Warning: this is a very graphic post describing a terrible accident scene. Please consider if you really want to read it.
In 1991, in the continuing upheavals after the fall of Communism and all that jazz, the country known as "Yugoslavia" ceased to exist. This was a place in the center of Europe. A place full of cosmopolitan people and wonderful musicians and the 1984 Winter Olympics. A place was gone. A set of wars were just starting, full of people pressing their visions of place with force.
It was a fucking disaster. And it took breath away, to consider how far a nation had slipped into barbarism. So sitting somewhere in 1993, thinking back to the news reports upon the start of the war, one especially stuck out in my mind clearly: "Deadly Clash in a Yugoslav Republic", by Chuck Sutedic, an amazing writer who had covered this part of Europe for years.
This was the first time I realized there was all-out war there. Here's the lead:
Wha? Policemen and rebels fighting over a national park?
I often exercise, and I do so for two reasons: in order to increase the chance that I can catch the train if I hear it and decide to break for it (see figure 1), and so that I can increase the chance that I would come out of a bread line riot with a couple loaves. I walk by old armories and think, "this is where troops might muster, if they had to". I think this way, in part, because of this war I read in the paper. But for some reason, I've always thought like this. That's why I felt compelled to go to Beijing in 1990 to see Tiananmen Square for myself. See where heads were cracked on granite, where troops popped out from underground. Revolution and armed violence is an option, always, everywhere.
So this article by Chuck Sutedic– and this entire disastrous war in the middle of what was once pleasant, stuck with me. And I wondered how people get from here to there. From Olympic bobsledding and pin-trading to shelling schools and hospitals from the hills. And I thought that maybe no one was surprised. Maybe no one was surprised when all the weird things started happening, like clashes in parks and nutjobs calling for genocide and people who lived together for decades deciding that they hated each other after all.
No one was surprised, at each and every step, until there was war everywhere and no one to stop it. And around that time I was walking near my office in 1993, at the northwest corner of Clark and LaSalle, and coming upon a quick terrible scene where a man had apparently been crushed by a southbound bus. I didn't see the poor man's head, as there were so many people surrounding, and fireman and everyone. From the chatter of those leaving the inner circle of the scene– you know how that forms in a time like this– the man's head had apparently popped off due to crushing force and physics. And seriousness and despair was evident in their tears and facial contortions as they walked helplessly away. I am not a glutton for such things, so I averted my eyes. And one could imagine that it happened so quickly. I did see the pool of blood in the gutter, though. It was crimson. Deep, thick, shockingly crimson.
The only surprise was the– easy, easy now– crimson nature of blood.
The music in this version of this poem, "Europe, 1991" is composed by Dylan Morgan and played by him and Bob Christy, and recorded as a part of the Crimson Nature of Blood.