Balkan Trilogy
the Most Boring Man in the World and the Balkanization of America, featuring Rudy Guliani and the Bush family
about a decade or so ago...
I hopped off the bus in Belgrade, Serbia, having travelled overland from Sofia, Bulgaria.
This was a weighted trip for several reasons.
In part, a search for heritage...
and a need to unlock the deeper layers of what happened in the Balkans in the 90's from several perspectives....the Romani, Croatian, Bosnian and now, Serbian.
It had all started with The Most Boring Man in the World...a taciturn, uncommunicative stranger on my massage table.
And then the story took several curious twists and turns…
* * * * * *
All worthwhile travels commence with wandering... Wandering and feeling the place and its people, tracing down layer by layer.
Like it or not, Belgrade's complexities put a lot of my senses on high alert.
For instance, there was a nondescript four-story brick building overlooking the river that I passed several times. I found myself avoiding it. Slowly I realized it stirred a sense of unease that grew into more...a heavy, dead feeling of suffering and horror.
At first, no one wanted to tell me what the building was. But finally it was revealed to have been a notoriously brutal prison during the war in the 90's.
By day's end, I had stumbled upon Skadarlija in the bohemian heart of Belgrade… a place that preserves the traditional spirit of the past. I felt attracted to a rustic restaurant and made my way inside. It was early and blessedly empty.
Scanning the room, I was drawn to a certain table...and a certain chair. The waiters stirred and suddenly there was a sense of excitement in the air.
"Welcome dear Lady! Do you KNOW where you are sitting?!"
I drew a blank as several more waiters gathered around. "You are sitting at the same table AND in the same seat as President GHW Bush!" There followed an animated conversation in Serbian.
"Wait one moment, please!'' Several waiters dispatched to the kitchen and soon a wizened octogenarian waiter was presented with pride. "THIS is the man who waited on him!" He bowed politely. His sharp memory intact, he regaled us with stories of that special evening.
Discussion soon turned to the politics of the time.
It was riveting...
Because JUST the day before, I had been sitting in a very posh restaurant in Sofia, Bulgaria, asking our host, Gary MacDougal, the head of the ‘America for Bulgaria Foundation’,
"So what's a nice Scottish boy like you doing in Bulgaria all these years?"
As he sipped his second glass of wine, he waxed eloquent, telling his story of being in the oil business during GHW Bush's tenure and how the Bush family had opened doors for him, eventually making him a VERY wealthy man and a man of some influence. (see his bio* below)
In time, those favors came due. His bio does not mention that a Special Observer Chair for the Bush oil interests was set up at the UN with Mr. MacDougall in the role. He was elevated…now a trusted partner.
"Imagine!” he said with mock apprehension, “I am 65 and I now have the hardest job of my career! I have to find a way to spend $50 million dollars in a place the size of Ohio!” (He had sponsored the Iliev Dance Foundation of which I was a part.)
As he continued his story, his tone shifted. He then said something quite chilling and unexpected..
With a charming, refined smile that belied his true character, he said:
"Now...You all think that you are here working for Petur Iliev, but actually, you are working for ME!"
Now more seriously, he continued…
"YOUR job is to make Bulgarians LIKE Americans. Moreover, your job is to make Bulgarians TRUST Americans. You see, we are trying to do fracking here and the government is resisting."
I froze, my hair stood on end. The implication made abundantly clear. Our real job…
So THIS is the real reason we’re here?!
I turned my head ever so slightly and, with my eyes, asked the young hip-hop protege of Lady Gaga seated next to me if she had heard what I’d heard. She had…
To our dismay, everyone else simply smiled as if a bomblet had not just gone off in our midst.
I realized then that we had been mucking around in their politics for decades! At least four, by that reckoning...
And I realized that my companions had sold their souls…cheaply, at that.
There is a bit more to the story, but suffice it to say, I tore up my return ticket to the US and ended my affiliation with them.
I bought my own ticket home...but first, a bus to Serbia...and the education I was getting in the Belgrade restaurant.
Certain biting criticisms of America from a variety of Balkan friends and acquaintances in recent years were now beginning to make sense.
People in this part of the world have lived a lot of history and they are politically quite astute. The atmosphere became a bit more serious as the waiters spoke with hard-earned knowledge about many aspects of the political world. I was light-years behind, soaking up all I could.
Then we turned to the headlines of that particular day. Everywhere I looked, there was a somewhat familiar face... Someone special had arrived in the country that day and all the media were abuzz. Billboards, TV screens, newspaper and magazine covers, flyers and posters plastered everywhere.
Suddenly I realized it was Rudy Giuliani who was Mayor of NYC when I lived there... many years later and certainly out of familiar context.
I asked them "What is HE doing here?"
Immediately the mood darkened.
"So, if you notice, he is always pictured with a certain politician...wherever you find him. This man is running against our incumbent president. Giuliani always has his arm around this man. Elections are in 2 weeks. This is America's nice way of telling us who to vote for."
* * * * * *
The Most Boring Man in the World and the Balkanization of America
When you touch a body, you touch a soul… It’s not often that I draw a blank.
In fact, it has only happened once…with this client. He was iron-clad remote. That’s what stood out about him. Nada. More nada. Nobody home.
It wasn’t that he was simply silent during his massage session. That is a good thing.
I’ve heard enough stories in my life. For various reasons, I do not pry…ever.
But, even working in silence, there was nothing to connect with or latch on to. Nothing to feel on any level.
Against my will, I found myself battling thoughts about how boring he was.
‘That’s not professional,’ I chided myself. ‘But he REALLY IS BORING! How can anyone be THAT boring?!’
By this time, I’d had about enough of myself.
It was a very long hour…
As he was about to get up, a chance remark about Thai massage suddenly piqued his interest. He actually spoke…like a real person.
Turns out, he’d had a lengthy military career that had taken him to Thailand…and to several other nations.
He had spent a lot of time in the Middle East in the years leading up to various upheavals. He had been, in fact, a covert operative. It was his assignment to go unnoticed…to be the most boring man in the world.
He learned the languages and dialects, he spent time in tanning beds, beard just so, mannerisms perfected. To falter in any of those details would have endangered his life.
Serious business.
Out of curiosity, I asked where else he had served.
“The Balkans”…about 10 yrs before Tito’s death and the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia, (the most prosperous region of Europe at the time, so the locals told me).
“We infiltrated the churches and the mosques, stirring religious and cultural divisions. We did that for years…and then we exited the assignment before the actual trouble started.”
Then he cut his remarks short, the remote persona dropped back down like a lead mantle and that was the last I ever saw of him.
On his way out the door, he turned and said simply…”This was practice for America.”
WHAT?!
I didn’t…and couldn’t grasp fully the meaning of that statement.
But I remember how it felt…disorienting…and real.
Like an anchor in the pit of my stomach.
At that time, I didn’t know that I would soon be going to the Balkans myself.
It was there that I saw war up close for the 1st time…in a Western setting.
My time there was brief…and galvanizing.
I had been prepared for this… I just didn’t know where the puzzle piece fit until then.
I returned to the US, deeply…and I mean deeply embarrassed and humiliated by my lack of knowledge of the conflict..
I read everything I could get my hands on, and then I cooked up a couple of volunteer assignments and shipped myself back to Sarajevo 6 weeks later.
I was working with the survivors of the rape and concentration camps from that war. Everyone had shrapnel fragments, many were missing limbs, all with deeply traumatized nervous systems…so much so that virtually everyone’s hair had turned white overnight, they were all diabetic as a result of severe, prolonged stress and their upper bodies were calcified…a somatic response to terror.
Through interpreters, I collected their stories.
With my hands, I contacted their trauma in a very literal exchange.
one story…
Rasema...Dancing with the DeadDebra Robinson·October 24, 2024Read full story
I had to know…to understand WHY…HOW this level of barbarism and savagery erupted in a culture that was described as the Jerusalem of Europe with 3 major religious and ethnic groups living together harmoniously for several hundred years, attending each other’s celebrations, intermarrying, etc.
Really lovely, cultured, intelligent people…. A high state of education and culture had been cultivated…and now destroyed.
Paradox was rife. The road to understanding strange…and then suddenly clear!
The crazy quilt, if you will…
A quick background…
I was a folk dancer. Entranced (literally) the 1st time I stumbled on it in Central Park in NYC. The strangely compelling music, the circle of many kinds of people holding hands and performing unfamiliar dance moves.
As a friend and I wondered at the curious scene, suddenly, as though something had reached in and grabbed me by the heart, I began to sob…uncontrollably.
It was a flash of recognition…something that conveyed ‘Home’ on a deep, almost primal level.
It became my passion. On a deep level, it connected me to an earlier time and place when people lived as people ought. Gentleness, civility, care for one another, strength when needed.
I was young, but already world-weary. Crazed, neurotic, greedy, inhumane…strange, aberrant life-forms encroaching on all sides. (NYC circa 1979)
All I’d ever heard about in the International Dance community were the happy aspects of the Balkans.
The rest of the story was here…on the ground.
In the 6 week run-up to my return to Sarajevo…during this time of accelerated realizations, I heard almost constant drumming in my head. It even intruded into my thoughts and dreams.
Then more omens. (I don’t have TIME for omens! I insisted) Feathers were gifted to me (odd) by several people and I had almost constant run-ins with turkey-vultures (Latin translation ‘Golden Aura’. Turkey vultures, the only bird that does not kill, was known from ancient times to gather at the end of a battle to clear the carnage).
There was no escaping it, either in my dreams or daily life. Very disconcerting stuff. Then the Native American piece merged with the Serbian piece…and the connection with the ‘savagery’ aspect was made.
An old OP was in play…
Drug wars have existed for a long time. The opium wars are one form (that karmic favor is being returned to us now in the fentanyl era).
Alcohol falls into this category…
The early American settlers observed that alcohol had a different effect on the Natives than the white men. They made quite a sport out of getting the Natives drunk (they still do in the bar scene, plying certain people with shots so they can watch a catfight. A few shots in and the fights are on- makes you wonder if anything ever changes in brute-world).
It wasn’t long before they took full advantage of the Natives’ inability to ‘hold their liquor’. They were intentionally plied with alcohol, which deranged their brains, making them psychotically savage.
Once they were reduced in the common parlance to ‘savages’, the authorities and military could do whatever they wanted with them. They were deemed subhuman.
During this phase, I inexplicably had a simultaneous influx of people who were battling alcoholism and fibromyalgia. Not your regular massage types…You take notice of these things.
I observed some common denominators and patterns. In the end, what both groups struggled with was actually a metabolic issue…and not a moral one! Alcoholics and sugarholics (fibromyalgia)…essentially the same addiction and breakdown of the body. Alcohol is just sugar with a kick…
Then I found that there are 3 groups of people in the world that lack an enzyme to metabolize alcohol. (Native Americans, some eastern Europeans-often Serbians, and the indigenous Ainu of Japan)
So for them, alcohol acts as a poison to their brains, which cannot metabolize it properly. They get drunk quickly…and quickly addicted. As a result of the poison, the person becomes quite deranged…often with sudden personality shifts. They lack control and drink until they black out or pass out.
I soon realized that anyone who drinks and experiences the rage and personality shift has some mixture of native blood.
For the alcoholics and their families, an understanding of this issue gives them great insight and removes the weight of shame and stigma. Once they understood how things worked, it was easy to move beyond the addiction. They were able to see the multi-generational damage in a truer light.
Beyond that, not every alcohol is equal. For instance, tequila and Thai whiskey are semi-hallucinogenic alcohols.
My Hispanics love to party on the weekends. They are alright in moderation with beer, but when the tequila comes out, so do the knives…and the words that can never be taken back. Many a divorce has been avoided by just leaving the tequila alone.
Again, the three groups that lack the enzyme to metabolize alcohol are the Native Americans, the Japanese Ainu and certain Eastern Europeans.
So the upshot to all of this is that Orthodox Serbians custom is to go to church and stay afterwards to eat and drink…and dance. Beer and a bit of the hard stuff, like rakija. Drunkenness is frowned upon. That tends to work out alright.
But our operatives began to infiltrate the churches and sow division (the mosques and RC churches, as well). Soon the talk was more political, there was more drinking (less beer and more rakija) and less dancing and before long, problems intensified and eventually, savagery erupted.
So you had these unthinkably insane scenarios where you might bring soup to a sick neighbor in the morning, but by evening, that same neighbor’s family would come to your door and slaughter your family in front of you.
I actually see this in Chicago’s Serbian churches in recent years. The young men are drinking, angry, no longer dancing…being slowly, but surely, overcome. These are normally some of the kindest, most hospitable and intelligent people…
Same OP.
“This was practice for America.”
* * * * * *
* https://us4bg.org/about-abf/our-team/ Gary MacDougal has served as Co-chair of the Board of Directors of the America for Bulgaria Foundation since its inception until June 2015. As a CEO, Mr. MacDougal built a small engineering company into a Fortune 1000 multinational; he has also been a US Delegate to the United Nations, the General Director of New York City Ballet, and has served as Chairman of the Illinois Governor’s Task Force to move people from welfare to work. He is the author of ‘Make A Difference: A Spectacular Breakthrough in the fight Against Poverty’ (St. Martin’s Press) and of articles in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Harvard Business Review and other publications. Mr. MacDougal has served as Chair of the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Illinois Republican Party. He has also served as a Trustee of the Casey Foundation and as a Director of eight New York Stock Exchange listed corporations. Mr. MacDougal is the founding Chairman of the Bulgarian American Enterprise Fund and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Gary MacDougal received his Master’s Degree in Business with distinction from Harvard University and his Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from UCLA.
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