There are two towns, town A (where the music school is) and town B (where we live, and where the music school has a small franchise in the local elementary school). They border on each other. Both are run by the conservative (Christian Democrat) party; town A by the bourgeois small-to-medium business arm of the party, being a town of shopkeepers, and town B by the agricultural arm of the party, being a town of farmers. So of course they hate each other, the two towns.
Town A is snotty and uppity, and town B residents are doltish farmers, depending on whom you ask.
The music school held a recital in town B last week, and I went since my daughter was playing there. She was one of the ringers. The music school, see, sent several pupils to this recital to give it a little class, although they actually attend class in town A, because although I hate to say it, not many of the other kids, and not many in the audience did very much to put the lie to town B's image.
It was scary at first. I'm used to recitals in town A. Lots of people dress up for them. There is a high level of music appreciation in the audience. It is taken seriously. Kids play real instruments like violin and piano, some go on to study music.
At the town B recital, though: primarily keyboards with boom-chicka-boom rhythm tracks. And the ringers of course. And the obligatory sad little girl sawing her violin in half with her bow.
And the proud relatives in the audience taking pictures, thick of neck, red of face and not wearing the latest fashions. Who are these people, I wondered. If we suddenly had an ice-age, would they kill me for my firewood? They'd probably eat me as well, I thought.
Who are these people? My neighbors. Proud parents. And I'm an insufferable snob. I paid more attention and noticed that the crowd was far rulier than at earlier recitals. Fewer little children ran around screaming this time, and none climbed onto the stage during performances. Everyone waited until the recital was over to begin eating the buffet food. They were learning. Music was having a civilizing effect on them.
And maybe town A is getting less snotty now that town B's strip mall is draining business away.
I have seen Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 on last Friday at the Oakridge Theatres in San Jose. We were lucky enough to get tickets for the 10:20 PM show. When we took our spot in the long line waiting to get seated, we received a printed apology letter from the theatre management. The short version: Our owners are Republican and we don't really want to show this movie, but it makes a lot of money and therefore we do it anyway. However we apologize for the bad taste. OUTRAGEOUS!
To top the whole pre-movie fun, a cop was checking the waiting line of people. My friend asked him if he has to check other movie lines, too, and he responded that he only had to show up for the Michael Moore movie. I more or less expected that my fingerprints would get taken before they let us move on. However, this was not the case - maybe next time.
If you click on www.moveon.org, you will find a link that leads you to house parties/potlucks all over the country taking place on Monday June 28. They all will connect live with Michael Moore. You can sign up online. Most of the places in my area - in/around San Jose, CA - are already filled up. I got a spot at a party in Sunnyvale, close to my office in Cupertino. I can't wait to get information about certain elements (scary elements) appearing in Fahrenheit 9/11.
America, it's time to get rid of the Mad Cowboy disease!
Without pretending to understand Czech politics...
The Prime Minister, Vladimir Spidla, has resigned, thus disbanding the government. The reason (as far as I can tell) for this is largely that the man is a modern milquetoast, but it also has to do with the fact that his party took a beating in the recent European Parliament elections. There's a certain amount of "at least under the Communists" talk going around, and the people I know who are more interested in politics than, for example, I am, take these things quite seriously.
Of course it's scary to think about Czechs honestly wanting the Communists back, and perhaps (after I've had some time to Get Serious) I could reflect that it all boils down to a "freedom of choice/freedom from choice" sort of thing. When you're buying bananas one at a time, you don't really have time to worry about whether the color of your kitchen cabinets reflects your True Soul.
But I think there's a more scary thing going on here, and I'm a little concerned that the big people in government seem to be overlooking it. Less than 30% of the eligible voters turned out for the EU elections. That's about 2.3 million people.
Contrast that with this: over three million people voted in the last round of the Czech Pop Idol (Cesko hleda SuperStar) contest. Three million. In the last round. Of a TV show.
Clearly, Mr. Spidla is going about things all wrong. What's needed is some spandex, some hair gel, a few of those headset/microphone things, and a good power ballad for each party. Then we'd see some voter turnout. Then we'd see some action.
As we went through our usual 'and how was your day day' routine at the dinner table this evening, I was almost- but not quite- sorry that I missed seeing the school today. But- on the other hand- I am enjoying not having to walk back and forth to that fool school a half dozen times a day, taking our precious Meg to her classroom.
It seems that everyone ( well, everyone except our children, half breeds that they are) wore orange clothing to school today. The teachers made it extra special by wearing funny ( or stupid, depending upon your point of view) hats throughout the day, perhaps shaped like an orange wooden shoe, or two hands clapping.
Sally then asked Han if she and Freek, the boy across the street, could string a line of orange flags from their respective windows, to create- as it were- a bower of orange on our little street.
Muttering about how much he disliked overt displays of nationalism, Han said 'no'.
And at the bakery they have a large selection of pastries, in various shades of orange.
Yes, tonight the dutch national football team plays against Germany in the EK.
( 1974 : never forget.)
We went hiking on the weekend in the mountains of the Austrian province of Carinthia, my family and my wife's parents. My father-in-law is from there, from a small village up the mountain, which would not be of further interest to anyone except that there used to be a mine there, iron ore, that dates back to "Roman times" and maybe even the Celts.
This is way up in the hills. The roads are, once you get off the main drag, bad to the extent that they are often single-lane roads, some by design and some because the other lane has slid down into the valley. Guardrails are rare. I can only imagine what it's like to drive there in the winter.
My father-in-law will be seventy next year, and he tires us out, running from lodge to lodge, and finally to a lake near the top of one of the mountains. That is one advantage hiking in Austria has over the United States - the lodges. If you get hungry or need a beer or a toilet, the next lodge isn't too far away. Also, no bears.
Actually, someone reintroduced a couple bears to Austria several years ago, but one was hit by a car, I think, and a hunter shot the other one. Not sure what the current status of bears is.
My father-in-law hikes so hard that the soles -- literally -- peel off his hiking boots. The next day my wife and I go looking for a new pair of boots for him. The town we are staying in has one potential store. We find the owners sitting inside, in the dark. They seem surprised to see us. As if they had been expecting someone else, a tall person wearing a long robe, carrying a scythe. They turn on the lights, we look at some boots, they don't have his size and recommend a town twenty miles away where we eventually find a pair.
There is a farm way up the mountain that is also an inn, with a restaurant where we eat when we visit. My wife's grandmother is buried there, in a small cemetery beside the inn. The people who run the inn have one family name, and the inn, and farm, have another. My father-in-law explains that this is common there. Every time we go there, he explains this to me. "The farm has one name," he says, "and the family living there has another," he says. "I see," I say. Sometimes I ask him why, although I know in advance it is pointless. "That's just the way it is," he says. Sometimes he adds, "That's just the way it's always been." This is when I realize I'll never be a serious journalist, because this explanation is sufficient to me.
This time, we are the only guests at the restaurant.
From our hotel, where we are practically the only guests, we drive down to a restaurant in town, a Gasthaus, for dinner. The roads are definitely in worse condition than two years ago when I was last here. Except for an elderly couple who soon leave, we are the only guests at the Gasthaus. Soccer (Greece vs Portugal) is on television. After dinner the owner, a young man, talks to us. He leans against the bar and explains that the butcher has gone bankrupt and another restaurant and the bakery is closed down and its building owned by the bank now. He says it's pointless, that everyone who can is moving out. School enrollment is falling and schools are being closed and combined.
My wife does some family research while we are there. We visit a couple graves in the cemetery and write down dates. She tells me the iron mine was shut down once in the 1930s, for five years. It was basically a company town, so how did they live? That was, we calculate, when her grandmother's brother ran away to get married in another town. She never forgave him for taking the family cow with him.
The mine reopened during the war, but it's been shut down for decades now.
There used to be 120 kids in his school, my father-in-law tells me. The one he attended is closed now, kids go to one further down the mountain; we ask a local woman how many kids there are, she thinks about it and tells us maybe four.
A few years ago, five or ten, they had a big exhibition at the mine and built this large modern addition, with lots of steel and glass and the town perked up a bit while the exhibition was going on, but it was only temporary.
At the Gasthaus, the young owner tells us this is a typical evening for him. He had one bus of tourists earlier in the week. It's a matter of time, he tells us, before he closes down.
A mass is held for my wife's grandmother in church that Sunday. My daughters are the only children there. The average age of the worshippers is seventy.
I was talking to a friend about the attitude towards alcohol in the Czech Republic, and I realized that it’s another one of those subjects where I’ve so completely assimilated the Czech version of reality that the American version now seems crazy to me.
The Czechs are mostly a beer-drinking people, and it’s not uncommon to see a grandmotherly type putting back a few pints with lunch. A lot of people have lofty political ideas about the "Velvet Divorce” (the Czech/Slovak split), but I know the truth: the Czechs wanted the split because once the liquor-drinking Slovaks were off behind their own little border, the Czechs were finally and easily able to edge out their German neighbors and become the highest per capita beer consuming nation in the world. Yay, Czechs! And yay to the grandmas, for doing their part to keep the country on top.
So beer is a fairly integral part of Czech culture (where else would the "best book of the century" be about a beer-loving soldier), and alcohol in general is looked upon with a fairly friendly eye. There are drunks, especially around the train station, and they are annoying (my friend described them as “belligerently trying to stand upright”) but the Czech attitude seems very much to be “hate the sinner, not the sin”. The people are idiots: the alcohol merely exacerbates, rather than actually causes, their public displays of idiocy.
My favorite definition of alcoholism is this: What's the difference between a drunk and an alcoholic? Drunks aren’t required to go to those boring meetings. A generally accepted Czech definition of alcoholism, while perhaps less witty, is a reflection of the attitude towards alcohol. An alcoholic is a person who is unable to perform the duties expected of him because of alcohol. An alcoholic cannot make it to work on time, or maybe even hold a job; cannot maintain relationships; cannot keep a family. In the United States, an alcoholic is a person who is unable to perform the duties expected of him without alcohol. If you cannot go a day without alcohol in the United States, regardless of how well you get through that day with a drink or two at the end of the bar at the end of the day, you are considered an alcoholic. Whereas here, you can close the bar every night, and as long as you can get to work the next day (ideally without effectively euthanizing the tram with your morning-after breath) and do a full day’s work, nobody seems to care.
Are Americans too puritanical? Are Czechs too permissive? I do think that the strictness of many U.S. laws makes it almost impossible to take a deep breath without the risk of breaking something. I’m well into my 30s, and I still am frequently required to show proof of my age to buy alcohol in the United States, where the legal drinking age is 21. I know it’s meant to discourage young people, and maybe it does, but it induces a fairly incredible thirst in me, which certainly seems the opposite of what one imagines to be the intended effect. The Czech official drinking age is 18, but the unofficial age is “as soon as you reach the bar”, and even recently, it wasn’t uncommon to send the most underfoot child off to the local pub to bring back a pitcher of whatever was on tap. The disadvantage is that most Czechs have been absolutely staggering at least once by the time they’re 15, but then few of them lack the sense to say “No!” when it’s suggested that they join in a quick boat race when they move away from the more watchful eyes of home (and you would most like to think of them as being responsible).
I should admit that part of my affection for the Czech attitude has to do with a certain, ah, vested interest in that point of view. So I know which approach I prefer. But I am interested to know: Is it a uniquely American attitude, this "away with rum!"; all alcohol is bad, and some is even worse? And if so, what’s it like elsewhere? If the U.S. attitude is not the norm, is the Czech attitude common, or is there a middle ground... what’s it like where you are?
At lunch yesterday with a visiting fellow American, we somehow stumbled on the topic of class divisions. Or rather class identification.
I mentioned that another friend of mine, who just moved back to Sweden after living eight years in London, was dismayed because his English girlfriend was ashamed of the fact that he worked as a hairdresser.
I said that it would probably be the same in the States.
"Yeah, I guess," my American friend said.
"And sort of the opposite is true, too," he continued. "Like people are overly impressed with the fact that I'm a veterinarian. Not that I mind talking about it. I guess it's just something that a lot of people wanted to be when they were young."
Which got me to thinking. America hates to admit it is classist, but it is. For the most part based on income, occupation and education, but classist it is. I can't think of a single friend of mine from the States who didn't have a university degree, so I guess I'm a middle class snob.
But here in Sweden, after five years I have yet to figure out what the class divisions are exactly, and more to the point, how people feel about them. My gut feeling is that, like America, Sweden prefers to think of itself as a more or less classless society. Which it isn't, of course. But university degrees seem to be much less common here than in the States, and salaries fall between a fairly narrow range so income can't be a very good differentiating denominator either.
I suppose class is something you're born into here, no matter how much Swedes hate to admit it. And the marker, of course, is how one speaks - every Swede I've ever met can place an upperclass Östermalm twang at fifty paces.
Is it possible that after nearly a century, George Bernard Shaw and his Pygmalian still ring true, ever so faintly?