New Heights - a soap opera review

New Heights - or Neumatt, as I believe it's called in the original Swiss German - is a 2021 Netflix production about a Swiss family trying to keep a traditional dairy farm going in the face of the modern world of factory farms and other big city types out to make a buck, tradition be damned. The story begins when the Wyss family has to confront the fact that, believing his failure to manage finances has bankrupted the farm, their husband and father has hanged himself in the barn, leaving them all to scramble.

It's also, almost in passing, an LGBT drama - which is how I found my way to it - because I am a sucker for gay romances, and because I wanted to see how modern-day Switzerland would deal with the topic of gay people in a rural setting.

It has the usual flaws of TV serials; it is too drawn out in places and you have perhaps too many subplots you have to keep track of. But all in all, I found it a cut above most soap opera/telenovela Netflix/Amazon Prime TV drama standards, for the writing, the acting, the dramatic turns of plot and the settings. It moves between a high powered downtown Zurich consulting firm and a dairy farm in Neumatt, an actual place a half hour north of Bern and an hour west of Zurich. It's a highly professional production, with actors who have some serious acting chops. And a great story of a family with skeletons in the closet and an inclination to rush to each other's aid one minute and throw each other under the bus, the next. It's great soap-opera material, in other words.

Before he takes his own life, the father writes a letter to the golden boy of the family, Michi, asking him to keep the farm going and look after his younger brother, Lolo (Lorenz). Lorenz combines a love of animals and the virtues of a hard-working farmer with near saintliness of character. He knows what's right, sees and calls out the evil all around him, and serves as the conscience of and motivator for his mother and his siblings. Michi never saw eye-to-eye with his father and left a long time ago to go off to the city to make his fortune. His mother and siblings are both proud of his talents and accomplishments but also find him hard to relate to, so thoroughly has Michi turned his back on them all. At one point, as a relationship is developing with his colleague and soon-to-be lover, Joel, Michi lies to him about his background as a farm boy.

What makes this a slice above soap opera quality story-telling is the skillful way the contrasts are worked in between rural and urban consciousness, between "the bright kid" and "the slow kid" members of the family, the way Michi is torn between the farmers of the world he grew up in and the opportunity to excel at what he can do as a consultant for the money-grubbing dairy farmer technocrats who pay him such a good salary. His father wants him to come help fix the roof. "Don't you know I can pay five workers to do that in the same amount of time it would take me to do it myself?" he responds. Other moments lift it, as well. When younger brother Lolo catches Michi in flagrante with his gay lover Joel, Michi is humiliated at being outed this way. "I know you're gay," Lorenz responds. "I was just wondering if this is a serious relationship." The low IQ son with the big heart, it turns out, has a really big heart - and is not so dumb, after all.

One of the reasons I watch so many LGBT dramas is I'm dealing with a lifelong need to find evidence that things have gotten better. I don't know whether this story is indicative of Swiss attitudes in general, or of just a segment of the Swiss population, or whether this is a form of socialist realism, but the treatment of Michi's homosexuality and the couple's relationship is refreshing. The local veterinarian, Döme, who complicates the story when a childhood fling is momentarily rekindled. Döme is now happily married and has no doubt his wife a child come first, but the fling serves to remind Michi of years gone by when he was caught by his father with Döme, also in flagrante (can't people do the jolly behind locked doors?). And this puts some meat on the bones of his need to run to the city and leave farm and family behind. The pre-gay-lib and post-gay-lib contrast is striking.

Another progressive element to the story is the fact that Michi's lover, Joel, has dark skin. Joel is played by the established German actor, Benito Bause, whose father is German/Italian and whose mother is Tanzanian. He is never identified as "the black guy" but only as "the guy from Hamburg." Progress worth noting. 

Or is it? That's the trouble with social progressive elements in film or in literature; you never know whether they reflect attitudes in the larger society or simply the views of the filmmaker.

I can't predict how others will find this photoplay, let's call it. Those who want characters they can relate to may have a hard time relating to these sometimes loathsome members of the Wyss family. I don't know if their redeeming features are sufficient to overcome the backstabbing. I won't comment on the ending except to say they've left open the possibility of coming up with another season.

I'll be first in line to watch it, if they do.

In Schwyzerdütsch, Swiss Standard German and German Standard German, with English subtitles; also available dubbed in English

photo credit

Putin's War - a lefty's perspective

I've been listening closely to the debate going on in Germany over Putin's war and I am struck by the number of public voices in Germany urging their government to press Zelenskyy to the negotiating table. I'm taken aback by how many Putin apologists there are and how broadly they are supported, if the commentaries to their public appearances on social media are any indication.

There's an irony in this. I became a diehard lefty many years ago. I once said my arm would fall off if I ever voted for a Republican and these days, now that the remnants of the Republican party that retain dignity and integrity have been swallowed up by the thoroughly repugnant MAGA wing of their party, I don't waste a minute apologizing for my lefty stance. I watch Amy Goodman for news and my bookshelves are filled with books by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. I'm a big Michael Moore fan.

What put me on this path was my experience in the army in the 1960s, where I discovered unbelievable mindlessness and justification for blind obedience. That came with the understanding that the Vietnam War showed the United States to be effectively indistinguishable, in my view, from earlier European imperial powers. The good guys, the noble American idealists striving for an expansion of democracy, were still there, bumbling their way with occasional successes. But much of the time I saw America as a bully willing to go to war to aid American commercial interests. Over the years, that hasn't changed. I still see America as a seriously flawed democracy, struggling to contend with its greedy vulture capitalism segment, and I still see war as the failure of human beings to give peace their best efforts. I remain fiercely anti-war, and despite the arguments I've rehearsed over and over again in my mind for this thing called a just war, I prefer to take the view that living to fight another day is the better course of action in most cases.

But if opposition to war is, or should be, the default position, that does not shut down the case for fighting a just war. I've struggled over the contradictions involved. So why, I've been asking myself, do I find myself so strongly wanting the Ukrainians to push the Russians out of their country if it means not only endless killing not only of the Ukrainian population, but of innocent Russian young men? Putin, we know, won't hesitate to use the youth of his country as cannon fodder, or mine sweepers, as we remember how Stalin used to clear the mine fields by running young recruits across them to give his more seasoned troops easier access to the Nazi forces. Prolonging this war only makes us party to Putin's inhumanity. This switch is more than ironic. It reflects a moral dilemma of the first order.

Why do I want to make Volodymyr Zelenskyy into a hero? Why do I feel so good that Biden has just promised the Ukrainians, by a vote of 68 to 29 in the Senate, another $44 billion in assistance? And why am I feeling a sense of resentment for Germany for not getting behind the war efforts?  For so many years I was proud of Germany that it had picked itself up from World War II and become arguably the chief voice for war-avoidance. They knew what they were talking about. If you've seen the images of German cities in 1945, with scarcely one block of stone on top of another in some places, you'll see why the cry became "Nie wieder Krieg" - no more war. In Europe, at least. This was tested in Kosovo, but by and large Germany became the peacemaker, and I was proud of Germany for that.

So many Germans I once admired - Sahra Wagenknecht, Serdar Somuncu, Richard David Precht - all notable public intellectuals, as well as other leftist politicians like Gregor Gysy and the head of the Lutheran Church in Germany, Margot Kaessmann - have come out, usually citing the responsibility Germans carry, given their tragic history, for never shooting at Eastern European people in a war situation. And they are not outliers, but are joined by large numbers of others in both the German radical right and radical left. All united by the eminently responsible sounding argument that Germany must never again engage in war.

I don't want to make the political arguments here. Or go into the historical events, such as Putin's earlier invasion of Ukraine in 2014 when he got away with murder and the Europeans sat on their hands as he ran off with the Crimea and the Eastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk as well. There were rumbles among the members of NATO, in the UN General Assembly and elsewhere, but nobody made any effort to resist the blatant disregard for the agreements signed by every nation involved to respect established borders. Those are arguments for another day.

I just want to say out loud that the images of bombed Ukrainian cities have had an effect on me. No amount of justification for Putin's dream of a Russian-controlled Ukraine matters any more. It's the images of the bombing of civilians, the brutality of attacking gas and water generating plants as the winter is upon us. It removes the last shred of truth to the claim that Putin wants to see his fellow Slavs as brothers and sisters. Makes him a bloody, war-mongering hypocrite. 

I will still listen to anti-war arguments. But if you want me see any solution to this war other than Putin's defeat you're going to have to come up with some mighty convincing new ones. As long as the Ukrainians continue to show such determination to defend their borders, I'm going to continue, I imagine, to see Zelenskyy as a heroic figure and Ukrainians as a people with a cause worth defending. Count me in as one tax-paying American cheering the trillion-dollar package the Senate came up with today. Keeping the government funded. Good idea. Increasing maternity leave benefits. Good idea. And supporting Ukraine with big bucks. Very good idea indeed.

Reichsbürger Milieu

 Unless you were out looking for it, you may have missed the news from Germany that they are dealing with a bunch of clowns who want to overthrow the government and bring back the German Reich. A German analogue to the white supremacist element of MAGA, with supreme authority in the hands of the Kaisers, a Germany of heroic Siegfrieds and Brunnhildes, free of Jews and foreigners. Reich is a distinctly German word which embraces all monarchical rule from kingdom to empire. It is the antithesis of a republic governed by democratic institutions. I can justify calling them clowns only because, so far, they are both impotent and downright silly, and present no real threat to anybody. Unfortunately, there are two reasons for concern: they are widespread and involve a broad range of followers, including police, military, and members of the justice system, and they are inclined to violence.

Chief among the disparate conspiracy groups are the so-called Reichsbürger, "citizens of the Reich," who have set up a 71-year-old member of the minor nobility, one Heinrich XIII, Prince Reuss, to be their leader. Reuss is a wealthy entrepreneur living in Frankfurt who has partially funded the Reichsbürger efforts. Another ringleader is 69-year-old retired military officer Rüdiger von Pescatore, expelled from the army for selling illegally-obtained weapons from the defunct East German army. A third notable would-be member of the new restored government is Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, a former judge in the Berlin regional court and former right-wing Alternative-for-Germany Party member of the Bundestag (German Parliament).

Looking at this phenomenon through American eyes, three things come immediately to mind. One is the tragic fact that anti-semitism lives on in Germany. A thorough study of German antisemitism will show, I am convinced, that it remains very much a fringe movement, and that Germans as a whole have done much to make their country both proud of its Jewish history and a welcome place for Jews who make Germany their home. But given the impact the horror of the Holocaust has had on Western Civilization, there is no escaping the fact that even the smallest trace of anti-semitism in Germany is disheartening. We hear constantly of the necessity of "eternal vigilance" in keeping democracy alive; the same applies to the effort to head off any possibility of a repeat of the Holocaust.

The second thing that strikes me as worth noting is the way in which the Reichsbürger and other members of what the media are calling the "Reichsbürger Milieu" - a curious choice of words for a grouping of people unhappy with the way many modern-day democracies are run - see the U.S. as the bad guy. Much of their dissatisfaction is understandable and many Americans, including myself, will readily admit that when America sneezes much of the rest of the world catches a cold. But I also see the UK and the EU as more than capable of working out their own destinies with America less and less a big brother as time goes by. Blaming America for Europe's woes is one way to go; finding common ground with your neighbors is a better one. Europe has the numbers, the talent, and the energy, if they can just figure out how to harness these resources.

A third observation I'd like to make how often the U.S. and European democracies find themselves fighting similar struggles. Trump got a foothold in the U.S. because he was able to manipulate the legitimate dissatisfaction among his countrymen that too many of them were falling through the cracks. The gap between the well-to-do and the have-nots has grown to a staggering degree in recent decades, and Americans observe, correctly, that all is not well with the American way of life and government. The problem is they hired a fox to tend to the henhouse. Germans too, are uncomfortable with the cracks in their system. They too, some of them, are looking for a king, a big-daddy to ride in and solve all their problems. So far, fortunately, at least they are not seeking a new Führer. The bottom line, unfortunately, is there is a surprising number of folk in both places who have lost faith in democracy as the best - or, at least, the least bad - way to govern themselves.

None of this is new information, I realize. I repeat it here only to emphasize that the only way out of this mess is a steady persistence, a commitment to do the right thing, to keep going, keep speaking out, keep getting informed and staying informed. You don't need to stick your hand in the fire to know that pain will follow. You don't need to let the clowns and the wackos - and the self-serving Enablers who believe they can ride the tiger - to dismantle democracy in order to see the consequences. 

I love it that we have strong democracies and the luxury of allowing blithering idiots like Marjorie Taylor Green and Heinrich XIII to come forward and reveal their limitations as public figures. Keep laughing. And keep watching carefully.

Shawn, rhymes with get off my lawn

One of the ways I believe our quality of life has improved since the onset of the internet age is that we now have easy access to all sorts of bloggers and vloggers now sharing their views on what matters to them. Like with fire, or any other powerful entity, how you spend your time in front of a computer screen has to be properly managed. Fire can burn you; it can also heat your soup. Dumb blogs can bore the bejeezuz out of you or lull you into closing down your brain; good ones can further your lifelong quest for new information and greater understanding.  And you don't need to go to a library, a lecture hall, or a public debate to take these new things in. All you need is an internet connection and a monitor to watch things on. 

Covid has been a perfect nightmare for a lot of active people, but for me it was a turning point. I realized immediately, now that Netflix and Amazon Prime can provide you with more movies than you can realistically take in, that I could easily become an even bigger couch potato than I already was.  I could also bewail the fact that I (and everybody else) had become housebound. But I could just as easily do something about becoming more selective about what I take in.  Faced with the opportunity to select from among an almost infinite amount of new information, I soon found myself shutting down movies I once might have watched to the end, searching for ever more reliable sources of news, and renewing my faith in the human race by watching world-class classical musical performance after another. I could also sit and allow to parade through my living space an astonishing array of young people with magnificent minds and keep myself from falling into despair over America's dumbed down embrace of fascism and the destruction of the planet, and focus regularly on a plethora of pick-me-up bits of evidence that all was not lost, that there are young people out there who might just keep us from going under. I began to take serious note of possibilities I had not seen before. Or seen but not paid much attention to. I don't believe in any gods, but if I did, their name would be YouTube.

Let me mention just two examples of whiz kids who have provided me with endless hours of education and entertainment.  There are so many more.  And I know my interests are parochial and that what turns me on may not turn you on. But let me show you mine, and invite you to show me yours.

Here's just a few:

1. One is a gay couple in Nova Scotia who have decided they want to live off the grid. They travelled for a time in a camper, but then settled down in the woods north of Halifax and built a geodesic dome to live in, cleared the land, brought in solar panels, built a garden and generally went about making a life for themselves while waiting (two years now) to be able to build a permanent home out of shipping containers. They have a huge following and post a fascinating update on their accomplishments every Sunday. I always look forward to Sunday for two reasons: The Sunday New York Times and Tyler and Todd.

2. Another is a recent Oxford university graduate in philosophy and theology named Alex J. O'Connor. He runs a blog he calls Cosmic Skeptic in which he advocates for a greater understanding of atheism (as opposed to being an evangelist for atheism itself), for animal welfare and for vegetarianism, and is, in my view, a powerful argument for going to university to not merely get a degree in philosophy, but to become a philosopher in practice. His videos have been viewed 50 million times and he has 450,000 subscribers, including yours truly.

Alex has a steel-trap mind and I couldn't do him justice. If you have time and the inclination, you can jump in anywhere and hear what he has to say.

There are so many more, cooking shows, political discussion groups, debating clubs. But I'd like to focus for the rest of this space on one guy in particular. He is perhaps not as impressive in the same way as Alex O'Connor, but he's somebody who nonetheless blew me out of the water as I began to see the extent of things of which he was capable. I'm talking about somebody named Shawn.

Shawn is a mystery. Whether by design or simply because I haven't done all my homework, I can't be sure. I have not been able to find out his full name, nor where he comes from. His blog name reveals the fact that he has a good sense of humor - and I always associate humor with intelligence; call it a prejudice, but I think you have to be smart to be funny. He goes by "imshawngetoffmylawn." The name has nothing to do (that I can see) with what he does. He is just about the most amazing polyglot I've ever come across. And he's so damned young! God knows what he's going to be capable of as the years go by.

I started out with his trashing of the Hebrew alphabet. He tells us he's been speaking the language most of his life, which led me to assume, once I saw his Russian and English were also native, or near-native, that he must be among the many Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel, and then moved on to life in an English-speaking country.  He can't write Hebrew, he says, and that would fit with his having left as a child. Click here for a taste of that video (or, of course, the whole thing.)

Shawn has a magnificent obsession.  He wants to support the efforts to bring dead languages back to life, as in the case of Cornish, and keep endangered languages from disappearing. The reasoning is the same as the effort to maintain plant and animal species. (I just heard that one in 8 species on earth is at risk of distinction.) The argument runs like this: It's not just human beings that should be treasured but especially the diversity that exists among human beings and all life species as well.  We never know, for example, when a plant species goes extinct, whether we've lost a chance to develop a cure for all kinds of diseases by medicines yet to be discovered. And when it comes to human language, anybody familiar with how differently the world is constructed in the mindsets of speakers of diverse languages will understand what a loss of a human language means to the richness of human civilization. And if you're familiar with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis you know the theory that the world you are able to take in is to some degree directly affected by the language you speak, because that language determines what it is

you focus on.

So let's hear it for ranters, I say.

Shawn is a polyglot and he may be a good linguist as well - many polyglots get seriously into linguistics sooner or later. I'm not sure about the extent of his linguistic knowledge. But there's no doubt he's an exceptional whiz kid when it comes to mastering languages. He's got this great thing going with his followers where he gets them to pick a language for him to learn and he then goes at it intensely for a couple weeks and shows off his knowledge and his proficiency. Mind-boggling what he accomplishes this way.

But let me finish my speculation on his mystery identity.

But here's what I've been able to surmise from watching the videos I can find under his name.

I discovered that he speaks near native English, Russian, and Hebrew early on, so my first guess was that he must be a Russian Jew who found his way to Israel and then to North America. I then noted that his Russian, like his English, is near-native, but not-native, and that led me to think he may have been raised in one of the non-Russian countries of the former Soviet Union, maybe the Balkans. I then discovered a vlog he did in Latvian in which he says he grew up there but is not Latvian. He obviously speaks Latvian either natively or near-natively, to add to the pile.

Here is a video of his about the Latgalian language, the language spoken by many in Eastern Latvia, aka Livonia

He's got a great sense of humor, evidenced by his videos where he speaks English, Russian, Hebrew and Latvian in various foreign accents.

Here he is speaking Hebrew, which he claims as one of his native languages.

And here he is speaking Hebrew with various foreign accents. He needs to get together with Trevor Noah.

 

And here he is showing off his ability to read the UN Declaration of Human Rights preamble in all identifiable Slavic languages:  . Not too many people could pull that off.

And here he is showing off his ability in another fashion - counting to 100 with each number in a different language from all previous ones. Here he's just show-boating, but when you got it, flaunt it, I say.

My ears really perked up when I saw him take on a bit of Nova Scotia history, as well, because I have Nova Scotia roots, and am familiar with the Mi'kmaq Indians, the aboriginals of the Maritime Provinces.  Mi'kmaq is an Eastern Algonquin language and Shawn talks about the Mi'kmaq interaction with the speakers of Algonquin and the Pidgin language that ensued. 

If you want a more thorough linguistic take on that example of languages in contact, as well as a bit of history of the French expulsion from Nova Scotia, check out this blogger, "History with Hilbert"

And if you want to hear the sound of Mi'kmaq, here is a young lady singing the Beatles song, Blackbird, in Mi'kmaq.

And while we're on the topic of Nova Scotia, my memory of the Gaelic-speaking priests from St. Francis Xavier University who came to visit me when I was stranded at the age of 16 in a hospital in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, was jogged. Here Shawn takes up the topic of "Canadian Gaelic," and he is, of course, talking about these wonderful men I knew as a kid: 

Here he is discussing the Keres language. A linguistic isolate (like Basque), that is a language with no connection to any other language on the planet.

And Breton. 

And Cornish. 

 

I mentioned his sense of humor. Here it is again as he points out, with barely hidden glee, that "I speak English" in Chinook is "Naika wawa Kinchotsh wawa." naika = "I"; wawa = both "speak" and "language"; and Kinchotsh (King George) = English.  And - how's this for an ironic tidbit of interest only to advocates of keeping endangered languages alive - the Chinook jargon (it doesn't even have the standing of a language, but is referred to only as a jargon) was once a widely spoken lingua franca in the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington and British Columbia), used in trading, in court proceedings and elsewhere, but at its peak, in 1870, according to Shawn, it was spoken by no more than an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 people. And here's Shawn being gleeful again when he points out that there was a textbook published in 2018 for Chinook Jargon, titled  La Chinuka Interlingvo Per Esperanto, which, if your Esperanto is up to snuff, is The Chinook Jargon, in Esperanto.

When they took away our language, they took away our ability to think in our own way.      

Clare Swan, a Dena'ina elder in 1985 (and I doubt she had any idea who Whorf was.) 

Kind of sums it up.

And speaking of polyglots interested in language maintenance, here's an interesting tale about a French guy who decided to make the preservation of Eyak his life's work.

And the Dena'ina language of Alaska.   It's worth noting in passing that the Dena'ina language of Alaska has been shown to have a linguistic connection with Navajo and Apache. So there, those of you looking to prove Uncle Henry came over from Russia millions of years ago by walking across the Bering Strait.

Did you know? - bet you didn't, but now you do - that if there is a field of study on the Latgalian (Livonian) language called - wait for it - Latgalistics. And if you decided to pursue it, that would make you a Latgalistician.

Moving on...

Here's his report on Estonian.

I won't go on. There is much more, if languages are your shtick. And if you're tired of this messed-up world and find it encouraging, as I did, to come across young people with the kind of skills we all wish we had, a way of seeing a bit of hope for the future, Shawn-of-unkown-origins will be a treat.

If you ever do discover his roots, do let me know, will you?