In the midst of all that has occured and caught notice in the last week or so we have overlooked yet another shot across the bow in a centuries-old struggle between ancient peoples with a twined history. As I recently noted in another space, I think that when considering what it is that makes a nation we would do well to also weigh an idea put forward by the humorously paranoiac author Thomas Pynchon in his last novel: "maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again."
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This is not the first accusation of its kind. When in the Czech Republic some years ago, I was taken to the Brno Ikea by some Czech friends who wanted to demonstrate to me that Swedes thought the Czechs stupid (the Thirty Years' War has left some long simmering prejudices methinks). The evidence of this prejudice was physically demonstrated to me as the Czechs led me through a tortuous “labyrinth” that forces them to pass in front of all the Nordic wares before being able to exit that quiet, but nonetheless insidious consumerist bacchanalia which markets itself as “Affordable Solutions for Better Living.” I chuckled and told them that, unfortunately, Ikea had not yet mastered such sophisticated glocalization and all stores (and thus markets) suffered from the same malady. On a final note, the recent film Czech Dream (http://nymag.com/movies/listings/rv_46967.htm) demonstrates that my Bohemian mates were not too far off the mark when they worried that they were the victims of manipulative capitalist conspiracies to separate them from their crowns.
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