The wire-service reporter, who seemed to be rather too well-informed on various matters, said that pot cost thirty dollars a kilo in Albania. And The Economist magazine’s business report on Albania said that in March 1997, a fully automatic Kalashnikov assault rifle could be bought on the streets of Tirana for as little as three dollars. “ Everyone is surreptitiously armed,” said the wire-service reporter. Or not so surreptitiously. I saw a middle-aged man in civilian clothes walking along what used to be Boulevard Stalin, holding his five-year-old son by one hand and an AK-47 in the other. Such are Second Amendment freedoms in Albania. And First Amendment freedoms lag not far behind in their extravagance. Each evening during the first weeks of July 1997, a couple hundred royalists would march into the chaos of Skenderbeg Square, bringing traffic to a new pitch of swerve and collision. I watched the royalists set up podium and loudspeakers on the steps of a Soviet-designed cement blunder that used to be the Palace of Culture. They unfurled the heart-surgery-colored Albanian flag, bearing the image of what’s either a two-headed eagle or a very angry freak-show chicken. The royalists shouted into the microphone such things as, “We will get our votes, even by blood!” The volume was enough to drown out the loudest car crashes. Then, at greater volume yet, they played the Albanian national anthem, which is as long as a Wagner opera and sounds like the Marine Corps band performing the Ring cycle while falling down all the stairs in the Washington Monument. The royalists were demonstrating on behalf of one Leka Zogu, who thinks he’s the king of Albania. He’d just gotten his butt whipped (80 percent of the voters said, “ jo ”) in a national referendum on restoring the monarchy. Not that Albania ever had a monarchy. The country wasn’t even a country until the twentieth century. It was a backwater of the Ottoman Empire from the 1400s on and a back-further-water of the Byzantine Empire before that. Leka Zogu’s father, Ahmed Zogu, was a putsch artist from the sticks who overthrew what passed for the government in 1924, crowned himself King Zog I in 1928, pimped the country to Mussolini, and Airedaled it into exile one step ahead of Axis occupation in 1939. Leka was two days old at the time. Since then the younger Zogu has sojourned in Rhodesia and South Africa, been thrown out of Spain over an arms-dealing scandal, and spent a brief jail stint in Thailand for gunrunning—at least as good a preparation for the throne as having your ex-wife martyred by paparazzi.
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