alviso, calif.
I’ve been doing a lot of photography lately, and haven’t had much time for anything else, between that and my actual job. This is from Alviso, a neighborhood in San Jose that used to be a town of its own. It’s five minutes from high-tech Silicon Valley, yet it’s like another world. This building used to be part of the Bayside Canning Co., closed since a long time.
hello, 2015
Beginning the year with some social science research, this map summarizes data from the 2010 World Values Survey. At the bottom you have survival vs self expression values, and to the left traditional values vs secular-rational values. My country of origin, Sweden, appears extreme here, by itself up high in the right hand corner. What this means, is that when asked in the survey, Swedes score both secular-rational values and self-expression highly. When asked in the same survey, Americans score self-expression almost as highly, but at the same time their values are way more traditional than those of Swedes. When it comes to traditional values, the US is on par with Argentina, Poland, Turkey, Zambia, and Ireland. Uruguay, Vietnam, Croatia, Italy, and Spain are all less traditional than the US. I think this is a good reminder, and something I tend to forget.
for the swedish reader, a small rant
Spanarna, Sveriges Radios gamla goding, har sänts sedan 1988. Enligt hemsidan fick programmet nyligen det europeiska radiopriset Guldrosen i klassen Reality & Factual Entertainment.
Programmet, de flesta svenskar har antagligen hört det åtminstone någon gång, har ett enkelt upplägg: En panel om tre personer levererar varsitt inlägg, där de beskriver en “trend i samtiden”, som programledaren brukar säga.
Förra fredagen, den 19 september 2014, pratade Johan Hakelius om den tilltagande, och enligt honom oroväckande, trenden att låta folk själva definiera vem de är. Hans första exempel (inläggen i programmet har alltid tre exempel) var ISIS, Den islamiska staten i Irak och Syrien som ändrat namn till IS, Islamiska staten, därigenom läggande under sig ett teoretiskt sett oändligt område.
Han fortsatte: Och det här är ju ett allt vanligare problem i en värld där vi har lämnat iden på att det finns nån slags objektivitet eller objektiv sanning, /…/ någon rim och reson att pröva begrepp mot. Utan allting skall vara en fråga om självdefinition. Och om man inte får definiera sig själv så är det kränkande.
Därifrån går Hakelius till sitt andra exempel, som handlade om den sortens självdefinition som har med enskilda individers identitet att göra. “Är en man en kvinna, om han, eller hen, upplever det som om han är en kvinna?”, frågade han sig till exempel. Och “kan [någon] hävda att han är svart bara för att han känner sig svart?” För att riktigt stryka under det löjliga i detta spädde hans spanarkollega Calle Norlen på med “Jag ser mig själv som österrikare!”. Helfånigt, ju!
Men. Jag skulle svara obetingat ja på båda Hakelius frågor. En transsexuell människa känner sig som om hon, eller han, fötts i fel kropp. Personen kan se ut som en man, men känna sig som en kvinna. Lätt. En person med ljusare skinn än president Obama, och med gröna ögon och blont hår, kan vara svart. Lika lätt.
Det tredje exemplet handlade om Fotbollförbundet. Förbundet utan genitiv-s. Egen identitet, skapad i ett språkfel.
Hakelius gled från vad han kallade identitetspolitik till Fotbollförbundet på ett glättigt bananskal. Hela panelen skrattade och tjoade. Alla skrattade åt Fotbollförbundet.
Hakelius sa såhär: … jag har stor respekt för de här kinkiga fallen som har att göra med kön och ras etc. Det kan vi prata om tills korna kommer hem. Men, det finns fall som driver mig till vansinne och jag vägrar acceptera. Vi vet alla, och nu kommer det exemplet…
Och där, övergick han till att prata om Fotbollförbundet.
Men det är något knepigt med början av det sista citatet. Efter att han talat respektlöst om svarta, och transsexuella, säger han att han har stor respekt för de här kinkiga fallen som har att göra med kön och ras etc.
Johan Hakelius säger att han har respekt, men har just visat att han inte har någon respekt alls. Han vet att han borde säga att han har respekt, så då säger han det. Det är vad som brukar kallas politisk korrekthet.
En fråga man kan ställa till någon som Johan Hakelius är varför det är så viktigt hur andra identifierar sig. Han vill ha mer objektivitet, och mindre subjektivitet. Begreppet hegemoni säger att i ett givet samhälle uppfattas som objektivt det som inte hotar status quo.
Jag tror det är såhär: Bara den som aldrig haft sin ras ifrågasatt, eller gjord synlig, tycker att rasifiering som begrepp är löjligt. Bara den som möts av respekt vart han går tycker det är löjligt att andra kräver respekt. Bara den som lever i ett samhälle som automatiskt definierar honom som naturlig och självklar skrattar åt andras behov av att själva få bestämma hur de vill kategoriseras.
eh?
When I was still living in Sweden (in the 1990s, not that it matters), in the department where I worked there was an American grad student taking classes on some kind of visitor’s visa. She had a Swedish last name and Swedish ancestors. She felt at home in Sweden, and I think she’s still living there 20 years later.
As an American in Sweden she experienced cultural shock, of course. There were things that irritated her, like the non-itemized phone bill. She couldn’t understand how you were supposed to pay a phone bill if you couldn’t check that the calls were actually made by you. (Never having seen an itemized phone bill I didn’t understand what made her so upset.) She struggled learning, and speaking, Swedish, and did pretty well. But as all immigrants know it was tiring for her to speak and hear a foreign language all day.
Out of desperation she had created a fantasy that has stayed with me. She said that she had moments when she felt it was all a game, and that if people only wanted they could just snap out of it, start speaking English, and be normal. She felt that the Swedish culture was like a veil covering the real world. A veil that could be lifted.
As a Swedish immigrant in the US I don’t think I’ve ever felt like that. Partly because in a way her fantasy was true, Swedish people do speak English for the most part. And American culture, not to mention pop culture, is an important part of Swedish culture. To some extent Swedes like to think of themselves as American. As an immigrant in the United States, on the other hand, I know I’m the one who has to learn, and adapt. Americans don’t speak Swedish and often don’t know the first thing about present day Scandinavian culture.
The north American reviews of Welcome To Sweden, currently on NBC in the United States, and broadcast earlier this year by TV4 in Sweden, have been mostly positive. I enjoyed the first couple of episodes of the series when I saw them this spring, mainly because Swedish Americans got to see what Americans look like to the Swedes, and what Swedes look like to Americans, at the same time. There were some funny bits, I thought.
Reviewers seem to agree that the premise of the show (a man leaves his life in New York to move to Stockholm to be with his girlfriend) is OK, the stars are OK, and the are jokes at least mildly funny. Alessandra Stanley, in the New York Times, has this to say:
Scandinavians don’t complain. Not even about ethnic stereotyping. Apparently it’s not a slur to paint an entire people as tall, blond and briskly self-sufficient.
some words of advice for my dear daughter, if I had one
I read a story in the Huffington Post the other day, advice for women, listing things they should make sure to do in their 20s. I tried to find the article right now, but it wasn’t easy. If you want a taste, any of the many stories that came up in this search will be roughly the same.
I am admittedly tired and cranky right now. I’m teaching summer school and I haven’t had a break since Christmas. Many things irritate me.
But. These articles telling women what to do (because, let’s be honest, women are told what to do way more often than men) are annoying, irritating, and false. The gist of the advice for women in their 20s that I read was to make sure to travel, and to be spontaneous. It sounds, to me, like thinly disguised advice for women before they become moms and wives. Because, like everyone knows, no more travel, no more spontaneity, no more anything for women after they marry. Right?
In 1794 Anna Maria Lenngren (1754-1817), a Swedish contemporary to the Bronte sisters and to Jane Austen, wrote a poem titled Some Words of Advice For My Dear Daughter, If I Had One. (In Swedish, here: Några ord till min kära dotter, ifall jag hade någon.) The poem is satirical, and reflects the tension between a professional life and the life of a wife and mother that Lenngren herself must have experienced. An acclaimed writer, Lenngren was married to a newspaper publisher. After her marriage her work was only ever published anonymously in her husband’s paper.
220 years later, the big secret is this: Educated middle class women, the target audience for both Lenngren’s poem and the HuffPo piece that I read, can have whatever life that they want. They can travel if they want, they can have children if they want, they can marry if they want. They can publish under their own names, and they can run their own newspapers and websites. (Well hello, Arianna Huffington.)
Here are my words of advice for my dear daughter, if I had one: You don’t have to get your traveling, or your spontaneity, done by your 30th birthday. You don’t have to read advice columns. You don’t have to get a business degree, or play soccer, or minor in communication. You can do whatever you want. You don’t have to answer to anybody, but yourself. But, you need to know what you want. Meaning that you need to spend some time figuring out what it is that you really want. Even if no one except me will ever tell you that’s what you should be doing. And, if it’s difficult to hear your own voice for all the chatter, you will have to try harder.
That’s it. You can do it.