Stealing Latvia, Final Episode

Fourth part of Ra-gana’s story

Driving home one evening.



Ra-gana bared her teeth—though none of the blinded Latvians could see them. Raw heat flowed from her mouth and as soon as her words struck the ears of her listeners, their empty eye sockets twitched as if the black eggs that filled them were hatching black chickens infected by Turret’s.

The chickens jumped to the sunlit ground and formed a whirl of black feathers, but instead of “pihp, pihp,”, the customary ‘chirp’ of chickens, one heard “behp, behp” of an automobile. As if this was not sufficiently dreadful, a chronal event joined the chickens honking with the rat-ta-tat of a machinegun, the squish of moss in a swamp, and, for good measure, the rattle of tank treads and an earthquake. It made one think of Latvian ghosts of who knows what wars come alive to mix it up with Lady Gaga.

“How on Earth!...” howled Ra-gana, “could the Latvians, co-inventors of the endearing word, have sunk to such corruption? How on Earth did the sons and daughters of the Sun, Saules meitas un dehli, the zhenchinas, the Tochtern aus Elisium http://younghill.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/image018.jpg become such suckers for cream of shit manufactured in Brussels, Stockholm, and other overfed places of the world?”

No problem to answer that one, yelled a listener. The angels got raped http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2010/100/a/6/Tochter_aus_Elysium_by_Venty_chan.jpg and lost their wings.

We are living in millennium horriblis, said Ra-gana. The Pavlovians are still shoving a peppered broomstick between my legs and calling the Sun in her chariot a witch on a broomstick.

Driving along a country road.

Latvia is no longer an existential question for Latvians. Did you see those cow licked fans of outgoing President Valdis Zatlers come to wimp it up at the Garden of Fates (Liktendārzs)? The umbrellas of the so-called “umbrella protest” a few years ago were replaced by summer parasols making make-believe that it was time for the rainbow.

However, the President’s good bye and farewell wishers were put in their place by the incoming Viceroy* Andris Bērziņš [*before he came out of retirement, Berziņš was president of Uni Banka, an affiliate of Swedish SEB http://www.sebgroup.com/pow/wcp/sebgroup.asp . This is why his interests are conflicted, motives may be questioned, and service may be contrary to the interests of Latvians http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andris_B%C4%93rzi%C5%86%C5%A1_(Latvian_President-elect) ], who trumped the outgoing President by marrying his girlfriend, a Latvian doctor, who does not understand why she should not have married—given that she had not been in a hurry to do so before Berzins sudden rise to fame.

Ra-gana was visibly eclipsing herself. Those who were listening to her saw neither the sun nor the moon.

Did the doctor weigh the existential question, i.e., whether she should be wife of a president who may not be averse to the de-sovereignization of Latvia? Not surprisingly, the news media were interested in the banker on his way to becoming the President of Latvia, not the non-event of the near ex-President at the Park of Fate (Liktendārzs).

Ra-gana’s questions, many of a rhetorical nature, because they implicitly questioned the President-Elect loyalties, reverberated through Latvia with a “ker-plunk” that has no bridge overhead to echo it. Though the questions are rhetorical, mere thinkable unthinkables few think about, they are actually weighty enough for President-Elect Andris Bērziņš to refuse the Presidency, confound a corrupt Saeima that elected him, and call for direct popular elections to take place simultaneously with the Referendum on the dismissal of Saeima.

I know that my enemies are calling for Garth Wader, shouted Ra-gana, but I love the Latvians. They are among the last of indigenous peoples, and not much is left of them.

So, what else is new?

One may readily imagine an alternate future for Latvia, one more advantageous to her as a sovereign nation than a nation de-sovereignized and stuck for public view in a bottle of formaldehy. Is freedom being bought at the price of seeing one’s self de-Latvianized enough to be indistinguishable from Latvian tourists touring their own country http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdYwAXZh0ME&feature=related . Many Latvians do not agree that the life of their community is being put in jeopardy by debts, many of which were accrued by oligarchs and those with tendencies to imitate them.

Driving into it.

Why should Andris Bērzins want to preside over a system, where the heirs of Latgale region are paid for their labour with a bottle of ‘krutka’ and piece of fatty sausage? The suicide rate in Latvia under the government in operation for the last twenty years (where suicide is a way of sacrificing one’s self to Gods of one’s forebears to keep from being miserable under the present One) is rather impressive. One should check out whether President-Elect Andris Bērzins, as a banker, repossessed the farms of some who protested by killing themselves.

Not that Berzins would admit to ever having heard of such a thing, someone shouted. He will say that the Swedes love Latvians.

The corruption problem of the Latvian government (some say it began in 1993, when Adolfs Buķis from Jelgava killed himself at the foot of the Freedom Monument in Riga) is the result of a visionless government marching into the future looking backward and full of faith in the short-lived post-World War Two economic story.

Much of the present march into oblivion is the result of the uneducated optimism of Latvian exiles (trimdinieki), the hidden greed of former communist apparatchiks, people living in belief (still) that liberal and self-regulating capitalism is a system for forever, and abandonment of community in favour of anarchy of individualism will be sustained by good money also forever. While the success stories of Latvians living abroad is impressive, few knew enough about the history of economy to oppose the shock capitalism advocated by America and other Western countries in the early 1990s or are themselves committed to a unipolar world view.



One more bend in the road and I am home.



President-Elect Andris Bērzins is of oligarch vintage, a careerist—as we see—even as a retiree. Why are we to believe that the answer to the question (as yet unasked by the media) that he is free of conflict of interest on behalf of Sweden, when so much of the evidence (true, indirect and inferred, not objectively proved) leads one to infer the opposite or at least investigate it as the Latvian media does not do.

Ra-gana was out of breath as she came to the finish of her story to the blind. “Oh, do not go gentle into that good night,” she screamed at the top of her voice. “Make rage at what you have been made to become!”

Many windows in Riga opened as people looked to see who that Crazy Jane, a pa-yane for sure, was doing in depopulated Riga. Unfortunately, the windows opened to the dark of night, and an echo that sounded very much like “On July 7^th, the President of Latvia will be Andris Bērzins. Latvia is making a great leap forward. De-sovereignization, here we come. What crisis? There is no crisis.”