Observations and Generalizations

In what seems to be a rare departure from my usual complaits and reports from a bourbon cloud, I thought I'd take a moment to make unfounded, sweeping generalizations about entire European populations and about Sweden in general. I base these thoughts on my encounters with the representatives of each culture I have met personally--rather in the same way that I have only seen a half dozen Thai movies, but they were all excellent, so I assume all Thai movies are excellent.

I have always been somewhat put off by the recent American anti-French angst. I never entirely understood it (after all, the worst charge I can level at the French is that without them, there would be no America) and as a student of history, I have had the vague impression that it's largely unfounded. But I've met people from all over Europe here, and I've discovered something interesting: none of them like the French.
This bewildered me for a while until now, a scarred veteran of group work with French exchange students, and having spent most of the day watching French students attempt to give presentations, I have had an epiphany. I know where the universal distaste for the French comes from.
The French are the Americans of Europe. Think about it! They refuse to learn other languages, they seem to think their culture should dominate the world (and are prickly that it failed to do so), they don't work or play well with others, and they're belligerant about their surly exceptionalism.
Yet women seem to find them attractive, despite the fact that the seven French guys I know are all hairy, smelly, bad-tempered, humorless, and insular. I only know two French women, but they are both gorgeous, and when I ask very nicely, they are willing to swear at me in French, which sounds like sweet, sweaty sex on silk sheets. I love it.

I still find Germans alarming. Two members of my group for my current class are Germans. Our Australian member Joel and I usually walk home together and the topic of conversation tends to drift around to them. He finds them oddly attractive--these massive Prussian women who could probably bend you in half like a pretzel. I disagree: I'd be vaguely worried that they were plotting tank maneuvers or thinking up really long words to capitalize for no apparent reason. I have determined that they do not like to be wrong: they like to be in charge, and they do not trust anyone else to do anything properly. Hence Fascism, I suppose.
It is only when talking to Germans that I realize how much of my humor and references have to do with the Second World War. The issue is a massive conversational pink elephant in every discussion, and we spend a lot of time studiously not mentioning it. The Germans seem to have a bit of a chip on their collective shoulders about it, like they want to say, "It's because of you people getting all irrationally upset that I had to spend years in school learning about the Holocaust."
I was also quite surprised to hear both German girls in my group immediately reject the suggesiton that we devote a section of our paper to gender issues. They said quite adamantly that they were tired of feminism and that it was quite silly and unnecessary--something I have never encountered in the United States, where I was once taken to task for spelling "woman" properly, instead of with a "y".

I am willing to dub the Australians honorary Europeans, since any hostel you go into anywhere in Europe will be full of Aussies who have been travelling for a year or more. They're everwhere, downing twenty beers each and closing out bars every night. I quite like the Aussies in small doses, since they are universally friendly and willing to talk to anyone about anything with equal degrees of inebriated interest. They all seem to hate Australia, though, and will tell hours of horror stories about the heat, the bugs, the institutionalized racism, and (worst of all) how it's full of other Australians.

The Czechs might be my favorite people on Earth. Their women are gorgeous and friendly, their beer is the best you'll ever find, their men seem to be good natured and vaguely simple, and their government is practically nonexistent. Everyone I've met from every part of the world tells me unanimously that I must go to Prague, and I look forward to visiting it in a month. I expect the streets to be paved in Krušovice, and for their women to come standard-issue to every visitor as a gesture of welcome.

Europeans in general seem to be universally well-educated and well-travelled, as well as at least bilingual and usually secular. Most of them have been all around Europe and are used to the presence of foreigners, but there does seem to be a deep-seated ethnocentrism: that they are very comfortable with any group of people (which is great) as long as those people are white (which isn't). I'm not sure if this is just a case of low-grade culture shock and the Europeans are in fact post-racism, but that isn't the sense I get, I've gotten a real impression of genuine hostility towards anybody vaguely brown.

The topic of most of our class presentations this week has revolved around the darker side of the Nordic welfare states. Everyone from continental Europe seems to take a morbid glee in uncovering these sorts of things, perhaps due to a sense of jealousy at the egalitarian systems the Scandinavians have made practical.
For instance, it seems there were widespread eugenics policies in all of the Nordic states well into the 1970's, based mainly on sterilizing people who had mental illnesses, genetic diseases, physical deformities, or criminal records. There doesn't seem to have been much of a racial element to it, rather an attempt to weed out the genetically unfit and to make the population universally productive, but eugenics is eugenics, and I was surprised to learn that it was so recent and widespread.
There is also a history of persecution of indigenous northern people (the Lapps and the Samis) who really just seem to want to herd reindeer all the time. There was a mass re-education and re-culturalization program against them in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark well into the 1960's which centered mostly on taking children from their parents and putting them in white homes to be "civilized."
Much also is made of the famed coldness of the Swedes, and it is theorized that this is due to the pervasive role of the state in every day life. The idea is that people get used to interacting with impersonal representatives of a governmental machine, and this has a gradual dehumanizing effect on the culture to the current point where you can spend an evening drinking in a pub and no one will ever talk to you. For my part, I have found the Swedish aloofness to be fairly exaggerated, since my corridormates are much more friendly than I am, but I know far fewer Swedes than I do Germans, Brits, Americans, Canadians, Czechs, or Irish. Which is peculiar.
Anyway. The Swedes seem to be the opposite of nationalist--displays of the Swedish flag are frowned upon, and most people don't even know the national anthem. There isn't any pressure to be "proud to be Swedish," and I find that interesting. Maybe that's part of the reason why very few people in the world consider Sweden to be "the Great Satan" and spend time hating the Swedish freedom and declaring jihads against Social Democrats.

Place holder

Until I get around to writing up my Dadaist weekend experiences, go read my shiny new politics/economics/history blog.

Yes, that's right. I've decided that my views and analyses are so spectacularly captivating that I've started up a second blog, just to house them. Consider this a favor, those of you who have no interest in such things: now you'll never be confronted with a monstrosity like that post on Marxism a while back, and you'll know that whenever you click over to this blog (which I expect to be often), you will be greeted only with the utmost hilarity.

So. Go read and bookmark:

diogenesofsinope.blogspot.com

Pareto efficiency

I keep odd hours these days.
My usual schedule is this: I wake around 1 or 2 in the afternoon, in time to have a 3-slice of salami and 2-slice of cheese sandwich while I watch the sun set--or rather, while I watch the sky turn all the way black. I haven't actually seen the sun in almost a month. I typically spend an hour or two puttering around, reading Wikipedia entries, responding to emails, seeing if Len has put up a new blog post, and so forth. Then I tend to head out to a library--if it's a Tuesday, I go straight to the Dag Hammarskjöld to read the new Economist. Other days I mix it up between the Dag, the Ekonomikum, the Karin-Boye, and the Carolina if they have something in that I've ordered. I spend a couple hours reading and browsing, though not nearly as much as I used to. It's a forty-five minute walk each way. I'm usually home by 6 or 7, and I spend a few hours reading. I have felt lately that my mind has grown fat and disgusting and I am constantly irritated that I feel I am not the intellectual match for the professional economists and political theorists that I spend my time reading. There is so much to learn, and such an urgency to learn it, though there are no deadlines save for those of my own construction.
At any rate, around 9 or 10 I tend to make my crude dinner, which I have begun to refer to as Bachelor Chow. I eat it while watching a couple episodes of downloaded TV--often West Wing these days, since I finally got bored with House and I refuse to get into Lost for no reason at all.
Then I tend to have a couple MSN conversations, write emails, check the blogs, etc. By about 11:30 I find myself restless and disgruntled, so I bundle myself up in my wholly inadequate outdoor clothing and go for long walks in the cold steel rain that's been falling for seventeen days.
I usually get home around 1 or so. I wind down by watching another episode of West Wing and by reading a bit, then get to bed around 2:30 or 3. I lay there for an hour or so, suddenly possessed by wild ambition, thinking of all the things I intend to do the next day (construct parliamentary systems, write elaborate critiques of Jaroslav Vanek, etc) and eventually give up, turn on the light, and do some reading and writing until I can't stay awake anymore, which is usually around 4:30.
This is not a good habit.
It also means I rarely see my corridormates, who for some reason "sleep." I'm in another three-week break in my classes, so the only people I see with any regularity are Caroline, who I meet for a regular Monday coffee, Piotr on Saturday afternoons, and Ashley for weekly movies. Then there are the parties, of course. There are always the parties. I intend to go to one shortly in Sarah's corridor (I saw her at ICA yesterday, incidentally, with some scrawny blonde Swede who I couldn't resist terrifying) which promises to be awkward. I will stagger over there only after the regular ration of four shots of bourbon in quick succession which I have found enables me to find having the same conversation over and over to be tolerable.

What I'm Reading
Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: the Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.
Mohammad Yousaf, Afghanistan- the Bear Trap.
David Callahan, Unwinnable Wars: American Power and Ethnic Conflict.
Geoffrey Woglom, Modern Macroeconomics. Yes, this is a college textbook. So what? You wanna make something of it?

Conversations

Piotr, a great Polish guy who looks a hell of a lot like Harry Potter, was flinging pizza dough around with more gusto than was absolutely necessary. "In Poland," he said, "we are used to having this Santa Claus, but when Russians come boosh boosh they are going on television, radio, and everywhere they are saying now we will not have Santa Claus, we will have Frozen Grandpa."

While we had our pizza (which is turning into a weekly Saturday ritual, and is getting increasingly elaborate to the point where this one involved pepperoni, köttbullar, bell peppers, onions, mushrooms, corn, and goddamn bananas) and drank Krušovice, he explained to me the elaborate and impressive repetoir of Polish profanity. "We are having really amazing rude words in Polish," he said. "Like this word kurwa, for example. [Note: pronounced koor-va] It can be meaning anything!" He proceeded to conjugate it for quite some time. "It is meaning woman who is selling her body in a street shaped like this." He made U-shaped gestures. "And you can be adding to it all of these things like to sit, to stand, to run, to walk, to fall down--"
"To make a sandwich," I suggested.
His eyes lit up. "Exactly! You are understanding!"
Apparently, the most common word in Polish is pierdolić, which is their "to fuck" equivalent, and it can be modified to mean all kinds of things. Like this:
To beat up - napierdolić
To break - rozpierdolić
To run - spierdolić
To steal - podpierdolić
To throw away - wypierdolić
That and kurwa are used essentially as punctuation, so that you can have a sentence which literally says, "Whore! I fucked up. It was a whore-fucking whore day. I had a fucking whore drink and whore, then I was fucked. And then this fuck comes up, whore!" And your mother would answer, "Whorefuck!"
I bet you're glad to learn all this stuff. It was an especially enlightening conversation since Katka, this Czech girl was present. Czech and Polish are quite similar languages, to the extent that they can very nearly understand one another, except on some words which can mean entirely opposite things. I've never seen two people speaking three languages and trying so hard to figure out how to properly say "Assmonkey."

Some time later I was walking along Sernanders väg, all shrouded in mist and big yellow floating globes of the streetlights and Goran told me about The Hoffentotters.
Goran looks almost exactly like Mike, the second host of Mystery Science Theater 3000, except he often wears a Gatsby cap. He's a philosophy student, but I don't hold that against him. He's got the most comfortable chair in Flogsta, he drinks decent scotch, and he smokes a pipe. He lives in Amie-with-an-ie's corridor along with a crazy fucking psycho Swedish broad and a few shifty beta-male Swedes who he calls his Clan. He took a liking to me when he heard me talking about Diogenes, and he's got me hooked on the pipe, much to my displeasure, as it is by far the most pretentious manner of ingesting nicotine.
Anyway. He draped an arm over my shoulders and slurred, "Do you know about...The Hoffentotters?"
"Actually, no."
He made noises quite like a donkey. I will attempt to transcribe his broken, inebriated Swenglish as accurately as possible: "There was used to be a show Swedish with Finnish don't trust the bastards and they were fucking children's mind! Everyday when you open the door, BAM they are right there, and do you know what they are doing?"
"I have no idea."
"I'm going to tell you!"
"I had a feeling you might."
"They are doing...the dance of The Hoffentotters!"
"Sweet Jesus."
"Yes! Don't look them in the eyes! They are looking all happy like this" (he moved his shoulders up and down one at a time) "but then, the next day, they are CLOSER. And do you know what they do then?"
"I have no idea."
"Well, I'm going to tell you!"
"I had a feeling you might."
"They are doing the dance!"
"Of The Hoffentotters?"
"YES!"
"That's the worst."
I suspect this tirade (which continued unabated for another hour as we floundered into a party somewhere) had something to do with the impossibly hot blonde Finnish chick who was with us. I get the impression Goran either had a problem with her or with some other Finnish girl in the past and was trying to somehow warn me off, in his crazy moon-language.

Also. The crazy broad I mentioned? She rang my bell at about one in the morning on Wednesday night. I answered, not knowing who it was, and recoiled in horror when I saw her hideous, unbalanced form darkening my doorstep. She asked if I had any beer, and I told her hell no and closed the door.
I related this story to the Clan and Amie-with-an-ie, all of whom live in terror of this crazy broad. I hadn't really thought anything of it, until they suggested that it wasn't random at all, and that she was checking to make sure it was indeed me who lived there, and now she's gonna kill me or sacrifice a chicken in my room or something. Which is just pierdolić great.

In praise of Option Three

Sarah called me at about 1 in the morning the other night, in tears. She had just gotten back from Berlin, where she had visited a concentration camp, and the experience left her deeply shaken. She talked for an hour or two, using the sort of pseudo-metaphysical nonsense language she favors when she's trying to make sense of emotions. I didn't really know what to say to her--I know quite a lot about the Holocaust, have a nearly almost photographic memory, and tend to intellectualize most things. I suspect that's why I'm so often accused of lacking overt emotional responses to things: I think strong emotions are largely dependent on surprise, and I make it my business to learn as much as possible about things that I attach emotional significance to for the exact reason that I don't want to be surprised.
At any rate, I wasn't exactly sure what to say. "No kidding" didn't really seem apt. She asked desperately what anybody could do about it, and I remembered a line from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon: "Well, what can we do? I sort of intend to spend my life ensuring that nothing of the sort ever happens again."
Which is silly, of course. I'm a student of history. I know about the Holodomor in Ukraine, the Armenian genocide, the Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, Darfur, the Germans with the Herero and Namaquas in Namibia, Pakistan in the Bangladesh War of 1971, Burundi in 1972, East Timor, the entire founding of the United States, and so on and so forth. Human history consists largely of lunatic attempts to bring about our own extinction and it shows every sign of continuing that trend indefinitely. And that's just instances of systematic extermination of discreet populations and doesn't begin to encompass the unspeakable scope of human suffering both today and throughout history. I think about these things all the time --perhaps that is the logical consequence of intellectualizing such things rather than reacting emotionally. Her emotional response will run its course and she will become wrapped up in her everyday life again in a few days and will think no more of it, unless it's brought up in conversation. I envy her that, I think.

More to the point, I really do want to spend much of my life working as best I can to slow our inexorable march towards omnicide. My primary concern, however, is largely ecological, since short of nuclear war, people can really only kill other people into the low millions before the white northern hemisphere starts feeling squeamish. Given another hundred years of our current rapacious attitude towards the environment, however, and humanity will be reduced to a few hundred survivors at the north and south poles--all of whom will have very brief, cancer-ridden lives due to the massive holes in the ozone layer.
The point here is not entirely to be alarmist. As I am frequently assured, the market will find solutions to all of the staggering ecological problems, and that may be true. But that requires that somebody get to work on it, and since I have little faith in the capability of most other people, I'd really rather I was one of those people.
Besides, it's just good capitalism. If you know for certain there is going to be an enormous captive market emerging within a certain timeframe, wouldn't you want to be the first one in the strongest position to dominate that market?
Which brings me to Option Three from the last post. I've actually been thinking a lot about the aforementioned Neal Stephenson book lately, which I read when I was in New York at the Model UN back in the spring. In it, one of the protagonists is a fairly regular, nerdy guy who (although quite intelligent and capable) would probably spend most of his life attached in some unsatisfactory way to a public college in California were it not for his friend who a) has plans and business models and b) knows people, and knows people who know people. I see a certain analagous situation with my potential future and the more I think about it, the more attractive it becomes. Besides, the guy in the book got to hook up with a hottie who owns and operates an ocean salvage company in the Phillippines and then found a lot of gold.
Consider the popular objections to Option Three. It would mean descending into the noxious depths of Business and Government, rather than the pure, clean world of academia. But I have no illusions about how much change academics are capable of bringing about, and I have even fewer illusions about the changes possible on a middle-class income. If you are poor, you are irrelevant.
Another objection: it would mean eventually, inevitably, being surrounded by the sort of bloodsucking soulless neoconservative sorts who dominate both Business and Government. Distasteful, yes. But to those of you who raise this objection, I say: would you rather have one radical left-wing Horvatian socialist lunatic rubbing shoulders with the high-and-mighty, or none? Wouldn't that hopeless, futile attempt at leftist input be worth it? And isn't a stubborn exercise in futility right up my alley?
A poor college professor is going to rarely, if ever, be in a position to offer advice to governments and businesses on how to make their actions ecologically sustainable, let alone get paid for it. That seems like a pretty strong argument in favor of Option Three.

In other news, it's cold here. I woke up at about 2:30 in the afternoon yesterday (since I stayed up all night listening to election coverage) and found that the sun was setting.

What I'm Reading
Jasper Ridley, Garibaldi
Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987
Dambudzo Marechera, Black Sunlight
Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things
Jaroslav Vanek, The General Theory of Labor-Managed Market Economies
David Schweickart, Against Capitalism