Poker as a metaphor for Croatia

(This is an edited excerpt from comments I gave to eStudent, the student association of the University of Zagreb, on Oct. 10, 2013. Thanks to Hrvoje Tkalec for inviting me and to the students who attended.)

An Expat in Zagreb

By Roger Malone

Does anyone here play poker? Poker is all about the players and the odds. For instance, in one variation of poker called Texas Hold ‘Em, if you’re given two aces at the start you have about an 80-percent chance of winning your hand against one other player. But you also have a 20-percent chance or so of losing. New players -- "fish" in poker jargon -- if they know the odds at all, feel that 80 percent is close to a sure thing. It's not, and in the wrong game you can lose everything despite the favorable odds. 

(I was once in the first hand of a live, low-stakes tournament. Three players bet everything right away, and when they showed their cards one had two kings, one had two queens, and one had two tens. The kings were the favorite, but the tens won the hand, sending the other two players home.)

When you lose a hand despite the odds, it's called a "bad beat." And when fish fall victim to a bad beat, they curse the world. They fume at how stupid the other player was for staying in the hand. They glare at the dealer. They shake their fists at the poker gods somewhere up there in the sky. And most important -- especially if they still have chips and you're sitting at the table -- they play really bad poker for a while. They throw easy chips into the pot and squander any opportunities that may come their way. In poker terms, it's called going on "tilt," like when you bang against an old pinball machine because the ball dropped directly between the flippers.

The best players learn not to go on tilt. They forget about the bad beat from the last hand and move on with a clean slate and whatever chips they have left. They focus on the new odds, the new cards, and the other players. They focus on rebuilding their stack of chips and winning the game.

Sometimes it seems that Croatia is on national tilt, still focusing on how unfair that last hand was and moving forward carrying a grudge that can blind it to the future: Slovenia had it easy when it broke from Yugoslavia and took some advantages and cash. Some people got rich when state property was privatized in the 1990s. Atrocities were committed during the war, and ancient hatreds linger. There’s truth in all of this and unfairness … and a lot of excess baggage.

A while ago, I was working on the draft of an English response to some criticism that had been included in a report about Croatia. To my eyes, the criticism was a little over the top, but not exceptionally so. I was told several times by smart people, though, that the reason the report was critical was because the organization that issued it had a Serb secretary on its staff. I tried to pass it off as a joke, but it was clearly not meant to be one. True or not, focusing on a Serb secretary in part blinded my client to any valid criticism worth considering from the report and, perhaps more importantly, colored the way it wanted to respond to the report in a way that the response would have lost some credibility.

Here’s the question for you: Is it time for Croatia to shake off the tilt, pick up the cards it has and make the its best plays as the game moves forward? Yes, prosecute individuals if the evidence is there. Yes, remember the personal and collective sacrifices made as Croatia struggled for independence. And yes, take care of those who made those sacrifices. But move ahead without the delusion that all the wrongs of the past can be magically wiped away?

I obviously don't have the answers, and I don't pretend to. Sometimes, I don't even know whether I understand the questions. But I know one thing. Your generation is key. Your generation has the opportunity to disconnect from the past. Your generation has the power to insist on leaders that can articulate a modern vision for the future. Your generation has the ability to stop keeping score, to stop trying to balance a ledger that can never be reconciled. That is your opportunity, and that is Croatia’s opportunity.

At least Croatia’s government isn’t shutting down

(The Croatian version of this article ran in today's Jutarnji List, Croatia's largest daily.)

An Expat in Zagreb

By Roger Malone

If Croatians ever despair over the quirks of their government, they can glance across the seas and take heart. In today's world, there is no government more broken than Washington. The US government is so out of order that it’s shut down, and if it’s not fixed, the ripples could soon be felt even in Croatia.

When people learn I’ve lived outside America for decades, they often ask what I miss most by being overseas. I usually dance around the question, but the truth is that my one real regret is not having the opportunity to participate directly in the political system. I yearn to beat the pavement for politicians and causes I support, and at one point I even imagined running for office if I ever moved back. Taking cheap shots at Tea Party conservatives on Facebook just doesn't fill the gap.
 
(I also miss a handful of consumer goods, like Old Bay seasoning, cling wrap that tears easily from the box and cheddar cheese.)

But I haven’t missed what passes for politics these days in America. Once there was a civil conversation of opposing views; today there are sound bites inspired by talking points found on the Internet. The tone has been hijacked by a group of extreme conservatives centered on the Tea Party and convinced of their righteousness. Now the hijackers have taken hostages: 310 million Americans, and perhaps even all the world.

Some Croatian officials might be corrupt. Some might be incompetent. And some might even be self serving. But as far as I can see, no elected official in Croatia is as terrifyingly delusional as this select group of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives. My mother was a precinct worker for Richard Nixon, a Republican president who resigned just before being forced out of office, and even she would be appalled by today’s party.

So what happened? Soon after being elected president in 2008, Barrack Obama tackled one of the most embarrassing problems of the US system: the absence of universal health care. For the world’s biggest economy, the fact that nearly 50 million Americans had no health insurance was immoral. The Affordable Care Act—better known as Obamacare—was a first step toward fixing the problem and was itself a compromise with conservatives who opposed a more extensive approach.

After Obamacare was passed, Republicans in Congress tried 44 times to repeal or dilute Obamacare. They failed. A Supreme Court lawsuit challenged its constitutionality. It failed. Republicans opposed Obama’s re-election in 2012, in part by promising to reverse Obamacare. They failed.
Now, a small band of Republican diehards, led by House Republican Leader John Boehner, is getting desperate. As Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said, “For the right wing minority, hostage taking is all they have left.”

In the US, a president can’t spend a dollar unless it’s approved by Senators and Representatives. The Senate has approved continued spending; the House of Representatives hasn’t. The House passed a measure that would cripple Obamacare in the process, but the Senate rejected it. Ironically, an unencumbered budget measure would likely pass the House easily if it came to a vote, but Boehner, as leader of the House, has refused to put one up for a vote. He fears that a couple of dozen extreme house members would rebel, and as last year’s presidential election showed, the Republican Party is suffering. Alienating its right wing could make winning future national elections impossible.

Federal budget authorization ended Oct. 1, and the US government shut down. About 800,000 federal workers—roughly the population of Zagreb—were sent home without pay and no guarantee of keeping their jobs when the government reopens. Another million are working without pay. The military and other essential services got an exception, but parks and other federal offices have locked their doors. Even the NASA’s Mars explorer Curiosity was turned off.

The US federal government has shut down before, in the mid-1990s, and then reopened a few weeks later with little long-term impact. Then, the economy was booming. This time the United States—and much of the world—is still struggling through a fragile recovery from the 2008 global economic crisis. And this time, another political battle, this one over the US debt ceiling, is only weeks away. Without an agreement on the debt ceiling, which the Republican right also opposes, there could be sharp US spending cuts and the possibility of defaulting on US bonds.

Economists have argued that a prolonged US government shutdown coupled with an impasse over the debt ceiling could send the country back into recession. Paul Krugman, at the New York Times, wrote that a US debt default could “create a huge financial crisis, dwarfing the crisis” of 2008. (Croatia is still looking for economic recovery, and another global crisis could destroy any hope it has.) Boehner and his cohorts are willing to risk all this because they don’t like Obamacare, which has withstood every legal test, and because they really don’t like Obama.

Meanwhile, Obama and the Democrats are unlikely to budge, either. First of all, they played Boehner’s game to disastrous results last time the debt ceiling came to Congress. Next, Obamacare is rightfully the legacy of its namesake’s presidential tenure. And finally, as others have written as well, bowing to Boehner would threaten the very fabric of democracy. Really. Democracy is based on majority rule—without oppressing the minority—and if you don’t have the votes, you don’t have the votes. You don’t resort to desperate tactics. You work to win the next election.

Compared to shutting down the government and possibly bringing the world to the brink of another financial crisis, taking some money from a contractor here or giving cousin Pero a job are playground antics. So, if you ever look at the Sabor in misery, just repeat to yourself, at least we're not America.

[Follow Roger Malone on twitter at @ExpatinZagreb or at http://expatinzagreb.blogspot.com/]