Commies and Commentators

This from a foreign Estonian in Los Angeles calling herself Kairus: “…the only people in Soviet Estonia who spent their summers touring the Soviet Union in Volgas were high ranking KGB and Communist Party leaders, the very same people who kept the country imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, and directly or indirectly participated in the deportations, executions…”

The quote is from Kairus’ consumer review of my book on Amazon.com, and her conclusions about my wife Liina’s family from a story called “Spoiled Little Soviet Girl.” In the story, I compared the lazy summertime life of Liina in Soviet Estonia versus mine spent on a factory floor in Canada. According to Kairus, Liina’s Volga-driving family is a bunch of commies and murderers. So tell me, Liina. What other secrets are you hiding?

I of course understand that when you publish something, it is only natural to suffer some abuse. Anyone who submits something to the public sphere invites criticism and, for the most part, writers should shut up and not complain. (That’s why we’re paid the big bucks.) As the sometime object of abuse, however, I perhaps pay more attention than most to international dialogue about the responsibility of publications for the comments associated with the stories they publish.

For the Estonian side of the issue, I was intrigued by an interview with Kristjan Tamme published last year in Eesti Ekspress. Tamme is one of the men responsible for reading some ten thousand comments per day on the web portal Delfi and removing anything potentially libelous or offensive. He seemed to handle his job with good humor, but I couldn’t help but wonder how long he could endure the work of reading hundreds of thousands of hateful words on a daily basis. Will he go postal? And when?

The law in Estonia, as Rein Lang would like to have it, would be that newspapers are responsible for what comments their readers write. If the Postimees automotive section happened to run a feature story on the roadworthiness of the GAZ-21 Volga, I personally think it would be rather shameful to hold Merit Kopli responsible for a reader who tries to establish a causal link between Volgas and murderers. And on the US-based Amazon.com, I’d feel equally bad if Amazon were held liable for Kairus’ insult, even though the absoluteness of her statement is factually baseless, and, one might argue, could potentially damage the image of Liina and other Estonians with histories of Volga ownership.

In the United States the debate still rages about whether newspapers are “publishers” or “innocent distributors.” Courts have determined fairly clearly that Google, AOL and the like are "innocent distributors" who are simply conduits and not liable. Although the issue in the States remains muddy and unresolved, many of my American friends in the newspaper business surprisingly tend to support the Rein Langian view. As one of them remarked: “In theory the public square sounds great, but in practice it's a cesspool of hate speech, vulgarity and functional illiteracy. There's just so much noise that real conversation is rare. And virtually every discussion, no matter the subject of the story, eventually turns to race or college football.” Or Nazis.

Godwin’s law posits that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." While the law is popularly used to describe the inevitable deterioration of online commentary, the original version referred to Usenet newsgroup discussions, the academic precursor of the modern-day internet.

My American journalist friends cite a recurring pattern in the comments sections: intelligent, educated, thoughtful people will try to debate an issue. “Then,” a journalist friend writes, “they will be torn down and assaulted viciously by ignorant, ill-mannered rubes. Soon the entire discussion becomes a race to the bottom, and the intelligent, thoughtful participants either give up, or are shouted down. Those who dominate the discussions hold opinions that are based not on knowledge but on faith (not necessarily the religious kind), and so they cannot be swayed. Imagine George Will arguing with a dog. Will would certainly win the argument, but the dog will never understand that it lost. So why bother?”

My French writer friend Guillaume was visiting last summer and posed this question to a table surrounded by international readers: Have you ever posted a comment online? And, if no, do you know anyone who has ever posted a comment online?

Interestingly, if we set aside hobby forums like fishing or photography, no one at the table had ever posted a comment after an online story published by a respected newspaper or magazine. Many testified to regularly using Facebook, but no one would admit to having ever posted a comment on the websites of the New York Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, or Le Monde. Who then are these who post vitriolic remarks and vent their spleens online? It’s tempting to conclude they are uneducated, lower class brutes, but given the original version of Godwin’s law, I fear we have seen the enemy and he is us. While I’d like to think of Kairus as a drive by shooter from Compton, there is a reasonable chance she is a community college librarian from West L.A.

Theodore Dalrymple—real name Anthony Daniels; father was a Communist, in case Kairus is reading—recently remarked in an essay that the atheist Richard Dawkins has suffered great abuse in the comment sections of places he publishes. He was recently called, for example, “a suppurating rat’s rectum.” I don’t know about the Estonian language, but an English-language reader who uses “suppurating” and “rat’s rectum” in the same sentence is probably no idiot and very likely someone I would want to hang out with.

Dalrymple advances his theory that “…the balance of the evidence suggests that children who grow up with a mental diet of violence on electronic media are more likely themselves to become violent than those who do not…” which leads him to conclude that “…it seems to me at least possible that easy access to public self-expression tends to make people more bad-tempered and ill-mannered than they would otherwise have been.” Seems quite possible to me. Although I don’t post comments online, I do admit that there was a period in my life that after I’d had a bad day, I would have gladly fired a pistol around in the dark, if there were a guarantee that I could not be held responsible for where the bullets landed.

So I am still left with what to do about Kairus. Going online and posting a book defense—arguing that Liina’s father is not a KGB murderer and that while the USSR was not one big Tivoli, the lives of Estonians weren’t all “utterly miserable,” either—would insult intelligent readers who are capable of making that determination for themselves. Respect for the reader is, after all, perhaps the key characteristic which separates good writers and good publications from the bad.

While I hope he remains unsuccessful in his bid to declare internet martial law, I do have some sympathy for Rein Lang. I tend to think of newspaper editors like party hosts. When I have friends over, I want to promote lively discussion but at the same time keep my guests from fist fighting and breaking things. And so with my blog I delete comments when someone calls me a fuckwit or turdburglar. Pretty much anything else, including Nazi, goes. I’m pleased that I self-police by choice and not because of a law. And while it may be tempting to respond to Kairus’ generalization about Volga drivers with another generalization that all foreign Estonians from Los Angeles are porn actresses, that probably wouldn’t be prudent, either. Amazon’s solution is quite fair, actually: every poster is linked to a real human being via a credit card number, which actually solves America’s debate of the public square. When in history could you walk into a public square, shout epithets repeatedly, and remain anonymous? And so why should we allow it now just because we have the internet? Why do I still allow anonymous posters on my blog? Not a bad question, actually. Maybe my practice should change.

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Illustration by Hilde Kokk De Keizer.
Click here to join the mudslinging in Estonian.

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).

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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.

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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.

Folk Dancing

“How can you write that shit?” The man was seated next to me on an Estonian Air flight to Copenhagen. He thought we’d been double seated, asked to see my boarding pass, and identified me as Vikerkaar. “I’m a Canadian Estonian, too, you know,” he said, “and I’ve never heard of anyone with a name as silly as yours.” The foreign Estonian’s name was Taivo, and he had the aisle seat. I was completely blocked in.

The issue of my silly name aside, what “shit” was he talking about? I’ll admit some of my columns are better than others. But shit?

“You know,” Taivo shoveled half a bag of peanuts into his mouth, “how you write about poisonous mushrooms, your neighbor’s house on fire, and singing prostitutes.”

Oh. That shit.

I put my seat in its most reclined position and gave him the answer I give all foreign Estonians with that complaint: “You mean how do I ignore the fact that in reality Estonia is a perfect nation where the sun shines every day, children sing, and lovers picnic in the grass?”

“What I’m saying, smartass” — he shoveled the other half of the bag in his mouth and two peanuts tumbled back onto his lap — “is that you shouldn’t write what you write. You should only write about the good things in Estonia.”

He could have stopped there and let me finish for him. It’s the speech about the duty we all have to promote Estonia and help the poor little country on her way. As if the nation is populated by 1.3 million children, and we foreign Estonians with our superior education and sensible world view have a duty to help them grow up right. Then comes a tirade about I shouldn’t be allowed to publish what I write, that someone ought to censor me. Foreign Estonians are a sensitive lot. Far more so than Estonians who were born and raised here.

A journalist I know who writes for an international news magazine has said privately that foreign Estonians are only interested in reading about folk dancing. Judging by the number of times I’ve been cornered on airplanes or in public bathrooms to discuss my columns, I kind of think the journalist might be right. I mean, really. How can I write that shit?

Of course many foreign Estonians actually aren’t that bad. Many actually do have well-developed senses of humor. Many of them — except for a few living out some sort of eurofantasy by smoking stinky Gauloises held in foot-long amber cigarette holders — are much like you and me. But there are still too many who act as corporals of society and administer a full-time self-improvement course to the rest of us.

These include those who have accused me of being a shill for Moscow. Part of the evidence cited for this is how the Finnish Stalinist columnist, Leena Hietanen, has interpreted my words (“Vikerkaar says that the worst crimes of the Soviet Union were that it was cold in Siberia and that bananas did not grow there…”). Sentient beings who have read Ms. Hietanen’s full essay will reach the conclusion that she doesn’t understand enough English (or Estonian) to have any clue what I’ve written.

But to address Ms. Hietanen’s accusation, I can place my hand on a Bible and testify that Moscow has not yet approached me. But should I have any secret admirers in the Kremlin, then I have nothing against them paying to reprint my columns in Russian or even sending me a suitcase full of money. There’s nothing like a visit from the muse in the form of cash.

Recently, I was sent a letter circulating in the Estonian-American community, in which I was identified as a “controversial figure.” Personally, I fail to see the controversy. I write. Some read. Some like it. Some don’t. End of story.

A professional psychiatrist – or my mother – might offer a clearer diagnosis, but it seems to be that the foreign Estonian community is beset upon by the disease of having too little to do. I was once told a joke about how foreign Estonians were screwed twice by the Soviet Union: first when Estonia was occupied and they were given their “foreign Estonian” identity, and again when Estonia got its independence and the identity was taken away.

Foreign Estonians in the community of Scarborough where I grew up were always an interesting sight. I was the only one of my friends who had an interest in singing and dancing (real Canadians played hockey), and for some reason I had no qualms about wearing our rather ridiculous native costumes to school. It’s a wonder I didn’t get beat up.

When I got a little older, a friend and I started the ELO, which we had to remind people was not the Electric Light Orchestra but the Estonian Liberation Organization. We had t-shirts printed up that read Vaba Eesti Eest ("For Free Estonia"--we weren’t sure if this was grammatically correct) and met regularly with our schoolmates to plot a D-day like invasion of Estonia’s west coast.

We practiced the Estonian language as a group, reciting lines to use when we landed:

Tere. Oleme kanadast. (Hello. We're from Canada.)
Oleme teie sõbrad. (We're your friends.)
Kus on venelasi? (Where are the Russians?)

We drilled in hand-to-hand combat before turning back to the language:

Me toome vabadust. (We bring freedom.)
Liituge meiega! (Join us!)
Oleme sõjaväelased. (We are soldiers.)

Then we broke to eat some sausage boiled in beer, which we were convinced was how real Estonians prepared it. I can’t say all the language we learned was useful, but at least, we hoped, real Estonians would understand us when we landed near Pärnu:

Me armastame eestimaad. (We love Estonia.)
Mis on teie koordinaadid? (What are your coordinates?)
Teised tulevad meile järgi. (Others will follow.)

So with all I gave to Estonia in my youth, I wonder if I really deserve to be cornered on airplanes? Where was Taivo when I was making plans to liberate the country? Judging by his demeanor and the faded tattoo on his forearm, he was busy getting a spike through his tongue and smoking cigarettes behind the school with other waste cases. But none of his lazy past mattered now. Now that he’d arrived to save the country. Unfortunately, I was in his path. And he wanted me to give him folk dancing.

British writer Mike Collier has described stories of that ilk this way: “…those godawful ‘aren’t-they-amusing-and-rather-Ruritanian’ travelogues written by people from the Sunday supplements who think patronising sarcasm extended for long enough eventually forms a kind of insight.” Yes, folk dancing.

What I have the most trouble with is Taivo’s idea that we’re all somehow acting as little ambassadors for Estonia. Personally, I’d be rather uncomfortable speaking on behalf of Estonia, especially when I would be at a complete loss trying to explain many actions by parliament and the Tallinn city government alike. But even scarier than me speaking for Estonia would be giving my new friend Taivo the job. As Taivo sees it, if we dropped a few hundred colorful postcards out of an airplane window, then all our problems would be solved. Taivo would give us feature films, novels, magazines, and newspapers—all about folk dancing.

I think it would all be simpler if we all just spoke for ourselves. I don’t speak for Estonia. I speak only for me. And sometimes not even that.

***

Read it in Postimees.

Food for Thought Awards

The 2009/10 George Bernard Shaw Food for Thought Gastronomy Awards

“He was never more serious than when he was joking.”
–said of Mr. Shaw


After much deliberation, the George Bernard Shaw Society of Estonia proudly announces its Food for Thought Gastronomy Award winners for 2009/2010.

Hermann Simm Best Kept Secret Award
There’s no such thing as a secret, though some information does take longer to become public. In the spirit of secrets that shouldn’t remain so, we’re proud to celebrate Rucola in Mustamäe.

“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” Best Gourmet Restaurant Award
In the oblivious spirit of “Let them eat cake,” this award honors the places we’d all like to dine in more often, if only our pocket books would allow. This year’s honor goes to Horisont at Swissotel. Not only a spectacular view but, considering the economy, an altogether fine place for a last meal.

Luciano Pavarotti Six Chickens for Dinner Best Soul Food Award
When you want to stuff yourself in a comfortable restaurant surrounded by staff who seem to actually want you to be there, try Kohvik Moon, a great new brasserie-like joint with good ambience, great food, and good prices.

Passepartout Best Ethnic Restaurant Award
One big hurrah for Chakra. Finally, fans of Indian food have been rescued from the bland. Chakra’s chef and part-owner is Indian, and the other partners also lay legitimate claim to authentic Indian food. Enthusiastic, pleasant waitstaff, too.

Sweaty Edgar Best Hole-in-the-Wall Restaurant Award
Argo is a great Georgian hole in the wall on the corner of Vilmsi and Faehlmanni in the neighborhood fast becoming Tallinn’s gastronomic district, Kadriorg. Like any real hole in the wall, Argo has no website, though Mingus (see comments section) kindly directed us to its Facebook page.

Holly Golightly Best Café Award
Three cheers for Anni Arro and Komeet for a good gastronomic reason to visit the Solaris Center. Solaris is the Teenage Death Star, its aura driven by white-kid-in-da-hood clothing shops, but Arro’s venue is welcoming to adults. Her menu approaches soul food, but her real winner is the bakery. Also of note in the Solaris Center is Cha, the teashop. Authentic Indian tea and a lot more to help you get rid of the shakes induced by shopping in the Teenage Death Star.

Rick Blaine Best Bar Award
No bar has ever measured up to Rick’s Café Americain, but there’s always hope. A sophisticated place where rogues, spies, les femmes fatales, and bon vivants gather to swap lies. Kaheksa is where Jacques Clouseau meets John “Die Hard” McClane, dirty rotten scoundrels speak Italian, Megan Fox smokes a stogie, and Bond is back.

Oliver Twist Best Gruel (Worst Restaurant) Award
Since we can’t give this award to Paat every year (we hear it’s improved, but we’re afraid to verify it), this year the award goes to Senso in the Olümpia hotel, otherwise known by its Occidental name, Oliver Twist's Gruel Canteen. And while Kaerajaan isn’t the worst restaurant in town, we can’t help but mention what is surely Tallinn’s worst dish: Kaerajaan’s Baltic Herring Lasagne with Chive pesto, a train wreck of modern Estonian cuisine. (Website addresses withheld as a public service.)

Kalev Meedia Most Ridiculous Business Concept Award
Combine American-style steaks with below average Estonian service, put your restaurant far enough from the Old Town that nobody would possibly bother to walk there, and you get the Goodwin Steak House. We wish them well, but as betting men can only give them six months. Hopefully, there’s a steak-eating oligarch who’ll prop them up until the economy improves. On Tartu Road in the building which appears to have been splashed with mud by a passing carriage.


Full disclosure: I am one of eleven on the Shaw committee which elects the winners. As a rule, in order to vote in a category, a jury member must have eaten at least three times at every nominee-restaurant in the category (visits are unannounced and anonymous). If there are fewer than five judges able to vote in a category, the category is dropped. I therefore had to recuse myself from many votes--I just don't get out like I used to.

SWM...

Straight white male, 43, gainfully employed, seeks woman for marriage. Suitable candidates love their mate at least as much as God, carry no more debt than can be paid off in one lifetime, and agree to practice monogamy.

Attention ladies of Estonia: My brother Villu is available.

Villu is smart, well-read, has an interesting career as a journalist in the American South, but seems to have little to do other than work, buy stuff, and hang out in restaurants with his friends. He’s 43 years old. The family is starting to worry.

It’s not that he doesn’t want a wife—or so he claims—but he’s either completely unlucky in that department or has been marked by God to receive His wrath, carried solely by female messengers. And carry it they do.

Bernice was three girlfriends ago. Villu was probably in love with her, though the relationship never reached that stage where he was forced to say it. According to American mating rituals, a commitment to not sleep around generally precedes use of the L-word. But Bernice wasn’t able to make that commitment. She had more or less moved in with him, spending several nights a week at Villu’s house. But when it came to the question of sleeping around, she, in my brother’s words, thought monogamy was an expensive material used to make cabinets. Bernice wanted to fly out to California several times a year to continue sleeping with a man in Los Angeles. Villu is a live-and-let-live Libertarian, but when it comes to women he’s an old fashioned guy. Bernice had to go.

Tabitha he dated close to a year—and they both had used the L-word—until she put the hard question to him: “Can you give me five thousand dollars?” Tabitha had taken a bank loan for 300,000 dollars to buy a McMansion, one of the American tract homes built of particleboard to resemble mini-castles. If you blow on one, it falls over, but they hold real appeal for a majority of the upwardly mobile American middle class. With an eye toward remodeling and flipping the house, Tabitha borrowed an additional 200,000 dollars, ran through that, and then put an additional 60,000 on her credit card. When Villu came into the picture, she owed well over a half-million dollars to a variety of creditors. According to Villu, there was no way her house was worth even half her debt, especially with nicer, newer homes down the block listed for as little as two-hundred grand. Tabitha, living in a state of denial that personal bankruptcy was still avoidable, asked Villu for a gift of five-thousand dollars. In an attempt to take the bullet with honor, Villu wrote her a check for five-hundred and told her it was a loan. The very next week she surprised him by buying him a plane ticket and taking him to Florida for the weekend. Tabitha not only couldn’t count money, she lacked all common sense. There was nothing to do but let her go.

Phyllis is the most recent disaster. Somehow convinced (possibly by a perfect body) that Phyllis was terribly interesting but holding back, Villu dated her for nearly a year. Over that time, she never expressed an opinion about anything and, according to Villu, constantly annoyed him by never paying for anything—not a single lunch, dinner, taxi fare, or movie rental. Finally, Phyllis’ never paying for anything overpowered Villu’s curiosity to know exactly how long she could continue without uttering an opinion, and Villu took her to lunch to break up with her. “Villu,” she breathed a visible sigh of relief, “God has told me you’re not the one.” While many Southern American women claim prayer as an important part of their lives, Phyllis, it turned out, claimed a direct channel to the Almighty. God spoke to her, she said, in an audible voice over morning coffee. As Villu was digesting this bit of information, Phyllis stunned him further by reaching for the check. “I’m allowed to get this now,” she declared. “But the Bible says that when in a relationship the man must pay.”

Southern girls are a long way from the sort Villu and I grew up with. In high school and university in Canada, Villu dated Protestants, often Lutherans with an occasional Anglican. None of the girls took God as seriously as the clothes they wore to church. These were independent, liberated girls, far closer to those you’ll find in Estonia. But in the South, girls grow up very close to Daddy, which means they can always turn to him for money. And he’s always “Daddy.” And even when he’s finally gone, they’re still Daddy’s Little Girl. These women strut and chew gum much like a sponsored blonde on the arm of a Russian oligarch, except in the South the custom is to marry them and make them your “trophy wife.” Villu has never adjusted well to this culture. He never will.

Which is why Liina and I have encouraged him to consider Estonian women. Tallinn is a literal wasteland of single women with few prospects for marriage. First, statistically speaking, there are too few men to go around. Second, Estonian men seem less patient with their women than types like Villu. And third, Estonian women, in one key respect, are identical to women the world over: at a certain age they convince themselves that all the good men are either already married or gay.

I’ve thought of running a personal ad on Delfi.ee and then correspond with the women on Villu’s behalf until I’ve vetted twenty suitable candidates. Then I’d invite him over for a couple of weeks and bring the girls in to meet him one after another, just like planes stacked for take-off and landing at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.

If money weren’t an issue, I’d select one-hundred top candidates and charter a flight. I’d bring them to Villu directly, and then we’d get a very good picture of who might survive a dinner party in the American South, where Yankees are expected to participate (and sometimes lead) that awkward prayer which takes place before the meal and where there’s a Daddy’s Little Girl issuing strafing fire from both right and left flanks. Not all Estonian girls would tolerate that. Villu himself has hardly managed.

The only hitch in my plan is that it’s based on the assumption that Estonian girls might be interested in Villu. His Estonian is far worse than mine and he’s really only comfortable in English. He’s lived in the US so long I think he’s actually become American. He even eats like one and will, for surprisingly long periods of time, hold down his end of a discussion about the virtues of a particular barbecue sauce. And what if the Estonian girls have no interest at all in foreigners?

I’m told by experts in these matters—the expatriates who hang out at Nimeta pub—that Estonian women are no longer dazzled by foreign men. Nimeta’s esteemed barstool philosophers inform me that, according to their most recent studies, Estonian women actually believe that foreign men want nothing more than to get down their pants.

But ladies, I implore you: Villu isn’t like that! Yes, I cannot deny that at some point he will indeed want down your pants. But he isn’t so shallow. His needs run deep. He’s been abused at the hands of plotting, scheming American princesses of the South. With Villu, ladies of Estonia, a little understanding will go a long way. Deep inside him, as with all we foreign men, he just wants to be held.

***

Read it in Postimees. Spend the money Santa brought you here.