DIRTY SARAH DETESTS EVA
Edward Meadows on how American
proselytisers are — unsuccessfully attempting to subvert the women of Prague
Prague HER NAME is Sarah and she's a sour- faced feminist drab from California, a Molly Yardesque ugly-on-purpose young Malcontent, now working for an English- language newspaper in Prague. Her favourite comment to men is, 'You haven't got a clue!' My beautiful, saucy and smart- as-a-whip Czech pal Eva calls her 'Dirty Sarah' because of her grubby appearance. Eva, apparently, does have a clue. Dirty Sarah detests Eva because Eva Proudly wears partially unbuttoned blous- es, no bra and microskirts with no panties underneath. If that weren't bad enough, Eva hates the communists, who persecuted her dissident father and prevented her from going to a good university. It also bothers Dirty Sarah that Eva laughs a lot (she has the Bohemian's lascivious and Ironic sense of humour), smokes cigarettes and likes to pop out every once in a while for a shot of Becherovka, the potent Bohemian liqueur made from herbs and the spring waters of the Karlsbad spa Where Beethoven and Schiller, among oth- ers, came to take the waters. In short, Eva Is a typical Prague girl in a town where Nana Trump look-alikes are a dime a dozen.
Sitting under a tall chestnut tree in a beer garden by the Vltava river, Dirty Sarah told me that life was much better in Prague when she visited it in the 1980s, when the communists were still in power. Now, prices are rising because greedy American capitalists have arrived to exploit the poor Bohemians. Dirty Sarah and her politically correct American friends feel they must protect the Czech naffs from the depredations of the capital- ist pigs. She sighed for the better life which the Bohemians had now lost.
It was a peculiar statement: how could the Bohemians miss the secret police, who tossed them into jail for smiling the wrong way? Or the concentration camps? Or the jobs in factories, where every day they ate enough pollution to kill a roomful of rats? Or the misery of the 'they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work' socialist ethic which kept the shop shelves bare? I seri- ously considered, on behalf of all Czech people, smartly splashing my beer in her face. But my Czech sidekick, Stanislav the lady-killer, would have severely repri- manded me. One never wastes Czech beer — the best in the world — on such dubi- ous causes. (Never mind imported Pilsner Urquell, the original pilsner, which doesn't travel well. The Czech brews, Branik, Gam- brinus, Budvar Krusovice and a dozen oth- ers, when drunk fresh on draught in a 600-year-old Prague pub, are simply with- out parallel in the world. In comparison, American beer is, in Sir Kingsley Amis's words, 'gnat's piss'.) But Dirty Sarah is not alone. As if the Slovak separatism which broke their coun- try in two was not enough to worry about, as if the changes accompanying their econ- omy's conversion to capitalism were not a big enough burden, the Czechs now have to deal with 20,000 young American college graduates who have come to Bohemia in recent months, ostensibly to teach English, or to find a job which, in the words of one, `does not involve taking out garbage'. They all say they came 'to help the democracy', but most came because they read in the erroneous Let's Go Europe guide that Prague was dirt cheap and, at least when the stylish, play-writing president was sip- ping beers in Prague Castle, chic as well.
Ideologically, these invaders are indoctri- nated with the political correctness they learned at Stanford and Princeton. They are acolytes of socialism, anti-American Third Worldism and the general victimolo- gy of the loony Left. In Harvard Yard and at Stanford's Ujamma Hall, this political correctness makes sense; hey, dude, it's the conventional wisdom. But out in the real world, in Eurocentric Europe (home of the dread 'dead white European males') after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it resonates like a buzz-saw.
Bohemia is, after all, a land where for- mer dissidents still hang colour pho- tographs of Ronald Reagan on their walls, and decorate their bedrooms with large American flags. The Czechs cheered Rea- gan's much denigrated 'Evil Empire' speech. They knew from personal experi- ence just what he was talking about. Start spouting off about the wonders of socialism to people who suffered 44 years of the real thing and their eyes pop, their faces red- den, their fists clench.
Dirty Sarah and her retrograde fellow- travellers seem amazingly ignorant of one detail: the Velvet Revolution of 1989 was a profoundly, vituperatively anti-communist revolution. Chic though he may be, its leader, Vaclav Havel, was an anti-commu- nist's anti-communist. In 1968, the Czech leaders told Havel he could either emi- grate to New York and accept a cushy pro- fessorship, or go to prison. He chose to stay in his country, to fight the communists and to go to prison. Later, when he was imprisoned again in the 1980s, ill and close to death, the communists told him that if he would just sign a request to be let out of prison, they would let him out. He refused, feeling that even signing that note would compromise him. How many politi- cally correct American intellectuals have shown a fraction of Havel's courage?
If the Czechs don't want to hear about the glories of communism, they want even less to hear about the evils of capitalism. In Bohemia today, there are probably more free enterprisers per square mile than in the state of Massachusetts, and they don't need Dirty Sarah's big sisterly protection against big, bad American capi- talists. Bohemian entrepreneurs are quite capable of taking American businessmen to the cleaners before breakfast. Who's naive here? Czech businessmen, honed by years of attempting to beat the communist system, will be outdone by no one in shrewdness.
Not stopping with politics and eco- nomics, the Dirty Sarahs in Prague are also sprout-chomping, proselytising, teeto- talitarian prudes, the anti-Evas of the New American politically correct puritanism. They hardly fit in Prague, a city where a major newspaper once displayed a photo- graph of a nude man with a full erection on the front page, where frontal female nudity is a staple of prestige magazines, where high government officials have posters of naked women on the walls of their offices. It seems odd that they would come here, to a city where 10,000 gor- geous Evas parade down Wenceslas Square in microskirts. One American girl wrote a newspaper article declaring that the sexuality of Prague is 'unacceptable'. Oh? What's she going to do, call an air strike? Why doesn't she just go home?
It also seems odd that teetotalitarian New Puritans would flock to a place where no man goes to bed completely sober such is the power of the ancient Czech pub culture — and where everyone over the age of 12, including the recent president, smokes cigarettes. And why would they bring their vegetarian ethos to a country where pork, sloshing in fat gravy, is the staple, and vegetables, aside from pota- toes, are practically unknown?
I've asked, but all I got was blank stares. The only clue was provided recently by .8 friend, a Republican congressional candi- date, who called and asked me about the wisdom of some Americans he knows who want to go to Prague to start a women's lib' eration movement there. After I stopped laughing, I told him that Czech women, like French women, know they already have the real power. Vaclav Havel provid- ed all the liberation they feel they need. Might as well try to convert the Vatican to voodoo.
But the story did provide a possible motive: perhaps the traditional American do-gooder's missionary zeal has surfaced 01 a postmodern permutation. Maybe the politically correct are rushing to politically incorrect Prague because they have sud- denly been overcome by a mass desire to convert the natives.
They are unlikely to succeed. The Czechs are a patient and peaceable people, accus- tomed to outsiders — Habsburg princes, Nazi propaganda ministers, Russian com- missars and now American teetotalitarians — trying to tell them what to think. They react as they always have: bring us your dollars, they say, and have another tankard of beer.
In the end, the Bohemians will not appreciate American New Puritanism any more than they did the communist prudery Which the Soviet colonisers tried to impose on them. It's foreign to their native cul- ture: look at the bold nudity of the statu- ary, dating from the 13th century to the present, adorning every building in Prague. Nor do they care for American political victimology. They don't need instruction from whiny, American Dirty Sarahs about mostly imaginary oppressions. The Czechs have long been the real victims of real oppression — the deadly kind.
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