A year later...

No pictures on this one...

I just read Georgia Diary by Thomas Goltz (an EXCELLENT book on Georgia in the 1990s and early 2000s, btw), and now I'm much more informed than I was about the civil wars that busted up this country in the early 1990s. It leads me to wonder...

... Is this entire blog an irreverant, disrespectful stab at a country so recently torn apart by civil war? Is it right for me to poke fun at the educational system and the antics of my host family when a little over ten years ago people like them were sitting in cold rooms without electricity waiting for the gunfire to stop long enough so they could get water from the spring? Back in 1993, I was 9 years old. In the grand scheme of things, that's pretty damn recent.

... Should I consider their recent history when dealing with Georgians on a personal level? Before I criticize someone in my mind for being late, should I remember that they lived in a violent, broken country for years of their lives that are not even fogged by memory yet? When I'm rolling my eyes as the roof gets blown off the new airport on a windy day, should I think about how Rustaveli Street in Tbilisi has been restored from piles of rubble? As I grind my teeth on days when the internet is down, should I give thanks that a country with war-torn infrastructure has come so far that internet cafes can spawn in a town as far from the capital as Samtredia?

Given these circumstances, I can't really explain why I'm going to continue to write the same kind of blog entries that I've been writing the whole time. In the first place, nothing has changed between two weeks ago and today, except for that my level of ignorance has been lowered somewhat. In the event of another civil war (KNOCK ON WOOD), my tune would change. One argument I've given myself is that part of the healing process is the ability to laugh at situations, but that's a better argument for a Georgian who starts a blog than for an American who toes the water for two years and then ships back out. One better argument I've given myself is that this blog isn't that offensive. Naturally, it walks the double-black line that the US government has set for my freedom of speech (being a representative of said government, I understand the need for that), but nobody would read it if it were a collection of breathless, awe-struck fascination by the beauty and purity of Georgian culture.

By the way, breathless, awe-struck travel writing about cultures is crap. I love Georgia, and I hope that comes through in my blog, but the way some travel writers take a culture and place it on a shiny culture-pedestal above all others only ensures that the travel writer himself will look knowledgeable and cultured, while the culture itself becomes exotified, and people who run away from their own cultures to seep in the exotic culture's harmonic utopia will be confused to find the same familiar problems in the latter. To say it as any hippie Peace corps volunteer would, exoticized travel writing accentuates and exacerbates the differences between cultures, rather than pointing out the similarities. That, and it's boring.

In conclusion, out of respect for the Georgian culture as one of real people and not one of exotic, fragile caricatures, this blog will continue in the same irreverant, mediocre-quality vein as it has followed for the past year. To all four or five people in the world who read this, I make this proclamation with a resounding echo: More sarcastic posts about my unaccomplishments await you! More descriptions of Georgia from a restrained western viewpoint! More love for my temporary home country, sans saccharine paragraphs of obsequieous adoration!

I have to believe that if this blog were that truly awful, Georgians wouldn't read it. (holla, Nico!)