidation, big boxes, Amazon, and e-books have done to it. One of many depressing factoids: "It has become common practice for representatives of large retailers to weigh in on everything from book covers to sample chapters of manuscripts. In some cases, retailers even demand changes...Without their buy-in, the publisher is unlikely to go forward with a book." Perhaps Borders will be surrendering their seat to Amazon or Wal-Mart shortly.

Hungary on the Brink? Hungary's government is showing its true colors, and they aren't pretty. My friend Dumneazu has a comprehensive round-up of the situation from there. Good news is, I understand support for the farther-right Jobbik party -- subject of some of my not-so- recent reporting from the region -- has been on the wane.

Extreme right to enter Hungarian Parlialent

You're unlikely to know it if you rely on the website of The New York Times, but Hungary held elections yesterday, and the extreme right had a powerful showing, winning 17% of the vote.

As some of you know, I lived for several years in Hungary, and still report from the region once or twice a year. In recent years I've been following the rise of Jobbik and their uniformed paramilitary arm, the Hungarian Guard (Magyar Garda.) The latter marches around in intimidating formations in Roma neighborhoods sporting symbols favored by Hungary's fascist Arrow Cross during the Holocaust. The former won seats last year in the European Parliament, where one of their delegates arrived wearing the Magyar Garda uniform. The party advocates reopening the Trianon Treaty, which set the region's borders and created Slovakia. Roma leaders liken it to Nazism, though the party's slick, English-speaking communications staff claim they are merely patriots.

Sunday, nearly a fifth of the Hungarian electorate cast votes in support of Jobbik, which will now occupy 26 seats in the Hungarian parliament. Wednesday they're introducing the foreign press corps in Budapest to their candidates for ministers of economy, finance, and foreign economy. It remains unclear whether the party will be marginalized or coddled by the election's big victors, Viktor Orban's center-right Fidesz, which took 53% of the vote.

Watch closely to see what Mr. Orban says or does not have to say about Jobbik in the coming days and weeks.

[UPDATE, 13:11 EST: Orban just pledged to remove the "political and economic landmine" that strong support for Jobbik represents, the Associated Press reported minutes ago.]

Europe watches as Slovakia implements anti-Hungarian language law

Another story from my recent trip to East-Central Europe is up today over at Global Post, this one on Slovakia's draconian language law.

The country's Hungarian minority is upset because, read strictly, it criminalizes the use of any language other than Slovak in a wide range of public circumstances. The government says they're overreacting, but the government also includes a far-right party whose leader calls the country's Hungarian citizens a "cancer" which must be wiped off the national map.

Slovakia's an E.U. state, right? So what can the union do about it? As you'll read in the piece, not much. (Like most of my Global Post stories, this appears in their subscription Passport service, so you'll need to login to read it. If you care about international news, however, it's well worth the price.)

While we're in the neighborhood, Hungary's own extremist party isn't doing much to calm tensions between the two countries and is poised to enter the Parliament after April 11 elections. Jobbik, which has its own jackbooted paramilitary, has been trying to charm the foreign press corps of late, hoping to receive sympathetic coverage of their proposals to, among other things, revisit the peace settlement that ended World War I and created Slovakia. I'm on their mailing list and I listen to what they have to say: it's not charming.

Map: Hungarian minority in Slovakia (majority areas in red), Courtesy Nationalia.

Things to Watch and Read, March 22 edition

I'm still hiding out in my secret lair with a book manuscript, but a few things of interest crossed my desk over past few days.

Tea Party Bigots at the Capitol: The freedom-loving "Tea Party" folks who showed up at the U.S. Capitol to protest the health care bill reportedly shouted the "n" word at black civil rights hero John Lewis (D-Ga.), spit on Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), and screamed "faggot" at Barney Frank (D-Mass.)

"I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus," James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told the Huffington Post. Later that day, someone threw a brick through the window of Rep. Louise Slaughter's district office in Pine View, New York.

What's next: tarring, feathering, and burning down houses? That'll keep health care affordable.


The Hungarian "race": The Hungarian-American lobby sent out a press release with instructions for their constituency on how to declare themselves racially Hungarian on the U.S. 2010 Census, apparently believing the write-in campaign will increase leverage on lawmakers.

I'm not sure that Hungarian-Americans share a common policy position on events in their ancestral home: someone whose family fled the Nazi takeover may have different feelings about, say, the rise of a far-right party with its own jackbooted militia, than someone who fled the Soviet invasion in '56. But what if ancestral memory really does trump independent thought? To hedge my bets, maybe I'll declare my race to be "Anglo-Franco-Irish-Dane-Scot" and give the politicians something to puzzle over in the next redistricting effort.


Timbuktu Claims the Blues: My Monitor colleague, Scott Baldauf, has an interesting piece on how Timbuktu, Mali, the famous terminal of trans-Sahara caravan trade, asserts itself as the birthplace of the blues, preempting the American South.


Editor who Needs An Editor: For those in Maine wondering what's wrong with the former newspaper of record, the Portland Press Herald, here's another clue. Owner/editor Richard Connor -- whose possessions also include the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal -- appears to have no idea how to research and write something as simple as a personal opinion piece.

His contribution on health care in yesterday's Morning Sentinel is a case in point: a rambling and unfocused piece that features an uninterrupted 500-word block of quotes from a Gorham innkeeper to make the rather obvious point that insurance premiums vary by state. The innkeeper has some theories as to how to improve the situation, but rather than examine their merits, Connor veers off into some fuzzy ruminations about his companies' health care costs (replete with undigested statistics) before arriving at a perfect non-argument: what's done is done, so "it’s time for all of us to get on with our lives."

This is why directors shouldn't act in their own movies: there's nobody around who can tell them when when they're making an ass of themselves.

Austria's banking worries

I was in Austria recently in connection with a series of stories on how the Great Recession is playing out in East-Central Europe. There many countries had only just emerged from their post-Communist recession when they got whacked hard by an uber-Capitalist one.

One of the casualties has been Austria, whose banks loaned heavily to the region during the go-go years, so much in fact that many experts say the country is vulnerable to a Greek-style meltdown. Read my piece on this topic in the Christian Science Monitor to find out more.

One thing to be aware of: reporters generally don't write the headlines and subheads that go with their story, and the ones the Monitor wrote for this piece don't accurately reflect the article. A better headline would have been "Austria fears wave of bad banks loans tied to Eastern Europe" and the subhead should have focused on the Hypo bank failure (in December) rather than the Austrian state's massive bank rescue (more than a year ago.)

Memo to journalists: always ask to see headlines and captions beforehand.

Has Eastern Europe's crisis peaked?

My old stomping ground in (what we children of the Cold War called) Eastern Europe has been hard hit by the Great Recession. So has the region's crisis peaked? That's the topic of my first piece from my recent trip to the region, which posted at Global Post today.

The story is for the Post's Passport section, which means they'd like you to subscribe, but it's well worth the bother. Remember all those newspapers that cut their foreign bureaus? A lot of their veteran writers file copy for Global Post these days.

More from Europe coming up....

A Year in Review

World Wide Woodard turns one year old tomorrow, so I thought I'd offer a round-up of updates to some of the stories I've covered.

In Iceland -- from which I made my first post -- the financial collapse hasn't stopped the country's ongoing effort to stop using fossil fuels altogether. The country just added ten hydrogen fuel cell cars to their test fleet.

The central figure in the corruption scandal I reported on in the Turks & Caicos apparently hasn't lost his penchant for the high life. According to BET, disgraced Prime Minister Michael Misick tried to crash Beyonce's birthday party in the Dominican Republic but, as he is no longer married to celebrity Lisa Raye, he was turned away as being a nobody.

I reported on the rise of a far right party in Hungary, Jobbik, with an animus against alleged Gypsy criminals. As the party's popularity grew, someone was busy assassinating gypsies in a series of death squad style executions. Some suspected Jobbik, Jobbik suspected the government. This summer I thought we'd get some answers after several men were arrested and charged with the murders, but my former colleagues in Budapest tell me there's been little new information released about them. Does anyone else think that's strange?

Here in Maine, the major media have continued not to ask troubling questions about the Maine State Pier debacle, in which city officials appear to have engineered a sweetheart deal for a politically-connected real estate firm so as to "fix" a public asset that actually didn't need fixing. Meanwhile, the Portland Press-Herald's toughest reporting to date on the ill-conceived Ocean Gateway Terminal was written in verse. (I'm not making this up.)

Looking forward, I'm headed back to the Czech Republic and Austria this month, so expect fresh material from there soon. And there's this book I'm working on......

1989-2009: Remembering October 23rd

As regular readers know, in the fall of 1989 I was an exchange student in Budapest, Hungary, and was fortunate enough to see many of the events of that historic period firsthand.

Among them: Hungary's first open and officially-sanctioned commemoration of the 1956 Hungarian uprising on October 23, 1989, the thirty-third anniversary of the toppling of the country's Stalinist government. During the popular uprising, the reformist prime minister, Imre Nagy, had announced his country was pulling out of the Warsaw Pact and called on the United Nations to help ensure its neutrality. A few days later, Soviet forces invaded from the East to crush the revolt. Some 2500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops were killed and 200,000 fled to the West. In 1989, entire Budapest neighborhoods still bore the scars of the fighting.

There were rallies in front of Hungary's massive Parliament building scheduled for noon and 6pm, and I attended both. The #2 tram ran straight up the river from my dorm to the Parliament, but had to stop two blocks short because the crowds had overflowed Kossuth Square and blocked the tracks. The atmosphere was festive. Bands played. Soldiers marched. There were long speeches I couldn't understand -- except for part of one in which the names of various countries were read out loud; the U.S. was cheered, the Soviet Union booed. At another point they chanted "Gorby! Gorby!" in thanks to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who hadn't rolled the tanks this time. Hundreds carried the Hungary's tricolor flag, but with the emblem of the Hungarian communist party cut out of the middle, just as in 1956. Some guy came out at noon next to a photograph of Imre Nagy and gave a speech. Bells rang across the city. People cheered.

We students could barely ask directions in Hungarian, didn't have access to CNN, and, this being the pre-Internet age, we didn't learn what most of the rest of the world knew until later that afternoon: Hungary had proclaimed itself a republic. The guy I'd seen was Matyas Szuros, who a few days before had been named Hungary's first president, and he's the one who made the announcement. "This is a prelude to a new historical age," Szuros had declared. "The Hungarian Republic is going to be an independent, democratic, and legal state in which the values of bourgeois democracy and democratic socialism are expressed equally." He was prophetic on all counts, it turns out, though he missed the bit about the far right.

In the evening, the mood was more somber. People carried candles and torches. Old men -- the generation who'd lived through the Great Depression, World War II, Stalinism, and '56 -- wept openly. The rally was lit with eerie floodlights, which reminded me of the last scenes in Close of Encounters of the Third Kind.

It seemed incredible: in a single week Hungary had announced multi-party elections, disbanded the party militia, rehabilitated Stalinist political criminals, and declared itself a neutral state. Pressures created by Hungary having allowed tens of thousands of East Germans to escape the Eastern Bloc had just forced the hardline leader of East Germany, Erich Honecker, out of power, replaced by a Gorbachev-esque reformist. We'd been fortunate enough to witness history take place. Little did we know that 1989's most epic events were yet to come.


For more on the 1989-2009 series -- including the opening of the Iron Curtain and visits to Ceausescu's Romania and inflation-plagued Yugoslavia -- click here.

Eastern Europe: remembering the bad old days

I've been a longtime foreign correspondent of The Chronicle of Higher Education, for which I covered Eastern Europe for much of the 1990s. On the occasion of this, the 20th anniversary of the collapse of Communism there, I put together this feature on how some prominent university professors see their professional lives then (underground classes, listening devices in the walls, etc.) as compared to now (as European Union citizens with academic freedom, university autonomy, and more conventional challenges.)

At this writing, at least, the piece is freely available online. If that changes, it's also in the Chronicle Review section of the print edition.

I was actually an exchange student in Eastern Europe in 1989 and saw many of the historic events of that fall firsthand; I've been posting about that here at World Wide Woodard.

My last piece for The Chronicle was on the role of Iceland's universities in addressing that country's economic meltdown.

20 Years Ago: Visiting Ceausescu's Romania

Twenty years ago this evening two friends and I boarded an overnight train to the Transylvanian city of Brasov. It was to be a dark, cold, and scary trip.

Just about everyone in Budapest had warned us not to go, many of them with wearing the grave expression of the villagers in those old Dracula movies when the main character asks for directions to the Count's castle. Be careful, we were told. Bring food. Don't take anything of value. Dress warmly.

It wasn't vampires they were worried about, it was Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, whose dictatorial rule had degenerated into madness. Ceausescu had built a cult of personality modeled on that of North Korea's Kim Il Sung backed by the securitate, a secret police force believed to have Orwellian omnipresence. Some securitate officers were said to have been recruited as children from Romania's massive population of abandoned children, itself a direct product of Ceausescu's rule. Possessed with the notion that Romania's national greatness would grow in direct proportion with its population size, he had banned abortion, banned the import or sale of birth control, slapped taxes on couples with few children, and instituted surprise examinations to detect illegal terminations of pregnancy. the result was a flood of unwanted babies, many of whom wound up in horrifying conditions in overtaxed, under-supplied state orphanages.

Meanwhile, having spent millions razing much of historic Bucharest to build his Stalinist palace, Ceausescu had become fixated on the need to immediately pay off appreciable his foreign debt. His solution: import nothing and export everything without regard to domestic needs. By 1989 the situation had become dire, with severe rationing of even the most basic foodstuffs. Buildings were heated for only a few hours each day, elevators and many electric appliances were banned, and inspectors arrived at homes unannounced to ensure that no more than one room was lit at a time, using a bulb of 40 watts or less.

As we prepared to visit, Ceausescu was making bellicose noises about the reformist government in Hungary and cutting back on the issuance of foreign visas. We got our visas by chance: one of the coordinators of our exchange program at Karl Marx University was related to Budapest's Romanian Orthodox bishop and had friendly contacts at the embassy. We packed our bags with food for ourselves, chocolates to give as gifts, and cartons of Kent cigarettes, which had become Romania's unofficial currency-of-graft. Then we boarded the old Orient Express bound to the East.

At midnight the train screeched to a halt at the border. The heaters in the compartment shut off. Romanian border guards marched through the wagon, throwing open doors, yelling at passengers, tearing into bags and dismantling the seat cushions. Outside someone was cackling into the public address system, his mad laughter echoing through Curtici's railyard. The other passengers just stared down at the floor in silence, as if awaiting their fate. A guard screamed threats at one couple - the wife was apparently ethnic Hungarian -- but eventually lost interest and stormed off to terrorize the next compartment.

Then two customs officers stepped into the compartment: a slim, pale-faced, raven-haired women with Natasha Fatale's demeanor, and her male colleague, who was portly, drunk, and loud. She confirmed we had no subversive materials (Hungarian newspapers, bibles) and collected $30 for each day we would spend in the country. In exchange I was given a wad of greasy rags: greasy and smelling of dirty socks. On closer examination this proved to be Romanian currency -- $30 worth at the absurdly optimistic official exchange rate -- although the notes were in such terrible condition their denominations could only be identified with considerable effort. The national mint had apparently stopped functioning in the late 1960s. The aging notes, like most things in the country, were falling apart. "Have a nice time in Romania," Agent Natasha said ominously before sliding the compartment door closed.

An hour later the train jolted into motion, pulling us further into Ceausescu's nightmare.

Continued here.

1989-2009: 20 years ago, Hungary at the Threshold

Twenty years ago today I was in Yugoslavia for the first time for one of what would become a series of whirlwind three-day weekends throughout the region.

By late September I'd gotten my bearings in Budapest and felt a mild sense of disappointment: it seemed that the "big events" of '89 -- the symbolic dismantling of the iron curtain, Imre Nagy's funeral, the Pan-European picnic, and the mass release of East Germans -- had happened before I had arrived. We'd all been holding our breath: would the Soviet Union crackdown, whisking reformist prime minister Miklos Nemeth off for a Nagy-like execution and rolling the tanks as they had in 1956? As days passed it seemed less and less likely. Hungary, amazingly enough, seemed to be on its way to joining Yugoslavia as a non-aligned Communist nation, open to East and West.

Of course, we foreign students were hardly the best informed, but we had one big advantage. Two of our professors at the Karl Marx University of Economics -- Geza Jeszenszky and Peter Akos Bod -- were members of the semi-legalized opposition and were participating in round table talks with the government that were supposed to lead to free elections in 1990. Both kept us apprised of what was going on at Parliament. Bod, who would later serve as head of the Central Bank, taught a class on socialist economics which emphasized the tragicomic effects of central planning on the average person. Jeszenszky, a future foreign minister and ambassador to Washington, darkly warned of the military threat posed by Ceausescu's Romania, which (as I would soon see) had entered its final Orwellian phase.

Three things stuck out for me about life in Budapest in 1989: moneychanging, air pollution, and the lack of computers.

Black market moneychanging was everywhere, especially the first week I was in country, when tens of thousands of East Germans were trying to secure hard currency for their flight to the west. Street changers -- most seemed to be East German refugees, Romanian exiles, or Middle Eastern students -- offered nearly a third more forints for your dollar, making everything in Hungary a third cheaper. Having grown up poor, the inflated exchange rate made me feel affluent for the first time in my life. My monthly public transportation pass (above) cost less than a buck; a full meal with drinks and appetizers, $4; a round-trip overnight international train ticket with a sleeping couchette, $4.25. Changing on the street had its dangers. There were plenty of thieves who would count the money they were to give you in front of you and, with a sleight of hand, swap it at the last second for a bundle of low denomination notes. An East German refugee pulled this on my roommate, presumably to help get his family out of the Soviet bloc.

Budapest's air pollution was staggering. An eye-watering grey haze hung over the city as often as not, the result of leaded fuel burned in cars without pollution controls, including the two-stroke engines of East German-built Trabants and Wartburgs. Sometimes the clouds of exhaust were so thick you had to hold your breath and run for cover. I know Budapest still gets wintertime air inversions, but this was in the early fall and was much more intense. This and other profound environmental problems I encountered in the region later caused me to become an environmental journalist.

But it was the utter lack of computers that most affected my day-to-day life. By 1989 most U.S. college students had a computer and western banks, travel agencies, and airlines used networked computers to process transactions. In Hungary, most banking and travel transactions were done by hand, with occasional telephone calls (over a barely-functioning phone system) to other offices to verbally collect dispersed information. The result: two-, three-, and four-hour lines to buy international train tickets (and mandatory seat reservations) at the Hungarian State Railways reservation office. And there was no way to secure a seat reservation for the return trip to Hungary; you had to stand in line for hours at your destination and hope there was still a place for you on a return train before your Polish or Czechoslovak visa ran out. Throw in the lines to secure transit and tourist visas at foreign embassies and it sometimes seemed one spent more time waiting in lines than in the destination country.

Of course I had it easy. As I'd soon see, Poles were waiting in line for toilet paper, Romanians for pigs' feet.

Austria: fearing a borderless Europe

My piece on the (fearful) Austrian reaction to their vanished Eastern frontier has finally posted at The Christian Science Monitor. The original piece ran in the September 13th edition of the Monitor's weekly print magazine as a companion to this piece on the (more celebratory) reaction in Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. The old Habsburg empire is now borderless again, after all.

I'm also following the aftermath of the arrest of four suspects in the spate of death squad style gypsy murders in Hungary. There's been a curious lack of information coming from Hungarian authorities, which is being capitalized by the far-right Jobbik party.

For more on Eastern Europe (including Jobbik and the 20th anniversary of 1989) click here.

1989-2009: Habsburg lands borderless again; does anybody care?

Twenty years ago, when I was an exchange student in Budapest, our teachers would tell us how in the early 20th century it had been possible to take a streetcar from Vienna to Bratislava. It had all been one country then -- the Habsburg's Austro-Hungarian Empire -- and people moved freely from Krakow to Ljubljana. I remember how, at the time, this seemed so preposterous, given the Iron Curtain -- guards, fences, tank traps, visas -- then dividing Austria from Slovakia.

How times change. For nearly two years now, most of the Habsburg Empire (save Transylvania, Trans-Carpathia, and parts of old Yugoslavia) has been borderless again, recreating the mythic cultural space called Middle Europe. Bratislava's city transportation system doesn't quite make it to Vienna, but you can get as far as Hainburg, and there are plenty of trains of course.

I have two pieces in last week's weekly print edition of the Christian Science Monitor that ask how this is all playing out. Is Middle Europe being reborn? If so, why are Austrian borderlanders so queasy about it? The main piece -- from Sopron, Hungary -- is now online at the Monitor's website but, last I checked, the companion piece on Austria wasn't up yet. [Update: 9/25/09: the companion piece is now online.]

1989-2009: Sept 11: Hungarians made history, I bought towels

As I wrote yesterday, I arrived in Hungary on September 10, 1989, just as the reform communist government announced it was letting the 60,000 East German refugees in the country escape to the West. (My piece on all that is in yesterday's Monitor.)

The ruling took effect at midnight, and on September 11, 1989, ten thousand of these East German "tourists" fled to Austria (and on to West Germany) by any means they could: Trabants, buses, trains, hitchhiking, you name it.

I, on the other hand, had gone without sleep for 36 hours to get from rural Maine to Budapest's Ferencvaros neighborhood via Boston, Zurich, and Vienna. (It was cheap!) I read my journal entry for this historic day -- and my first full day in Europe -- and what did I do? I bought a towel.

Yes, despite having read Douglas Adams' books, I'd come all that way without packing a towel, and the Jeno Varga Dormitory at Karl Marx University certainly didn't provide them. So it was off to the towel section of the old Corvin Department store on Blaha Lujza ter (No trendy rooftop bar back then, I assure you.) My first Eastern Bloc shopping experience made an impression. "The clerks were all highly amused by my ignorance about socialist shopping," I wrote in my journal afterwards. The towels were stacked behind the counters (still are in many smaller shops in the region) and could only be examined through the graces of one of the people behind the counter. "Four people were required to handle my purchase: one to take down the towel, another to carry it to the register and then to a wrapping station, a third to take my money, and a fourth to wrap my purchase in brown paper." Maximum employment I suppose. Looking back on it I'd guess three of those people were out of work a year later while the value of their savings and benefits evaporated.

My other recorded "accomplishment" of the day: at 20, I was apparently legally served a beer for the first time. The location is lost to history.

Fortunately I'd interface with history much better in the coming days and months. I'm not entirely sure if it was entirely clear to us at the time -- pre-Internet days these -- exactly what the Hungarians had just done. I seem to remember hearing about it all as if it were all rumor, passed from person to person like jaw-dropping gossip. You weren't sure if it was all entirely true, but it sounded extraordinary.