So this is it. My third stay in Douglas is over. Tonight I will be taking the bus to Chihuahua where I will hopefully arrive by tomorrow morning. And I am leaving alone. I am really not sure about where I am going other than that I am going south for now at least.
Last night I spent with Robert, the son of the librarian who comes to town every once in a while and otherwise lives in Tucson. I tried to update him on recent events and rumors on what I had heard and witnessed in Douglas over the last two and a half weeks, and that was when I once again realized the enormous relative size of conspiracies here in town. I am quite sure that I have been involved or witnessed more of those during two and a half weeks of Douglas compared to 1.5 years previously in Oslo. But Robert charged me with maybe not really understanding what is going on: “well, I just can’t imagine that you know these people here very well… you have been here like six months, and then been back twice over the past two years?” Well, true enough. According to all rules of probability, it is highly unlikely that I have much of a clue what is going on here….
leaving Douglas — am I allowed to feel at home here?
After months of proofreading and editing, the second edition of On the Margins” is finally available at lulu.com. Online stores should be updating their version within a few days. Strangely, this comes somewhat synchronously with me leaving Douglas once more after having spent the last few weeks here. Douglas is still a site of much (personal) drama which also I have a hard time staying away from, at the same time as it seems to exist somewhat independently of time and space around it. Besides having grammar fascists and people unfamiliar with Marxist theory run through the book again and again until they could not find any more unclear passages (thanks, Edwin M. Basye!) , also some of the names have been changed in order for them to be more realistic, and new pictures have been added (by filling out white space and not adding any extra pages at all).
the border, version two, and me
Also, it seems like there is a whole genre of books on scandals in Douglas. One of the recent books is The Reaper’s Line, which, according to those supporting it, reveals quite a bit of the corruption that is going on in Douglas. The author Lee Morgan is a former drug enforcement agent and his language (goddam, fuck, …) reveals that he tries to be a real redneck. The interesting part is that he is naming all the various people he is accusing of being corrupt. Other Douglasites however claim to have been present during some of the instances he describes and they say that since the description of those have little to do with reality, they doubt that the rest holds much water either.
The Reaper’s Line — truth or fiction?
One argument I’ve heard against Morgan even seems to originate in the Scandinavian cultural conduct code “janteloven”: He thinks he is somebody, and that they’ll put him on all the TV shows… whereas really “all of us” (that is all Douglasites + me) really do not matter to the world.
“In Douglas live the most beautiful women in the state,” one Tucsoniantold me some years ago, and others have confirmed that it is a common conception. And the third book is called Beyond Betrayal — One woman’s journey through infidelity and can, to my knowledge only be bought at the Gadsden Hotel in downtown Douglas. In it a seemingly nymphomanic former school teacher describes her various sex escapades in Douglas. “She looked real attractive and so everybody wanted a piece of her,” one Douglasite tells me — and seemingly they all got what they wanted. Her husband decided to get involved with a girl in Agua Prieta though, and although they have moved far away by now, it is said that he still comes down here to see her.
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→
For those who have read the article on “Super Students” in Universitas (university newspaper of the University of Oslo) here is one minor correction:
Update: another thing is that I never was the (national) leder of the Pedagogy Students. The only thing I have ever been was the leader of the University of Oslo chapter of the Pedagogy Students.
In the article it says I had to take 115 ECTS points (SP) one semester (you are supposed to take no less and no more than exactly 30SP every semester) because I had failed all courses the first two years and therefore I had to take courses corresponding to about two years simultaneously so I wouldn’t loose my Danish student stipend.
While it is correct that I failed a lot of courses during my first two years, this is not really the reason.
Interrailing is great fun and despite low air plane tickets these days, there are still many reasons to engage in interrailing. For example, the fact that you can decide on the spot whether to stay in a place or leave to the next city. Once you hook up with some other interrailers, it can quickly mean that you trash your entire pre-planning and instead just decide to hang around with them instead.
Interrail map — leaving out parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Marocco and Turkey
Also, interrailing is something entirely different than driving around Europe with a car, even though you might have borrowed the car from a family member and are leaving cheaply in all other ways, simply because you don’t really meet your fellow travellers very much. And when you do, it is somewhere at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, with both cars heading in different directions. Meetings like that seldom last beyond just a few minutes.
Interrailers however meet mostly in trains between two transportation hubs (which usually are cities) or when they try to stay overnight in some town, preferably without having to pay for it (which usually can be done either in some park close to the train station by simply rendering the local police out of control by outnumbering them heavily in some of the main hubs or somewhere on the outskirts of cities, where no-one has thought about putting up a sign saying that you’re not allowed to sleep under someones balcony). In both cases, they have many hours on them during which they can (and usually do) engage in discussions on all kinds of topics, though at least I end up talking about mid-term (between long- and shortterm) European politics (Is it better or worse in Poland now after the end of the soviet era? Did singer with the extremely deep voice who some Swedish travellers have on a CD just not become big because he was European and not American? etc.), sites one needs to have seen that no-one knows about, or experiences with control freak border guards.
I guess taking one of the far distance buses comes the closest in that they meet one another either while travelling between or within cities (a setup which I believe also comes closest to the experience people had during the early modernization period when trains connected inner-cites with one-another, before they were largely replaced by cars that are impossible to park in inner cities and instead suburbs, gas stations and interstate/highway restaurants and motels with one another). And often I do have some of the same conversations in the bus between Oslo and Copenhagen that I would have while interrailing. However, it is generally harder to move around in a bus and although a few bus pass systems exist now, they are few and probably due to another few reasons I haven’t thought about, it all just ends up with contacts made on a bus breaking off immediately upon arrival, whereas interrail contacts often continue into finding a common place to stay, etc. .
Due to the summer holidays there are no updates to be expected in the near future. Also, I will be leaving for Hermosillo, MX taking off from Copenhagen, DK on August 11th, so updates will be scarce also in a somewhat longer perspective. In the last few days, I have been converting the clip on the Danish minority to another (and larger) format and transferred it from te commercial “Windows Movie Maker” to the free for use AVISynth. FOr those of you who had problems reading the subtitles on the previous version, the upcoming version should bring relief. Right now it’s stuck in the Google Video approval system, but I’ll update all links once it’s up and running.
I am just about to finish another visit at my parents and so I’ll be heading back to Oslo for now in order to help with the Afghan refugee actions, before I’ll go to Berlin to visit my friends from highschool and take the IEALTS (English test) on July 29th, and from there on to Schwaan to participate in the Solid youth camp (watch the video from last year) up until August 6th. After that I’ll hang around Zealand, Dk until I am to leave this continent.
Political acitvist with too much time on your hands during the summer holidays? If you live in Oslo, you should of course join us in the struggle to keep Norway from throwing out the Afghan refugees. However, if you do not live anywhere around here, this is one thing that is easily done: write letters do the editors! Yes, that was “letters” as in plural of “letter” and “editors” as plural of “editor”. The newspapers do not have much of anything to print during the summer months, and most of the ordinary writers in the letters to the editor section of any newspaper have gone on summer holiday this time around. Nevertheless, people still read that section. If you keep the letter short and to the point about some current issue, it is very likely to get in.
Hey there, back from Amsterdam. Besides attending the European political bureau meeting of the Fourth International over one weekend, I walked around and sat around much of Amsterdam reading and watching people around me get excited by the world soccer cup. I myself can not really get anything positive out of these constant, but controlled “wars” that make chauvinist and nationalist feelings come out everywhere. So I usually just wish that “my countries” are kicked out as early as possible. With neither Denmark nor Norway being in it to start with this time, “my countries” are Germany and Sweden (the latter of which apparently has been kicked out now). Whenever they’re out, the enthusiasts pick some other country to support, quite independently of where they come from themselves, but the feeling of being in the middle of a war usually vanishes quite fast.
This year the feelings are running especially high in Germany where social problems are about to climax. With the population drugged on soccer, the government is taking the opportunity to parse laws on increasing the sales tax (a tax that generally hurts those with little money), while at the same time cutting even more in the spending for the unemployed. The newest idea of theirs is to cut the amount they’re willing to pay for rent and the amount the unemployed is allowed to own. But who cares if Germany might end up as the world soccer champion? As an East German said at the camp ground that I stayed at in Amsterdam: “You saw that old English guy over there? Yesterday [when it was Germany vs. Poland], he fevered for us! I told him: ‘respect, man, respect!'” I don’t know if that meant that he had settled all hard feelings between the British and the Germans following WWII, but according to this soccer fan it was absolutely a deed of diplomatic proportions.
Update : The video below has been replaced by a better edited version in which one actually can read the subtitles. (Sep 16, 2007)
By coincidence I am visiting my parents right now, when the Danish minority has its annual meeting (in Danish: “Årsmøde”). It lasted for three days, and I was back in Oslo the last day, so I decided to take my sister and shoot a little video of one of the celebrations in a tiny little village called “Ascheffel” (just far enough away for me not to run into old teachers from kindergarten, etc.). The resulting video has many flaws, amongst which are:
– The sound is not very good + you need to know both German AND Danish to make sense of it all. But then again, it’s subtitled!
– There are quite a few references which don’t make much sense to anyone who hasn’t been there. (though look at the very bottom of this article)
Now I am putting the video up now nevertheless, because I know I will not have much time at a pc in the near future due to me travelling to Copenhagen tomorrow, then to Oslo from there and on Tuesday I’ll be in Amsterdam for a week, before going back to Oslo. (and yes, I’m staying in my tent both in Amsterdam and Oslo). Anyways, for anyone who doesn’t mind all these problems and is interested in a tiny documentary about the Danish minority in Germany from a critical perspective… enjoy the download!
