01.30.04

Why I Like Poland

For those just tuning in, I recently came back from a three-week visit to the old country, my first in three years.

Courtliness

In Poland, the proper way for a man to greet a woman is by kissing her hand. The proper way to address a person with whom you are not on very close terms is as "My Lord" or "My Lady". When writing to someone, you capitalize the second-person pronouns and leave the first-person ones in lower case. You address the envelope to the "Respected Lord/Lady So-and-so".

These formalities are absolute - even when you're swearing at a cab driver, you are expected to observe decorum. This can make even the most minor fracas in a bus queue sound like a tetchy day at the House of Commons. "My Lord is a filthy pig! My Lady is a tramp and a harlot, and her Ladyship's face looks best suited for sitting on!"

Carp

In America, this king of fishes is practically impossible to find outside of a goldfish bowl. Maybe it's because carp can have a muddy river-bottom taste if not properly prepared. But a correctly purged carp (left to fast for a few days before slaughter, with time to contemplate its sins) is the most heavenly, delicate fish there can be, pan-fried and served up hot. And besides, Americans seem to enjoy the inveterately muddy catfish.

I suspect the real reason carp isn't eaten here is because Americans are too wussy to deal with all the cunning little bones embedded in its flesh. This is, after all, the land of the individually-wrapped cheese slice. We are a people grown fat on convenience. And to American restaurants, a carp must look like a liability lawsuit with fins. So its consumption is limited to people like the Poles, the Chinese, and the Jews, who are used to hardships and don't mind a little risk with their fish course.

Applause

In all of Eastern Europe, it's traditional for passengers on an airplane to applaud when it lands. The cynic in me is tempted to call this a legacy of the Tupolev days, when a safe landing was truly a special occasion, but I prefer to think of it as an acknowledgement that flying ten kilometers above the Earth at near-sonic speeds is something to appreciate. For unknown reasons this custom irritates the stuffing out of certain of my American friends, who will be glad to know it is slowly dying out, reserved now only for more spectacular landings in heavy rain or turbulence.

A second great innovation of the Slavic tribes is rhythmic clapping, which serves as a useful intermediate stage between loud applause and a standing ovation. I believe this is the same thing as the slow handclap in England, but in Eastern Europe it has a very positive connotation. Not only does it sound cool to hear an audience segue from general applause to a slow, rhythmic clapping, but it makes it much easier to lure a musician or performer back for an encore. After all, you can't hear a standing ovation.

The Giant Holiday Aid Orchestra (Wielka Orkiestra Świątecznej Pomocy)

The Orchestra is Poland's version of the Jerry Lewis telethon. It started in 1993 as a fundraising event to help buy equipment for the children's cardiology unit in the main Warsaw hospital. Over the next 11 years, it has grown by leaps and bounds, to the point where the one-day drive is practically a national holiday. In the process, the Orchestra has raised $44 million to fund equipment for pediatric surgery, transforming Poland from a backwater into one of the world leaders in treating serious congenital defects and diseases in children. Last year, Poland became the first country on earth to test the hearing of all newborn babies. The survival rate for pediatric surgery has doubled since 1993, due entirely to the Orchestra. Polish hospitals, which have traditionally had very well trained medical staff and microscopic budgets, now have the resources they need to operate at a First World level.

All of this is the effort of one single man, Jerzy Owsiak, who has turned the telethon into a public carnival that turns out massive crowds in every major Polish city. On January 11, it is almost impossible to find a Pole anyhwere who does not have a big red heart sticker on his lapel, indicating that he's donated some money to one of the hordes of children deputized to take up collection. Particularly inspiring is the fact that the Orchestra spends 100% of its funds on aid - what administrative costs there are are paid out of interest on the previous year's donations. Because the Orchestra pays in cash up front, it has been able to negotiate major discounts, so each dollar collected goes even further. It is the largest charity effort of its kind in Europe.

Soup

Poles eat three meals a day - breakfast, a small supper at around seven in the evening, and the main meal of the day sometime between one and three o'clock. This last always consists of a soup course and a second course, usually some variant on hunk of meat + starch. Because soup is served every day, Polish cooking has evolved a great variety recipes, all of them delicious and most practically unknown outside the country: chicken soup (rosół), sorrel soup (zupa szczawiowa), fermented rye soup (żurek), pickle soup (zupa ogórkowa), potato and vegetable soup (kartoflanka), sauerkraut soup (kapuśniak), beet soup (barszcz), mushroom soup (zupa grzybowa), split pea soup (grochwka), barley soup (krupnik), tripe (flaczki), tomato soup (zupa pomidorowa), chilled beet and sorrel soup (chłodnik, also know by me as Pepto-Bismol soup, for its color) and a thousand others, including many regional variants. Whole civil wars would have been fought about the proper way to prepare barszcz, if not for all the invasions.

Dairy Bars

The dairy bar (bar mleczny) is where frugal and impecunious Poles go for soul food, a cross between a school cafeteria and an old-style American diner. Dairy bars were once ubiquitous in the socialist era, operated by the dour tribe of professionally hostile white-coated women who effectively ran the country back then (they continue to thrive in the civil service, which functions as a kind of wildlife preserve for homo sovieticus). The name 'dairy bar' comes from the fact that most of these places did not serve meat, or at least not regularly (meat was a "deficit product"). Dairy bars specialized in soups, dumplings, crepes, noodles, omelettes, and other basic dishes, served with alumium cutlery on a worn porcelain plate, with the weight of each portion always scrupulously listed on the grooved notice board that serves as a menu.

Many of these bars have gone out of business since 1989 - they were subsidized to the gills - and many others have converted into Ye Olde Inns, Rustic Peasant Kitchens, and similar monstrosities, but those that remain are generally still in business for a reason. The only difficulty is figuring out which dish is the establishment's secret masterpiece. For example, the dairy bar on the way to Wawel Castle in Kraków will feed you a marvelous plate of scrambled eggs with sausage, served on a little individual frying pan. The bar across from the Old Town on the east bank of the Vistula in Warsaw makes delightful crepes.

Visiting a dairy bar can be a little tricky for a foreigner - anyone who can speak English can probably find a better job than serving derelicts in a dairy bar, after all. So I would suggest coming armed with a clear list of Polish dishes, and submitting your request in writing. After all, you don't want to accidentally wind up with a plate of blood sausage and beef tripe, unless of course it's the dairy bar in Zakopane, where the tripe is to die for...

6:25 PM

01.26.04

Howard Dean in Plymouth, NH

When rumors about a Dean presidential race first started circulating in Vermont, the conventional wisdom was that he was laying the groundwork for a future political career at the national level, or maybe hoping to secure a vice-presidential slot if his campaign did exceptionally well. I don't think anyone dreamed he might become a front-runner, largely because we thought it was impossible for him to raise the necessary money. So Dean's transformation over the next few months came as a stunning surprise. And it was hard to know what to be more surprised by - the good doctor's unimagined success, or his transformation from a sedate centrist into the standard bearer for what was left of the Democratic party.

With the New Hampshire primary approaching, I thought it was time to see this transformation with my own two eyes, and so I drove to New Hampshire to attend a Howard Dean town meeting in Plymouth. I figured it would be my last chance to see a presidential candidate up close, and find out what had happened to our Dear Leader.

I had vague memories of Dean on the radio during my college years, when he would periodically sit in and take questions on a weekly Vermont affairs call-in show, and like everyone else I had followed along during the divisive debates on civil unions and property taxes. Interestingly enough, though, I had never even known what Dean looked like until the start of the presidential campaign (short! short!), and wasn't sure what to expect from him now, with the media calling him "angry" and a "liberal firebrand".

One day someone will write a monograph about the critical role of school gymnasiums in American political life. Get rid of school gymnasiums and church basements and you destroy the very fabric of the Republic (a vestigial, shadow America will linger on in VFW lodges and the local mall). This particular meeting was held at the indoor gymnasium of Plymouth State College (home of the Panthers!), an oasis of learning about forty miles north of Concord.

Plymouth is known mainly for its large interstate highway, I-93, which provides a convenient way of getting the hell out of Plymouth. With the forecast predicting temperatures of ten to fifteen below zero that night, this is what all reasonable people had done, leaving behind only hypercharged Dean partisans and the enigmatic, furless, tax-hating bipeds indigenous to northern New Hampshire.

I arrived at 6:15 and found a crowd of about forty people already thronged by the entrance (mercifully enough, in a heated hallway). At 6:30, the main building opened and a detachment of Dean volunteers escorted us up to a registration queue, where we were stickered, welcomed, and asked to give our names. I toyed with the idea of becoming indignant abou this, but it occurred to me that I was going to be describing the event on a public website under my real name, so that it would take special effort to work up a real head of indignation at the loss of privacy.

The door to the gym opened onto an enormous American flag suspended from the ceiling, reassuring us that we hadn't walked in on a Canadian provincial election by mistake. The room layout opened every cynical pore in my body - instead of facing the bleachers, the (squat) podium was set up to face a camera platform set up against a blank wall, so that any TV shot of Dean would capture the whole of the crowd in the background. There were a few token rows of chairs squeezed in front of the podium, and I quickly snagged one about twenty feet from the podium, to get a good view. It felt like being a lecture hall where the professor's chair faces the blackboard.

People were streaming in quickly, and the seats around me filled up with a group of high school kids from Connecticut, who had already been to a Kerry and Edwards event and displayed an refreshing level of cynicism about the political process. We all stared across the room into the bleachers, where one woman in a gaggle of orange-jumpsuited attendees had removed her orange jumpsuit to reveal a costume made entirely of silver foil. It was unclear from this distance whether the costume was related to the space program, or just represented a particularly aggressive response to the local weather. The center section of the bleachers seemed to be taken up by union people - grizzled, large men in identical acronym T-shirts. And there was also a sizable sprinkling of granola girls (braids, organic hemp caftan) to remind us we were not far from the Franconia hippie enclave, an island of good vibrations and poorly masked body odor in an otherwise redneck sea. Ah, New Hampshire.

The warm-up act for Howard Dean consisted of a troupe of children, ranging in age from six to sixteen, all of them looking faintly diabolical in their TV makeup. They were here to perform excerpts from "Mail to the Chief", a stage revue compiled from thousands of letters that misguided small children had written to the President of the United States (think Barney as portrayed by Lee Greenwood). To my great dismay, they took it all very seriously - I could see lips moving even among the kids sitting out a song on the bleachers, and those doing the actual performing displayed a creepy, Stanislavsky-grade level of emotional committment.

The performance started with a miked-up twelve year old singing the pledge of allegiance, while her cohorts performed an interpretive dance of allegiance behind her. Everyone on stage was facing Howard Dean, hidden in a distant corner of the room, so we were spared the full impact of the performance. The twelve-year-old girl broke off halfway through the pledge to give a long recitative on the benefits of living in the United States, the comparative superiority of the United States to all other nations, past, present, and future, as well as her fervent hopes that the United States would continue to increase in strength and influence without limit, providing a source of comfort and joy to other nations, a beacon of light in a dark and uncertain world.

This was followed by a song about equality, in which it was proposed that we all deserve a chance to do our best, that everyone can learn to play the violin, and that differences of rich and poor, smart and dull are to be ruthlessly suppressed. "Everyone can learn the violin / and everyone... can.. WIN!", the chorus went, and I couldn't help but think of the old Vysotski* song about ideologically acceptable sports:

We're not afraid of bad news,
Our response is to run in place,
Where even a beginner finishes with the winners.

Beautiful: among the runners,
There are no leaders, and no one is left behind,
Running in place brings everyone together.

* Vysotski - the king of the underground Soviet-era bards, an amalgalm of Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Lenny Bruce rolled into one alcoholic package. He died in 1980.

The grand finale of the Mail to the Chief program was a real showstopper. Two pairs of students came out, each holding taut a long, blue silk banner. They began to flap the banners up and down, creating a wave effect, while yet another twelve-year-old with big lungs trilled out "America the Beautiful". While she sang, a teenage boy walked out with a life-size, very realistic stuffed eagle on a stick, and began to slowly make "eagle soaring" motions among the blue waves.

I'm afraid I lost it a little bit at this point (alright, a lot, for a long time). But to Howard Dean's credit, he bore he whole thing like a man, and even managed to thank the fine students with a straight face afterwards.

Dean came out with his wife, who has lately been serving much the same purpose in the Dean campaign as the stuffed eagle on a stick served in the floor show - they wave poor Judy around at every opportunity to inspire the voters, and she seems quite gamely up to it, for someone with such a fierce devotion to privacy. She gave a very short and gracious introduction for her husband, who then pleasantly surprised me by refusing to turn his back to the audience, and then we were off and running.

For a speech two days before the primary, Dean seemed strangely calm and measured. I had been conditioned by the press to see a liberal firebrand, but there instead was our good old Governor, sounding just like he did back in the Vermont radio days - respectful, slightly didactic, low-key. Dean has a nice way of holding a crowd that he must have cultivated in his doctor days - he tells you what the trouble is, explains the symptoms, and leaves you waiting in suspense to hear the perscription. He speaks without notes, and I think almost makes a point to call up lots of policy detail and budget figures without having to look them up. It's a mark of how bad George W. Bush is at extemporaneous speaking that this kind of thing even registers, but all the candidates are smart to make a subtle point of it. At one point in the speech, Dean started listing all of the industrialized countries that have universal health care - "the British, French, Canadians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks..." and got a big laugh from the crowd at the implicit reference to Bush's Grecians.

The most surprising thing about Dean's speech was how closely it seems to have been lifted from John McCain's playbook. During the 2000 campaign, I lived right across the river from New Hampshire, and still have vivid memories of the Republican primary here. I will confess that I developed a great fondness for McCain, who was running his campaign almost entirely on the issue of campaign finance reform. In three debates, McCain completely destroyed George Bush, who seemed to be working hard at not grinning and looking offstage to his handlers, as if to say "hey, get a load of this, I'm in the presidential debate!" McCain stuck to one point - his belief that politics is corrupted by an "iron triangle" of wealthy corporations, lobbyists, and their pet representatives in government. Since he was standing next to a man who had been given his career on a silver platter, and broken all fundraising records with the help of wealthy corporate backers, his point was hard to deny. When the vote finally came, New Hampshire voters seemed to agree, giving McCain a 19 point victory.

McCain's candidacy fizzled after South Carolina, partly because of a dirty tricks campaign and partly because the Republican party establishment was in no mood to change its mind after finding its golden boy. But everyone noticed McCain's immense success in raising money over the Internet - a great deal of it in the form of small individual contributions, the kind that are now funding much of the Dean effort. And when Howard Dean started getting press for his skilled efforts at organizing online, I like everyone else was instantly reminded of the earlier campaign. The feeling grew stronger when I actually saw what Dean looked like - another short, thick-necked man with a mischevious streak. And at the town meeting, it occurred to me that the transformation was complete. Dean was clearly stepping into McCain's track, assuring voters that he was his own man, railing against the corruption of politics by corporate interests, promising to win people their country back.

When Dean was governor of Vermont, he faced three major issues. The best-known of these was the furor over civil unions, which received national attention, and for a time bitterly divided the state. The legislation wasn't passed on Dean's initiative - the Supreme Court ordered the change in the law - nor was Dean an especially vocal proponent of civil unions, before or after (the bill was signed in private). But he did take a stand in support of them, and he signed the bill that passed civil unions into law. It was an ugly time of "TAKE BACK VERMONT" signs in every other yard, a narrow majority opposing the new bill, and promises of an electoral rout to come ("Remember in November!"). But November came, Dean stayed (though the House didn't), and three years later, none of the horrible predictions of civil unions opponents had come true. All Vermont was left with was equal rights and a slight uptick in tourism.

Act 60 was easily as divisive an issue as civil unions, but it took place on the local stage. The Act also had its origins in a court decision. Since schools in Vermont are funded by property taxes, there had long been a massive disparity in budgets between between so-called gold towns (ski areas like Stowe and Killington) and rural towns like Whiting or Orwell. The Supreme Court ruled that this was fundamentally unfair to Vermont students, and ordered the legislature to come up with a more equitable system of school funding. The result was a statewide property tax and the creation of a common fund (the most hated part of the law) that effectively moved money from rich districts to poorer ones. Act 60 was universally reviled by the richer towns in the state, but Dean stood by it and won a re-election campaign despite strong opposition.

The third great issue during Dean's tenure was public health, with a special focus on health insurance. This one was a Dean initiative all the way - his background as a medical doctor made him especially passionate about getting people insured - and he got results to be proud of. In Vermont, you can get health insurance on a dishwasher's salary, which is unheard of in other parts of the country. If you have children, you can get insurance for them at token cost. If you need perscription drugs, you can join an organized trip to buy them at a fractional price up in Canada. And as a resident, you benefit from the Dean-era focus on children's welfare. Teen pregnancies are down 49%, child abuse is down 45%, child sexual abuse is down over 70%. Young people in the state are materially better off thanks to those policies.

Vermont has an interesting political make up, in that there is an island of Progressives in Chittenden county, the most urban and populous part of the state, and a mixed bag of Democrats, independents and rock-ribbed Republicans in other parts of the state. In the 2000 election, Vermonters elected both a socialist (Bernie Sanders) and a Republican (Jim Jeffords) to Congress, both with huge majorities. Dean consistently placed himself in the middle of this wide spectrum, frequently angering supporters on the left and right with his Clintonian triangulation. At the time, I found this centrist dance a little too calculating, and I was angry to see Dean accept large campaign contributions. In the 2000 gubernatorial election, I voted for Anthony Pollina, a candidate with much purer environmental and campaign finance credentials, and felt all clean and pure myself. But I can't say I was sorry to see Dean win.

Having now sat through three years of the Bush restoration, including the ignoble meltdown of the Democratic party in 2002, I have to say that a talent for practical politics and a certain level of shrewdness are starting to look mighty attractive to me. The Howard Dean I saw in Plymouth is principled, consistent, but also smart enough to wage the kind of presidential campaign that could unseat Bush. His views, which he has done a good job of drawing attention away from, continue to be very moderate. And I can't help but be impressed that he spoke against the Iraq war when no one else dared to do it. He was a good governor for Vermont, and I wouldn't mind another four years of his leadership.

Thinking all that through on the long drive home, I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and make a donation to the Dean campaign, whatever the New Hampshire result turns out to be. I don't know quite how a sense of optimism has managed to overcome my powerful miserliness and cynicism, but somehow it happened. I am sure it had to do with the stuffed eagle.

The Rutland Herald has an excellent archive of articles on Howard Dean, worth exploring if you are curious about the candidate. The Herald may be a small-city paper, but it's got a Pulitzer under its belt, and its coverage of Dean is far more penetrating and interesting than anything you'll find on a weblog.

6:34 PM

01.20.04

Security As Theater

Taxiing down the runway yesterday on a New York-bound Finnair flight from Helsinki, the steward made the following announcement:

"The Transportation Security Administration has asked us to advise passengers that congregating in groups during the flight is prohibited. Please note that this includes standing in line to use the airplane lavatories."

Airline security is rapidly becoming a theater of the absurd. It's hard to imagine how the bureaucrats at home can top this effort, but at this point I have every confidence in their abilities. Nevertheless, I can't resist the temptation (fool!) to try and apply rational thought.

What threat, specifically, is this measure addressing? Are hijackers supposed to be deterred from getting up and storming the cabin because of an in-flight announcement? ("Alas, Mahmoud - foiled again! We must remain seated"). How is this measure in any way enforceable? Is the pilot expected to divert the flight? Perform a barrel roll at the first sign of a pee queue? And how, exactly, is the sight of multiple passengers simultaneously lunging from their seats towards a suddenly available lavatory an attractive alternative to having a little group milling about by one of the galleys?

I was filled with curiousity to see if the pilot would perform an emergency landing at Reykjavik after the meal service, but of course (inevitably) everyone just ignored the directive, and let the passengers empty their bladders in peace. On an eight-hour flight with free alcohol and predominantly Russian passengers, there was just no other solution. Even the few people who understand the announcement were in no condition to comply with it after a few glasses of cognac and orange juice.

(Incidentally, who apart from Russians drinks cognac with orange juice? Why has the world remained silent about such barbarity?)

On arrival at JFK, I got to see many of the same passengers who had failed to commit violent acts in the pee queue waiting in line to be photographed and fingerprinted in the second-class non-US citizen line. The immigration agents, who had already had their fill of fingerprinting confused, tired foreign people, were perhaps understandably gruff. But the impression they created was awful - grabbing hands, barking instructions at people who did not speak English, physically pushing little old ladies into camera range. The line was long and moved slowly, another hurdle for people who had already endured a non-refundable hundred dollar visa application fee, long questionnaires at the embassy, two immigration and customs forms to be filled out in flight, a stern video about customs procedures before landing, and of course the majestic Soviet-style dinginess of the JFK international arrivals terminal. I felt embarrassed to be an American.

The only hint of sense in this depressing carnival came at the baggage carousel, where a friendly customs inspector was walking the Sausage Dog around, looking for contraband. The Sausage Dog is a very cute beagle who is designed to detect meat products, fruit, and other contraband that one is not supposed to bring into the country, for fears of spreading pestilence and little six-footed fauna. He is very effective - we have been busted by the Sausage Dog several times on our trips from Poland, losing whole meters of Krakow's garlic-stuffed finest - but I remain an admirer of the animal, because he really is quite friendly, and does his work with flair.

The procedure with the Sausage Dog is simple - if he takes a liking to your suitcase, you get a green A written on your entry card, and the customs inspectors at the exit gate take a closer look at what you've brought. If he gives you a free pass, you're less likely to be checked before leaving. And the handler walks the dog around while people are collecting their baggage, so there's no extra hassle for the passenger. While I was waiting for my bags, I saw the animal detect a bag of oranges, a suspicious bundle in a carry-on bag, and a live cat (legal, in a carrier, but one got the sense that the dog had strong opinions about the cat's immigration status).

It would be nice if more of our security measures could be this smart, rather just ostentatiously useless. Unfortunately, our Homeland Security Bureau has become obsessed with collecting as much information as it can, with little thought to how to use it. It is ossifying into a bureaucracy that would make the Austro-Hungarian Empire proud. And it's making many visitors' first impression of America one of fear, incompetence, and a general disrespect for human dignity. If irony hadn't been declared dead after September 11, this might be one promising place to look for it.

12:57 PM