Eso’s Chronicles 272 / 12
32—Latvia Deaded
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

When I was still a child, Latvia was still a smelly country. It was difficult to escape this phenomenon, unless one was born in a wealthy family. This, indeed, was my good luck, but, unfortunately, this ‘luck’ lasted only until I was eight years old. When I got to that age, those terrible Ruskies (actually of the Soviet Union) took over the country, and all my family had was taken from it, and within about a year eight of them were shipped to the gulags (including my Russian maternal grandmother and aunt).

To try save what he could, my father (a newspaper editor) sent his family to the smelly Latvian countryside, where one of his aunts (his mother’s sister) and her husband owned a farm. It was summer time. The barn, a complex of two buildings was less than fifty yards from the main house. It housed twenty-five cows, a dozen horses, thirty-five sheep, a dozen pigs, and a henhouse that included ducks. The feature on the kitchen table was amanita muskaria or the fly agaric, its cap lay flat on a white dinner plate with its under side immersed in purplish alcohol. This was meant for the flies, which lay dead on the plate around the mushroom by the dozen.

In about a week’s time, after becoming familiar with all the farm’s inhabitants and having walked the wood surrounding it, I was apprenticed to the cow herd, who was the thirteen years old stepson of my aunt, and was deemed too valuable a hand to waste his time looking after the farm animals that were let out in the morning from the barn to graze in the fields and returned hence in the evening. I was to take over the job as soon as I had lost my fear of the cows and gained enough confidence to stand up to the dozen or so horses that were not hesitant to take advantage to boldly come up to me and give me a push with their nose out of sheer curiosity: Whuur you?

Anyhow, I was to be in charge of (including the sheep) and the shepherd dog of over seventy farm animals. I viewed it as quite a promotion and advance in status, when only a month or so before, I had myself been the charge of a nanny, a young woman, who had not yet left the country under Hitler’s out-migration program for those of German descent.

I give this lengthy account, because only a few days ago, a Latvian internet site carried an as if outraged account of how the Bloomberg news service had stated that the Latvian metal euro featured on the face of it a “milk maid”, that is, a maid who milked cows. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-31/latvia-becomes-18th-euro-area-member-as-public-animosity-lingers.html Bloomberg is said to have later changed the description of the figure to that of a “Folk Maid”*. Not a few email respondents protested such low regard for the sensibilities of the Latvian urbanites. After all, in only twenty-two years of independence, the Latvian government has almost destroyed Latvia’s formerly robust countryside culture, and made the people (at least 300,000) become economic refugees in other European countries or move to Riga, the capital, where they either become impoverished urbanites or brainwashed molecules carrying a happiness virus for all things of consumerist nature. The authoritarian manner of introducing of the Euro, too, is designed to make Latvians forget their biocentered origins in favour of the EU urban melting pot.

The ‘public animosity’ to the euro, mentioned by the Bloomberg link, is a mild word for the outrage some Latvians feel toward their own government for deconstructing their culture and replacing it with Nothing, certainly no significant economic development except as advertisement of promises that consumerism is about to recover without fail, and the PM, under whose government the Latvian money, the lats, was abandoned and the euro introduced, is soon likely to leave the country for, as the urbanites so proudly claim, a bureaucrat’s job in Brussels.

Since the destruction of Eastern Europe has not a little to do with American Foreign policy, with significant contributions from the likes of Harvard Business School and professor Jeffrey Sachs (see previous blog for more), this writer (a Latvian and American citizen) wishes the pox on American foreign policy: May the ‘polar vortex’  http://rt.com/usa/us-canada-weather-snow-191/ do its deconstructive best on the American cityscape, and may the semi-urban countryside reclaim the wood it abandoned in favour of urbanite Wall Street’s worthless promises.

* “Folk maid”—there is no such maid in Latvia. There used to be “the Sun’s daughters”, who used to dress in what are now called “folk costumes” http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/young-woman-folk-dress-5688241.jpg . Actually, these ‘folk costumes’ are the dress of the once deified Sun’s priestesses. The globalization theology of the Christian church forced the Latvians to abandon their culture in favour of a religion invented by princes from the West.