The Invisible Idiot

I have had the email address politicalidiot@yahooo.com for eleven years. I first opened it when I started touring with my book, “Diary of a Political Idiot.”
It was useful to me to have a Yahoo! account — actually, I had two of them — because my email address in Serbia, mermaids@eunet.yu, was undependable and often could not be reached at all. My friend Stephanie Damoff opened the account for me in New York.
The old geographical political scheme of the former Yugoslavia was often simply not recognized by Internet service providers. Serbia, as the country of the aggressors, was commonly unrecognized, an outlaw state simply not in the databases. For instance, I could not enter the US Library of Congress because my national ID was invisible to librarians. Submitting visas at airports was commonly troublesome, not because the visa was wrong because my country was simply absent from the airport computers.

Meetup in LA

Boing Boing meetup in LA

Share Belgrade 7-9 April

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After twenty years of being online all over the world, proud to be here in Belgrade and take part in this great meeting of geeks activists musicians and other cool people

LA Diary 2005 : March

photo by Stephanie Damoff

March 2, 2005

In NY, what a change of pace: snowing and severe atmosphere here: people are not smiling, even if you stare at them; they are hurrying and looking at their feet as they walk. It reminds me of Belgrade really, life is hard in NY, and there is a permanent survivor’ s war here.
At the Bowery Poets Club I read my ‘Letter to an Imaginary American Friend.‘  I speak of the parallels of the Milosevic’ s regime and Bush’ s. I speak about the polarization, militarization and silence of a political idiot now American. I get a big applause; then other people mostly young speak the same way, performing dancing singing ridiculing seriously their grim reality. 

    Finally we drink beer and life goes on in the snow.  Four hard years yet to come, they say. 

LA Diary 2005: January

The Diary of an American Idiot
Photos by Bruce Sterling

January 17, 2005

It is not true that nobody walks in LA. I do. There’s a metro I can reach on foot from my flat in Pasadena.

Off at almost every metro station, wasting time until the next train arrives. Not much to see, except real nice hippie hobos giving speeches almost everywhere, from trains to parks. They seem as if they know a lot, and have as much to deliver. They don’t seem neurotic or geeky. They do seem out of their time and in some particular political space.

Three days of holidays. One belongs to Martin Luther King. He was killed April 4th, but Americans don’t like death dates, I was told. So they celebrate him today, which makes no sense to me. Except that every day is good for pacifist marches. As a Woman in Black, I honor this date wherever I am.