Those Daffy Delightful Danes

Like many people I know, I fantasize from time to time leaving this country and going someplace else.  Someplace where the murder rate isn’t so high, where religious nuts don’t get taken seriously, where democracy works better.  It’s not a radical idea for me to leave the United States for another home.  I’ve done it twice.  When I left Japan after living there for more than two decades, I hung onto my permanent visa despite a number of complications - just so I could go back there if things didn’t work out here.  Germany, too, holds a great attraction for me in and I still hold onto some nostalgia over the innocent time fifty years ago when I began plans to emigrate there.

To actually pull up stakes and emigrate to another country, you need serious cause.  It’s no casual matter.  A very great pull, like the love of your life, maybe.  Or a very great push, like the desire to get away from political enemies or religious persecution.  Or a combination of push and pull factors.

Each time something goes awry, this talk starts up of emigrating to greener pastures.  I have acquaintances who left for the Netherlands when it became the first country to recognize same-sex marriages.  Others left for Germany, Norway and France for similar reasons.  A friend talked seriously of emigrating to Spain when Bush II was re-elected.

My latest fantasy land is Denmark.  My partner and I had a wonderful trip to Scandinavia last year and it left a strong positive impression.  All things being equal, I’d probably choose Stockholm over other places.  Taku would choose Bergen.  But all three countries turned our heads.  When the Danish series Borgen came to my attention I watched the entire first two seasons’ worth in just four or five marathon sittings.   I even decided - no small concession, this - it was even better than West Wing.

There are so many positive things to say about Denmark.  Danish women receive equal pay for equal work.  Day care centers are available for most children when they are a year old.  People get married for their own reasons and nobody worries about such things as “wedlock” when having children.  “Illegitimate children” is not a Danish concept.  You get AIDS?  Don’t know how you’re going to pay for the $900 a month cocktail?  In Denmark, treatment in a public hospital is free of charge if you are involved in an accident, suffer a sudden illness, give birth, or suffer a sudden aggravation of a chronic disease.    You can focus on getting better.

There are lots of reasons to be proud of Denmark.  During the time of the Nazis, Danes might have ridden the zeitgeist of Nordic superiority.  Instead, while Jews were being murdered all over Europe, Danes got it together to save 9 out of 10 Danish Jews from Nazi clutches.

If you’ve never heard about “Blue Zones,” have a look.  It was an idea fostered by Dan Buettner, the founder of Quest Network.  Trekking around the world, he came upon the notion that people who lived the longest had five things in common.  They ate vegetables; they especially ate legumes; they put family ahead of all else; they engaged in moderate physical activity; and they were socially active members of their community.  From there he went on to social science studies to establish where people saw themselves as the happiest.  The United States came out at #23.   And #1?   Denmark, of course.  The fact that everybody seems to ride a bicycle there is probably not coincidental.

And then, while pondering these Danish curiosities, my Danish friend Jason brings to my attention the fact that in 2009 Copenhageners decided that by 2015 they would cut their carbon emissions back to 20% of what they were in 2005.   An ambitious project, when you look at what the rest of the world is about.  They reached their goal, never mind 2015, in 2011 - four years early.   Even more impressive is the fact the city’s population grew in that time by ten percent.

OK,  now what,  they say. 

I know.  We’ll make sure that 75% of all travel in the city by 2025 will be by bicycle or public transportation, and that 20 to 40% of all vehicles will be running on alternative fuels.  That includes all city vehicles.  Public transportation will be completely  'carbon neutral', electricity will be generated by wind or biomass to exceed the entire requirement of Copenhagen so we can sell the excess to somebody else, and over 300,000 square feet of solar panels will be installed on our public buildings to provide energy for heating and electricity. 

That’s the plan.  Never mind that it costs a lot more to make energy with non-fossil fuel resources, they say.  We plan to cut the average family's power bill by $1,000 a year through better building and better use of the energy that is generated.

As Jason describes his former countrymen and women, “Talking to your friends and neighbors must be something like ‘I cleaned my bicycle and all the windows in the house with old lettuce and left-over envelopes.’”

“Delicious excess.”  If the concept wasn’t invented by the Danes, they’ve certainly made it their own.  An excess of social consciousness.  One could do so much worse.

I know if you go digging for dirt in Denmark you’ll find it.  Political corruption, corporate greed, crime.  It’s got to be there.  But I’m not bothered by reality here.  I’m indulging in fantasy.

Even though I’m not really going to give up my homeland, where I have a house and a network of friends, where the sun shines 300 days of every year, and where little cable cars go halfway to the stars, it does bother me a great deal of the time that my country is now run by plutocrats and their congressional servants - which servants represent only 11% of the population, by the way - and I live in a land where we torture prisoners, and we have two million more people in the criminal justice system than Denmark has Danes.  I live in a country where the Republicans are in control of government and think rich people earned their money and shouldn’t have to pay taxes on their earnings.  And that means Governor Brown is making more and more cuts to education all the time,  and is even talking about shortening the school year by as much as a month. 

I live next to a city, Oakland, where 4 in 10 black high school kids drop out before graduation, and  half of my fellow countrymen, according to current polls, seem to want to put the same guys back in office that ran the country under George W. Bush.  And it’s largely the same half who want gays to continue to view themselves as loathsome (or at least “disordered”), because the Bible tells them it is so.

I know, I know.  It’s only fantasy.  I’m going to stay and fight, like the rest of you.

But give me a break.  Allow me to fantasize from time to time I might fly across the sea and settle my aching bones in a land called Denmark.

Sitting in Solidarity

My friend Emilio is learning how to pee standing up.

His father decided it was time.  He turned four a few weeks ago, and I guess it’s all part of becoming a man.

Emilio is the son of my chosen family niece Rachel and her husband Pierre.  Would love him to pieces no matter what, but since the first day he came over and crawled into the dog cage with “Mikibounce” (our two dogs are a single entity in his mind), he’s in pretty solidly in my “favorite people in the whole world” category.

Always looking for an opportunity to help my friends raise their children properly,  I asked  Pierre, who’s from Switzerland originally, if he was aware of the European movement to get men to sit when they pee.  And how the movement has turned Sitzpinkler (German for “Men who sit down to pee”) into heroes and Stehpinkler (“Men who stand up to pee”) into demons.  Is he sure, I asked Pierre, if he wants to go this route?

How you whiz (if you are a man), like more and more things these days,  has become political, in other words.  Used to be enlightened men were Klodeckelruntermacher (men who put the toilet seat down), and men who left it up were jerks.  Now it’s not enough to put the seat down, according to members of this feminist movement.  They shouldn’t be putting it up in the first place.  No need, you see, if they always sit to pee.  Such a habit would not only avoid ugly messes on the floor of the john; it would go a long way toward erasing an unnecessary gender distinction. 




Not so fast, say the Vive la difference!  crowd.  If God had wanted you to pee like a girl, he would have plumbed you differently.  God is not mocked there, fellah.  Stand and do it like a man.  Sitzpinkler in German has taken on a secondary meaning besides “a man who sits while pinkeling.”  It refers to a pantywaist.   A milksop.  Weakling.  Wuss.  Yellow Belly.  Cream puff.  Schlemiel.  Not a real man.

So what’s it going to be?  Go with the program and show gender solidarity?  Or grab your gun and kill you some venison for dinner?  (When’s the last time you saw a deer hunter squat to whiz?)

Slight digression here... Just can’t help it.   Opera fans will recognize the name of Madame Butterfly’s American lover as F. B. Pinkerton.  But did you know that in the German libretto the name is changed to Linkerton?  Now put on your thinking caps, boys and girls, and see if you can tell me why.  If you think it’s because opera houses didn’t want their audiences running to the john (or just giggling, maybe) every time his name is mentioned, you’re probably onto something.  Word associations can be powerful.

But seriously, folks.  Thank God we in America are not plagued by this latest European fad.  It’s bad enough the French have gone and elected a socialist president.  Imagine what the right wing will do when they get wind of the fact that Europeans are now teaching their little boys it’s better to wee sitting down. 

Some Europeans.  Some, like my good friend Pierre, are leaving the question open and simply providing the next generation with options.

There are always ways around the pitfalls of child-rearing, if you put your mind to it.

So much to think about when raising a kid...

Empathy or Right?

I can’t believe I’m nodding in agreement with  Charles Krauthammer.  Didn’t think I’d ever see the day.  Not only nodding, but impressed at his insight.  There are two ways to support same-sex marriage, he says, the first through empathy toward gay people on a human level, the second through recognition of their civil rights.

He’s recognizing the observable evidence that the more straight people get to know gay people, the more they come to recognize the desire to love and live in dignity with a life partner has nothing to do with sexual orientation, and that “who you love”, as the old line goes, is less important than “that you love.”  Getting between a fellow human being and a person they want to devote themselves to for life makes you a cad.  Nobody gains.  Everybody loses.

The civil rights argument is also plain.  The reason there is wide-spread opposition to homosexuality in general is that the cherry-pickers of the texts of the Abrahamic religions have decided the animus against same-sex relations they find in them should justify treating gay people as pariahs, not as fellow-citizens with equal rights.  Once you establish that the views of folk who read their Koran or Torah or Old Testament literally are at odds with the views of folk who read them differently - or not at all - then you wonder how it came to pass organized religion got to be making laws in the first place.

Krauthammer sets up the empathy argument in two parts.  One can empathize with gay people, or one can empathize with people who are not comfortable with gay people.  The latter have had their way historically, and that means we are faced with a radical re-thinking of how to see the fundamental institution of family.  The gay-friendly see an evolution of thought, a healthy progression.  Homophobes see a net loss in morality, approval of something God wants us to disapprove of.

If you’ve read Krauthammer’s piece at timesleader.com this morning, you’ll see that while I’m not exactly misquoting him, I’m reading my own views into what he actually says.  Same story.   Different slant.  Looks like I’m not in agreement with Krauthammer after all, and the world has fallen back into making sense.

What he’s about, in this article, is not so much shedding light on the political dilemma we face as a society over gay rights (which he actually does quite well), as finding a way to beat up on Obama.

Talking heads go on about whether Obama was brought kicking and screaming to the “evolution” of thought on same-sex marriage, and decided in favor only after his vice-president shamed him into doing so (if you listen to his opponents on both the left and right), or whether he was simply taking the next logical step toward gay rights, which rights he had basically been fostering throughout his presidency.  The delay is only that he first had to test the waters.  Either way, he’s here now, and many people recognize it’s a dramatic lurch forward, a very big deal indeed.  Check out the cover of this week’s New Yorker, if you doubt this.

Krauthammer faults Obama for wanting it both ways.  He hasn’t “thought it through,” somehow, because first he comes out in favor of gay rights and then he turns and argues gay rights ought to “evolve” state-by-state.  Where Krauthammer and I part ways is he wants to make Obama look dumb and cowardly.  I think he's merely crafty.

I imagine most gay people are annoyed as hell - I am, anyway -  that Obama looks like he has backtracked and forgotten how justice was delayed and denied when the states were allowed to “evolve” in their own good time over the rights of the descendants of former slaves.  They’re calling Obama a flip-flopper, knowing that term has legs, because he’s changed his mind.  They’re missing the absolute consistency in the way Obama goes about doing his job, endlessly seeking the middle ground when forming policy, giving a little bit to both sides.  Whether you agree with him or not, he’s making a political decision on the basis of a (to him) higher principle.  I don’t like it.  Don’t agree with it.  But saying he hasn’t thought it through strikes me as an assessment that is way off.

Lefties like me will get a kick out of watching Krauthammer be Krauthammer, never missing an opportunity to take a swipe at Obama.  But they should also get a kick out of the fact that in order to do so he has apparently had to write a column giving two good reasons for supporting gay rights.

Thank you, Charles Krauthammer.  Nicely put.


source for New Yorker cover, May 21, 2012: http://chime.in/user/sheigh/chime/138482357200846848