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Volume I
Issue 7
November 1999 |
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Politics and Eccentrics by Michael Nicolella
Anomalous reflections of Europe, the
West, and the Middle East Politics and Eccentrics by Michael Nicolella In our current election season I have been visiting the online big-name candidacies that I don't need to be telling you about, and in doing so I have come across some of those peripheral opportunities that frequently waylay seekers. The Balkan nations of southeastern Europe occupy the Western imagination as anomalous reflections of Europe, the West, and the Middle East - rainy, dark, and unaccountable little places. Access to information about the histories and economies of countries in this region is available through several websites, some of them more gothic than others. The Romanian Government site, http://domino.kappa.ro/guvern/ehome.nsf/, has links to many web sites about Romania. The History section of this site attempts to define and describe the ways of life that have taken place within this ancient crossroads between Europe and Asia Minor, a region so prosperous that Rome celebrated its conquest for 123 days, a place that saw successive empires, trade patterns, and religious movements which have become confused over the passage of time. The intellectual concept of nationalism that spread through western Europe in the nineteenth century inspired the Romanian people to unite, and this site attempts to describe this inspiration in various ways, such as language, breeding, religion, and geography. The troubled history written on this long page ends with the denunciation of deposed dictator Nicolai Ceausescu, who had a motorcade for his dog - made a colonel in the Romanian army - and who constructed a government command center smaller only than the Pentagon. He is called absurd and mentally ill by the current government site listed above. More about Ceausescu can be found in this slightly glib site: http://www.historyhouse.com/stories/ceausescu.htm. The towns and rural areas of this region are often stunningly beautiful and somehow sad. Taking a break from history, information about Bulgaria such as images, information about tourism, and news media organizations may be found at http://www.mrl.uiuc.edu/~petrov/bgimages.html and at http://www.bgtv.com/. The Accursed Mountains of Albania, mapped only in the 1930's, are featured at http://pubwww.srce.hr/muzej_sibenik/izl/b.html, which also features other links for this region. At http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jun/transyl.htm Jeffrey Tayler tells a fine story about traveling through Romania. Of course anybody from one of these areas has their own stories to tell: Art from/for Bosnia is a list of links - http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~bosnia/artwork/ ; http://www.port.hu/kultura/index_a.htm says that it is out of date due to funding shortfalls, but still has very many links about Hungarian culture; http://photoarts.com/haviv/bosnia/test.html is a powerful photo essay about the terror in Bosnia that has since overcome the former Yugoslavia; the Romani (Gypsy) people, ever difficult to hold to account, can be found through links in an excellent directory at http://dir.lycos.com/Society/Ethnicity/Romani/.
Budapest, Hungary. Photo: Anne Carley The Political Corner, a good Italian site, http://www.agora.stm.it/politic/, provides extensive access to mainstream and fringe political and media organizations throughout Eastern Europe and the rest of the world. While they lack the ruthless sarcasm of Balkan political and media organizations' sites, several U.S. web locales offered ideas not wanting in their convictions of optimism. The Expansionist Party of the United States http://hometown.aol.com/XPUS/index.html has as its motto: "XP is a general-purpose political organization of the radical center dedicated to geographic enlargement of the United States, ultimately to culminate in world union under the Constitution." This site advocates extending citizenship to the people of Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and others worldwide, culminating in eventual global union under the U.S. Constitution. The site is friendly and not very militant, and the party was founded over the telephone. Impatient for polity, I turned to the Constitution Action Party http://www2.ari.net/home/CAP/ but found too much idle talk about God. The New Party http://www.newparty.org/elecsuc.html seems to encapsulate the grassroots of American life that we are so often hearing about on the news. Speaking of which, a person seeing so much in the space of a desktop sometimes has to stick a foot in "reality" somehow. I opened the window and took note of the damp chill in the streets of my neighborhood. Turning to http://www.nytimes.com/ (requires sign-in) for the five-day forecast, I reviewed the news and wondered what keeps nations bound. The index of the Philosophy of Mind web site http://artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/dictindex.html features theories of imagination, memory, and the origins of thought from experience, matter, and language. I found little, though, about why people might band together and rejoice in war, which we obviously do from time to time http://www.army.mil/, or why people develop immense organizations that help us to use tools. The "Creativity" entry of the Philosophy of Mind site misspells Michelangelo and undertakes a major logic leap when concluding that the standard arguments against machine creativity are not convincing. The entry ends with a loose claim that tools carry the creativity of their maker, an idea which has been interpreted favorably by both art lovers and militant fascists. Still, history and destiny have been the creative efforts of groups of people since the dawn of time. From time to time some of the websites featured in this article may be out of service. You may want to notify the system administrators of those sites. Michael Nicolella is interested in Chopin, Debussy, online publishing and contemporary art.
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