Vello Vikerkaar

Power Trip

2012-01-19T01:05:00.003+02:00

First come two blue-and-white police Skodas followed by a pair of black BMW X5s. Then it’s the president’s gleaming Audi A8 led by three lions on the number plate. Then follow two Scandinavian ambassadors in their black Volvos, dust-covered except for spotless national colors on polished stainless steel flagpoles. In pursuit is another X5, blue light flashing, and then two more cop cars. Then, straggling in the rear, behind the part of the motorcade any self-respecting terrorist or disgruntled ministry worker might want to blow up, is a rented silver van.

That’s where I am, in the back row of the van on a seat covered with what I hope are only food stains. The motorcade has just blown the light at the Viru roundabout, and instead of mowing down three American Indians in buckskin and war paint toting a synthesizer and drum set across the street, our driver has applied the brakes to wait out the light.

I ask my fellow passengers if we’ll arrive at our destination before everything is over with.

“Maybe they’ll serve you salted peanuts or give you a logoed umbrella as a souvenir?” a journalist remarks, compelled to put the new guy in his place for displaying too much enthusiasm.

“If you arrive in time, you’ll get to see Ilves present his guest with a painting of a ship made from tiny bits of amber,” adds another.

It’s my first Estonian motorcade, and I have to admit I’m excited. Were I not here, after all, I’d be staring at a computer monitor, or scooping up dogshit in the yard, or any number of less interesting things than watching diplomats and government officials preen and pose.

But the passengers on this bus are jaded journalists or ministry officials so far down on the food chain that they don’t even rate a ride in an unwashed Volvo. These are the ministries’ coffee fetchers and bag carriers, whose moments of glory come when a pissed-off minister wants to vent and they just happen to be in the room. A thankless job, but it’s the only action in town. I mean, not everybody can work for Skype.

But, hey, it’s a job, and these ministerians are already nicer to me than the journalists. “There are always delays,” one soothes me. “You’ll get to see what there is to see.”

What there is to see, of course, I have no idea, but the invitation to join the entourage was the best offer of the week and, really, how many times in your life do you get to join the circus? True, I may not be a full-fledged clown, but cleaning out the animal cages I still see more of the Big Top than the average Joe who drinks beer and farts in front of his television every night.

In 1994, during President Clinton’s visit to Riga, I was part of a group invited to meet Mrs. Clinton. Asked to be present a full three hours before her arrival, I was x-rayed and metal-detected and then ushered into a room with about fifty other people. A few moments before her arrival, Secret Servicemen entered the room with two German Shepherds who both put their noses right in my crotch to pronounce me First Lady fit.

When Mrs. Clinton came through the line it came out that the mother of the guy next to me was a major donor to the Republican Party of Arkansas. Although the man’s mother was an enemy of Mrs. Clinton, the First Lady knew her, and they chatted as if old friends. When Mrs. Clinton arrived in front of me, I knew I would have to do better.

“My mother hates his mother,” I said, and she laughed and asked my name.

“Vello?” she queried. “What kind of name is that?”

“Gypsy,” I replied. “We’re palm readers, but we’re Democrat.”

“Well,” she stepped back to take in two such distinguished mothers’ sons, “today has certainly been interesting for me.”

The higher a government official moves up the food chain the duller his days become. When you reach the highest levels, a huge part of your day is devoted to public appearances where you spew complete bullshit to people eager to be hit in the face with it.

Imagine the hundreds of people who said things to Mrs. Clinton like “Oh, I am just the biggest fan of yours.” And she replied, “Thank you for saying that,” while all the time thinking, Jesus, why can’t I go somewhere and get high?

The cool thing about living in a small country like Estonia is that it provides easy access to power, and I don’t just mean that you might find yourself seated next to the president in a restaurant.

In 1993, I was literally an arm’s length from John Paul II, but instead of touching His Holiness, I allowed Estonians to take my place to cop a feel of his ermine-lined red velvet shoulder cape. I could only imagine how they felt, a people separated from the West for fifty years and then one of the first foreign dignitaries to arrive after independence is a frail old man dressed in white who rides around in a bullet-proof golf cart while an Armani-clad security force jogs beside him. So this is what we’ve been missing? they must have wondered.

It was in a similar spirit that I met President Bush in Tallinn in 2006. In a tiny, packed hotel conference room a disk jockey played “Hail to the Chief” and the crowd rushed a velvet rope as Mr. Bush entered the room and leapt upon the dais. “I’d like y’all to meet Condi, my Sec-uh-tary uh State,” he said in that faux-cowboy voice which comedians had down pat. Then he spoke nonsense for a few moments before working the rope, paying careful attention to those who couldn’t be bothered to fight the crowd to press presidential flesh. Somehow the two of us got to talking about how the dry season had influenced fishing on his Texas ranch. “Well, let me know ahead of time,” I offered, “and we can go fishing here.”

“Really?” he seemed stunned. “People fish here?”

“Mostly with explosives,” I replied. “But a spinning rod works, too.”

That got the president thinking. “Explosives,” he nodded. “Wow.”

So I have never understood why journalists don’t get more excited about hanging out with dignitaries. It is what you make of it, and if a journalist is bored, well, it’s his own damned fault.

In 2000, David Foster Wallace chronicled life in the John McCain entourage, in “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub,” the Twelve Monkeys being the starch-shirted reporters for newspapers of record who, at least as Wallace saw it, traveled with jumbo-sized cobs up their asses.

The only starch that the reporters seated around me on this bus have ever encountered, however, is in a potato, and it didn’t take me long to conclude that the ministry coffee-fetchers held more potential for fun.

So I ask one of the ministerians, an attractive 20-something in a pair of governmental pumps, what drew her to the job. She didn’t miss a beat: “I wanted to help my country.”

“Hey,” I hold up my hands in surrender, “you’ve already got the job. You can tell the truth.”

Estonians aren’t good bullshitters, and if you give them the chance they’ll often tell you the unvarnished truth. She thinks a minute and replies, “Well, I get a front row seat to what everybody else has to read in the newspaper.” Then another pause. “And it’s kind of cool to be around power.”

I gesture toward the starch-free journalist who by now was now paying rapt attention to our conversation. “He agrees with you,” I tell her. “He just refuses to admit it.”

The rest of the discussion doesn’t take much imagination. The journalist calls me a sellout whore for not taking my job seriously enough. I call him a sellout whore for writing down whatever officials spout instead of piping up with intelligent questions. He argues that if journalists caused too much trouble nobody’d be invited. I argue that missing Reflector Day at Paide High School isn’t a major sacrifice. It quickly degenerates into one of those did-not-did-so discussions, which can end only by insulting each other’s mother.

But before a fistfight can start the light changes, and the driver jumps on the accelerator as if kicking at a cockroach and we pull a few Gs racing after the motorcade. By this time there are too many civilians between us and our destination, and the silver bus has no blue light. The young ministerian reports that we’ll probably miss the national anthem but that we’ll surely catch the second half of the speeches.

“And the other half we can read on Facebook!” I exclaim with enough visible joy to irk the journalist. But inside I’m really a bit depressed. Because I can imagine how everyone might have enjoyed it if we were there for the national anthem, me there in the back with the bus people, the only guy in the crowd bravely singing along.

***

The Collected Vello here.

Role Models

2012-01-14T12:21:00.002+02:00

“Auto.” It wasn’t Robert’s first word, but it’s his favorite.

Robert sees autos everywhere. When we explore the neighborhood in his stroller he shouts “auto” every time one passes. Several times a day he points out the window to our own car parked in the driveway. “Auto.” Even reading a book where a little boy locates his ears, eyes, and nose, Robert points to the illustration on the boy’s shirt. “Auto.” Indeed, I hadn’t even noticed.

I don’t know where he gets it. We are not particularly an auto-centric family; no one in the family has ever been a gearhead. And ever since I’ve been old enough I had to pay for them myself, I’ve thought of cars as a necessary evil – an asset which devalues 20 percent the moment you drive it off the dealer’s lot. Liina and I have only one car between us, and it is nothing fancy: a Skoda wagon that we bought used. Most of the time my transportation is a bicycle, which elicits no reaction whatsoever from Robert, except for when he sits on the back in his child seat, which allows him to see and identify even more autos.

Liina and I have considered that he might get his love for cars from our gearhead neighbor, the one Robert can see from his bedroom window. This is a kid whose entire life consists of a 15-year-old BMW, leather jacket, gold chain, bad haircut, illiterate friends, techno music, cheap beer in two-liter containers, and cursing at the neighbors (us) over the fence.

It is perhaps too early, but I worry that Robert might want to emulate him. As far as I can see, the he contributes nothing to the GDP, sponging off his 50-something parents who go to work in the morning while the young man blares bass from his second-story window. He is not even polite. Perhaps the gearhead’s presence is why some of my other neighbors – bankers – must earn so much: someone’s social taxes have to support the deadbeat.

I see the gearhead and I imagine Robert at 18, lighting spliffs on the sofa and declaring that he’s not going to work until his journey of self discovery through the lyrics of “My Beamer Has New Tires” is fully complete.

It is my hope of course that Robert will choose role models closer to home – his father – which of course creates its own attendant worries. Am I worthy?

Robert’s grandfather, a taciturn man not known for dispensing much advice at all, told me shortly after Robert’s birth that I would have a period of ten to twelve years to teach Robert something, and after that it would be pretty much hopeless – the young man would decide things for himself.

(The only other advice I recall my father providing me was before my first date: “Treat all the girls like ladies. Those who are expect it. Those who aren’t appreciate it.” Years later, comparing notes with my brother, we discovered that the pre-first-date advice given him was entirely different: “Never trust women with two first names.” Perhaps we each got the advice we needed?)

My father, in my eyes, was a sterling example of what any father should be. While he was not as affectionate as modern women would perhaps wish, he was a model of fairness, discipline, hard work, and devotion to his family and community. Mother was God. Not a negative word about her was permitted. You did not swear in front of her. You finished everything she put in front of you on a plate.

He was compassionate. Driving sideways into a post, I once put a dent the full length of his favorite hunting vehicle. He only put his arm around me to forgive. He never bothered to fix it.

He great dignity, too, though some would call it pride. I remember during one period of rather tough economic times he refused to take even a cent from the government. Even pleas from my mother that he had paid countless times more money into the government – so why not take some out? – were ignored. We were not that desperate and never would be. We could live on less. It was better to be your own man.

Through times good and bad he was a master of composure. Perhaps it was stoicism. As his son, I saw it as raw conviction and self-confidence. He could not be visibly shaken; or if he was, it would not have happened within view of his children. The only time I ever heard him lose his temper was when another duck hunter criticized his dog. (And God help the man who would have criticized his son.)

And so I have considered what kind of example I am setting for my son. Is Robert seeing anything worth emulation?

William, an American friend of mine, who is completely devoted to his children, once flipped the bird to a reckless driver who came close to hitting his kids. The driver stopped his car and challenged my friend to a fistfight. William, a former Golden Gloves champion, could have easily given the driver the beating he deserved and gone on to smash the windows of the precious car, but with his kids present, William was left in a quandary.

In a traffic culture like Estonia’s there is no shortage of opportunities to flip drivers the bird. Robert currently lacks the motor skills raise his middle finger, but he is a little sponge, and so I have attempted (unsuccessfully) to resist the temptation to point my finger at the country's deserving many.

I’ve become almost paranoid about my own behavior. Are my clothes clean enough? (Does he notice me shine my shoes?) How are my table manners? (What if he catches me eating over the sink? Am I pushing my soup spoon?)

Of course what he more closely monitors are things like how I treat his mother. Even though it may be considered a declaration of love in Eastern Europe, I’ve never beaten her, but now I’m even more careful to try to show her the respect she deserves. I now endeavor to tell her she is wrong in a fashion worthy of my own father (“Oh, I’m not so sure about that, dear”), instead of slipping into the lazy approach (“What are you, on crack?”). I have probably failed, and so I hope that, though Liina may not, children will perhaps award points for good intentions.

I also attempt not to reinforce his antisocial behaviors which I find amusing. When he makes the farting sound with his mouth I try not to laugh. When he rolls around on the church floor as if possessed by Satan, I try to simply pick him up. When he climbs out of the shopping cart to ride the supermarket’s conveyor, I try to remove him before he reaches the scanner. Although I am rarely successful, I think of my own father and try to live up.

Given Robert’s love for automobiles, I have braced for the day when his love of something inanimate surpasses his love for me. I have taken the magazine essay, “Why I Hate Barney,” to heart, the lament of a father whose infant son has given his heart to a purple dinosaur.

But amidst the worrying, Liina and I have instituted counter-programming measures to indoctrinate Robert against gearheadism – and here, one must fight fire with fire. Whenever he says “auto,” I offer him a toy gun.

Liina and I are also aggressively working with new vocabulary. She is teaching him about herbal teas and healing plants. I am instructing him how Salmo trutta may be caught on an imitation Ephemeroptera. On his own, he is taking a seminar course on the best movies of Jean Claude Van Damme.

Hopefully Robert will move on from cars and Liina and I can return to the more usual parental concerns, like worrying that our son might be gay. Of course, I suppose it is possible he could turn out to be both. And we would still love him unconditionally.

***

Good Green Living

2012-01-09T11:27:00.004+02:00

My bank is committed to me. How do I know? Because they told me so.

I got a letter from my North American bank yesterday where they “restated our commitment” and then segued to a bit about the financial landscape changing, at which point I didn’t have to read further to know fees were increasing.

With the letter came a little brochure, all in green type to illustrate how much they care about the environment while they’re sticking it to me with “the best customer service around.” They even renamed my checking account “LifeGreen,” whatever that means.

Why does my bank think I care whether they give a damn about the environment? Do they think that because six tellers take part in a neighborhood cleanup every year this means that the bank loves the environment? The bank loves green type, though. That much I’ll concede.

This is no American disease, unfortunately. Estonian companies, banks included, tend to believe that if they print enough brochures using the color green, or send enough smiling employees around to talk to schoolchildren, then we’ll all embrace them as great stewards of society.

“Our company really does a lot of CSR stuff!” a smiling Estonian capitalist told me not long ago, assuming that the acronym has become part of the vernacular. CSR, for readers who don’t work in a megacorporation engaged in wringing the maximum amount of blood from each customer, stands for Corporate Social Responsibility. It may be defined as all the feelgood stuff a company does to distract you from the real business they’re in: making money.

Back in a former life I attended an American graduate business school. On the very first day when they issued me a supply of starch for my shirts and a shiv for intramural sports, we learned what would become our mantra: The goal of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value. Ethics were not mentioned anywhere, though the topic was later briefly taken up by a professor who noted, “If your mama didn’t raise you right, then nobody here is going to be able to help you.”

While the profit motive may not always be pretty, it certainly is pure. It is easy to understand, and when we accept that this is the mission of private enterprise then the behavior of business is hardly a mystery. But when we attempt to convince ourselves that a corporation can have the public good at heart, then what’s called for is a Tough Love rehab program. (If you doubt me, buy some shares in a big company and attend shareholders’ meetings. Or make a career in them: If your employment hasn’t been coldly terminated at least once, then you haven’t had much of a career.)

So it has always troubled me when I get the polished CSR patter from a PR hack, since the truth will not be held against them by any rationale being. Corporations perform a needed function in capitalist society. It’s not necessary that we love them, only that we understand them. Let us recognize that a wolf does what it does. And that even an animal-loving farmer has to, from time to time, shoot a wolf.

If you still don’t believe me then visit your neighborhood CEO’s house and check out his bookshelf. With a few exceptions, you’ll not find Eat, Pray, Love, but rather a veritable Special Forces library on inflicting quick death. The Art of War, The Prince, Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, How to Win Friends & Influence People. Not to mention a pile of books by Jack Welch wearing his famous shit-eating grin.

What ought to be on every proper citizen’s bookshelf is a copy of Twain’s What is Man? The dialogue between the Old Man and the Young Man can get tedious, but sometimes we all need to be beat over the head with a shovel. Twain’s point: Any help I give you is because it makes me feel good. And what’s wrong with that?

The charitable work of corporations should be viewed much like the charitable work done by fraternities at American universities: They do it because when they do screw up — and they inevitably will — society will tolerate their dark side more if it is mingled with a history of good deeds.

On my university campus, a handful of fraternity brothers committed a gang rape. The guys who participated called it “pulling a train” and it was not the first time they did it, though it might have been the first time the act clearly fit the legal definition of rape.

Certainly, the group’s community record didn’t save them – they were aided more by a victim who did not want to endure the publicity of a trial – but the boys played their trust capital to some advantage. It was nothing more than a PR program in action, executed by a group of 20-year-old boys.

To say that if you add 30 years to those boys, remove a (small) bit of testosterone, and then you have the makings of a corporate boardroom would be unfair. There are some real gentlemen in business who are well able to keep their Johnsons in their pants. But don’t doubt that boardrooms are full of people who know well enough that things can go wrong, that one day their tanker may run aground and poison an ecosystem.

Would we really think less of a corporation which admitted that “Our objective is to make a pile of money, though some innocent folks may get helped along the way”? Or perhaps more reasonably: “We’re out to make a pile of money, and if along the way we can help others without getting too distracted from our primary mission, then great.” I think we’d embrace such honesty.

I don’t mind when they preach that the profit motive does not preclude bettering society, but they lose me when they name products “green” or want publicity for giving a bicycle to a crippled kid.

In a candid moment with an industrialist, he will not utter the phrase, “You know, if these unions will step out of the way, we’d treat these workers just fine.” He will more likely tell you that unions are a pain in the ass, but they’re necessary to keep him from abusing his workforce as if they were slaves in Egypt.

The Occupy Wall Street movement saddened me at first. When I visited their website, those who were often featured in front of the camera weren’t the most articulate. They hardly appeared qualified to take over the institutions they wanted to see reformed, and they often seemed on the edge of beginning a sentence with, “Dude…”

Now, though, it seems they’ve gained momentum, improved their speaker roster, perhaps by reading books like Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia or Michael Lewis’ The Big Short while they’re camped out in the financial district.

But there is real power in Dudespeak when backed by raw intelligence. I keep waiting for the TV camera to find someone who uses the opportunity to articulate why Alan Greenspan is the “biggest asshole in the universe”* (Taibbi’s claim), and then quote Greenspan’s 1994 Senate testimony or take up the complexities of moral hazard in perfectly digestible terms.

More good news is that heavyweights like Paul Krugman are adding their voices, and the movement is no longer limping along with only Hollywood celebrity backers.

On the homefront, what’s disturbing is not local Estonian corporate hacks waxing on about CSR and green culture – indeed, they’re just doing their jobs – but rather when a journalist writes it down. But I guess even the most jaded journalist can get caught up in the spirit of the moment with all its attendant Team Spirit bullshit. Plus, he’s got to file something. For better or worse, though, Estonia’s history of corporate abuse is no longer than its own history of independence, and therefore we are possibly still too eager to swallow whatever nonsense corporate leaders feed us.

But I do wish we’d recognize more that CSR and green culture are mere flavors of the month. (CSR is a term from the 1960s, and it comes in and out of fashion.) I can almost guarantee that in ten years, when absolutely every public and private corporation is using green type, then the one who uses black will be called a marketing visionary. Black. It’s the new green.

Perhaps you believe Estonian corporations are moving down the Scandinavian socialist path and will be different. That it’ll be capitalism with a human face; a kinder, gentler wolf. Personally, I’m in favor of making sure the farmer is well informed. And always sufficiently armed.

***

*Taibbi also called Greenspan a “…gerblish mirror-gazer who flattered or bullshitted his way up the Matterhorn of American power…” Now who, except maybe Greenspan himself, couldn’t love a sentence like that?

Feed Vello.

Inside Darth Vader

2012-01-02T22:40:00.002+02:00

“Do you find this work demeaning?” my boss asked me. She owns a relocation company and occasionally employs me because she has a tough time finding Estonians to do the job. She says they often find showing apartments to be demeaning.

I told her I didn’t find it demeaning, though if she made me wear a squirrel costume or something, then it might be another matter.

Actually, since during the 1981-82 recession in Canada I had applied for a job babysitting dead bodies in a funeral home, and since I had also done work climbing into sewers to plug them with a giant cork, I kind of thought standing around in clean clothes while foreign yuppies looked at apartments was pretty cool.

The relocation job pays okay, and another benefit is that you get to see a good number of apartments in Tallinn.

On Viru Street, I looked at an attic apartment, where to enter you have to pass directly by a carnival barker who insists you eat at his restaurant. On the second floor, you are greeted by the wafting chemical odors of a hair and nail salon which occupies an apartment. On the next floor, an apartment has been converted into a torture museum, and features two young girls at a desk who beckon you to enter their lair.

Once you reach the attic apartment you find that it’s designed like a patchwork quilt made by an alcoholic grandmother: disjointed rooms meeting in odd places, bathroom walls covered with alternating granite and cheap plastic tiles, and part of its floor is suspended and fenced in timbers which makes it resemble a dance floor. All it’s missing is a silver stripper poll.

I imagined the tenants running the gauntlet of capitalism every day when they came home from work. Just how much formaldehyde and acetone would they have to breathe? And would the two girls at the desk ever learn to recognize their faces and stop shouting to “Come enjoy torture museum”?

“My company owns the whole building,” said the landlord in a tone which made me wonder if he weren’t in negotiations to put a Mini Cooper dealership in one of the empty apartments or to lease the rooftop to Copterline.

In the Fahle house on Tartu road, I saw a bathroom built so that its door hung at a negative angle – and the rest of the bathroom suspended above you like some Damoclean sword. Seated in the living room you got the feeling like all the heavy fixtures might come crashing down upon you at any moment.

And when seated on the toilet – situated in the very center of the bathroom – you are Luke Skywalker at the helm of an X-wing fighter, ready to launch proton torpedos to make a parking lot of the Sikupilli shopping center, if it weren’t already, mostly, a parking lot.

Down in the surprisingly small kitchen a stove vent looks like it is part of an expensive stereo system. Fashion magazines are fanned across a glass coffee table as if to instruct. It would be only natural to see a dozen lines of cocaine and a golden straw next to them. I wondered if the developer’s brief to the architect had been: Apartment should impress Mexican drug lords.

I also got to tour one of those many houses in Viimsi which resemble Darth Vader’s head. Some are white, some black, but all have dark, imposing windows which stretch the length of the house. You approach cautiously as if a laser cannon might fire at any moment.

The owner of this particular Darth Vader home wore a shirt which read FUBU in huge letters across the front and all the time wore D&G sunglasses while indoors. He kept peering out the window as if he was afraid thieves might be lifting the spinning rims off his Cadillac SUV. Inside, the house was nearly sterile and reminded me of a modern art gallery. I left with the same sensation I’d felt when I crowded in among the throngs to see the Mona Lisa for the first (and only) time: What’s wrong with me? Why wasn’t I as excited as everyone else?

The architect Christopher Alexander has written that the test of a good public park is whether people easily fall asleep in it. Knowing nothing of Feng Shui, including its proper pronunciation, I cannot say the Feng Shui is wrong in these modern Tallinn dwellings, but I can say I don’t feel at ease there. As soon as I sit down, I get the impulse to leave. These are not places which invite me to just be.

Liina’s theory is that architects just can’t stop trying to find new forms. “A round wheel works just fine,” she says. “Why do architects keep trying to make it flower shaped?”

A prominent musician once told me that the two most regrettable periods in Estonian history were “the 50 years of Soviet occupation and the last fifteen years of real estate development.”

I suppose it’s simply the curse of new money and our need to show it off, if only to each other. Had we been thinking, the 1990s and its availability of labor at slave-like rates should have enabled us to build with stone and expand the Old Town to swallow up Kesklinn. Who would object if the Three Penis Towers on Narva road were replaced by a tasteful medieval structure? Or if that giant Methodist Church looked a little less like a circus tent?

But that’s 20/20 hindsight, and none of us is all that clever. For all my talk, Liina says my tastes tend toward American trailer parks.

The people who mostly kept their wits about them throughout history are rural Estonians. Even during the past fifteen years they’ve continued to build simple, human-friendly structures with practicality in mind — the type of places with souls, where worries are shed and not accumulated. And the good news is that city folks are slowly starting to learn from them.

Although thatched-roof cottages may be no solution for the city, a friend of mine and his wife have taken a stab at embracing the natural and used straw bales to construct a house in one of Tallinn’s suburbs.

While the house has been celebrated in a couple of western magazines, it has not been popular in Estonia. The couple stopped meeting with journalists after a camera crew set up on the front lawn and filmed the newsgirl reading the story of the three little pigs, before she produced a local “expert” to say the house was inappropriate for northern climes, conveniently forgetting the fact that there were already several hundred in Finland and Sweden and now even 20 or 30 of them in Estonia.

And there are neighborhoods like Nõmme and Kadriorg, populated by people who apparently saw enough concrete in Soviet times to last a lifetime, and who don’t currently embrace the material as the end-all, be-all of modern construction.

We are exiting our teens, however, entering our twenties as a nation, and I believe we’re on the path to good things. My prediction is that the next generation will have far, far better taste. I predict they’ll dismantle the freedom monument and build a greenhouse in its place using the very same glass. Instead of free potatoes, there’ll be free tomatoes.

They’ll dynamite the Linnahall and the plans for a casino along with it, and they’ll develop a port area even more inviting and tasteful than anything across the bay in Helsinki.

And they’ll save the Three Penis Towers by adding a glans to each tower. They’ll market it as the Second Bhutan, and millions will flock here as art tourists, instead of just for cheap booze and a massage with a happy ending.

I look at my own little boy, and I believe in Estonia’s new generations. They’ll believe that all honest work is honorable. They’ll not only fix the mistakes we’ve made, but they’ll surprise us with their ability to work together and make good things happen, in matters of taste and beyond. It’s a small boat we’re in, and I think they’ll know how to all blow in the same direction.

And we don’t necessarily have to wait, either. There is hope for us now. “I have seen kind things done by men with ugly faces,” the poet Masefield wrote. “So I trust too.”

***

More on penises, thatched roofs, and Star Trek here.

There from Here

2011-10-03T10:24:00.003+03:00

“You can’t get there from here,” I used to hear so much it became a mantra when I would attempt to travel by public transport deep in Estonia’s countryside.

I’d be without a car in some remote southern Estonian village with the desire to get to another remote village. To get there I always had to travel through Tartu, or at least Võru. But that was the charm of the countryside, and it was why I often shunned the bus for hitchhiking.

Today, in the larger context of Europe, remoteness is the charm of Tallinn. Wherever “there” is, with the exception of Helsinki, it’s hard to get there from here without engaging in some minor odyssey.

My recent mission: fly to London, discuss a project over lunch, return home the same day.

I soon found out it was impossible from Tallinn. There was the Helsinki option, but the ticket cost 800 euros, and the departure was so early and return so late that I’d end up spending at least one night in Helsinki. Add taxis to and from Vantaa, and the trip hardly justified the price.

So I flew from Tallinn via Riga on an airBaltic deal which gave me one night in a hotel near Hyde Park. All for a little over 300 euros.

The tradeoff for the price is, of course, the Riga airport, still a booming outpost of Eastern European culture. Despite the fact it’s been physically remodeled, one would not be surprised to find its corridors lined with babushkas in housedresses shouting about the virtues of dried fish.

Many of the airport staff speak English with thick, Boratish accents. Passport control looks you over as if you might be traveling with your anus stuffed full of heroin, and then: “Where’s your boarding pass?”

“I don’t have one,” I answered. “Transit check-in is on the other side of you.” The young man eyed me suspiciously. I honestly wasn’t trying to be a smartass.

“You need get boarding pass at transit check,” he declared, as if it were his original idea.

Then he gave me one more suspicious stare and buzzed me through. On the other side, the terminal’s air was filled with the constant din of wannabe disc jockeys making pre-flight announcements which ensure you can’t hear yourself think, much less your telephone ring. In a search for earplugs I found only Rigas Balsams.

A few hours later at Gatwick I was sent packing from the EU passport line when I showed my Estonian ID card. “But I have permanent residence in the EU,” I protested. “Shouldn’t that be worth a shorter queue? And I’m Canadian. Your Queen is my Queen.”

The lady looked at the card as if I were handing her one of my son’s dirty diapers and banished me to the line with Pakistanis, Afghanis, and Americans. There I got a healthy grilling, though the accent was pleasant and the tone polite.

The guard was clearly not interested in the answers to his questions, only that I, in fact, had answers. “And who would you be visiting here, sir?” “Is that a business partner, sir?” “Where are you staying, sir?” I often wonder that if you told them in a confident tone that you were sleeping on a bench in Hyde Park would they carry on in their cheery fashion. “And which particular bench would that be, sir?”

But what struck me most about London is that in the 24 hours I spent there I did not meet a single native Brit outside of passport control and in taxicabs.

The Gatwick Express conductor was Spanish. The entire hotel staff, even the concierge purported to possess supernatural local knowledge, were Eastern European. It was as if I’d never left the Riga airport.

The girl running the pub was Polish. The restaurant I ate in was Lebanese (its waitress Italian). At the entrance to Kensington Palace I was greeted by a familiar accent. “You American?” I asked the ticket taker. “Canadian,” she replied.

It occurred to me that I would have had more interaction with British people if I’d stayed home and driven around Tallinn with my GPS turned on. (The voice I’ve selected sounds like Miss Moneypenny.)

The point of all this is that more and more I find that when I leave Tallinn Airport I start to immediately miss it. I like its Scandinavian silence, its short lines, and free wireless internet, all which somehow serve to mitigate the strangeness of the pat-down man, who just a little too lovingly runs his fingers around the inside the waistband of your trousers.

All this would seem to add up to opportunity for Estonia, Tallinn Airport, and Estonian Air.

A friend has pointed out that the peace and quiet I so enjoy in Ülemiste bears a remarkable resemblance to a graveyard. Because you can’t get there from here, no one does, and the airport’s charm is based on the fact that so few passengers are served.

That may be, but whatever great success Latvia may boast of in air travel should probably be taken in context: all media accounts point to a Day of Reckoning for the Latvian state and airBaltic, which is said will soon lay off hundreds of workers.

And although it’s a popular pastime to make fun of Estonian Air, I’m optimistic now that issue of ownership has been sorted out. Bringing in the pragmatic, bottom-line-loving Joakim Helenius and his hired gun Tera Taskila seems a clear step on the road to profit. Of course it’s impossible to know just how bent on instant gratification and immediate returns the state will be. Will they leave the new team alone long enough to do the job? Or will they meddle from behind the curtain and force sült on the inflight menu, put yellow-vested reisisaatjad in the cabin, or quadruple daily flights to European armpits like Minsk?

May I suggest a daily London route? It’s not just for me: I read somewhere that Skype buys some 2,500 tickets per year to London. (They must surely tire of flying through Riga.)

Tallinn is a wonderful city to come home to. An affordable taxi awaits you, as does the lovely euro. The border guard is efficient and is familiar with ID cards. There are authentic Estonians in the shops and behind counters.

Why not build on that? What if airport walls were covered with soothing Estonian art? What if orchestras rehearsed there? Or choirs? Or what if Tallinn city government members (in yellow vests) roamed the terminal giving free massages to waiting passengers? What if you could get a free sauna while you wait?

There’s plenty of potential to make Tallinn Airport the most pleasant departure and arrival point in Europe. If only you could get there from here. Some day, though, you will.

***

And while you're waiting in that airport...

Cock Ring Ken: the Movie

2011-09-19T12:19:00.002+03:00

One deep bow to artist Toon Vugts who has produced a film based on the column "Cock Ring Ken."

Second Hand

2011-08-28T10:02:00.002+03:00

Did the writer David Sedaris really get pubic lice from a pair of jeans he bought in a second hand store? Liina and I have debated it ad nauseum, and she says he’s lying. I say pubic lice are inevitable if you try on enough pairs of jeans.

Public lice, the tiny, six-legged critter — “crabs” as they're popularly known — are generally transmitted through the intermingling of pubic jungles during sexual intercourse. And though it’s more rare, they can indeed spread through contact with toilet seats, sheets, blankets, bathing suits, or even jeans.

Thanks to Sedaris, for years I shied away from second hand shops. But thanks to Estonia, recently I returned.

For reasons I should not disclose, I have the occasional need to wear a uniform. Whether one needs to appear to be an Army General, customs worker, medical doctor, airport runway technician, or American TV news cameraman, the second-hand shop USA Today near the Tallinn Väike rail station has an outfit for the occasion. It didn’t take me long to find the toxic waste disposal worker uniform I desired. It was even in my size.

But I discovered other treasures, too. There was a Mossimo corduroy jacket and L.L. Bean lined trousers for winter. Joseph A. Banks dress shirts were abundant in my size. Some were new, some were close to new, and each was something around five euros.

I took some comfort in the fact that David Sedaris never got crabs from a shirt. But just in case, I tried them on with a tshirt underneath, removed them as quickly as possible, and washed them in hot water at home before wearing.

USA Today piqued my curiosity. If the Americans were sending perfectly good Joseph A. Banks dress shirts, what might the Europeans be sending? This led me to Humana where I found trousers in my size, as well as several sport coats which were of higher quality than most of what you find at Stockmann. One of them fit me. And only ten euros. No kidding.

Two weeks later, wearing my new-to-me jacket, I saw my friend Alan at a party. I admired him greatly, not only because he was an intellectual who had tackled Estonian literature’s most massive translation project, but because, sartorially speaking, he had the disheveled professor look down pat.

Perhaps I am only trying to justify my own less-than-neat appearance, but if a man’s clothes have just the right amount of wrinkles, if his hair is such that he won’t get a job modeling for Supercuts, and if he isn’t completely drunk, then you know he is likely a man to be reckoned with, a man who cannot be bought and sold. “That’s a beautiful jacket, Vello,” Alan clapped me on the back. “You think the shop has one in my size?”

I told him I was pretty sure Humana didn’t, but said if the jacket would fit him then I’d give it to him right then and there. (I meant what I said, but I was safe; Alan was at least one-and-a-half of me.) Alan’s approval set me on an even deeper second hand course.

I admit that I first viewed second hand as a chance to reduce the burden of my annual provisioning trip to the west: fly out with no suitcases and return with your maximum allowance. (Why shop Estonia? Buy your stuff in the west, and the savings easily pay for the plane ticket.)

But while the seeds of my second-hand habit may lie in the fact that I’m a cheap bastard, they quickly grew into something Zen. Buying second hand offered instant relief from the burden of things.

If I decide I don’t like the pattern of my shirt, or if it’s slightly too long in the sleeves, then I give it to the Salvation Army. If my son throws up on my Nautica pants, so what? If someone praises my jacket or tie, I may take it off and give it to him in a grand, Gandhiesque gesture.

But despite my Zen level, there is the occasional trauma.

I recently bought a pair of jeans from Humana. I tried them on briefly in the store, but with Sedaris’ words in the back of my mind I removed them as quickly as possible.

When I got home, I washed them at the highest temperature and then proudly showed them to Liina. “Calvin Klein!” I told her, sashaying around the living room as if I were Carmen Kass on a Paris catwalk.

She hardly looked up from her book.

I preened in front of the mirror, tugging at the jeans. Something wasn’t quite right. The zipper seemed a bit high to allow freedom for urination, but wasn’t this how designer jeans were supposed to be? I recalled the credo of Fernando Álvaro Lamas: It is better to look good than to feel good.

The jeans hung in my closet for a week. For some reason, I could not bring myself to wear them. They did not look bad on me, certainly, but they didn’t look good, either.

One day, two gay friends were visiting, and I showed them the jeans and explained my reservations.

“These are women’s jeans,” Martin declared instantly.

“That’s right,” agreed Mattias, “You’re wearing girl’s jeans.” He snickered in an overly theatrical manner.

I was slightly offended. “Just because you guys are gay doesn’t mean you know shit about clothing.”

“Oh, yeah?” Martin countered. “Then why did you show them to us.”

“Look!” Mattias snatched the jeans from my hands and flung them open on the kitchen table. “You think you can get your tool out with that tiny zipper? No way, mister.”

“And look at the hips!” cried Martin. “They’re wide. For women. Are your hips wide, Vello?”

Mattias began prying around inside the jeans. “See? Size 14! Women’s.”

“I’ve tried on the jeans,” I said, “and they aren’t wide in the hips. And the sizing could be because they’re designer jeans. Also, they were in the men’s department.”

At this both Mattias and Martin howled. “Well,” shrieked Martin, “those clothing experts at the second hand store surely know!”

“Wear women’s jeans if you want then,” said Mattias, folding his hands across his chest in a case-closed gesture.

“No one will notice,” added Martin. “Probably.”

I took the jeans from them and told them they knew so little about clothing that they were going to lose their homosexual licenses. Later that night I scoured the internet for information on Calvin Klein size 14 jeans. Everything I found was for women.

I wondered if I might not give them away to some unsuspecting friend. But how Gandhiesque would the gesture appear if I didn’t take them off my own body to give them away? And wouldn’t someone have to first express interest in them? I might be waiting a very long time.

The next day, I quietly took them to the Salvation Army. “These are women’s jeans,” I told the girl working there, so she wouldn’t make the mistake of putting them in the men’s section.

She gave me a strange look. “Of course they are,” she said.

“I washed them, too,” I added. “Just so nobody will get crabs.” Then I turned on my heel and marched out the door.

***

Read Vello not virtual.

Dispatch: Malawi

2011-07-30T10:08:00.003+03:00

After a column suggesting suitable debate topics for the upcoming elections, some have suggested I might best serve Estonia as the republic’s envoy in Malawi, with which Estonia established diplomatic relations on July 19. The following is my first report. It is published here with permission of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Arrival

The sini-must-valge now flies above Malawi's rolling plains. Or near them, anyway, as I have duct taped it to the outside of my apartment window in Lilongwe’s Old Town – yes, they have an Old Town – one of many things our two proud nations have in common!

(Note to Minister Paet: Please send more duct tape via the diplomatic pouch – I must replace it daily, as it is popular here for upholstery repair.)

Presentation of credentials

President Bingu wa Mutharika is truly everything our ministry’s reports say, and the two of us have already enjoyed several chess games in the palace courtyard with live Malawian servants as pieces. Our games may go on for hours, and the discipline of the Malawian people is truly incredible. How do they stand still for so long?

Dispatching captured pieces with a high-powered rifle from the palace roof is rather unorthodox, but Bingo (as he insists I call him) has assured me the country’s unemployment rate—listed as “NA” in the CIA Factbook—is high enough to enable this kind of chess. Bingo has asked repeatedly whether there is sufficient room on Mr. Ilves’ lawn to set up a chessboard when he visits. Bingo says he wishes to play several matches in the memory of Paul Keres, and has characterized Estonia’s unemployment rate as “sufficiently high to allow proper chess in your country, too.”

These chess games have provided an irreplaceable forum for our two nations to get to know each other and for Bingo to point out similarities in our countries and cultures. Did you know, for example, that both our nations have an abundance of limestone? And that we are both bordered by a large lake to the east? We both have democracies, too, and Bingo has remarked many times during our conversations that a “multiparty democracy” is only several letters away from a “military democracy.” He has noted, too, that our nations share life expectancies exceeding 50 years, and that our respective infant mortality rates differ only by one single decimal place.

And as with all leaders, Mr. Minister, Bingo is sometimes tormented by the press. Just recently, this July 25, he was forced to deal harshly with the press when he shut down the nation’s radio stations, surrounded churches where journalists were seeking shelter, and delivered severe beatings to them in the national interest. I have enclosed Bingo’s gift of a dozen sjamboks in the most recent diplomatic pouch. If they work on African reporters, he believes they may also find application with Estonians, too.

Let me assure you, Mr. Minister, that I now more fully appreciate the significance of having established diplomatic relations here and the considerable expenses associated with my presence. It is my hope that I will be able to concentrate fully on Malawi and not be distracted by being asked to cover South Sudan, as I hear rumored in the halls on Islandi Väljak. Although if a black Chrysler 300C is part of the package, I could of course be enticed.

The Estoniafication of Malawi

A wise move, Mr. Minister, in dispatching the team of consultants from EAS. In no time at all they have managed to put the headline “Welcome to Malawi!” in red text on the country’s tourism website (see for yourself here!). The Malawians are starting to appreciate it, especially when it is paired with the equally compelling “Come and visit Malawi.”

The consultants are currently working to reduce enthusiasm for the current overly-specific slogan, “The warm heart of Africa.” The EAS men also raised the issue that the tourism business might improve if potential tourists were not informed that Malawi was in Africa. They have also suggested, in light of last week’s 18 dead protestors, that Malawi give consideration to whether they continue to advertise their country as “safe.” (NB! Though there’s perhaps something for us in this? “Estonia. It’s safe.”)

Under coaching from Bingo himself, I have begun “talks” with Estonian Air and instructed them to add daily flights from Tallinn to Lilongwe and Blantyre. I have suggested—and the EAS consultants agree—that these routes may be thematically linked with the airline’s Tallinn-Minsk routes, given similarities in management style of the leaders (both having been known to employ the phrase “I will smoke you out”). Should Messrs. Taskila and Helenius offer resistance, I count on you and Mr. Parts to remind them that profit is, at best, a secondary concern in a state-owned business.

Healthcare initiatives

In the city of Lilongwe, it is estimated that 20 percent of the population is infected with HIV/AIDS, which Bingo touts as an “effective initiative which has significantly reduced sex tourism” in the country. He eagerly awaits the chance to discuss his program as a prescription for reducing the number of British stag partiers in Tallinn’s Old Town when he visits Estonia in the autumn.

Another secret of Malawian healthcare, says Bingo, is the presence of zebra meat in the Malawian diet. Zebra is a deep red meat with a medium grain tasting delightfully sweeter than beef. It may surprise you to know, Mr. Minister, that the zebra can reach speeds of up to 65 kilometers per hour, and has a strong jaw and teeth sharp enough to cleanly bite off a grown man’s arm. I have come to see possibilities here for Estonia, as 100 hectares can easily support one stallion and four to five mares. I believe that we may have found our solution as to what to do with the increasingly de-populated areas in the countryside. I have sent a separate report on the zebra, but please know for now that a zebra can live 25 years, each has its own unique stripe pattern, and its skin is ideally suited for upholstery in Chrysler 300C sedans.

Commercial opportunities

Lilongwe’s Old Town supports a thriving bicycle parts business, and I believe many of Estonia’s out of work cobblers and watch repairmen may be gainfully employed here. Bingo has alluded to the fact that he might be willing to nationalize the bicycle parts business, and I have cabled the owners of Hawaii Express to check their interest in having a part in such a concession.

I also understand that there is growing support within the Tallinn city government to begin to use western-made buses, and Lilongwe is home to a sprawling mini-bus station which may be a source to distribute many of Tallinn’s Soviet-era public transportation. I have been in touch directly with Mr. Savisaar concerning this matter, and his office has also shown interest in a personnel exchange program so that both governments might be enriched by the other’s best practices.

Next Steps

As per our nation’s The More The Merrier policy, I have assured Bingo that he has Estonia’s unconditional backing for membership in both NATO and the EU, and I have duly presented the president with the gifts you sent. Bingo especially seemed to like the Georgia, Ukraine, Malawi tshirt you sent him. (And I note here that our former President Rüütel had spoken publicly in favor of also backing Ishmaelia for membership.)

As per your recent cable, I have begun to form a cozy alliance with Minister of Education Arthur Peter Mutharika, believed to be in line to succeed his brother in 2014. I urge the inclusion of Arthur Peter among the autumn delegation. Under his leadership, tuition at the University of Malawi increased 220 percent, and he will certainly have knowledge and experience to inform our country’s debate on free education.

I am,

Your humble servant,

Vello Vikerkaar

A Point of Pride

2011-07-16T15:46:00.002+03:00

Much has been made of how formidable the Estonian language is.

In the 1990s, the American Peace Corps volunteer Douglas Wells wrote both a short story and a song celebrating its difficulty. Flattered by his harmonic salute to their impossible language, Estonian radio listeners rallied and put Wells’ song at the top of the charts for a period of several weeks.

Estonians generally resist flattery, but one surefire method to please them is to talk about how difficult their language is. Its difficulty, in fact, is a point of national pride.

Although most Estonians are unaware of it, historical records show that Jakob Hurt proposed Ardua lingua as the Estonian national motto in a companion piece to his 1886 dissertation on pure -ne stem nouns, Die estnischen Nomina auf -ne purum. “Foreigners may conquer our soil,” Hurt wrote, “but they will never master our language.”

But it now appears Hurt was wrong. Just the other day I set out to prove his thesis to a visiting group of tourists by counting the Americans (the laziest people on earth when it comes to languages) who have learned the Estonian language. I was confident I could count them on one hand, but I quickly found myself needing the other. And a few toes, as well.

There is Greg in Tallinn, who speaks it so fluently his very slight accent gets him mistaken for a drunken native. There is Robert in southern Estonia who can dazzle natives with his knowledge of every growing plant and scurrying critter. There are Jerry, Justin, Stewart, James, Edward, Bill, John, Scott, David and Rufus, whose accents may keep them from deep undercover spy work or limit local acting careers, but who manage quite nicely and are even able to read legal contracts in the Estonian language.

Of course I can name dozens from the European continent who have mastered the language. There are at least a half-dozen from China, Japan, and India who speak the tongue. And I know several fellow väliseestlased who have learned the language, as well.

If so many foreigners are successfully learning Estonian is not a key source of national pride in danger? Is the risk not present of the Estonian language losing its small, elite, club-like status? And so shouldn’t something be done to make the language more difficult?

If any presidential candidate is looking for campaign material, perhaps making the Estonian language more impenetrable might be a worthy platform, a cause around which every loyal Estonian speaker would surely rally.

President Ilves’ word competition Sõnaus is already making headway to drive the offending foreign words from the vocabulary. I have recently noticed the appearance of terms such as taristu, vabasektor, kestlik, and idufirma.

But we can do more. If we dedicated the Language Inspectorate (to which we should seriously consider giving an even more imposing name) full time to the task, we might be able to eliminate other offensive foreign terms such as “telefon” (suggestion: “elektrooniliseisiklikukõneaparaat”), “check-in’ima” (“sisseastumisregistreerimine”), “hotell” (“lühiajutiseööbimisepaik”), “hängima” (“lühiajutiseööbimisepaik”), and “tšau” (no suggestions).

There is of course another camp in this discussion. Some advocate making Estonian more user friendly, basic changes which would form a Pidgin version of the language. This new language would be highly flexible in its written form and pronunciation, something equivalent to the kind of English that my young Estonian friend Mart speaks.

Me to Mart: “Mart, stop capitalizing the ‘Y’ in ‘you,’ unless it’s at the beginning of a sentence.” Or: “Mart, quit pronouncing the ‘L’ in ‘salmon.’”

Mart to me: “I speak British English.”

In honor of Mart, I suggest naming the new language “British Estonian.”

We might go further. Roughly half the case endings could be dropped and few would know the difference. And do we really need two infinitive forms of every verb when much wealthier countries make do with only one? And why not drop the formal “teie” and its attendant verb conjugations?

Despite the obvious virtues of British Estonian, I suspect the simplification approach will find little traction among the Estonian people. To simplify anything runs counter to the culture at large. While e-advances may have theoretically made the workings of the state more efficient, has it resulted in sweeping reductions in the size of the public sector? “Show me the beef!” an American friend often demands of me when I start to praise Estonia’s e-state. Then he goes on to argue that to overcomplicate things is the very essence of being European, that a continent and culture in decline has little else left to do than make rules.

Also lending itself to further complication of the language is the dogged stubbornness of Estonians. Their desire to protect all things Estonian is evident in state-financed programs to keep the culture and language alive, but it is even more visible at the grass-roots level. Purchasing bus tickets at my local R-kiosk, no matter how fluent my Estonian-language request for a pack of ten tickets is, all further matters are handled in English (“Will you pay with a card?”).

Of course it could be insecurity, a need on the R-kiosk worker’s part to demonstrate that she, too, speaks a foreign language. Or perhaps she simply wants to practice. But I prefer the conspiracy theory, and I do sometimes suspect Estonians consider their language a very private matter, and that they would rather make fools out of themselves in English than to use Estonian in the presence of foreigners.

There is the unconfirmed story circulating of an Estonian EU representative who opted to address the general assembly in English. Reportedly, the representative stressed her conviction on a certain matter, noting that she would “give head” if she were wrong.

Having heard the story third- or fourth hand, I am sure my version is likely inaccurate on many levels. But, still, what a difference the omission of a possessive determiner can make. Perhaps she intended to convey that she would bet her life that she was right?

A French interpreter I know who works in Brussels tells me she has noticed that while representatives of big nations will generally don headphones to hear a speech in their native languages, Estonians will often shun the use of interpreters and listen to the speech in English. We may consider here the same theories in the R-kiosk case, but as an armchair scientist I must embrace the conspiracy. Don’t let Estonian out of the bag. Even Americans might learn it.

Which must lead us to conclude that further complicating the language is a natural next step in the defense of the culture. Consideration should be given, as well, to the illegalization of its use by foreigners. What might it do for state coffers if foreigners were fined for every “tere” or “tänan” that they tried out on a shopkeeper? Or if the uttering a complete sentence in Estonian by a foreigner could be considered an act of espionage? I think you’ll agree that I’m on to something.

Consider this fair warning: Allow foreigners to learn the Estonian language and they will soon sink in much deeper roots. They’ll soon start to marry the local women. And by then it will be far, far too late.

***

Visit our lovely gift shop.

White Unicorns

2011-07-02T14:53:00.002+03:00

It’s a dreadful scene and no one is permitted unescorted. Wash your hands and disinfect before entering. There’s a sign by the sink offering cheap parking, but that’s going to be little compensation.

There supine on the bed is your nine-kilo, 77-centimeter, one-year-old son: unconscious and stretched out before you with tubes in his nose, hands, and one between two of his tiny toes. His little limbs are lashed to the bed as if he were a suicide case.

You stand on the wrong side of his bed and it only gets worse. There is a roomful of them: a first-birthday balloon floats above the bedpost of one; a box of toys stands quiet on the windowsill of another. Some of them have been here for a while.

***

In the 1990s, there was a saying among foreigners: Get sick in Estonia and the only cure is a plane ticket out. Given the state of the healthcare system, it often seemed justified.

It was said that to get proper treatment a payment was necessary—and it didn’t have to be cash. I imagined Estonia’s top surgeons sipping tea from bone china in immaculately groomed gardens, surrounded by chickens, pigs, and cows which patients had given them in payment.

In case of illness, American Peace Corps volunteers I knew kept their own supply of syringes, so much did they fear rusty, harpoon-like Soviet needles.

A physician friend once told me that it was easier for a doctor to amputate than to set a broken leg. (He laughed when I took him seriously for a moment.)

But personal experience only served to validate the stereotype. In 1993, having taken a fall on the ice and suspecting a broken leg, I visited Mustamäe Hospital. Limping through its unmarked labyrinth, knocking on closed doors until I finally located a doctor. She stared at me for a long while, and I suspect the only reason she did not simply turn away was my accent. She agreed to do an xray, and in excruciating pain I dragged myself up two flights of stairs by the handrail while she led impatiently in front.

Once with Liina in Haapsalu, an emergency room physician, his face beet-red and breath like rocket fuel, was perturbed at being taken from his soap opera which blared in the background. He grabbed Liina’s wrist and twisted it. She screamed in equal parts agony and surprise.

“It’s not broken,” he said, and did an about-face to return to his television. (It wasn’t broken. An xray the next day at a private clinic proved him right.)

Soviet medical care is free, went the joke. And then the rejoinder: But care of this quality is free everywhere in the world. Truly, the plane ticket out was not a bad idea.

Although things have changed, memories like these still flood your mind when you visit a hospital today.

The Mustamäe Hospital, despite improvements to its facade, from many angles still appears from the outside as a horrific Soviet monster which feeds on the ill. Inside, though, and especially the children’s hospital, it’s a case study in how to resurrect an old commie building.

The equipment is modern and the hallways are spotless. The pastries in the children’s hospital café are as good or better than most in the city. The main hospital’s atrium café (in some freak accident of a public tender?) is actually run by Reval Café, a place regular human beings would otherwise delight in eating.

Estonia’s doctors today, in my experience, are superb. Though they may not know me, I have come to know many of them by name, and I am most every time impressed by their professionalism, commitment, and compassion.

And the nurses? As my mother was a nurse, I am probably predisposed to like all nurses. “You will only be allowed to stay home from school if you are bleeding to death,” was a familiar refrain of my mother’s, which perhaps epitomizes the spirit present in all good nurses, their instinctive ability to strike the right balance of taking no guff yet imparting some sympathy.

And beyond the medical staff, in the children’s hospital there are even occasional visiting magician clowns in lab coats, who I have seen make a sick little boy shriek with joy.

“Why is everyone so nice here?” I finally asked an allergist who showed herself to be the talkative sort. I noted that the myths of Soviet medicine sometimes still hang heavily over Estonia.

“It’s great to work with kids,” she said simply, and I wondered how were the state of things across the street at the big hospital. Was everyone there so nice, too? Or was the positive environment at the children’s hospital partly due to external factors, like community interest led by the Children’s Hospital Fund and the republic’s First Lady?

Of course it’s not all roses. Spend enough time anywhere and you start to notice stains on the carpet.

On some days you may begin to wonder if there are any ethnic Estonians left in the hospital at all. It can sometimes seem that Estonian may not be the best language to use when seeking medical care. But you soon realize that nearly everyone speaks enough. You meet a few native speakers, too, and it becomes apparent that, despite what we read in the papers, not everyone has yet gone to Finland.

You meet the wacky resident who delivers a lecture ad nauseum about how to weigh urine in diapers. He explains to you the meaning of the numbers to the left and right of the decimal point on the digital monitor. Kilos. Grams. (Ah, the thrill of science!)

I want to ask him how to know the difference between a “6” and a “9” on the digital thermometer, but Liina stops me. “Don’t make enemies here,” she says. Besides, one veteran doctor has already told the resident to shut up and stop spewing nonsense.

Then there’s the jailhouse food. While it may be good in the cafes, the food brought to your room causes you to wonder whether one of Stalin’s actuaries has conducted a calorie count, and you are being fed the bare minimum in order to keep you alive. This is somewhat mitigated by the very pleasant servers, who seem always in good spirits when they enter your room.

There is the pay parking lot patrolled so efficiently that its proceeds must fund half the hospital. Perhaps Liina and I are not the smartest parkers, but we have been fined three times, and we console ourselves by hoping the 35-euro fines might go to fund a new kidney machine or to fill the canyon-sized pothole at the turnoff to the hospital, and not go to put gasoline in some politician’s luxury automobile.

Once you’ve been there a while you disappear into the woodwork and start to hear private conversations in the elevator. Workers’ complaints about ridiculous bureaucracy. A nurse telling a doctor to stop treating them like dogs. There’s an ear doctor from Soviet era who still thinks it’s the Soviet era. And there are of course still a number of angry babushka types, who, in the words of a friend, are accumulating major karmic debt.

Some floors are run like prisons where the nurses are the guards. “We have rules here,” said Nurse Ratched, after she caught me sitting in the bed. “The bed is for mothers!”

“I thought the bed was for the parental guardian?” I replied. “And that would be me.”

She bared her teeth as a warning and moved on.

But other floors are little Utopias. Convalescing children do cartwheels in the hallways and socialize in the playroom. The staff is happy and smiling. For example, it would not be out of place on the third floor, I think, for a fairy princess to appear riding bareback atop a white unicorn.

***

When your infant son wakes in the ICU it’s the most unsettling part. He wants to cry out but can’t because of the tube in his nose. He thrashes about, pulling at his tethers. You can see the terror in his eyes. You place a hand flat on his chest and another on his forehead. But that doesn’t help at all; it only makes him want to be held.

After a while he steadies, he turns his head and stares you in the eyes. He melts you.

And you are as helpless as he. There is nothing for you to do but trust. Trust in fate, in your god, but mostly trust in the physicians and nurses.

And you do.

One Voice

2011-06-18T08:49:00.005+03:00

“One voice can change a room. If it can change a room, then it can change a city…can change a state…can change a nation…can change the world.” Call me an idealist, but I believe it.

True, humanity may be doomed, but since you can’t sleep 24 hours a day, you might as well do something useful with your time. And trying to change the world is far more challenging than, say, real-estate development.

I’ve always wanted to be a speechwriter, and so I’ve drafted this one for President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. I invite other writers to do the same and publish the results in newspapers and websites around the country. Because once voice…

Commencement address of Toomas Hendrik Ilves to the graduating class of Tartu University, June 2011.

As I look out at your young, somewhat bored faces, I see you are expecting the usual pablum from a commencement speaker. It would be tempting to trot out the platitudes about how you are different than those who have gone before you and the great successes you will enjoy. But since that would no doubt bore us both, probably me more than you, and since your rector and I just shared a case of beer in the shade of a large oak, I have decided to spell out for you exactly how things are. [Note to self: Loosen bowtie; gaze thoughtfully over crowd.]

The usual commencement speech would entail me telling you that you are the future of Estonia, and that I am comfortable handing over the country to you. You would recognize the former to be a fact, and you would suspect the latter to be idle flattery. You would be right.

Quite frankly, some of you, despite your very good educations, scare me. If we cannot stop people of your age from driving cars into trees, if we cannot stop the spread of AIDS in our country, if we cannot find a solution for people of different ethnicities to live in productive harmony on this one small patch of earth, then there is not much hope for our future. I wonder whether you are up to this task.

Without boasting I will tell you my generation has accomplished a great deal. In a few short years, the names of my peers will be given to streets and public buildings. In this way, history will celebrate the problems we have solved more than the ones we will leave to you.

But since you are, like it or not, our future, I would like to remark briefly about the past and then offer a few words about your future, which is indeed the future of Estonia.

Most of you are around 20 years old. You have only heard stories of the period of history which ended with Estonia’s re-independence in 1991. And you may not be intimately familiar with the history of the last 20 years, as you have been busy — and rightly so — being young. But you have now reached the age where it is time I spoil your fun.

This first period I speak of, 20 years prior to your birth, was spent by many working for an independent state. The second 20 years after your birth were spent, so to speak, arranging a seat for you at the Big Table.

Since the year of your birth, Estonia has made the necessary sacrifices and changes to ensure our security through memberships in elite western clubs.

The list is long and impressive: The UN, the World Bank, the IMF, NATO, the EU, the Schengen zone, the OECD, and the Euro.

Estonia has been admired by and praised by the west for our significant achievements. We have been, in a way, the absolute best Boy Scout, earning every merit badge there is to have.

But I would remind you that many of these achievements were within an externally-prescribed context. We were given no guidebook, but the goals were clear.

The meaning of this is that Estonia is now an equal: no more and no less than our western allies. We worked 20 years, one might frame it, to arrive at the starting line. We “got to Denmark,” to tamper slightly with Fukuyama.

Some may hint that my generation of leaders, having achieved all there is to achieve under this merit-badge like structure, is now confused and adrift. Joakim Helenius has pointed out that to be among Europe’s five richest is not a vision. The Economist has noted our Prime Minister is "a manager, not a visionary." I would argue, however, that what Estonia has most needed was a highly disciplined manager. And that is what we got.

My generation’s work has laid the groundwork for you. We have brought you a stable, independent state, a state with a seat at the world’s table. But what will you do with it? Have you any idea?

I will suggest to you that the hardest work (and perhaps the most interesting) is still ahead: We are entering the era of original thinking.

This new era will require an entirely different type of change, a type which no external body can prescribe.

In 2010, Chris Patten outlined in the New York Review of Books what he thought Europe’s role in the world ought to be. As far as I am aware, such a thoughtful look at Estonia’s future role in Europe (and the world), has not been so cogently articulated by our statesmen. But maybe you ought to consider it.

So what can you do? [Note: Untie bowtie now — let it hang around neck.]

Start by ending the practice of constantly reminding ourselves that Estonia is small. This too easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I cannot imagine that citizens of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, or Liechtenstein so often begin their sentences with the words “Our country is so small…” One is as big as one imagines. Let us right here and now agree to repair our imaginations.

End “semu kapitalism.” A country with such scarce human resources as ours has no room for anything but a meritocracy. To compete in the world only our very best will suffice. Our partners in every walk of life must be selected on the basis of merit and experience alone, and there is no place to wonder “Kas sul on oma jope seal?”

Smash the glass ceiling. As Vello Vikerkaar has written, the best man for the job is a woman. Let key decisions be made around the conference table and not in the sauna or bordello. Our nation cannot afford a good ol’ boys club and must take talent where we find it.

Stop eating our own. It is entirely true that an Estonian’s favorite breakfast is another Estonian. You may laugh, but you should cry. Because this is not at all funny. It is rather a very telling statement about our self-esteem. The only solution is an Estonian-free diet.

Beware the communal ego. The Estonian media, though heavily criticized, devotes inordinate amounts of space to atta-boy articles celebrating how clever we Estonians are. Too much of this puts our culture at risk of indulging in the celebration of mediocrity. As the eminent professor Jack Gladney has noted: “We’re all brilliant…You call me brilliant, I call you brilliant. It’s a form of communal ego.”

Despite the advertising, our image abroad is not often “positively transforming” but rather one associated with crime, AIDS, or the grey pall of Eastern Europe. It is not always fair, but it is reality. Let us recognize it as such and begin to change it.

End the brain drain. Our talented doctors, scientists, and tech minds, as well as our qualified skilled laborers, are exiting the country faster than replacements enter. If this is not somehow reversed — perhaps by ending the bureaucratic water-boarding of our own Estonian companies who wish to employ foreigners – Estonia will continue on its path toward being nothing but the most distant suburb of Helsinki.

To make Estonia a viable employment market, our educational- and health care systems must rival any in Europe. Nobody, least of all Estonians, wants to be a citizen of a backwater nation.

Our “talendikoju” call has gone largely unheeded, perhaps because of young people’s proclivity for adventure, perhaps partly because an older generation’s call to a younger one is often naturally ignored. And while I recognize that an education abroad and a little bit of foreign work experience may not in themselves produce change in our country, these bring with them higher expectations for ourselves and others. These we desperately need.

After 50 years of forced separation from Europe, it is more contact with the world that we need, not less.

And last but not least, we must embrace the Russian-speaking population of Estonia as our own. I have been partly at fault here, I admit. I recognize that I am also the president of 400,000 Russian speakers. I recognize that they are not occupiers, nor are they representatives of occupiers. Perhaps what Russians know best, something we modern Estonians might remind ourselves of as we chase the Almighty Euro, [Note: Look directly into TV camera] is Не имей 100 рублей, а имей 100 друзей.

And as poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko remarked in 1993 at the University of Chicago: "We need to teach tolerance from childhood. The future for all of us is patriotism for all mankind."

Thank you.

[Note: In event of ovation, throw bowtie into crowd.]

***

Get more would-be speechwriting here.

A Three-Martini Breakfast

2011-05-28T10:31:00.003+03:00

“Perhaps a tad bit of white tea?” offered the businessman, “before I tell you all about my philosophy of life?”

His sentence contained two clear reasons to run the other direction, and normally I would have, but I was being paid to interview him. But for money or not, if I was to endure what was surely to be his cliché-ridden, borrowed outlook on life, I was going to need something stronger than tea. “Got any whiskey?” I asked.

“No, but maybe you’d prefer Bai Hao Yinzhen?”

I had no idea what that meant, but I was very much afraid he might next suggest that we go get pedicures together. “As long as there’s plenty of alcohol in it,” I answered. But there wasn’t any alcohol in it. Bai hao Yinzhen, he explained, was also a tea.

***

The great thing about getting drunk in the morning, Sergei Dovlatov once wrote, is that you can take the rest of the day off. And Dovlatov had done enough journalism to know. While I never lived in Estonia in the Soviet time, the early 90s were close enough, with the bottle-in-the-desk-drawer office culture still largely intact.

It was usual to have a brandy with your morning coffee, a beer or two with lunch, and then a bottle of vodka or two at whoever’s place you ended up for dinner. All this alcohol consumption seemed to aid us in the office where I worked, though to an outside observer it might have appeared that our chief competence was the ability to take anything simple and make it excruciatingly complicated. But Estonia had no real international ambitions in those days: the focus was on a move to capitalism, and a bit of alcohol on the job was merely a transitional tool.

“You’ll be judged by what you eat and drink,” a kolkhoz director once announced when I visited for a tour of his farm. We got loaded and then drove around in his Volga to inspect the cows. Once a morning meeting with a brewery director turned into a two-hour drinking session culminating with a singalong to “The Brewer” where all present performed the last verse on top of the conference table. What the directors of those companies knew was, respectively, how to make a cow calve and how to brew beer. They had little use for parroting modern management books, utterances such as “two plus two equals five!” or “Business 2.0” or “win-win.” These men just rolled up their sleeves and, at least between the drinking, did their jobs. And they never asked if you needed a yixing pot or wanted yak butter with your beverage.

It sometimes seems the trouble with post-EU Estonia is that the previous work culture has been thrown out wholesale, the baby along with the bath water. The works of Vladimir Lenin have been replaced by Deepak Chopra, Tom Peters, Peter Drucker, and Michael Porter, whose chief contributions, it seems to me, have been to make us all take ourselves very seriously. Was it one of them who, when I wasn’t looking, replaced the alcohol with green tea?

I never worked in North America during the three-martini lunch period, but in the 1980s it was perfectly acceptable to eat lots of red meat and have a drink or two with lunch. We even enjoyed coming back to the office a bit lit. It offered additional courage for negotiations or for flirting with the office hottie.

But in a nascent business culture the pendulum swings wider, and I fear we are saddled with living like Buddhist monks for a while. Hang some wind chimes in your office, attend yoga classes at lunchtime, quote Sun Tzu to a visiting journalist.

***

My particular businessman started in about “CSR,” and though I know what it means I gave him the satisfaction of explaining it to me.

“Corporate Social Responsibility…” he continued, as if he had personally invented the concept and would be soon beatified for donating a couple of Chinese-made bicycles to an orphanage. He went on with the altruist act, throwing in terms like “synergy” and “human capital” and half a dozen other terms which had nothing to do with calves calving or beer brewing, until he realized that my mind was elsewhere.

“Aren’t you going to write any of this down?” he asked. How could I have explained to him that a good writer respects his readers?

But since it was a corporate assignment, and since I was being paid in part to make him feel good about himself, I told him that I had been blessed with an audiographic memory and that, anyway, he’d get to approve whatever I wrote. And then I said I was feeling a bit ill (which wasn’t a lie) and asked to use his bathroom. There, squirreled away in a stall, I phoned Liina and begged her to call me in exactly three minutes and shout into the receiver: “Warren Buffett called again. He wants to talk right now.”

“Who?” she asked.

“Warr-en Buff-ett,” I enunciated. “Just make sure you’re loud enough to be heard.”

Back in his office I excused myself when my phone rang. “This call I have to take.”

“I completely understand,” he said, after he overheard my brief conversation with Liina. And of course he understood, because after all it was his god of gods who needed to talk to me.

“Do you think he might come to Estonia?” the businessman asked.

“He’s an old-fashioned guy,” I replied, standing in the doorway. “He likes steak or burgers washed down with Cherry Coke. Or a beverage even stronger.”

With that I brought my hands together in front of my chest. “Namaste,” I said, bowing slightly as I stepped out into the world.

***

Postscript: Nature Photography Update

My April 23 story, “How to Become a Nature Photographer,” inspired a significant amount of reader feedback, including requests for tips on nature photography, but also a surprising number of suggestions about the best techniques for cooking roadkill fox (baked seems to be the favorite in Harjumaa, while southern Estonians prefer it grilled).

Jacques-Alain Finkeltroc, a photographer for Estonian Public Broadcasting whose activities were chronicled in the story, was recently honored by the Estonian Nature Photographers Association for his work photographing rodents in the Elistvere Animal Park.

Tarmo, a.k.a. Gagarin, was deluged with reader requests as to where one could purchase the Merino wool underwear. (Answer: Amazon.com.) Gagarin also recently garnered fame by photographing the five rarest animals on earth within the space of one single week: the Pinta Island Tortoise, the Baiji (river dolphin), the Vancouver Island Marmot, the Seychelles Sheath-tailed Bat, and the Javan Rhino. His expedition was financed by a grant from British Petroleum.

Powerpoint People

2011-05-07T07:15:00.004+03:00

There’s an old Native American tradition that was still practiced the year I lived on a Dakota reservation. Every full moon, all those who had passed the manhood ritual would gather around the fire, and a pipe would be passed. It was not a pipe for smoking – most braves smoked Marlboros or rolled their own — but one for speaking. Tribe members patiently waited their turn, and when the pipe reached a brave’s hands, he might say what was on his mind. Or he might not. There was just as often silence.

In my exploration of Northern Europe I have discovered a Finno-Ugric tribe which keeps a similar ritual for allowing braves to speak. No pipe is passed, though. The Finno-Ugric tribe has replaced it with the cord to a Powerpoint projector.

And unlike the pipe, the cord is not passed peacefully, and a meeting can sometimes turn as aggressive as a game of lacrosse: it is custom that tribesmen attempt to grab the cord as it dangles from a ceiling-mounted projector near the center of the conference table.

“Here’s the point I’m making,” said Pekka, snatching the swinging cord from the hands of Heikki and plugging it into his laptop. Pekka stated his case, managing three or four painfully-constructed slides, until Kalevi, a brave of higher standing, yanked the cord from the socket of the Pekka’s laptop and plugged it into his own.

After a two-hour meeting, with the cord passed to half a dozen corporate warriors, no decision had been made on the issue, but all left satisfied. Each had had his chance to express himself and show at least some of the slides he had spent hours constructing. The meeting adjourned with promises to email presentations to each other.

I encountered this tribe when I was brought in to consult on a form of communication unfamiliar to them: the corporate magazine. They had come to me through their tribe’s medicine man who had traveled over the great water and had heard my name in context of the mystical practice of the printed word. Soon, my name and likeness were carried to his tribe and spread among their ranks via Powerpoint, and eventually I was invited to visit the tribe at its pleasant camp in a grassy meadow by the sea.

Though the vast majority of Northern tribes lead isolated existences, this one had seen the need to stretch beyond its borders in the name of commerce. More prescient members of the tribal council recognized a Powerpoint presentation in their native tongue was no more decipherable to the West than the smoke signals their forefathers had used. Just as their predecessors had come to eventually accept Colonel Colt and his invention as part of their future, the tribe believed that I and my words on papyrus in a widely-spoken language might be the key to their future.

Northern tribes are known to have accepted few outsiders, and those who have been received have generally returned to document the tribes’ consumption of copious quantities of alcohol and co-ed bathing rituals involving nudity, sweat, and birch branches. So I was not completely unprepared for their colorful oddities.

But I was indeed struck by the tribe’s devotion to Powerpoint as a communications tool. For it, they shunned all talk, and their corridors were as silent as a funeral home. This was clearly strong medicine.

“Perhaps we might talk over a cup of coffee,” I suggested to Pekka, after what I interpreted to be his victory in the conference room with the projector cord.

Pekka was silent for a long moment, perhaps because he had no specific slide to address my question. “Coffee,” he at long last uttered, “is in the silver pitcher at the far end of the table. Tea is in the black one.” There were sandwiches on the table, too, though they went unmentioned.

Though I was not successful with Pekka, after several weeks in the presence of this Finno-Ugric tribe, I twice managed to make eye contact with one I believed to be a single female. One day, I managed to engineer it where we were both walking through the same corridor in the same direction. I walked faster to catch up with her and just as she turned her head I removed a shiny blue can of Gin Long Drink from my pocket. “I have more,” I said.

She quickened her pace which I took as nervousness. “Could we not meet?” I said emboldened by her palpable quickness of breath. She stopped and looked at her feet. “I could tweet you,” she offered guardedly, and she dashed down a staircase on her right. I did not follow. Despite her beauty — she was a fine specimen — a 140-character limit was not going to allow me to complete the magazine.

I began to worry how I might write an entire magazine requiring 40,000 words if the most input I was to receive was a host of Powerpoint slides and random, 140-character tweets. I sought guidance from the medicine man who had brought me to the tribe.

“The drums say you have Gin Long Drink,” he said to me before I had even a chance to sit down. “Long Drink is strong medicine.”

Indeed. And I knew a ferryboat where it was kept.

The magazine proved a success. The stories celebrated the wisdom and cleverness of the tribe and enumerated the superior quality of its goods. And despite their worry that a photograph could steal a soul, they permitted my colleague Kaupo (whose name amused them) to make attractive, well-lit images of them in their daily routines. Pekka was photographed in front of a projection of a histogram, remote control in hand. Heikki was shown from behind, staring hard at a multi-color pie-chart slide on his computer.

As a show of thanks, I was invited to the tribe’s summer conclave, where after a welcome Powerpoint detailing the tribe’s seasonal successes, we adjourned to a row of chairs near a pristine lake. Male tribesmen removed their shirts to tan their pale bodies. Strong medicine in blue cans was passed, but it was still some time before the silence was broken.

“If you close your eyes and stare right at the sun,” said Pekka, “then the image you see is much like Powerpoint.” Braves all around grunted in assent.

***

Get more ethnography here.

How to Become a Nature Photographer

2011-04-26T12:38:00.004+03:00

Every third Estonian claims to be a nature photographer. If you don’t believe me check the census data. It’s just one of those peculiarities of the country.

Most don’t sell their photos and, if you corner them, they’ll admit they’re not professional nature photographers, but rather masons or dentists or accountants or lawyers. But if you meet them in a dark bar on the edge of the wilderness, before you even have your drink ordered, they’ll identify themselves as nature photographers.

Jacques-Alain Finkeltroc, a news shooter for ERR’s English-language website, is one of them. “Veux-tu aller avec ton roi à Soomaa?” Jacques barked over the telephone. Or something like that. I don’t speak French, but that never stops Jacques. Each time I remind him I’m from the other part of Canada, which he is only able to remember until the next time he calls.

When I finally got Jacques to switch to English he informed me that we’d been invited to accompany some nature photographers on a canoe trip in Soomaa. Since it was the flood season, they were making their annual pilgrimage, and if I would quickly stuff some dry clothes into a plastic bag then two authentic nature photographers would be in front of my house within an hour.

“Where could the damned thing be?” Tarmo the nature photographer was rummaging around inside his car, tossing thermos mugs and maps this way and that. “My hand lotion. I need my hand lotion!” After he found it and greased up, he offered me his hand. “I’m Tarmo. They say hand lotion is addictive, but I’m not sure.” I rubbed into my skin what Tarmo left on me, half wondering if I’d soon want another hit.

As we drove toward Pärnu, Tarmo and Jacques sat in the front, discussing their choice of long underwear. Jacques was wearing French military-issue polyester, while Tarmo had new Merino wool.

“Smell me,” said Tarmo, shoving an arm in Jacques’ face.

“All I smell is hand lotion,” said Jacques. “But it’s nice.”

“That’s the beauty of it,” explained Tarmo. “In two days you’ll smell like Vello’s butt, and I’ll still smell like, well, hand lotion.”

I thought about joining the conversation, but I had no idea what type of underwear I had. Liina bought it for me several years ago and so far it had kept me warm. But today it was five degrees and raining, and we’d spend all day sitting in Tarmo’s canoe. Maybe I should have thought more about my underwear.

Throughout the drive, when Tarmo and Jacques weren’t discussing the newest in keep-warm fabric, they were talking about Janno, one of Estonia’s more famous nature photographers, a photo god of sorts, who had just published a series of polar bear photos which had drawn more than 100,000 visitors to his blog. This was of course the dream of any creative human: to have another human want to look at his work. And 100,000 was quite a few other humans. We were due to meet Janno in just over an hour, board canoes, and photograph the rainy, flooded wilds.

But when we arrived Janno wasn’t there. After a series of phone calls, half of them disconnecting mid-stream due to lack of signal, it was determined that Janno had left his telephone at home. Some other nature photographers, who did not have their own canoes, would rent them from the Viljandi side, and we would somehow meet on the water. Janno would presumably be among them.

“It’s gonna be a goddamned song festival,” announced Tarmo, pocketing his telephone and reporting the intel he’d gleaned from the conversations. “Every canoe in Estonia is currently in Soomaa. There may even be a Nature Omnibus.”

“I thought those were mostly full of pensioners?” I said. “And it is a weekend, right?”

Tarmo and Jacques looked at me like I’d peed in their camera bags. It was clear that nature photographers considered themselves the eagles of the forest, soaring majestically, high above the ground-dwellers who must forage for nuts under leaves and logs. “Well,” Tarmo conceded, after a long silence. “The pensioners won’t go too far in their boats. We’ll just go farther.”

And so, after another application of hand lotion, Jacques and I stepped off the dry road into our canoe and floated into the flood plain.

Soon followed Tarmo, but I would never have recognized him. He was paddling hard in a short sea kayak, dressed in a yellow dry suit, a rubber gasket sealed tightly around his neck, his head crowned with an astronaut’s cap. “They call him Gagarin,” said Jacques from the stern. “He not only dresses like that, but he’ll go anywhere to get a photo.”

It was true. On a dare, Tarmo had once crawled into a den of hibernating bears to get a photo of the cubs. To increase his odds inside the den, he wore a hockey goalie’s mask, thick fingerless gloves, and fired a series of shots with and without a flash. Shouting to his friends to extract him, they pulled him out by his feet and then all ran to the safety of a metal cage where they examined the photos. Tarmo had given the bears redeye. And so it was with nature photographers. You could risk your life in a den of bears and they would still criticize your work.

We spent the entire day navigating through the song festival looking for perfect light and for Janno. Nature was replaced by throngs of canoes crashing through forest cover and the occasional shriek, sometimes from joy and occasionally from an overturned boat.

Though few photos were taken due to the rain, we did not find Janno until the evening when we beached our boats and he arrived by car. “Smell this,” was the introduction I got from Tarmo, who led me to Janno’s car and insisted I sniff.

“Hand lotion?” I ventured a guess.

“No, smartass. A dead fox. Janno picked one up off the road last week and can’t get the smell out.”

“Picked it up, why? To eat?”

Tarmo considered this a question not worth answering, shook his head, and ordered everyone in their cars. We would be heading for a meal and a sauna in a Kilingi-Nõmme guesthouse. The cold and wet had spoiled everyone’s appetite for camping.

At dinner it became clear that Janno had picked up the dead animal to give it to a wounded feral dog, recovering under a friend’s care. Janno’s tales of his unsuccessful attempts to rid his car of the smell led to more discussions of the superiority of Merino wool underwear (Tarmo encouraged everyone to smell him) and eventually to the discussion of photography. Janno’s polar bear photos had already been stolen and circulated around the globe. He had received no money of course, and many of the thieves had even removed his name and replaced it with their own. As if to add insult to injury, the Kilingi-Nõmme guesthouse was distributing Estonian government-funded country tourism brochures which featured a cover photo by Janno. A photo for which he’d received neither money nor credit.

“You should sue them,” I offered, trying to whip the shooters into a frenzy. “Set their office building on fire,” added Jacques. But the photographers only shook their heads, as if to suggest that suing someone or setting something on fire were distinctly North American and French behaviors, respectively.

The next day the sun shined brightly – another curse for photographers – and we were too late on the water to take advantage of any of the morning fog. This day there were even more canoeists, but the Sunday boaters were more well-behaved. A flotilla passed which was full of Centre Party politicians. We passed an internet guru. A well-known banker. Even a former porn star. It was a floating song festival and well worth the trip, even though nature is better viewed alone.

On the way home we crossed the Pärnu River and witnessed a canoe ram a tree head-on and capsize. First on the scene, we pulled over to assist, and as Jacques tied together every piece of rope he could find, Tarmo climbed into his Gagarin suit.

The canoe washed far downstream and the couple clung to a tree in mid-current, stranded with their bodies half in the near-freezing water. Tarmo grabbed the rope and headed upstream for the bridge.

“What’s he going up there for?” I asked Jacques, as the treed woman screamed for help. “He could wade out right here by the woman.”

“Do you know how much that suit cost?” asked Jacques. “You spend that kind of money then you've got to have drama.”

And with that Tarmo leapt off the bridge into the swiftest current and drifted down to the girl clinging to the tree branch. He fixed a line under her arms, swam until he had sure footing, and then pulled the girl to the bank. He repeated the procedure with the man, though without the action-hero bridge leap.

“Thank you,” panted the couple who by this time were being whisked to a waiting car which would take them to a nearby sauna.

“All in a day’s work for a nature photographer,” replied Tarmo in a faux-deep voice. As he walked to the car he clapped me on the back. “Say, Vello,” he offered, “any chance you want to smell my underwear now?”

Of Caca and Springtime

2011-04-09T08:53:00.003+03:00

“You better pick that up!” she shouted at me from the other side of the fence. My Siberian Husky Mundo had just crapped near her apartment building.

“I don’t have a bag with me,” I replied. “But I’ll come back later and get it.”

“No you won’t!” she bellowed.

I usually carry several plastic bags, though on that day I had simply forgotten to resupply my coat pocket.

“What’s your postbox number?” I asked in an even tone of voice.

“Why do you want to know?” This woman obviously had problems much bigger than dog shit, and they’d eaten away at her, making her suspicious of everything and everybody until she’d become a troll under the bridge.

“I need to know your postbox number,” I continued in the same level tone, “because that’s where I’m going to put the dog shit. Otherwise, how will you know that I’ve cleaned it up?”

That old cow just stared at me, and before she could come up with some other little problem I blew her a kiss and moved on. I would have come back to pick up the dog shit, too, if she hadn’t have been such a bitch.

For readers who like stories with clear lessons, this one has nothing to do with dog shit. The moral of the story is Don’t be a bitch (with the corollary that then there’ll be a lot less shit in your life). But, since dog shit is so topical at the moment – since it has even inspired a work of literature by Estonia’s most famous living author – I feel compelled to publicly comment: For the record, should I ever decide to run for parliament, I am in favor of cleaning up dog shit from public places.

I often like to walk Mundo near the sea in Pirita and as the snow melts around the TOP Hotel the earth gives up its treasures: rotting husks of Roman candles, rusty syringes, used condoms, kinder surprise shells, last summer’s chicken bones, and of course a veritable minefield of dog shit. It’s the time of year when the city epitomizes the Soviet maxim that if something belongs to everyone then it belongs to no one.

Recently, I heard about a campaign to point out the dog shit everywhere by placing little yellow flags to mark each pile. This is a nice gesture, but for it to work it would require that the majority of citizens access their conscience. This might work in cities where space is truly at a premium or in rich socialist countries where the angry are fewer. But in Tallinn, given the still vast gulf between the haves and have nots, the sense I get is that too much bitterness still remains. Your dog crapping and your Lexus-driving neighbor stepping in it in his thin-soled Italian shoes provides an immediate sense of satisfaction and in a small but important way helps reset society’s delicate emotional balance.

My wife Liina — who like me considers herself an amateur psychologist but who also has a soft spot for conspiracy theories – has floated the idea that there’s a reason we are given little yellow flags and not parks crawling with municipal cops with their flammable green uniforms and inbred eyes: If the city were to take away our dog shit (or, for example, the 10,000 swans we’re not supposed to feed) we might turn our attention to more serious issues, like a serious discussion of Estonia’s presence in Afghanistan, Narva’s dreadful HIV record, human trafficking or god-knows-what. Dog shit, Liina says, is the modern opiate of the masses.

Liina makes her case by pointing out that mayors of much bigger cities have shown the world that where there’s a will there’s a way. Giuliani solved New York’s litter problem and crime problems almost overnight. Boris Johnson and Mike Bloomberg are recognized for making their cities cleaner, calmer, and greener. Liina contends even an incompetent administrator, if he had the desire, could quickly solve Tallinn’s dog shit problem (and its snow- and ice removal problems).

I’m not sure I buy Liina’s theory, not least because intelligent discussion about Afghanistan and HIV would serve to draw attention away from the city government to the federal government, a clear advantage for the Centre Party, but also because there is likely a very good reason why no one gives a damn about the dog shit. It could be the fact that many city offices are still staffed by the Homo Sovieticus generation who are simply accustomed to dog shit in public places. And it’s likely Mr. Savisaar does not stroll through parks in the season of the melt: his daily walk is from the heated leather seat of a Mercedes Benz E350 CDI 4Matic directly to his door.

I have met Mr. Savisaar only once, at an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon. Those of us seated at his table asked him questions in our accented Estonian, and he briefly huddled with advisor Heido Vitsur over each question before – as if Mr. Savisaar had his hand shoved up inside him and was moving his lips — Mr. Vitsur answered our questions. I wasn’t able to form too many conclusions, except that Mr. Savisaar is not comfortable around westerners.

I recently saw Mr. Savisaar again at the press conference where he revealed his contention that the 1.5 million euros was for the Lasnamäe church. With a deft hand and without a single visible drop of sweat, he played flawlessly to thirty journalists in the room. It was a masterly performance.

Add to his stagecraft a personal history right out of Oliver Twist, and you have the perfect makings for a long profile in a well-known American magazine, to whom I actually tried to peddle the story of a three-dimensional profile of what makes Mr. Savisaar tick. They were not interested, sadly, the editor bluntly asking “Why would Americans give a shit about that?” While it seemed no less relevant to me than a story that same magazine ran about a minor politician in Central America, I guess I was simply too minor a writer to guarantee them readers for a profile no matter how interesting I could make an Eastern European politician. And so there was little left to do than write about dog shit in Postimees. (Full disclosure: Dog shit was their idea.)

Without knowing the man, what I am willing to conclude is that Mr. Savisaar is very bright, and I am sure that if he were to set his sights on dog shit in Tallinn, he would be able to eradicate it. But my sense is that his interest in the city of Tallinn is not equal to his interest in Estonian politics — city goings-on must bore the poor man to death. What of course we need to rid the city of dog shit, is a leadership more committed to the city itself than to a certain ideology or class of voters.

I find it interesting that in Estonia one may easily find plenty of people who are proud to be Estonian (or Mulgilased, Muhulased, or Whateverlased). It’s easy to find people who are proud to be from Tartu or Viljandi or Pärnu or Haapsalu. But I’ve met very few people who are genuinely proud to hail from Tallinn. (A certain breed of Tallinner — elitists more often than not — are often proud that they are not from the countryside.) Being neither a tiny town nor a big city, Tallinn somehow lacks any distinct identity; it’s the capital city we have to have, the city center a vast collection of architectural mistakes and monuments to the vanity of small-timers, and, except for the Old Town and its remarkable residential neighborhoods, the city is a rather forgettable gray blob.

It would be tempting to say that what Tallinn needs is some big event to inspire and bring us together as a community, like being named a Cultural Capital of Europe. But what Tallinn really needs is a leadership who cares both passionately and visibly about it. A leader who can make inspiring speeches about why we should care for our neighbors (Mr. Ilves’ speeches on this topic seem rote). A leadership who clearly gives a damn and can make us believe that cleaning up dog shit is about a lot more than cleaning up dog shit.

Until that happens, however, I wouldn’t place to much faith in yellow flags. Keep wearing those thick-soled shoes.

***

Thick-soled shoes available here.

A Wider Berth

2011-03-26T09:32:00.003+02:00

Almost daily, for the eleven-and-a-half months of the year when Estonia is covered with snow, someone will ask me if I ski. This is a test with only one correct answer.

“But do you cross country ski?” they follow up, their look showing they think they’ve got me now.

“Absolutely,” I reply. And then before they can think too long I quickly add: “Of course, unlike you I wasn’t born on skis. I learned in army survival courses, which required me to ski fast enough to catch a wild horse, kill it with my knife, and then gut it and sleep inside its still-warm carcass on a cold Canadian arctic night.”

This usually effectively ends the skiing discussion and allows us to move on to other topics.

Of course the answer Estonians expect to hear is that I am a downhill skier, which is, in their minds, hardly a skier at all. As with ski resorts anywhere, visit one of Estonia’s two or three “mountains” and you’ll find the sort of people which residents of mountain country derogatorily refer to as “flatlanders”: Unfit pussies in designer ski wear who are present more for the après ski than the skiing itself. It is no wonder cross-country skiers would avoid them.

In Estonia it is debatable whether it is worse to be a downhill skier or a non-skier. So, if one does not want to be thought less of, it is always best to lie.

Estonians’ devotion to cross country skiing is worthy of scientific study. My friend Gunnar took part in the Tartu marathon this year--63 kilometers in minus-25 degree Celsius weather--just because he thought it was an experience he should have. My friend Ahti, who is just a regular guy and not especially ski-crazy can be found at least three nights a week on the lighted ski trail in Pirita. The prime minister is there, too, more than he’ll publicly admit. How do I know all this? I sometimes go there to walk the dog.

The rest of the world has yet to fully embrace this sport for a variety of reasons, mainly of which is that it’s terribly boring. (The Americans have cross-country ski teams, but this is hardly out of enthusiasm for the sport: it is rather to not be completely ignorant in the case that someone someday finds a way to actually make money off the sport.)

What could possibly be fun about skiing on flat ground? If all one wants to do is sweat, then running is a better substitute, and the gear is a fraction of the price.

I understand that cross country is a quiet sport, and I do see appeal here: one can quietly approach game and kill it with less trouble.

But cross country as a spectator sport is a let-down, crowds cheering for a half second as the skiers fly by and disappear into the trees. Skiing is even less conducive to televised broadcast than bowling or yoga.

Add personalities like Smigun, Veerpalu, and Mae, and it still holds no appeal. Who wants to listen to a skier in an interview say things like, “I’ve trained really hard” or “my team did a great job on the wax”? And when do ski fans do anything more than stand alongside the trail and wave flags? (In the Tour de France, fans used to throw tacks in front of the cyclists!)

The biathalon improves skiing only slightly, because it has a hint of an element of suspense: will the Chinese skier miss his target and accidentally shoot the Russian? What if the skier forgets and leaves a round in the chamber and falls hard rounding a turn which is packed with spectators?

If you want to give cross-country skiing more universal appeal, then you have to add back the element which makes all popular sports popular: violence.

What if Kristina Smigun were to ski through a forest inhabited by wolves and feral dogs? (Or ski through Bucharest, if no wolf population can be found.) What if contestants were required to ski across the Russian border at night armed only with a puukko and return with the scalps of a dozen Russian soldiers? (Or perhaps Latvian scalps, as the international community would hardly take notice of a few less Latvians.) Or what if prisoners were put on skis and forced to cross a clearing which is simultaneously shelled by artillery and strafed by fighter jets? One could easily argue that cross country skiing has not been interesting since the Winter War.

Despite the sport’s shortcomings, though, each year I give it a fresh try. Just as I’ve tried to give a chance to beet soup, head cheese, and Baltman suits, I approach skiing with an open mind. So what if there’s nothing on the trail to kill? So what if the sport causes the release of no more adrenalin than billiards? Onward I ski, striving not toward a finish line, but toward understanding.

And there goes the prime minister past me. Again. And again he in his spandex superhero costume cannot hide his disdain for my baggy wool Swedish army surplus trousers and my worn-out wool sweater. “Eest ära!” shouts one of his bodyguards, as if my pace is holding up the machinations of the Estonian state.

“Up yours!” I shout back. “Try sleeping inside a horse!” And then all three of them, Ansip and his body guards, slow their pace and turn back to have a look.

“That’s right,” I say. “A horse.” And next time, they give me a wider berth.

***

Oprah recommends Inherit the Family.

Eurovision’s Dirty Little Secret

2011-03-12T22:11:00.003+02:00

Although it’s enough for most viewers to tap their feet to the Eurovision beat, something within my soul compels me to listen to lyrics and attempt to divine their meaning.

For example, these lines from the Sven Lõhmus song which will represent Estonia at the contest in May:

Daylight fading away

Night silhouettes in the sky

LED lights are flashing in towers

It’s Manhattan’s magical time

Ballerinas dancing to Swan Lake

On a river made of diamonds and pearls

Everything’s a little bit weird now […]

One-two-seven-three down the Rockefeller street

Everything is a little surreal

Weird and surreal, indeed, because I have no clue what Getter Jaani is singing about. Perhaps the author chose “weird” and “surreal” because the phrase “incredibly fucking stupid” is so hard to rhyme in English?

Apologies. I don’t mean to be cynical, but as far as I know, offices in skyscrapers are still not illuminated by LEDs (which would be confined to stairwells or parking garages, and in any case not pronounced like the chemical element with the symbol Pb). The nearest Rockefeller Street is in Randolph, Massachusetts (population 30,000), the definite article has no place before “Street” in that context, and wouldn't 1273 on the Avenue of the Americas would be near the Time Life building, somewhere uptown of Rockefeller Plaza?

Readers will no doubt rally around Mr. Lõhmus, invoking a defense of “nonsense literature,” a legitimate genre that defies language conventions or logical reasoning – and the “Rockefeller Street” lyrics certainly do that. But they do not meet the second test of nonsense literature, which is to have an excess of meaning rather than a lack of.

But wait, readers will interject: it’s so easy to be critical. Anybody can laugh at a Eurovision song.

True, but I have done more. I have, in fact, discovered the genesis of Eurovision lyrics, the fountain from which they all gush. And, it turns out, Sven Lõhmus is not to blame.

Take these lyrics for example:

I like to play with toys

Let’s all have a party

Watch me blow bubbles

It’s fun to make music

Goodbye

Set the words to a catchy tune, add Getter Jaani’s voice, a few godawful dancers, and viewers will shriek at their television screens in orgasmic pleasure.

Or imagine these words recited by a beat poet backed by a contrabass:

When you cook onions and broccoli, why do they stink up the kitchen?

Why is the smell of a dead animal attractive to a vulture but disgusting to you and me?

And why does your morning breath smell so bad that your mom runs screaming from the room?

All are no less worthy of Eurovision than “Rockefeller Street.” And they require no expenditure of creative energy since they are already written: All the passages were excerpted from books in my ten-month-old son Robert’s personal library, a veritable Eurovision gold mine.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I beg the reader to put himself in foreign shoes for a moment. If the Estonian language, instead of English, dominated the world, then how might you be moved if song lyrics were taken from books titled, Vaata, raputa, ja loe; Ahvenapoiss Sulev; or Pese ennast-sa?

Or what if a contingency of foreigners were to compose lyrics in the Estonian language for songs romanticizing your infamous industrialists? Titles like “Hanschmidt Puiestee,” “Kruuda Tänav,” or “Armin Karu Avenüü”?

The solution is for Mr. Lõhmus and his songwriting colleagues to expand their reading lists. What if they sought poets for inspiration? Jaan Kaplinski has some good lines. Or there’s Karl-Martin Sinijärv, who not only is a fine poet but boasts some of the coolest threads in town. And anyone who borrows from a poet immediately basks in associative glory. In this fashion it’s possible to climb several rungs in the cultural ladder by simply leaving the public library’s children’s section.

And if Estonian poetry won’t suffice and international flair is desired, there’s the American master, Wallace Stevens, whose material cries out for song lyrics.

Let the lamp affix its beam

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Were these Eurovision lyrics, a whole new class of listeners might join, who would speculate that the song is about a “forced choice between the gross physicality of death and the animal greed of life.” And the lyricist himself might fire back with an overarching statement that a poem must “resist the intelligence.”

As it stands now we are without that debate, and a lone Postimees columnist is left to hope that the significance of 1273 might amount to more than Tommy Tutone’s 1982 hit, “867-5309/Jenny.” The latter caused thousands to dial the number and ask for Jenny. Yet the former, I fear, will cause only this one curious listener to plug the address into Google Maps.

***

Visit our lovely gift shop.

Gastarbeiter

2011-02-26T10:52:00.009+02:00

Imagine everybody who has ever wronged you being in one place at one time, trapped somewhere they cannot escape.

For anyone who has ever built a house in Estonia, that place is the 9:30 p.m. Tallink Friday ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn. It is packed stem to stern with gastarbeiter returning from a week of blessing Finland with their craftsmanship and work ethic.

The ferry crowd resembles a parade of mafia middle management: thousands of short-haired thugs clad head to toe in black. Many sport bling. A few wear arm jewelry, peroxide vixens in heels ever ready to heed the disco’s call.

Looking at the men, I feel I know them all. And some I actually do.

In the pub with three pints before him is Andrus, who got drunk one afternoon and disappeared from ceiling work for 30 days, announcing upon his return that he’d been down with a virus.

By the one-armed bandit is another bandit, Mart the electrician, who worked assiduously for a month and then vanished with several thousand kroons intended to buy a fusebox.

There is Sven the mason who, while boasting of the young masons he had taught their craft, constructed an oven for me that only produced smoke. (He blamed the chimney, forgetting that he’d built that, too.)

Pulling a trolley full of gin long drink is Edgar, who did not own a single tool except a hammer (the only thing he couldn’t get from Ramirent, according to him).

And there, rocking out on his iPod, is Marek, an enthusiastic plumber who disappeared on the second day of work leaving his brand new cordless drill and a dirty pair of sneakers in the middle of my living room floor. He never returned to claim either.

It is a boat full of David Copperfields, all with highly polished disappearing acts. Even those I don’t know personally, I still feel I know their stories, and I mention this to the Finn I’m traveling with.

“They can’t behave like that in Finland,” he says. “They wouldn’t last even a day.”

But I wonder. It seems many have made a career out of lasting less than a day.

I nod to Andrus in the pub, and he looks away. Despite the fact we paid the same for a ticket, owing to the crowd on the 9:30 boat it is more his boat than mine, and I suppose we must play be his rules. A year ago I might have challenged him here, throwing down my glove and drawing my rapier for some therapeutic slashing and thrusting.

But my anger has transformed to wonder. I am dumbstruck by the construction culture: it calls into question everything I have learned about the self-correcting free market system. How can so much incompetence and laziness exist for so long? There are good Estonian workers, yes. Highly professional workers. (So hold your mail!) But they are not this crowd. What could the five workers I know possibly do in Finland? Do they sweep up the sawdust of sober Finnish carpenters? Or do I misread the situation and the explanation truly lies in how an Estonian friend, having seen the horror in my eyes while seated in the passenger seat of his car, explained his aggressive driving: “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t drive like this in your country.”

I wonder for a moment how we would all behave if this ferry went down. Would we degenerate to mayhem and thievery of the nature William Langewiesche described taking place aboard the Estonia in his 2004 Atlantic Monthly article? Or would things reflect the civility expressed by the film line given the Titanic musician: “Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you”?

And if the ferry did go down and all of us with it, would the country of Finland grind to a halt?

I ask, because I, too, am a gastarbeiter.

For several years now, the larger portion of my income has come from Finland. For Finnish firms international enough to need me, I write their magazines, their newsletters, the speeches their CEOs make at the stock exchanges.

I am a double gastarbeiter. I have left Canada for Estonia and, for part of each week, I leave Estonia for Finland. I console myself with the belief that what I do Finns cannot do for themselves. A speech in English by a non-native speaker made to a western audience too often resembles a Monty Python skit. I save the Finns from themselves. Or so I tell myself in order to believe I am different from the other gastarbeiters on the ferry.

But if the ferry went down and I knew I was doomed, Langewiesche would likely have no cause to chronicle my noble behavior. I would grab a lifeboat oar and help speed the journey of Andrus, Mart, Sven, Edgar, and Marek. “Godspeed, boys,” I might utter with each delivered blow.

***

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Go West, Young Man

2011-01-29T15:54:00.004+02:00

At the emergency room — don’t ask — Liina was admitted immediately while I hung out in the waiting room with Robert. Having rushed to the hospital without packing baby food, I tried to buy juice from the vending machine. But holding a crying seven-month-old and trying to feed enough air-light 10-cent-kroon coins into a slot proved too much to manage. More fell on the floor than went into the machine.

“Here, let me help,” said an attractive young woman, who fed her own coins into the machine. The apple juice box plopped to the bottom.

“Here, take mine,” and I reached out to hand the young lady my coins.

“You keep them,” she said. “I’m leaving Estonia tomorrow and won’t have any use for kroons.”

Helena was twenty-three and studied art history at a university in Scotland.

“Will you come back to Estonia?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said flatly, and we agreed that there were currently few opportunities for young people in Estonia, or at least for art history majors.

“I know you from Facebook,” said Helena’s mother, joining the conversation from a wheelchair. We had barely enough time to determine our mutual acquaintances when the nurse wheeled the mother away for an x-ray.

“She fell on the ice in Old Town,” explained Helena. “She lives in Norway and was supposed to return home tomorrow.”

“Sometimes I’m not too keen on Estonia,” Helena said. “I fell in the very same spot a week before and people seemed angry that they had to walk around me.” She admitted that her mother had said people were nice to her, even stopping to ask if she was all right. “Maybe it was me.”

The nurse approached again and Helena stood for a chat and returned to her seat.

“Maybe they thought you were a foreigner?” I offered half seriously, suggesting they thought she was a soft westerner accustomed to cities where property owners keep their sidewalks clear of snow and ice.

“It could be,” she agreed. “Whenever I go into shops in Old Town they speak English to me.”

The nurse returned and Helena stood to receive the report that her mother’s leg had a dangerous break. The doctors would operate immediately.

“Well, I don’t know how long you’ve lived in Scotland, but you definitely don’t look or move like an Estonian,” I told her as she gathered her things to join her mother.

“What do you mean?”

It’s not often I get an invitation to deliver my armchair analyses, but I enjoy it when I do. I rose and mimicked Helena’s body language when she received the news of her mother. I put my hands on my hips with elbows behind me. I arched my body back and up in a bowed, I’m ready-to-hear-you posture. “You see, Helena,” I said. “You’re exposing yourself here. This is a vulnerable position. But it’s very confident, too. It shows you fear nothing from this establishment. Most Estonians would not strike this pose.”

“How would an Estonian stand?” she asked.

“Well, there could be many ways, but generally not your way. An Estonian’s pose would cede power to the hospital worker.”

Behind us they wheeled out her mother and pushed her toward a door to another part of the hospital. I raised my hand in salute. Helena stood and offered me her hand. I wished them both good luck abroad.

I looked down at baby Robert in my arms and wondered at what age he might pack his bags and leave Estonia. Although he’s only seven-months old, I’m already plotting his future (to the dismay of his mother). I’d like him to attend primary and secondary school in Estonia, but I think it would then be good for him to leave.

The American professor Robert Rebein has written of small places. Roughly: Small towns give you everything and ask nothing in return, except that you leave and never come back.

I think the same might be said of a small country, at least to some extent. Or, if we want to consider the case of Tallinn, I can think of few towns of 400,000 in North America which are able to offer enough to keep all its sons at home. It would be asking too much, both of the town and of the sons.

I’d like my Robert to leave Estonia so that he may better understand himself and the world. Liina will disagree, but I contend a city without a famous song written about is no place for young people. Small towns are where you settle after you’ve already had your adventures. Liina argues that travel broadens your horizons, and that’s true. But travel is not the same as living abroad for an extended period without the comfort of your pinginaaber and the friends you grew up with. The tourist, as G.K. Chesterson pointed out, “sees what he has come to see.”

There are surely exceptions. E. Faye Jones, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most successful disciples, apparently cheekily declared he would remain in Arkansas and let the world come to him. But that declaration was made later in life, after he’d ventured abroad for a turn flying torpedo bombers in the Pacific Theatre and lived in a half-dozen cities he wasn’t born in.

Maybe Urmas Sisask can stare at the planets from Jäneda and find inspiration. But then, I’d argue, he has as much access to the universe sitting with his piano in his garden under a dark Estonian sky than he would from any place.

But most of us aren’t exceptions.

It’s said there are 130,000 Estonians like Helena and her mother who have packed up and left. I say good for them. I even say we ought to raise a glass every time someone like Helena throws a few items into a bag and ventures out to strike a claim in the big bad world.

I sometimes think that the Talendikoju program ought not to be an invitation for Estonians to return, but rather a giant exchange program, where we bring foreigners in to do jobs which need done, and where we export as many young Estonians as we possibly can.

Not all will return. But those who do will enrich the rest of us. They’ll come back with the confidence of Helena, postures erect from knowing that they are no less than anyone else, and that they are very often more.

And they’ll carry with them higher expectations. Higher expectations for themselves and for the society in which they live.

***

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Donkey Jockeys

2011-01-15T09:00:00.004+02:00

It’s a matter of professionalism. And a simple matter of self-respect. But everyone I make this argument to tells me to shut the hell up, that I’m simply wrong, or that I should accept that the battle is lost before it’s begun.

They tell me my criticism is minor compared to the larger crisis in journalism, the major issues we ought to be wrestling with to improve the state of things. But I’d argue the first crisis to be dealt with is the one journalists have created for themselves: their identity crisis.

Lately I’ve been getting out to a few press conferences. I don’t go so much as to write about Mr. Savisaar’s quit-picking-on-me rant du jour or to hear IMF representatives think twice before saying nothing. I go to get out of the house, to see how the world is turning, and enjoy the bizarre, snail-paced spectacle of what Estonians call the pressikas.

The press conferences I’ve witnessed are pretty much interchangeable. The gray mass of journalists quietly trickles into the appointed room, invariably choosing seats at the back of the room. Among the reporters are many sleepy young men in worn sweaters and jeans, hair jutting out in random places in the fashion American collegiates refer to as “nappy head.”

After a short delay, a suit-clad young man with a boyband haircut appears and provides speaker introductions vaguely reminiscent of Vegas nightclubs, even though the speakers are already known to all and name cards are present in front of each.

The speakers themselves appear professional, wearing suits, ties and shined shoes. But they seem terribly annoyed, as if they would very much rather be somewhere else and have deigned only under great duress to attend the press conference that they themselves have organized. Their expressions cast them as the adults who have agreed to indulge the children.

And so the two sides face off: the Narcoleptic Self-styled Bohemians versus the Antsy Irritated Establishment.

As I see the regular lament and hand-wringing about Estonia’s media, it more or less goes like this: The critics say that experienced journalists are too few, most of the senior ones having left long ago to pursue other, better remunerating ventures. Politicians seem to be routinely grumpy with the press, as if they cannot get a fair break, when, by western standards, it has always seemed to me that they tend to get off easy when question time arrives.

The press itself is refreshingly introspective, occasionally even self-flagellating. There is acknowledgement in their own pages that they could do better and they mourn the turn toward yellow led by a compete-for-clicks environment.

While I find neither the Bohemians or Establishment more in the right, it seems to me that like many other areas of Estonian life, the debate itself is healthy, and as long as it goes on we are only in for an improved quality of the press. Where the head goes, the body will follow.

What I would like to see—and where I am told my cause is lost—is an improvement in the appearance of the press. It is my belief that a polished exterior is often the mark of an organized interior. And when that is not the case, an exterior may rally an interior to live up to its example.

Not all Estonian journalists dress down, of course. Should Priit Pullerits, Priit Hõbemägi, or Sirje Rank be in attendance, they will be as professionally clad as their foreign colleagues who may be witnessed on C-SPAN pelting Mr. Obama with questions.

But while Estonia’s politicians and businessmen seem to have too little respect for the press, I can only hold the press responsible for having too little respect for itself.

“What you need to get through your thick foreign head,” says my wife Liina, who was briefly employed in public broadcasting during the Soviet era, “is that the press were bohemians. If you were in the press in Soviet times, then you were a rebel and you dressed the rebel part.”

To which I of course respond that it’s been 20 years since the Soviet Union and most of the journalists attending the press conferences are too young to remember it.

It is also difficult for me to see journalists as rebels. We are every bit a part of The System. One may argue our role is to keep the rest of the system honest (and I’d agree), but does that not make us more policeman than rebel? Have a look at a policeman’s haircut. Would he function better in his job with hair down to his ass?

And, most importantly, if a journalist can write like a rebel, then he hardly need worry about dressing like one. (Flaubert: “In order to write like a revolutionary, you need to live like a bourgeois.”)

A nattily-dressed Estonian editor friend of mine argues that she can’t pay her staff well enough to ask them to dress professionally. But I lack sympathy. Journalists are paid poorly in most societies and the more respectable newspapers still require them to turn out in a tie. And I argue that an affordable, presentable pair of trousers, jacket, and tie cost far less than the designer jeans some of her reporters wear low enough to reveal their pubic hair.

It isn’t as simple as everyone putting on a necktie, my editor friend argues. She’s right, of course. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt things. People treat you how you treat yourself, a motivational consultant once said. My French writer friend Guillaume says that his stylish countrymen “dress to show respect for a place and for ourselves.” Would a well-dressed, attentive, whip-smart journalist inspire better answers from the subjects he interviews? The Antsy Irritated Establishment can best answer that.

A tie-requiring editor I know in the United States likes to inspire his reporters by borrowing from Jeremiah when he sends them out into the world. He tells them to let their subjects “hear the snorting of our warhorses, let them feel the ground tremble beneath their feet, as we approach to devour the land and all that fills it, the city and those who dwell in it.”

Of course it’s hard to leave that impression if you show up riding a donkey.

***

Read it in Estonian and join in the mudslinging here.

Animal Planet

2010-12-30T10:00:00.003+02:00

Playing in the snow-covered yard were a bear, a fox, and a hedgehog. Drinking vodka on the porch was a tropical bird. An owl answered the door to the house.

“Uhhuu,” the owl cooed, both eyes blackened like she’d been beaten by a husband. If not for the familiarity of the hoot I would not have recognized Liina’s mother in the dark of that Estonia winter.

“The rest of the animals are in the forest,” she said, pointing into the trees. “Look for the bonfire.”

It was New Year’s Eve 2000, and I’d arrived late from Tallinn to Liina’s family’s country house. I hadn’t known Liina long, and she’d invited me to join friends and family to celebrate the New Year. She’d said it was animal party and that I should dress the part.

Twenty animals, Liina somewhere among them, danced at around the bonfire, stopping occasionally to literally howl at the moon. It was something out of Indiana Jones, with me, the western anthropologist, peering over a rock at jungle natives about to engage in a ritual blood sacrifice.

Liina has always been a bit different. In some cases, I have chided her for not being more normal and the trouble it has gotten her into.

Her driver’s license was revoked for several years for reasons, in part, of drawing extra attention to herself by defacing her license with a indelible marker, adding horns and a beard to her otherwise attractive face to give it a Satan-crossed-with-a-female-werewolf look. In most parts of the world policemen are not known for their senses of humor, least of all in former Soviet republics.

Traveling in Iran, she was jailed for a night for being seen in the company of a local man, an unauthorized tour guide. She narrowly escaped getting caught with a bottle of wine in her bag, which, in Iran, still carries a minimum penalty of being buried to your neck in sand and stoned to death.

In a nature reserve in India, she ignored signs telling her to stay on the trail and not touch things. When she exited the park, two armed guards awaited her. “What’s in the bag?” one asked. “Oh, just a few books,” she replied. “And a Bengal tiger skin.” Lucky for her, they actually thought she was funny.

It is as if Liina is on a mission to test the limits of patience and sense of humor of everyone she meets, taking copious notes so that she may one day, like an audit office, release a report to the world, providing us all with more accurate portraits of ourselves.

Several years ago in the tax office, unable to figure out how to manage an ID card reader, Liina and I sat before the unfortunate, humorless woman assigned to assist us manually file our documents. “Do you have any family or dependents to list?” the ametnik asked. “How recently do they need to have been alive?” Liina queried, adding some vague remark about an avalanches and bad luck in general.

For me, situations like tax filing are ones I want to enter and exit as quickly and smoothly as possible. But in Liina’s world all events have equal standing and are part of life’s rich tapestry. “Really,” she rebutted my scolding once we were safely outside the tax office, “why would you want to cheat a bureaucrat out of an interesting day?”

When I suggested that bureaucrats were in fact bureaucrats for the reason that they wanted all their days to be more or less the same, she shot me a disapproving look. “You’re wrong,” she declared. “There’s nobody alive like that.”

I will say this for her: she is never guilty of conscious Bohemian affectations or, as is common with some, trying to be different in the same way. She would never tattoo her body or adopt the Goth look. To her, these people are not at all genuine, and are, in themselves, walking contradictions.

To get on Liina’s good side, it is helpful to one-up her. Had the Estonian policeman checking her license understood this he would have offered her the chance to change into a werewolf, run into the forest, and slay a deer with her teeth and fingernails right before his very eyes. If the tax bureaucrat had been more aware, she might have topped Liina’s avalanche story with a better tragedy, such as an accident with tropical quicksand.

That New Year’s night I observed the animals dancing around the fire for some time. At other parties I’d gone to, it seemed people would sit around a table staring at their feet until the first was drunk enough to engage another. But these dancing animals. . . I didn’t think there was enough alcohol in all of northern Europe to do this to people. (And I would later learn they were mostly sober.)

Finally, I had to play my part, and I stepped into the light to present myself. Eventually they noticed my presence. I wore knee-high boots but was otherwise dressed head to toe in camouflage. Slung behind my back was a BB gun.

“What are you?” came Liina’s voice from a floppy-eared, purple creature. I could have asked her the same, though she appeared to be Barney the dinosaur.

“Take a guess.”

“You’re a praying mantis,” offered someone who was clearly a squirrel. “A chameleon on a branch,” suggested a rabbit.

I unslung the BB gun and raised it high over my head. “I’m a hunter,” I shouted, “and I’m here to take hides.” And with that the animals fled into the forest, correctly playing their parts. I would have my hides soon enough when they got too cold and returned to the fire.

Ever since the birth of our son Robert, we don’t dress up as animals for parties anymore. Partly, this is because we’re too tired, but I think it’s mostly because Liina can dress Robert up. He has already attended one very formal Christmas party dressed as a miniature Santa Claus. He owns a coat where the hood morphs into an elephant trunk. And he has webbed duck feet, shoes which slip on over his regular shoes.

We haven’t happened on any ametniks or policemen yet when Robert is in tow, but I can only imagine it when we do. “We found him in the countryside being raised by a family of wolves,” Liina will say. “Does that mean we can keep him?” And we’ll just have to hope the ametnik has a sense of humor equal to ours. Well, equal to Liina’s, that is.

***

Visit the Vikerkaar family duty free shop on our mezzanine level.

The Virtues of Blizzards

2010-12-11T19:35:00.003+02:00

A community’s traffic culture is often mentioned as an indicator of the health of its society. Within the larger traffic culture is a public transport culture, and Tallinn’s public transport doesn’t have the best image. A former Tallinn mayor once remarked that public transport was for children, the handicapped, and people too drunk to drive. But each year more and more Tallinners seem to abandon their cars for public transport, and the atmosphere aboard the bus grows a bit more similar to that of western cities. And there’s nothing like a blizzard to bring riders into closer quarters and the system under a loop.

Read the entire article here (on ERR).

The Dinner Guest

2010-12-05T22:43:00.003+02:00

“Daddy, why don’t white people eat carp?”

It was 1977 and my father and I were reclined on a riverbank, our lines in the water and hooks baited with corn.

“Dunno,” he said, taking up a bit of line slack with his reel. “The Chinese eat them. Maybe it’s an ethnic or a religious thing.”

Dad had been a carp fisherman for twenty years. He liked to catch them on a fly rod for sport, or lounge in the bankside shade, watching his young sons fight fish strong enough to pull them in the water.

“Why don’t we take one home and eat it?” I asked. We’d always just let the fish go, or occasionally we’d put several on a stringer and give them to black fishermen, who were always glad to get them.

“All right. But you have to clean it.” Dad was an avid hunter and fisherman who believed his children should understand where supermarket beef came from, and so whatever you killed, you had to clean it and eat it.

Cleaning such a tough-skinned and bony fish was no easy chore, but I managed and handed it off to mom, who added salt and baked it. We sat down to dinner. We chewed quietly.

“Dad,” I broke the silence. “I think I understand why we don’t eat carp.”

Mom made polite excuses and said that she might not know how to season it. Dad said it could be spiced to the hilt and you couldn’t escape the nasty bones. Mom wondered if black people didn’t deep fat fry it. My brother said maybe Asians liked the taste of mud. No, I argued, it was just a bottom-dweller completely unsuitable for consumption. Dad suggested we throw the fish away and go to a restaurant. We fought each other to be the first out the door.

***

“This is a product from our very own kolkhoz!” the hostess declared proudly, entering the room with a silver tray held high above our heads.

It was Christmas 1992 in Estonia. She placed the tray directly in front of me, the guest of honor. It was a five-kilo carp.

“You like carp, of course,” she said.

“Who doesn’t?” I managed. If there was one ironclad rule in my family it was that you never refused something offered when you’re a guest at the dinner table.

The Estonians’ mouths visibly watered. The host forked a huge serving on to my plate and then the family fought over who got the eyes.

I hadn’t expected Estonians to be carp eaters. The worst thing I’d encountered on an Estonian table was headcheese, which had an appearance and texture which could completely extinguish my appetite. Next to that on the fright index was tongue. I’d eaten it once in France, didn’t like it much there, but an Estonian had spoiled it permanently for me by removing the entire organ - including the long, more-disgusting part that runs down the cow’s throat - from a boiling pot and dropping it on my plate. I seem to recall that it writhed. Sea Devils were also frightening, but fortunately the fish was expensive enough that no one had ever served it to me. And then there were those alcohol-filled chocolates, which exploded in your mouth and liqueur ran down your chin and on to your shirt if you weren’t capable of swallowing the vile little treat in one go.

But I’m sure Estonians found some of my Canadian eating habits odd. Before I married Liina, I was able to enjoy an entire bag of Doritos-brand nacho-cheese-flavored tortilla chips at one sitting. I also liked to eat standing over the sink just to avoid getting a plate dirty. To save the work of cleaning a pan, I cooked hotdogs by letting hot water run over them in the bottom of the sink. And I was not unaccustomed to eating food directly from micro-waved bags. Cosmonaut food, as Liina calls it.

With the carp, my strategy was to eat slowly, ostensibly to savor every bite, but relying on the greed of my fellow diners to speedily consume the fish. I also dulled the taste of each bite with a mouthful of vodka, which my hosts interpreted as a positive sign. The carp on the platter quickly became only a skeleton, the others having taken seconds and thirds.

“How’s that fish? Good?” asked the hostess.

“Mmmmm,” I grunted, a thumb thrust in the air to express my approval. But these people knew no more about cooking carp than my mother, and the fish was just as muddy tasting as the one I’d tried to eat as a child.

“Well, you eat as slowly as you want,” she said, “because I’ve got another in the oven.”

Sometimes you just have to take the bullet.

***

Growing up in Scarborough — or Scarberia as we called it — it would be many years before I moved to the city and discovered that my mother was not in fact the best cook on earth and that the culinary traditions of my youth were not five-star.

And it would be many more years before I moved to Estonia, and even then I would never come to terms with refusing something I was offered. While it might be true that an Estonian will not take offense if you don’t eat carp, I could not have brought myself to say so at Christmas dinner in 1992. My hosts had surely gone to considerable inconvenience, if not expense, to offer me that fish, and I could not have insulted them by pushing away a plate.

It’s been years since I’ve been offered carp or bream (a rose by any another name…) in an Estonian home. The nation seems to have turned to salmon, tilapia, and even sashimi. Perhaps the carp are being exported to Russia, or perhaps they’re just finning quietly in the bottom of some muddy waterway, waiting to make a fashionable comeback.

Either way, I’m prepared for them. I’ll declare a unique devotion to another dish on the hostess' table (pasteet, for example). Or I’ll claim fish allergies. Or I’ll say it’s an ethnic, religious, or cultural thing. In fact, I’ll say, my culture requires me to go to the kitchen and eat standing over the sink.

This story recently appeared in the holiday magazine Jõulud.

The Book Tour

2010-11-27T14:50:00.004+02:00

I’d never done a reading before. The appeal that writing holds for me is that you do it sequestered, and you meet your public on the page, or in correspondence. But I was visiting my French writer friend Guillaume in Portland, Oregon, and he was doing a reading and asked me to take part. I wouldn’t have said yes if I hadn’t been drunk. He wouldn’t have asked if he hadn’t been drunk. But that’s how these things happen.

And so I found myself the opening act for Guillaume at the legendary independent bookstore, Powell’s City of Books. I hadn’t brought any books to sell, but Guillaume said that would be a plus: it would make me appear aloof and indifferent. “But my book isn’t even on the shelves here,” I’d protested the night before. “Think of them as sold out,” Guillaume slurred over the top of his umpteenth MacTarnahan’s Amber Ale. “Besides, I invited a bunch of Estonian friends.”

The next evening, I sat on a stool staring down a packed room of serious readers who had come to see Guillaume. A Powell’s worker, an not-quite-goth twenty-something with a pierced lip, dreadlocks, and a strand of concertina-wire tattooed around her wrist, droned through the introduction of me that Guillaume had given her to read. …Vello Vikerkaar is one of the most talented homosexual men writing on the topic of modern Estonia... There were a few chuckles, and I then understood why Guillaume had refused to let me proof what he’d written. He had mentioned only that he’d take care of me and that Powell’s customers had well-developed senses of humor.

Guillaume had insisted I read my essay, “Cock Ring Ken,” and to put all modesty aside I have to say the crowd approved. There was laughter in the right places, and the applause seemed sincere rather than perfunctory. Then the Powell’s worker announced I’d have time for a few questions.

“Where can we get your book?”

I held one dog-eared copy in my hands, the one I’d borrowed from Guillaume’s bathroom. “Amazon,” I replied, thrilled that things had gone exactly as Guillaume had predicted. I started to silently count heads, thinking what if every one of them bought my book. Oh, the whiskey I’d buy.

There was a second hand in the crowd.

“Do you know Justin Petrone?” She was a plain but still attractive blonde who added an extra syllable to Justin’s family name. Pe-tron-eh.

I said that I knew him.

“I really like his book. He’s a very funny writer.”

I said that I agreed.

“He was in Los Angeles on a book tour. I heard him read there.”

“Great.” I had no idea Justin was touring. A vision came to me of the smiling Italian-American at a table in front of his books stacked to the ceiling, a Sharpie marker in hand, and a line of fans running out the door. Estonians love Justin. If a foreigner is ever put on the cover of Kroonika for reasons other than drug smuggling or murder, Justin will be the one.

“Are you also on a book tour?”

“Well,” and I paused. I wondered if I should tell the truth, or if I had some sort of tacit obligation to keep up an image. Would Powell’s really want me to confess my book has the word “shit” in the title and is published in an obscure foreign language in a country with only two bookstores? And should I admit that my English-language book sells far, far fewer copies than Justin’s, producing revenues that could never hope to cover the cost of a book tour?

“Vello is touring with me,” Guillaume shouted from the crowd, saving me, but making it clear I was just an opening act.

“Well you should try to get Justin Petrone to come here,” replied the blonde, knowing the main act was listening.

Alone on the stool, I quietly reminded myself that not all opening acts suck. After all, Lou Reed opened for U2.

Then Guillaume took the stage and really saved me.

Later on the blonde cornered me. Her name was Tiiu, and she said she used to read my stuff online. “Used to?” She’d all but insisted I ask.

“You’re not always kind, Vikerkaar. You sometimes make fun of Estonians. I don’t think you should do that.”

“But I make fun of myself, too, sometimes, right?” I would hope that she’d at least grant me that.

“I like Justin Petrone and Abdul Turay,” she shrugged.

You can’t fault her honesty, that’s for sure. But I then understood why I haven’t done readings. Take Guillaume, for instance. His books aren’t bestsellers, but he’s a well-respected literary writer for whom the intellectual community will turn out to see. A documentary was recently made about him. He is asked to write for the big name glossies. But even he has horror stories from readings. He was once invited by an American university to read on campus, and nobody showed up to see him. Not one single person. He blamed the shitty weather, shrugged it off, and proposed to the hosting professor that the two of them go drink beer. “No,” said the professor. “We brought you all this way, and so you’ll read.” And so Guillaume had to sit on a stool in front of the professor and read to him in an empty room for a full hour, all the while constructing painful death scenarios for the asshole professor.

If Tiiu is any indication of an average book buyer, then I’m thinking what might be good would be for me, Justin Petrone, and Abdul Turay to go on a book tour together. Justin and Abdul could pay me a percentage of their book sales to appear with them, to play the role of darkness which makes lights around it appear brighter. And if things get too bad for me, if the suffering in the role of the group cynic grows too painful, Sami Lotila could be added as a fourth.

The lesson of all this is probably to stop drinking so I won’t agree to do stupid shit anymore. Or perhaps it’s to be kinder in print. I’m not sure which would be easier.

***

Visit our Dept. of Shameless Commerce.

Dispatch: America

2010-11-21T03:36:00.004+02:00

Down in these parts they call it ‘merica. Not the United States. Not the US or the USA. Not even America. Merica.

Merica is the part of America that didn’t vote for Obama. It’s the heart of the Tea Party. Here dwell confederate battle flag-flying, Second Amendment-loving, concealed weapon-toting, God-loving, abortion-hating, WalMart-shopping, monster truck-driving, ballcap-wearing, fast food-eating XXXL behemoths.

In search of size-M clothing suitable for a barbecue, a Canadian-Estonian visits WalMart and encounters Mericans so overweight that they perambulate through the aisles in electric carts supplied by the store. Under the handlebars often rests a hydration station with a three-liter Big Gulp, standard serving size for all beverages except coffee, which is still legal to consume in one-liter servings.

At the suburban barbecue the guest excuses himself from a pile of ribs to go to the bathroom. Quietly, he opens his Merican host’s medicine cabinet. The labels read like Martian poetry:

Lipitor. Hydrocodone. Vicodin.

It’s all the explanation one needs for the power of the pharmaceutical lobby.

Prinivil. Synthroid. Levorthroid.

Adderall (the kids must share this bathroom). Hydroccet. Hycodan. Norco. Amoxicillin.

Is the Viagra in the nightstand drawer?

Zocor. Zithromax. Glucophage.

Chances are a member of the house suffers from high blood pressure, low blood sugar, diabetes, arthritis, high cholesterol, heart failure, or the inability to produce thyroid hormones. Or all of the above.

Xanax. Ambien. Alprazolam.

And depression. Pick-me-ups were prescribed 169 million times in Merica last year; twice more than anti-anxiety drugs. No wonder the host was smiling when he served the ribs. And so talkative.

Where you live? Sure, I’ve heard of it. It’s in Russia. You got football? Only soccer, huh? Well, that’s too bad.

For Mericans, as Professor Alfonse Stampanato has pointed out, there are only two places: Where they live and their TV set.

Like my big screen, do you? It’s HD. Thousands of channels. I got the porn blocked on this one though—heh, heh—since the kids can watch it. Bedroom set gets all the channels. You like Glenn Beck? You don’t get Fox News in Russia?

Programming fills airtime between the advertisements. Advertisements are poetry about pain relief, penile dysfunction, and dependency treatment facilities. And lines like “…Lipitor may cause suicidal tendencies…” are read slowly in grave tones.

He’s a warm host. And not ignorant about the part of the world which touches his business (he’s in sales). China and Brazil are the ones to watch. India, too. All coming on strong. Trade restrictions. Currency manipulations. Merica can’t compete if the towel-heads and slant-eyes won’t play fair.

Culture comes via Bluray, and lines from favorite movies are recited in turn by men surrounding the grill with Coronas in their hands.

I’ve got one word for you, son: Plastics.

Have a beer; don’t cost nothin’.

What we got here is a failure to communicate.

Badges? We ain't got no stinking badges!

Houston, we’ve got a problem.

Toga, Toga!

Howling laughter for Toga.

Liina sees that the party has split along gender lines, and so she takes her place among the womenfolk with their perfect dental work, frosted hair, and sweaters adorned with knitted strawberries or holiday themes.

The talk turns to how difficult it is to be white anymore. How a man can’t say the N-word without getting into trouble. Of course he shouldn’t, anyway. We’re better than that now. Nothing against blacks, of course. We’ve got one as president. Probably a Muslim, too. Light chuckling, as if it’s a joke everyone is in on. The host says he’s got a black neighbor. Nods all around to say I know whatcha mean.

The visitor offers that Tocqueville said slavery recedes but the prejudice to which it has given birth is immoveable.

Well, the host toes at the composite decking, we don’t watch a lot of European films.

The Baptists run this suburb says the host. Church of Christ runs the next one. They want to make the county dry which will mean a 50-mile drive to get Coronas. WWJD? someone asks. What Would Jesus Do? He’d shut up and drive the 50 miles, of course. I’ll drink to that, says the host. And they do.

Where’s that you’re from again? Oh, but you’re really from Canada? Why can’t you live in Merica?

Merica is under attack they inform. The uppity hippies two subdivisions away have banned leafblowers. Gas or electric, no matter. Banned. Just like that. First they took our healthcare. Now our leafblowers. Stay vigilant, fellas. Freedom is something you gotta fight for.

Everyone plans to vote. To do his part as a citizen. If you don’t vote you can’t bitch. It’s time to take back the country. They’ll take both the House and the Senate. And if they don’t they’ll filibuster.

What’s it like in a communist country? the host asks. For the first time, the guest has their full attention.

“God bless America,” says the guest. Amen to that! and the guest is clapped on the back by all.

A Dying Breed

2010-10-23T09:14:00.008+03:00

Estonia’s surliest coat-check woman works at the Tallinn children’s hospital where Liina takes little Robert to swim.

Every time I see the woman, she wears an expression as if she’d been waterboarded and sleep deprived by a team of CIA interrogators. If Liina tries to offer her coat from the right side of the desk, the old woman barks at her “Tulge teisele poole.” In this case, the “other side” is a distance of one-and-a-half meters down the very same counter. Because of my accent, I suppose, I am given a modicum of respect, which means that she will take my coat from whichever “side” but, as with Liina, she will not acknowledge anything I say to her. “Good afternoon” or “thank you” or “I once had a lover who looked exactly like you” are all met with her showing me her back.

Another place I know has a coat check manned by multiple women who, when in foul moods, routinely punish coat-seekers with lasers fired from their eyes. If you approach the woman responsible for check numbers 200 through 400 with check number 150 in hand, you risk having a trap door sprung beneath you, which will carry you away, your family never to hear from you again.

According to the scientific research I have personally conducted, Estonian museums, on average, have the grumpiest coat check women. Museums are a veritable repository for Soviet-era battle axes. The Kadriorg Art Museum is especially rich with them. I have been shouted at for putting my coat on an unauthorized rack, and I have witnessed the glee with which these women roam the floor near closing time, shooing you out the door.

Even the otherwise progressive KUMU is not immune. Once, before even reaching the coat check (whose attendants will win no prizes), I showed my press pass to see an exhibit. The desk attendant gave me a look as if I’d insisted she carry me around the museum all day on her back. “You’re supposed to call ahead!” she snapped. Since then, I’ve simply shut up and paid my money, since who visits a museum to have his mood spoiled? Perhaps in retribution, I have abstained writing magazine stories about museums. Of course this isn’t fair, and it only proves that I, too, can be capitally petty and therefore might make a fine coat check woman myself.

It has been explained to me that a coat attendant is perhaps the last bastion of the Soviet Union. She is a schveitser, or doorman, of sorts, a person in a rather insignificant role who is vested for a small time with disproportionate power. She may choose to take my coat or not take my coat. Once taken, she may choose to return my coat or not return my coat. And while in her possession, my coat may accidentally fall on to the filthy floor, the contents of the pockets may disappear, or a pack of wild dogs may shred the garment to rags. And none of this would be her problem.

An American friend of mine has a more healthy attitude toward these women. He treats each one as a puzzle to be solved or a code to be cracked. He will say or do anything until he gets the woman to smile. It may take two or three attempts, but my friend will always inspire one of these furies to at least roll her eyes. His toughest challenge and greatest triumph, a feat which I was privileged to personally witness, was a ticket seller at Tallinn's train station. Over a period of months, he had bought dozens of tickets and tried dozens of witty lines in the pursuit of making her smile. But to no avail. Finally, on a summer’s day, he ventured onto an overgrown vacant lot in the neighborhood and picked a bouquet of wildflowers. He returned to the station, approached her window, and fed two-dozen flowers, one at a time, through the tiny opening at the bottom of her window. This brought not only a smile, but shrieks of pleasure, and every other ticket seller stopped business for a moment to come stand behind her as she received the flowers.

My problem is that I have not progressed enough along the path to enlightenment to see these women as my friend does. I tend to personalize their behavior, not realizing that it is not directed at me, and perhaps not even directed at the world in general, but perhaps a simple function of the fact that they are doing a miserable, low-paying job, and on a given day perhaps their husbands have not been sufficiently kind to them in the morning.

Most of us are not zen masters, and we instinctively return the negative emotions we are presented with. Another friend, a writer based in Latvia, once published a story entitled “Selling Pisses at the Riga Station,” a supposed first-person account of the life of a bathroom attendant at the Riga bus station. It was stunningly well written and entertaining, but it did nothing to advance the cause of peace on earth and goodwill toward men.

Liina’s grandmother worked for a time as a coat check woman. She was an underfunded pensioner, and this was at least some income, as well as a place to go during the day. I never witnessed her at work, but I would like to think she took up the job with the same zest with which she went about the rest of her life, and that she was an exception to the rule in the coat check trade.

In her memory I’ve tried to make at least a first attempt to make coat check women smile. I am usually unsuccessful. Perhaps they sense insincerity? Perhaps they are too far gone for one pleasant remark to help? More often, the best I can do is keep my mouth shut and try not to return the emotions. Because there but for the grace of God go I. And because you never can know what I might be doing as a pensioner.

I suppose the future will put an end to these positions. Over the long-term, it will be far cheaper to have people put away their own coats.

“The coat-check woman with her singular nastiness is a dying breed,” one of my more cynical friends likes to exclaim. “And thank god for it,” he is quick to add.

But I think we’re going to miss them. With the same sort of nostalgia people express when they see that Soviet-era TV advertisement for chicken (“kana, kana, kana, kana, kana…”), or when a Zaporozhetz passes by on a city street, the coat check women are a unique part of the culture. And they are a daily reminder of the fleetingness of power and position. We may all be the worse when they are finally gone.

The Onion Fair (без лука)

2010-10-09T11:53:00.003+03:00

In the early 1990s, I heard a guy remark at a conference that Estonia offered a more sanitized, civilized way to experience Eastern Europe. “Like a drive-through zoo,” he said, “where you see the tigers from behind the safety of your car’s windshield. But in Russia,” he noted, “you have to actually climb into the cage with the animals.”
I thought he made a pretty good point that where tourism was concerned, Estonia offered a safe and secure way to taste the bizarreness of Russia. I’m not sure that’s true anymore.
This weekend, Liina, Robert, and I visited the Lasnamäe Onion Fair. I like Lasnamäe for its modern shopping centers, as well as for its tiny shops which aren’t much different than they were 20 years ago – you know, the kind which sell 80 varieties of vodka plus every kind of little seed or nut you can chew and spit on the ground. And so I thought the Onion Fair would be a little slice of Russia, picked up and re-planted behind the safety of my window glass.
The day began with promise, me practicing my language by shouting out the car window to some Russians. “Skazhitye pazhalyusta, gdye lukovaya yarmarka?” A man carrying a small child with a balloon pointed east and told us to follow the noise. Liina and I waved our thanks like goofy tourists, and I imagined a day with a dozen balalaika players singing songs with the words “maya tzerdse” or “a kakaya zhenshina” in every other chorus.
As we neared the noise’s source, I could make out the Estonian language over a loudspeaker. A song’s refrain rang “Du-du-dut-dumm.” Were we in the right place? But children were leaving the area carrying balloons, and how many festivals could there be on a single day in Lasnamäe?
Consumed by the spirit of things, we parked the car in a decidedly Russian fashion - paying no attention to street markings and hoping the parking police had been told to stand down for the day - and headed into the fair.
There were vendors selling sheepskins, bream, sausage, and goat cheese. A young woman in a booth dispensed literature about the health benefits of sea buckthorn in winter. Clean-cut young men at a booth marked UusMaa appeared to be counseling passersby on the benefits of life insurance. A very few onion vanikut hung from tent eaves, but there was no mad scramble to buy them.
“Izvinitye,” I hailed a woman behind a table stacked high with colorful plastic hair barrettes and other beauty accessories. “Gdye lukovaya yarmarka?”
“Siin samas!” she answered in fairly decent Estonian. Estonian? I craned my neck to look for language cops.
As I tuned my ear to the surroundings, I noticed no one was speaking Russian. The sea buckthorn sales pitch was in Estonian. Even the signs were in Estonian. There were no luka here at all. Only sibulad.
“I’m ready to go,” I announced to Liina. “There’s nothing of Russia here. It’s just some gariyachi estonski parni’s idea of Russia.”
Once, when shopping at a market in Kyiv, a middle-aged, heavyset woman stood behind her tomatoes and shouted, “I’m the ugliest woman in this entire marketplace, but I’ve got the best-looking tomatoes of all!” That was what I’d come to Lasnamäe to find: zhisn as lived by Russians. And the Russian dusha. All the Slavic emotions which cannot be had from a hospital-clean eurostate.
I wanted to see dark-eyed young men repairing wristwatches and calculators on top of overturned cardboard boxes. I wanted a line of women selling flower-print housedresses, sausage, and dried fish. I wanted pirated DVDs and CDs, like the rare copy of Eric Clapton’s Superbest I once discovered in a Moscow kiosk. But I got none of that in Lasnamäe. Someone had stolen my Little Russia and replaced it with ersatz.
“And now,” announced an Estonian voice from the stage. I looked up to find Erich Krieger. “Katyusha!”
I rushed forward to the improvised dance floor hoping to see veterans with medals pinned to their chests, who would sing of the grey steppe eagle and greetings from Katyusha. And babushkas, hair tied down with platki, who would sing of the bright sun and reach for the soldier on the far-away border. Instead, I found a small boy in black trackpants who kicked and gyrated as if he were having a seizure. Finally, two babushkas showed mercy and took the young man’s hands to form a circle of dance. An authentic khorovod perhaps, but it was too little too late.
I found Liina at the wig tent. She was trying on one with ears protruding from it which resembled exactly the mouse cap our four-month-old Robert wore. “You don’t wear wigs,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“They’re not wigs, you fool. They’re hats.”
“Ersatz!” I charged. “A real Russian market would sell wigs.” But either way my fun was ruined. If babushkas had poured from the concrete block apartment buildings, locked arms, and performed a prisyadki, it would not have been enough.
“Let’s go to the Baltijaam,” I pleaded. Liina knew that what ailed me could only be cured with a cheborek served from a kiosk with questionable hygienic standards. Or a few ounces of kvass dispensed from a trailer, served in a community glass, carelessly washed by an indifferent salesgirl. I needed the real Russia. Or at least more convincing ersatz.
“Okay, let’s go,” she agreed, but not before turning to the wig salesman. “Skolka stoit?”
“Nelisada,” he replied with a look in his eye like he sold them all day at that price.
Liina put the hat back on the table. “Come on,” she said loudly enough to be sure the salesman could hear. “I know a great wig shop at the Baltijaam.”

Something Big

2010-09-26T11:44:00.004+03:00

I’ve been jonesing for some travel lately. Even if it’s just an overnight trip to Helsinki or a couple nights in Rakvere, a change of scenery is nice – and necessary – especially as the dark and rainy season comes on.

But I haven’t traveled anywhere for almost a year. Compounding my frustration is Liina, whose sister just went to Toscana with a bunch of her girlfriends. “Why don’t we go to Toscana?” Liina asked. I haven’t answered, because I suspect it’s one of those rhetorical questions wives often pose, questions to which they don’t want answers but rather expect you to dream along with them. “What a great idea!” I’m meant to reply. “Why don’t we rent a cottage and spend the winter there!”

The real answer to The Toscana Question of course is that we can’t possibly afford it, that the mortgage won’t be paid off until I’m damned near 80 years old, and that any spare money we do have won’t be spent on trips to Italy, but rather to Canada so our son Robert won’t grow up thinking it’s a foreign country.

But when a man tries to answer such questions, it inevitably leads to ugliness, as he will not only disappoint the wife, he will conclude that his own income is unsatisfactory and, seeing limited future prospects, will suggest the wife get a second job. And none of that is what the wife had in mind when all she wanted was to dream out loud about a week spent in a warm climate.

So I’ve tried to learn to play along. To dream along without firm commitment. “Yes, dear,” I’ll say, “a week in Toscana would be grand. Think of the food, of life’s slow pace.” For a moment, I’ll even drift away myself, imagining a cigarillo with strong coffee and old men playing bocce ball in a sunny courtyard.

“You know,” she’ll say, edging the conversation toward reality, “the airline ticket to Toscana is only 3,000 kroons.” True enough, I’ll think. And then I’ll do my best to refrain from mentioning that two plane tickets would be 6,000 kroons, plus the airline- and fuel taxes they don’t include in the advertised price. And then there’s the rental car, the food, the hotel, and the shopping we’d do for things not available in Estonia. (And when you’re traveling, almost everything is not available in Estonia.) What my little voice is telling me is that we won’t get out of Italy for under 20,000 kroons. I’ll shut up and try not to remind Liina that our last “cheap” trip to India resulted in us returning with a carpet which cost more than both our plane tickets combined. And the carpet couldn’t even fly.

Sadly, when Liina dreams aloud, most of the time I spoil things for her by introducing harsh reality. Whether it’s a male trait or not, I don’t know, but I almost never learn. Liina each time will point this out, and then tell me to shut up and think more positively.

I’ve been working on that.

I recently read a New Yorker article about a group of men who live together in an eighteenth-century row house on C-Street in Washington D.C. What they all have in common is a love for Jesus. That, and they’re all American Congressmen. When one cheats on his wife, the others confront him with the teachings of Jesus, and everybody lives happily ever after. The residents of the house are a support group, and they’re connected both spiritually and financially to the weekly prayer breakfasts held in Washington. Some Estonian parliamentarians have attended these breakfasts, I know, and they’ve brought back positive reports.

One of the founders of the organization behind the C-Street house has encouraged those who have not yet found Jesus to “pray for something bigger than yourself,” so that when it happens you can’t take personal credit. He suggests praying for a continent, like Africa.

But having the rock star Bono on its side already, does Africa really needs Jesus? Assuming Africa can manage in the short-term, I’ve decided to pray for myself. And I am praying for “something big.”

I don’t yet know what this something big is, but I know that it will involve some travel (and not a budget trip to Toscana). I know that it will involve fulfillment, both spiritually and financially. And it will involve Liina, too. It might be that an American publisher discovers my book Pikk jutt, sitt jutt and it becomes a bestseller. As much a part of the book as anyone, Liina will also be flown first class to Chicago to be interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. We’ll then have enough money to import Polish workers to finish our house construction. Robert can have a part-time nanny which will give Liina more time for herself. We’ll get a second car, a little Toyota perhaps.

As I described this dream to Liina she made no effort to hide her disappointment. “That’s not big,” she fumed. “You get an audience with the Son of God and all you ask for is a Toyota Corolla?” She went on to remind me that if what we wanted was a middle-class existence, it would be as easy as picking up and moving back to Canada.

“Fine, I’ll ask Jesus to throw in a trip to Toscana,” I cracked. “Or two trips to Toscana.”

But of course Liina had a point. The boys on C-Street would not be impressed. Which is why I’ve decided not to pray only for my unambitious, boring self. Instead, I’m praying for Estonia.

I see a lot of potential Big Somethings for Estonia. And from what I’ve read about prayer, the more people who do it the better. So why don’t we all pray together, right here and now as you read this column? Given your probable lack of experience with prayer (if you're Estonian), I’ve taken the trouble to write a prayer you can simply read out loud:

Dear Jesus, this is [insert your name], and I’m contacting you from Vello’s prayer group in Estonia. I pray for my nation. I pray for a robust national economy based on original products and original ideas. I pray for a solution to the integration issue, for more ethnic Russians to knock the chip off their shoulders and start taking active part in making Estonian better; and for Estonians to show a bit more respect and to stop referring to them as “venka” and “tibla.” I pray for my politicians. I pray for Mr. Ansip to get over his public constipation, to lighten up, and be open to discussing new ideas. I pray for Mr. Savisaar to realize that everyone who’s not for him is not necessarily against him. I pray for Ms. Jänes to have the wisdom not to fix what isn’t broken. I pray for Mr. Lukas to understand that homosexuals are not freaks but people just like him only with better-fitting suits. I pray for my home. I pray for my family. I pray for my neighbors. I pray for something big. Something really big. In your name, Jesus, I pray. Amen.

You may be a bit skeptical. Perhaps you tried a motivational seminar, or maybe you read The Secret, and cash and happiness did not rain from the sky. But as the C-Street boys would ask, Have you tried Jesus? There’s absolutely nothing to lose. So if you didn’t read the prayer out loud, go back and do so. Go on. It doesn’t cost anything.

The weekend this column is published, let’s all pray together. On Saturday and Sunday, no matter what you’re doing, just pause now and again to think positive thoughts and dream about what you’d like to happen. Pray for something big. Pray for Estonia. And pray for yourself while you’re at it.

I’ll be praying for Estonia. Liina will be praying for Toscana. You’ll be praying for whatever, and together there’ll be a huge vibe of positive energy emanating from Estonia. According to The Secret, a positive thought is multiple times more powerful than a negative one, so even with Latvia next door, Jesus will hear our prayers. And think of the fun we’ll have this weekend, giving a sly smile to our neighbor knowing that we’re both praying. Praying for something big.

Multitask Me

2010-09-11T08:56:00.003+03:00

Headline from The Onion: “Are you checking your email often enough?”

My friend Katrin recently showed me her Twitter. “I’m very careful, though,” she said, “whose tweets I receive.” I asked her how many friends she has whose messages she receives. “Sixty,” she replied, but explained how a tweet can come from far, far away. “Most of the time they’re citing someone else’s tweet.”

Katrin got me counting. She runs a fairly large organization, and in addition to following sixty tweeters, I guestimated that on an hourly basis she also gets several text messages and at least several phone calls. She has a Facebook account, uses both Skype and MSN Messenger. Add to that three or four daily newspapers plus whatever news she follows online. Then there’s television and radio—she’s almost always listening to public radio. Whatever it all sums to, the amount of information she is receiving and sending on a daily basis is rather frightening. She’s a real multitasker, the type of person the modern world rewards. “Can you even walk and chew gum at the same time?” my mother used to chide me. Well, Katrin certainly can.

Now consider the novelist Jonathan Franzen. Franzen is so unimpressed with multitasking I doubt he’d even deign to use the word. In a recent interview with Time magazine, he remarked:

"We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we've created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful. The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world."

So that Franzen can engage productively in this scary and unmanageable world, he has created an environment which is the antithesis of Katrin’s. He not only has no internet, but he has removed temptation, as well. "What you have to do," Franzen told Time, "is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it."

At about the same time Katrin was trying to convince me of how cool Twitter is, my friend Mingus sent me an article somewhat vindicating Mr. Franzen’s world view. Scientists have discovered that the faster we shift between pieces of information, the less sense we can make of any of it.

They say there’s a region of the brain called the posterior lateral prefrontal cortex (pLPFC) which is a routing hub for inputs. If information comes in too quickly the pLPFC bottlenecks—queuing some of the info and ignoring the rest—and the routing hub slows down. This means multitasking is a case of diminishing marginal returns. The more information you pile on in short bursts, the less you get to keep.

I suppose Katrin would argue that’s why she only receives the tweets of 60 friends—you gotta draw the line somewhere. And the shape of Katrin’s head seems normal: I see no swelling of her pLPFC.

When Katrin mentioned sixty friends, my first thought was not their tweets, but the number sixty. I don’t know if I even have sixty friends. If I expand it to acquaintances, then perhaps. But one thing I’m damned sure of: I don’t have sixty friends or acquaintances all of whom have something intelligent to say on a daily basis. Even the world’s better columnists can only manage a few hundred good words per week. Out of curiosity, I did the math and determined that if I tweeted my column in a tweet’s outer bound of 140-character installments, then it would take me two weeks to get it done. So maybe Katrin’s tweeting friends aren’t so vacant after all. Perhaps they’re simply fond of the serial?

Maybe it’s just a matter of personal taste, but too much information makes me want to stock up on Early Times bourbon and push the furniture against the wall. Even without Twitter, I have enough trouble receiving information. The biggest transmitter of information around me is my four-month-old son, Robert. All day long, even when sleeping, he sends and receives tweets. At first I suspected him of being an alien, making constant transmissions to the mother ship. Lately, I’m favoring the theory that he’s mimicking the sound the coffee pot makes.

What Robert has helped me realize is that I’m capable of receiving only a finite amount of information. The addition of Robert means the subtraction of other inputs in order to stave off the Early Times purchase. I still welcome print editions of Postimees, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books into my home, and I get a regular shipment of books from Amazon. All that is plenty. I’ve shut down the invasive Skype and Facebook, and I try to answer the phone only at reasonable hours, selecting a certain part of each day to devote to returning calls. We’ve killed our TV, too. Or, rather, we chose not to follow when the country went digital. Now it just sits there, taking on a kind of significance like the decaying Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes.

My wife Liina is also anti-Twitter (“Reading about everyone else’s lives I don’t understand when you have time for your own”), but ironically she still wants a digibox. If she wants to pay for it and install it, then I’ll be pleased to watch a few of the TV programs I like.

But in the meantime I’m enjoying the silence. I’ve got a stack of books I’m working my way through, though Robert tends to interrupt often, forcing me to digest them in 140-character bursts. All this has made me realize that Jonathan Franzen is right. In the 21st century, taking someone to that “place of stillness,” or getting and holding a human being’s undivided attention will have the significance of America’s 1969 moonshot.

So if you’ve opened the newspaper, begun reading, and reached this point in my column, then, you’ve spent about seven minutes in a twitter-free place of stillness. I’m flattered, of course. But, more importantly, how do you feel?

***

Help Liina buy a digibox.

Watching Clifford Levy

2010-08-28T10:42:00.002+03:00

Whose day was it to watch Clifford Levy?

It was June, 2010, and the New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief was visiting Tallinn’s Pae Gymnasium.

Levy reported that Estonia, “...a small former Soviet republic on the Baltic Sea, has been mounting a determined campaign to elevate the status of its native language and to marginalize Russian, the tongue of its former colonizer.”

Fair enough, I thought, until I read this gem of a sentence, “In Estonia, 30 percent of the 1.3 million people speak Russian as a first language, and the government seems bent on employing the schools to lower that figure.”

I wondered if that might have been a lazy sentence. “First language,” after all, is defined as the language someone learns from birth, and a first language serves as the basis for sociolinguistic identity. Perhaps Levy meant the state was out to lower the number who speak Russian as “first language in the workplace”? But papers like the Times have copy editors to weed out lazy sentences.

I wondered if Levy truly thought the Estonian government was plotting to use the schools to reduce the number of people who speak Russian as a first language. Does he believe (and do Russians in Russia and Russian-speakers in Estonia believe) that speaking Estonian in the workplace (and marketplace and post office) endangers the Russian language?

I’ve read some about the Soviets’ efforts to relegate the Estonian language to kitchen status. I’ve been told that once a language becomes a kitchen language, then soon all it’s good for is “Pass the butter.” But while that might have been a worry for Estonians, it doesn’t really stand to reason that it could be a worry for Russians. After all, what about the 142 million Russians right next door, the 285 million Russian-speakers worldwide, and the enormous cultural machine which feeds them all? But what I believe matters far less than what Russians believe. And it also matters less than what the New York Times believes.

What I can agree with in Mr. Levy’s article is that yes, for a variety of reasons on a variety of levels, Estonians don’t always make it easy for foreigners to learn or speak Estonian. The Times could have confined its article to that issue, but they chose, for whatever reason, to add a hint of intrigue and conspiracy. Certainly no malice was involved. Mr. Levy may simply be victim to the inherent disadvantages of reporting on Estonia from Moscow. Still, it was a lazy sentence.

Generally, with great newspapers like the Times, what slips past the copy editors and fact checkers doesn’t make it past the readers. My guess is that Levy’s errant sentence would have earned Estonia some op-ed space in the Times, though perhaps I was the only one to make much of the sentence. The country, as far as I could tell, chose to let Levy’s remark pass.

Perhaps an unfair analogy, but I wondered whether Estonia’s football fans would be so passive if their national team let an attacker run all over the field unmatched by any defender. The national team may not be a serious contender for the World Cup, but at least they show up for the games. At least they try to cover their man. So who’s covering Levy? Which PR flack or government official is supposed to be helping him understand the Estonian position?

Expressing my dismay to an Estonian political scientist, she postulated that Estonians somehow believe that “in the end the truth will come out.” An interesting theory, certainly, if only for the reason that it casts Estonians as optimists in the face of a history ripe with instances where the truth did not come out, came out too late, or the historical narrative was simply authored by another party. Or the worst: instances when the truth came out, but nobody in the world really gave a damn.

The Times visited Tallinn again in August, this time covering gray passport holders. Levy quoted a heartsick Russian film producer who had “…done a whole lot for my country” (Estonia) but whose country “has not done a whole lot for me.” I’m sure Mr. Levy presented the story as he saw it, but my overactive imagination couldn’t help but wonder if a western reader would see the film producer as a proxy for the ethnic Russian community in Estonian, a community, as the narrative would go, which makes a substantial and visible contribution yet is still rebuked? I wanted to know what had the film producer done for his country? Had he served in the army? Joined the ranks of TeachFirst? Had he taken part in Let’sDoIt Estonia’s nationwide trash cleanup? Was he actively involved in civic organizations or government? Or did he only go to work and pay taxes, like most of the rest of us?

Then the article drew comparisons to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova. Another opportunity, I thought, to make the case for op-ed space for Estonia. But, alas, no. As far as I could determine, Estonians chose to remain silent yet again.

From what I can find in the Times archive, Mr. Levy has written only two stories on Estonia, but they both come from the same mold. The simple protagonists are oppressed by an indifferent state. They are sentimental, kind-hearted souls who want to make better lives for themselves and those around them. They want only to be understood. Were Hollywood to get hold of them, there would be many teary departure scenes with locomotives in steamy stations, and full orchestras would be employed for sound tracks.

It worries me that Mr. Levy doesn’t seem to know anyone in Estonia. In his August 15th story, he quoted President Ilves, though it was a recycled quote from an interview Ilves gave to a Russian newspaper. I don’t know how it is with President Ilves but, in general, Estonia has prided itself on having accessible politicians, and the president of the republic has been no exception. I wondered whether Messrs. Ilves and Levy had dined together.

The real problem, however, is not that Mr. Levy doesn’t know Estonia. The problem is that Estonia doesn’t know Mr. Levy. If Estonia wants empathy, or even more fair and balanced stories, the first step is getting acquainted: Our Mr. Levy must become our Cliff. And though the nation might flatter itself by thinking Mr. Levy might make the effort himself, as a small nation, it is incumbent upon Estonia to take the first step and extend an invitation.

But if no one else wants to dine with Clifford J. Levy, then I’m happy to do so. I have already checked his Facebook page and can see that with a degree or two of separation we have common acquaintances. In the digital age, we are practically brothers.

Personally, were I King of Estonia I’d settle things with Mr. Levy and the Kremlin the easy way. (Now that was a lazy sentence.) I’d give all the gray passport holders citizenship. It’s only seven percent. Astute readers will point out that that’s not my right, yours is not my history, and as a foreigner I should just shut the hell up. And the reader would be partly right. The problem is there are plenty of foreigners who won’t shut the hell up, and Mr. Clifford J. Levy is among them. He’s just doing his job, of course. But it wouldn’t be a bad thing if Estonia tried to help him out by making an effort to set the record straight.

Tourist Bashing

2010-08-14T12:16:00.004+03:00

Opening season for tourist bashing begins each year in May. Snow recedes, the sun appears and warms our bones, and in our heads dance visions of an Old Town packed tightly with white-shoed American retirees closely trailing guides with their numbered signs thrust high in the air. Well, maybe it doesn’t dance in your head. But it does in mine, since almost every year I celebrate the cruisers’ arrival by penning a tribute, chronicling, for example, a senile band of Americans trying too hard to make friends in an Estonian café.

Soon after my column, the Estonian journalists join in, and the first article appears in a local newspaper bemoaning the arrival of the cruiser tide, lamenting how 4,600 tourists can roam the city at any given time without a single one of them actually opening his wallet. The American-dominated tribe wanders the Old Town streets for half a day before returning to their great white ships to sail for sunny St. Petersburg where, presumably, they leave the money that was by all rights ours to take in Tallinn.

“You'd think,” wrote Postimees’ Uwe Gnadenteich in June of this year, “that their arrival would give the economy a shot in the arm, but the majority of the thousands of predominantly retired cruise tourists don't even spend a cent during their day in town." Restaurant keepers bellyached that the cruiser, at best, bought only a cup of coffee, and then only because he wanted a place to rest his legs. Then followed a long, long list of what the cruiser will not buy.

But then this year, livening things up in the comments box was a poster calling himself Heh, who summed things up this way: “What could they buy here? They can get matryoshka dolls for half the price at their next stop." And, I might add: wool socks or sauna hats or juniper butter knives or sweaters or paintings of three-masted schooners made from tiny pieces of amber. Heh’s succinct summation reminded me of Navin R. Johnson, Steve Martin’s character in the movie The Jerk who sells souvenirs at a traveling circus. Johnson stands next to his wares and shouts at passersby: “Step right up and buy some crap!”

How dare these cruisers exit our city with anything left in their wallets? How dare they not purchase the many distinctive Estonian souvenirs such as matryoshka dolls and amber cigarette holders? The gall!

A friend of mine, who worked as a guide until he was fired for encouraging an American tourist to urinate on a Toompea street, thinks of the cruisers in a different light: He’s of the opinion they leave something behind other than empty water bottles. Have the ships, he asks, not paid a handsome fee to dock? And do the cruisers not support a small industry of bus drivers, students and off-season English teachers who serve as tour guides? And what about the bicycle rental business? Or even our reptilian taxi drivers? But all this counts for nothing in the press. We cast the octogenarian cruisers as Viking hordes, torches in hand, advancing on the Old Town for a little scorched-earth fun. (And note the plural: I am guilty, too.)

My friend suggests EAS’s tourism division should think of cruisers as Estonia’s wet dream target market. The cruisers are extremely financially successful, well-educated white people, who have limitless time on their hands. They generally do not have drinking problems—or if they do, you can rest assured they’re not swilling the rotgut Finnish tourists choose. The cruiser will knock back a decent bottle of wine or cognac, and he’ll do it with his feet propped up in a hotel the caliber of the Telegraaf. While he has no interest in buying a two-meter, St. Nicholas wool hat which warms your head and still wraps five times around your neck, when presented the right environment, the cruiser is more than happy to spend.

So why haven’t we started to think of cruisers as the greatest opportunity yet for our tourism sector? They leave their ship to enter the Old Town and be dazzled by one of the world’s most impressive and charming medieval settings. They’re doing more than taking snapshots: they are willingly subjecting themselves to what is literally a six-hour interactive advertisement for Tallinn. The low-hanging fruit of the tourism industry is generally thought to be Finns. But maybe the cruisers warrant additional thought.

At least once every summer some friends of my parents arrive via the cruise boats. I wait beyond the schlagbaum for them to walk the length of the pier, where I escort them into town to drink a few cups of coffee and tell them tales of Tallinn. “You’re really lucky to live here,” they always exclaim. And they mean it, too. And I’d argue that my parents’ friends are fairly representative of the half-million cruisers who spend a day in Tallinn. I guided a few cruiser busloads one season, and with the exception of the one or two who thought they were too special to be seated with common cruisers, talking to cruisers was about like chatting with my parents. They’ve worked hard all their lives, and they’ve earned some money that they want to spend before they’re too old to do much anything else but wear Depends adult undergarments, drool on themselves, and stare blankly at a too-loud television.

So what do we offer to make them want to come back independently where they really will spend money? Here we may trot out the usual debate about quality of service and the pros and cons of following behind the raised umbrella of a 60-year-old guide with her monotone patter of historical dates and other sleep-inducing facts. (Though this problem has been solved. Take one of the Blue Drum company’s more unorthodox tours. Full disclosure: I’ve led these tours.) But the point is not what we show them, but rather how we receive them. They can see very little of Tallinn in a half-day tour, but they can see enough to make them want to come back.

If I were King of Estonia or Tallinn’s Czar or Mayor—or even just a journalist dispatched to chronicle the tightwad cruisers—I might put some thought into how best to mine the cruisers’ potential. We have no need to try to woo people in tourist fairs throughout Europe, and we don’t need campaigns touting how positively surprising we are. We only need to warmly shake the hands of those 5,000 tourists per day who disembark the cruise vessels for a pleasant stroll around our town.

They’re too sophisticated to fall for the fake medieval village trick with a cheesy market at the port. And they got over buying logoed shot glasses, baby spoons, and other shit-on-a-stick when they were teenagers. All that’s left to woo them with is a good story told by a remarkable storyteller.

For my own part, I’ve decided to stop making fun of them. I promise to not mention in my column that some of them are overweight, loud, and completely ignorant of even their own country’s history. If we want them to come back and leave all their money, then we’ve got to learn to love them. Though, as the Annie Lennox song goes, it’s a thin line between love and hate.

***

No, before anyone asks, I have no idea why all of my stories are in a different font.

Feed Vello here.

Going Local

2010-07-31T08:09:00.011+03:00

I finally had enough of the heat and shaved my head. The mop of hair you see in my columnist’s photograph is quite comfortable in December, but in 30-degree temperatures I resemble a perpetually-sweaty rockband roadie, which makes both Liina and visitors to the house nervous.

For years, Liina has tried to convince me the shaved look is in style, though I’m not sure where except Eastern Europe (and prisons and army boot camps the world over). But I have to admit it’s comfortable to feel the wind and sun on your scalp. And there’s the added benefit of knowing you’ve, at least temporarily, given up the fight to cover your bald spot, something most western males spend half their lives in pursuit of.

Last week, I had to put on a necktie for a meeting, and I ended up in the Tornimäe district around five o’clock. Other similarly-clad bald professionals were filing out of their offices and for a few hundred meters I felt part of some sort of grotesque parade, all of us on the way to tram stops or parking lots.

“Hey, Vello,” someone shouted, and I turned around to find my French-author friend Guillaume who returns summers to Estonia to write prose and chase prostitutes.

“How’d you recognize me?”

“Because your head is shaped like a banana.”

Which is actually true, and it’s a comment people have made even when I had a full head of hair.

“I kind of thought I blended in this way,” I said, scratching my dome.

Guillaume said I blended in more than before, but still not much. “I can see you’re trying to go local,” he noted. “But it will never work. I will always look like a Frenchman, and there’s nothing I can do about it. And you, my friend, will always look like an American.”

“I’m Canadian.”

“Whatever,” he shrugged.

Guillaume had once told me a story about how he tried to go local when he lived in New York. He got the Wall Street haircut, the Brooks Brothers suit, the Church’s English shoes, and he learned to vertically fold the New York Times in the way of New Yorkers so it could be read while riding the subway. “Though there were two things I would not do,” he said, “the warning signs of when someone has stepped over the line.” These were owning a pair of black cowboy boots and to the desire to begin sentences with My shrink says… “I swore to myself that if I ever was tempted toward one of those two, I would get the hell out of New York."

Guillaume believes there are danger signs for foreigners in Estonia, too, like getting a Caesar haircut or spending huge sums on a sports car in a country where there’s no place to drive it.

“I’ve never had a Caesar,” I defended.

He looked at my bald head. “Whatever.”

As far as I can tell, no one has mistaken me for an Estonian. It isn’t just about the bald head or the clothing you put with it. Foreigners could be outfitted to look Estonian by an anthropologist and an expert from the Estonia Theatre’s wardrobe department, and they still wouldn’t look Estonian. We even walk differently. Americans, in my opinion, walk like gunslingers. Arms at their sides, they tend to walk down the middle of the sidewalk, as if they were on their way to meet their adversary at High Noon. Russians, when they’re not squatting somewhere with a cigarette or leaning against a Benz showing off their bling, have a similar way of walking. But while an American will duck out of your way and mutter an excuse-me, a Russian is more typically oblivious to your presence: as far as he knows, he is the only one on the sidewalk. Italians are a moving carnival, from their colorful shoes to their printed tshirts and the multiple conversations which orbit them as they move down the street, every one of them chattering away simultaneously. And Estonians are often the quiet bald guys who have a characteristic way of melting into the wallpaper to be strategically inconspicuous. Although he’s there listening, recording things like a court reporter, you don’t notice him unless he speaks up. An exception is the supermarket, of course: an Estonian with a shopping cart is all over the place. With shopping carts or automobiles, he’s a demolition derby driver.

So if people don’t think I’m Estonian, then what am I? “Well, there’s the obvious cancer patient thing,” said Guillaume, before adding that I appeared to be more a foreigner who was experiencing his midlife crisis in Estonia. “I see a lot of that sort in strip clubs,” he said. “Fifty years old, married with kids, and thinking that stuffing kroons in a girl’s G-string is the high point of living.”

“And you’re different?”

“I’m there to meet the girls and bone them,” he replied, with zero hint of irony. “For most of the others, the whooping and dollar throwing is the climax. I have a higher purpose.”

I’ve always respected Guillaume for his bald honesty. He believes what he believes and makes no apologies for it. Much like Priit Pullerits, who I saw in a recent Postimees is on his horse again about Estonian women and foreign men. Even though I may not always agree with him, I admire that Priit is bound so closely to his set of beliefs, and I’m pretty sure you’d not get Priit to shave his head (or wear a Caesar, for that matter). I don’t think Guillaume and Priit would agree on too many things, but I do think they’d respect each other at a certain level. And, luckily, Guillaume isn’t a threat to take Estonian girls out of the country, if only because most of the strippers nowadays tend to be from Ukraine or Belarus.

By the time this piece is published, my hair will have grown out a couple of centimeters and Guillaume will say I look like my chemo is over. Liina will tell me that the style is to keep it shaved. But it’s my hair, isn’t it? And if I want to parade around town looking like I just stuck my hand in an electrical socket then that’s nobody’s business but my own. At least I won’t be aping anyone. I’ll be firmly in a transitional phase, on my way to only-I-know-where.

Elites

2010-07-17T13:31:00.004+03:00

As infrequently as I fly I am relegated to the cattle section. On my last trip to North America, airline personnel shuffled me into the first class check-in line to speed things along. For a short while, society’s elite, middle class, and heroin smugglers all stood together in the queue, leaving a few of the first class passengers perturbed. A well-dressed man in his late fifties turned to me and sneered about a backpacker who was getting checked in before him: “He doesn’t look like first class material to me.”

A bit put off by his snobbery, I gave the man a conspicuous onceover. “Quite frankly,” I said, “I’m a bit worried about you.”

“What do you mean?” he said, examining his clothing, stunned that I might question his perfect suit and designer bag.

“Well, you could be undercover. What if you’re an Al Qaeda man who’s had plastic surgery? Or worse. What if you’re just some middle-class Joe in an expensive suit.”

He wasn’t quite sure what to make of me. “Look there,” I said. “I believe it’s your turn at the counter.”

I haven’t flown first class in years. Or Upper- or Business- , or Elite-, or Grey Poupon-, or Up Yours Class, or whatever more recent name they’ve dreamed up for it. In the day I flew first class, the airline TWA (The Worst Airline) was still around, and I got to sit in the wide seats only because I flew so often that I was automatically upgraded. But even when I basked in the comforts of first class, I always thought they were overrated.

The food wasn’t that much better, and eating with a metal fork wasn’t significantly more gratifying than eating with a plastic one. The movies were fine, but if you wanted a good one you still had to bring it yourself. Drinks in the first class cabin were free in North America, though every passenger knew they weren’t really free, and first class passengers generally aren’t much for getting drunk on airplanes. Sure, the reclining seat and extra legroom were nice on flights over the Atlantic, but for me those were few and far between. However, there was one benefit to first class that was certainly not overrated: Stewardesses were always nice to you.

Part of the general nastiness of American stewardesses has been attributed to the fact that these poor women joined the airline when they were starry-eyed twenty-year-olds. Flying was a good way to see the world and, back before women’s liberation, working as a stewardess was a pretty sexy job. The ladies joined the union, jetted in and out of Paris, and by the time their fun became work they weren’t twenty years old anymore. They were locked into careers, condemned to serve Coca-Cola at forty-thousand feet for the rest of their working lives.

As the mood of stewardesses began to turn nasty, the US skies saw deregulation, which meant competition and a precipitous drop in fares: the common man could now afford to fly. Soon after deregulation, life got harder for stewardesses when low-cost airlines entered the fray. Anyone who’s had a basic chemistry course knows that if you take a bitter middle-aged woman used to serving the wealthy, pour in a planeload of middle-class boors, all the fun will soon be gone from air travel.

Coach passengers are indeed sometimes the raggedy-assed multitudes who fly once a year and think that the flight attendants are their personal slaves. I’ve more than once seen a stewardess blow up at a coach passenger, informing him that she is first and foremost responsible for his safety. Which is true, but she’s also responsible for getting him a drink and a meal, and I’ve always thought we’d all be better off if a stewardess could just smile her way through a difficult situation.

Of course it isn’t just North America. Even in Scandinavia, under whose socialism we enjoy double extra equality, there’s a difference. First class stewardesses are a bit cooler, but since there isn’t usually a Finn puking in the forward lavatory, they are decidedly more at ease, which translates to a superior flying experience.

Now that the Estonian state will soon have the majority of Estonian Air and is starting to think about change, I’ve got an idea of my own: Make every Estonian Air seat a first class seat.

Estonians are enamored with the idea of first class. During a recent ETV news segment about a manor home, the manager mentioned at least three times that they were targeting “elites.” I recently bought a used Skoda, which an Estonian man deemed a chick car—“Very simple,” he said. “Not enough buttons,” which, he felt, made it “inappropriate for business use.” And more than two Estonians have told me my telephone number is too long. “Prestige numbers come from EMT,” one said, “and your number says ‘cheap plan’.” Move too much beyond Maseratis and designer clothes, and I am useless at recognizing the symbols of Estonia’s upper class.

Coming out of the throes of Soviet poverty, Estonia is understandably caught up in a chase for status. It may take years for people to come back down to earth, so why not simply embrace this quest to be elite by making every Estonian Air seat first class?

But it’s not about giving everyone a wider seat, a metal fork, gourmet food, and unlimited amounts of alcohol, though of course we’ll need those, too. And I’m not talking about stewardesses helping each passenger off with his jacket and hanging it in a dust-free environment, though let’s do that, as well. My idea of first class is that no one will sneer at a backpacker in line. That even the most absurd behavior by the most vile economy-class passenger will be met with an approving smile. Like when dining at Buckingham Palace and the Queen of England blows her nose using the tablecloth because the Latvian president has done so first: Indeed, Her Majesty may be offended, but she knows it’s more important to make the guest feel welcome. I envision the same for Estonian Air.

What if every passenger were addressed as härra, preili, or proua? What if the check-in worker was still glad to see you at six a.m.? What if stewardesses were thoroughly versed in the English language? (They’re the only stewardesses I’ve seen who can make “safety” a three-syllable word.) And let’s teach them to be more assertive. Currently, they’re so quiet they might as well not even be there.

It won’t be easy, of course. We’d need to bring in Peep Vain, possibly the only man who can get an Estonian to smile without the use of artificial stimulants. Or maybe we just forget hiring Estonians and get all our stewardesses from Singapore Air. That would be expedient, but probably not doable, given state ownership.

But what if every passenger exited an Estonian Air plane remarking, “Geez, they were so damned nice to me…” and was somehow dazzled by a positive flying experience. Sure, Estonian passengers may not give a damn about being dazzled, but they’ll fly Estonian Air anyway, no matter how bad it gets. The fact is that if Estonian Air is going to be financially successful, then foreigners are going to have to like it, too. So perhaps this elite business is something Estonians and foreigners can agree on? I, for one, am always ready for someone to dazzle me.

***

Illustration courtesy of Hilde Kokk De Keizer

"Normaalne"

2010-07-03T08:11:00.001+03:00

Summer brings me out from under my suburban rock and into the city to witness life once again in my self-appointed role as an amateur anthropologist. I’ve followed the economic decline in the newspaper, but by the looks of Old Town on a sunny day, you’d never know a crisis had visited. Many of the fashionable restaurants are still around, interiors still sleek and modern enough to make a Finnish designer blush. The streets are still packed with Mercedeses, Audis, and the occasional Bentley or Maserati. True, there seem to be fewer locals in the cafes, but those present don’t seem to have lost the spirit of the boom—Hugo Boss all over the men, and women sport more D&G sunglasses per capita than in places on earth where the sun actually shines.

Each new season, much like the black storks who return to Estonia, I begin a search for a café nesting site among my own species, what I call the “normal” people. This means a search for people like me, whose clothing is worn around the edges, who don’t have trophy mistresses, and who can’t remember the last time they went to a nightclub. I search for a place where there is the absence of a thirst for more, where those who sit among the tables appear merely content, without an agenda to impress. I look for those, who, as Marcus Aurelius put it, are not “studious of the popular applause.”

I used to like the Noku klubi, though to get in I had to wait outside until someone leaving let the door swing open long enough for me to enter. (My wife Liina is a member, but she lost her card, and out of principle refuses to pay 100 kroons to replace it.) I’ve thought of applying for membership myself—I know two members who would recommend me, but rumor is they reject everyone who applies who isn’t pals with the owners. More importantly, if I happened to be accepted it would take the fun out of sneaking in. And if I were rejected, my enthusiasm would be soured, sneaking into a place where I am officially unwanted. Also, as Liina pointed out recently, the “No” of Noku stands for “young,” and by Estonian standards, I no longer fit that description.

Another haunt where I look for normal people is the little cigar shop tucked away on Dunkri Street—La Casa del Habano. Its name rings of a place where you might bump into revolutionaries and spies, two types I’m naturally drawn to, if only because I’ve fantasized since youth about being recruited by MI6 and issued a Walther PPK. La Casa, as its known to regulars, is Estonia’s spiritual heir to Rick’s Café Americain. Sans Nazis, as far as I know.

Among La Casa’s regulars you’ll find Belgian Jacques-Alain, a former circus performer. He now makes his living selling WMDs to Arab nations, but after a drink or two you can always persuade him to show you a few moves from his days as a contortionist. His specialty was enterology, which he’ll explain is the practice of squeezing one’s body into a small container that appears to be impossibly small for the human body. I once saw him get almost his entire body inside a cigar humidor no bigger than a footstool. After he did it, others tried it until the humidor broke into a dozen pieces and they had to chip in to pay for it.

There’s a Persian called Shah by his friends, because he could be the doppelgänger of the Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan. Shah always has a CD in his pocket in case a local establishment is playing techno music. It disappoints him when young Estonians think the throb of techno is a danceable beat, and so he flies from table to table recruiting Estonians to join impromptu Bollywood dances. I once saw him lead thirty Estonians as they flexed and gyrated to the Hindu classic “Nimbooda Hum Dil De Chuke.”

There’s another Persian, far more mysterious, who always seems to have a cigar in his mouth and be talking at the same time. This man’s story is never the same twice. One day he’ll claim to be a Zoroastrian descendant of Darius I, the greatest of the Achaemenid kings. The next he’ll regale you with stories of fighting alongside Sir Bart Fitzroy Maclean, though he’s roughly my age which would mean he, at best, fought battles with a toy sword. Darius, as they call him, was educated in English public schools and his favorite parlor trick is to recite poems in Brythonic, a predecessor language of Welsh, which he does without any prompting after his third Campari.

There’s a nubile twenty-three-year-old who is already on her fourth man this season, and she makes no bones about only wanting them for their money. “I’m not interested in Taivo anymore,” she told me while bouncing on the knee of the guy she dumped Taivo for. “Taivo’s credit card got me only as far as London, and by the third shop I visited it was maxed out. I had to buy my own plane ticket home.” I’d met Taivo a couple of times, and I have to believe he’d planned the whole thing, figuring she’d be stranded in London and have to learn humility by sleeping in the tunnels of the Underground. But everyone likes this woman, perhaps because she’s unabashed about her greed. I find her honesty refreshing but on the other hand don’t see how she’s much different than a prostitute. I haven’t yet got around to asking her that.

Another regular is Rein, who is some kind of high-level policeman, probably connected to KaPo or the CIA, or maybe even the KGB. You can always find him in a dark corner smoking strong Spanish cigarettes. He never moves from his seat and quietly surveys the room. I once asked him if he always sat with his back to the wall in case there was a gunfight. He only stared at me, his expression unchanged. After a while he told me he thought guns were overrated, that it was much more fun to kill with your bare hands. Not sure if he was joking, I said that that was also my experience, though I occasionally liked to use a garrote for a little variety. Since then, we haven’t talked much.

Oddly enough, none of these people I gravitate toward fit my definition of normal, and I’ve begun to consider revising it. I’m told by a friend from a village on Estonia’s north coast that they have one resident referred to by the villagers as the normaalne mees, the normal man. This normal guy happens to be the only sober working-age man in the village, and he’s the one called upon if a leaky roof needs repaired. I’ve begun to think the villagers have a point, and perhaps I’m asking too much of “normaalne.”

I’m not sure how I fit into my decidedly abnormal crowd, nor am I sure why the proprietors of the joints where I hang out don’t run me off for being too boring. One reason could be that I always pay cash for my drinks. Or perhaps they like the idea that I one day might write about them and make them legends in print. I suppose the next best thing to having a song written about you is to cut a romantic figure in someone’s newspaper column.

It’s also possible that after this is published the thrill will be gone and I’ll no longer be welcome. Shah will complain that I didn’t properly describe his strapping, youthful figure. Or Darius will be angry that I didn’t mention he also has an excellent singing voice. People are impossible to please.

The frustrating thing is that while I’ve never found the normal people I seek, I am not uncomfortable around this whiskey-swilling band of bullshitters. And if the birds of a feather thing is actually true, then I’m merely nesting with my own kind. And that is the scariest thing of all.

Registered Bastard

2010-06-20T22:22:00.001+03:00

“This has no apostille!” So said the lady at the registry of births who examined my marriage certificate. I was trying to register my newborn son with the state, but it seemed the officials weren’t going to have it.

“Sure it does,” I said. “Look right there.” I pointed to the embossed gold stick-on seal in the corner of the document in all its splendor. I drew her attention to the attractive gold tones used elsewhere and the four different signatures on both sides of the page! This document was a bureaucrat’s wet dream. If this wasn’t an apostille, then I didn’t know what was.

The official raised the document to eye level and turned it in the light. “No, that’s just a gold sticker. You need an apostille.”

In 1992, Estonia freshly out of Soviet clenches, a gold seal on a document would have gotten me just about anything. An American friend who taught English in Rakvere once presented his university diploma to a traffic cop and told him he was head of the United Nations and had diplomatic immunity. The cop let him go. The same friend liked to show the police his City of Chicago library card when he was stopped for inspection. He claimed the cops believed it was a driver’s license, but I think an equal argument could be made that they wanted to avoid the extra hassle that arresting a foreigner would bring. Especially one who was also head of the United Nations.

Those were the days when the reverence for shiny stickers was such that any document with stamps and signatures could pass for whatever you said it was. While I remember those days fondly, I’ve stopped living them. I honestly believed that my marriage certificate had an apostille. After all, the marriage certificate had long been accepted by the tax board to justify filing a joint income statement, and it was approved years ago by the immigration authority as the basis for my current residence permit. If it was good enough for them, why wasn’t it good enough for the registry? I put that question directly to the nice lady.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “The immigration authority will only take a document with an apostille. Maybe you had one and lost it.”

“No, I never had one,” I insisted. “Because I remember well when they took away my three-year residency permit. When I reapplied under the basis of marriage, I was only eligible for a one-year permit.”

“The migratsiooniamet will only take an apostillitud document,” she repeated, as if saying it out loud somehow made it true. Or made me a liar.

“Well,” I said, trying a different tactic. “I have lots of foreign friends in common law marriages with Estonian women whose children have been registered. What’s different about my son?”

“Because you and your wife are married.”

But were we? Hadn’t she just told me that in the eyes of the state we were not? She had me thoroughly confused. I pinched myself to make sure I was actually there.

“Well, I can tell you right now that I’m not going to be able to get you the document you want before your 30-day deadline,” and I noted that there were only seven days left. “So go ahead and register my son as a bastard.”

“No!” she gasped. Which quite frankly surprised me.

***

Although Estonians like to brag about their IT accomplishments, I have always been more impressed by something else: their tolerance for alternative ways of living. In the west, where a child born out of wedlock is often viewed as a potential bank robber or murderer, in Estonia nobody bats an eye. But what impresses me even more about Estonia, is that single mothers never indulge in self-pity. They do not take on poor-me-against-the-world attitudes; they do not see their lives as “over”; they do not stand in line twice at the government trough; they do not use the lack of a father as an excuse for everything that goes wrong in their lives. Quite the opposite: they meet reality head on and go through life without any visible chip on their shoulder.

In the west, I’ve often thought many children might do better without a father in the home. I am overstepping my mandate here and speaking as a psychologist, but it seems to me that no father is better than a crappy father. In Estonian society, a woman is free to mate with a deadbeat and drop him, while in the west he is often kept on for appearance’s sake, because a child born out of wedlock is “disadvantaged” and teachers will whisper behind his back in the school corridors: “There goes that poor bastard. With no father around to teach him to use deodorant, it’s no wonder he smells.”

But I don’t care if my kid is a registered bastard, and that’s what I told the woman at the registry. “He’s going to be a Canadian citizen. He’s going to be an Estonian citizen. Why should I care what mark you put next to his name in your book? Make him a bastard and give me my piece of paper so I can take him to the doctor.” I only wanted some mark next to his name. I didn’t care which. Any mark at all would get him, as Walker Percy famously wrote, “a neat styrene card with one's name on it certifying, so to speak, one’s right to exist.”

All this time, Robert sat there in his car seat on the bureaucrat’s desk looking ever so helpless. Twenty years ago a cute kid and a box of chocolates would have gotten the job done. No apostille would have been needed. But this official was completely unimpressed. How Germanic, I thought. I reflected that maybe the Estonians would run the EU well in 2018. (And then I wondered if we’d get the roads fixed by then.)

Despite my appeals and the cuteness of my child, the bureaucrat was chained to her system. She believed that Liina and I were married, and she desperately wanted to record in her book what was correct. I admired this, honestly, but it wasn’t all that expedient. My pressing issue was that after 22 hours in labor, Robert’s emergence into the world wasn’t the easiest, and his family doctor thought it might be a good idea to see a specialist. “But don’t take him to a big hospital,” the doctor said. “The doctors will refuse to see him if he’s not registered.” Our options, she explained, were to pay at a private clinic or petition the state health insurance fund to give Robert short-term coverage. “So what am I paying 33 percent social taxes for?” I asked the doctor. She didn’t have much of an answer. “Bureaucrats,” she shrugged.

***

I’ve determined the west is wrong in attributing the troubles of the world to the birth of children out of wedlock. It’s not bastard sons responsible for the ills of the world, but rather frustrated fathers of bastard sons. What bureaucrats fail to understand is that when it comes to my son I am completely indifferent to their tiny pieces of paper and the different positions they arrange them on their desks during the day. If my kid needs a doctor, I’m going to do whatever is necessary to get him one, including stepping over, around, or directly on top of a bureaucrat. Don’t bureaucrats have children of their own? Or are theirs are born with apostilles on their foreheads, completely equipped to navigate life’s labyrinth of ciphers? And, most to the point, why can’t Estonia’s bureaucrats simply be as practical as Estonia’s single mothers?

***

Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

Fatherhood

2010-06-05T09:22:00.006+03:00

“Lance Armstrong, how does it feel to win the Tour de France?”

How do you answer that? I’ve never been satisfied with the answers athletes give, and so I found myself stumped when friends began calling to ask, “How does it feel to be a father?” I answered like a professional athlete (“Great!”), but I couldn’t help but be disappointed in myself. For someone who values language, the answer didn’t measure up. How should one express the feelings of fatherhood in a telephone sound bite suitable for the 21^st century? Perhaps the greater problem was that I didn’t yet really know how I felt. Some distance was required. It had to soak in before hitting home.

But Lance Armstrong, upon winning the Tour de France and asked about his emotions, is not permitted to shrug his shoulders and answer, “I dunno.” And so I too had to come up with a better answer.

***

At first, all the screaming is charming: a hospital floor packed with women in labor. I’d seen a birthing video, and so I knew the women had been trained to make these sounds. It’s like the mother is pronouncing the letter “U,” and breathing out at the same time, and it comes together in a way which might resemble an orgasm but is far more similar to a pack of coyotes howling around the rim of the Grand Canyon, a pleasant sound I’d used to put myself to sleep on several occasions. But the howling doesn’t last forever, and sooner or later, each woman on the floor begins to scream. It’s then that pleasant comparisons come to an end and you start to think of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo.

After 22 hours spent in the birthing ward, the screaming ceased to haunt me. It became rather business as usual, or white noise, the background hum of the world in which you dwell. In my case, I entertained Walter Mitty fantasies of what a fine medicin sans frontieres I’d make, the type of man who calmly saves lives amidst the chaos of battle or, in my case, wards of hysterical women.

Physically speaking, giving birth for the first time is difficult. I think those who forgo the laughing gas or epidurals are the Sir Edmund Hillarys of the birthing world. Although aware of the rigors of natural birth, I knew I was up to it. Liina was committed, too, as much as she could be, not knowing what circumstances would dictate. My job, according to the natural birthing video, was to support her in every way possible. To encourage. To enable. To, as politicians say, share her pain.

But, as Liina will attest, I am not the most patient man. I am also slightly competitive, and so nearing the twentieth hour of labor it began to irk me that the howling and screaming were so regularly followed by the crying of someone else’s newborn. As if by clockwork, every hour saw the birth of a child not ours, and each time I felt like someone who had been seated out of order in a popular restaurant: Hey, we got here before they did!

Although Liina and I are bit older than the average couple who gives birth in Estonia, this was our first child, and I tried to remind myself that first births are the most difficult. I had anticipated a birth like in the videos: ten minutes of coyote howls, two minutes of murderous screaming, and then a slimy infant in the arms of a weeping mother. Even though I’m aware there is editing involved in those videos, 22 hours is longer than anyone deserves. And that’s speaking only for myself. I can’t imagine Liina’s pain.

But all birthing videos are accurate in one respect: the child will eventually be born. True to the video’s promise, Liina’s pain ended miraculously and immediately, and mine along with it. There was palpable relief that the child would not attend university inside the womb.

***

As someone whose office is the kitchen table, bringing an infant home means that all work ceases. Life immediately revolves around the infant, and any pre-pregnancy pledges about a disciplined feeding routine are thrown out the window with the child’s first scream. Stopping the hollering becomes the focus of everyone’s life, and the father soon discovers that neither the pacifier, contorting your face, or threatening the child in a mock German accent will have any affect. A child will scream. It’s what they do.

I soon found it helpful to see my relationship with the child much the way the west views Hamid Karzai. Recognize you have to give him aid, but know that he’s almost always out to manipulate you. Remain flexible and in good humor. And constantly seek intelligence about his motives.

I placed my son on my lap as he screamed, and I logged on to Perekool.ee to seek advice from veteran mothers. Despite far more information available in English, I sought comfort from the experience of Estonian mothers, as if my son’s genetic code or their geographic proximity might make their advice more effective. I mummy-wrapped him in towels in the Soviet fashion, rubbed olive oil on his belly to relieve gas, and finally settled on the most cynical e-mother’s advice: I turned on my iPod and set it to maximum volume.

Given Liina’s birthing ordeal and her need to rest, I helped out where I could with our son’s care. I took over the shopping duties and found myself shoulder to shoulder with mothers in the aisles of Selver. An infant in my arms somehow gave me the right to join their lamentation about the poor quality of Fazer pirukad (no filling), the absurdities of sterilized eye swabs (sold only three to a pack), or where to put the oil on the stroller wheel so it will drive straight (I’ve given up).

Occasionally, I would encounter another man engaged in solo care of his infant, and we would naturally bond, sitting on a sunny bench outside the store where we made lists of pithy observations to give our wives who sent us shopping (Don’t put fruit and apples on the same list: the latter are the former, so we buy one and cross them both off. Lehttaigen and filotaigen are similar enough to be interchangeable. And don’t ask us to buy Estonian chocolate when Finnish chocolate is cheaper.)

In my forays with my son I was even given instruction in the Estonian language by fellow parents. For example, one should not ask if a newborn is an isane (male) or emane (female). Poiss or tüdruk (girl or boy) will do just fine. Passing Russian babushkas were so full of advice that I never even once had to ask for it. Store clerks became more patient. With an infant in your arms, it’s as if the whole world is finally on your side.

***

I finally made my peace with the answer “Great!” when someone asked how it felt to be a father. The real answer was simply too time consuming, and I was raised stoically enough to not give it over the telephone or share it with those I didn’t know well. But in the case of someone calling who really did want to know, I answered this way: When your child is born, you understand the phrase “I love you” is much more than three trite words on a Hallmark greeting card. You understand that it is shorthand for “I would throw myself under a train for you.”

And I also learned that at that moment when a child is born, everyone cries for different reasons. The child cries to fill his lungs; the mother cries because that’s what mothers do; and the father cries because, perhaps, he’s finally done something in his life that truly matters.

“Hey, Lance Armstrong, how does it feel to win the Tour de France?”

“Honestly speaking, I feel a lot of love.”

No, I can’t imagine it, either.

***

Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

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Longing through Line: Drawing Back One's Home

2010-05-24T22:56:00.002+03:00

The Estonia shown to foreigners — or, more accurately, the side of itself Estonia chooses to show — has never struck me as the real Estonia. Brochures with strings of suspicious superlatives about the most meteor craters per square kilometer of island, Laetalu’s record 70 plant species per square meter, or even the country’s impressive number of Olympic Gold Medal winners per capita have never held appeal, and seeing them in print brings to mind the desperation of Kansas farm towns I once witnessed on a car trip with my parents across the prairie: offerings such as the world’s tallest prairie dog, the world’s deepest hand-dug well, the world’s largest coal shovel, and the world’s largest ball of twine. What Kansas had to sell, I thought, was a safe, cheap, Africa. Endless, sweeping vistas with a lower likelihood that one might be eaten by a lion. And so it is with Estonia: its nature is what holds the appeal.

And not just nature. What, to me as an outsider, makes Estonia remarkable in the larger context of the overpopulated, over-hyped consumer society in which we live, is the subtlety of its nature.

But subtlety, by definition, doesn’t lend itself to easy description, which makes it doubly difficult to market. And most marketers would surely look askance upon someone who advocated the appeal of sitting against a tree and staring into the forest to watch light play against pines, or lying on one’s back staring into a Navitrolla sky.

Perhaps, then, representing the subtlety of Estonia is best left to artists. Perhaps art is the only medium which can to justice to Estonia’s subtlety?

The work of artist Jaanika Peerna does it justice. Whether speaking of her drawings or her installations, the Estonian artist’s work is devoid of superlatives and chest-beating declarations. Her drawings, in particular, bring to mind a rural landscape in a particularly cold March: the earth’s still-frozen surface with life below quietly waiting its turn. And he who takes time to contemplate it, somehow sensing the northern energy of spring which will not burst forth, but will emerge in its own paced, measured fashion which, like the Estonian temperament itself, can occasionally deeply frustrate outsiders.

Peerna lives in the picturesque Hudson Valley north of New York City, but spends summers in Estonia. She did coursework in Estonian art schools while earning degrees in art education from Tallinn University and the University of Art and Design in Finland. Her work cannot help but reflect her background and environment. “What I got from Estonia was a sensitivity to light and to the subtle, slow workings of nature,” Peerna says. “Every time I return to Northern Europe, I am reminded of that patience in nature – no big forms, no impressive anything. Only the quite flow of things.”

But to appreciate what you have, you sometimes have to lose it, and being an hour by train from the heart of New York City, for what it has deprived her of, has certainly given her perspective which informs her work. When she and David Rothenberg, her writer-philosopher-jazz-musician husband moved into their home in Cold Spring, New York, deep inside the Hudson Valley, she found herself yearning for open space and horizons. “I caught myself painting long horizontal works with horizon lines which were only visible here if you climbed to a mountain top.”

In her second graduate school experience, working for a Masters of Fine Arts at SUNY New Paltz, Peerna turned to inner landscapes, as well as works with micro- and macro levels of reference, microscopic imagery as landscape. No matter how her art developed, her yearning for an Estonian landscape somehow surfaced in her work.

“I am very aware that the reason Estonia’s nature influences my work so much is because I moved away from there,” she says. “If I was living in Estonia, I might not notice the things I described. So there is some nostalgic and idealistic tone to it all. But what can I do?”

Since the late 1990s, she has quietly recorded Estonia’s subtlety in drawings and video installations and shown them in galleries in New York, Lisbon, Aarhus, and Dubai. Two years ago, after a show at the Galerie Lavignes Bastille in Paris, two of her large drawings were acquired for the French National Art Collection.

Peerna is an Estonian artist better known outside Estonia than she is inside her homeland. This, in large part, comes from not having aggressively pursued a reputation on the Estonian art scene, but it also comes from having developed as an artist outside the traditional Estonian path. A graduate of Tallinn Pedagogical University, Peerna studied art teaching, rather than art itself. “For a career as an artist in Estonia,” she says, “I did not have the right credentials.”

To an outsider, “making it” on the Estonian art scene seems a struggle one might do well to avoid. Estonian artists seem to live in a revolving struggle: Scrape to buy paints and canvas; build a collection of works to show; wait two years to show at a decent gallery; pay the gallery owner; buy alcohol for other poor artists to drink at your opening; endure the obligatory speech about the significance of your work; hope your kultuuri kapital stipend will cover the costs when your work doesn’t sell; and beg any buyers to pay you black cash to escape social taxes. Then do it all over again and again until you die.

But home is in the blood, and sooner or later the artist must journey there. Especially when she’s been painting it for so long. Peerna has slowly begun to close the gap to her homeland, and her first bridge to the Estonian art world was provided by the New York Estonian House in 2001. Since then, she has had only two shows in Estonia (in 2001 at the Art Academy Gallery and at Linnagaleri 2002). She is quietly developing a following among Estonia’s few serious collectors. This June, she will have a solo exhibition at Tallinn’s ArtDepoo, her first show in Estonia for eight years, which she hopes will be one more quiet, subtle step toward being thought of as an Estonian artist.

Being recognized by the art world anywhere is no easy task, and it is certainly far more difficult in the United States than in Estonia. Despite Raul Meel’s rather sweeping, critical view of the Estonian art world in a 2006 Eesti Ekspress, where he wrote at length about lack of public funds for financing exhibitions and general artist survival, getting grants in the United States is even more difficult, because there are so many artists and so little government support.

Statistically speaking, for a nation with an adult population in its prime of only slightly over one-half million, one living artist breaking through in the West would be an achievement. For Estonia to have even a pair (Raul Meel, Jaan Toomik) whose names are familiar to art collectors and gallerists in New York is remarkable in itself.

Jaanika Peerna is too modest to add her name to that list, but she is working toward it. She was recently interviewed and photographed for inclusion in an upcoming American book called PRIME, profiles of international women who are in the periods of their lives where they are at their most productive. The book includes just fifty notable women, including political heiress Caroline Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, supermodel Christy Turlington, and Estonian/American artist Jaanika Peerna.

“I’m flattered to be included in the book,” Peerna says, “though I thought my ‘prime’ was ahead of me! There’s so much more to do.” More to do includes shows in her adopted home of New York, but also a kind of spiritual fulfillment and satisfaction for the soul through closer attachment to the art world of her native land.

Jaanika Peerna’s work is at ArtDepoo, June 2^nd through June 30^th.

Class Confusion

2010-05-22T11:55:00.007+03:00

“Don’t be friendly with my builders,” cautioned a contractor we hired to work on our house several years ago. “If you get too close, they’ll take advantage of you.” Of course, I’d already gotten too close.

In Canada and the United States, where we’re all part of a conspiracy to pretend class differences are minor, we are inculcated from birth to make extra efforts to show that while some have more money than others, we’re all created equal (or if we’re not, then Colonel Colt made us so). Children are taught to say “yes sir” and “no sir” to even the plumber’s assistant who arrives to remove the giant hairball from the bowels of the bathroom sink. While father may get in his Mercedes to drive to the office, he is not above standing in the driveway for a morning smoke with a crew of workers arrived to put on a new roof. It’s important to make a show of it.

The classes of society may or may not have something in common, but all seem at least superficially engaged in a quest for a classless society. Like Henry V moving incognito among his soldiers’ campfires to take their temperature on the eve of battle, children of America’s middle- and upper classes are often sent to work summers in the company of the country’s lower class, the logic being to help them understand the real world, as well as to appreciate how good they’ve got it.

And so as a North American, it was not unnatural for me to sit in the garden with a crew of Estonian house framers, share a few beers, and discuss everything from a builder’s choice of mountain bike to the merits of steel-toed work boots. Little did I know that from the moment I popped the bottle cap off that first Saku, I had upset a thousand years of Estonian tradition.

***

“Orjapidaja ei räägi orjakeelt,” I’d heard a dozen times—the slave keeper doesn’t speak the slave’s language—though I first saw it only as an explanation why Estonia’s rulers never deigned to learn the language. Only later would I realize that a language barrier is immensely practical: it further ensures a solid class barrier. Had I been unable to speak Estonian, I would have been forced to honor a thousand years of history and not gotten myself in so much trouble. Without a common language, I would have remained an unknown entity. Had they not gotten to know me, they perhaps would have feared me. And as it turned out, the very moment I was no longer mysterious is the moment they started taking advantage of me.

I knew they were drunk because of the questions. An Estonian may have burning questions inside him, but he will rarely ask them until he is drunk. “Tell me, Vello,” dared Sven the floor layer. “How long did it take you to learn Estonian?” It was a compliment, of course, but a devious and calculated one. By answering it I permitted him inside my perimeter. Flatter the manor lord a little bit. Take him off his guard.

While I should have politely answered “six months” and kept on walking, I had a five-minute conversation with him, which led him to conclude I was a pretty good fella. And pretty good fellas stick together. Sven informed me that it was his cat’s fifth birthday and that tomorrow was Walpurgis Night. Of course, this was code for: We’re drunk now and will remain so indefinitely. Over the next two days, Sven and his crew installed floorboards with gaps between them big enough to insert your finger and inexplicably created fist-size holes in sheetrock walls. One simple human gesture had given rise to a full-scale revolt.

***

As a solution to the problem of forming relationships with workers, I’d tried an overseer, the man whose job it is to monitor quality. In practical terms, this means he screams at the workers on a regular basis, as if they were motivated purely out of fear. But the overseer concept never worked for me, since I could not afford to have one on the job site full time, and I tend to want faulty work corrected long before too much of it has been done.

But I see the system’s merits. When the German nobility departed Estonia, they did not leave a vacuum. Estonians themselves (often military officers) stepped into the role of manor lords, and the overseer fit nicely into the new management structure, serving a similar purpose to the overseer on a slave plantation in America’s antebellum South. The language barrier that existed for 700 years in Estonia may no longer be present, but the overseer provides a time-tested buffer to ensure the work process goes smoothly. He is the manor lord’s hatchet man. He knows which swearwords will have effect. He even wields the whip, which I have seen effectively used: a overseer entering the workers’ hut and literally beating the shit out of a drunken plasterer.

Until I served as my own overseer, I believed Estonians overdramatized the country’s class system. How could a people who so readily admitted that they were all once slaves have need to develop such a nuanced system for creating boundaries between them? But it was this way, too, in America’s antebellum South. Lines within the slave class were drawn by both skin tone and the type of work they did: field slaves versus house slaves. Estonians have drawn their class lines via education. Pairing the word “haritud” with an Estonian means far more than he is educated. An educated Estonian is one who is sensitive to the ways of your foreign culture, who likely speaks your language, one with whom you will find something in common. It means that he is less likely to, in the vernacular of Estonian literature, Rehepapp you.

Of course, a builder can be educated. In the west there are plenty of PhDs who can be found toting hammers, and there are plenty of autodidacts (and the occasional published poet or novelist) to be found among tradesmen such as carpenters and cabinetmakers. I find it odd that Estonians, a people who took quick advantage of the German system of higher education offered them, did not replicate the German guild system, the very soul of pride in one’s trade. Indeed, try to find a bonded workman today engaged in residential construction. The best the homebuilder may hope for is a builder with a company which has withstood the test of time, but even he will be relegated to employing some workers who would be far happier lying stone drunk behind a haystack in a sunny field.

There are of course plenty of Estonians lacking formal educations who will not Rehepapp you, but these tend to gravitate toward other fields. To Estonians, there is little sexy about construction, despite that the fact that, when done right, it is honest, even honorable work. On the New York City subway, one may observe tradesmen on their way to work, dressed in stylish work clothing, carrying their tools in bags which can cost nearly as much as the tools inside. Such is the pride in their craft.

***

Although I think I’m closer to understanding the way things are in Estonia (though you may dispute my theory about the class system), it has proved to be of absolutely no practical value. I haven’t learned a damned thing about dealing with workers. Despite keeping my distance, as soon as they learn my name they ask to borrow money. “Doesn’t your boss pay you?” I asked the most recent worker at my doorstep.

“Yes, but not this week.” He scratched his head and then turned around to spit. “Because you weren’t happy with the work.”

“That’s true. You want me to show you the window you installed upside down?”

“I just need to borrow some money. Could you give me a thousand kroons?”

“Only if it’s against money I owe your boss,” I said, hoping to find a way out of it. “So your debt would be to him, and he would have to approve.”

“Oh,” and he looked at his feet, pausing to think about that one. “No,” he concluded. “The boss can’t know.”

“I don’t even think I’ve got any cash in the house,” I said, trying to think of another tack. He was just about to turn away when a voice came from above: “I’ve got five hundred kroons you can give him.”

It was Liina from the top of the stairs. Ruining things. And sending me back to square one with the builders.

***

Illustration courtesy of Hilde Kokk De Keizer.

Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

The Info Hole

2010-05-08T14:05:00.005+03:00

“The United States dollar will be worth nothing by the end of next week,” declared my friend Tanel only two weeks ago. Tanel is a very smart, highly-educated Estonian man who loves conspiracy theories. He’s so good with Google that he can uproot the most obscure websites run by paranoid crackpots living with their heaviest furniture pushed tight against the door, loaded shotgun by the bed. The trouble is that Tanel sees little difference between a fanatical website and a newspaper of record. To him, all information is equal.

According to Tanel, the world is run by a cabal of white men in black suits with good manicures who spend their days around a burled oak table discussing what to do with the rest of us. Tanel cites the Illuminati, Freemasons, Wall Street, the Jews. Always the Jews. Name a group, and Tanel will tell you how they’re manipulating us.

Conspiracy theories, as I’ve heard them best described, are convenient for those who can’t be bothered to try to understand the complex world around us. They’re ideal for those who are not actually Masons, have not worked at Bank of America or Merrill Lynch, or don’t have any friends who are Jews. Conspiracy theories are ideal for those who want to believe they have made the conscious choice not to participate in The System. Tanel segregates himself, does not get involved, and then convinces himself he’s outside the club because he was refused entry, though in fact he never even applied for membership. Tanel says they know who he is. Just like they know who I am. Like they know who you are. And none of us will ever get anywhere.

What Tanel refuses to believe is that getting into the corridors of power in the United States (the seat of all evil, according to Tanel) is not that difficult. I’ve tried to persuade him that any American with a university education and a lot of resolve can, in fact, penetrate the sacred corridors of power. The worker starts at the bottom, where his most important responsibility will be to make sure the insignificant Congressman he works for (and has only met once) gets his dry cleaning starched and his Chinese food delivered hot. If the young person is smart, he’ll move up quickly, and sooner or later he’ll find himself in close contact with those who make the actual decisions. At some point, he will have to make a decision: Does he want to be a decision maker himself? Is he willing to make the sacrifices necessary to play that key role? I know a half dozen men and women who have worked hard and penetrated the ranks of the power elite in the United States, some in government, some in corporate America. None, though Tanel says I’m wrong, is the genealogical heir to Thomas Jefferson. None was taken as an infant from his crib and raised as a prince in the palace. All took financial and career risks by moving to a major city and getting a job which was far from glamorous, suffering as a small fish in a big pond, despite the fact each owed over 100,000 dollars on two university degrees.

It is this fundamental truth that Tanel refuses to accept: the evil men in suits behind the curtain were once just regular white guys like us. Instead, Tanel views himself as a helpless passenger in the world, with no chance to drive. With no chance to even suggest the route. Tanel is a lost cause, and I long ago stopped arguing with him. But I sometimes worry that Estonia’s young people may be leaning toward a Tanel-style of easy explanation for everything wrong in our lives. I can’t count the times someone has cited a Michael Moore film or YouTube video as an unassailable explanation for the way things are.

Part of our problem is the Info Hole. Tanel is of the generation whose window on the free world was Finnish television. He says Finnish TV showed him how things in the world really were. I wonder. Finnish TV is possibly better than American TV, but it’s still TV. But I don’t want to blame television. It’s too easy a target. Maybe it’s what Tanel’s reading?

Although the Estonian press has been free to write what it wants since 1991, the major papers still occasionally resemble the neighborhood paper I read growing up in Scarborough, Ontario. It was full of small-town-boy-done-good stories and columns by community blowhards titled “As I See It.” Sometimes Estonian journalism catches a case of Scarboroughitis and devotes the front page to a story on the shape of the NATO table (round), its cost (130,000 EEK), or its provenance (Estonia!), when the real news might more likely be how smart the Estonians were to exploit every opportunity to put Hillary Clinton and Anders Fogh Rasmussen on camera saying in plain English that NATO will defend Estonia if Russia attacks. Given the stories about The Table, I half expected a follow-up feature on the length of the delegates’ turds after their meal (served by Carmen Catering, I read) in the Estonia Concert Hall.

True, sometimes international papers are no better. The New York Times publishes information about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s house in Bermuda (550 square meters) and favorite steak (coffee-rubbed New York strip), but the items are not the stories themselves and the paper stops short of putting them on the front page.

I often wonder where is the real meat for Estonian newspaper stories? I often see stories in the local business press which are rehashed versions of what the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal published the week before. Where’s the regular fruit of hard-core original research and reporting? And what kind of stories is Tanel left to read in his native language? By the very nature of the reporting, Tanel is made to feel like an outsider: the west makes policy; Estonia makes tables.

I once needed to conduct a proper background search before meeting an interview subject and called up an editor friend at an Estonian newspaper to ask to borrow the paper’s LexisNexis subscription. “Estonian journalists don’t fly that high” was the answer I received. The paper had no subscription. (LexisNexis joins five billion vetted sources and is the world’s largest collection of public records, opinions, legal, news, and business information. In a journalist friend’s words: “It eliminates from the equation the millions upon millions of bullshit blog posts written by nutjobs in their parents' basements, and takes you straight to legitimate publications.”)

If we want to carry a public conversation beyond the provenance of the NATO table into the realm of political dialogue, and if I want Tanel to ease up on the conspiracy theories, then some better informational tools to widen the view of our journalists are surely needed.

But that’s a small step, of course, and it isn’t likely to have any impact on Tanel. He’s convinced he’s really on to something now, since he predicted the downfall of the American economy. Of course, he’d been predicting that since he first got internet access, so it was only a matter of time. But he still claims he told me so. Which I guess he did.

The one I’m worried about his 2013 prediction for the violent reversal of the earth’s poles, which will basically wipe out humanity. But since he has inside information (a website he refuses to disclose), he’s contemplating the construction of some sort of ark for his family. They’ll float with the earth’s currents until they hit dry land, where they’ll begin anew, eating their just-add-water spaceman food until their first crops come in. He hasn’t invited me to come along, and I haven’t asked. I know there’s no room for people under the spell of The System. Tanel needs fresh thinkers for his new frontier. People who see the world as it really is.

***

Illustration by Hilde Kokk De Keizer.