Thursday afternoon, while working on my laptop at a local Starbucks, I ended up having a conversation with a couple nearby. It turned out they were from Paris, in the U.S. on vacation. Nothing too odd about that, but this particular Starbucks was tucked into a stretch of U.S. Route 46 chockablock with hubcap shops, fast food restaurants, hourly-rate motels, used car lots, a couple of BYO strip clubs, and a recently-demolished massage parlor. I go to that Starbucks sometimes because it gets a lot of late afternoon sunlight, but it's not somewhere I'd think of taking friends from out of town. Not exactly a tourist hotspot.
The couple explained that they had taken a year off to travel around the U.S., and had bought a used minivan (for $3k) at a used car lot near that Starbucks last spring. Now they were back after circling round the country and taking a detour into Mexico. They were planning to drive up to Canada for a couple of weeks to renew their tourist visas, but first they wanted to take their new American friend -- the guy who sold them the minivan -- out for a nice French dinner.
They asked if I knew any good French restaurants and I gave them a few ideas, and then let them borrow my laptop to book a hotel for the night. The husband gave me his business card: back in Paris he's a rédacteur en chef of a magazine. His wife was an editor too. The night before, I had been arguing with Trumwill on his blog that the class distinctions he and one of his guest bloggers frequently make are mostly pointless, partly because the demarcations they try to draw are so porous. And here, as if to underline my point, were two Parisian journalists befriending an American used car dealer.
Recently, on the 4HWW forums, someone mentioned CouchSurfer.org, a site built to connect couch surfers with hosts willing to let them sleep on their couches. In one of the testimonials on that site, a host said that hosting a foreign couch surfer was like "traveling without moving". Meeting that French couple in the Little Ferry Starbucks reminded me of that line, which in turn reminded me of where I'd first heard it: in Dune. Embedding is disabled for this one, but click the link and see 1:47-1:57 of the clip.
Dune: Folding Space
Showing posts with label Dune. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dune. Show all posts
Friday, January 22, 2010
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Becoming Sweden
I'm not a frequent viewer of The Daily Show, but I have to give a little credit where credit is due. By suggesting that if certain liberal policies are enacted we'll be in danger of "turning into Sweden", some conservative commentators floated a big softball over the plate. The Daily Show took a swing at that softball with the video below. This is pretty funny, so let it play first. I'll leave a few more comments below the video.
The conservative pundits warning about Sweden missed two obvious points. The first is that, as the video above shows, Sweden seems like a pretty nice place. Better to invoke the specter of a not-so-nice place when warning of the potential consequences of enacting liberal policies. The second point is that even if our tax burden and our government spending as a share of our economy were as high as Sweden's, that wouldn't make us like Sweden. Sweden is known for (among other things) honest, effective government. As Wolfgang Münchau of the Financial Times has noted, Italians have a tax burden similar to that of the Swedes, but get far less effective government from it. Similarly, invidious comparisons between us and Sweden (e.g., the international education comparisons brought up by The Atlantic when they posted on this Daily Show video) are specious because of the homogeneity of Sweden's population. There is a non-trivial number of Americans of Swedish ancestry; I'd bet they'd do fine in any objective comparison with their cousins in Sweden, if anyone wants to compare apples to apples.
Instead of ominously warning that we're in danger of turning into a pleasant European country if certain liberal policies are enacted, conservatives would be smarter to point out that, regardless of what policies are enacted here, we'll still be Americans, and this will still be America. We need to keep our differences in mind when considering policies: e.g., as we suggested in a recent post, the sort of energy policy that works for a small country that juts out into the North Sea might not work for another country that spans a continent.
Another thought: the bit at the end of the video with the Swedish pop star was a cleverly chosen example of Swedish egalitarianism, but it's worth noting that Sweden has produced its share of extreme wealth as well. For example, the Swede Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea, is listed as the fifth-richest man on this year's Forbes list of billionaires (Kamprad moved to Switzerland though, presumably at least partly for tax purposes). One nice touch in that video was the inclusion of the ominous theme from Dune. You can hear more of that theme at about 40 seconds into the trailer below:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
| The Stockholm Syndrome | ||||
| ||||
The conservative pundits warning about Sweden missed two obvious points. The first is that, as the video above shows, Sweden seems like a pretty nice place. Better to invoke the specter of a not-so-nice place when warning of the potential consequences of enacting liberal policies. The second point is that even if our tax burden and our government spending as a share of our economy were as high as Sweden's, that wouldn't make us like Sweden. Sweden is known for (among other things) honest, effective government. As Wolfgang Münchau of the Financial Times has noted, Italians have a tax burden similar to that of the Swedes, but get far less effective government from it. Similarly, invidious comparisons between us and Sweden (e.g., the international education comparisons brought up by The Atlantic when they posted on this Daily Show video) are specious because of the homogeneity of Sweden's population. There is a non-trivial number of Americans of Swedish ancestry; I'd bet they'd do fine in any objective comparison with their cousins in Sweden, if anyone wants to compare apples to apples.
Instead of ominously warning that we're in danger of turning into a pleasant European country if certain liberal policies are enacted, conservatives would be smarter to point out that, regardless of what policies are enacted here, we'll still be Americans, and this will still be America. We need to keep our differences in mind when considering policies: e.g., as we suggested in a recent post, the sort of energy policy that works for a small country that juts out into the North Sea might not work for another country that spans a continent.
Another thought: the bit at the end of the video with the Swedish pop star was a cleverly chosen example of Swedish egalitarianism, but it's worth noting that Sweden has produced its share of extreme wealth as well. For example, the Swede Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea, is listed as the fifth-richest man on this year's Forbes list of billionaires (Kamprad moved to Switzerland though, presumably at least partly for tax purposes). One nice touch in that video was the inclusion of the ominous theme from Dune. You can hear more of that theme at about 40 seconds into the trailer below:
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