Author Archives: Stefan Geens

Hopefully, Hitchens: Tempes in a teacup

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Christopher Hitchens has written a review of SAIS Professor Patrick McCarthy’s latest book, Language, Politics, and Writing: Stolentelling in Western Europe, and it is an embarrassment to the genre. It reads superficially as the verbal (and by now proverbial) skewering one expects of Hitchens, but in this particular case it is his critique, not the book, that ought to be shooed off the stage peremptorilyNot having read this particular book of McCarthy’s, I am not in a position to judge it; I can only judge Hitchens’s methodology in attempting to review it. On the basis of past exposure to McCarthy’s ideas and the typical clarity of his exposition, however, I would be very surprised to find this book not up to par..

Hitchens’s modus operandi, alas, is to elevate several grammatical misdemeanors by McCarthy — such as his use of “hopefully” instead of “it is to be hoped” — to the level of such offense that we are meant to mistrust the arguments they frame. It’s not quite an ad hominem attack, but it constitutes a logical fallacy nonetheless; let’s call it an ad eminem attack (in honor of someone truly grammatically challenged who nevertheless has something relevant to say). Elsewere, Hitchens attacks McCarthy’s spelling as a proxy for his ideas — we’ll call this an ad homonym attack.

But what is truly gratifying is to see Hitchens commit the very same types of errors for which he reproaches McCarthy. For example, he casts the first stone when he writes that

… it’s not undue nitpicking to notice the repeated misspelling of important names—Salman Rushdie, Jesse Owens, and Brian Friel—even though some of these must be blamed on cretinous copyediting.

In which case it is not undue nitpicking to notice Hitchens referring to Francois Mitterand, not Mitterrand, and Sartre’s Les Tempes Modernes, instead of Les Temps Modernes. For such a short piece of writing, that’s a far worse batting average than McCarthy’s. If such errors are meant to be an indictment of the quality of one’s arguments, so be it. If they are not, Hitchens’s broadsides are pointless filler; a waste of my time, were I not having so much fun penning this riposte.

To see where such an approach to criticism can lead you, we can apply Hitchens’s stringent criteria for intelligibility to his own writing:

I was once as happy as anyone to sit with McCarthy and to discuss Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks or the ambiguities of Sartre’s Les Tempes Modernes. I still enjoy these pursuits, though they occasionally strike me now as comparable to well-conducted tours of Atlantis. Perhaps that’s why the cultivated guides have such a marked tendency to gurgle, as they make their appointed rounds.

So which is it — is he or is he not happy to discuss Gramsci and Sartre? The defensive word “occasionally” must have been inserted in a moment of unease, as Hitchens would say. The last sentence of this passage hovers on the verge of gibberish — why on earth would a guide to Sartre and Gramsci gurgle? Actually, there is one way in which this sentence can make sense, but it would confirm that Hitchens has the emotional intelligence of a drunk. Lawyers: Clearly, when I say Hitchens has the emotional intelligence of a drunk, I am not implying that he is a drunk, merely that he has the emotional intelligence of one. Similarly, If I were to say that Hitchens has the sense of humor of a Mormon, I would not be implying that he is a Mormon.If you’ve met McCarthy, you’ll know he has a heavy speech impediment, the result of a motor neuron disease. Hitchens seems to find in this suitable material for a cheap joke. If I am wrong, then he is far more careless in his choice of words than we give him credit for. I wonder which fault Hitchens would rather own up to.

Actually, I don’t.

In fact, I am left wondering whether there isn’t something pathological to Hitchens’s motivations. He himself clearly thinks he acts out of an allegiance to honesty and intellectual rigor for which he will gladly sacrifice friendships. But in this review, he merely comes across as someone in desperate need to be cleverer than thou. This is not so easy with McCarthy, who is probably the cleverest man I’ve met. This must have rankled Hitchens.

The result is that Hitchens raises so many pointless quibbles, all so easily refuted, that the refutations themselves run the risk of boring you. Here are just a few:

Wouldn’t now — with Umberto Bossi in political alignment with Silvio Berlusconi — be the ideal moment to revisit Gramsci’s concept of Italy as two nations, southern and northern? McCarthy repeatedly passes up such cross-references, and one can’t but suspect that this is because they might interfere with a settled attitude.

No. The ideal moment to revisit Gramsci on such matters was in 1994, when Bossi and Berlusconi first entered into political alignment. And McCarthy covered it then. Trust me, I was there. Then there is this remarkable passage:

[W]hile discussing the divorce scandal that ruined the career of Charles Stuart Parnell, so stirred James Joyce, and so greatly retarded the cause of Irish nationalism, [McCarthy] calls it “arguably Ireland’s Dreyfus case.” This assertion is plainly ridiculous, as well as anachronistic. Parnell was dead before the Dreyfus case occurred and was never tried for anything himself. The only possible analogy is the lamentable fact that in both “cases” (in my opinion as well as that of McCarthy), the Roman Catholic hierarchy committed itself on the wrong side. The defensive word “arguably” must have been inserted in a moment of unease.

So he agrees with McCarthy, then; he just took a lot longer to reach the same conclusion, and had to think aloud to get there. Hitchens really needs to find himself an easier target; may I suggest some recent speeches by George Bush?

How the Irish saved civilization? By blogging it.

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I’ve finally read How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill, and as I expected, it contains a number of big ideas. Among them:

The Irish were the first people to be Christianized without also being RomanizedSt. Patrick, circa 450 A.D.. Celtic traditions were not jettisoned when Christianity was adopted, and this resulted in a rather pragmatic approach to religion — for example, the Irish pioneered the concept of being able to confess privately and repeatedly for the same sin. In Romanized Christianity, confession until then had been public, and forgiveness granted only once. It used to be two strikes and you’re out of the Church, excommunicated, set to burn in hell for all eternity. To the Irish, this was rather harsh: “We’re all sinners, all the time,” was the official excuse, though it more likely had to do with Celts being a lot looser sexually than those prudish Romans. It’s thanks to the Irish, then, that heaven isn’t emptyI’m sure there’s an Irish joke to be made from this historical nugget.
How about: “An Irishman goes to confession: ‘Forgive me father, for I have not sinned.'”.

But their main contribution to civilization was the preservation of Roman and Greek texts amid the collapse of the Roman empire. The Irish had replaced the Christian tradition of martyrdom with that of “green martyrs,” or monks, whose own recent Celtic roots made them receptive to pagan literature. These monks set about collecting and copying such manuscripts — without censorship — in their remote Irish monasteries, while the barbarians thoroughly brutalized the continent.

These copyists acted as meme-promoters, keeping classical ideas alive until they could once again be let loose on a critical mass of fertile minds in the next renaissance. This is how the memes at the foundation of modern western thought skirted extinction — our knowledge of Plato comes to us through the ages via a thin but sinewy thread that extends through Ireland. Eventually, the Irish monks re-evangelized the continent, and made sure to take the classics with them. By the time the Vikings were raiding monasteries on Ireland, the texts were being kept safe by Irish monks as far afield as Italy.

And while copying was their main task, these monks could not help but populate the margins with annotations, comments, approval or mockery. Cahill writes (in 1995) about what might have motivated them:

[The monks] did not see themselves as drones. Rather, they engaged the text they were working on, tried to comprehend it after their fashion, and, if possible, add to it, even improve on it. In this dazzling new culture, a book was not an isolated document on a dusty shelf; book truly spoke to book, and writer to scribe, and scribe to reader, from one generation to the next. These books were, as we would say in today’s jargon, open, interfacing, and intertextual — glorious literary smorgasbords in which the scribe often tried to include a bit of everything, from every era, language, and style known to him.

That was, effectively, blogging, circa 700 A.D.

Of course, today, we bloggers have been relieved of the task of manually copying the memes we deem worthy of promotion (and disparagement); the cost of copying information is now negligibleIt is even more efficient merely to refer to the texts in question with a link (although at the risk of the link going bad).. Blogs are the new marginalia, our annotated lives, riffs on our cultural and political patrimony (like this post), asides on the political drama of the day, knowing winks at perpetuity…

To illustrate the similarity: Here is a magnificent journal entry, disguised as a poem in the margin of a 9th century manuscript on Virgil in a Swiss monastery:

I and Pangur Ban my catHere is the original old Irish, together with a literal translation. The text on the right is copied from here.
‘Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.
Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.
‘Tis a merry task to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.
‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.
When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!
So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

Now that, surely, rivals Lileks on a good day. Cahill furnishes other examples — here is one monk’s opinion of a Celtic epic:

I who have copied down this story, or more accurately fantasy, do not credit the details of the story, or fantasy. Some things in it are devilish lies, and some are poetical figments, some seem possible and others not; some are for the enjoyment of idiots.”

He could just as well have been writing on Bush’s reasons for invading Iraq, no? One final example:

“Sad it is, little parti-colored white book, for a day will surely come when someone will say over your page: ‘the hand that wrote this is no more.'”

Amen; his work was important; it is still read and treasured; and it’s a good omen for today’s blogs.

Life of Ryan

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It was inevitable that I eventually tried RyanairI wrote this post a few days ago, but have been unable to secure unfettered internet access since arriving in Ireland. Consumer broadband in Ireland is very new; cable broadband was introduced to Dublin a few days ago. I’m ready to bribe or kill someone to feed my 1-megabit habit. . They’ve been proclaiming the second coming of aviation all over Christendom, and although their fares seemed too good to be true, I have always been for quantity over quality when it comes to flying. As I am summering in Ireland this year, the perfect opportunity presented itself; how fitting it would be to fly to Dublin on Ireland’s latest contribution to the cause of European civilization, I thoughtThis post is an homage to Felix’s penchant for blogging his suffering on airline flights. It also gives me something to do while waiting for my connecting flight..

How do they do it? I got an early hint as I boarded a Ryanair bus from central Stockholm to Skavsta airport, a hangar in a field 80 minutes to the south. Inside the terminal, a queue of third world proportions awaited me as two employees proceded to check in an entire 737. At the end of that queue I was told, first, that no, I could not check in my luggage here and expect to pick it up in Dublin, I would have to pick it up off a carousel in Prestwick, Scotland, and then check myself in again for my connecting flight to Dublin. Second, I was 13 kg over my luggage limit of 15kg. Never mind that I had dragged the same accoutrements all over Europe over the past year without hassle on BA. Never mind that a laptop, sturdy walking boots and the odd book are enough to put you halfway to their limit. I had to pay an extra $100 if I wanted to take my luggage with me.

Oof. That pretty much erased any price advantage they had over the competition, and suddenly, my eye had become a lot more critical. At that price, let’s see how they stack up. Terminal: crap. Miles? Are you kidding? Window or aisle? No, it’s the Afro-Russian boarding method, where your ticket gets you a mandate to storm the plane for the best seats. In the event, the dash was over tarmac through a good 150m of steady rain.

This free-for-all has one advantage that I thought of too late; it’s an evident incentive to chat up pretty women early, whom, it is hoped, you will invite to share your row of seats during the flight. In that sense it is a refreshing change from all that Lutheran predestination about whom one sits next to on traditional airlines. For once, it is not left up to the gods, who always conspire to have you sit next to bloated businessmen from Basingstoke rather than models from Milan.

Except that the models from Milan do not as a rule fly to Prestwick.

On Ryanair, you pay for your inflight food. This is fine by me; it minimizes waste, etc… But I did not expect, upon a request for a coke and a tuna sandwich, to be handed a can the size of a thimble and a triangle of bread that contained tuna safe for vegetarians (“It contains mayonnaise,” the air hostess stewardess flight attendant cabin crew member warned me.). For $10.

At Prestwick, I waited for my luggage in a sputnik-green terminal straight out of those books of boring postcards you see in museum shoppesAgain, no internet access so no handy link to Amazon. How did I survive before 1995?, then dragged it to the Ryanair check-in counter. Same luggage. Same weight. No problem this time.

“Have these bags been in your possession at all times since you packed them?”

“No.”

“No?!”

“No, I gave them to Ryanair. I just got them back.”

By the time I got onto my second Ryanair flight, however, I was mellowing. Obviously I was not their target customer. Around me sat pensioners visiting grandchildren and students upgrading from bus travel. Ryanair is a bus with wings, not a budget airline. From this perspective, it’s a perfectly reasonable proposition. Just don’t carry too many books to Ireland.

The letter

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In the summer of 1999 my morning commute went thus: I would walk up St. Marks Place to the N/R subway under Broadway, which took me to the Financial District, home of the whopping equity bubble.

Just off St. Marks and 2nd Ave, I would stop by the Porto Rico Importing Co. to pick up a coffee. At the time, I still smoked, and because it is hard to light a cigarette with matches while holding a scalding beverageI always used those free flat matchbooks from grocery stores because the half-life of any lighter in my possession was measured in hours., I would first set the cup on the window ledge of a bank just next to the store. The cigarette and coffee lasted exactly as long as it took for me to get from there to Broadway. My commute was well-rehearsed.

One drizzly morning, the window ledge had an old, damp letter lying on it. Absent an owner, I took it. Two things were immediately clear: It was addressed to a Margaretha Lennerbring, living in Stockholm, and it was mailed in 1970. I couldn’t read Swedish, but I knew several people who did. I showed it to them. It was a love letter! A young Swedish man doing his military service had written to his girlfriend
 
Lucidor turns out to be a renowned 17th-century Swedish poet, not the least for having composed some of the country’s favorite drinking songs..

I kept the letter. Over the past four years, I’ve come to feel responsible for it, and these last 9 months, as my Swedish has gotten progressively better, I have returned to it periodically, as a yardstick for my comprehension.

I have a theory as to why it was on the ledge that morning: In 1999, the corner of St. Marks and 2nd Ave still had second-hand book peddlers on the sidewalk. The peddlers feature tangentially in the 1992 King Missile cult spoken word/song hit Detachable Penis (Lyrics). I imagine somebody bought a book there, found this incomprehensible letter in it, and discarded it. Perhaps they couldn’t bring themselves to actually throw it in a garbage can, so they left it on the window ledge, feeling guilty, not wanting to favor the cause of entropy (our common enemy).

This letter has been important to someone, important enough perhaps even to drag it across the Atlantic. All would be clear were I to find Margaretha. To that end, the Swedish studies task I set myself yesterday was translating the letter in full:

Page 1
 

Hässleholm, 1/7/70 (the night before)

Hey sweetheart,

Thanks for the letter, it was really kind of you. I was in such a good mood all Monday thanks to your letter. It’s really great that you have already met Timo, and, by the way, say hi to him for me.

I have been to Sergels– and Hötorget [Shopping center in Stockholm].

Here at PZ [P2? army regiment?] it’s the same shit as usual, lying and crawling in shit, and last night (Tuesday) we thoroughly cleaned our whole [military] company, although it was not approved, so we can do it all again, unfortunately.:

Page 2
 

It is not so fun to go home to Halmstad when you aren’t there, the only fun thing was when I, Kent and Gustav (Kent’s father) worked on Kent’s boat and drank beer (and I thought of you, you sweet “witch”). I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to call you a witch. On Saturday we were in Mellby, first at Christer’s house, and we were all in a good mood (Christer, Kent, Roger, and I), although after a few hours in Mellby, Liza came with another boy, whom I’ve never seen before, and then Kent became angry (I think it was jealousy) and we went home early.:

Page 3
 

On Sunday we continued to work on Kent’s boat until 5pm and then I had to dash home to eat and then I took the train to Hässleholm. By the way, little Maggan didn’t come down because Ryden and I were at her aunt’s place (I think) and she said that Maggan had hurt herself and so couldn’t come, but we got a free snack [fika] out of it.

Now you have to wait a moment because I am going to take a smoking break. I’ll be back soon, darling. Now I have smoked.

I’ll write a letter before I come up to you because I must figure out train schedules:

Page 4
 

and connections so that I can tell you when I come up to Stockholm so that you can come and meet me at the station. I can perhaps already come on Thursday noon, if that’s okay with you, because I long for you so much. I get paid about 350 kr now in wages because we will definitely go to Göteborg LV 6 on July 27.

Kiss and hug from Bengt and I hope that you don’t forget me.

Write soon darling and I will read your letter many times so that I stay in a good mood. Bye [Maggan…?] sweetheart.:

Here are the most important clues, then:

  • It is addressed to Margaretha Lennerbring, who lived at an address in Gamla Stan, Stockholm. Today, it is student housing, and most likely it would have been when the letter was written. Perhaps “Lucidor” refers to a building, floor or university society named after the poet.

    Update (29/6/2003): It does indeed: The building is called Lucidor, and here it is on the web.

  • The author writes from Hässleholm, where he is doing his military service.
  • They both seem to be from Halmstad or nearby Wellby, where they have friends in common.
  • The letter was written and sent on July 1, 1970. If Margaretha was around 18 then, she’d be around 50 today.
  • She seems to have just arrived in Stockholm: The author refers to a previous letter, wherein she must have mentioned that she had “already” met a common friend (Timo).

While there is plenty of information here, there are also plenty of questions, namely:

  • Did she take the letter with her to New York, perhaps as a bookmark?
  • Did she come back to Sweden or did she stay in the US?
  • Is she married to the author? There is nobody with her name in Sweden, according to a cursory search on Eniro, but she would likely have dropped her maiden name if she got married.
  • If she did not marry the author, how did the relationship end?
  • What does PZ or P2 signify? Is there a military connotation?
  • What or who is a Maggan?

    Update (30/6/2003): Maggan is the diminuitive for Margaretha, says Joachim.

So, does anyone reading this know these people, or know how to find them? Or perhaps someone can answer some of the military or university clues? There seems to be only one Lennerbring living in Sweden — perhaps I should send him a letterUpdate Dec 1, 2003: The story continues here.. Posting this information here is not as passive as it seems; I expect Google to hoover all this up, and between now and 20 years from now I am sure I will get searches that refer to this post, perhaps even a Lennerbring googling him or herself. I can wait.

Apple of my iSight

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Much as I try to get people to blog, I try to avoid blogging about blogging. It’s a bit too meta for me. Same goes for all things Apple; I love ’em, everybody near me eventually caves in and buys one, but I try not to blog this particular passion of mineIt seems like there is a disproportionately large percentage of Mac-using bloggers, both in Sweden and NYC. Thinking different is a bloggable trait, is my guess..

In this case, however, I’d like to note a particular feature of Apple’s new iChat AV application that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere. I’ve been using my Canon Elura DV camera as the iChat video input, and it works flawlessly. I’ve been videochatting with Matthew and Kim in New York; Matthew and I have even used it to gloat or despair while playing Scrabble online.

But today, I was using my DV camera to do some logging and capturing in FCP when I started to wonder if I could send that video feed over iChat. I fired up a one-way video stream to Felix (who “only” has voice, the second class citizen that he is), and sure enough, he could see the rough cuts, with sound, while we commented away via text. In other words, whatever is on a DV tape can be monitored live by any iChat AV user.

Sure, the quality is much lower than full-blown DV, but what a collaborative tool! You can now show rough cuts or edited works in real time to clients, and elicit live feedback. This is going to make the video crowd very happy.

I’m sure that with a bit of tweaking, it should be possible to get a video-in feed that comes off the television. This way, It’ll be possible to follow the baseball World Series live off American TV, should I be so inclined, and should Matthew be so kind.

Fear and loathing in Hummelmora

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Last weekend I was witness to the most important Swedish ritual of the year — Midsommar — wherein small children are converted to socialism whilst adults revel in the ungodly pursuit of booze.

My midsommar took place on the Stockholm Archipelago, which was constructed to maximize the amount of coastline, so that a waterside summerhouse could be had by all according to need, not greed. Joachim and Elise and their two-year old, David, invited me.

Before setting off, I was instructed by my hosts to report to System Bolaget, the state organ in charge of alcohol dissemination. I have a love-hate relationship with this monopolistic institution. Although I am against monopolies in principle, there is something to be said for the state deriving significant income from my drinking habits — clearly, our interests align in his case.

Most System Bolaget stores look like pharmacies. You take a number; while waiting for your turn, you may peruse giant glass-cased display shelves of wine organized by color, region, price and type. Go to the counter, where a functionary takes your order and fetches it from their stock. At first, I would simply ask for the vintages or brands I craved, but now I have discovered another advantage to the monopoly regime: Since I am not about to buy this alcohol anywhere else, store employees are actually quite happy to discuss my purchase at length. They even have a help line.

Let me just repeat that. They even have a help line. In other words, whereas other countries might subsidize AA centers, in Sweden a government employee will gladly help you plan your next blinder.

On the ferry to Ljusterö, which was chockablock Thursday afternoon as the city emptied, the boozing started in earnest. On deck, in the rain, a man cradled his case of oversized beer cans, going through them at an impressive rate, but careful to keep the empties so he could recycle. His pal decided to gift ferry passengers his guitar music, and he was soon joined by a chorus of woken, wailing babies.

Two hours later, I was on “dry” land again, with dry in scare quotes as it was still raining, and would do so for most of the weekend. The upside, however, was that we could take David snail hunting. The modus operandi was to place one of David’s toy animals within talking distance of a snail, and then to engage it in conversation. David did most of the talking: “Hej snigel! Hej? Hej! Hej snigel?…”

On June 20, Midsommar day itself, we were prepped for the ritual dancing around the maypole (majstång), which symbolizes the pivotal role the state plays in Swedish society. First, we all drank shots of aquavit purchased at System Bolaget. Then, the children were carted off by tractor, probably to a re-education camp, while the adults made their way to the festivities:

Before proper homage could be paid, the maypole had to be raised. For this, foreign labor was required, so I volunteered, and together with other Swedes we hoisted the great green branches of government. Those who work for the state even got to wear branches on their head:

Just in time, the children reappeared, and they proceeded to do a dance where they act out how they are but small helpless deaf frogs (små grodingen, ej öron), in need of welfare.

Afterwards, back at the summer cottage, many of the invited guests took part in an impromptu soccer match in the rain. It was eerily like the last scene in Tillsammans/Together. The object of the game, much like with parliamentary proceedings here, was to ensure a draw for the sake of the children. We quit when the score was 14-14.

June 20 was also the day that one guest, Ludwig, turned 5. He got a cake and a bug examination kit, so we set off to find some bugs. We soon found an ant and a milkweed bug, and I suggested we put them together in the same box to see who would win a fight to the death. We never did find the answer, for Ludwig kept on rescuing the ant. I think he will grow up to work for SIPRI. There was no sun, so the magnifying glass proved useless.

There was some hope, however, in the form of Ludwig’s younger brother, Erwig, who the next day was caught using his boot heel as a WMD on snails. They performed an ostracism on him, and by now he’s probably been cured of all antisocial impulses.

With every passing day, I get closer to the dark underbelly of Sweden’s soul…

Shifting allegiances

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I’ve been down on the United States for the past few weeks. When the missing-WMD meme hit mainstream on the weekend of May 30, I was moving house, and I kept coming back to the implications in my head as I loaded boxes into the car, feeling slightly nauseous at the thought of having been played so thoroughlyThe moment I decided to trust the US government: the Powell speech at the UN.. My blog post earlier that week had been measured, but it hid a burgeoning sense of betrayal.

As the Iraq war started, I had challenged myself and others not to move the goal posts post-factum to justify whatever the outcome might be. “This nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. Now there are some who would like to rewrite history; revisionist historians is what I like to call them.” Bushism is what I like to call that, even though the second part of what he said is literally true. It sounds like he thinks revisionism is a morally suspect activity.
 
To be fair, Andrew Sullivan does see the need for an inquiry.To no avail; feel the least bit queasy now about this gulf between the promises and the evidence and you’re a “revisionist historian” according to George Bush. The Little Green Footballs of this world do not even feel the need for a congressional inquiry because, the argument seems to be, as winners we can write the history of this war, and the history will now show that the war was justified even for humanitarian reasons alone — just look at all the mass graves.

For the record, that is called dissembling, for it ignores the opportunity cost of not spending that money elsewhere for humanitarian purposes. Once we concede that there was no immediate threat from Iraq to the US and its allies, we need to ask what would be the most efficient way to spend $100 billion (and probably a lot more) and 250 soldiers’ lives (and counting). A third of Americans polled, including the President, seems to think WMDs were indeed found in Iraq.How could we get the biggest bang for the buck? If we had left Saddam to kill his 10,000 people a year, we could be saving millions of lives instead by flooding Africa with cheap AIDS drugs. Or we could ensure a moderate and stable Pakistan by buying every Pakistani kid a high-school education. Or we could eradicate an entire disease. My point is not that we should do this. It is merely that the humanitarian claims of the neo-con apologists are as bogus as the WMD claims.

So, I’ve been down on the US. But I’ve learned to be wary of such shifts in affiliation. Too often, in the past, my emotional allegiances depended on where I happened to live. When I left Switzerland aged 6, I wanted to be Swiss, not Belgian. The first time I left New York, aged 13, I wanted to be American, not European. But by the time I moved to Australia at the age of 15, though, I had figured out what was going on: the people I was trying to integrate with assumed (uncritically) that they were living in the best of all possible societies. I had to participate in the vernacular that maintains this belief (national stereotypes, food preferences, sport team preferences and even sport preferences) in order to play along. Eventually, I would come to believe it, and it would feel goodThere is nothing controversial in this. it’s at the base of Donald L. Horowitz’s excellent Ethnic Groups in Conflict..

Now, however, I make a point of recognizing this impulse in myself, and compensating for it. I make a point of recognizing it in others. It’s also why I tend to defend Europe in the US, and the US in Europe: Most anti-Americanism and old-Europism is borne from national allegiances that are irrational, pre-rational if you will, and they do not withstand scrutiny. But it was getting harder to defend the US here in Europe — until yesterday, when I found my bearings again in an unlikely place.

I was listening to last week’s show of A Prairie Home Companion on NPR while making dinner, and as Garrison Keillor led a local Oregonian band into some good ol’ country & bluegrass with a genial quip aimed at Republicans, I realized what my mistake had been. The US is not some monolithic agent. It is a complex and splendrous kaleidoscope of culture and ideals and optimism and fear; a fascinating experiment, 200+ years old, that can occasionally go awry, as with the neo-cons currently. I know all this, of course, but it’s easy to lose sight of such self-evident truths when not immersed in the culture day-to-day.

May I introduce Miss Philips?

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Zed and Clarice swept through town over the weekend, bringing Georgian cognac The cognac came labeled with a strange and wonderful script I had never seen before.
 
 and taking with them most of the contents of Södermalm’s thrift shops. Clarice had a Berlitz European phrase book from 1974 with her, with a chapter for Swedish:

The section on dating in particular suggests the 70s were a simpler time, before pickup-line inflation, when smoking was a language common to all, when the romantic (and the optimistic) could hope to get lucky during a night on the town armed with nothing more than this Berlitz guide and courage-through-lager. I wonder if the editors field-tested their lines. I imagine they assumed a typical “date” would go something like this:

Of course, the “datee” would only be able to nod yes or no, since the “dater” wouldn’t understand actual Swedish responses Some helpful phrases for dating in Georgian.. However, there is this helpful icebreaker:

The highlighted part especially seems like a good idea, though the more logically aware might hit a serious philosophical impasse if they ever needed to look up the phrase “Just a minute. I’ll see if I can find it in this book” in order to use it.

Updated links page

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I’ve updated the <a href="http://www.stefangeens.com/links.html"links page, adding many new links and taking out the ones I never visited (and hence you probably never did either). I also did a redesign, which you will like better once you are used to it. For those who absolutely hate it, the old links page is still here.

Also, if you’ve been using this page as your start page and there are sites you visit regularly but can’t find here, please signal them and I will consider adding them.

The Economist, the euro, Sweden, Germany

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The Economist focuses on the Nordic region in a special report this week. I scanned the part where it reports on Sweden’s upcoming euro referendum:

Elsewhere this issue, The Economist is not at all impressed with Germany’s performance as the supposed economic engine of the eurozone: “Only partly in jest, The Economist suggests that a better question is not whether Britain should join the currency zone, but whether Germany should leave.” Very interesting reading, and relevant to Sweden’s decision whether to join EMU; does Sweden really want to have the same interest rate required to get the German economy back on its feet?