If she only had a brain!

I am in the mood to be particularly vile today. I want to tear something or someone to pieces. I got out of bed after attending a great concert yesterday and the only thing that I can really think of doing is ripping someone to shreds. I mean this figuratively of course. I have chosen my weapon this morning as well for this deserved ripping: the written word, which as we shall soon see is the appropriate tool. I have chosen my target: Bristol Palin. Let the ripping commence!

She’s got a book deal and it’s for a memoir. Pardon my limited understanding of the literary world and the American system as a whole, but I have somehow been under the false impression my whole life that someone writes a memoir after they have accomplished something memorable in their life that probably effected others as well. Usually a memoir would include some great event. Think Mandela, Gandhi, or even someone as horrible as Silvio Berlusconi (but he does have stuff to write about). Bristol Palin though, what does she have? Well to be fair and balanced like her dear mother’s devoted channel, she was on Dancing with the Stars (or something like that) wasn’t she? Besides that she got knocked up, in what may or may not be the most famous out of wedlock pregnancy since the virgin birth (in America dear readers only in America), by a head case redneck named Levi Johnson.

Add to this that she is Sarah Palin´s daughter and suddenly we have a book taking shape. Wait, I still haven’t seen anything here that is really memorable at all! Maybe someone should tell her that this is what a diary is for: people’s lives that aren’t good enough to be memoirs. We live in a capitalist society and it’s the markets that decide whether or not a book like this comes to fruition (or comes to term). That means that someone at a conservative book company decided that this was really good enough to sell. I don’t know what this proves more than that the worst and most tasteless garbage sells pretty well apparently. Are they even going to pretend that Bristol is going to do the writing? Will Bristol even read the book? I would like to go on and mention that this girl is obviously a nitwit for allowing someone to do this for to her, but then when you think about it this might be how the Palins are planning to pay for her college, since they don’t make enough between Sarah’s Fox News skits and all those speaking fees. Desperate times call for desperate measures and so as the rest of America suffers in the midst of economic stagnation, they will have to do so with more information about the Palins on the front shelf at Borders.

Was Bristol famous before she got knocked up or was it during her first trimester? That anyone cares so much is a shame, and if any other politician’s kids have ever written books like this then shame on them as well. America is a place where nonsense is being sold for profit. Where can I cash in?

___________

Trains again and books of course

Thinking about the issue with the funding for trains and public transport in the United States. Why can’t they just give the money to the states that really want it? There must be some governors and states that can come up with a plan for the future, where they want to invest in and diversify their various transportation networks. Its one thing to call a train system socialist and all that political jumbo designed to ignore the actual issues at hand, but its another to consider that these kind of things might be really useful to have in the future.

The notion that urban development in the US is to be entirely based on the Automobile in the future is pretty laughable to be honest: you can only fit so many cars in an area. Where are we going to keep parking all the cars? The list of problems with not diversifying the transport options keeps growing. Is there anyone who is listening? I hear crickets chirping.

I have finished reading Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim. For anyone who enjoyed Heart of Darkness I can honestly say that from everything else I have read from him, this was the closest in magnitude (and yet it still didn’t quite make it). Now I have moved on to the Widows of Eastwick by John Updike. After that it will time for Günter Grass in German for the first time.

The Reading List as it stands:

1. I Married a Communist by Phillip Roth (finished)

2. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (finished)

3. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (non-fiction)

4. Going After Cacciato by Tim O´Brien

5. The Green House by Mario Vargas Lhosa (hard to find in English)

6. Grimms Wörter by Günter Grass

7. Buddha’s Little Finger by Victor Pelevin (taken a break for now)

8. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (finished)

9. Invisible by Paul Auster (finished)

10. The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike (currently reading)

11. Peeling the Onion by Günter Grass

____________

Guttenberg revisited!

I have been doing some more thinking about this plagiarism thing with Guttenberg. Basically I have started comparing the political systems and their processes in Germany and Italy. Is this an oversimplified way of thinking about things? Yes, without a doubt the two countries cannot simply be thrown together and thought of as having similarities. So why did I take the whole thing in that direction? I thought about Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. He is the scandal man of Europe. Everyone knows the man is rotten to the core and that while it may not be so in the case of money, the way he uses media and treats women has led to most people viewing the whole Italian democracy as something as a farce: if you can keep getting elected to office with all this baggage then you must be doing something right.

Now then, moving on to Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg. I should add first that he is no longer a Dr! No, once the University of Bayreuth had discovered and reviewed how much plagiarism was in his dissertation, they stripped him pretty fast. Lets be honest, it’s a major scandal. It’s something that most politicians wouldn’t survive. So why is he still defense minister? Well for one thing he is so popular among the CSU/CDU that they are well aware that if they lose him as the poster boy, then they are all but done for in the next set of elections. That begs the question though: are these two parties more interested in the next round of voting than they are in the integrity of their own leaders, and by extension Germany’s leaders? It certainly appears so.

What has Guttenberg done to defend himself? Not a thing worth reporting. He claimed it was at a time in his life when he was very busy (because only he has such times and that we should forgive him because of it). I highly doubt that if you tell a police officer anywhere in Germany that you were speeding because you were busy that they are going to say “oh, so sorry, can I accompany you and make sure you arrive on time.” It is highly doubtful. Lets go back to the Italy thing. I hear a lot of jokes about the Italians and their pathetic leader here in Germany from the Germans, but what I don’t hear is the sound of real outrage from Mr. Guttenberg’s own party demanding that he stop defiling their party (and by extension their democracy) with his mere presence. At least step down from the ministerial post. Better people have been fired for less.

_________

To doctor or not to Doctor...

There has been some big news brewing in Germany the last couple of days. CSU darling Theodor zu Guttenberg, a shooting star of the conservative movement and possibly the next chancellor, has been accused of plagiarizing. To make things as clear as possible he has been accused of plagiarizing several different parts of his doctoral thesis. I wasn’t very aware about how plagiarizing is dealt with in German universities until this case came up and now that I am learning, I am quite surprised to be honest. It seems that they are a bit more relaxed with these kinds of things. A lot of people have even been coming to his defense and claiming that this is somehow politically motivated.

Why would anyone ever have sympathy on a plagiarizer, especially when they have used their doctoral thesis to propel them to the place where they are today. As far as the accusations go that this is somehow politically motivated, it seems strange to have to ask this question but whatever: either he did or he didn’t plagiarize. If there is one small sentence somewhere in the thesis then that is one thing, now if there are several paragraphs worth of stolen sentences then I would say this seems like a slam-dunk case of a person loosing his doctorate. It would be even funnier if Merkel fired him after that. Of course like most politicians these days, he seems to not have anything stick to him too long. He is like Merkel in that sense: both of them are made out of Teflon.

Now Guttenberg has given up his “Dr” title, but while that seems a bit hasty (the university gives and takes those kinds of things), it isn’t as if he is out of the danger just yet. For one thing the man has lied to everyone, made the university he attended look really bad, and is now trying to simply take away his title as if that will magically fix everything. If he remains in power that will say a lot about German attitudes toward their possible next chancellor.

_________

Rick Scott and the Train to nowhere...

The governor of Florida, Rick “the crook” Scott, has turned down federal money for a high-speed rail link between Tampa and Orlando. My first reaction was: well big surprise here, a Republican/Tea Party governor turning down an infrastructure project. Since reading the article though, I have been giving the entire project a little extra thought.

At this moment in time there are places in the United States where high-speed rail would work (the Northeast corridor for instance) and places where it wouldn’t work (the Dakotas?). Arguments about density and cost-benefit and all that can be made over and over again and most times the numbers aren’t too thrilling if you are a train advocate. That being said there are some other issues that need to be taken into account when you have a project of this nature. First and foremost it’s an infrastructure project meaning an investment in the future. If you build something for the long term, then a lot of your long-range projections will be off because we aren’t fortunetellers who can peer into the future. One of the Republican arguments against rail investments is that it won’t be competitive. Yeah, I can see the point, but is the interstate system competitive? I don’t really think so, but I don’t hear anyone (but I could be deaf) yelling that we need private roads everywhere to compete with the federal roads.

Does anyone reading this know where I could find a chart comparing subsidies that road, airports, and rail receive per year? I would love to have a look at what the numbers say. Remember that development as a whole follows the pattern that the government lays out. If you don’t believe that then you just have to take into account that suburbs, the way we have them today, wouldn’t be possible without highways and the interstate system (and cheap oil but that is another post for another day). The American low-density existence wouldn’t be possible without this system. So why can’t we offer the Americans another option: that they wouldn’t have to live in the suburbs and could ride a train? I thought Americans liked freedom of choice. I hope they spend all that federal money somewhere else, where the people like having jobs and would like to diversify their transport options for any variety of reasons, plus they like offering their kids new futures. Didn’t America used to be about optimism?

__________

Reading List

Short post today to save time. There is nothing much going on for a report or comment. We still have no real information about how our water-damaged apartment is going to be fixed. The Champions League game tonight between Arsenal and Barcelona should be a wonder to behold. Barcelona should win to be honest. Would love to see the Englishmen win this one and then take the Camp Nou by storm. Not going to happen?

Here is the reading list as it stands for 2011:

1. I Married a Communist by Phillip Roth (finished)

2. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (finished)

3. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (non-fiction)

4. Going After Cacciato by Tim O´Brien

5. The Green House by Mario Vargas Lhosa (hard to find in English)

6. Grimms Wörter by Günter Grass

7. Buddha’s Little Finger by Victor Pelevin (taken a break for now)

8. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (currently reading)

9. Invisible by Paul Auster (finished)

This is currently all I've got, so I would love some tips from anyone reading this blog.

__________

Brooks, what are you saying?

Just finished reading David Brooks latest column in the NY Times. It’s an interesting observation on a book by Tyler Cowen called “The Great Stagnation” that I have yet to read. I wanted to add a few thoughts of my own to Brooks ideas. The idea of the book is that as society in the United States has changed from an industrial and manufacturing base to a more consumer oriented society we have lost a few things. First off, more people now choosing careers that create fewer jobs. For instance that manufacturing nowadays is reliant on less people and that jobs for other companies require less people. This isn’t really surprising at all. In many ways its merely a confirmation of the fact that more of the jobs we used to do by hand, or that were labor intensive, are now being done by computer controlled robots or have moved overseas. Is there really a big surprise in that Mr. Brooks?

Brooks then seems fascinated by this in the sense that he thinks there was some sort of golden age. That according to Cowen’s book, and Brooks seemingly agrees, the economic growth accomplished by the United States up to the seventies was done cheaply. Ok, that may be the case when you run it through certain economic modeling, but as most people can figure out for themselves the problem lies with what your pricing mechanism is. For instance we have built a society based around the Automobile. What if we then run out of cheap fuel? Then our very way of life at the moment, which is (has been?) extremely cheap in the United States (a post-industrial nation), suddenly becomes more expensive. Once again how one makes such calculations so as to conclude that things were cheap seems tricky at best. Add to this that the nostalgia for the way things used to be is usually based on a false understanding of the past. To belabor the point: how we view the past is always dependent on our current situation, both when it comes to means and how we are doing in terms of psychology.

For example, I am unemployed at the moment and have a hard time finding work in the field that I studied. Therefore I tend to conclude, at the moment, that I have done something wrong during my academic years and that this is having an affect at this moment. Whether or not this notion is based on reality is another thing. Were I to be employed I would instead conclude that I had studied exactly the right thing at the right time. To be fair to Brooks I should probably read that book…

__________

Life takes a strange bounce

It’s been lovely today. Its just one of those days where it didn’t really matter how much you got right to start with or for how long for that matter. You come home at five in the afternoon. Your wife is cleaning up the bathroom. You wonder why and then you have a look. A pipe somewhere in the ceiling has burst or something like that and suddenly the whole bathroom has been destroyed. Like I said, at that moment in time it doesn’t matter anymore how much had been accomplished that day, because the rest of it is ruined.

You try to smoke a cigarillo, the kind you really like, the kind you like to enjoy because they are easy to enjoy. It’s impossible at this point to enjoy anything. You have applied for something from the Tax Office. It was supposed to arrive eight days ago. It’s holding up your payments from a job you did last month. You call them, and the first two times they transfer you to a phone line that eventually hangs up on you. You call them back the next day. You finally reach the person who processed your paperwork. They tell you that there isn’t anything they can do, since it is someone else in another department somewhere that sends out the official document with the special number that you kind of needed a week ago.

Sometimes the ball doesn’t go into the open goal when you kick it from four meters out. It bounces off one post and then the other before it runs out back onto the field and a defender clears it away. Football can sometimes be a great metaphor for life. I keep hitting the posts at the moment. It’s so close and yet it seems that really its always so far away.

_________

Things of present

I haven´t found the drive to write anything on this blog recently. I don´t really know why. I have been writing though. Its been a long time since I got beyond writing one page of fiction and then finding myself stuck in writers block. I haven´t had an aha moment though: instead I just pushed through the garbage (and there is a lot of it) and found that there was something to write about after all. I am writing about Latvia. No that isn´t true actually. I am trying to write about people´s experiences with Latvia. Whether its a way to achieve an understanding for myself or whether or not it actually becomes something worth reading will hang on me.

I will try to have another post soon about the Swedish national team. The B-team easily demolished Cyprus´ A-team so lets see what the A-team can do to the Ukraine. I am stoked.

________

A wish list or an article about the Swedish National Team

There has been a slight hint of spring in the air the last couple of days. It could be the lack of snow (though its still freezing outside) or it could be that the first real Internationals are being played next week. I think its a combination of the two. As a follower of team Sweden (BlåGult) I have been reading as many articles as possible about the selected squad and what can be expected from them. I tend to drift from euphoric phases of optimism to the deepest depths of pessimism. I want to see Sweden at Euro 2012. To get there, its going to take a lot of heart and hard work. Its also going to take a bit of luck.

Sweden isn´t bad really, but they aren´t world beaters at the moment. The 4-1 loss in Amsterdam at the hands of the Netherlands was a good reminder or wake up call about the quality we have at the moment. Sure there are stars in the team, players even who have the potential to be something great. The problem I see is that many of them aren´t taking that final step up. I will grant that its easy to sit here and couch-coach. I don´t see the practices and I don´t get to watch all the games. I wish I did though. I wish I were a players scout.

For Sweden to reach Euro 2012 I think a few things have to happen. First we need to find a solution to the right back. Right now we are playing a young guy from Rosenborg BK named Mikael Lustig. He is still young enough where he can be developed, but I think that Adam Johansson from IFK Göteborg is a better option. I think he is more mature and a better defender than what Lustig is at the moment. A strong and solid defensive back four is the kind of base that Sweden needs to have if they are going to have a chance to hang with the bigger teams. You have to be able to rely on the back four to hold down the ship when the storms are raging. If you can´t rely on them, then there will be no solid effort on scoring once you get one or two of those rare chances against a top ten side. Sweden´s other problem is the midfield. Anders Svensson needs to stay because without him at the moment there isn´t much holding the whole thing together. I also have to admit I like Kim Källström, though he has a nasty habit of disappearing or being over-eager at times. If he can get his game together when it matters he is one hell of an asset. One player who needs to take a solid step forward in his personal development and really grab the bull by the horns is Rasmus Elm. He has had a lot of injury problmes and fitness issues the last season and a half, but it seems he is finally starting to move forward again.

The question is can he be what the national team needs: a playmaker? The same question mark hangs over his Alkmaar teammates head Pontus Wernbloom. Sure he has been good against average sides such as Hungary, but can he really put his play into a higher gear when the shit storm is raging? These are the kinds of questions that Sweden needs to answer in these two games next week. What about Bajrami and Sebastian Larsson? I am still not sure they are really the answer. I am hoping though, hoping really hard. The next challenge coming our way to Euro 2012 is Moldova. Sounds easy on paper, but its three points that we can´t be without. Its three points we have to have.

________

Saturday Post

Its Saturday and its been a pretty productive day by my own standards. I am right in the middle of making delicious vegetarian lasagna for Clara, myself, and two friends of ours. At the same time I am also making vegetable broth from all the leftover vegetables we have collected over the last week and a half. This is one of those things that remain a work in progress. This is the fourth time I have made it and I am still learning how to do it and what the combination for a good taste is. This time I added some stalks of rosemary. We will see if it adds anything to it. I want to make my kitchen into a place where I do most, if not all of the cooking from scratch. Sometimes that is not possible, and sometimes there is simply not enough time. There is a massive difference in taste, and taking the broth as an example, last week we made a soup using the broth as a base and then adding some more fresh vegetables and pasta and letting them simmer some. The final taste was incredible and not even comparable to store bought broth.

I haven’t watched a single episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska (I think that’s the name) but I can’t help but wonder if she runs for president, will she then have a reality show about how the whole thing goes? What would that be called? Sarah Palin Goes to Washington? Sarah Palin’s Washington? If anyone has any good ideas then please post them below.

The new congress spent some time reading the constitution for everyone to hear. I like that Time Magazine asks the question as to whether or not there is some kind of Constitution Cult that is rearing its head right now in the US. The quote at the end by Jefferson is pretty damning of the whole “original interpretation” idea. Well there will always be nuts among us, now we have people who fall for the American Religion. Classic.

__________

First Post

The New Year is here. It brought with it large explosions that lasted up to around four in the morning and then piles and piles of dirty snow and the wrappers and leftovers of the fireworks. The city, of course, is the one who will have to clean the whole thing up like they do every year. I think this is probably one of those ironic moments in Germany, a land so proud about being clean: that on New Year’s eve and day its ok to litter. Going to the baker in the morning was like walking through a bar just after they closed: half empty bottles and cups lined the street.

My first book of 2011 I actually started in 2010. It was Phillip Roth’s “I Married a Communist.” It was only the second Roth novel that I have ever read, but I will admit that it won’t be the last. While at times the story line was bland, the characters themselves kept the thing afloat and all the insights into the McCarthy era were extremely interesting and irritating at the same time. It will forever be one of those classic ideas to me that a country can call itself the greatest on earth and then turn around and tell its own people what they have to believe in order to be permitted to work.

That’s the thing I want to point out as we begin the new year: that our end results or present versions of old projects often have little to do with their origins and history. The original United States allowed for slavery and gave no votes to women, and yet if you speak to some people, they would give up everything they had to go back to that time of constitutional purity. I am guessing that most of these people have no background in American history beyond the third grade.

The book list for 2011 will keep the books that weren’t finished from last year as well.

1. I Married a Communist by Phillip Roth (finished)

2. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (considering buying this after all the reviews it got)

3. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (non-fiction)

4. Going After Cacciato by Tim O´Brien

5. The Green House by Mario Vargas Lhosa (hard to find in English)

6. Grimms Wörter by Günter Grass

7. Buddha’s Little Finger by Victor Pelevin (Currently reading in German)

Finally an apology for today’s post, I know it isn’t that great or fiery or whatever, but it’s the first one of the year so it needed to be gotten out of the way.

First picture of the year was a great success as well: Quiche with tomatoes, Asiago cheese, and spinach.

Not Impressed

So there was this guy who blew himself up in downtown Stockholm yesterday. Apparently he blew up his car as well. I am pretty sure that when you act as a terrorist you are supposed to maximize the amount of damage you cause to your attended targets. This is especially true if you are a suicide bomber, as this man appears to have been. The idea is not just to wreck your own car and injure two witnesses.

Now all the questions are starting to sound like this “did he have an accomplice, like say Al-Qaida or something like that helping him out?” This is where one should be prepared for endless analysis and conjecture. The Swedish media is salivating. My first guess is that this was a lonely (read isolated) young man who thought this was somehow his only course of action. I also have to go by the assumption that he was a nut job. The meaning here is obvious: he failed to do more than make second page headlines after the first evening outside of Sweden. Apparently he was upset about Lars Vilks. Well that is fine, it is ok to dislike someone else’s artwork, but that is in no way a justifiable reason to blow yourself up.

If you don’t like freedom of speech there are plenty of shit countries that one can go live in and please don’t understand me wrong: I don’t like religion, but I believe that these people have a right to believe what they want to believe, but it isn’t allowed to affect others in a physically harmful way. Ever. Period. I believe in freedom of speech and I think it should be protected, and that includes mocking religions. To be honest: if your religion can’t take a joke or any kind of criticism for that matter, then there is something wrong with that religion to begin with.

Another thing that would-be radicals should take into consideration is that when you go around blowing yourselves up like this, it doesn’t do the people left behind any good. Suicide bombing has not solved any problems, instead it has the opposite effect: it makes people like your cause even less. It makes you seem strange. Its even stranger to a computer addicted Western world that can’t understand the fondness a few extremists have with a weird, sullen man in a cave somewhere in what is left of Afghanistan. Think about it, how is your family going to be treated after you kill someone else because of your religion. Terrorism is a way of destroying the societies we live in today, but what they aim to replace it with is so much worse than any of the problems we are currently facing. I just hope the Swedes don’t overreact now, but I won’t be surprised if they do. The Sverige Demokraterna are going to eat it up like jello!

_________

Neruda for Saturday

From Isla Negra: Memorial de Isla Negra

Exiles! Distance

Grows thicker.

We breathe air through a wound.

To live is a necessary obligation.

So, a spirit without roots is an injustice.

It rejects the beauty that is offered it.

It searches for its own unfortunate country

And only there knows martyrdom or quiet.

-Pablo Neruda “Exiles”

__________

Friday Post

I am on my second coffee for the day and I do believe its time for a post about that there reading list. I am currently reading Phillip K. Dick´s novel Ubik, which is probably going to take me until Wednesday at the earliest to finish. The story seems fantastic, but I am just not in the reading mood today. I still haven’t gotten a shot at the Franzen novel which I am guessing has to do with the amount of people trying to read it and I just didn’t get to my reservation fast enough. What will probably happen now is that because I have heard so much about the book, I won’t enjoy it and secondly I probably know too much about the story. Here is the reading list with one new addition:

1. Der Kleine Brüder by Sven Regener (finished)

2. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike (finished)

3. The Handmaid´s Tale by Margaret Atwood (finished)

4. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (considering buying this after all the reviews it got)

5. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (non-fiction)

6. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (orig. Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said)

7. The 158-Pound Marriage by John Irving (finished)

8. Going After Cacciato by Tim O´Brien

9. The Green House by Mario Vargas Lhosa

10. Grimms Wörter by Günter Grass

11. Wait Until Spring, Bandini by John Fante (finished)

12. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick(finished)

13. Ubik by Philip K. Dick

14. The Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick (finished)

15. Porno by Irvine Welsh (finished)

So I finally got around to reading the sequel to Trainspotting, which I consider to be Mr. Welsh’s best novel to date. All in all I am not so impressed. I will admit it was entertaining and all that, but it was quite a departure from the original. By that I mean that Trainspotting was a fantastic story told through remarkable characters, while Porno was the same characters but nine years older and without a great story. Hard but fair.

Tonight I am having dinner with some friends at Lei e Lui in Mitte. It’s the same restaurant that catered my wedding. The food is always fantastic and I am looking forward to great food and seeing good friends. Hopefully I will take some photos.

___________

FIFA and Wikileaks

So the world cup went to Russia and Qatar. Since those will be the summers when I will supposedly have some money in the bank, it’s too bad that the destination to watch either Germany or Sweden (both?) play is going to be either of these.

Now to be blatantly honest, Russia has some breathtaking nature and to go hiking or canoeing on some of those rivers would be amazing beyond words. It’s the cities (other than St. Petersburg) and the anti-foreign mindset that bothers me the most about Russia. Not to mention the levels of corruption. This is before we even start talking about Qatar! I am guessing it will be the first world cup with tea and coffee as a sponsor, and no beers served on the premises. Fifa goes where the money goes and right now that isn’t in the US, Spain, or England. The only real surprise here is really that China didn’t make a bid, because given the odds they would have had a good chance as well. Bizarre.

_____________

The Wikileaks “scandal” seems to be dominating the headlines in most of the western countries, or at least in the countries where I read the newspapers. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t quite get what the big deal is. Please open your diplomacy and international affairs textbooks to page 1: every nation looks out for its best interests 100% of the time. While the descriptions of the heads of state may have been cruel, it wasn’t as if we didn’t assume that this was how the leaders view one another. The real scandal here is with those who act outraged and pretend as if the USA is some sort of beacon of enlightenment. Its not and never has been. We really should accept that, it would be so much healthier than believing the American religion.

____________

Book Review: The Handmaid´s Tale by Margaret Atwood

In our society today we can look around us and see the obsession that our fellow humans spend on conspiracy theories and the fear of a new totalitarian society. People like Glenn Beck spend hours of their time trying to convince followers that a person like Barack Obama is a socialist who will, if given the chance, turn the United States into a Third Reich or a Stalinist Communist land. Whether or not one takes such arguments seriously or not, the point that fear mongers are allowed so much time to spout them is what is worrisome. As citizens we should be involved in our democracy and take good care in understanding what our politicians are advocating for. That is a significant departure from lying and pretending that something sinister is at work when the reality is otherwise. Case in point: the 2010 midterms where the democratic party lost their majority in congress, proving that democracy is just as alive and well as it was before. I bring this up as an example to show that paranoid thinking is easy to indulge in today, mainly because fact checking often seems to be virtue long forgotten by today’s media. The inability to fairly consider differences of opinion and the conservative American principle of rejecting other countries ideas because they are too “European” is where we are today.

Now onto the dystopian novel that is The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood paints a picture of an American society where a group of fundamentalist Christians have taken over the United States government, using the excuse that society has become too liberal and too free to be able to carry on. This sect, or better put paramilitary organization, of fundamentalists quickly goes about turning the US into a theocracy in many ways reminiscent of present day Iran, though as the book goes on even more extreme in substance and action. Women, within the first couple of weeks of the take-over, have their rights taken away. All the things that women’s suffrage fought long and hard for vanish almost over night. This fundamental aspect of the story then draws our focus away from the more historic aspects of what such a take-over would imply and takes us to the narrator, who relates her experience of the oppression. She doesn’t attempt to be a hero; in fact all she really wants is to have her husband and child returned to her. At times, she even appears to accept the new political regime of oppression as it is and instead looks to her survival first. To be fair in many ways Atwood is more exploring the way women have been oppressed through time, than she is the practical implications of a Theocracy. This is one of the strengths of the novel.

One of the parts that had the biggest impact on me was the idea that a society like this is only truly capable of coming about when the elements needed for its realization are already in place. Christianity historically has not always been very favorable to intelligent and strong women, despite what the more recent teachings of the church would lead us to believe (and they have made significant strides in some of these areas). Still there remains in American and in Europe this nostalgia, it’s fair to call it sexist, that things were better previously in the organization of the “traditional” gender roles. Then again, this is itself the most common fallacy in the appropriation of history by fundamentalists and conservatives: things were actually better before and we were happier without our current freedoms. Its one of the ideas, expressed by the oppressors in the novel, that there are two types of freedom: “freedom to” and “freedom from.” The kind of freedom we had in the liberal USA in the book was freedom to and what they are given by the fundamentalists is freedom from. This is a typical argument we can spot today in the arguments of those who want to tell women how they should dress: that requiring women to cover up gives them freedom is the most normal argument for heard for the veil. Going along with this is the notion that women are to blame for the horrible treatment they are often afforded by men: they dress provocatively and that is why men rape them. This horrible idea doesn’t deserve further explanation as it never has and never will hold any substance.

Atwood also deals with a very important topic in the idea of the control and possession of a person’s body by others. In the case in the book, the women of the Republic of Gilead have lost their ability to choose sexual partners (and preferences) and are either forced into arranged marriages or used to produce offspring for those at the top who are unable to do so for a variety of reasons. Perhaps this is the greatest fear that Atwood expresses: the fear of losing control of ones body. The narrator can accept the significant changes to her society, but what she has the most trouble with is that others want to control her body and dictate how she should care for it. The other idea expressed somewhere in the midst of this is that the men in our society were unhappy with the way things were going: that they no longer felt satisfied with their lives. That such a problem would necessitate oppression is laughable and disturbing all at the same time: and yet it’s been a kind of rationalization used by oppressive regimes before. The notion that those who impose repression are doing it for our best is as old as humanity itself.

For those who have not read the novel I don’t want to write too much more and destroy it for you, but I do on the other hand want to recommend it as a reminder that we should remain active and not give fundamentalism or false historical narratives about our nation’s past the chance to gain ground in our society.

________

Tuesday´s Photo of the Week!

I have worked in Restaurants as a cook for several years now. It’s an experience that gives me a strong sense of what is and what isn’t good, quality food. Something I have learned while living in Europe, both as a consumer and as a cook, is that restaurants located on tourist shopping streets tend not to have good food. Instead they sell something more like an idea and you just happen to get food along with that idea or concept. Now of course there may be exceptions to every rule, however I don’t think this is one of them:

Add to this that they specialize in schnitzel and then also have pizza. I don’t get how the two fit together so well.

Taking a train ride for ten hours (to and return) gave me plenty of time to read so here is the reading list as it stands:

1. Der Kleine Brüder by Sven Regener (finished)

2. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike (finished)

3. The Handmaid´s Tale by Margaret Atwood (finished)

4. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (considering buying this after all the reviews it got)

5. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (non-fiction)

6. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (orig. Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said)

7. The 158-Pound Marriage by John Irving (finished)

8. Going After Cacciato by Tim O´Brien

9. The Green House by Mario Vargas Lhosa

10. Grimms Wörter by Günter Grass

11. Wait Until Spring, Bandini by John Fante (finished)

12. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

13. Ubik by Philip K. Dick

14. The Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick (finished)

I am currently on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Dick, which will be followed by Ubik. The Handmaid’s Tale by Atwood was so good that it’s going to get a review in this blog tomorrow so watch for it.

_________

Cologne

Its been snowing softly all day. Its cold outside and on the surfaces elevated above the ground, on parked car roofs and other inanimate objects, it’s staying. It’s still too warm to stay on the paved streets or sidewalks that are still busy. The minute the sun pokes its head through the overcast, grey skies is the moment that it will be gone even from those places. Its only November, there will still be plenty of time for blizzards and freezing weather.

Cologne is on the list of things to do tomorrow. It’s going to be a quick little weekend. The train rolls out around eight in the morning and then we arrive sometime after noon. There will be some time spent with friends and family. On Sunday there is mass and Clara’s cousin will go through some Catholic ceremony-not one that I am familiar with. Cologne is a place that I don’t care to live in but love to visit. It’s a small city yet it retains a feeling of its own steadily eroding self-importance. It was once one of the greatest cities in Europe. My how the mighty have fallen.

Sometimes, when living in foreign countries, we learn to make the most out of the small things. For instance: we learn to laugh at the signs that incorporate two languages at once. Sometimes it’s done to be cool, as if the native word wouldn’t suffice, a pattern all to common in Sweden, and others it’s done just for humor. This is probably one of the latter:

I am more than halfway through The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. It’s been fantastic this far and once I finish with it, I will write a post or two reviewing it. Have a lovely weekend.

_________

Thursday´s Nameless Post

I finished the novel The Man in the High Castle last night. It’s a chilling reminder of what life might have been like, had there been a different ending to the Second World War. Of course the problem with a book like that is that while the scenario suggested is plausible, so are an endless number of other outcomes. Sometimes history turns and pivots on such small moments of time and singular events, while at others there is more than meets the eye, and sometimes we never know exactly what lead to today.

Earlier, I was sitting on the bus on my way home from the unemployment office, which wasn’t so bad when you consider the horror stories that some people tell about the bureaucracy here. In any case, I was still thinking about the future and the various shapes that the future is capable of taking and I realized that most of them, when we sit and imagine them, come out as being dystopias. Especially in this day and age of cynicism: every future is a dystopia of some sort waiting to happen, every utopia we can imagine must have some dark side to it. Why is that? Is it possible that the future is always unpredictable, meaning beyond our control, and therefore to be feared? Or is it the unknown part of the future that leads to the fear of it? This kind of thinking is what I imagine is responsible for the conservative movements continuous worship of the past. The notion that it was better before and so we should return to that is ingrained together with a fear of the future. It also seems like it has some kind of control elements to it: when everything is defined and understood; then it is safe. Isn’t that why we often dislike new art or new music? Because we haven’t fully been able to make sense of or understand it yet?

Perhaps it’s simpler than all of the above reasoning. We know too much about our past, we have seen what humans are capable of toward one another and toward nature; therefore we assume we will not get any better than we already are (and the idea that we are somehow doing better than before is dependant on what measurements are being taken and by whom).

Here is the reading list as it currently stands:

1. Der Kleine Brüder by Sven Regener (finished)

2. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike (finished)

3. The Handmaid´s Tale by Margaret Atwood (currently reading)

4. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (considering buying this after all the reviews it got)

5. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (non-fiction)

6. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (orig. Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said)

7. The 158-Pound Marriage by John Irving

8. Going After Cacciato by Tim O´Brien

9. The Green House by Mario Vargas Lhosa

10. Grimms Wörter by Günter Grass

11. Wait Until Spring, Bandini by John Fante

12. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

13. Ubik by Philip K. Dick

14. The Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick

_____________