The Universal City

27 April 2010  

I’m travelling through Europe at what clearly is a turning point.  The dreams of mutual prosperity that linked and empowered such diverse peoples and economies are quickly fading.  In Greece, where I will soon be, the economic masters of world finance are forcing ordinary working people to pay for the greed and corruption of the wealthy few.  There will be hell to pay for this.

In Budapest the streets are not filled with tourists with thick wallets anymore.  Like many cities of the east, its feet are mired in different camps – one in the command economy of the past; the other in the service economy of the supposed future.  Budapest itself has become a theme park trading on its history.  Everything is geared to pry out the little money that comes in with the dwindling crowds of holiday-makers.  So they sell whatever they have – memories of the Romans, the Turks, the Austrians and memories of the holocaust.  There are dens for sex and dens for gambling.   The city has become a service centre for fantasy and desire.  When you’re competing for the dwindling cash of the jaded tourist who has seen it all, you have to give it everything you’ve got.  But what does that mean for the people who live here?  As the money shrinks and belts are tightened, will they all have to compete to be cleaners, touts and whores?  Is that the fate of Eastern Europe?  No wonder the far right has once more emerged as the protector of the ordinary man and woman.  With so many promises betrayed, people revert to the wooden cross and the iron sword.

I don’t mean this to be taken in the wrong way, but there’s much about Budapest of 1970 that I enjoyed more than the contemporary version.  Back then it might have had a dour side but the city hadn’t been sold down the river in the way it has today.  It had integrity in so far as the State allowed. Budapest itself had a sense of community and its inhabitants shared something that made them unique.  Visiting the city was not like visiting Paris or Rome or London (though Paris or Rome or London were different then as well) since the Universal City hadn’t been invented yet.  Also the streets weren’t filled with beggars and unemployed kids trying to earn a bit of money by hustling tourists. Certainly tourists were hustled back then in different ways, but it’s the extent.  Today’s touts are young kids who have no other way of earning a living.  They don’t want to be hustling tourists.  In Cambridge college kids hustle tourists but they do it because they think they can make more money than doing something else – and maybe it’s considered cool.  In Budapest they have no choice.  They either hustle tourists or nothing.  There’s a big difference between having to do something and wanting to do it. 

The great malls and esplanades that have sprung up selling everything you can buy in whatever Universal City you go, exude the fragrance of truffled exploitation.  But that’s where the money is while the rest of Budapest is sucked dry.  Consider the Jewish quarter where communities are being rent asunder by big money buying up the aging tenements, remodelling, refurbishing and then selling them on.  Ironically (maybe not so ironically) a lot of this capital is coming from Israel.  So rich Jews, in a strange way, are responsible for pushing out the poor Jews from communities they had been brutally pushed out of not so many years before.  Still the old community exists and, to compound the irony, it might yet be saved by the recession (if that’s the proper word for financial Armageddon).