An Ex-Spat's Cure: TEFL at the BBQ
An Ex-Spat's Cure: TEFL at the BBQ
When I first arrived in Hungary, I was invited to a local BBQ for bacon. Curious, I went along to discover that Hungarian bacon has no meat attached to the fat, that is, it’s only fat. Perturbed, I recalled that David Essex track ’Imperial Wizard’:
’Hungary is hungry and the people are broke,
Imperial Wizard - salt mine king,
What kind of state of mind must your state be in?’1
Of course, when Hungary was Greater, it could boast Vlad, ’the impaler’, who was perhaps the inspiration for the drac’, ’Imperial Wizard’, because it was Vlad Dracul who became the model for Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula (1895), which celebrated the bloodthirsty activities of the 15th century ruler of Wallachia, who impaled his victims on stakes, in the shape and form of Dracula, a vampire who had become immortal by drinking the blood of his victims. Consequently, there was no meat on the fat to discourage the cooking of red meat by the gathering at the barbecue because of the attraction that bloody meat has for the vampire. Either that or they couldn’t afford any meat. However, the allegorical concept of the track inspired by ’dracs’ in a music industry infamous for its leeches led me to examine the bacon more thoroughly. Bacon, of course, was the Elizabethan playwright who was deemed by some to have written plays attributed to William Shakespeare, so perhaps the Hungarians were expressing an opinion on Baconism:
’Open your windows, let the sun shine on in,
There's more to life than killing, killing, killing ...’
As an Ex-pat and a writer, I understood that Shakespeare had his own plays, and that the 20, 000, 000 Jews sent to the ovens after the election of the German Nationalist (Nazi) Party in 1933 weren’t the schweinhund at their BBQ. The Nazis also burned books while waving their copy of the Bible, that is, Shakespeare’s plays were accepted as his whereas Bacon’s weren’t. Or, in other words, although the Jews weren’t pagan, their Bacon, that is, their books, weren’t going to escape being burned either. I was an Ex-pat to the English, which meant that the value placed on a writer’s brains by Hungary’s people was equivalent to that of a headless Jew on a BBQ spit.
Chewing the tasteless stuff thoughtlessly, I deduced that this was how ethnic cleansers spat on an Ex-pat. It’d been all the rage in Eastern Europe during the 1990s when the war in nearby Yugoslavia was at its height, for example, Serbian Christian militia in Bosnia (1992-5) built ’rape camps’ to contain upwards of 70, 000 Moslem women as the break-up of the Balkans into independent states on ethnic lines gathered momentum. The Hungarians had lost the First World War (1914-18), which’d been Germany’s first attempt to enslave the East for paganism, and had been forced to sign the Treaty of Trianon in the Palace at Versailles, France, on June 4, 1920, seceding from the territory of Transylvania, for example, where Vlad had lived. Because Vlad was pagan, it seemed obvious that there was some bacon that oughtn’t to be saved. Observing that the fat had been in the fire at the BBQ, the absence of any meat suggested that Bacon and his books could be saved. There was hope for a writer perceived as an Ex-pat teacher of English to foreigners. Even if I were unwashed, and with a dirty neck beneath a stumped appearance, I accepted another piece of spat fat as being meet for the Baconic hero of the unfolding drama.
In a country where you don’t speak the language, it’s like being deaf and dumb, although there’s the advantage of seeing clearly the world around undisturbed. Being prodded regularly like cattle through airport terminals, for example, affords a perspective on Catholics, Protestants, and ethnic cleansers that others can’t afford. Whether beef or Bacon, victims are pagans, because the victimizers say so. Like the debate over whether men should drink tea and be tea men, or coffee and be caffeine men, the daemon that’s the vampire of the coffin prefers the deaf and dumb, so knowledge of a foreign language for an Ex-pat helps among the barber’s queuers waiting for a choice cut is essential equipage in teaching environments where the students can describe their educator as anything from a spy to a spider and be believed by their own culture, because in this way it feels cleansed.
In Christianity, for example, Jesus is crucified by the Romans because his disciple, Judas, found him alone with a woman and suggested that the ’perfume’ be sold to raise money, and Jesus admonished him: ’Leave her alone.’ (Mk: 14, 6) Suiting advice to pointed explanation, Judas sold Jesus to the Jewish religious police, the Pharisees, for ’thirty pieces of silver’, and Jesus was killed as a ’dissident’ preachiing, ’Love your neighbor as you love yourself.’ (Mk: 12. 31) In Islam, however, the story is that there was a man called Jesus, but it wasn’t him, that is, Jesus was a shell. Consequently, the torture and murder of men is how society perceives itself cleansing, and it’s ethnocentric. In simple terms, people can be tortured to death, because it isn’t them, they’re only shells. Or, in other words, the Romans were a foreign Empire imposing a reign on the Jews in Palestine. It was necessary to learn their language in order to avoid being victimized, which is what the Jews weren’t able to achieve in Germany where they were shells to the Nazis. In Hungary, ’Boldog uneppeket!’ means ’Happy New Year!` It’s important not to be perceived as an empty shell; if you want to teach: ’I am the way and the truth and the life.’ (John: 14. 6)
1 Essex, David ’Imperial Wizard’, Imperial Wizard, Columbia, 1979.