Serb Vulgarians

by Anne Roiphe
This column ran on page 5 in the 4/12/99 edition of The New York Observer.

Does anyone doubt that the Serbs are the Scum of the Earth, the latest Darth Vader lookalikes, at least today's best candidate? There they are, the winners of the award for the least-civilized, least-humane, least-able-to-understand-Mozart-or-Shakespeare-or-Yeats, distinguished vulgarians of the year.

There they are: fangs for teeth, claws for hands. Upright they walk on two legs, but that's an illusion; they really crawl on their metaphoric
bellies. I do not want them in my neighborhood. I do not want them to come for dinner. I do not want them in my children's schools.

I know I should be more tempered, more polite. Six hundred years of regretting a battle loss
can do bad things to a person's disposition, but still: The burning, the killing, the chasing into the night of women and babies who are without
blankets to keep them warm, the destruction of marriage and birth records and the occupation of other people's homes and villages, well, what is that but coarseness, human indifference, bestiality, brutish behavior of the barely human, the not quite human?

Yes, the war crimes tribunal will catch one or two of them. Yes, the killing will one day be finished, exhausted, because there is no one else to roust, pursue, plague; no families left to destroy. Or perhaps the slaughter will end because the outside world has found a way to put the monster back in his hole, at least for a while….The Serbs will glow in the moral dark until my grandchildren have gray hair.

Of course, if they win, if they take over a Kosovo emptied of Albanians and a Greater Serbia rests-teeth glistening from the marrow dug from the bones of the dead, a great wolf after a high romp through a henhouse that was home to the farm dog, the family pig and maybe the newborn baby-then the after-the-fact objections will be just so much more hot air polluting our atmosphere.

But we don't live in a maybe world of might and would, we live in the here and now, and here the Serbs are possessed by the demon of nationalism and are forfeiting their claim to belong to the civilized community.

Perhaps beetles are a more promising species than humankind.