Rottin' in Denmark

It appears Vox is going the way of all startups, so I moved my blog to Wordpress. The new URL is RottenInDenmark.Wordpress.com. 

is that you're hardwired to find all kinds of irrational shit inexplicably moving.

1-03 If I Could Hear My Mother Pray

Yesterday I participated in a swimming race through the canals of Copenhagen. I was talking to my buddy online afterwards.

Dave

What are you up to?

Me
I have hypothermia! And jellyfish stings all over! I did a race in the CPH canals today, and it was a bit more of an ... undertaking than I had expected

Dave
Jellyfish?!

Me
yeah they’re everywhere here!
fuckin ridiculous. I was literally the only one without a wetsuit.
The doctors practically had to pull me out of the water, and I sat 2 inches away from a heating unit for 30 minutes after the race, unable to move or speak

Dave
Well...

Me
You know that footage of the cow with mad cow disease, where it’s all popping and locking, but it doesn’t fall over? That was me walking to my towel.
I was drooling and moaning and shit. The doctors made me eat a banana, and I couldn’t taste or swallow it, I was just pushing it around with my tongue and making vowel sounds through it. Attractive stuff.

Dave
And jellyfish?!

Me
yeah my nose looks like a penis, all red and angry at the tip
I got one on my cheek, too, and both hands
This city's uninhabitable, I tellya

Dave
Just the canals!

Me
it's nuts, I don't even remember the race.
I do know that I swallowed a lot of saltwater, though, my throat is all scratchy

Dave
I don’t think you won...

Me
I remember swimming through patches of motor oil and some little garbage-islands, I’m glad I retained that.
I swam WAY faster than I expected though! I wanted to get OUT of that water. Crawl stroke for 2km! Personal best!
Though, the rest of the afternoon has been a personal worst. I literally had peanut butter and whip cream on a fork for dinner because I can’t face leaving the house. 19 degrees outside feels like the tundra.

Dave
But you've swum in there before sans wetsuit?

Me
Yeah when the water's been warmer. It was 16 degrees today. I'm used to like 18 or 19, plus only doing it for like 20 mins at a time. Today was more than 45 mins

Dave
Fail

Me
i feel like its hella win
I beat nature
The only one without a wetsuit! buncha pussies in this country

Dave
Riiight

Me
It's funny how I totally thought there would be no consequences of this. I literally did not think it through at all. Like 'of COURSE it'll be fine swimming in urban canals in late summer with no protection. Having never done this before.'
People in the start line were like ‘you’re gonna get hypothermia dude’ and I was like ‘haha right. High five!’
The bike ride home was particularly drastic. My legs were still shaking, and I could barely steer

Dave
Will you be in bed all tomorrow?

Me
Still, I feel rather badass. In spite of cancelling all my non-couch Saturday plans due to my epic win.
haha, nah I'll be fine after some sleep

-

I found a book called ‘The Status Seekers’ in a bookstore in the Faroe Islands for a dollar (it was an unmanned bookstore. You pick a book, check the price, then deposit the cash through a slot in the office door. Only in Scandinavia!)

The book is by Vance Packard, a forgotten blip in the genre of bestseller psychology. It was published in 1959, and chronicles the increasing class stratification of America in the midst of its first period of sustained income and economic growth.

It’s a fascinating artifact, both for its descriptions of things that haven’t changed since 1959 (Bosses hate mingling with subordinates! People buy fancy cars to demonstrate their status!) and what has (Rotary clubs! Upper class people go to church!).

This is the third book I’ve read recently about the 1950s in America, and the more I learn about the decade, the more I think its conception in the popular memory is utterly false, to the point of perniciousness.

The 50s were awful. Our idea of them as embodying universal prosperity, equal opportunity and family dinners is based entirely on movies and TV. Imagine someone 100 years from now extrapolating the dimensions of our society solely on the basis of ‘High School Musical’ and ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’.

-

The dark side of the 1950s wasn’t depicted in 1950s music, movies or books. That’s precisely what the dark side of the 1950s was: Nothing that scraped the veneer was tolerated.

This extended far beyond TV and movies. As Packard describes, applicants were barred from employment if they weren’t white, happily married or Protestant enough. All forms of socialization—from workplaces to schools to social clubs to churches—were designed to pre-emptively exclude those who didn’t fit in.

-

The 1950s were also the decade where The Greatest Generation laid the foundations for everything that sucks in America today. They abandoned their inner cities and built an infrastructure devoted to mass-produced suburbs and shopping malls. They invented the commute.

More perniciously, and something I never really realized until Packer pointed it out, was that they built a society where classes rarely come into contact with each other. As the physical geography changed, neighbourhood institutions and social structures could more restrict themselves to a narrow demographic band. Neighborhood churches and schools became increasingly focused on servicing the universally rich (or universally poor) residents who lived near them.

‘What happens to the personalities of people who live in communities where the houses for miles around are virtually identical, and the people seen are all from the same socio-economic slice? It is too early to tell,’ Packer writes. I think with 40 extra years of perspective on his question, we can answer it.

-

Someday the country won’t be run by people who look back on this time of social exclusion with nostalgia. It’s time we moved on from our simplistic idea that the 1950s were America’s glory days, and start constructing them as they were: The increasingly panicked flailing of a generation that would go to any length to preserve its unearned privilege. 

I was visiting my friend Rogvi in the Faroe Islands this weekend. The Faroe Islands is a colony of Denmark, a small island chain right between Norway and Iceland. It’s been inhabited by Vikings, and little else, for the last 1,000 years. Most of it looks like this:

-

Just after I arrived, Rogvi took me on a driving tour.

‘Where are we off to?’
‘I heard on the radio that they caught some whales in Kvivik,’ he said.

Apparently a whale hunt works like this.

1. A fisherman spots a pod of whales.
2. He broadcasts the location of the pod to all other fishermen in the area.
3. The other fishermen rush to his location
4. En masse, the fishermen use their boats to push the pod of whales closer and closer to the shore.
5. Eventually, the whales simply wash themselves up on the beach
6. The fisherman hop off their boats and club the whales in the head to knock them unconscious.
7. The fishermen sever the whale’s spinal cord with a long knife they keep with them whenever they’re on the sea. Imagine a ninja cutting someone’s jugular, only in the back of their head instead of the front.

The entire process takes less than 10 minutes, and about 1,000 whales are killed like this every year.

Here’s what we saw when we arrived in Kvivik.

-

-

-

The intestines are the only part of the whale you can’t eat.

 

-

Though dolphins, humpback whales and killer whales are regularly spotted up here, Faroe Islanders only kill pilot whales. The carcasses ranged from golden retriever-sized infants to full-grown males the length of a Cadillac. One guy was hosing them down while another tried to arrange them in rows with a forklift.

It was about as effective as eating sushi with a blindfold. The whales were sliding all over the place.

-

-

-

Each of these hunts yields thousands of pounds of whale meat and blubber. The person who first spotted the whale has first dibs, and gets the largest share. All the fishermen who participated in the hunt are also allocated a ‘part’. After that, parts are reserved for village residents, local hospitals and old-folks homes. If there’s any left, people simply sign their name in a sort of guestbook and are also given a share.

A hunt like this can yield 500 parts, each consisting of about 100 pounds of meat. People eat it year-round, and some ends up in restaurants.

As Rogvi put it, anyone who eats meat isn’t allowed to be sickened or disturbed by this. Many of the industrial processes between ‘cow’ and ‘hamburger’ are significantly less edifying than these pictures. Humans eat meat. Meat comes from animals. This is just what that process looks like.

Rogvi also pointed out that, for about 1,000 years, whales provided one of the only sources of food for Faroe Islanders. Only about 2 percent of the islands are suitable for agriculture, and meat from fish and whales—raw, dried, smoked or boiled—was literally the only food available.

I’m definitely not convinced on the latter point. We don't own slaves in 2010 just because, hey, for a few hundred years there, it was the only agricultural labour available. The repugnance of human activity is not related to its longevity.

But there’s something to the former. I don’t know if I found the experience of seeing all those whales uncomfortable because I think whales are closer to humans on the sentience-spectrum than cows, or simply because I’ve never been that close to a bunch of large, freshly killed animals before. Either way, it's hard to stand within smell-distance of the consequences your consumption behavior and not feel compelled to defend it. 

-

I'm reading post-Nazi literature again:

The program for the destruction of severely handicapped and mentally ill Germans, [...] set up two years before the Final Solution[:] Here, the patients, selected within the framework of a legal process, were welcomed in a building by professional nurses, who registered them and undressed them; doctors examined them and led them into a sealed room; a worker administered the gas' others cleaned up; a policeman wrote up the death certificate.

Questioned after the war, each one of those people said: What, me, guilty? The nurse didn't kill anyone, she only undressed and calmed the patients, ordinary tasks in her profession. The doctor didn't kill anyone, either, he merely confirmed a diagnosis according to criteria established by higher authorities. The worker who opened the gas spigot, the man closest to the actual act of murder in both time and space, was fulfilling a technical function under the supervision of his superiors and doctors.

The workers who cleaned out the room were performing a necessary sanitary job -- and an highly repugnant one at that. The policemand was following his procedure, which is to record each death and certify that it has taken place without any violation of the laws in force. So who is guilty?

[...] Once again, let us be clear: I am not trying to say I am not guilty of this or that. I am guilty, you're not, fine. But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might also have done what I did. With less zeal, perhaps, but perhaps also with less despair.

That's from Jonathan Littell's 'The Kindly Ones'.

Reading the novel's first few pages (all of the above appears before, like, page 10. This book is not messing around.), I wondered if the postwar generation is the first in history to live with this understanding, that they might have acted monstrously if they were born in different circumstances. 

I don't know how previous generations and civilizations looked upon their history, but I doubt it was with as much guilt and apology as we do. From colonialism to slavery to segregation to, hell, the '80s, our construction of history amounts to a sort of collective cringe. 

When we're taught about Nazism, it often comes with an acknowledgement that it could have been us on either end of the rifle or the gas chamber. We're asked to empathize not only with the victims, but with the perpetrators, in a way that we aren't in other historical episodes. No one ever says 'it could have been you raping and pillaging through the northern isles', or 'under different circumstances, you might have sentenced Jesus to death'.

Yet part of the way we construct Nazism in particular is with this built-in hypothetical. The collapse of values was so systematic, we're told, that we might have acted with the same chimpanzee viciousness as everyone else.

This strikes me as something genuinely new. I don't think French schoolchildren in the early 1900s were told of the atrocities committed during the Napoleonic wars and asked to transpose themselves with the agressors. Spanish kids presumably aren't told that it might have been them branding apostates during the Inquisition.

I'm glad we look at our histories this way. Honesty beats triumphalism, I hope. I really wonder how it changes the way we think. I don't know if it makes us guilty, but I certainly hope it makes us careful.

-

One thing I couldn't get over when I first moved here was how politically diverse the gays are. Some of them are left wing, some of them are right wing. Some of them are racist, some of them are patronizingly inclusive. 'Jesus,' I remember saying on one of my first weekends, 'It's like being gay doesn't even mean anything.'

And it doesn't, really. Gay marriage has been legal in Denmark for 20 years, and gayness has been a political non-starter so long that politicians have to be asked about it, and then they all give pretty much the same answer. Anti-gay sentiment isn't completely banished, but you hear it come up about as much as you hear about, say, the flat tax in America. It's there, but it's not a divisive issue in many races or party manifestos.

In other words, gays have no built-in incentive to be left-wing. In America, gays are mainly limited to the blue end of the spectrum because the right wing wants to actively curtail their rights and reduce their quality of life. For gays, self-preservation trumps the economic and social issues that most other citizens vote on.

If gay marriage gets legalized in the States, after a few political aftershocks, I think a lot of gays would start to migrate rightwards. It would be slow, but in the long term gays might even be a reliable Republican voting bloc. Gays tend to be affluent, and eventually, the dimensions of self-preservation would warp to exclude Oppressed Minority and include Yuppie Wealth Preserver.

I wonder if American left wing politicians know this, and this is part of why they don't grant full civil rights to homosexuals. As long as we're second-class citizens and one of the parties is slightly better than the other, they can take us for granted. Giving us full marriage rights would effectively put both parties back at Go, and they would have to compete for our votes.

I've been wondering that this year, as the promises made during the presidential campaign haven't materialized, and as the Democrats face the loss of the majority that would have made pro-gay legislation reasonably easy to enact. It's about time we started asking whether it wasn't the opportunity that passed, but the politicians.