Correct Me

I was clearly in the minority. Four purebred Estonians seated around my kitchen table, blue-eyed blondes with names like Sepp, Kivi, and Kuur. One wore a linen shirt like he’d come direct from a song festival. They were right out of central casting, except that, because of my presence, they were speaking English.

My Estonian doesn’t completely suck, though my accent is at least as amusing as an Estonian’s accent when he speaks English. I comprehend nearly everything in the Estonian language, though I can be thrown by submerged metaphors about angry roosters or rusty plows.

My four friends were bantering about Kant or bad journalism or nudity on Pirita Beach or I don’t know what, and all I could wonder was why they had consciously handicapped themselves by speaking English in a discussion I was largely not participating in. They spoke English well, I have to say, but hardly at the level they could carry on a conversation in their native language. Why, I wondered, had they chosen to rob themselves of the eloquence they possess in their native tongue?

Of course it’s not just my Sepp and Kuur who do it. It’s almost every Sepp and Kuur. Almost anywhere I go in Tallinn (except the central market) I am addressed in English. Asking a question to a waitress or stewardess in Estonian, she will often respond: “So do you want to speak English?”

What I want, really, is a simple answer to my simple question. Often I suppress the urge to point out that we are, in fact, in Estonia, a small country just south of Finland and west of Russia, and the language spoken here is Estonian. If we were in Sweden and I asked a question to a waitress in serviceable Swedish, would she respond in English?

But I never answer with that speech. Because if I were after a discussion about sociolinguistic theory I would have asked Basil Bernstein, not some waitress, and her injection has already hijacked what should be merely a transaction and turned it into an exercise to feed her self-esteem.

In most places in the world the locals are flattered when you want to speak their language, and they take some pleasure in playing along, sticking with the local language until the moment the foreigner gives up in utter frustration. Why is Estonia different?

One popular theory is that since so few foreigners even attempt Estonian, every accent is seen as ridiculous. (Conversely, since everyone attempts English, no accent is seen as strange.)

Another easy theory to reach for is insecurity. Some need to demonstrate that “I, too, speak English” and are not inferior beings.

“We want to practice our English” is another reason I’ve heard, and this is perhaps plausible for longer conversations, though I find it hard to believe that saying things like “Do you want cream with that?” add much to the speaker’s repertoire.

“We want you to be comfortable” is the explanation I’ve received most often if I ask why they switched to English. But if that’s the motive why don’t they just as quickly switch to Russian when an accent is detected? A slightly different matter, you may say. But if it is, then the explanation should be changed to “We want certain people to be comfortable.”

My French friend Guillaume theorizes that Estonians don’t want foreigners to learn their language. They don’t want you in their inner circle, he says, and the only way in is to learn their language. To be sure, Guillaume is a lazy bastard and he has not learned Estonian despite the countless euros he’s spent taking lessons. I would discount his theory on that basis alone, except that it actually makes sense. For thousands of years, language may be the only thing that occupying powers haven’t managed to take away from Estonians, so why should they be eager to share it now with people who will only pollute it?

If it ended there we armchair linguists would have it easy, but on a recent trip to Norway (where I did not attempt Norwegian), I met an Estonian mother who complicated things even more: she spoke only Norwegian with her children.

I saw no evidence that she was ashamed to be Estonian, but I didn’t see any major effort to instill the culture or language in her children. I do not presume to present her as representative, but she is surely not a bizarre aberration, either. With tens- if not hundreds of thousands of Estonians having emigrated in the last twenty years, perhaps we ought to worry about the Estonian language.

“Nonsense,” says a friend of mine. “We were down to 30,000 Estonian speakers in year 1200-something-or-other after the plague and we rebounded from that!” Speaking about it as if it were only yesterday, he is certain there is no risk of the language dying.

But with population experts saying the number of Estonians will shrink to something like 700,000 by 2050, it might not be a bad idea to take every opportunity to encourage use of the language. Especially with foreigners who demonstrate an inclination to learn it.

Speaking for many of them, let me say that we do not need or want praise. (We know we’re tubli.) We will not be encouraged by free folk costumes. (Nor amber or matroshka dolls.) And we do not seek Estonian citizenship. (We are not fleeing the tyranny of Canada.) What we desire is to be corrected.

My friend Katrin in Tartu is the epitome of what foreigners need in an Estonian. If I say õieti when I should have said õigesti, Katrin is quick with a reprimand. If I use street language, she will frown and refuse to answer. If I say something capitally silly or with an unbearable accent (I cannot properly pronounce loll or kalli kalli to this day) she will laugh out loud and later relate the story to her friends. She offers no quarter. But she does correct me.

Estonians who do not know me are surely too polite to correct me, but I would invite you to get over it. What could better improve a foreigner’s Estonian than an entire nation who takes it upon itself to help him learn the language? I’m not talking about free language lessons given in church basements by pensioners with nothing better to do (though that’s not a bad idea). I’m talking about a dining companion who gently tells me what I really want is gaasiga vett, not gaasiga vesi.

And Sepp and Kuur could have their arguments around my kitchen table in Estonian. My theory is that the extra time consumed by me interrupting to clarify a meaning would be roughly equal to the time lost by them using English. Nothing would change in the grand scheme of things except that one foreigner would speak Estonian at a slightly higher level.

The danger of all this, of course, is that Estonians might start to learn from foreigners. My wife Liina is so used to hearing me speak incorrectly that she’s begun to parrot me. I know several Estonian women who have learned English from their spouses, complete with ghetto expressions and plumber-style swearing, but Liina has added a new twist and allowed my Estonian to replace her own. Daily I fear that Urmas Sutrop may show up on the doorstep and take her away from me.

Perhaps a compromise might be reached where Mr. Sutrop simply moves in with us and takes me on as his Eliza Doolittle. He could rid me of my accent, repair Liina’s laziness, and make sure little Robert grows up speaking one language properly. And the rest of you might do your part, also. After you’ve finished laughing at my sentences, just gently correct me. Otherwise, we all may be doomed.

***
Vello 24/7.

Stars and Cars

How did Anne Alamets get my name? And how could she have known I was jonesing for a Renault?

On May 22nd Anne’s email arrived which informed me that Lenna Kuurmaa traded her two-door coupe for a four-door Fluence (starting from €15,450), and Koit Toome swapped his Twingo for a Grandtour (starting €14,650). According to Anne, Lenna sold her old car on Facebook in an auction last March and needed a new one, and Koit needed a bigger vehicle to cram in all his band’s stuff! How could Anne have known I’d identify so much with Lenna and Koit? It was Kismet or something. Some stuff you just can’t explain.

After reading Anne’s email, the first thing I thought of was how Koit and Lenna must really love Renault if they were willing to tell me about their cars. Since the Estonians I know pride themselves on being well above mere commercialism, I knew that Koit and Lenna’s messages were from the heart. If they said it, it had to be true: Renault really does have a car that satisfies every need!

But just as I was about to race down to the dealership and buy the most expensive, biggest Renault on the lot under the most unfriendly financing terms I could organize, a tinge of jealousy entered my head. Why hadn’t Anne asked me to plug Renault?

Since I was not born in Estonia, I am no stranger to consumerism and its attendant savage western habits. In the early 1990s when I tried to get a coffee in a paper cup to go, restaurants treated me like a stinky beggar. “Coffee to go?” a waiter scoffed. “We Estonians are cultured people who drink sitting down. You will never see coffee to go here.”

Around the same time a real estate agent asked me how she might sell more homes (not that she really wanted or needed to sell – I am sure it was just curiosity), and I remarked that in the west the agents try to heighten their profiles by putting their photos on their business cards and for-sale signs. “That will never happen in Estonia,” she laughed.

So from early on I knew Estonians were a superior race impervious to the powers of advertising. And I also knew that for that reason I could never really become one. I would always remain a simple Canadian, one born with no special powers for resisting consumerism. As kryptonite brings Superman to his knees, as the color yellow makes Green Lantern powerless, a well-crafted commercial message can induce me to open my wallet and let you take all that’s there.

So for a little bit of baksheesh, or even by being asked nicely, I would have gladly lent my name to Anne Alamets’ ad campaign. Just as Lenna and Koit did, I could have made a video.

Imagine me advancing toward the camera as I explain why I traded my Skoda for Renault’s Megane Grandtour. The camera pulls in close as I remove the Grandtour’s door panels to reveal thousands of cigarettes with no tax stickers. The consumer is struck by the car’s amazing hidden cargo capacity as I deliver the line: Whenever I cross the Narva-Ivangorod border, I do it in a Megane Grandtour.

Or imagine me trading down in cars for something smaller. The viewer sees me in the driver’s seat, my two-year-old Robert jumping up and down in the passenger seat trying to break off the rear-view mirror. The camera then pulls back to reveal Liina, barefoot in the back seat smoking a cigarette and reading a gossip magazine. I turn to the camera and say: In a few short years Estonia’s population will be only 900,000. Twingo was made expressly for the Estonian family.

So what’s wrong with me, Anne Alamets? All the years I’ve written this column why have you not tried once to exploit my celebrity?

And what about my readers? Proprietary Postimees research repeatedly confirms that Vello readers are Estonia’s opinion leaders, the nation’s most intelligent, the most beautiful and virtuous. The nation’s übermenschen.

You should also consider, Anne, that those who listen to the music of Koit and Lenna don’t have the money to buy cars, yours or anyone else’s. The Vello demographic is far superior: my readers are actually old enough to drive.

Or, Anne, if you don’t like me for some reason, why not choose another cultural figure? Imagine a billboard of Tiit Aleksejev accepting the keys to a Grandtour stuffed with a fresh printing of Valge kuningriik! Or Annely Peebo paying for a Megane Cabriolet with her American Express card! Or Jelena Skulskaja or Mihkel Mutt, two writers whose faces are more ubiquitous than any politician, arriving on the HeadRead festival’s red carpet in a Laguna Coupe! Or Epp Petrone – whose readers are more like groupies – packing away her 17 children into a Kangoo Express Maxi.

Not to take anything away from Lenna and Koit. I know they are really hard workers. And I sympathize with anyone who earns his living as a performer in Estonia. Since no one can be on the Eurovision stage 365 days a year, half the time you’re performing at some redneck’s wedding or a businessman’s 50th birthday party, or some Reform Party event where a cabal politely applauds and then returns to plotting how to make Edgar Savisaar experience so much pain he will lie down on the ground and plead, “Mommy, mommy, take me back inside you.”

In the videos attached to Anne’s email, Lenna and Koit talked about the Renaults they love. Despite my personal preference for Lenna, I found Koit to be the better car spokesman. Lenna seemed perturbed that she had to make the video and her performance was tinged with an undertone of “Just finish the fucking video, will you, so I can get out of here with my free car?” If Lenna weren’t Estonian, I might have suspected she was lying.

But since Estonians are the world’s most savvy and skeptical people, a race of man who lives above commerce, possibly the only people left on the planet who have not given themselves over as slaves to consumerism, because of this I know that Lenna and Koit’s messages were sincere. They would not drive a Renault if it weren’t the perfect vehicle for them. That’s just how it is.

But I myself can no longer resist. The day after this column is published I’m going down to City Motors to find Anne Alamets and purchase a Renault. Maybe even Koit’s old Twingo.

***
Dept. of Shameless Commerce: Get the complete Vello here.

Winners

“What’s it like to be 25 and still eating out of your mother’s fridge?” I asked Tiit, the son of some close friends I was visiting. I was prodding him in good fun but quickly realized it was a touchy subject. The kid had been out of work since the day he got his MBA in marketing from the Estonian Business School.

Taking up my insensitive remark as the topic of conversation, my middle-aged friends explained to me that more often than not their twenty-something children - and their friends’ twenty-something children - are still living at home.

“Why not kick their asses out?” I suggested, having just popped open my fifth beer. Tiit’s parents then painted a picture of Estonia as a little version of Spain, where there is little or no opportunity for young people.

According to Tiit’s parents, the kids who had studied finance or IT were working and earning enough money to have small apartments and independent lives, but the rest, if they were working at all, were earning chicken scratch while chained to an oar on the lower decks of Estonian companies.

“Do the math,” said Tiit’s father. “Can you rent a flat, pay your utilities, and cover all your expenses on four hundred euros a month?”

The obvious answer was yes, if you had at least one roommate. But some practices common abroad just don't happen in Estonia. While in London or New York you might find an apartment shared by three guys fresh out of university, I’ve never heard of it happening in Tallinn. Tiit’s parents were clearly convinced that Estonian kids have it tough, so I shut up and popped open another beer.

Later on Tiit joined us in the sauna and I was able to hear it from the horse’s mouth. He’d been offered a couple of jobs, but they weren’t in marketing, and they all paid less than he thought he was worth. Feeling a bit bad about the crack I’d made earlier, I listened carefully and sought to empathize with the young man. But then I recalled my first few years out of university, when the best I could afford was a tiny room in a cocaine addict’s downtown Toronto flat.

“Of course you’re without a job,” I told Tiit. “Studying marketing in Estonia is like going to the botanical garden to learn about grizzly bears.”

Tiit gave me one of those looks that made clear he’d been told at school that he held a coveted skill set and had been pumped full of that you’re-the-future-of-the-nation bullshit that young graduates get everywhere.

“What’s a Soviet-era professor know about marketing?” I continued. “And if he’s worked in the business then his experience comes from a tiny country with a homogenous population of look-alike whiteys. Why didn’t you study math or physics?”

I know I shouldn’t have said it, but I was drunk and it happened. But sober now, thinking back over those words, they are more or less true. And it turned out okay, really, because my honesty got us talking about Tiit’s feelings, and according to my wife Liina, talking about your feelings is a good thing.

Tiit then told me about the Winners’ Generation, “the generation who had balls but not necessarily smarts, the incompetents who occupy Estonia’s seats of power but who won’t get their fat asses out of their chairs so the new generation can have their jobs.”

“Yeah, man,” I cheered, actually taking out a notebook to copy this stuff down. “More spleen!”

And Tiit obliged: “These sad fucks for whom everything is ‘service,’ including art, and success is measured by tickboxing through a list of Soviet-era dreams they established by watching some western series from Finnish TV. And that is the ceiling of their imagination, this sad generation of one-dimensional men in beige sandals that they wear with like-colored socks. No soul, no fantasy, just emptiness.” I half expected him to start singing Bruce Springsteen songs, but he instead muttered something about Blur’s “Charmless Man,” a group I wasn’t hip enough to know and had to google later on.

I’d worked with some of Estonia’s Winners’ Generation, those born in the mid 1960s, those who were in the right place at the right time, “who bridged the past and the future,” as Linnar Viik once characterized them in an interview.

The Winners were the self-anointed Princes of Estonia, and although my words wouldn’t have been as condemning as Tiit’s, I had found some of them to be spoiled and lazy. “After I rest for several weeks I may be able to make a decision,” one Winner told me just last week when I approached him about his interest in a project. This Winner was the sort often profiled in Estonian business magazines, the narratives so full of flattering drivel that reading one start to finish is the equivalent of a warm enema.

Tiit was angry, but I understood his point: In a true meritocracy many Winners would probably have to give up their chairs. The skills they brought to the table in the early 1990s are often not the skills that industry is currently in need of. But despite Tiit’s outpouring, I wasn’t convinced that his generation - shiny diplomas, no experience - were necessarily the best replacements.

So while I didn’t fully buy into what Tiit preached, I did wonder how a guy with so much passion wasn’t employed somewhere. I mean, channel that energy into any job and there’d be no stopping him. Perhaps Tiit was too proud for his own good?

The next day I sent Tiit an email with a link to an article quoting Toomas Hendrik Ilves. "The pyramid tip is always narrow. In the years after the Winners it's nearly impossible to replicate such quick and successful careers. A 45-year-old manager or top specialists intends to remain in his job for at least another 25 years."

I suggested to him that 25 years is like a prison sentence. Twenty-five years of sitting around waiting for a Winner to give up his chair. And so I suggested to Tiit that he move to the UK, share a flat in a seedy neighborhood with Polish and Lithuanian construction workers, and get the first job that’s offered him. Even a job in a London McDonald’s would teach him much about ethnic relationships, conflict, working efficiently, and how not to put his hand into a 2,000-degree vat of boiling grease: stuff they don’t teach you in Estonian marketing courses.

Tiit didn’t reply to my email, and so I can only conclude he wasn’t too keen on that advice. Maybe he decided instead to go back to school and study mathematics.

Liina says my problem is that I’m too insensitive. But I say the problem is that the real world is even more insensitive. Regardless of what the career placement officer may tell you at your local university, absolutely nobody is waiting for you once you get out. There is only the job you want and the job you can get. And sometimes you just have to take the job you can get.

Mom and dad are there, though. They really do care, because they know how special you are. And they’ll always keep plenty of beer in the fridge.


***
More speeches to give your kids here. And, no, I have no idea why some text appears with a white background.

Little Revolutions

Pissed off consumers on one side of the counter. Bitter 50-something Soviet-era shopkeepers on the other.

“This is just unacceptable,” an architect I knew stood with the customers, his face growing increasingly red. “I want you to understand why I cannot use your work.” The smirk on the face of the copy shop’s battleaxe widened in direct proportion to how angry the architect became. “My drawing is green, and look at your copy. What color is it?”

Standing a meter away even I could see that it wasn’t green. “What color is this?” the architect asked me when the shopkeeper put her hands in her pockets and stared away into space.

“It’s piss yellow,” I answered loudly enough she couldn’t ignore it.

“Piss yellow,” repeated the architect who turned again to the shopkeeper. “Are you now going to tell me it’s green?”

The shopkeeper stared at her feet for a good long moment. “No, it isn’t green,” she finally conceded. And then I just about hugged the architect for his small victory over some of the nastiest human beings in Estonia. I had used that copy shop dozens of times, each time secretly hoping its employees would be visited by the plague.

I’m not proud of wishing ill on unfriendly shopkeepers, but I have to admit that I am not above it. Almost every week, during some customer interaction in Tallinn, I think to myself while staring the shopkeeper: Would it be too much to ask for you to just go away and die?

“But it’s not our fault,” the shopkeeper added as soon as she’d conceded that green and yellow were not the same. “It’s the machines!”

As the architect puzzled his way out of that one, an Estonian pianist known for his dramatic flair flew through the door.

“This is a disaster!” he shouted, brushing past all of us in line to the counter where he threw copies of a musical composition in front of another shop worker. “The black is not black, the white is not white! Do you know how much money I have spent in this shop? Twenty thousand euros I would bet you. My entire career I have come here. And now look what you give me!”

As I stood on my toes to peek over the pianist’s shoulder to see if they’d made his music piss yellow, the employee folded her arms to form a shield, jerked her chin skyward, and entered her thousand-yard stare. “It’s not my fault,” she said. “It’s the machines!”

The pianist paused. He looked at the shopkeeper. He looked at the architect. Then he looked at me, his expression saying, Does she really think I’m stupid enough to accept that as an answer?

He was asking for my help, I could see, and I wasn’t going to abandon a man in the right.

“It’s the machines!” I shouted at my highest volume. “The machines have taken over, and it’s up to us to stop them!”

“Oh, my god!” exclaimed the architect. “They’re probably unstoppable now. They’ve taken over the entire city, at the very least the city government.”

“He’s right,” cried the pianist. “Maybe Bruce Willis is available to fight these machines?”

Other customers also got into the spirit of things.

“I’ve warned my son about computers,” said a middle-aged woman, though I was not sure she’d completely understood. “Computers can be dangerous!”

“Perhaps we should set fire to the machines!” offered a very old man with a cane. “That sometimes works in the movies.”

“A great idea!” howled the pianist. “A huge fucking fire! It may be the only thing that will work!”

“I’m with you,” the architect declared. “Perhaps you have a canister of gasoline we can pour all over the copy machines?” he asked the shopkeeper, striking the flint on a ruby red cigarette lighter produced from his pocket.

Such camaraderie and singleness of purpose I had never before had the privilege to be part of in Estonia.

I’d of course heard of the Baltic Chain and Hirvepark, but they were not a part of my youth. Until now, the Estonia I had known was one of passivity, of people shrugging and turning the other cheek. But finally, after 20 years of waiting, I was present for the moment when an Estonian finally put up his hand to say, “Enough.” And it was an object of beauty.

So what if it was only in a copy shop? So what if the adversaries were nothing but some middle-aged ciphers? It was still pure joy to see citizens confront the perverse stupidity of somebody’s system.

I sometimes imagine what it might be like if Estonians collectively got tired of the shenanigans of the city government. I imagine thousands of them converging on city hall some sunny day. When they arrive they knock on the door and are politely received by the mayor.

“Won’t you send these people right out?” asks the people’s representative, who hands the mayor a list. “And examine the list for your own name, too.”

Seeing there are a few thousand people outside, those called have little choice but to come out. And the people show themselves to be in no real hurry, having brought lawn chairs, thermoses of coffee, and pastries wrapped in newspapers, which they happily share between them.

The people on the list report one by one, whereby the people’s spokesman offers them his seat, and calmly delivers the message: You have violated our trust and proved an embarrassment to the republic. You are requested to leave your post immediately and report to a farm in Põlvamaa where you will be retrained with a useful skill. Thank you for your time. That is all.

While the Greeks and French may be talented at setting things on fire, they have a rough and clumsy way about them. There is really nothing more elegant than Estonians deciding they are going to get their way.

Classy protests are few and far between, but when one happens abroad, I often look to see if Estonians are not behind it.

When University of California at Davis students lined the path from Chancellor Linda Katehi’s office to her car to silently shame her for the pepper spraying of students, the composure they showed was an act so elegant in its execution that I scoured news reports and blogs to see if an Estonian name might not be behind it.

Although I wish Estonians luck with their IT, I am not convinced it’s going to be a famous export item. But why not singing revolutions? It isn’t everyone, you know, who possesses enough self-control to not throw a Molotov cocktail.

There is nothing I would have enjoyed more, quite honestly, than to see that copy shop set on fire, but we all knew that nothing of the sort was to happen. The Soviet battleaxes were as safe as they could be. They could only go home that night, like Linda Katehi, secretly ashamed for having let things reach the point they did.

I imagine that copy chop is as puzzling to the architect and the pianist as it is to me. Like me, each time they patronize the shop they speculate as to how it’s possible every single employee can be so bitter.

Perhaps the employees were genetically engineered in a secret laboratory deep inside the Urals? They were people bred to be emotionless, who were simply released on the world when the funding ran out in the 1990s.

Or perhaps all the copy shop staff are orphans, children who grew up without being held in the arms of a loving parent even a single time in their entire lives? They had come from a cold, cruel world, and were only giving back what they received.

Or is their story more quotidian? Perhaps all the workers are former executioners from the Patarei women’s prison?

Or perhaps they are former mistresses of the copy shop owner? They fell hard for him, were nurtured by his love, only to be thrown over for another woman. They were still needy, and they had nothing to do in life but to work in close physical proximity to him, spending their remaining years tearing themselves apart, wondering why they weren’t good enough to be The One.

This is no ordinary copy shop, after all. One could send a troupe of professional circus clowns into the shop, and each would leave in severe need of psychological counseling.

There is a second copy shop within walking distance of the city center, but I do not go there.

Its employees are not especially friendly, either, but they seem to present no great psychological puzzle. When you pay what it costs for copying, if you can’t get good customer service then it’s still nice to get a little something extra, even if it’s only a glimpse of life’s rich tapestry. Just don’t go there looking for quality copies.

***
Enjoy a battleaxe-free purchase.

Back to School

“You’re ten minutes late!” the teacher barked at me as I entered her classroom. “I’ve already started the lesson!”

I’d left my home an hour before the appointment, since the school was in one of those Tallinn neighborhoods right out of the Russian film, "The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!" Upon arrival in the general vicinity, I parked the car and asked directions from a local who sent me to the wrong school.

Although most Tallinn buildings do have a number on them nowadays, the old Soviet axiom still often applies: “If you don’t know where you’re going, then you have no business being there.” With the possible exception of Ülemiste Airport, modern Tallinn was simply not built with anybody but the locals in mind.

Even though I had called the school to say I’d be late and explained what had happened the teacher was still rightly unimpressed. Perhaps she was one who harped on the virtues of being prompt, and so by allowing me to stay she was compromising some formerly unassailable standard? Or perhaps she was in a pissy mood because the teachers’ strike was due to begin in just a few days?

But I couldn’t hold it against her. I was, in fact, late, and in my experience it’s only the better teachers who invite strangers into the classroom.

“Hey, I don’t mind leaving,” I offered. But she decided I should stay.

II.

As the father of a young son, the kind of education he’s going to get in Estonia is of keen interest to me. Critics say Estonian schools still stuff students full of useless facts instead of teaching them to think, and so I am always interested to visit a school and see for myself what the students and teachers are thinking.

I have followed the teachers’ strike, attending the rally on Freedom Square to talk to a few of them, as well as reading the coverage in the newspaper.

(A slight digression: At the rally, I noticed no grammatical errors in any strike sign. About how many protests can you say that?)

While I find it hard to take sides in the strike, it does seem that some politicians have used all available opportunities to belittle the strikers. To call the teachers naïve or suggest their activities evoke the red flag of Communism would seem to say more about the politicians’ understanding of democracy than about the teachers themselves.

As an outsider, to me it seems rather that the strike has fueled a healthy dialogue about education. And the “strike” – three days – can hardly be considered much of a strike by anyone who’s ever seen the real thing. Perhaps the politicians should rather express thanks that the teachers let us off so easily?

From what I’ve gleaned from the papers is that how much a teacher earns – whether above or below the average – depends largely on how you slice and dice the numbers. If I were a teacher, though, I think I’d have a problem with earning anything close to average.

One thing society is surely guilty of is constantly feeding teachers with the talk that they are some of society’s most valuable members, those in whose trust we place the delicate minds of our precious children. But then the 600-and-some-odd euros we pay them each month seems to send a different message: We value you less than a construction worker.

What if the ugly truth is that we as a society do not value teachers at all? That we see them as little more than babysitters with university degrees?

An American friend of mine – a professor of philosophy at an east coast university – has an interesting point of view. “Schools are just a place to get kids out of their parents’ hair during the day,” he argues. Beyond teaching mathematics and serving as a forum to socialize kids, my friend doesn’t think schools have much to offer. “What’s much more important is what happens in the home,” he says. “Are there books around? Is there art? What kind of things do the parents talk about with their kids?”

My friend may be right when the world is seen through the middle- and upper-class prism. But I think he’s wrong concerning the bottom layer of society. It may be my years working in America creeping in here, but I don’t think much education takes place in the homes of those trapped within the cycle of poverty. Just as a school lunch may be the only healthy meal a kid gets all day, a state school may be his only opportunity for an education of any sort.

But since many politicians are career politicians, and since these lawmakers tend to come from the middle and upper classes themselves, my professor friend’s point of view may be more representative than we know. Ilmar Raag probably got it right when he wrote in the pages of Postimees about empathy and government. Most of us in the middle and upper classes – career politicians included – don’t have the faintest clue what it’s like inside the huddled masses. We don’t even want to know.

III.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on life in Lasnamäe, but from talking to the kids in schools and elsewhere, the vibe I get is that kids are getting mostly negative signals from their parents: The deck is stacked against you in Estonia. Even if you speak Estonian without an accent, you won’t get the job because of your Russian family name. Just bide your time until you can emigrate west. And then take us with you.

But the positive message for the children – that not even an angry, disenfranchised parent can take away – is this: EU citizens are welcome everywhere. Get a good education and the world is yours to conquer.

I don’t try to preach to kids, but I do try to point out that university educations in Estonia, even given the low salaries, are about as inexpensive as you’ll find. I also try to suggest that wanting to leave the place you were born is, at least in part, attributable to reasons other than ethnic. When I was their age, all I wanted was to get the hell out of Scarborough, Ontario.

I don’t have the answers to The Russian Problem in Estonia. I won’t even pretend to know the questions. Perhaps over time it will sort itself out. Dissatisfied youngsters will leave the country, and those who want to stay will learn the language despite the difficulties. (If it’s possible for Russians to acquire fluent Finnish to sell wigs and cheap Chinese crap to tourists, then I imagine most anything is possible.)

IV.

When it comes to my own kid, I have to confess I would not want him getting hit with the negative vibes present in some of the schools I’ve visited. Just how much art would we have to discuss at the dinner table to counteract the effect?

Nor would I want him having to endure the daily grind of school in some of the Tallinn’s dilapidated structures. One school I visited (in Mustamäe) was fit for little more than use as a shoothouse for urban warfare training. But that was a year ago, and so maybe they’ve torn it down by now. Or maybe it just fell down.

But I might also not be so eager for my son to study at one of Estonia’s so-called “elite” schools, where I am told a dessert cart is wheeled between the desks and each lucky child removes an iPad for the day’s lesson.

I have been told by students in these schools that they feel pressure via regular reminders that “You are the future leaders of the Republic.” And the stories my friends tell of gaining a place in the school for their children – how they've taken the school director to lunch or dinner, or how they registered their kid at a friend's address in the school's district – these turn my stomach as well.

The good news is that I have also visited Estonian schools much like my own in Scarborough – not elite, though not full of the bitterness of the disenfranchised. In these schools half the class is attentive and the other half stares out the window like zombies. And I feel right at home.

I am not uncomfortable knowing that my son will simply get into whichever school he gets into. While I refuse to wine and dine a school director, I do believe in doing my part to better the overall system. Taking part in it when asked, and supporting the teachers as they do their jobs.

Long term, I think it might behoove us to put some thought into what kind of hypocrites we are. If teachers truly are as important to society as doctors, attorneys, and members of Parliament, should the paychecks not reflect that?

And shorter-term, I think the very least that we as a society can do is to allow the striking teachers to keep their dignity. What we might discover is that in allowing teachers to keep their dignity, we’re able to maintain our own, as well.

***

Read the collected Vello.

Not Kingly, Not Manly

I.

“So what is it you do?” I asked one of the men sitting across from me at a dinner party. But it was clearly the wrong question.

“I’m an intellectual,” he said, exhaling dramatically to indicate that I was a complete idiot for not knowing who he was.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I was tempted to say. “I thought you were just an asshole.” But the specter of Mother Vikerkaar appeared in the room and I thought better of it. “So that’s a job title now?” I asked instead.

Then the man two seats over took up the topic and said he was making films about intellectuals but how Estonian TV networks weren’t interested in airing them. “They only want to hear about Eurovision,” he said.

There had clearly been a mistake in the seating chart. What was I doing with these people?

Then the discussion turned to a debate over which was the most elite secondary school (English College, the 21st, or Realkool? – with no mention of the Woburn Collegiate Institute in Scarborough). Then the dikes finally broke and we were all drowned in a Hit Parade of Western Philosophy. Abélard, Acquinas, Adomo, Aristotle, Augustine. It was if someone were reading off crib notes in alphabetical order.

Well before they arrived at Wittgenstein I felt like standing to quote a character from White Noise about the communal ego: “You say I’m a genius; I say you’re a genius; and we’re all geniuses together.”

But I didn’t have the courage to cause a stink, and so rather I silently recalled the words of Bluto, one of the intellectuals from the movie Animal House: “Grab a brew. Don’t cost nothin’.” Which means I got drunk instead.

II.

Last week, I worked at my friends’ secondhand English-language bookstore in the Old Town, substituting for them while they were away making porno films or assassinating evil African dictators, or whatever it is that booksellers do on their days off.

I was humbled by the fact that every customer who entered the store seemed better read than I, and I lost count of the number of obscure literary references I was supposed to pick up on, because working in a bookshop they assumed I had read everything on the shelves. (I found myself wondering if forest rangers are often asked about specific trees among hectares of forests.)

Also, many people felt compelled to tell me about the size of their personal libraries (thousands of volumes), and they were shocked to learn how light I travel: my library is limited to a hundred books or so.

I could not even escape intellectualism on the bookstore’s radio: “…not singing about frivolous things…” said a talk show host about Leonard Cohen, who then noted that Cohen was writing on the “human condition, duality of our flesh, higher self…” Puleez. Give me my vomit bag.

But one of the things you do in a bookstore is read, and while leafing pages I stumbled upon an observation made by Iivi Anna Masso to Toomas Hendrik Ilves in the book Omal Häälel: “Paradoxically, this is a problem of our northernness – to be ill at ease with elitism is a northern phenomenon, and in the 'old' Nordic countries it's feared even more than in Estonia.” If this were true, I thought, then someone had failed to inform those at the dinner party.

Thinking a bit, I wondered if perhaps the Estonians, though not known for speaking in coded language, have simply employed a euphemism: visionary. I have noticed it is currently fashionable in the country to refer to oneself as a visionary. Is it perhaps the Bud Light-version of Intellectual?

But I have always considered a visionary to be an action figure from Hasbro, or a millionaire with a self-image problem. Even Steve Jobs refused to describe himself as a visionary. (“Technology leader” was his preferred term.)

I somehow believe the real visionaries among us aren’t the guys who call themselves visionaries. (And shouldn’t a true visionary have the courage to call himself an oracle?) And I am sure true visionaries are not the guys who continually post inspirational quotes from self-help books on Facebook. Real visionaries are more the troublemakers and the shit-stirrers, the activists, misfits, the dreamers and the downright crazies.

The moment I hear the word “visionary” I unsheathe and ready my dagger. I want to sit across the dinner table from a visionary just about as much as I want to receive a Jackie Lawson e-greeting card or walk barefoot over broken glass.

III.

I’ve often wondered why it’s not okay to be smart in Europe without branding yourself as such. Perhaps it’s the North American in me, instructed from birth to pretend that class differences don’t really exist, even when they’re staring me right in the face.

I’ve long been a fan of intellectuals who shun the title. Like Joan Didion. She’s said the term “doesn’t make her reach for her gun,” but that she isn’t one because she doesn’t think in abstracts.

But mostly, to me, a peasant boy from Scarberia, Didion seems like somebody I’d like to drink a beer with. From her essay “Insider Baseball“: “[I]t had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations, […] had not gone to Yale or Swarthmore or DePauw, nor had they even applied. They had gotten drafted, gone through basic at Fort Ord. They had knocked up girls, and married them, had begun what they called the first night of the rest of their lives…”

My favorite Canadian intellectual — who will reach for his gun if you employ the term — is a timber framer with little formal education. Michael is a boat builder and collector of antique tools, all of which he employs in his craft. He can speak for hours on the virtues of Damascus steel, the art of typesetting, or Plato’s conviction that books were a poor substitute for dialogue – and convince the listener that each topic is of burning relevance to his own life.

I also find refreshing a diplomat I know in Tallinn with the courage or courtesy (I’m not sure which) to answer in the affirmative with a one-word response: “Rad.” (Probably only in unofficial communication, as the term has not surfaced in the Wikileaks memos.)

Were I to ever achieve status as a writer to the extent that readers make pilgrimages to my home, I would hope to be a recluse in the manner of Cormac McCarthy, who was once reportedly so aloof that he stowed his mail in the trunk of his car – unopened royalty checks, included, until his agent arrived to cash them for him. Or Pete Dexter or William Gay, modern day Hemingways who can make a fist fight real on the page because they’ve started a few themselves.

And so I should have punched out those fool dandies across the table from me, I know. I should have stood, thrown down my napkin, and declared that they had offended the sensibilities of a Thoreauian.

“To be a philosopher,” I might have crowed, “is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.”

But, alas, I did not. And perhaps in Estonia, as in America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler (as Gore Vidal told us). And if you think you’re a great thinker then you must say that you are. Perhaps there is nothing American about it? Perhaps it is simply human? If so, I am saddened.

***

More philosophy.

Friends

Just like you, I’m excited to see if Anna-Maria Galojan will be granted political asylum in Great Britain.

I admire her cohones for attempting that maneuver, but I also have to wonder how she found a British attorney willing to take on her case. They don’t work for cheap, and if she hasn’t somehow squirreled away the cash, will she sell her designer clothes on eBay to cover the several hundred pounds sterling per hour she’s being billed? Or is her tab being footed by a political party? And might she appear again in Playboy? Is she considering hosting her own talk show? Will Estonian Public Broadcasting take it, or is it more a thing for Tallinn TV? Or will she keep her current high-profile position as foreign- and energy policy analyst for that elite English-language diary, The Baltic Times?

And in addition to Anna-Maria, what about that ex-Pirita politician who likes to drink coffee in Amps? Did he only have to return the bribe he got? No jail time? Did he lose friends after his conviction? Did the family stay intact? Will we witness his return to politics after finding salvation in Jesus Christ Our Lord? These are the questions which haunt me when I see him in cafes, sipping coffee and laughing with his friends.

And what about the other Estonian businessmen wrapped up in court cases currently? There are the land scandal guys. Will they have to risk homosexual rape in a penal institution? (Does that even happen in EU prisons?) And who’s going to get only the finger wag, sentenced to lay low for six months before actively rejoining business life as a local hero?

And what about the businessman who may or may not have paid someone to whack his associate? I see him weekly at the grocery store, but I can’t bring myself to ask the obvious question. Would “How’s that murder trial going?” be an appropriate question in a culture which prides itself on the lack of small talk?

Growing up in Canada we never had it so good: you could never see your criminal class in the grocery store. Once a person became even scandal material, he retreated completely from public life. You might witness him step outside his home in a bathrobe to pick up the morning paper, but there was far too much peril in shopping or café sitting. But in Estonia it’s like we’re all in one big Catholic marriage: for better or worse, we’re going to make this thing work.

In Canada, there was my scoutmaster, arrested for indecent exposure, caught showing his tool to a group of small boys in a schoolyard. Reportedly, he revealed himself in the classic fashion (raincoat), but the small children were unimpressed. They went about their business on the playground unfazed, even though thousands of dollars was later spent on them for hours of obligatory counseling. And the scoutmaster? It was before the digital era, and so he packed up and moved to another city several hours away, safe for as long as it took a newspaper clipping to follow.

Then there was my tennis coach, sent to prison for fondling an exchange student. Reportedly, the coach had asked for photos of the Scandinavian boy in his underwear in order to evaluate his physical fitness, photos which were duly sent. When the boy arrived, he was the beneficiary of special off-the-court training sessions. The coach, after his release, also moved several hours away to start a new life, hopefully sans his special kind of tennis.

There was the science museum director, tried for keeping someone else’s artifacts at home, and perhaps selling a few on eBay. Until the end, his family maintained his innocence but the court disagreed and he was both bankrupted and jailed by the system. Released early due to ill health, he moved to a new community and died several years later, presumably from the shame of ostracism. His case was so well publicized that he could never again visit the grocery store without enduring shouts of “Shame!”

The moral here? In a country of 34 million people, criminals are disposable.

Having never had the opportunity to see a prison in Canada, in the 1990s I took advantage of an invitation to visit a prison in Estonia. There were no politicians that I can recall, but rather garden-variety thieves and rapists who were serving their sentences in the filth and squalor of pre-EU prisons. And amongst it all a book club to which I had been invited to speak.

We all hit it off quite well, though I only recall that we never talked about books. Among other things, we did talk about their one celebrity prisoner – a foreigner in for drug trafficking – who did not attend the book club. Perhaps it was because he was my acquaintance? Or perhaps it was because he spoke not a word of Estonian, the language of the book club?

After my first visit, I began to receive telephone calls from a couple of the inmates. “How’d you get my number?” I asked. “And how’d you get a phone?”

“We can get anything in prison,” the caller replied.

They could get anything except me to return, which the warden strictly forbade. “This is a prison not some boulevard café,” he told me when the inmates invited me back for a third time. “You just can’t come and go as you please.”

Several years later, one of the inmates was released, and invited me to tour the Patarei with him. He’d served several years there, and his comments made during the tour demonstrated such remarkable knowledge that the guide – a retired guard – was prompted to ask how a tourist could know so much. After the tour the former inmate approached the retired guard, shook his hand, and told him who he was. He had never been guarded by the guard, but had read a book on prison life authored by the man and respected him very much for it.

My newly free friend and I had a coffee together where he told me he’d been admitted to university, which pleased me very much. I loaned him 500 kroons and I never saw him again, not even in the grocery store.

But I know it’s only a matter of time before we meet. In a country so small, not meeting is probably a statistical impossibility. So when we do meet, given the mores of a small society, how am I expected to behave? Must I, like the rest of Estonian society, tacitly welcome him back to the world by pretending the past is water under the bridge? Because – as an Estonian politician once explained to me – in such a tiny society we need everyone we can get. (We often don’t seem to need those in Ida-Virumaa, though that is another story.)

So should I ask him how he’s doing? Did he finish university? Is he gainfully employed? Is he happy? Does he have a wife? Children? Or will I have the cohones to ask what I really want to know: Am I ever going to see my 500 kroons?

I’ve never met Anna-Maria, but I feel like I know her. Via Facebook, I’ve followed her many adventures, where we enjoy many mutual friends. My feeling is that she’s truly destined to have a talk show, and when she does I hope she’ll answer all my burning questions about a public life on the lam. She has 5,000 Facebook friends currently, but has anyone unfriended her since her conviction? Or has this incident, in fact, brought her more friends? Has she ever turned anyone down for friendship?

I’ve not yet tried to friend her. I wonder would she take me seriously? Would she be my friend?

***

Vello in print.