This post was written almost two years ago now, in August 2006. Although the person mentioned apparently isn’t dead yet (or he wasn’t when I checked a few weeks ago), I now feel comfortable publishing it for technical reasons.

I just left Douglas, heading south, not really knowing if or when I will ever return.
My last stay in Douglas, AZ, has been a rather odd experience. For one thing, some people have read the book and reacted at least partially negative on some of my points. Specifically the fact that it is written in a Marxist framework is hard to understand for most probably.

However, even more odd is, I believe the fact that so many people have not reacted very much at all and that generally it seems as if not much has changed since I left last time.

One person stroke it rich though. Bicycle Peter (in the first edition of the book called “Bicycle Victor”) managed to receive around 82000USD in disability compensation. Those who have read the book might recall that Bicycle Peter is 77 years old and had been in the Korean War. From there he was relocated to Japan after an incident, and he met a prostitute, whom he grew to love and wanted to marry. Although that marriage never actually happened, he has since almost only been dating prostitutes across the line in Mexico.

But Peter has spent the money already. Part of it went into a new car (though no money is left for gas), some debts were paid, and the two houses of his girlfriend’s family in Chihuahua were fixed. “They are both big enough to put a small airplane in them,” Peter explains.

Continue reading Eat or kill — what to prefer? →

No, it’s not that I don’t have a life and that I only write about and am concerned with issues relating to the usually very far away Danish minority in Germany and its mother country. While I have not been blogging for several months, I moved to Hackney in north eastern London with Petra (false name), who I met in Oaxaca (see posts from about a year ago) and I started MPhil/PhD studies at Goldsmiths College — quite a radicalizing change from the University of Oslo. In October, the print edition of the Norwegian Dagbladet also had a piece on me coordinating activists from Norway and Germany to come to a demonstration for the youth house Ungdomshuset in Copenhagen, while I was situated in Århus. I wrote notes in online communities such as Facebook.com and Underskog.no — one of my Norwegian comments on the current political situation in Denmark in Norwegian was translated to Danish by Espen Stegger Ledaal — and I supplied Katie, with whom I had been traveling in Central America, with enough data on the Danish welfare state model for a group presentation as part of her social woks master degree, that her professor said she was very lucky to have “a significant other” from Denmark… So yeah, I sure have been active, although I stopped writing here for a while.

It is actually quite easy to record patterns of behavior of those around me here, but they are anarchists and so a bit paranoid of having their stories published all over the Internet. Also there were some events in the last few months that were so close to me that I would be afraid of putting them out for everyone to see. So you will have to wait until I go somewhere else — like Nicaragua some time this spring/summer.

Nevertheless, every now and then I find the time to scan through the Danish minority paper Flensborg Avis.

Continue reading What is the Danish equivalent of the Koran? →

Last year (the article should soon be online at http://www.duo.uio.no ) I pointed out that the various changes in border perception both at the Mexican/US and Danish/German border all have their economic underpinnings. National identity and ideology on either side are changing closely related to economic factors — even though national ideologies usually hold that their particular national ideology has not changed (or currently resembles a state that it was at before it somehow was changed towards the worse). Also, it is usually held that national allegiance lies above any economic factors.
I ended my article with predicting…
Continue reading Ethnicity based on economics →

Ha! Finally I got my neighboor to speak again – at least a few sentences. The occasion this time was that I had forgotten a frozen pizza outside of our door in the hall way. “Is this yours?,” she asked – thereby breaking several weeks of silence. “Ehm… yes” – I had actually been looking for it for several minutes. She gave me the “you are freaking weird”-look while handing me the pizza. But of course that was not all cause the next thing was that she was about to enter the bathroom: “If you need to shower, just remove those,” I said while pointing at the five wet pink all-body suits that were hanging in the shower. Apparently that was no weirder than leaving a frozen pizza in the hall way, so she just said: “In fact, I do have to shower.” And after another few words exchanges she moved into the shower, putting away those pink suits.

Now of course, you might ask, why did I have five pink suits in my shower? And how do I communicate with my neighboor without using words? And why does the picture seem to be completely unrelated?

Continue reading doing the “confused professor” →