Friday, March 6, 2009

Get Your Treaties off my Asparagus

Foraging is the same as smuggling if you draw lines around it. A village in Cyprus can't get to their wild asparagus crop due to the U.N.'s demilitarized zone that divides ethnic Greeks from ethnic Turks. (Maybe this forbidden zone will one day become Cyprus' most beloved attraction, as the DMZ is now in Korea)

It's one more example of a socially-constructed barrier that fails to recognize the way life really happens. As in the Bosnian film No Man's Land, the arbiters wear the smurf-blue of the United Nations. That film is thick with ironies, the least of which is that the English idiom "no man's land" has been borrowed into common use in several European languages.