The Ketchup Curtain

“You vant ketchup?” Sergei asks, positively glowing in the light of Old Town’s newly-remodeled hipster McDonald’s. Actually, I do want ketchup but not enough to pay for it, so I take my fries without. It’s just too humiliating to pay for ketchup. Because there is nothing which says We don’t trust you, you dirty Eastern European more than McDonald’s selling ketchup. It’s like letting them spit in our faces every time we eat there. Nowhere in the developed world that I’m aware of does McDonald’s sell ketchup. In Helsinki, you can take as much as you want. And they don’t even hide it behind the counter.

I’ve often wondered what McDonald’s thinks I would do with free ketchup. Would I take two thousand packages, open each individually over a sheet-metal funnel in below-zero temperatures, and bleed them for their alcohol to make samogan? Or do they think I’d steal enough to fill a bowl, dilute it with water, and make ketchup soup, the dietary mainstay of American heroin addicts and poor college students too proud to donate blood plasma? What exactly does McDonald’s think? (I wrote them with that very question, but they didn’t reply.)

In 1992, I was invited by a visiting foreign Estonian to dine in Tartu’s Püssirohokelder restaurant. At the time, it still had its Soviet doorman who looked you over to decide whether he would deign to let you in and pay for the food that paid for his salary. We were allowed in, ate a meal that was probably the best you could get in Tartu in those days, suffered through the obligatory varietee show, and finally were presented the bill by the tuxedoed waiter. Jüri, the foreign Estonian, glanced over the check as one would do anywhere in the world, just to make sure it bears resemblance to what you ordered. Eyes halfway down the check, Jüri smiled broadly, laughed, and summoned the waiter. “Butter?” Jüri asked. “You’ve put butter on the check.”

“Yes,” harrumphed the waiter. “Butter.”

“You are charging me for butter?”

The waiter said he was and by the look on his face he saw nothing strange about it.

“Just to be clear,” Jüri confirmed, “you’re charging me for butter?”

“You had butter on your bread.”

“I also put salt and pepper on my food and had sugar with my coffee, but I don’t see those on the check.”

The waiter stared at his shoes. He’d indeed been bested by logic but had no answer for it other than that’s the way things had always been.

Jüri paid the bill, and we walked into the night air discussing how long it might take for things to change enough where restaurants wouldn’t be charging patrons for butter. As far as I know, nobody charges for butter anymore, but I don’t think either Jüri or I could have imagined that almost twenty years after independence, McDonald’s would still be charging for ketchup.

My wife Liina and I often have the discussion about when Estonia will stop being thought of as an Eastern European nation. It won’t likely happen in our lifetimes, but it someday surely will. Norway was once considered a festering backwater, and I can remember having Norwegian friends in the 1970s who had emigrated to Canada to seek better lives. Around the same time period, Finland had such a low standard of living that its citizens were pleased to live elsewhere in Europe. And now it’s Estonia’s turn to rise from the ashes and build a genuine economy which isn’t based on buying and selling real estate to each other. It may be harder to do without Norway’s oil, natural gas, and coal, or Finland’s timber-related industries, but I believe Estonia will do it. If I didn’t, I’d get the heck out of Dodge. There may be no shame in poverty, but it’s definitely not much fun.

I’m not so sure there’s much more Estonia can do as a nation to accelerate growth, which is, once the incentives and structure are put in place by government, largely an organic process. While we have the groundwork laid, what many Estonians lack is a worldview similar to that of their wealthy neighbors. Finland, Sweden, and Norway, arguably having been spared some of Estonia’s ugly history, simply see the world through a different prism. While I don’t know if Estonia will be among Europe’s five richest anytime soon, I don’t believe it will linger long among Europe’s poorest. Estonia’s fix will be a generational fix, and the fruits of a truly free society are already noticeable on public transportation. While the older generation often sits silent, heads locked forward and frowning, the younger generations leap about and talk as excitedly as a busload of Canadians on their way to a hockey match. They seem to be energetic little optimists, and it’s a joy to know they’ll one day occupy the seats of government.

Part of Estonia’s problem, of course, is Russia, and by this I don’t mean Russia’s schoolboyish need to torment Estonia. The problem is Russia’s reputation as a feudal society. “CIA Believes Russian Scientists Have Discovered the Technology of Fire,” read a satirical newspaper headline in the early 1990s. Funny, yes, but it’s also a fairly accurate portrayal of how the world views Russia: a bassackwards place full of peasants who shit where they eat, and corruption so endemic that even native Russians themselves can lose their way trying to figure out who to bribe.

Recently, Russian banker Vladimir Antonov—who wants to own Saab (and probably will own it one way or another)—lamented about that reputation in the New York Times: “It is obvious that European business has strong prejudices against investors from Russia. There is a fear of Russia itself, of the increase of the influence of Russian businesses in the international market place.” Antonov then called on Europe and the world to “trust Russian business.” Trust is probably too much to ask, but Antonov does have a point about how the world sees Russia.

President Medvedev has publicly recognized Russia’s image problem, and so maybe Russia will do something about it. What exactly is hard to say. It’s not like even a well-financed Welcome to Russia advertising campaign would do much good. But if Russia is able to improve its image a bit, then Estonia will surely benefit. Despite Estonia’s EU- and NATO membership, much of the world doesn’t differentiate between Estonia and Russia (does McDonald’s?), and Estonia will benefit from any improvement in Russia. Maybe Medvedev can make the world stop seeing Russians as only either oligarchs or serfs. Probably not, but even a small improvement would be good for all of us.

In the meantime, though, while we’re waiting for Russia to solve her problems, and while we’re trying to leave the future generations a decent structure they can use to build the Estonian Nokia, I think the folks at McDonald’s could end the humiliating practice of charging for ketchup in Estonia.

Tartu’s Püssirohokelder long ago stopped charging for butter. The cafeteria Amps gives away free bread (and butter) with its soup, and I haven’t noticed pensioners sneaking out the door with burlap bags full of dinner rolls.

I have often wanted to mount a dais at the Viru Gate with McDonald’s as a backdrop and utter a challenge to Jim Skinner, the Vice Chairman and CEO of McDonald’s: “Vice Chairman Skinner, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity . . . come here to this gate. Mr. Skinner, open this gate. Mr. Skinner, tear down this wall!” The Wall was dismantled years ago, and the Iron Curtain along with it. Let’s gather our virtual pitchforks, join together, and march on McDonald’s. Isn’t it about time someone tore down the Ketchup Curtain?


P.S. Why not write McDonald’s Jim Skinner and ask him to end this humiliating practice? Contact jim.skinner@us.mcd.com (cc: Walt Riker walt.riker@us.mcd.com, VP of Corporate Communications).

***

Illustration by Hilde Kokk De Keizer.
Read it in Postimees, too.

Bardakk

Ivan Ivanovich was everywhere. In the parking lot of Pae High School he had parked four deep amongst a sea of taxis, drivers abandoning their cars in the middle of the parking lot, perhaps assuming that everyone else was here for the same reason. A few of the drivers, boxed in and going nowhere, shouted in Russian at the rest. There wasn’t a word of Estonian to be heard, so I knew I was in the right place to take the state’s Estonian-language exam.

Inside it was chaos as well. Hundreds of Ivan Ivanoviches were pressed together tighter than a rugby scrum, all jostling for position to find their names and room assignments on thirty A4 pages taped to one wall in the entry way. A woman with an administrative mien stood quietly by, observing the shoving match.

“Is there anywhere else I can find my room assignment?” I asked her, not really in the mood to behave like a football hooligan so early in the morning.

“No,” she replied, and gestured to the scrum. Men were elbowing women, women elbowing men, everyone pushing forward like they were trying to get to the front row of a rock concert.

“What a bardakk,” I said calmly in Estonian, making note of the mass of people crawling atop one another.

“Ei olje bardakk,” she disagreed loudly with a thick Russian accent, clearly offended that I’d criticized her work. Surely, in her mind, our e-state was functioning at its finest, firing smoothly on all pistons.

This may sound arrogant, but so be it: There is normally nothing in Estonia I want badly enough to join in a shoving match with one hundred ethnic Russians. On any other day I would have turned away and sought more civilized ground. But I had been refused the right to vote in the past local elections due to the status of my living permit (temporary), and I was determined to rectify that by passing the B1 language exam. To my way of thinking, if you don’t vote, you have no right to bitch. And sometimes I really do enjoy bitching.

So I threw myself into the scrum. Instinctively, I covered my pockets with my hands to guard my wallet. This left me unable to elbow anyone, but I bounced back and forth from body to body as if in a mosh pit. Occasionally, someone gave me a dirty look, which I met with a sheepish smile, the international sign for “Don’t blame me for your culture.” Five minutes later I was standing in front of the papers, but I still couldn't find my name. One Russian woman had taken it upon herself to call the room numbers and then read the twenty or so names out loud. I heard lots of Nataljas, Natashas, Viktorias, Veronikas, Tatjanas, and Tamaras, as well as a few Sergeis and Ivans. But I heard no Vello. I heard not a single name not Russian. I could see only six sheets from where I stood, so there was nothing else to do but change position. I pounded forward and bounced off the wall much like a hockey player checked against the glass. I bounced left and could see several more sheets, and among the Russian names, I saw a Paul with an English surname. Rejoice, a fellow foreigner! But still no Vello. Knowing the military maxim that to advance is to conquer, I did not give ground. I fought forward again and then to the left. If my name were not on this side of the board, I would interpret it as a sign from God, that He, in connivance with the Republic of Estonia, did not want me to vote. But there I was. A proud student assigned to Room 209.

When I struggled from the line, Ms. Ei Olje Bardakk was present to assist me, and she pointed me up the staircase to the second floor, where proctors Mihael and Piia welcomed us to a sunlit room. Piia greeted us in snail-speed Estonian and explained the ground rules for the exam. I was told to put away the notes I was making about the bardakk downstairs. As I looked around the room it was clear that the only thing Estonian in this school was the language exam: even the exam proctor spoke with a slight accent. All the signs on the walls—inside the classrooms and in the corridors—were all in Russian. I hoped I would understand enough Russian to complete the exam.

The essay portion required us to fill out a survey about a moving company we had employed, which I gladly did, noting my dissatisfaction with the company since they’d broken a large portion of the items they were paid to move. Immediately, the young man in front of me removed a crib-sheet from his pocket and began to copy something from it. But it wasn’t enough, for after another minute he turned in his seat to me and asked in English, “What means ‘firma’?” Thinking that Mihael and Piia would only miss this if they were blind, I suggested he ask one of them. In principle, it was his business if he wanted to cheat, but I had not fought through the rugby scrum in the lobby to get thrown out of the testing facility for helping the biggest fool in the room.

The next assignment required me to write a letter to my good friend Kaido to tell him how I spent New Year’s Eve. “Do you remember, Kaido?” I wrote, “How you got so drunk last year that you puked on the mayor of Tallinn's car?” I often pity those who must grade standardized exams, so why not entertain them? I continued to explain to Kaido that I had gone to Moscow for this year’s celebration and that “Mr. Putin sent his limousine to meet me at the train station.” I described my wonderful holiday to Kaido, adding “As a souvenir, Mr. Putin gave me a grocery sack stuffed with American currency.” I finished the exam before the others—how could I not if they didn’t know what “firma” meant?—and handed it in. I noticed Mihael reading it over front and back, but he didn’t crack a smile. I wondered if smartasses were penalized. At the very least, my mention of vomit and the mayor’s car would surely elicit closer scrutiny, which might result in points deducted for incorrect grammar which might have otherwise passed unnoticed.

Exercises followed where we learned about the beauty of Estonia’s winter capital of Otepää, how Otto Kubo, Kalev’s Grand Old Man of Chocolate, studied chemistry in university and speaks ten languages, and how much a young Estonian named Raili loves and respects her aging grandmother. In general, I felt Estonia’s standardized test was less silly than those I’ve taken in Canada and the United States, and I had to give positive marks to Mihael and Piia for their diligent administration. Everything was clear. Everything moved smoothly. And, so far, the test had focused solely on the Estonian language. The morning’s rugby scrum appeared to be the only cultural assimilation test I would be required to take. I felt palpable relief. Perhaps I would not be asked to spit sunflower seeds great distances or fire a Kalashnikov from a speeding vehicle.

For the speaking portion of the exam I was partnered with Katarina who in her self-introduction said she was an unemployed mother of one. Katarina’s toughest verbal challenge came when Piia asked her to remove the chewing gum from her mouth so that I might better understand her. Katarina struggled, yes, but in my opinion she managed her part of the simple tasks presented us quite well. She had only to pretend she was a consumer, while my job was to sell her an overpriced book with 600 color photographs from TEA Kirjastus. But Piia was not satisified, and she told Katarina she would score only four out of ten. Me, I would get eight, which I shrugged off with the refrain that “Estonian is grammatically impossible,” which generally is guaranteed to make an Estonian smile with pleasure. Piia laughed and said that I’d done fine, which I wasn’t sure I had. I hadn’t really had a conversation with Katarina. I’d just made brief telephone talk. But if the state was happy, then I was happy. There was no scrum near the door on the way out—the papers had been removed—and I stepped into the light of the first warm day of the year, hoping that when it comes to voting in Estonia I won't have to push and shove to cast my ballot.

***
Bardakk = бардак = (literally) whorehouse = SNAFU = big mess

Inherit the Family: Marrying into Eastern Europe now in English from Amazon.com

Read Bardakk in Postimees.

British English

“We speak British English,” proclaimed Vesta, an Estonian woman, aged sixty, with whom I was trying to have a discussion about an essay I’d written for her firm’s corporate magazine. She refused to speak Estonian and insisted on English, though the whole process would have gone faster had she deigned to suffer through my halting Estonian. Instead, Vesta attributed our difficulties in communication to my Canadian English.

I often receive comments from Estonians about the superiority of British English over Canadian and American English. On a certain level I agree: When spoken properly, British English is indeed more beautiful than American or Canadian English. And although Vesta might not agree, I find Irish- and Scottish English even more pleasing to the ear. Canadian English, however, falls somewhere in between British and American—more American, but with the preservation of British spellings in a nod to Her Majesty The Queen, who is, indeed, still our Sovereign.

When a “British English” speaker likes Vesta gives me the speech about the inferiority of my brand of English, I often want to ask her why she pronounces the “L” in "salmon" and why, in written communication, she capitalizes the “Y” in “You” when it isn’t at the beginning of a sentence. I once pointed this out to a class of English students at a Tallinn high school who claimed that’s just how they’d been taught. I told them to go find their teachers and demand their money back. Whatever kind of English they’d been taught, it certainly wasn’t British.

Vesta will want to strangle me for saying this, but I think Siim Kallas is a great example of how Estonians can communicate well in English. Kallas’ English is what is termed “halting” in the true definition of the word (hesitating, faulty), as well as in the fact that it stops you in your tracks. His English is bad, but he’s loud. Add the shit-eating grin he constantly uses, even if he’s just repeating some tired old bromide, and he somehow really reaches people. It’s not self-confidence his technique emanates, but it’s a very believable proxy, ideal for non-native speakers who simply need to communicate in order to get what they want. Mr. Kallas is not a bad one to model, especially for “British English” speakers like Vesta. Loud is often good. We may not like to admit it, but the world loves loud.

Recently, I was witness to a British book salesman attempting to sell books at one of Estonia’s largest bookstore chains. The meeting between the salesman and the bookstore’s buyer took place in the bookstore café, and I happened to be sitting nearby. The buyer expressed her distaste for American English and noted that she wanted to buy products in British English—she particularly disliked American calendars which begin the week with Sunday. The salesman, who also clearly represented some Yankee publishers, attempted to defend the Americans and noted that most English spoken in the world among the young tends to be American. The buyer was unimpressed and replied, as if channeling Vesta, “We want British English.”

I can understand that some Estonians don’t like American English since it is seen, at least in part, to be in the vanguard of American hegemony. Critics routinely hold Hollywood, MTV, and other culprits responsible for poisoning young minds with trash culture and trashy English. But I’ve lived in America, and I can say I never met a single person who spoke like he was a gangster in a Hollywood movie; I never met anyone who drew his nine-millimeter to blast away at Al Qaeda attackers; nor did I ever meet anyone who’d been in a car chase—all events which any amount of American TV watching might lead one to conclude are daily occurrences in the States. The majority of Americans speak an English which is actually quite attractive to my ear (perhaps because it isn’t so different from mine). Educated Americans speak a quite normaalne English which employs interesting syntax and diction and draws from a wide lexicon, and I even find the uneducated ones charming—from the South in particular—for their wonderful accents and colorful expressions they bring to the language.

Americans are certainly accustomed to taking abuse for their language and culture. Recently, Horace Engdahl, permanent member of the Nobel jury, took up the cause by accusing America of not participating “in the big dialogue of literature” and saying Americans’ “ignorance is restraining.” Mr. Engdahl, as even many British English speakers quickly pointed out, was talking out of his ass, but he still found many to cheer him on for his anti-American remarks.

But this is not to defend American English, nor is it to suggest Estonians take up the American brand of English. In defense of the brand of English Estonians speak (not to be confused with Vesta’s brand), I am favorably impressed with many students in Estonia’s English-biased schools. I have accepted invitations to visit both the 7th and 21st Secondary Schools, where I encountered remarkably good English spoken with a variety of accents, a few even British. The Estonian accent is strange to my ear in that it seems to be a transitional accent, which the speaker eventually loses as his language improves. While I will always have my accent when speaking Estonian, Estonians who speak English, if they practice enough, actually do move into a realm where their accent is slight and not easily placed. When non-natives speak English—Chinese, Russians, Germans, French, Italians, Mexicans, to name a handful—many have accents which allow them to be pigeonholed. Estonians are tougher to place, and not only because it’s a small country (Latvians, for example, have a very distinct, annoying, childlike, sing-song accent). Estonians just seem to have some natural facility for languages.

But despite what Vesta would like to believe, Estonians don’t speak British English. They speak Estonian English: a fact I wish they were no more ashamed of than I am ashamed of my Canadian English. Sure, there are some bad habits Estonians might break when they use English—stop trying to write Faulknerian sentences (Hemingway is plenty good); avoid the overuse of idioms when you want to make a serious point (better to be yourself); and exercise caution in the humor department (practice jokes before attempting to dazzle your foreign audience)—but in the end Estonians are pretty talented.

To Vesta’s credit, I wish I could speak British English. But I don’t. And it would be terribly pretentious of me to try. I cringe every time I hear Americans throw around British terms like “spot on” or “kitted out” or when they want to ride the “lift.” Even worse is when they pronounce “schedule” like the British or note that something is not their “cup of tea.” One cannot be what one is not. And it’s very unappealing when one tries.

Vesta and I never did find a common language. She heavily edited my text, inserting all sorts of passages she thought were both clarifying and British, which I argued were neither. In the end, it didn’t closely resemble what I’d given her, and I suggested Vesta replace my name with hers, which she gladly did, and then released the publication to a print-run of some five-hundred copies as well as to the ether where it now lives an eternal but ephemeral existence, a contradiction only made possible by the internet: present forever, forever ignored.

The reality is, however, that a freelance writer who works abroad happens upon many Vestas who insist on their own sort of British English, and so I have learnt, when writing, to add the gratuitous “u” to colour, to travel by aeroplane, and to greatly exaggerate my use of the impersonal pronoun, “one”. (Note that one must also place punctuation outside the inverted commas.) If a small, humbling gesture on my part is all that’s required to pay the mortgage and feed the kids, then I suppose I can manage to adopt some “British English.” It’s such a charming little language after all.

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Read the Estonian version in Postimees.

From Disney to Dickens

It used to annoy me that the venerated New York Times seemed capable of only one type of article about Estonia—painting Tallinn as a medieval Disneyland with cobblestone streets and attractive wench-waitresses. Now, seeing what they’ve done to Latvia, I’m far more grateful than annoyed.

The last several Times articles I’ve seen used photographs shot from inside Soviet housing developments—light peeking at the end of a dark corridor, silhouetted subjects resembling heroin junkies in a urine-stained hallway. It might as well have been Baghdad. In addition to the photograph, the journalist Carter Dougherty employed the word “Dickensian.” In a publication as respected as the Times, it’s hard to imagine worse than Dickensian.

True, Latvia brings most of the bad press on itself. Their government has historically been so corrupt that even your average foreign businessman can be impacted by it in some way. And Riga is a town well known for tourists being subject to both credit card fraud and what my Latvian friends call “face beatings.” Even Bloomberg News, when writing about economics, makes reference to the price of Latvian prostitutes. Latvia is, sadly, one big train wreck of a country.

Latvia’s problem runs far deeper than bad press. Many Latvians I know suffer from a profound lack of self-respect and a sense of resignation that their country will always be the bad apple of Eastern Europe. A Latvian friend used to be fond of telling me that “Latvians are the niggers of Europe.” I used to think that was simply one man’s problem, but the more work I did in Latvia, the more I came to see Latvians as a people determined to see themselves as victims. Too many of them had a “niggers of Europe” story to tell, where The Man just wouldn’t give them a fair shake. Latvia is a nation, in certain ways, bent on its own destruction. And the New York Times isn’t part of the cause: they’re only here to record it.

But Dickensian? Is that really fair? Is Latvia really a land of bombed-out buildings where “normal” people live in pestilent squalor? I know a few Latvians who are having hard times, but so far they haven’t resorted to stealing cars or snatching purses in the Old Town. I even know a Latvian who lost his home to the banks. Had the New York Times been there to record moving-out day, would the photographer have been tempted to provide a cart pulled by an ox to carry the man’s possessions down the road behind him?

Even being the butt of quotes like: “…nobody has turned out as bad as Latvia” (Lars Christensen, chief analyst at Danske Bank in Copenhagen), Latvia surely has bigger worries at the moment than how the western press portrays them. But as their northern neighbors—even though a popular Estonian video refers to Latvians as “six-toed”—we probably ought to lend them a helping hand. And I don’t mean money. Estonians could show them how to charm journalists, how to direct them into your Old Town where they’ll write Disney instead of Dickens.

Why should I give a shit about Latvia? If you spend much time there, you’ll likely agree that in many respects it really does live up to the worst Eastern-European stereotypes. And it’s true that somebody has to finish last. But Latvia happens to also be my neighbor. I have Latvian friends. And, most selfishly, I don’t like my western friends opening up the Times to read about “…a two-room shack heated by a crude metal stove down a dirt road outside Riga.” The Baltics are not the Balkans, dammit. And even the Balkans are no longer the Balkans.

Oh, my dear Latvia, why do you do this to yourself?

The Boring and the Beautiful

Brand Estonia strikes again. This time, Estonia’s marketing arm gives us: “Estonia. Positively Surprising.” It’s a slogan that’s, well--and forgive me here--surprisingly unsurprising.

I’m willing to pardon the bureaucrats for not knowing much about international marketing, but they could at least take a lesson from the movies. In Crazy People, Dudley Moore stars as an advertising executive who’s reached his breaking point and, when committed to an insane asylum, starts to produce the best ads of his career by telling simple and compelling truths. Ads like these:

“Jaguar. For men who want hand-jobs from beautiful women they hardly know.”

“Metamucil helps you go to the toilet. If you don’t use it, you’ll get cancer and die.”

Moore also dabbles in tourism: “Forget France. The French can be annoying. Come to Greece. We’re nicer.”

But we can’t blame Brand Estonia entirely. Give most of us tens of millions of euros and the responsibility to promote Estonia, and we too might buckle under pressure and choose the most cautious route. Positively Surprising.

But there is still hope for Estonia. Brand Estonia may not get it, but others do.

Janek Mäggi recently wrote in the daily Postimees that Estonians want to be “the beautiful and the boring” and so offered some better slogans himself: “Europe’s most beautiful women.” For Finland he suggested “Northern Europe’s Cheapest Beer.”

Sadly, Mäggi doesn’t happen to run Brand Estonia. Nor do I. But since my income is connected to the success of this small nation, I’m not above telling them how to do their job. So in the spirit of Dudley Moore and Janek Mäggi, I offer a handful of highly targeted slogans to carry Estonia abroad.

For Russia: “Estonia. The continent’s closest flush toilet.”
To the Italians: “Estonian women are too reserved to slap you.”
For India: “Feel right at home—our taxi drivers will cheat you, too.”
To the Swedes: “Europe’s cheapest breast implants.”
For Africa: “Come be stared at. But not necessarily in a bad way.”
To Americans: “Estonia is Europe’s low-calorie Russia: All the excitement with only half the danger.”
To the Dutch: “Come touch a real live tree.”
For Finland: “Vodka 9 euros per liter.”
For men under 25: “A place where it’s permitted to drive like in Hollywood action films.”
For the French: “After you leave, you’ll appreciate your own food more.”
And to zee Germans: “Welcome home to the land you used to rule.” Or for after the freedom monument is unveiled: “Europe’s Biggest Balkenkreuz.”

Of course you think I’m kidding. Actually, I’m exaggerating. But only slightly. My tasteless slogans may not be as suitable as Mäggi’s, but there’s a grain of truth in every one, a starting place from which a marketing message can be crafted.

In fairness to the marketing wizards at Brand Estonia, we shouldn’t be so naïve to think one sentence is going to cause tourists and investors to come flocking over the border to see what Estonia is all about. Even one sentence plus a lot of money. Seventeen years is a very short time for a country to have formed any sort of identity, to know who it is and what it wants. When I was seventeen I was beset with conflicting goals: I wanted to drink beer and chase girls and show the world what an adult I was. As I later realized, I was bad at drinking beer, worse at chasing girls, and no clever slogan could ever have improved things. It wasn’t that I was a bad guy. I just hadn’t yet understood why I was a good guy. So perhaps we can forgive the shortcomings of a seventeen-year-old Estonia.

Still, though, if we’re going to spend the money, why not get that one sentence right? There are plenty of good case studies. Recently, India greeted guests at the Davos World Economic Forum with a “Dream Team” (to quote Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria) of India’s most intelligent and articulate government officials. There were Hindi tunes, Indian dancers, and free iPod shuffles loaded with Bollywood music. Somehow they even talked the forum’s chairman, Klaus Schwab, into wearing a turban and shawl. Their slogan? India Everywhere. “And it was,” wrote Zakaria.

Good advertising presents a product much like a self-confident person presents himself: as he is, not as he wishes to be. Age seventeen is about the right time for Estonia to look in the mirror and see who we are. To get comfortable in our skin and learn to be ourselves. And then advertise that. A big country with a big budget can get away with forgettable ads—put enough money behind even an inane slogan and it will eventually register. But Estonia doesn’t have that luxury. When your budget is only a drop in the bucket of international media, you actually have to say something memorable.

Every time that Standard & Poor’s or Moody’s Investors Service drops its ratings on Estonia, some government official appears on camera to whine, “But they don’t even know where Estonia is!” Of course they don’t know where Estonia is. And at the rate we’re going—“Welcome to Estonia” and “Positively Surprising”—they’re not likely to know anytime soon. To them, Estonia is no different than Latvia. But hey, there’s an idea in that: “Estonia. The Baltic State that Isn’t Fucked Up.” (Knock on wood, of course. Loudly.)

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As an exercise in Estonia's image via the web, try googling "Welcome to Estonia." In a normal text search, the fourth entry generated (above the fold, as they say) was a photograph from a porno shoot in a building across from Stockmann. What this says about Estonia's image I'm not quite sure. Maybe it says more about search engines. Thoughts?