Just now I logged on to Facebook and on an irritated whim I commented on a remark posted by a friend who has been somewhat estranged lately for reasons not germane to this.

Or perhaps they are. I often wonder how ideology affects one’s personal loyalty, ethics, etc. I haven’t seen a direct one-to-one relationship, it’s more complicated than that, but still…

At any rate, what this person posted was:

“Unregulated free market capitalism looks suspiciously like China…..”

I posted:

“Stephen W. Browne: Dumb on so many levels. A free market is not and cannot be “unregulated” by definition. A market systems cannot function without rules: against fraud and force, misrepresentation in advertising, enforcement of contracts,”

Then I hit the ENTER key, which I do often on Facebook. On some sites ENTER gives you a paragraph break. On Facebook it actually enters what you’ve written, and I often forget that. (And by the way, how do you get a paragraph break on Facebook?

So I continued to write:

“Stephen W. Browne: China has moved away from a totalitarian system that outright murdered tens of millions of people and caused mass starvation of similar numbers through the sheer economic idiocy that has resulted from every attempt at centrally planning the economy. And have you seen China? Nor have I, but I have taken the trouble to get to know a fair number of Chinese with first-hand experience of both countries. Some in the context of helping them defect. I have seen and lived in not one, but three countries which were in the process of moving from controlled economies to at least freer markets. In each case I saw first-hand the explosion of prosperity that followed immediately afterwards. I have visited at intervals several more, and seen reliable reports of still more. In contrast as a country, ours in this case, has fallen lower on the economic freedom index maintained by the Canadian think tank Fraser, well we see the results around us. This is so silly that, as one scientist said, “It’s not even wrong.” How China and the U.S. resemble each other is not in being “an unregulated free market” but in us moving towards the kind of crony capitalism of China. One where the government allows a minimal market, but picks the winners and losers through preferential regulation, complicated tax codes, awarding government contracts to favored supporters, and outright subsidies, bailouts etc.”

Then I hit ENTER, and this popped up:

“Sorry, you may not have permission to add this comment or the original post may have been deleted.”

No tags

We had an exchange at the office the other day, which I’m still chuckling over, for reasons I can’t quite explain.

The weather outside was foul, and our town is still rationing sewer use. The durn college sports auditorium electronic billboard is flashing, “Yellow is mellow, brown flush it down,” if that gives you an idea.

At any rate, I got an email from my father with pics of my wife and kids. They’re staying with my parents on the east coast while the emergency lasts.

(I suspect my boy became instantly popular in school after telling his new schoolmates there were no toilets in our town, “Ewwww gross!”)

At any rate, I was telling a female colleague in the office about the pics, and how the sun is shining on the bay and everything looks so beautiful.

“I don’t want to see them,” she said grumpily.

“Damn she looks good!” I remarked.

“Steve!” she said, shocked.

“Hey, that’s my wife I’m talking about.”

What can I say? Nine years and I’m still crazy about my wife.

There was a time that was considered shocking. The Polish King Jan III Sobieski, who led the Polish-German forces that relieved the siege of Vienna by the Turks, had a wife Maryszenka. Their relationship was the scandal of Europe at the time.

You see, one doesn’t know how to put this delicately, but the king was known to be in love with his wife.

That just wasn’t done!

Polish popular movies still make fun of this. I saw one in which foreign ambassadors come to the palace to meet with the king, and the palace staff find him in a corner enjoying a little slap-and-tickle with the queen.

Since the king was often away on campaign in those turbulent times, they wrote to each other a lot. It’s a pity their correspondence hasn’t been translated, I’m told it deserves a place among the masterpieces of delicately erotic literature.

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.”

G.K. Chesterton

No tags

About seven years back I found myself an expectant father, much to my surprise. It happened right about the time in my life I had given up hoping that it would ever happen for me, a time when many of my friends were starting to think about becoming grandparents.

I did all the enlightened modern father things, I went to birthing classes (in a language not my own) and trained to be a “birth coach.”

Thankfully when the time came, the (female) staff made me step aside, hold my wife’s hand and let the pros handle it.

For the next few years I would have these “fatherhood moments,” when it would just hit me right between the eyes, “Omigod, I’m a FATHER!”

Then about the time I’d adjusted to the idea, my wife informed me we were going to be parents again.

This time my son and I were both there, holding hands while he offered helpful advice like, “Don’t worry Mommy, it’s only a baby.”

So it started all over again. From time to time, out of the blue, it would just hit me, “Omigod I’m the father of TWO children!”

I wonder if fathers of big families ever get over that?

So there I was, an old dog trying to learn new tricks, the same way a dog learns – by getting my nose rubbed in it. So what did I learn?

Same things every other dad does I guess.

To begin with, dads and moms are not interchangeable.

Since both of us were English teachers when our son was born in Warsaw, my wife and I decided to structure our schedules so I’d teach my business classes in the morning and she’d put the baby down for a nap and go teach her pre-schoolers in the afternoon. Very modern, very enlightened.

Except that when a six-month-old baby wakes up early from a nap, daddy is NOT good enough. I’d hold the baby while he cried inconsolably – until my mother-in-law came by after work and the baby would turn off the faucet and gurgle and coo at the sight of grandma.

Second thing I learned was, no matter how much an enlightened male helps out with housework, diaper changes and child minding, fatherhood is not and never will be, as physically exhausting as motherhood.

After the birth of our second, I had another horrified realization. I was always pretty sure I had a handle on raising a boy, based on the (subsequently confirmed) theory that he’d be a lot like me, personality-wise. That is, he’d be a bright, healthy, active, smart-mouthed little hellion – and I’d have to keep a close rein on my temper when I got the backtalk. Simple.

When our daughter was born, it hit me that I had absolutely no idea how to go about raising a daughter. Zero, zip, nada. Worse still, I’ve begun to suspect it doesn’t gets any better.

And what surprised me most, I found I’d become dreadfully afraid of the effects of our culture on our kids. I mean trashy TV shows, video games, and idiot foul-mouthed celebrities with too much money, too little sense, and entirely too much attention paid to them.

I discovered I’d gone from being a hipster to a square. You know, four corners, L – seven.

A while back I had a conversation with a friend with more experience at this fatherhood thing. He’s got three kids, all older than mine.

I told him, “Man, sometimes I think all I can do is to give my kids parents who love each other and love them.”

He replied, “Sometimes it’s all you can do. But sometimes it’s enough.”

Note: This appeared on the editorial page of the Valley City Times-Register. In 2009 it won First Place for Personal Column – Serious, in the North Dakota Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest, in the category of 12,000 or less circulation.

No tags

A friend of liberty died April 10. We received the news when her grandson answered her email the following Sunday.

Judith (Baklanova) Hatton was our son’s godmother and our daughter’s namesake. She was English and the widow of a KGB agent from the department known as SMERSH who defected to the UK after WWII.

And that’s not even the most interesting thing about her.

I met Judith some years ago at a conference of the International Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL) in a village called Swit (near Poprad which was the official venue) in then-Czechoslovakia.

I recall sitting and talking with this elderly, but very lively English lady and talking. I think I quoted a line of Kipling, she quoted one back, we got to reciting whole poems alternately and after a while we noticed we had an audience.

The first interesting thing I found out about her was that she remembered Kipling coming to visit her father when she was a girl. He was sometimes accompanied by his wife, who Judith would invariably refer to as “that dreadful American woman.”

We met again at another conference in Tallinn, Estonia two years later. That’s when my friend Linda asked, “How did you get involved in the Free Russia movement Judith?”

“Well you see, my late husband was a Russian. He worked for SMERSH.”

I think my jaw dropped. “James Bond’s old enemies?” I blurted out.

“Oh yes, those dreadful Bond books” she said.

We corresponded pretty regularly after that and in a letter, I mentioned that I was going to the ISIL conference in Rome on my way back to the States.

She wrote, “Oh yes, Rome. A perfectly dreadful city inhabited by utterly vile people. I have friends who live there. They’re not vile, but their daughter is.”

I replied, “Come on Judith, don’t hold it inside. Come out and say what you think!”

I think the next time we met was after I returned from Saudi Arabia, bought an apartment in Warsaw, and met the woman who was to become my wife.

Judith was bitterly commenting on “Blair’s bloody Britain” so I invited her to visit me in Warsaw.

She replied, “Oh I do hope you were serious about that, because I shall come anyway.”

My then-girlfriend was apprehensive because of the age difference between us, “She’s going to think I’m your bimbo,” she said.

They got along like a house on fire. I remember when Judith said something typically Judith-like, Monika shaking with laughter and saying, “Come on Judith, don’t hold it inside, just say what you think!”

After her return to England, Judith sent out an email circular announcing that Monika was her “official favorite young lady” and that anyone dissing Monika would have to deal with her.

After which she sent me an email saying, “Don’t worry about the age thing. When I was eighteen the finest and best man I knew was my 80-year-old godfather and if I could have arranged a marriage, or at least an affair, I’m sure I’d have been a much better and happier woman.”

When I founded the Liberty English Camps in Lithuania with my friend Virgis Daukas (http://www.languageofliberty.org/index.htm) she was a regular fixture at every camp and the most popular teacher among the young Eastern Europeans. If you could see the conditions of the former Young Pioneers camps you’d know what a good sport she was about it!

She used to show up prepared with a kind of hobo bundle she could carry in one hand as her only luggage. She’d learned to travel light when she was young, and had participated in disaster preparedness groups.

One of my favorite memories is of when a young Belarussian girl who fancied herself an Objectivist asked her, “Do you like Ayn Rand?”

“Oh heavens no, I think she’s a cow,” Judith replied.

I think Elena choked on something. She definitely had trouble breathing for a minute.

At one of the last camps she was able to attend, she told Virgis, “These have been the happiest days of my life. All my friends seem to want to do is get together and talk about their doctors’ visits, and here I am meeting and talking to young active people.”

And speaking of doctors, when she broke her wrist in a fall, she came under the tender care of Britain’s National Health Service – something I actually would wish on my worst enemy.

At on point I advised her that she might want to consult my father, a retired orthopedic surgeon. She took me up on this and sent him X-rays, records etc.

For the next few years she delighted in telling how she presented my father’s letter to an officious medical bureaucrat at the NHS. Apparently father wrote things like “Miss Hatton is NOT a pain-prone person” and referred to her wrist brace as “that rag.”

So, she said this bureaucrat asked, “Do you know Dr. Browne well?”

She replied, “Well, I am godmother to his grandson, so we’re practically related,” and took an unholy delight in watching how white he turned.

I could go on and on. Judith was a member of a smokers rights group and co-authored a book called, ‘Murder a Cigarette’ and fondly recalled the days when “Got a light mate?” established a friendly camaraderie that reached across class boundaries in England.

I think I’m just going to give up trying to make this a coherent narrative and tell some of my favorite Judith stories.

- Judith mentioned having seen Neville Chamberlain around the time of his infamous “Peace in our time” proclamation. She said he was actually quite cynical about it, because England was in no way prepared for war.

- Once around a campfire in Lithuania we were trying to come up with provocative questions to spark discussion among the students. I suggested, “Does God have a sense of humor?” Judith sort of put an end to any further discussion, though sparking great laughter, when she said, “Of course. How else do you explain sex?”

- One of her favorite experiences in Warsaw was a Museum of Socialism exhibit in an art gallery near our apartment, where they had set up an old communist-era cafe with surly waitresses who served awful tea. Judith used to delight in trying to make them smile, the way tourists try to get a reaction from the Guards at Buckingham Palace. She said, “Oh how I long for the day when we’ll have one of these in England.”

- The best advice about diet I ever heard came to me from Judith, who learned to cook from a woman who cooked for a British battallion in WWI (yes, that’s One.) The pearl she passed on was, “Pay no attention to what doctors are saying about diet, because in ten years they’ll be saying something else.”

- Judith and Boris had one son. They delayed having children until she was 40 because they didn’t know who might be coming to call some day. Her advice about parenting was, “Pay no attention to the schedules (of child development) doctors give you. Babies do things in their own time.”

She used to delight in telling us what a fine, handsome, gutsy boy we had. And how we’d never know a moments peace from now on.

Judith’s was a life well-lived. We miss her and regret that our children won’t get to know her as we did.

“The secret to happiness is freedom, and the secret to freedom is courage.”
Thucydides

Judith is on the web here.

http://www.forces.org/writers/hatton/hattonco.htm

http://www.forces.org/writers/hatton/files/lies.htm

No tags

I’m a writer. That’s right, a writer. I write for publication and get paid for it. (Face it, without the money you’ll never really believe you’re a real writer.) God I love to introduce myself as a writer at parties. John Stakely (author of Armor and Vampire$) once told a group of us at the Norman Oklahoma Science-Fiction Association that the best thing about being a writer is that, (1) you get to be a writer, and (2) you get to write. Being a writer is major cool – even a minor writer who can’t quit his day job.

I started as an expat writer, meaning that the stuff I wrote that got paid for was published in the English-language press that serves the expatriate community in Poland. I also wrote for a (now sadly defunct) magazine for English teachers and students that had a circulation of about thirty thousand, which beat hell out of the libertarian/conservative journals I give my stuff away to. My essays for vocabulary building for non-native speakers have been published in book form in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and Novosibirsk, Russia and an English course I wrote has been used in places like Turkey and India.

Of course, I had always wanted to become a writer and from time to time made desultory attempts to set myself essay-writing assignments to practice and polish my technique. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t work for you either, does it? The fact is that for years, everything I wrote that got published was stuff I gave away to amateur publications read only by the faithful. I simply could not, without the discipline of a classroom assignment or a deadline, pick a subject, research and write something about it.

Stephen King, a writer I don’t read much, said that if you lift weights every day, you get big muscles, if you write every day, you get to be a good writer. Yes, it’s probably about that simple – but notice how many people can make themselves exercise regularly. For me, forcing myself to exercise has always been easier than forcing myself to write.

Then, in 1991, I moved to Poland. For two years I lived in a small town, Brwinow, which had a charmingly archaic phone system. The whole town was served by an operator exchange, the like of which I had never personally experienced in the States. The family I lived with had a party line, which I am just old enough to remember in America. All the phones in town were served by three-digit numbers, which you had to tell the operator – in Polish. For our house and the neighbors, we had a code of rings worked out with the operators so we’d know who had to pick up the phone.

To say the least, I felt a little isolated and as it became evident that I’d be in Eastern Europe for a while I realized that I’d have to start writing letters to keep in touch with my friends back home. In my first year in Poland I believe I wrote more letters that I had written in my whole life up to that point. And in my letters I, of course, told stories about what I had seen and done in Poland.

Now writing for publication is like losing your virginity. It’s not racking up scores that’s so difficult – it’s going from zero to one. (I’m counting only published and paid for. Unlike sex it doesn’t really count if it’s given away.)

For me it happened, appropriately enough, in a bar. I was drinking in Warsaw’s expat hangout in 1994 with a decayed Austrian baron who edited Okecie the Airport Magazine, one of the kinds of slick mags they give out at tourist agencies and put in the seat pockets of airplanes.

At one point this fellow turned to me and said, “Gee Steve, you sure can talk. Can you write?”

“Yes I can write.”

“Can you write funny?”

“Yes I can write funny.”

“Can you write me something funny about Polish health services?”

“Not even difficult.” I said.

So what I wrote was basically an article pointing out that the remnant of the socialized health service was not something you wanted to trust any major health problem to and illustrated with a few anecdotes of things that happened to people known to me, including a story of a friend who severed the tendons of his hand pounding his fist through a window at a party. (Where else?).

My friend went to an emergency room where he got sewed up, but was placed on a waiting list ten months long. Might as well not bother, after ten months he would never have gotten back full function of his hand due to tendon shrinkage. This was common in Poland and all the former Communist countries, which somehow never gets through to the admirers of socialized medicine

I also pointed out that many doctors were going private and providing excellent care. My friend eventually went to a private clinic in a converted apartment. The examining room was the kitchen and a bedroom had become the surgery – all spotlessly clean. He was in and out within a week of applying and his hand works just fine now. The price – you wouldn’t believe it for a fairly serious operation. It put a crimp in his beer budget for a while though. . (To give you a further idea, I have a Polish associate who is an MD. She doesn’t practice though because she makes more money providing English lessons.)

Bottom line was advice to expats to make arrangements now, rather than wait for an emergency when you’d be standing like a schmuck with a phone in one hand and a Polish phrase book in the other.

So, after the magazine hit the stands I met my editor at the pub. He was drinking as per usual and sporting a cast on his arm. He informed me that the very morning the magazine was issued the Minister of Health, not the secretary but the Honorable Minister himself had called the offices and demanded to know, “Who is this Stephen Browne guy and why is he saying these awful things about our wonderful Polish hospitals?”

“Jesus, are we going to get in trouble for this?” said I.

“No, no problem. By the way, you haven’t asked me what happened to my arm.”

“So what happened to your arm?” I asked. “A couple of friends of mine broke it.” he said.

(A fairly frequent occurrence. I eventually had occasion to damn near break his arm myself.)

“I got it taken care of in the hospital right away. Of course I had to give them two bottles of cognac to see to it!”

To say the least, he was not very sympathetic to the Honorable Minister’s complaint.

That’s how it started. My editor was delighted to have somebody who could write on any subject on short notice. I was given lots of assignments to write “adverticles”, advertisements thinly disguised as articles, and got to eat free with a date in some of the best restaurants in Warsaw. In return my editor published some of the stuff I was proud of, essays on the history and environs of Warsaw. I even got to write stuff considered a bit dangerous to publish, such as an article about taking taxis in the city. (Dangerous? More about this at another time.) For a while I was writing most of the magazine under my own byline and columns called variously; An American in Warsaw and Through the Eyes of a Foreigner.

My editor has since returned to his true profession of drinking himself to death but I’ll always have a warm spot in my heart for him and the great story he gave me about How I Became a Writer.

No tags