Then They Build Monuments To You

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”
– Nicholas Klein, American trade unionist

Yesterday was the International Day Against Homophobia, and as you probably know the demonstration in Tbilisi was preempted by a counter-demonstration, led by the Georgian Orthodox Church, the goal of which was to beat and/or kill as many demonstrators as possible.

Two weeks ago was Easter. The Georgian Patriarch said that abortion must be banned in Georgia because there are not enough Georgians, and that if Georgian mothers have babies that they cannot care for, they should give the babies to the Church.

I’ve been too busy to do either of these topics justice. I feel anger and rage and disappointment. I want to use these events as a bludgeon with which to attack the Church. I feel a sense of grim satisfaction that the Orthodox Church is finally showing its really ugly side to the world. Now, we can no longer ignore the violence inherent within the system.

Will my anger help anyone? My New Years Resolution was to avoid outrage for its own sake. What will outrage – my outrage – do in this case? Another foreigner coming to tell Georgians how to live. If anyone paid attention at all, it would be to point me out as an example of what the priests are fighting against – foreign influence ruining Georgia’s morality.

Two years ago, I wrote a post about the state of LGBT rights in Georgia. The gist was that the general direction of LGBT discussions in Georgia, in public, was that there were no gay Georgians. First they ignore you.

A lot has happened in that time. There was last year’s rally, which was attacked during its march down Rustaveli Avenue. Then there was the follow-up rally, protesting the violence, which was kept safe by the police. Then there was the broom scandal, where it came out that there was systemic rape – rape against men, in particular – going on in Georgian prisons. These are both viewed as assaults on Georgian manhood and Georgian morality. There was the election and its aftermath, during which many Georgians got the impression that the foreign media and foreign governments were biased towards Misha and were trying to enact their own agenda in Georgia – an agenda which might not necessarily have the best interests of Georgians themselves as its top priority. This, I would argue, is deeply interrelated with the rise in nationalist sentiment in Georgia, which is in turn reflected by things like the argument that abortion should be banned so that there will be more Georgians. And, of course, the homosexual lifestyle, which is seen as nonreproductive, is also at odds with this vision of Georgia’s future.

There are a lot of reasons why violence erupted yesterday, and many of them reflect real problems that Georgia has to deal with. But make no mistake: yesterday was a huge victory for LGBT rights in Georgia.

Now, the issue of LGBT rights in Georgia has international attention. Georgia made more of a spectacle of itself than most other countries around the world. Journalists and tourists were caught up in the violence and chaos. Georgia’s reputation took a hit, and many Georgians feel shame that their countrymen embarrassed themselves so thoroughly by resorting to this kind of behavior.

But more importantly for Georgians, now the issue of LGBT rights in Georgia has Georgians’ attention. Now there can be no more “there are no gays in Georgia” claims to close down arguments. In only two years, LGBT issues in Georgia have gone from total invisibility to total recognition.

Now, all of the people who were on the fence, who were quietly ambivalent, or who supported LGBT rights but did not talk about it because of social taboo or fear of offending someone or fear of being ridiculed, all of the people who we never knew were allies – now all of these people are standing up against violence and for the right of LGBT supporters to express their opinions in public. People who never cared before care now. People who didn’t think LGBT rights were their issue are making it their issue now. Thousands of Georgians, on the internet, in the news, and in person, are denouncing the violence perpetrated by their church and their countrymen against innocent human beings.

I have to wonder – could I have imagined, in May, 2011, thousands and thousands of Georgians, all over the country and all over the world, denouncing anti-LGBT violence? Could any of us have imagined that? This is what progress looks like. It’s painful, it’s discouraging, and we’re winning.

There is a widespread, non-partisan political consensus that the right of Georgians to demonstrate against homophobia must be protected. While a few commentators have tried to somehow blame Misha or Ivanishvili for what happened yesterday, I am encouraged by the fact that virtually every politician who spoke on the matter, including Ivanishvili himself, expressed support for the Constitutional rights of Georgians to demonstrate and to have their demonstrations protected. It seems like there is currently no party that is siding with the Patriarch on this issue in order to score political points. I suspect that next year’s rally will have better police protection (and I would note that the lack of adequate police protection at demonstrations has been a recurring issue since the last elections, not limited to this particular rally).

So do I feel anger? Do I feel pain? Do I feel fear that my son will grow up in an environment of hate? Absolutely. A part of me wants to retaliate, to curse the priests and the people who follow them, to fight fire with fire. But I will not allow that part of me to win. It’s counterproductive. I will focus on the positive.

Today, I am proud to live in a country where politicians will defy the Church and stand up for the right to freedom of expression. I am proud to live in a country where every act of violence is met with a public outcry against violence. I am proud to live in a country where a growing number of demonstrators every year will risk life and limb for the right of their fellow humans to live without discrimination or oppression. I am proud that my wife is disgusted by bigotry and that her family is disgusted by the violence. I am proud that this country has come so far in such a short time.

Two years ago I was disappointed by the wall of silence and apathy surrounding LGBT issues. Now I am proud that Georgians are standing up to confront hatred and ignorance head-on. What happened yesterday filled me with hope. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.

Easter, Religion, and my Georgian Family

So I have this dilemma.

Last year after Easter I was faced with the challenge of explaining to my students and coteachers that saying “Christ is risen” is a violation of the uneasy truce that exists in much of America over the issue of religious greetings, and is likely to be offputting to at least some of the guests that Georgia can expect to receive should the country continue towards greater social and economic ties with the world at large. I largely failed to meet this challenge, and I seem to have also come off poorly somehow in framing my dilemma such that some people thought I was being intolerant or disrespectful of Georgian religion.

When I was 17, I had what you might call a crisis of faith. I went to school in a very culturally diverse environment, and my friends came from a wide range of backgrounds and beliefs and represented a wide range of identities. At a certain point it became clear to me that I would be better off if I chose not to believe Christian moral teachings about these people – that their choices, their beliefs, and their lifestyles were evil – and furthermore I found that my conscience was actually urging me to make that choice.

Even still, it was unspeakably difficult to go against seventeen years of accumulated teachings for a number of reasons, not the least of which was because I knew that for me it was a package deal: if I chose not to believe in the moral teachings of the Bible, then I was also choosing not to believe in the epistemological validity of the Bible. Choosing to disagree with the Word of God puts one in something of a metaphysical jam.

That was fourteen years ago, and in the intervening time I have come to agree with the vast majority of the people of the world – with, for example, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, atheists, and many other modern Christians – in thinking that the Christian Bible does not represent a literally true account of historical events or a literal set of commandments from God about how to live one’s life. That includes not believing in the supernatural elements of the Jesus story – the virgin birth, the miracles, the Resurrection. Choosing to believe that those stories are literally true wouldn’t do anything to enhance my understanding of the world or how to act morally within it, and I have as my evidence for that claim the full and moral lives led by billions of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, atheists, and many other modern Christians who also choose not to believe that Jesus had supernatural or divine powers.

My family in America has dealt with this transformation in my views with a great deal of tolerance. I know it annoys them when we sit down to a family dinner and I don’t pray with them (because I don’t think Jesus gave us our food), but we all know there’s no use fighting about it, and so they just tell me every once in a while that it doesn’t matter what I believe, as long as I am a good person. This leads me to suspect that most of them have faced the same kind of dilemma at some point or another and come to approximately the same conclusion, which is that Christian theology isn’t necessarily the only way, or even the best way, to answer questions about how to live.

When it comes to my new family in Georgia, though, it’s a whole different ballgame. They didn’t see me struggle with this stuff. They didn’t see me go from wanting to become a Catholic priest to wanting to convert to Judaism to becoming passively resistant to any kind of profession of religious faith, over the course of twenty years or so. They just have to deal with this American in-law who, like most Americans, seems to have no beliefs and no traditions. Tea has explained to her family, in a vastly oversimplified way, about my desire not to participate in religious rituals. So far no one has ever brought it up.

But now we have Easter. Easter, in Georgia, is the one time of year when Georgians meet each other and exchange professions of religious faith – with friends, neighbors, acquaintances, teachers, and of course family. Now I will be confronted with friends, neighbors, and family members who will come up to me and happily tell me that Christ has risen, and they will expect me to respond that this is indeed the case. I still don’t exactly know what I am going to do in that situation.

Tea very much does not want her family and neighbors to consider me “godless”. I very much do not want to profess my belief in an event that I do not believe actually occurred. I don’t want to offend my new family, nor do I want to lie to them. I would like to be an example to them, the way my friends in high school were an example to me, that you can live a good and moral life without conforming to any particular system of beliefs and practices, and I can’t do that if I make false representations of my own system of beliefs and practices. I also don’t want them to prejudge me on the basis of my response to what to them is a perfectly normal and friendly holiday greeting. I don’t want to be seen as dismissive but I don’t have the language to explain why I’m not going to agree with them about the Resurrection.

Unfortunately, as I tried to explain last year, “Christ is risen” is a fairly confrontational greeting in terms of demanding some kind of response, even if the people who say it don’t mean it that way. Sure, I could pretend not to have properly understood, or I could pretend not to know what the proper response is, but both of those strategies, no matter how tactfully executed, are essentially deceptive and cowardly, and while that might be okay for dealing with strangers, that’s not how I want to conduct my relationships with members of my family.

In addition, eventually the topic of my son’s religiousity, or lack thereof, is going to come up in the family, and I would prefer if, by that time, they already have some experience with accepting people’s differing practices and beliefs with respect to religious (and non-religious) matters. Like I said, I would like to be an example to them of what kind of lives people who are not Orthodox Christians can live – and I would also like to be a model of how they can successfully interact with and relate to those people. I don’t want my son to face this same dilemma when he grows up.

So ultimately it comes down to a communication challenge – a way to decline to profess to faith in a way that will foster mutual respect rather than mutual distrust. I need to communicate in an honest and direct way that my moral code does not permit me to make an insincere profession of faith and that the tradition I follow is one of skepticism towards events or phenomena that cannot be duplicated or verified in some way.

If there’s some kind of extremely short way of doing that (like a word or phrase I can learn by tomorrow) I’d be glad to hear it.

Rape Culture vs. Traditional Culture

The Steubenville rape and the Adria Richards fiasco have given me an idea of what Georgians mean when they say that women are more respected in their culture. I can’t imagine either of those things happening here. I would ask Western readers to keep in mind what I normally ask of Georgian readers: when I compare the two cultures, I am not judging, I am observing – not in search of some ideal way, or right answer, but simply in search of insight.

In Steubenville, Ohio, a young girl became intoxicated while at a party. While she was passed out, two young boys raped her. Many of their peers were around, looking on, making jokes, and posting pictures, comments, and videos to social media. The issue became controversial all over again after the verdict: it was incredibly lenient for the two rapists, and yet numerous commentators lamented the fact that two promising young boys had their futures ruined over one night of drunken antics.

There’s plenty of victim-blaming to go around. It’s especially obvious how twisted and disgusting victim-blaming is in the Steubenville case, because the girl was passed out. She was literally completely deprived of all agency and yet some people still find a way to make it her fault. They say she should not have been drinking, not have been partying with boys, not have let herself get out of control. They say she should not have been doing all the things that a normal teenage girl in America is encouraged to do, that she should not have been doing the thing that all her peers were also doing at that very moment, that she should, at 15 or 16 years old, have had the fortitude to defy social expectations and peer pressure and she should have been home studying or watching American Idol or whatever. This is the double-bind that all women in America face in many, many situations: no matter what you choose, you fail to live up to society’s expectations, and you are punished for it.

In Georgia, the situation is rather different. Georgians would blame the culture. Georgians would say society has failed. Not only should women not have become drunk, but young, unmarried teenagers should not have been allowed to party in mixed company without adult chaperones. Georgians have social mechanisms in place to prevent the thing that happened in Steubenville. Are those mechanisms fair to women? Absolutely not. Are they effective at preventing awful things like the Steubenville rape and the thousands and thousands of other incidents that don’t receive the same media attention? Yes, they are. Traditional culture embraces rape culture in many, many ways – in fact, one could argue that it embraces rape culture in the name of preventing rape (much like the state embraces terrorism in the name of preventing terrorism) – and yet for many people, in many cases, that directive of preventing rape is not wholly disingenuous. It’s true that eliminating the opportunity for rape by keeping men and women physically separated prevents some rapes.

If it appears to the reader that I am arguing that women’s liberation has caused rape, I assure you, I am not. What I am saying is that traditional culture had a set of (very imperfect) mechanisms to prevent rape, and Western culture has undermined those mechanisms *without replacing them* with an equally strong, but more strongly equitable, set of mechanisms.

We are stumbling in that direction. Our rape prevention campaigns are just starting to shift their focus away from educating women on how to protect themselves and towards enculturating men not to be rapists – and in the wake of Steubenville, we’ve had calls to see how we can encourage bystanders to do something about rape or potential rape. We’ve asked ourselves why no one intervened, and how we as a society can make it so that next time someone does intervene.

When I talk about rape culture in Georgia – or in any traditional culture – I am not trying to Americanize or Westernize Georgian culture. I am trying to encourage Georgians to be proactive, rather than reactive. I am hoping traditional cultures can learn from Americans’ mistakes. Because there will inevitably come a time when Georgian traditional culture gives way to a more equitable and free society, and when young Georgians start having unsupervised contact in mixed-gender groups with alcohol involved (as they already do in Tbilisi, or so I am told) it would be really helpful to Georgian men and women to have some kind of backup social norms already in place to stop things like Steubenville from happening here.

But what I would absolutely not encourage is for Georgians to look at Steubenville and say “this is why men and women can’t be friends.” It would be very facile for a traditional or conservative person to point to this or any number of other incidents and say that they are the inevitable consequence of abandoning traditional norms. On the surface that argument appears to be motivated by a respect for women – but at the same time, on a perhaps more subtle level, that argument amounts to using the threat of rape to control women. That’s what rape culture is. In traditional societies, women are compliant and that threat is not carried out. In American society, women are non-compliant, and the threat is carried out. That’s not an argument for compliance.

***

As for Adria Richards, she has been given rape and death threats for tweeting a photo of two guys who were making jokes of a sexual nature at a tech conference. This whole scenario seems like it would also be very unlikely to happen in Georgia. In America there is a certain amount of debate over whether or not it is right or appropriate for men to make sexual jokes in the company of women. In Georgia, there is no such debate. Such behavior is unacceptable, and if a woman chooses to publicly call out a stranger who engages in that behavior, she would be virtually guaranteed to have the support of the crowd.

Of course there are caveats. The injunction against making off-color commentary around women is clearly an example of romantic paternalism, and if you want to know why that might be problematic, go ahead and follow that link. The quote at the top is from this court case. The gist is that the attitude that women should be spared sexual remarks often goes hand in hand with that attitude that women shouldn’t be in places where sexual remarks might be made, such as traditionally male-dominated fields of employment.

Georgia seems to have dodged that bullet – I never hear of Georgian men complaining about women entering traditionally-male fields, or complaining about having to restrain themselves in their comments because of the presence of women. If anything Georgian men are proud to live in a society with nominal, if not actual, equality of employment opportunity. We’ll see if that situation lasts as more women enter more fields – and if it does, I might just have to bite the bullet and acknowledge that maybe Georgian men really do have something to teach Americans about respecting women.

***

So of course, I think there are things we can learn from each other. Georgia and the US are at somewhat different stages of the same general cultural shift – towards more fair and equitable societies – and it helps to compare notes. Not so that one culture can copy the other’s – Georgia doesn’t want America’s rape culture any more than America wants Georgia’s paternalistic one – but so that we can gain deeper insight into the challenges and solutions that societies face and learn from each other’s successes and mistakes.

Quality of Life, Political Economy, and Ethnocentrism

A CNN article caused an uproar in the Georgiasphere because it listed Tbilisi as an example of one of the world’s worst cities. This list was based on the Mercer “Quality of Living” survey which rates 221 cities based on the quality of life in those cities. Tbilisi comes in at #213 out of 221, just below Kinshasa, DRC.

The article was a piece of travel fluff, that did not offer any real depth on any of the cities it featured. It didn’t talk about what the criteria were for inclusion on the list, other than being at the bottom of the Mercer survey, which is also quite opaque. We don’t know which cities are on the Mercer survey or how the different factors are weighted. It seems like there are probably more than 221 cities in the world, so clearly some cities must have been left out, so maybe the article was talking about cities of a certain size or regional prominence.

Certainly Kutaisi must have been left off the list. Kutaisi is equal to or worse than Tbilisi in every single domain listed under Mercer’s criteria (.pdf); for instance, while Tbilisi has water for an average of at least 21 hours per day, Kutaisi averages about four and a half. Kutaisi is also much smaller than Tbilisi, and not a capital. I’m sure Batumi would also fare poorly on the survey, were it included.

So CNN has somewhat misrepresented Mercer’s list, the bottom of which does not constitute the world’s worst cities, but rather the worst cities among the 221 cities surveyed each of which was selected on some unknown basis. Since Mercer does not allow the list to be published in its entirety it is hard to know which cities Tbilisi is even being compared to. Still, some Georgians have taken umbrage that Tbilisi is ranked below Kinshasa, and I get it. Tbilisi is not one of the worst cities in the world – certainly not the eighth worst – and it probably doesn’t belong amongst cities that are war-torn or exceptionally violent.

But what’s really interesting to me is how people conceive of “quality of life” (or “quality of living”, as Mercer calls it). To wit, does having running water for 21 hours a day really make your “quality of living” worse than that of someone who has running water for 24 hours a day? I feel like I’m happier, on average, in Kutaisi, even with my daily four-five hour shower and laundry window, than I was in Tbilisi, and I was happier in Tbilisi than I was in New York, where I could shower for hours at a time in the world’s most famous and delicious tap water, treating myself to a luxury only a tiny fraction of the population of the world has ever been able to access.

In fact, if you buy the argument that modern conveniences make us less happy – by isolating us from others, wrapping us up in consumerism and keeping-up-with-the-Jonesesism, and eroding our tolerance for annoyance – then you might as well invert that Mercer list. By that standard Tbilisi is the eighth best city in the world, tied with Nouakchott, Mauritania, the idyllic beachfront Burning Man of the Sahara.

In all seriousness, though, the idea of quality of living is problematic in that it sort of implies that some lives are of very high quality and others are of very low quality, which in turn leads to dangerous modes of thought regarding the value of human life – for instance, the idea that American lives are worth much more than foreign lives. This idea is rarely if ever spoken but it underlies American foreign policy across the political spectrum. The current drone controversy and the White House response both take as a given that using drones against Americans on American soil is qualitatively and pragmatically different than using drones against people in Yemen or Pakistan.

And along comes Mercer, with its survey tying the quality of living – and by extension the value of human life – to plumbing. It reflects our attitudes, though, doesn’t it? Don’t we Westerners have a deep and widespread superiority complex, compared to people throughout history or people in the third world? Don’t we view our lifestyle as part of that superiority?

The Mercer survey is brutally accurate and completely ethnocentric. It is a mirror that reflects our values, and the cities in it are the medium. They’re not what we’re looking at; they’re what we’re looking with.

The highest ranked city in the Mercer survey was Vienna. It’s almost certainly not true that, all other things being equal, every single human being on Earth would prefer to live in Vienna. I’m sure Vienna’s quite nice – it’s not the answer that’s absurd, but the question. Strip away everything about a person that individuates them – friends, family, culture, life experiences – and you don’t get a person who wants to live in Vienna. You get a non-person.

This is the exact same problem that renders Rawls’ Original Position dangerous and nonsensical – the idea that we could have a set of preferences absent identity. Our identity defines our preferences and our values, and so the supposed “absence” of identity is an illusion – it’s really just a trick to sneak the default identity back in under the guise of objectivity. “Of course any person, objectively speaking, would choose 24 hours of running water over 21 hours.” You’re begging the question.

Modern conveniences have a cost, and it’s not for free that the most livable cities in the world provide uninterrupted utilities and first-class public goods and services to their residents. Their wealth is often predicated on someone else’s poverty. If Austrians got paid for an hour of work what Georgians get paid for an hour of work, everyone in Vienna would be homeless. This is not to say that the Viennese are responsible for the inconveniences faced in Tbilisi, but rather that the world economy is arranged a certain way and the imbalances in that economy did not get there by accident and the relationship between those imbalances and the Mercer criteria is telling.

The cost of living in a “liveable” city is participation in the political economy that creates the Kinshasas, the Baghdads, the Kabuls of the world. The cost is making allowances in your culture for capitalism, for the Western values that come in along with Western medicine and Western preferences for animals to be kept out of the streets and Western thirst for a wide variety of consumer products. Does everyone in the world want to pay those costs? Should they?

This construction of the Western view as the default view – along with the attendant ignorance of the real costs of living in a city with the Eurocentric stamp of approval – is often fairly offensive to non-Westerners. On the other hand, inasmuch as the Mercer survey is intended to inform Europeans how European a place is, it does its job reasonably well. Like I said: brutally accurate, and completely ethnocentric.

Ban Smoking

Every once in a while I have to remind myself to be compassionate. I am easily annoyed by relatively insignificant things, and if I’m not careful I find myself reacting towards strangers with loathing and disgust, and when this spiral goes too far towards bitterness I try to put myself in the other person’s shoes and understand the circumstances that led to their choices and whether I’d make similar choices in similar circumstances. I try to imagine what it feels like to be someone else.

Even in America, smokers annoyed me. When I’d be waiting for a bus and someone else on line would start smoking, I’d have two options: one, step out of line (and lose my chance at getting a seat on the bus) or two, breathe in the second hand smoke. This infuriated me. It would always be one person, as opposed to several, who would light up – everyone else either didn’t smoke, or was considerate enough not to do so around strangers waiting for a bus. I used to mutter, under my breath: “fucking savages”.

In Georgia there seem to be more smokers to irritate me and fewer social and legal restrictions on where people can smoke. I complained about this several years ago and it seemed to annoy people, so I’ve shut up about it since, but the amount of smoking in Georgia continues to be a real inconvenience to me, and most of the time when I catch a whiff of someone’s cigarette smoke, or when I can’t go into a restaurant or marshutka because it’s too smoky, I still mutter, under my breath: “fucking savages”.

Today I had to remind myself: it’s not like smokers want to be addicted to cigarettes, right? I mean, if you’re 60 years old, dying of lung cancer or even just struggling to walk up a flight of stairs because of emphysema, don’t you think to yourself, “I wish I could take back all of those cigarettes”? Yes, my attempt at compassion involves visualizing the suffering and death of my tormentors; perhaps this is why I prefer to just not think about it.

In any case I realized that in Georgia the answer to that hypothetical is probably “no”. It’s probably the case that many people here would sacrifice their health or life as an elderly person for the benefits that smoking gives them. Specifically, if you’re in Georgia and you aren’t a smoker, what do you do when you are with friends and all your friends are smoking? What do you do when you’re waiting for that bus and everyone who is waiting with you is smoking? Basically, you take a deep breath and inhale the deadly fumes. I think if you gave Georgians the choice between being somewhat of a shut-in, like I am, and going out and having fun with their friends on a regular basis, Georgians would say that the social life is worth the cost in eventual health problems. Honestly, if I weren’t asthmatic, I might say the same.

This is not to say that every Georgian smokes (and let’s just admit we’re talking about men, here – Georgian women very rarely smoke, at least in public). There are lots of Georgian men who don’t smoke, but you don’t notice them that often, because they tend to avoid situations where there is lots of smoking going on. They’re working, or at home with their families, or playing sports, rather than going to bars or standing around on the corner. I don’t think smoking gives Georgian men any real prestige, and a lot of the men I know here who don’t smoke are quite proud of their abstention (for instance, basically none of the men in my wife’s family smoke). I think that the idea that Georgia has a smoking culture is driven by the fact that the Georgians who smoke are the most visible and in your face, and that they don’t observe social or legal rules (or there aren’t any) about not subjecting others to their nasty habit.

And this is why there should be social and legal rules about smoking, and why these rules should be enforced. It’s considered rude in Georgia to complain about others who are smoking. This should be reversed: smoking in front of non-smokers (especially children!!) should be considered rude and the people who do it should be shamed. All of the non-smokers – who are quietly tolerant of the fact that society punishes them for their clean living – deserve the prestige of being recognized, and the equal access to public accommodations. Non-smokers shouldn’t have to figure out ways around taking a marshutka because they know driver will smoke. Non-smokers shouldn’t have to sit in special booths outside the restaurant because the inside is so smoky you can barely taste your food.

And if smoking were not the norm, and if public accommodations were free from smoke, that would change the end-of-life calculus. No longer would people have to choose between a vibrant public social life and a healthy, long life. No longer would people get addicted to cigarettes just from hanging out with their friends. If we have any compassion for smokers, we have to recognize that the circumstances that cause them to take up this dangerous and disgusting habit are not of their own making, and that we as a society have the power – and, I would argue, the obligation – to change those circumstances and enable people to make better choices.

If people feel the need to smoke in their houses, their cars, their private booths at the restaurant, so be it. But shield the next generation – my son’s generation – from having to choose from the same substandard options you had to choose from. Don’t fill shared, public spaces with second-hand smoke. Empower the non-smokers – Georgia’s silent majority – to provide a better life for future generations.

Vowels

I’ve spent the last two weeks buried in research into vowels. That might sound boring to y’all, but I am a linguist by hobby and an English teacher by trade, and so vowels are right in my wheelhouse. This post might run a little bit long, so here’s the tl;dr version: teaching English vowels to Georgians is hard not because English vowels are inherently difficult, but because people on both sides have screwed it up so badly for so long.

Georgian supposedly has exactly five vowels and no diphthongs, although opinions vary on the matter and I personally am of the opinion that not nearly enough research has been done to state anything conclusively. It seems to me that Georgian has a much richer inventory of vowels than linguists give it credit for – that there are indeed five phonemic (meaning-carrying) vowels, but that realization of those vowels in different environments brings the total up quite a bit – perhaps as high as seventeen! That’s a huge gulf to fill, so it falls upon me to explain why Georgian has more than three times as many vowels as Georgians commonly believe.

The example that sort of started me off on this line of research is the Georgian o, written ო. According to most books on Georgian, this letter makes the sound found in English “saw” or “horse”. However, I hear the vowel as the “o” in “open”, except before r. Georgian “ori” (meaning two) might sort of rhyme with “story”, but Georgian “Tako” (a nickname for Tamara) definitely sounds exactly like the English (er, Spanish) word “taco”. The o in “taco” and the o in “story” generally do not sound the same, and in fact have different symbols in most phonetic transcriptions.

Another example is the famous Georgian reader “Ai ia” (აი ია), which is a book many Georgian children use when first learning their alphabet. Although basically every source claims that Georgian has no diphthongs – that is, no vowels that start in one place and end in another – I hear Georgian “ai” as a diphthong; in fact, to me it is indistinguishable from the English word “I”. If I were to follow the supposed rules of Georgian pronunciation, “ai” would have to be pronounced as two syllables, but in practice it is most certainly not. Other examples of Georgian diphthongs are oi (like in boy or noise) and ei (like in weight or cake), and I’d argue for au (like in house or now) and possibly some others.

Unfortunately, I can’t prove these claims without doing some serious science – recording Georgian speakers, creating spectrograms, plotting formants, etc. etc. I’m sure some of my readers will take my word for it, and I’m also sure that many of my Georgian readers will disagree with what I have said here. There are several reasons for this: one, native speakers generally don’t hear allophones as different. If I tell you that the a in “man” and the a in “mat” are different, will you believe me? Probably depends on where you are from and how much you know about English. If I tell you that the p in pot and the p in spot are different, will you believe me? They are – “pot” has an aspirated p and spot has an unaspirated p. Native English speakers don’t hear the difference because we don’t make a distinction between the sounds, but speakers of certain other languages (Korean, for instance) can easily hear the difference.

Additionally, the ideal spoken Georgian doesn’t blend vowels into diphthongs, and so if you listen, for instance, to a highly educated Georgian speaker reading poetry, a lot of the diphthongs will separate. Most Georgian speakers, most of the time, don’t speak in this literary register, but most educated Georgians (aka those who might be reading a foreign-language blog) like to think they do. Georgians react to informal Georgian the way Americans react to informal English – I’ve been told “exla” is not Georgian in exactly the same manner that I’ve been told that “ain’t” ain’t a word, but in practice “exla” is probably even more common in spoken Georgian than “ain’t” is in spoken English.

Part of the reason this interests me is that I just want to promote a correct understanding of Georgian to others who are learning the language. Another part is that I want to bridge the gap in the other direction – to promote a correct understanding of the phonology of Georgian and English so that Georgians can better learn English.

This brings me around to part two of my research: vowels in English and how they have been described and represented in academic and pedagogical literature. Modern sources like to use IPA, because IPA represents sounds with some degree of objectivity, and I admit I also like to use IPA for this reason. However, English has traditionally used a historical system that’s been grandfathered in from before the Great Vowel Shift – in other words, we describe our vowels using terminology that is outdated by at least four hundred years. Perhaps surprisingly, I have found this system to be not entirely without merit.

In particular, when I was taught English – using Phonics, and then phonetic respelling systems used in dictionaries – I was taught about the existence of “short” and “long” vowels. Short vowels are the sounds made by a, e, i, o, and u in cat, pet, sit, box, and cut. Long vowels are the sounds made by those representations in cake, Pete, bike, hope, and cute. There are many more vowels than this in English, some of which are also called “short” and “long” in different descriptions, and some of which aren’t (the schwa and reduced short i are often considered neither short nor long), but these are the most important and relevant ones for this discussion, for reasons with will become clear.

Long vowels may in fact be longer in duration than short vowels, but that’s not what distinguishes them in modern English. In modern English, long vowels are generally “higher” than short vowels, in that they are typically pronounced with the tongue higher up and closer to the roof of the mouth (short and long i are the exception; long i starts off lower than short i but glides over it). Long vowels may also be diphthongs, while short vowels are always monophthongs. Historically, long vowels were just short vowels that you said for a longer amount of time, but they underwent a lot of weird changes for unknown reasons, so now they vary a great deal in pitch from their ancestors; short vowels, on the other hand, seem not to have changed much during this time.

There are two main things that still “connect” English long and short vowels, that make the distinction relevant and, in my opinion, merit the teaching of these concepts even though the vowels involved no longer have the same sounds. One is orthography – that is to say, English spelling still generally spells long vowels using the corresponding short vowel plus a “silent e” or other helping vowel (cake, meet, time, boat). The other is a process called “laxing”, whereby a long vowel becomes short in certain circumstances – perhaps the most notable being “trisyllabic laxing”, where a word like “nation” (long a) becomes “national” (short a) when it becomes the third-to-last syllable. See also: “serene, serenity”, “divine, divinity”, “provoke, provocative”, etc. You also have words where ou becomes short u (“pronounce, pronunciation”) leading one to conclude that “pronounce” might once have been pronounced “pronoonce”. You also have “closed-syllable laxing” (“moon, month”, “keep, kept”, “consume, consumption”) and a variety of other, possibly related processes that all share these common relations between short and long vowels. So short and long vowels aren’t just connected by spelling, but often also by meaning – the a in “nation” and the a in “national” are clearly the “same” in a very intuitive way even though they are pronounced differently.

I bring up this whole sordid business because the designation of long vowels as “long” was apparently taken a bit too seriously by some Soviet scholar, who taught Georgians that English long vowels are distinguished from their shorter cousins by duration, rather than pitch. Thus moon will be pronounced “moooooooon” and sweet will be pronounced “sweeeeeet”.

Georgians have also been taught that English short i is the same as Georgian “ი” – but in fact Georgian “ი” is English long e, and while short i and long e are acoustically quite close, to an English speaker they sound worlds apart. They’re the difference between bin and bean, sin and seen, it and eat. I originally thought that Georgians mispronounced these English words because Georgian lacked a short i sound, but I have since discovered that there is a consistent misrepresentation of Georgian “ი” in English literature, equating the two, which means that Georgians might actually think that “it” is supposed to be pronounced like “ით” which sounds like “eat”.

Yes, it’s true that the vowel in “eat” is typically transcribed as having a markedly longer duration, but that is mitigated by the fact that English long vowels are typically shorter before unvoiced stops, like t – so the “e” in “bean” is somewhat longer than the “e” in “beat”, but this doesn’t really matter in terms of comprehension, whereas the difference between “beat” and “bit” matters a lot.

Instead of learning the correct distinction, Georgians have specifically been taught to distinguish these sounds by length: they say “eat” instead of “it” and “eeeeeeeeeeeeeet” instead of “eat.” This is extremely problematic from my perspective since my job is to teach pronunciation, and I’m not only trying to teach foreign sounds, but I’m trying to teach foreign sounds in the face of decades of scholarship that instructed my students, and their teachers, to pronounce those sounds incorrectly. I honestly don’t know how to surmount this problem, since Georgian speakers of English in general are not receptive to my corrections and have a highly over-inflated sense of the accuracy of their ideas about English. I don’t want to tear down my students’ – or my coteachers’ – confidence, and yet they have to be told, somehow, that basically everything they know about English vowels is wrong.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that, because of the variations and diphthongs that I mentioned above, Georgians actually can produce most English vowels using only native sounds. Of the 23 vowel sounds and diphthongs that Oxford lists in its Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Georgians can hit 17 almost exactly using sounds native to Georgian (18 if they speak Mingrelian or one of the other Kartvelian languages that maintains the schwa). They just need to be taught the correct correspondences.

Well, as promised this post has run very long – and I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’ll close on that note, with a link to an amusing but stunningly comprehensive resource for information on vowels:

The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vowels

The Mundane Mafioso

Did I make it an entire month without posting? Why yes, I did. My excuse is that February is a short month.

The water in my apartment building has been corrupted. Rumor is that it’s due to a new motor… I’m not entirely sure how to make sense of of that rumor, but I guess it has something to do with the mechanism that pumps water up into the sixteen-story building I live in. In any case, for just over a week there has been considerable sediment coming in with the water. It’s been clogging up the pipes, wrecking peoples’ appliances, and generally causing somewhat more inconvenience than what we’re used to here in K-town. I won’t bore you with details of plumbing but let’s just say we’ve had to devote extra time every day to dealing with the situation, which by all accounts makes us the lucky ones – some people have had their water heaters or washing machines – equivalent in cost to a month’s salary or more for many Georgians – ruined by this issue.

The amusing larger anecdote that leads out of this story is that initially people thought it was retaliation. “Retaliation,” you ask? “Whatever for?” Well it seems that just two days before the “new motor” was “put in” or whatever it is that happened to our water happened, a segment appeared on Georgian TV news about the fact that in 2013 Kutaisi still has water for only about four and a half hours a day. That’s quite embarrassing what with the Parliament here and all. It seems the natural conclusion that many people in my apartment building reached was that all Kutaisians were being punished by the water mafia for daring to speak up about the fact that our water situation is sub-par even by Georgian standards.

I’m not even kidding. I hadn’t really encountered this in Tbilisi – Tbilisians mostly seem to fear the government. In Kutaisi, however, everything is mafia. This is not unreasonable, as Kutaisi was incredibly mobbed-up until Misha came in and broke the “thieves-in-law”, as they’re called here. The city was completely run by Georgian organized crime, and now Kutaisians seem to view (or at least refer to) every instance of petty corruption or institutional incompetence as “mafia”.

Another “mafia” I’ve encountered lately is the infant massage mafia. If I’d said that with no context you would have thought it completely absurd. Water mafia? “Okay.” Infant massage mafia? “Surely you must be kidding.” But while the water mafia theory didn’t pan out, the infant massage mafia theory is still plausible.

Tea came home from some routine checkup with Giga, and told me that the doctor said he had “dysplasia” and prescribed 15 massage therapy sessions with a local infant massage specialist. Tea was concerned because these sessions would cost in the neighborhood of 12 lari per hour, and I was concerned because when I looked up “dysplasia” I found out that it’s a quite serious condition and that massage is not indicated as a treatment for it. Tea and I had one of our “internet vs. doctor” arguments and went off into separate rooms, where I complained about the situation on facebook and Tea called her friends and neighbors to get their opinions. It’s interesting how we essentially have the exact same reaction, just mediated through different technologies… anyway, amusingly, we both got roughly the same answer.

One of my friends who was born in the Soviet Union suggested that if you give the doctor a hefty tip, the doctor will suddenly become the most “ethical and concerned and reliable doctor you’ve ever worked with”. One of Tea’s neighbors said that that particular doctor was known to be in cahoots (my word, not hers… does Georgian have a word for “cahoots”?) with the local infant massage specialist, and that she got some sort of kickbacks for scaring parents into paying for unnecessary massage treatments. So yes. Infant massage mafia is the going theory.

By the way, my son does not have hip dysplasia. We got a second opinion from an uncahooted doctor.

The more mundane explanation is that this is just a manifestation of the Georgian tendency to overmedicate everything. If you visit a doctor you should expect to walk away with four to six prescriptions, even if it’s for a condition that will go away on its own. Because of my contract, if I take more than two days off from work, I’m required to see a doctor. That means that if I get a really bad cold or flu I have to go to the doctor, not to get medication, but to get a note that says that I really do have a really bad cold or flu. Insurance pays, so whatever.

In any case, I generally throw away the resulting prescriptions (antibiotics for a cold? really?) and I’m finding that I have to do the same for Giga. When he was a month old some quack prescribed him a cocktail of sedatives for “colic”, which he doesn’t have, because apparently in Georgia people think that newborns are supposed to sleep through the night when in fact it is normal for them to wake up every few hours to be fed. Ironically, the vial of poison the doctors recommended is called “NormoKid”, and when I googled the ingredients I got a bunch of newspaper articles about kids being hospitalized for taking them. I poured it down the drain.

**************************************************

I guess if I were to summarize this whole mafia situation I would say that folks in Kutaisi are quick to attribute to mafia what can be explained by simple human stupidity. Which is not to say that corruption and collusion don’t exist in Georgia (as they do everywhere), but personally, when I am faced with two competing explanations for a phenomenon, my money’s on the one that requires less competence and planning. Still, I sort of like the idea of “mafia” as a shorthand for the perpetuation of institutions despite their failure to provide basic services reliably and competently. It gives the issue a certain moral clarity that Americans lack sometimes when we consider the reasons for the failure of our own institutions.

**************************************************

Easily the best song ever written about the Mafia:

[Video: Smash Mouth - "Padrino"]