BOOKS: A Romanian Optimist Gives His View of America

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 22 1996 (IPS) - If it takes an immigrant’s eyes to look more fondly on a country than natives do, then Romanian-American radio host Andrei Codrescu could rightfully claim to be the greatest optimist in the United States.

Codrescu, a commentator on National Public Radio’s ‘All Things Considered’ show, sets an ironic, but upbeat, tone from the very first sentence of his new book of essays, ‘The Dog with the Chip in His Neck’: “I came to America on a chartered plane full of immigrants who started chanting, ‘America! America!’ when the coastline of Nova Scotia slid into view.” The fact that Nova Scotia is in Canada, needless to say, does not discourage them.

The book contains many such skewed views of what the United States means, particularly to people like the author, who grew up in Romania during the Stalinist rule of Gheorghiu Gheorghiu-Dej. In those days, Codrescu recalls, his mother told him that the United States was so rich that dogs had pretzels on their tails.

Codrescu is fascinated with the myths of America, from the media’s obsession to the length of Bill Clinton’s hair to Michael Jackson’s bizarre and short-lived marriage to Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie — a match the author knew was doomed the moment they decided to honeymoon in Budapest.

Some of the mythical figures Codrescu encounters are genuinely hilarious. When he meets Miss America, she is eating only scraps of food — looking “hungry and homeless” — because she is participating in an Oxfam fast to show rich people how the poor eat.

Codrescu also visits the Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta, to find that Coca-Cola’s self-promotion displays “the same values that Communist ideologues tried to indoctrinate…but failed”: youth, vigour, zeal.

The book’s central point, whether it is talking about the confusing world of the Internet or the sexual mores of modern U.S. society, is that all societies, whether socialist or late capitalist, have their mind-numbing myths, to which an ironic stance is necessary for survival.

When Codrescu returns to Romania after three decades in the United States, in fact, he is saddened most of all not by the suffering of pensioners as the economy becomes more market- oriented but by the lack of jokes.

“After forty years of eating jokes, people were ready for something better,” he says of Romanians following Nicolae Ceausescu’s overthrow. “When they didn’t get it, they stripped their jokes of humor and turned them into weapons. The racial stereotypes in jokes became real.”

The Eastern Europe he sees today is thus one in which Gypsies, Jews and foreigners are reviled — while in the United States, he worries, “simple-minded souls who want to go back to the safety of their 1950s doo-wop mashed potatoes are fixing to take away our hot sauce” by shutting off immigration from the Third World.

“Don’t trust them, folks,” he warns. “Believe me: boredom is hell.”

Codrescu’s rich humanism and sympathy for all sorts of rebels — from German communist leader Rosa Luxembourg to Carl Djerassi, inventor of the birth-control pill — is his own antidote to the boredom of official ideologies. But he is equally capable of savouring the sort of patriotic U.S. myths that the nation’s natives have forgotten, including the majesty of the Mississippi River.

Yet Codrescu — who was slapped as a youth for disrespecting Romania’s communist leaders, and later beaten by police in the United States for participating in protests in the 1960s — is not a knee-jerk patriot.

Modern U.S. politics earn his baleful glare, such as a new law mandating stiff jail sentences for the third violent offense a criminal commits, even if it is merely the crime of stealing a pizza.

Noting a pizza thief in California was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in prison, Codrescu writes, “That’s about five years a slice. I bet the man’s sorry he didn’t go for the poached salmon in ginger sauce with the steamed vegetables instead.”

One of the book’s many delights is that it includes some of the jokes Romanians told to lift their spirits under Stalinist rule. But Codrescu’s new jokes and insights about the alleged freedoms of the United States are equally funny, and equally sharp.

‘The Dog with the Chip in his Neck’ — who, incidentally, also appears in this book as just the latest sign of the oddities of the high-tech world — is 288 pages, and is available in the United States from St. Martin’s Press for USD 22.95.