My mid-20s were spent in the smoke-filled cafes and low, dark basement nightclubs of Central Europe, lounging for long afternoons with a pocket-size copy of Maxim Gorky’s “My Childhood” and a tiny cup of sludgy black coffee, loitering louchely until 3 a.m. over cigarettes and pear brandy with young men who wore their hair like Arthur Rimbaud and could quote Shakespeare in three languages. Budapest was soot-covered, pockmarked by the bullets of 1956, low-down, dirty, and exalted with poetry. It was also an education in what life in an authoritarian society does to citizens’ public behavior.
This was in 1993 and 1994, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Hungary was unfurling its fresh, green petals in a brief springtime of democracy. Before Orban. The lilacs were in bloom.
I spent my first year as an expat puzzling over social questions like why the residents of my magnificent but crumbling Art Nouveau apartment house left trash and junk in the common courtyard instead of picking it up — it was, after all, their courtyard, too — or why the elderly aunties on the No. 2 tram were so bold in elbowing other riders aside while climbing aboard. It dawned on me during my second year that the apparent lack of civic spirit demonstrated by the people of Buda and Pest was because the national populaces behind the Iron Curtain had grown cynical and nihilistic en masse in the 20th century: If you are expected by an oppressive government to participate in a farcical public life, a false commonality, the natural response and passive mode of protest is to disengage from public life totally. Every auntie for herself.
I flew home to the States on Labor Day Weekend 1995. I had been away for more than two years and felt very self-indulgently sad to be leaving my youth and Central Europe in the dust. I had cried from takeoff at Liszt Ferenc all the way to J.F.K., behind my plastic flea-market sunglasses. At Kennedy, a man in a beige uniform handed me an American flag on a wood stick as I passed through customs, then I caught the Hampton Jitney at the airport-connection stop by the Hooters on the service road in Queens. I remember that ride clearly. The smell of Americans barbecuing for the holiday weekend — charcoal, lighter fluid, and burnt hamburgers — was so strong in the suburbs of Long Island that it seeped through the sealed windows of the bus.
My sense of culture shock was intense. I felt like I was seeing America anew.
A woman seated ahead of me on the Jitney began to complain: “Do you remember the almonds?” she said to whoever was sitting beside her. “When the Jitney first started the service to the city? Those little foil bags of smoked almonds? And Perrier,” she continued loudly enough to be sure we’d all heard her. “They gave you a bottle of Perrier. Now they throw a bag of taco chips at you, and you get this ridiculous half cup of water, and when you try to pull it open it spills all over your top.”
The only nationalities that talked as loudly in public places as Americans were, one, Germans, and, two, South Africans — a distinctly dubious international brotherhood of high decibels. (I had considered what Americans’ shouting could mean many nights in many a Budapest bar, while my fellow expatriates were a-hootin’ and a-hollerin’ the lyrics of television theme songs like happy cowpokes trying to get an important cattle-related message to other cowpokes on the far side of a gully or gorge.)
I was at the very back of the bus, by the latrine. On the seat just beside me was a nylon animal carrier, which jiggled from time to time: Another passenger had bought a seat for her dog. It was true what the rest of the world said: Americans were strapping, beefy, with giant, white, flesh-eating teeth, and incredibly clean.
Overly judgmental by nature, at this moment in 1995 I was a monster of intolerance. Having become accustomed to the little Ladas and lightweight Trabant cars of Budapest, and in a foul mood, I even hated the S.U.V.s speeding past on the expressway — so shiny, so bulbous, so huge. (Why was everyone driving off-road-vehicles? Was there going to be a rhino hunt?) I hated the woman who wanted us to know she had been riding the Jitney since the exclusive beginning when they served smoked almonds and Perrier.
Pink was the color of the year in 1994. Americans on the bus were wearing pink capri pants with clear plastic sandals that had sparkles embedded in the rubber. Americans were wearing candy-colored plastic preschoolers’ hair clips. Americans were wearing chino shorts and Velcro sports sandals. (Why did Americans dress like children?)
The thing that struck me the most about America when I re-entered as a snotty, alienated, and still-young repatriated expatriate, though, were the parades. Parades were civil society displaying itself and handing out free candy. Parades were what made me remember why I loved America, despite all the yee-hawing and the gas-guzzling.
Down Main Street on the Fourth of July came the amateur bagpipers, the Coast Guard, and four different volunteer fire departments in dress uniform. (No one in Budapest in the early 1990s was volunteering for nuthin’.) An amphibious vehicle from World War II was painted to look like a shark. Girl Scouts from Springs dressed in costumes representing what they wanted to be when they grew up: a future veterinarian carrying a stuffed monkey, a future teacher with a chalkboard. The Antique Power Squadron rode antique tractors, throwing lollipops to the crowd. School bands played jazzy versions of the theme from “Rocky.” The Lions Club, in furry gorilla and tiger suits, pushed shopping carts to collect canned goods for the Methodist Church food pantry.
Sophisticated and worldly people like to say they hate a parade. All that jocularity, that grinning good fellowship and business boosterism. But the sophisticated and worldly people are dead wrong. To me, that summer, the parade was revealed as a ritual demonstration of civic participation and a living proof of robust civic health. The teenage drum major with his tall baton. A plumber costumed as Uncle Sam.
It seems deep, dark, and mysterious to me that Hungary, while officially a parliamentary republic, has steered itself so far from democracy and freedom. The springtime of 1993 is a long time ago. Please note that one of the first consolidations of power under Hungary’s autocratic leader, Viktor Orban of Fidesz, was to exert government control over universities (as the executive is currently attempting to do here in the States) and to try to control the free press (see: the A.P.). Just this past Monday, the Hungarian parliament voted to ban public events by L.G.B.T.Q. groups.
How strange and dark that the current occupant of the White House and his cabinet have taken such a shine to Orban, in their pantheon alongside Putin and Kim Jong Un, and that they seem to be purposefully following the anti-democratic and authoritarian playbook of Hungary, specifically. Donald Trump has hinted that he may like to stage a grand military parade from Arlington to Washington on June 14, his birthday. Red flag, red flag! This is not an American parade. Send in the bagpipers, the gorillas, and the clowns.