Playing Dress-Up: Ogden on Georgia’s Western Aspirations

OPED

Last week I wrote about the problems Georgia still has with a large portion of its male population, and I fear I may have given off the impression that many Georgians are anti-Western in some way. It's hard to be entirely balanced when I only have 750 words to play with, and a one-liner disclaimer seems to have mollified nobody, and so this week I'd like to discuss modern Georgians who are the antithesis of those who I described last week (and not just men this time, either).

Over the last eighteen months I've become more involved with two sections of society that I find incredibly interesting, superficially similar to each other but inherently different beneath the surface.

The first group are what I like to think of as truly modern people who are Georgian in much the same way that I am English, in that their nationality matters little and less. Unlike those men I discussed last week who can't go two minutes without grabbing someone by the collar and yelling 'Sakartvelo!' the males of this faction will discuss Georgia in a political context but rarely in a social sense. They acknowledge history and culture without letting either dictate how they should live, and aspire towards the West with a healthy (and entirely understandable) amount of scepticism over Europe and America's goodwill. Women of this ilk will discuss Georgian society rather more than their male counterparts, but this is to be expected since they inevitably come into contact with the types of men I discussed last week, and relay the same sorts of stories with ironic understatement and rolled eyes.

In short, they're my favourite sort of Georgians (or people, I should say), but for some time I confused them with another group that I originally liked before things turned sour.

These lads (and lasses) are also pro-West; in fact, they're so pro-West they do their utmost to pretend to be American. The other group I mentioned a few sentences ago invariably speak English very well, but the American wannabes know our language as well as native speakers (and infinitely better when I think back to the standard of English in Birmingham and Manchester).

I was originally very happy to meet this group due to my ill-luck with Georgian men in years past, and I was delighted and surprised that they spoke English to each other even without the presence of a native speaker, and a few of them had the most convincing American accents. All of their Facebook interactions were in English, too.

I was gradually introduced into this clique, but I was bemused when I met more of them and they didn't seem to regard meeting a native speaker of a language they spent most of their time talking as anything special. If I, an Englishman, spent all of my time speaking Spanish to other British people or Americans and then a Spaniard or a Mexican turned up, I rather think I'd have a different reaction beyond 'Yeah, cool, whatever'.

They hosted Halloween parties in costume and watched all of the latest fashionable American comedies and super hero films; they lived with friends rather than families, and boasted about drug use and casual sex as they must have seen their favourite characters on their films and television programs do. Some of them sported tattoos of pop culture references or Asian characters, with one of the men talking about how he cooks naked in his apartment of friends 'and it's totally cool', and the girls post revealing pictures of themselves on social media.

It soon became plain that their mannerisms and lifestyle was little more than affectation, doing these sorts of things simply because they're not what Georgians usually do. These are not the same as the Georgians of the first category, who reject traditional values because they're smart enough to recognize that they have no place in a modern European country; these American Georgians, who copy the lives of the characters off Friends and take their humor from Deadpool, kick against traditional culture in a far more aggressive way.

I don't particularly mind how people choose to live their lives if it doesn't affect me, but it wasn't long before this artificial lack of interest in their own country and nationality became annoying. In fact, it was nothing short of bizarre; here were Georgians, with Georgian names and Georgian faces, dropping words like 'bro' and 'dude' at every available opportunity and generally treating things like an American frat house.

Given the choice, I'd still rather endure the company of artificial Americans than people who talk about the Battle of Didgori as though they were there and Stalin as though he was some heavenly combination of Bismarck, Martin Luther King and Rambo, but I suppose the one thing that can be said for traditional Georgians is they don't pretend to be anything other than what they are...that is racist, homophobic, and intolerant, but at least it's an honest form of prejudice. (I jest, of course.) But if the future of Georgia lies in the hands of the first group I mentioned (and don't worry, it does) this country will turn out just fine.

Tim Ogden