Long Live the Government

Estonian actor Tõnu Kark, asked by a TV reporter why he came to the song festival parade, answered “I wanted to see some happy people. And there are a hell of a lot of them here.” Ditto for me.

The song festival is the only event I’ve ever witnessed where shouting “Long live (fill in the blank with almost anything)” is met consistently with a hearty roar. Most cheers are tributes to choirs, or counties, or parishes, but occasionally there’s something unique. Prime Minister Ansip marched by and shouted “Long Live Estonia,” to which a 70-year-old woman next to me rejoined: “Long Live the Government.”

Here are some images made by our staff photographer, Imbi Imetore.













And, finally, the following. Imbi, not being male, was wondering about the illustrated accuracy of the man's right hand as portrayed in the song festival portapotty wall-side instructions.

Raised by Wolves?

A friend's son was visiting and he posed with Mundo. Everyone started to wonder if the two weren't from the same litter.

Fair-weather Gentlemen

“What invoice?” the real estate developer said. He didn’t know it, but Liina had him on speakerphone. Phone conversations with him are cheap family entertainment.

“The one you didn’t pay three months ago,” she replied. This was one of her bigger clients for her interior design business. Around the house, I refer to this client as Snake.

“I didn’t get the invoice,” Snake said. “Can you send it again?”

That was three months ago. He still hasn’t paid. I sometimes think that we should translate Snake’s words to Latin and print them on currency: Ego non adepto invoice. Vos transporto is iterum?

The financial crisis has done a lot more than show who is, in the words of Warren Buffett, swimming without trunks. It’s put a host of so-called businessmen under the loop and outed those who are in American parlance, “fair-weather” gentlemen: they behave as gentlemen only when business is going well.

Of course Snake got the invoice both times that Liina sent it: she has a collection of his “we’ll get that paid right away” emails. So it’s a rather odd dance that plays out on the phone, where both Liina and Snake know the invoice was sent and received, yet Snake claims he never got it and Liina, out of a combination of not wanting to call the guy a liar and the hope of getting her money, plays along with him. Wouldn’t it just be easier on everyone if Snake would admit he doesn’t have the money? That despite his Audi Q7 and Hugo Boss suits, it’s really the bank who’s running his company?

Instead, he’s on the phone with my wife pretending he’s a bigshot, talking about other härrasmehed he’s in business with, and trying to convince her to take on another project, even after he never paid her for the last one.

An even better question: Why is Liina still talking to him?

I’ve tried her to persuade her to walk away from the guy, to take their contract to an inkasso company who will at least drag Snake’s name through the mud. So that the next time he appears in Kroonika, readers will look at his photo and say, “Ah, there’s Snake again. Has no one killed that scumbag?” Getting the money out of Snake would be nice, but telling him mine persse would be more satisfying. I can live without money. I can’t live without some measure of integrity.

Which is probably why I can’t understand Snake. To me, there’s no shame in bankruptcy itself. The shame is in pretending everything’s going swimmingly.

But I doubt Snake’s fooling anyone but himself. In Estonia’s real estate heyday, my dog Mundo could have run Snake’s real estate company. Some parts of the business excepted, it isn’t rocket science to buy property, build ugly apartments on it, and then re-sell it. In fact, the greed and false confidence of gentleman geniuses like Snake is what got the world into the mess we’re in. Why’d we ever let them run the place?

I think what we need in Estonia (not to mention the rest of the world) is a revolution of accountability. We start locally, because Estonia is so small no one can hide. Estonians seem to already know who the scumbags are in their country. But my question to you: Why haven’t we run them out of town?

The first step in this revolution is the rule of No Second Chances. Let’s say you’re a university rector who spends the school’s money on Church’s English Shoes and a charter jet instead of on a student library. You should get the boot and never be allowed a second chance. That’s right: Never. Not in a million years. Your ass should go to jail. And when you get out, the only job you should be able to get is shoveling coal into furnaces at the university you cheated. Well, okay, from time to time you should be released to do yard work, so that professors may point at you and say to students, “Look, there’s the stupid son-of-a-bitch who abused the public trust.”

The second rule of our revolution is Money is Not Your God. This could be taught by replacing obligatory Estonian military service with eight months of helping lepers in Orissa, India’s poorest state. And this program isn’t just for young men. Let’s say you’re a minor bureaucrat, convicted of siphoning off EU funds and awarding contracts to your own MTÜ. India will be happy to get the volunteers, and a little time away from fluorescent office lighting will do every public official some good.

Third is the rule of Public Humiliation. Let’s say you’re a minister of parliament who swapped land or sold your signature for cash. Public humiliation should be so steep that you’ll flee to Argentina to live next door to Nazi war criminals (if you stashed a lot of dough) or in a tent on the beach (if you didn’t).

Some Estonians argue that the reason these rules can’t be applied is because so many who might apply them also have skeletons in their closets. This is entirely absurd. There are 1.3 million people in this country, most of them perfectly honest. Many have never cheated anyone, have paid all their bills, and will do most anything to honor their word when they shake your hand on any size deal. If you’re an Estonian and haven’t met any of them, then you need to crawl out of the cave you’re living in and meet new people. There are some damned fine people in this country. (More good news: Some of these fine people are businessmen and some work in government.)

But what if the problem isn’t Snake and his ilk? Might the bigger problem be the rest of us? Are we too forgiving? Are we too easily walked over? Maybe Edmund Burke is overdoing it, but what the hell: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Some readers may wonder how I can judge. It’s easy: I’ve never cheated a fellow citizen or stolen anything. And, for the rest of my life, I don’t plan to. I also know plenty of rich people who got rich without stealing. So, in fact, it’s damned easy to sit on my high horse and look down at people like Snake.

Yes, if Jesus were here he’d tell me not to be so judgmental. He’d tell me to turn the other cheek and give Snake love. But until Jesus arrives, I don’t plan on forgiving Snake. And I think Estonia would be a hell of a lot better place if more of its good citizens weren’t so forgiving, either.

***

Due to Vello's crankiness (too much Martin Amis?) as witnessed in the above column, or perhaps due to shrinking magazine advertising revenue, as of next week his column will no longer appear in Eesti Ekspress. (He's still available here in English.) He promises to take a hoe to Snake and to recover the Vello within.

One Hell of a Skateboard Park

Granted, my opinion as a foreigner matters not one damned bit. And, when it comes to Estonian monuments, that’s exactly how it ought to be.

But Estonia’s monument to her War of Independence is nearing complete completion (not yet ready, but ready enough for the dedication ceremony to already have taken place), and now its critics, including me, are free to wander in its shadow and ponder whether the nation got its 100 million kroons worth.

My verdict: Not half as ugly as I feared. The monument is too totalitarian for my taste and provokes in me a sense of irony that a people who have freed themselves from the grip of both Fascism and Communism would choose such a structure. It is, in a word, unEstonian. Standing under the glass Balkenkreuz looking over Freedom Square (or Victory Square, as some insist), one may wonder if the government has not constructed Northern Europe’s largest skateboard park. Concrete and glass may be the calling card of modern Tallinn, but for me they have little to do with Estonia. For me, Estonia will always be country lanes, stark coastlines, and forests so picturesque that frolicking hobbits would not be out of place.



But a monument is more than its physical structure (witness the Bronze Soldier), and this one will be whatever Estonians make of it. If, in winter, the city fathers elect to clean the concrete plaza of ice, then perhaps it might function as more than just another source of broken limbs. And there’s no arguing the monument has improved the neighborhood. The marijuana paraphernalia, porn-video, and “French hot dog” shops in the tunnel have now vanished.



The day I visited there were far more Estonians than foreigners present (one thing you can’t always say for Old Town), everyone milling about, taking photos, and sharing their thoughts. “I think it’s pask,” said one old man, though he wasn’t quite old enough to have fought in the War of Independence. But he was courteous, very quietly calling the monument “runny shit,” since a veteran of the War dressed in sportcoat and necktie, medals pinned to his coat, stood only a few paces away.

Spoiled Little Soviet Girl

Liina and I don’t fight often, but when we do it sometimes ends with me calling her a spoiled little Soviet girl.

That’s how it goes at the beginning of summer, when the weather warms enough that it’s time for a new roof on the greenhouse, or the fence needs painting, firewood restacked, or a hundred other little jobs that the tough Estonian winter keeps us from doing earlier. “Why aren’t there any kids around?” I lament, bent over a can of latex paint, trying to get more color on the house than I get on myself. “This is a perfect summer job for a high school kid.” Then I’ll start my tirade about how Tallinn kids don’t seem to require summer jobs, how they spend their summers wind surfing or at grandma’s summer cottage or just hanging out in a parking lot somewhere with an endless supply of cigarettes and beer.

Liina will reply that not every place in the world is like America, where all anybody does is work, and when people aren’t working they’re thinking about work. Liina knows that summers after my sixteenth birthday my mother shipped me to America, where my Uncle Feliks in Kansas found me work which, in my father’s words, “built character.” According to my family, Canadian kids were “soft,” beneficiaries of a socialist system that encouraged reliance on the government cheese. If I went to America, the cruelest capitalist country of them all, then I’d be hardened and independent, never one to stand around and complain that the world is unfair. That was the logic, anyway.

My first American job was in the “building profession,” as Uncle Feliks put it. I imagined wearing a denim shirt and yellow hardhat, carrying around rolled-up architectural plans, and giving instructions to clean-cut men like those we see in deodorant commercials. Instead, I operated what is known to American builders as the Mexican backhoe: a shovel. And when I wasn’t operating the Mexican backhoe, I ran a jackhammer. Once I spent an entire month removing a parking lot which a client argued didn’t properly drain. Rather than sending out a machine that could destroy the parking lot in a single day, to punish the client the construction company sent me, a fifty-kilo kid with a twenty-five-kilo jackhammer. After thirty days of ceaseless noise and vibration I’d removed an entire parking lot in breadloaf-sized pieces. While I learned about character, the client learned what happens when you complain to a builder after you’ve already paid him.

The next summer Feliks got me a job as a plumber. Before I left Canada, my father explained what he called the cardinal rule of plumbing: Shit runs downhill. The job turned out to be more work with a Mexican backhoe, either digging holes or filling in those that others dug. As the smallest guy in the company, I was regularly called away from digging to descend into sewer lines with a plug to stop the flow of feces above a point where the real plumbers wanted to work.

Meanwhile, back in Estonia, what was Liina doing? She was windsurfing in the Bay of Tallinn and eating caviar from Viimsi’s Kirov Fishing Kolkhoz (one bright exception to the rule of Soviet poverty) where she lived with her family. There are plenty of stories about how hard Soviet kids worked, how they toiled in the fields to bring in the harvest, because Soviet combines were of such quality they left forty percent of the harvest on the ground. Even smart kids sent to the malevs (a camp for elite kids, as I understand it) where I imagined them playing chess in the shade and talking about how they’d one day rule their country, had to do some symbolic work. A malev camper friend of mind once showed me a brick wall he built at a camp.

But Liina’s summers were different.

When she wasn’t “training,” which many Estonian kids not destined for professional sports seem to do even today, she was aboard her family’s Moskvich, traveling around the Soviet Union. She spent one summer on the White Sea, diving for starfish, which she and her family then killed, painted, and trucked south, where they were sold as souvenirs of the Black Sea. She argues that was a job, but I say diving for starfish hardly counts as work. Try diving for turds in a fifty-degree Kansas sewer.

Perhaps Liina is right about Tallinn kids not working. Maybe it isn’t a tragedy. Maybe it is better for a kid to enjoy his youth before he becomes an adult and spends the rest of his life with a car payment, mortgage, and kids who need fed, watered, and educated. Maybe my father and Uncle Feliks were wrong in their belief that you can’t understand the value of a dollar if you haven’t earned it yourself. Perhaps they were wrong about character. Liina certainly lacks none.

But I was brought up the way I was brought up, and I don’t think it will kill my kids to earn a little money to help pay for the surfing camps and general goofing around which I know their spoiled Soviet mother is going to encourage. Let my kids sell Eesti Ekspress on street corners or shovel snow off the neighbor’s walk. Or better yet, let them go to America. Uncle Feliks has already offered to take them as soon as they’re old enough to work. “America has Disneyland,” I’ll tell them. Little will they know it’s two thousand kilometers from Kansas.

Borat's Latvian Sister

A graduate of the Dracula Academy of English, Latvia's Mairita Solima sells spa services in this Latvian promotional video. Anytime you're tempted to complain about EAS, just have a look at this. Latvia’s Minister of Economics, Artis Kampars, has requested the state's tourism development agency provide an explanation for the video, for which the state was billed almost 30,000 euros. It's sure to be an interesting explanation.



NB! Readers report the video is still available on Latvia's Delfi. (Was still working on 19 June.)

And here's the interesting explanation (19.06.09):
Standby News reported the following, summarized from Latvia's business daily: Uldis Vitolins has announced his decision to resign from his post as director of the Latvian State Tourism Development Agency. “This is my final decision and I will not change my mind,” he said. [Who's begging him?] He referred to the agency’s reorganization and the growth of the burden of bureaucracy as the basic reasons for resigning. Vitolins announced his decision to resign after a meeting with Latvia’s economy minister in which he tried to explain away the creation of a low-quality promotional video. The film shows a millionaire [What's the relevance?], Mairita Solima, who in very bad English and a Borat-style manner presents spa services provided in Latvia. The minister wanted to know why LVL 20,000 [30,000 EUR] was necessary for making it with such inferior quality. Vitolins argued that it was simply a demo version.

Child Labor

If there’s one event that marks the arrival of Estonian summer it’s children selling Eesti Ekspress on street corners. One of my favorite things to do is buy from the kids (no, I don’t get a free copy).

“Sixteen kroons!” the children shout. “Four kroons cheaper than in the store.”

This year the city is crawling with salesmen. A few weeks ago Ekspress advertised for the sales positions with a line in the ad that no child would be turned away. So now Tallinn has about five on every street corner, some of them not too long out of their strollers. The youngsters seem to love friendly competition and, unlike Estonian shop clerks, these kids aren’t afraid of conversation.

“Four kroons cheaper?” I said to a salesman. “That’s a pretty good deal.” He couldn’t have been more than ten years old, and I gave him fifteen kroons to hold while I dug in my pocket for a one-kroon coin.

“How much of the sixteen kroons do you get?” I asked.

“Six!” He was proud of it, too.

“So six for you, and ten for Hans Luik?”

He just smiled. He probably had no idea Hans was the paper's publisher, but he wasn’t going to risk a sale by entering uncharted territory.

I didn’t have a kroon coin and so gave him a two-kroon note. “If I give you seventeen, do you get to keep seven?”

“Yes!” He was still grinning.

“OK. Then it’s yours.”

He handed me his last paper.

“So you’re out?” I asked. “No more money then?”

“I’m going right now to get more papers!” he shouted over his shoulder, already running. He was so excited he could have peed his pants. And had I been a rich man, I would have hung around all day and bought papers.

***

P.S. If you read Estonian, Barbi Pilvre is traveling the US, touring its world of journalism, and blogging about it. Well worth your time.