There
is an old saying here that only on two occasions will a Finnish husband and
wife actually say aloud the words “Minä rakastan
sinua”. (“I love you”). One is on their wedding day. The other is on their
deathbed.
Okay,
it’s a joke. I think. It does illustrate, though, how Finns are not widely
considered to be the most expressive
people in the world, even when it comes to matters of the heart. It’s not that
Finns aren’t romantic, in their own way. It’s more that they don’t make a big
deal about it. Or a public spectacle. This isn’t Paris, after all.
It's not as if here, like anywhere else, love isn't the most consuming human emotion there is. The airwaves (or, more likely nowadays, the
broadband streams) are full of a never-ending string of romantic pop songs. A
current Finnish favorite is titled “Kolme pientä sanaa” (“Three Little Words”).
No prize for guessing what those three little words are. No, it’s not “Missä on
olutta?” (“Where’s the beer?”).
Another
well-worn Finnish joke marries romance with a certain politician’s awkwardness
with the English language. Supposedly, Ahti Karjalainen, foreign minister back
in the 60s and 70s, became smitten, so the joke goes, with an English girl he
met in London. On a romantic evening out, he was leading her gracefully around
the dance floor when he mustered up the courage to glaze into her eyes and tell
her in his uncomfortable English, “I love you.”
Without
hesitation, the girl softly whispered, “I love you, too.”
Ahti,
not to be outdone, excitedly blurted out, “I love you three!”
Maybe
it’s folk humor like that that makes Finns keep their more amorous feelings to
themselves.
Kidding
aside, Finns really do do some things differently. That was impressed upon me a few years ago when I had a minor cross-cultural insight at the big
transnational company where I worked. For years, I had been the only American in a team of
eight or so colleagues, mostly Finnish. My “sole Yank” status changed, however, when we
got a new boss, a fellow American, and I was reminded how free Americans can be
with the L-word.
Rooted
all day in our tight cluster of cubicles tucked away in one corner of the
office, we couldn’t help overhearing each other’s various phone conversations,
including personal calls with husbands, wives, and kids.
What
I noticed very quickly after our new American boss arrived was how he ended his
brief phone calls with family members in a way that no one else in our team
ever did. He always signed off with a “Love you”. Every single time, no matter
how mundane the call.
I’d
forgotten how very typical this is in the States, and it made me realize how assimilated
to Finnish customs I’ve apparently become, in one small way at least. Or maybe
I’m by nature just a hopeless unromantic. In any case, I have probably never finished
a call to my wife with a “Love you”. Not even once.
It’s
not that I don’t love my wife, but it’s not something she would expect me to
remind her of after discussing which one of us was picking up the kids from
daycare or whether we still had milk at home. It’s not how they do it here.
In
fact, I’m sure that if I ever did end one of our phone calls with the words “I
love you”, my very Finnish wife would think something was very wrong indeed.
When I was in high school, I spent a part of every
summer backpacking with my brother and our friends on trips of up a week in length.
Often we hiked on the Appalachian Trail, the famous footpath that snakes its
way some 3500 kilometers (2200 miles) from up near the Canadian border in Maine
southward to a mountaintop deep in Dixie (in fact on the edge of my home county
in Georgia).
I remember on one such trip meeting a solitary hiker
as we approached Tesnatee Gap, a shallow pass where the AT dips down to a
scenic two-lane highway crossing the Blue Ridge mountains of Georgia. The hiker we met was from New Jersey, probably a
“through hiker”, those hardy souls who hike the entire length of the AT,
usually from north to south. I still remember this encounter decades later
mainly because this hiker from the Garden State was a little rattled by something he
had seen just before we met him.
He explained that in the little parking lot back at
Tesnatee Gap there had been someone in a pickup truck – with two rifles
prominently displayed in a gun-rack inside the cab’s rear window. The presence
of the guns had clearly unnerved him. As I recall, upon hearing the “Yankee”
hiker’s concerns, most of my hiking companions, all local Georgians, just
shrugged our shoulders.
Typical pro-gun Facebook photo.
We couldn’t see what the big deal was. As
Southerners, we were fairly used to having guns around, and hunting rifles in a
gun-rack in a pickup truck, well, it’s practically a fashion statement in some
places, though nowadays it might be more of a political statement.
That short chat with a stranger randomly met on a
ribbon of worn dirt, almost swallowed in the lush vegetation of summer andstretching all the way
back to Maine, was perhaps my first inkling that, when it comes to guns, the
South is different.
At least, it used to be different from much of the
rest of the US. Maybe it was just ahead of its time. And that, in my mind, is
not something to be proud of.
America as a whole has always had some kind of gun
culture, born as the nation was out of armed revolt against Britain and the
violent conquest of Native Americans. Though I’m no authority on other parts of
the US, the “culture” of guns has always seemed to run deeper in the South,
where the history of armed revolt didn’t stop with the Revolutionary War and
the tradition of hunting seems more ingrained than in other, less rural and
impoverished, regions of the US.
Many Southerners like to hunt. And they like guns.
They, in a sense, have a close personal relationship with them.
I recall hearing how during the Vietnam War
commanders would often tap a platoon’s ever-present Southerner to be the “point
man” when going out on patrol, because they were supposed to be better hunters
and shooters. Maybe that’s a myth, though it’s one happily fostered by
Hollywood in such movies as “Saving Private Ryan”, where the expert sniper in
the band of brothers led by Tom Hanks was an unmistakable Southerner.
While the shooting skills of Southerners
wasn’t enough to ultimately give them in the upper hand in the Civil War –
since they lost – they were presumably better than those of the other side. An
army commander from New York was so dismayed by the poor marksmanship of the
Union infantry, which managed to hit only one Confederate soldier out of 1000
shots fired, that after the war he helped create an organization to improve the
aim of Americans. That group, the National Rifle Association, nowadays seems
dedicated more to ensuring that disgruntled secessionists can fightagainstthe United States.
When I was growing up, we always had guns in the
house, since my father was a serious hunter. He hunted everything from grouse
to rabbits to squirrels to, later in life, turkeys. But his big passion was
deer hunting, and I still have fond memories of being with him on some ridge
top watching the sun rise on a cold winter day, staying deadly quiet so we
could hear any tiny sound of a deer approaching through the woods.
Another photo proudly shared on Facebook.
If I remember correctly, we had at least three deer
rifles, a couple of smaller-caliber rifles, at least one shotgun, and a
revolver. We had a gun rack in our truck. My father often carried .22 shells
around in his pocket, just out of habit. Guns were just a fixture in the house.
And, all of our guns, except the revolver, were strictly for hunting. I don’t recall
my father ever explicitly mentioning self-defense as a reason to have any of
our guns, though maybe that just went without saying.
So, I do understand how “normal” it feels for many
Americans to have guns. I understand the “benign” use of guns by hunters,
though I long ago stopped hunting myself and have no plans to start again. I understand that some people want guns for personal security, though I think that's often exaggerated. I
might even understand shooting for sport, especially if it’s for target
practice and not just for the “thrill” of it.
What I don’t understand is the fetishism surrounding
guns, or the pervasive fear of “tyrannical” governments that apparently grips
so many supporters of “gun rights”. Many gun advocates say that guns are merely
“tools”, but it seems to me that for far too many of them, guns have become
more than that. Guns have almost taken on a mystical quality, becoming
practically an object of worship for some people.
If that sounds like I’m going too far, then you
can’t deny that some people have ascribed guns with an importance that goes far
beyond their actual use in everyday life (which hopefully is rare). They have
become emotionally invested in guns in a way that to me seems irrational, or unhealthy,
or just silly. Why else would anyone dream up a new holiday, “Gun Appreciation Day” (which happens to be today) if they weren’t, um, a little too attached to
their firearms?
The same goes for the delusional notion that
privately held guns are all that’s holding back those menacing black helicopters full
of “jack-booted government thugs” (to use the elegant phrasing of Wayne LaPierre, the CEO of the NRA) that are ready to swoop in and oppress Constitution-loving Americans.
That is a long way from shooting contests or rabbit hunting. It’s a long way down
into one very strange rabbit-hole.
Finland itself is a country with a strong hunting
culture and one of the highest levels of gun ownership of any nation in Europe
(reportedly something like 32 to 45 guns per 100 people, compared to America’s
86). But I know no one here who obsesses over firearms the way I see many
Americans doing. None of my Finnish friends ever shares gun-related memes on
Facebook (it’s not a political issue here). And I can’t imagine anyone here
posting a video on Youtube openly threatening a killing spree if even the
smallest measures are taken to restrict access to guns.
In short, Finland doesn’t have “gun culture”, and I
wish America didn’t either. I for one won’t be wishing anyone a Happy Gun
Day today.
Back in 1986, after living in Finland for
four years, I returned to the States to study journalism at the University of
Georgia. One of the courses I took on my way to a non-existent future job in
the Fourth Estate was “International Communications”, a course that surveyed
what passes for journalism in different corners of the globe.
Part of the coursework for this class
involved each student giving a presentation about the media of some foreign
country. Naturally, I chose Finland.
Luckily, I happened to have a prop I could
use for my presentation, an actual copy of a Finnish newspaper, in fact the
country’s premier paper, the Helsingin Sanomat.
Hesari, as Finns like to call it, is
something of an institution here, a 124-year-old broadsheet that is practically
revered by a nation that is one of the most voraciously literate in the world.
Looking at it in an American context, Hesari enjoys the gravitas and pedigree
of The New York Times, but with 15 times the readership on a
per capita basis).
The paper is said to have the biggest
circulation of any in the Nordic countries, amazing when you consider that,
population-wise, Finland is smaller than Denmark and roughly half the size of
Nordic heavyweight Sweden. Another way to look at it is that Hesari enjoys a
near-monopoly status not matched by say, Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s
biggest broadsheet daily.
In Finland, some 400,000 (or 8% of the
population) subscribe to Hesari, which supposedly reaches 75% of households in
the home market of Greater Helsinki. That’s something I’m sure the Times could
never even aspire to. In short, it’s damn near ubiquitous.
So, it’s no surprise that it was a big
deal this week when the Helsingin Sanomat switched from a
broadsheet format to tabloid size. I’m sure there was some trepidation about
what the change would mean for this icon of Finnish media. TV news crews were
on hand at the factory as the last broadsheet copies came off the presses, and
the nation had to wait a full day without Hesari in any format before it,
reborn as a not-so-broadsheet, again hit the streets early Tuesday morning.
From what I’ve heard, mostly second-hand,
the Finnish public has adjusted well enough to having its printed news squeezed
into a narrower space. I haven’t seen the new version myself, since we took the
opportunity to move completely from paper to an on-line subscription (with the
bonus of giving us an excuse to finally buy an iPad).
Even with its new size, Hesari still
follows a policy that's unique when it comes to deciding what goes the front
page. Basically, it comes down to money. Page One content is always determined
by who’s willing to pay for it.
I still remember how, when I made my
little presentation in Athens almost thirty years ago, even the professor was
somewhat surprised when I held up my copy of Hesari. The reason is that the
front page was covered with nothing but advertisements (and costly ones, too).
That’s how Hesari does it. Journalistic content starts only on page two, making
this paper probably the only national daily anywhere to take this, um, “up
front” approach to advertizing.
And so, in keeping with this tradition,
the front page of the very last broadsheet edition, issued on Sunday, featured
an appropriately traditional ad, one for an 80-year-old brand of cheese called
“Koskenlaskija” (which translates roughly as “rapids skier”).
The full-page ad, with its vintage graphic
of a rather determined-looking blond-headed log driver navigating through
whitewater rapids, seems like a perfect way to evoke the long history of a
venerable newspaper willing to rock the boat a little by making a big change --
and sell a little cheese at the same time.