[Dean's World] Celia Farber: Why I Love Sweden: A Lamenting Essay

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Posted by Celia Farber:
Why I Love Sweden: A Lamenting Essay
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1151943178.shtml


   Last week an article came out in the New York Observer in which I was
   profiled as an "AIDS anarchist," which was a very interesting choice
   of word. I have always claimed that I am some brand of anarchist,
   politically. But I got that idea and definition at the age of 14, and
   haven't updated it since.

   I am accustomed to being depicted as dangerous and crazy for reporting
   on trouble in the AIDS machine, so fair enough. This article is more
   nuanced than most and delved into themes that I myself prefer not to
   look at too closely, including Taboo, (as my friend Elizabeth pointed
   out) Journalism, Women, Career.

   I bring it up for a totally different reason than Dean will suspect.
   Not AIDS, but rather--Sweden.

   My chief regret among all my regrets about how I run my mouth off is
   that my only quote about Sweden in the article was cruel and juvenile.
   The writer did not misquote me--indeed I did say that Sweden was
   "extreme, socialist and weird," but when I read that part I felt a
   pain in my heart, and a deep regret about my manner of speaking so
   harshly about a country I love, and miss.

   We sometimes catch ourselves saying cutting things about people we
   love, or have loved, and in some way it often seems connected to the
   fact that something was taken away from us. Rage is almost always
   thwarted or repressed impulses of love, no? (This is what Pete
   Townshend has explained "Won't Get Fooled Again is About.")(Proving
   all WGFA camps wrong.)

   So I saw that quote and winced. How dare I speak of her like that,
   this beautiful country that achieved possibly the most ethical
   government ever imagined? If I could only show you the perfection of
   the countryside, the bristling wilderness of the land nobody is
   permitted to buy or own (yes!) The glittering snow, the candles lit
   everywhere, even in banks, the beauty of every table setting, the tiny
   wild strawberries beaded on a piece of straw, the mountains and
   streams and blueberry patches. The way people mean what they say, do
   what they have promised (ETHICS.)

   There's all that-- and then there's "Sweden," as a utopian experiment,
   erected by the Social Democrats in the 1930s to level the social
   classes in a country that was listing under fairly extreme poverty.

   I have spent my life railing against the soft "totalitarianism" of the
   perfect clock-tick Swedish Welfare State; This same entity, in fact,
   furnished our home, bought me my first designer jeans, taught me to
   ski and hike, and taught me to sing the Internationale in Swedish to
   keep warm while hiking in the mountains at the heels of soul-shaping
   Socialist Youth Leaders. I can't do justice to this subject in a
   single dashed off essay. I am only now saying that one comes to a
   crossroads sometimes in life; You realize that you are back where you
   started decades earlier, only you haven't left. The thing you railed
   against was the thing that shaped you, and the thing you love most.
   The most shocking thing I have found personally over the past few
   years is that I am returned, kicking and screaming, to emotional roots
   that come from the socialist indoctrination of my childhood, as a
   member of the kiddie wing of the Swedish Communist Party. (Formerly
   VPK, now VP, K for Communist being dropped when communism fell.)

   I REMAIN A STAUNCH AND ABJECT ANTI-COMMUNIST.

   Bueno.

   But I am growing in a new direction politically, namely backwards.

   I have to concede now, depsite all my red-baiting ways, that twined
   around the historical horror and reality of totalitarian socialism, or
   running beneath it perhaps, is indeed a kind of proto-instinct for
   justice. As I was cleaning my father's broken refrigerator yesterday,
   dealing with dozens of bottles of aggressive barbecue sauce, (he's
   from North Carolina) I listened to my favorite album circa 1977, a
   band called Hoola Bandoola, which personified the reigning Swedish
   political and cultural ethos of the time. Swedes call it "prog" music,
   not to be confused with "prog rock," which is more along the lines of
   ELO I think. Swedish prog was soft, fuzzy socialism, played by men and
   women who wore bangs cut short across their foreheads, granny glasses,
   velour tops, and Arbetar-fashions like the iconic black cap,
   previously seen in figures like Emil in Lonneberga--Astrid Lindgren's
   little rascal who always got locked in a woodshed. Follow?

   You can see I am having some kind of nostlagic meltdown over here. So
   homesick I am morphing into a socialist apologist.

   The Hoola Bandoola songs in their folly and kitsch, about terrible
   Egyptian kings who made the slaves build the pyramids and obscure
   figures like Victor Jara, who we were made to understand had his
   fingers chopped off for protesting some right wing regime or other.
   (Chile?)

   There was earnest, straightforward idealism in this music, and I found
   that my heart strings were the same as they were when I first heard
   it, age 12.

   That was the age I was when the communist indoctrination in Orebro
   Sweden began, at a "free time farm," in the housing complex where we
   lived, built by the founding fathers of social democracy, with steel
   faucets and flushing toilets for all "folk."

   This was the late 1970s. The parents all worked, and the kids were all
   more or less raised by the state as a surrogate parent, teaching
   everything from social values to the facts of life. My mother, who
   raised myself and my sister alone, and worked three jobs in hospitals,
   went berserk when my sister squealed on me and told her I was lurking
   around communist meetings. (My mother called my father, who is a
   lifelong anti-communist, and was stationed in Vienna aiding refugees
   during the Hungarian Revolution. She was livid, and threatened to send
   me to go live with my grandparents in Florida when she heard this. My
   father laughed. My mother yelled: "It's not funny! She'll ruin her
   life!" My father said: "You're telling me Celia is a communist? You
   cannot say that is not funny.")

   The "free time leaders" ('fritidsledare') had us working in factories,
   raking leaves, singing progressive anthems, and painting big red stars
   on the walls. I loved it. I believed it--all. My only excuse is that I
   was 12.

   It ended abruptly when the socialist leaders took us on an ill fated
   canoe hike in which we capsized, and wandered starving in the woods
   for a week. Suddenly, nobody was a socialist anymore. The leaders kept
   their dry clothes and hoarded their bits of bread and berries.
   Everybody was a suvivialist animal. We finally found our way back to
   civlization;My best friend, a very beautiful girl named Anneli,
   developed meningitis, died briefly, and was brought back to life by a
   shot of adrenaline to the heart.

   The same day, my mother's fiance died of a stroke.

   We were all supposed to go on vacation the day the two of them died,
   (one, blessedly, only briefly.)

   My heart seized up with betrayal. I cut my long hair very short,
   tossed all the lefty records, and jumped hungrily into the next wave
   hitting the culture at the time which was punk, anarchism,
   individualism, sneering contempt for all that fuzzy stuff.

   But I made an unconvincing punk. My hair was always wilting. I was
   still a sap. Yet I started, together with a ferociously bonded tribe
   of new friends, railing, railing, railing against socialism in all its
   forms. I was right. We were right. I traveled through the former East
   Bloc and saw my contempt justified by what was going on there, and I
   devoured the literature of communist dissent. The difference between
   us, there and then, and people I meet here who oppose communism, is
   that we opposed capitalism just as much.

   And this is the nerve center I have been returned to.

   The things that appal me now, here, are the things that were expressed
   in those hippy dippy songs: Exploitation, selfishness, ruthlessness,
   indifference to the earth's poor and dispossessed.

   Everything I ever say about Big Pharma and AIDS Inc is rooted in ideas
   that could be found on old Swedish prog records. And yet I am under
   constant attack from the elite left in this country. The elite left in
   this country, unlike in Sweden, seems to have contempt for what we
   called the working classes. I am still puzzling this together. The
   leftism I was reared in was governed by working class people. In
   America, working class people loathe and detest the ideals of the
   left. They vote Republican. They are Christian, and conservative. And
   ethical, mostly.

   This is getting too morose.

   Yesterday I spent the day with a blonb, beautiful female Swedish
   friend, and we discussed nude swimming. Now do I have your attention?
   She told a group of friends here in the US that she thought they
   should all go skinny dipping. The nearest man told her he would have
   to divorce his wife first, and looked gleeful. She scolded the fool:
   'I told him, but I want to go swimming with your wife too! Everybody!'

   So Swedish.

   She is divorced, and has found that women in America abandon and
   betray her constantly, in court, and in friendships. They all fear she
   wants to take their husbands. But she doesn't want her own husband,
   much less somebody else's. When she picked me and my son up at the
   train station in her car, she was wearing shorts and a bikini top. 49
   years old, and looks great, but that wasn't the thing. The thing that
   struck me was that she was not at war with her body--not covering it
   or displaying it or doing anything other than being IN it,
   comfortably, as a 49 year old woman's body that bore three kids, now
   taken by the ex. I cried the next day, picturing her waving goodbye to
   her son when we had to return him to his father's house.

   Money rules the legal system, people are frightened and rotten. Women
   are feared and hated. Nudity is a calamity when it occurs.

   Take me back to the Welfare State, I thought. I know it has collapsed
   and I know it was in its ways, very strange and repressive. But as the
   line in the Who song has it: "No easy way to be free."

   One last thing: When I cleaned the fridge, I found a small bottle of
   "Beska Droppar," tucked between all the barbecue sauce. My divided
   heart-- right there in the condiment shelf.