Day 87

Day 87 of Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine. It’s been a busy week for Finland. On Monday the Finnish parliament debated NATO membership for 14 hours. How much debate there was, is itself debatable, since when the vote was held the next day there was overwhelming support for the move, with only 8 parliament members voting against it (out of 200), mostly from the Left Alliance party.

Following the vote, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, declared that Finland and Sweden joining NATO doesn’t really matter to the Kremlin after all. Which begs the question: if a neighboring country joining NATO is no big deal, then what was all that rigamarole about Russia having no choice but to invade Ukraine because a neighboring country even contemplating joining the western alliance could not be tolerated by Russia.

The following day Finland, along with Sweden, formally delivered its application to Jens Stoltenberg, general secretary of NATO and fellow Nordic. The day after that, Finnish president Sauli Niinistö traveled straight from Sweden, where he was making a state visit (prompted by the NATO application), to Washington to meet with Joe Biden. Sauli’s been busy. 

And he did manage to talk by phone to Putin last week, expressing his view of Finland’s situation in a clear and straightforward manner. Putin, in turn, told Niinistö that Finland would be making a mistake by joining NATO. Which seems to fly in the face of what Lavrov said.

The Russians are saying a lot of things. Someone on Russian state TV explained that the USSR never invaded Finland in 1939, but rather merely “moved our borders deeper into Finland”. Defense Minister Shoigu also said last week that Sweden and Finland’s membership in NATO would force Russia to create 12 army “units and division” in the military district bordering Finland.

As of 7:00 this morning, Russia shut off the pipeline supplying natural gas to Finland. Luckily, Finland is not very dependent on gas in general, and the government has just signed a 10-year contract with an American company to lease the ship Exemplar, a “floating storage and regasification vessel” to help Finland import gas from other sources.

A small brewery in Savonlinna, not that far from the border that the USSR "moved" in 1939, is now marketing NATO-inspired beer, called "OTAN", which happens to be the French acronym for NATO and the Finnish word for "I take", commonly used when taking a good, hearty swig of beer. The Olof Brewing is planning to ship some samples to Joe Biden and Jens Stoltenberg. No word whether they will send some to Putin. 

Recently, I happened to notice that our cable TV package now includes, along with CNN, BBC, etc., the Nickelodeon cartoon channel – in Ukrainian. Unexpected. The only explanation I can come up with is that it’s for the benefit of Ukrainian children who are now in Finland as refugees. Though it’s true that, even before the war, Ukrainians has made up a large part of seasonal labor force in Finland. Whether there will be fewer Ukrainian strawberry pickers this summer due to men remaining in Ukraine to fight, I have no idea.  

Unvaxxed Nation Wipe Out

The number of new COVID cases in Finland, as in many places, are rising as we enter the pandemic’s 4^th wave. Despite that, it feels like things are going well.

Or maybe it just feels that way personally for me, since I’m now fully vaccinated, and soon (two weeks after the second dose) can travel again outside Finland, at least to certain counties. Estonia is one place we might visit before summer is over.

Looking on the bright side, there have been only two COVID deaths in Finland in the past two weeks, only five for the entire month of July. Hospitalizations are still lower than at the beginning of the 2^nd wave. People are going to restaurants, theaters. In some sense, things seem to be getting better.

Especially compared to the US, the land of my birth, where it seems the whole country has gone bonkers, even if it has a decent full-vaccination rate of almost 50%. That is admittedly higher than Finland’s 31%. (One explanation for Finland’s lower rate is that, facing a shortage in the supply of vaccine, Finland spaced out the two doses 3 months apart, compared to 3 weeks in the States. There is a lag here in the everyone getting the second dose.)

I think Finland will catch up with the US soon. While doing a better job at vaccination at the outset, progress in US is now stalling. It’s clear why – right-wing politics. Of the 30 states that have administered vaccinations below the national rate (below 50%) all but four of voted for Donald Trump. All of the remaining 20 that have done better, vaccinating over half their populations, were Biden states. Nothing could be plainer. For many, failure to get vaccinated is a political act.

And there are consequences. Three states now account for 40% of all new COVID cases: Florida (48% vaccination rate), Texas (43%), Missouri (41%). Those states make up only 17% of the US population, so they are obviously are punching above their weight when it comes to helping the spread of the delta variant.

The consequences are also deadly. Unvaccinated Americans now account for some 97% of COVID deaths. That shows the vaccines are working. Vaccinated folks are much, much less likely to die from COVID. Given that fact, it’s baffling why anyone without genuine medical reasons would refuse a free, safe way to lower their risk of infection. Baffling, but these folks are, of course, powerless against the right-wing media machine that has been fueling vaccine skepticism. 

A host on Newsmax recently floated the idea that vaccines in general go against nature by preventing “a certain amount of people” from being wiped out, like that was a bad thing. It’s true, of course, that vaccines do that, but that’s the point of vaccines. We want them to stop nature from wiping people out.

Considering that the Americans being wiped out are predominately the unvaccinated -- you could say, predominately Trump-supporting conservatives -- you would think hosts on Newsmax and other right-wing outlets would want their prime target audience protected. Apparently, you would be wrong.

Self-destructive antivaccination fervor is nothing new.
Cartoon from the 1930s. 

 

Commonsense Voting in Finland

Yesterday, I voted in the Finnish presidential election for the first time. But it’s not the first time I’ve voted here. (Non-citizen permanent residents can vote in municipal elections.) And as always, I’m impressed with how simple it is.

I showed up at the polling place (our local school), stood in line for some minutes (the place was busy and overall turnout was almost 70% nationwide, 80% in my neighborhood), and presented my driver’s license. The poll worker ticked my name off the list of registered voters and gave me a blank ballot, which I took to the booth and marked with the number of my candidate (there were eight to choose from). Then I dropped it in the ballot box (an actual box) after another poll worker stamped it. 

If not for the long line, I would have been in and out in about three minutes. As it was, it took about 15.

I could have used my passport as my ID, as many folks were doing. That’s proof of identity and citizenship. But a driver’s license is enough, since it’s an official photo ID. What makes the whole thing even simpler is that I’ve never had to bother registering to vote. I’m registered automatically, based on where I live. If I ever moved somewhere else, I would automatically be registered to vote there. Also, election day always a Sunday, when most people aren't working. Seems like an obvious choice. And I'm even talking about advanced voting and arrangements made for people who can't easily make it to polling places.

If you ask me, compared to the way voting is done in the States, the system here is so much more sensible. It's clearly geared to making casting a ballot as easy as possible, which is the way it should be in a democracy.  Or, at least, so you would think.

A Stupid Question

This is a stupid question, but also a serious one. 

Why is the National Anthem played, and people expected to stand, at every pro sports event in the US? As far as I know, this doesn’t happen at hockey or soccer games in Finland, unless it’s an international game. 

If this happens at sports venues, why not at other places where Americans gather in public? Like at movie theaters? You could imagine that after the commercials and trailers of upcoming features, just before the lights go down for the movie itself, a giant American flag would fill the screen and the Anthem would start in surround sound, while the audience rises to its feet. 

Likewise, why not at the ballet, the opera? Why doesn’t every university class begin with the Anthem? Or every business meeting? Or the beginning of every workday in the office? Or the beginning of every shift at the factory? Or every church service, so that before the preacher steps up to the altar, the congregation would stand, forget about God for a moment and gaze lovingly at the flag while the choir sings a lovely rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”? 

And should it be only at gatherings? Why not in out in public? There could be speakers on every street corner that would blare out at regular times, or even randomly, a recording of the Anthem, forcing pedestrians to stop and display their patriotism by standing with their hands over their hearts for a couple of minutes before hurrying on down the sidewalk. 

Why only at sports events? 

Language Learning, Or Not So Much

I can’t say I have a head for learning languages. Not by a long shot. That’s unfortunate, since I ended up in a situation where being a fully functioning member of society requires speaking a tongue that is not my own. And to my great shame I still haven’t got the hang of it.

To make matters worse in some sense, I’m surrounded by people who fluently speak at least two languages, sometimes three or even more. It's not at all unusual here. Finland is clearly a polyglot place, very much unlike where I was born.

As a kid growing up in the mountains of rural North Georgia, I probably encountered very few foreign words -- except perhaps, when I think about it, the word ”parfait”. That was the name of an ice-cream treat at the local Dairy Queen. Whether it was actually perfect, I can’t recall. Probably not bad.

In those days, I might have also occasionally run across some non-English words on T.V., though the only example I can be sure of was “Jawohl!” barked out now and then on “Hogan’s Heroes” the 60s situation comedy set in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II. And I'm sure I sometimes watched Lucille Ball being on the receiving of some choice words from Desi Arnaz in Spanish.

However, my first real exposure to languages other than English probably came in my maternal grandmother’s house, where I spent a decent amount of time as a kid. Grandma Davis had been a school teacher, and most likely had more books than most folks of her generation in my rural county.

One of those books -- in fact, the only one I really remember -- was a specialized dictionary, the Britannica World Language Dictionary, which provided translations of English words in six languages.

The book’s format was simple. On the left side of the page was a column of English words, listed alphabetically. Running from the right of each English word was its equivalent in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Yiddish. At the time, I was puzzled by Yiddish. I’d never heard of such a language, though I could see it appeared somewhat similar to German.

I remember being fascinated by the dictionary, seeing how you could say something in other languages. I recall in particular encountering the German words weiss and wein and thinking it was cool that by combining them you get “white wine”. As a child, I probably didn’t have any inappropriate thirst for weisswein. Maybe it was just the alliteration that appealed to me.

Maybe because of this early brush with the language, I always somehow felt a desire to learn German. For a long time, it was an unfulfilled desire. I suspect not many American high schools offer classes in German even now, but certainly not in the 70s in the rural Appalachian Mountains.

In any case, the only foreign language taught at my high school was French, which was a recommended subject for students planning to go on to college.

It was an exotic notion to study French, and I was excited to start the class. Even today I can recite (more or less) the first bit of dialogue of Français that we learned.

«Papa, mangeons dans un restaurant ce soir.» «Oui, Papa. Dinons en ville.» «Excellente idée, mais demandez à Maman d'abord.» «Ah, non. Ne parlez pas du restaurants ce soir.» «Pourquoi pas, Maman.» «Le dîner est sur la table.»

“Papa, let’s eat in a restaurant tonight.” “Yes, Papa, let’s eat in town.” “Excellent idea, but ask Mama first.” “Ah, don’t talk about restaurants tonight.” “Why not, Mama?” “Dinner is on the table.”

Unfortunately, after a while, despite a really fine French teacher, my attention span fizzed and my enthusiasm waned. I believe I studied a full three quarters, but ended up not doing so well with the French I took.

I’ve put my high-school French to use only rarely and to doubtful effect. The first time was probably in 1983 when my future wife and checked into a mostly empty campground near the coast of Normandy. Unsure where we could pitch our tent, I inquired of the campground’s matron with a “Où?” She understood well enough to answer -- with a Gallic shrug – by pointing around in different directions. I didn't improve much on that over the years. When we hiked in the Alps a few years ago, my French was no use at all and we had to depend on one of our sons to parle with fellow trekkers.

Anyway, that was French. When I went to the University of Georgia, I finally got my chance to study German. As with French, the first bit of German text we learned persisted in my memory:

„Hallo und guten Tag! Mein Name ist Bill Becker, und ich bin ein Amerikaner aus Chicago. Aber ich bin jetzt in Deutschland. Wo in Deutschland? In Marburg. Ich studiere hier. Was studiere ich? Deutsche: die Sprache und die Kultur.“

“Hello and good day. My name is Bill Becker, and I am an American from Chicago. But now I am in Germany. Where in Germany? In Marburg. I study here. What do I study? German: the language and the culture.”

I used to amuse my kids by reciting that. At least, I thought they were amused.

In the end, I took four quarters of German at UGA (compare this to my wife, who took the pitkä kurssi in German, that is, seven years). One of my teachers was an American with an appearance and vibe creepily similar to the Gestapo agent Toht from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” You got the sense that he was drawn to the German language for the wrong reasons.

Another teacher, my favorite, was an East German with an iconic Teutonic name -- which I won’t reveal, since after googling him, I see he’s still teaching in the States. Let’s call him Otto. He was tall, with blond hair and sharp, angular features you find in the villainous German characters typecasted in almost every American war movie.

Since this was 1978, a decade before the Berlin Wall fell and his countrymen could easily travel abroad, I got the impression that Otto came from some privileged, highly placed East German family. He had a slightly imperious air about him. He would sometimes lecture us on the faults of capitalist, and once brought to class a handful of empty food packaging from McDonald’s -- visual aids to berate us with over the wastefulness of the American throw-away society (which, natürlich, was true).

Otto also had a second job teaching at a private school near Atlanta, some 80 miles (130 km) away, and he often complained of getting speeding tickets as he tried to shuttle between the two schools, apparently at Autobahn speeds.

He once taught us how to say, “Step on it, Goddammit” in Norwegian, which seemed slightly sinister to me. He was a character.

I’ve gotten a bit more mileage out of my German. In the past, I sometimes used it as a “secret language” with my wife if we wanted to keep the kids in the dark about what we were discussing. Otherwise, I’ve hardly ever used it with actual Germans, even though I once worked for a half-German company and made regular business trips to München.

At the Baltic port of Travemünde back in the early 80s, as my wife and I waited to get a flat tire repaired at a service station, a man said something to me which I naturally didn’t understand. In response, I said “Ich spreche kein Deutsch.” (“I speak no German.“)

He corrected me: “Nein, du sprichst schlecht Deutsch.” (“No, you speak bad German.”) Genau!

So, that was German. When I briefly went back to university to study journalism in the late 80s, I decided to take another stab at language learning, apparently just for the hell of it. In this case, it was Spanish. And it was for one quarter only, so no hablo mucho Español. Obviously.

Even from that single course in Spanish, I came away with one little language artifact. My teacher was a Spaniard, as in from Spain across the ocean -- and this in a hemisphere of almost 420 million native Spanish speakers. Because of her, I learned the Old World Spanish pronunciation of the letter “c” (before “i” or “e”), that is, the Castilian pronouncement. For this reason, I think of Barcelona as “Barthelona”.  

I’m bizarrely proud of this, though that doesn't speak well for my solidarity with my fellow New Worlders in Latin America. As it is, we don’t talk with each other that much anyway.

I’d like to think that if I had remained living in the States, I would have actually learned Spanish. It is, after all, America’s de facto second language.

And then there’s Finnish, which I’ve been struggling to learn for, well, for decades, despite dozens of books and courses and living fulltime in the country where people speak it constantly. I have no excuse other than, as I said, I don’t have a head for languages.

That’s five languages I’ve studied, and still haven’t come close to mastering any of them, except for English – and I may be regressing with that one.

But I'm not stopping, it seems. I’ve now gotten hooked on the online language-learning apt, Duolingo.

I can't be sure how effective Duolingo really is as a learning tool. But its game-like format (with positive reinforcement through "rewards” and triumphant sound effects, and your progress marked by reaching different "levels" and other metrics) makes it a “fun” approach to language study. If nothing else, it’s a decent way to spend time, educational, you might say. And, similar to crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia, it’s available for free.

It currently offers English-speakers the chance to learn some 20 languages, mostly European, but also Vietnamese and Swahili. Other courses are under development (“hatching” in Duolingo parlance), including Japanese, Hindi, and...Klingon! Unfortunately, not Finnish. Not yet. Obviously, that’s harder to implement than Klingon.

I started doing occasional Duolingo lessons in German and French three or four years ago, just to brush up on those two. When the long-awaited Russian course was added in late 2015, I begun that one, too. And just recently I started studying the language of another neighboring country, namely Swedish.

It’s true that “studying” these four languages simultaneously may not be wise, especially when I've got much more Finnish still to learn. But that’s the way I do it, generally one lesson of each language every day. The lessons are short, so it usually takes about half-an-hour to do all four. In other words, it doesn’t eat up much of my day.

Am I learning anything? Well, according to Duolingo’s algorithm, I am now 42% fluent in French – my wife often chokes on her café au lait when I boast about this fact.

In German, my fluency is 33% and in Swedish it’s already 27%, although I started it only six months ago. It’s such a damn easy language. So far, Duolingo hasn’t given me a fluency score for Russian (which is NOT an easy language), but that course still seems to be very much a work in progress. It wouldn’t be an impressive score anyway. It’s fair to say I am struggling with Russian. 

But considering my track record with languages, that should come as no surprise.

Helsinki Votes: Christian Democrats

In the Helsinki City Council election this Sunday, one of the mainstream parties vying for my vote is the Christian Democrats (Kristillisdemokraatit). It’s a somewhat minor party, currently holding only two seats in the city council and only five in the national parliament.

The national party is led by Sari Essayah, a 50 year-old woman who I still more often think of as a champion race walker. She competed in the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. She also enjoys, in a sense, some name-recognition due to having a decidedly non-Finnish family name, Essayah, which comes from her Moroccan father.

As I scanned the list of KD’s 123 candidates displayed on a placard at the end of my street last week, I was shocked to see among them Paavo Väyrynen, a veteran Finnish politician. Very veteran. He’s been around forever. What surprised me was that, as far as I knew, Väryrynen has always been a member of a different party, the Keskusta, for which he has been a parliament and cabinet member and two-time presidential candidate. And, I thought he lives in Lapland, at least officially, not Helsinki. As it turns out, in the KD list he is marked as sitoutumaton (unaffiliated), which means he’s attaching his wagon to the Christian Democrats only for this race.

As the name Christian Democrat implies – well not implies, but states outright – the party is based on a particular religion and reflects the concerns of the more religious elements of the Finland population. My sense is that KD supporters are drawn mostly from Lutherans, and not so much from the Russian Orthodox.

As an openly religious party, you might compare the KD to America’s Republican Party, which is now, more than ever, an implicitly Christian party, despite recently electing the most un-Christ-like president you can possibly imagine.

But there are big differences. On the KD’s website (available in Finnish, Swedish, and English), you’ll find that its concerns are mainly health and well-being for families and the environment.

Some of the specific aims detailed in what might be called its manifesto for the municipal elections, entitled in English “Called to Care”, are such goals as: 

• Services for families must be increased to support parenthood and to help manage everyday life.
• School performance must be improved. Finland succeeds with know-how.
• We want mould resistant municipalities. [For Americans, this would be "mold resistant".]
• We want a comprehensive [health] service promise. Treatment must be available quickly and neighbourhood services accessible. Health inequalities have to be decreased.
• We defend smooth and affordable public transport

Missing from the list are many of the hot-button issues that get Republican Christians in the US so riled up. There’s no mention of abortion. There’s certainly no mention of same-sex marriage or which public bathroom a transgender person should be allowed to use. No mention of "religious freedom". (Of course, you might not expect such national-level issues to feature in local elections anyway.)

Now, I can’t say for certain that such culturally conservative topics aren’t, in fact, motivating issues for some Christians in Finland, and maybe even internally within the Christian Democratic Party. 

But, if so they aren’t widely discussed, perhaps due to the fact that such socially conservative views would be considered far outside the Finnish mainstream. Religious Finns don’t typically wear their faith on their sleeves the way Americans do and certainly don't political about it. You might say this reflect a general Finnish "live-and-let live" attitude.  Or maybe it's a reluctance to stray far outside a relatively narrow consensus of society.  

In any case, the word “Christian” (or any kind of reference to religion) appears only once in the KD "manifesto", in the following statement:

• Let’s play Suvivirsi. We cherish the Christian cultural heritage of Finland.

Now, this is an interesting issue, and it involves a song. 

Suvivirsi, which translates to “Summer Hymn”, is a song about the end of the school year and the beauty of the approaching summer. As any parent who has attended a year-end grammar-school happening will tell you, Suvivirsi is a firmly embedded Finnish traditional. After the schoolkids have finished their little plays and musical performances, after the ceremonious handing out of certificates for graduating students, after the fidgeting of the kids in the audience reaches a critical mass, everyone in the auditorium stands up and sings Suvivirsi as a long-awaited denouement to the school year.

In years past, I took part in this sing-along many times but, as with any song in Finnish, I was able to only hum along, since I had no clue about the lyrics. Everyone else in the auditorium knew the words by heart. And it’s an issue over those words – including a couple of references to God, the Creator – that has caused the song to be specifically mentioned in KD’s manifesto.

I have heard that, as highly secular Finland has become perhaps more conspicuously less Christian than in years past, Suvivirsi has created a controversy of some sort. 

Some people have questioned why schoolkids who are non-religious or of another faith, for example Muslim, should have to sing a hymn that flatters a Lutheran deity. I think there may even be cases where schools have already dispensed with the song altogether. This, naturally, can rub some people the wrong way.

Since our kids left school some years ago I can't say if anything has actually changed at our local school. I'm guessing the song is still being sung at the end of the year, the lyrics unchanged. And, personally, I don’t see why this should be a big deal.

Okay, it’s true that it’s a Lutheran hymn, referencing Jumala (“God”) and Herra (“Lord”). So, the song obviously assumes some religious belief. Naturally, I can't say for certain how Muslims see it, but – wading into some tricky theological waters here – I’ve understood they worship the same “God” as the Lutherans do, so singing a line or two about that god shouldn’t seem so out of line. Perhaps they would take issue with Herra, which I assume refers to Jesus. Still, how much of an affront should this be to the average Muslim? Again, I can't claim any special insight to that question. 

In many ways, it's the atheists who should have more cause for objecting to Suvivirsi. and perhaps do. Yet, I know atheists, principally in my own family, who have no problem with singing it. They see it as more "cultural", than actually "religious". I tend to agree. Perhaps another example of the Finnish live-and-let-live attitude. 

In any case, Suvivirse may be a natural talking point for the Christian Democrats that sets them apart from most of the other parties, but I can't imagine it will be a big enough issue to garner another Helsinki City Council seat or two. Guess we'll see after Sunday's election. 

Street-level Elections

A week from today, Finland will hold elections for kunnat (basically county-level municipalities). These are held across the nation every four years and have a major impact on local governance. (Well, duh!)

In the case of Helsinki, this means electing the Helsinki City Council, which is made up of 85 members, almost as big as the US Senate.

As a legal resident of Finland, I’ve been eligible to vote in these local elections for a couple of decades already, long before I became a citizen. I usually vote for the Greens.

I can’t claim to be an expert on Finnish politics, other than having a rough idea where the major parties stand on the political spectrum. And in truth, Finland, being a very consensus-minded country, with regard to many issues there aren’t large gaps between major parties.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to profile, over several posts, at least some of the parties involved in the Helsinki election. But, of course, first I needed to acquaint myself with who’s running.

The most concrete way to do that is check out the old-school placards displayed in long, purpose-built metal frames located around the city. One of these is set up every election season in the same spot in our neighborhood, on the sidewalk at the end of my street opposite a garden supply store. You can’t miss it.

The empty frame appeared there already a couple of weeks ago and has gradually been filled with placards from different parties listing all their candidates in the Helsinki race.

A few days ago, I took a walk down the street to take a look. About half of the spots in the frames were still empty, with placards absent from some of the major parties, such as Kokoomus and the Swedish People's Party.

The parties that were represented were: 

• Feminist Party (Feministinen puolue)
• Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP) (Suomen Sosialidemokraattinen Puolue)
• Greens (Vihreät)
• Christian Democrats (Kristillisdemokraatit)
• Independence Party (Itsenäisyyspuolue)
• Communist Labor Party (Kommunistinen Työväenpuolue)
• Finnish Center Party (Suomen Keskusta)
• Finnish Communist Party (Suomen kommunistinen puolue)
• Pirate Party (Piraattipuolue)
• Liberal Party (Liberaalipuolue)
• Martti Linnoaro (some guy with no party affiliation “sitoutumaton”)

I’ll try to cover at least some of these parties in the next few days -- maybe starting with the Christians. 

Count Forrest Gump of Finland

On our short trip to St. Petersburg last summer, my wife and I mostly stuck to the typical tourist spots as we wandered around that historic, sprawling city – with one exception, that is.

At my wife’s suggestion, we paid a visit to a cemetery a bit off the beaten path. Now and then, while on holiday, we somehow find ourselves in random graveyards, as ghoulish as that sounds, so this wasn’t so unusual for us.

In the case of this graveyard visit, however, we had a specific goal in mind.

The year before, a colleague of my wife’s had sought out a little-known cemetery while on a work trip to St. Petersburg. He was looking for one grave in particular, the final resting place of a Finnish nobleman with some historical connections to the part of Eastern Finland that my wife’s colleague (and my wife, for that matter) hail from.

This would be southern Savo, a beautiful and quiet part of Finland. Very, very quiet. Other than in the region’s principle town of Mikkeli (pop. just over 50,000), there’s not a lot of “bustling” going on there.

This is especially true in Ristiina, a tiny village south of Mikkeli where the man buried in St. Petersburg lived over 200 years ago, in a house that my wife’s colleague is helping to restore.

As sleepy and unassuming as the village is now, it would be hard to imagine the colorful life led by its former resident, including an unfortunate turn of events in vicinity of Mikkeli itself. 

Count Sprengtporten

Count Georg Magnus Sprengtporten was not a native of Savo. He had been born in 1740 in Borgå (Porvoo, in Finnish) on the southern coast of what was then the eastern part of the Kingdom of Sweden. I, for one, had never heard of him and had to search the Internet to pick up scattered details of his life. In some ways, I may have only scratched the surface, but I hope I got the basic facts right.

As a young Swedish aristocrat and army officer, Sprengtporten first made a name for himself in the Seven Years’ War, which American school kids will know as the “French and Indian War” -- if they know anything about it at all. In what was arguably the first truly “world war”, Sweden played only a small part, joining in on the side of France, Russia and Spain against a coalition of Britain, Prussia and Portugal, mainly to regain territory it had lost to Prussia earlier. Sprengtporten served with distinction in this unsuccessful attempt to reassert Swedish control on the southern Baltic coast.

A decade later, the Count helped his older half-brother Baron Jacob Magnus Sprengtporten in the surprise mutiny and (apparently) bloodless capture of the Sveaborg Fortress (Suomenlinna, in Finnish) off the coast of Helsinki, effectively seizing control of all of Finland as part of a plot to install a new king in Stockholm, Gustav III.

Under the new regime, Sprengtporten was then appointed as a prominent military leader in Savo, where he commanded a brigade and founded an early cadet school in, you guessed it, Ristiina -- in fact, in the house my wife’s colleague has helped to restore. (The school was later moved to Hamina and became Finland’s premier military school.)

Sprengtporten and his brother Jacob, meanwhile, became increasingly dissatisfied by how they had been treated by Gustav, and following a visit to St. Petersburg Georg began to feel more appreciated by the Russians.

Around this time, he also hired himself out in the service of France, where he came into contact with the ambassador from a newly independent nation on the east coast of North America. This elder statesman, a true renaissance man and creator of, among many other things, bifocal eye-glasses and pithy sayings, was of course Benjamin Franklin.

The Smolenka Lutheran Cemetery

Partly influenced by Franklin, Sprengtporten returned to Finland with the notion of splitting Finland off from the rest of the Swedish Kingdom. This led him to enter into an ill-fated conspiracy with the Swedish king’s brother, among other schemes aimed at bringing about some kind of Finnish autonomy.

The Count wasn’t the only one entertaining embryonic thoughts of independence. Officers in the Suomenlinna garrison were grumbling in secret among themselves about the new war that Gustav had started with Russia for purely political reason. At least some of those officers went on to clandestinely approach Russia, seeking an end to the fighting and perhaps support for Finnish independence, in what became known as the Anjala Conspiracy.

By that point, Sprengtporten had already switched sides. Enticed by Gustav’s cousin, Catherine the Great, the Count put himself at the service of the Russian Empress. When the war with Sweden broke out, he was sent to lead Russian troops in a campaign in what was to him familiar territory in Savo, not far from Ristiina.

In the Battle of Porrassalmi, Russian troops under Sprengtporten’s command marched from the south against Mikkeli, which was defended by a much smaller Swedish force. Despite this, the Russians were defeated and Sprengtporten was badly wounded.

Following the disaster at Porrassalmi, the Count lost the faith and favor of Catherine. Apparently thinking it wise to lay low for a time, he took up residence in Bohemia, in present-day Czech Republic, in the town of Teplice. There, he struck up a friendship with the librarian of a nearby castle, a man by the name of Casanova, who was (and is) better known for tending to something other than dusty books.

Sprengtporten's gravestone.

After Catherine’s death, Sprengtporten once again found himself in the employ of Russia, when the new emperor, Catherine’s estranged son Paul, sent him in 1800 to negotiate with Napoleon over the issue of Malta. Bonaparte had captured the island-nation, ruled by the Knights of Malta Catholic order, while on his way to conquer Egypt. Napoleon was determined to expel the defeated knights from the island, and Sprengtporten’s mission was to arrange for a large number of them to be granted refuge in St. Petersburg.

Following Tsar Paul’s assassination, Sprengtporten was again on the outs with Russian rulers for a number of years. He once more rose to some prominence in 1808 when he was appointed as Russia’s first Governor-General of Finland, after the new tsar, Alexander, won Finland from Sweden in the Napoleonic Wars. Sprengtporten held the position for only a year.

Benjamin Franklin, Casanova, Napoleon, plus various royalty – there’s almost a Forrest Gump vibe to Sprengtporten’s life. And now he’s buried, mostly forgotten, in a somewhat decrepit cemetery in St. Petersburg.

On my wife’s colleague’s visit to the cemetery, the location of the grave sadly eluded him. Still, his quest sparked my wife’s interest, so one afternoon we strolled from our hotel to the other, decidedly not touristy, side of Vasilievsky Island with a vague idea where the cemetery should be.

Following the very narrow and tranquil (you might even say, almost stagnant) Smolenka River we passed through a riverside park where groups of citizens were cooking on braziers and enjoying an early evening drink or two until we came to a bridge that crosses to Decemberists’ Island, directly opposite the heavily wooded Smolenka Lutheran Cemetery.

We really had no idea how we’d find the grave, but we were lucky in that at the cemetery entrance stood a large obviously new signboard listing the most notable of the people buried within. It was almost entirely in Cyrillic. We don’t speak Russia, but by searching for the right dates of birth and death we quickly located the correct bit of text:

СПРЕНГТПОРТЕН Егор Максимович

(Georg Markus) (1740 – 1819)

Граф, генерал от инфантерии, первый русский генера губернатор-Финляндии.

участок 5

Which translates to...

Sprengtporten Egor Maksimovich

Count, general of the infantry, the first Russian general-governor of Finland.

Plot 5

It didn’t take long searching plot 5 to find a tall, stone monument in better shape than many of the surrounding, half-ruined gravestones. It was inscribed on one side in French “Ici repose la dépouille mortelle de George Magne Comte de Sprentporten”. Voilà!

There was a newly laid stone path to the grave, a sign that the grave has recently been spruced up thanks to money from Finland.

And that, of course, would be fitting for a Finnish Count whose remarkable twists and turns in life included even a spell in bucolic Ristiina.

"Ici repose..."

Headscarves, Muslim and Otherwise

A conservative friend in the US recently shared a story on Facebook about a young chess player choosing to forego a chance to compete in this year's Women’s World Chess Championship in Iran. Nazí Paikidze-Barnes, a recent immigrant to the US, made this difficult decision mainly because of the requirement that she cover her head while in the country.

The point of my friend’s post was the notion that American feminists are not rallying to Paikidze-Barnes’ side because political correctness prevents them from criticizing Muslim customs.

A couple of days before that, a leftist friend in the US had shared a story on Facebook about Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s right-wing populist National Front party, refusing to wear a headscarf for a planned meeting with a leading Muslim cleric in Lebanon.

Similarly, the point of this friend’s post was the hypocrisy of liberal feminists’ for not applauding the feminist stance taken by Le Pen because, in this particular case, the stance was being taken by someone on the wrong end of the political spectrum.

Now, I can’t vouch for whether either of these points are valid. I don’t know what kind of response, if any, either of these events elicited from “feminists”. Perhaps my friends are correct in that these acts of female defiance were met by silence from advocates for women’s rights. In the case of Le Pen, I am aware of some skepticism on the left that her decision was a political stunt, though on the surface she was making what could be considered a feminist statement.

The whole question of whether foreign women should comply with local religious customs such as donning a headscarf seems to me to be a tricky one, though some folks are always ready with a knee-jerk reaction when the issues comes up.

It’s a delicate matter when outsiders comment on the practices of a religion. Or, let’s say, such comments are not always appreciated by the practitioners of the religion. Calling snake handlers "crazy" for handling snakes probably doesn’t make them want to embrace you. In many ways, it’s none of your concern what they do.

An exception in my mind, of course, is when actual violations of human rights are involved. Female genital mutilation, would be one example. And there are surely other, more subtle, cases of systematic human-rights transgressions against women made in the name of religion.

However, I’m not certain that being forced to wear a cloth over your head qualifies as one of these.

Like I say, it’s tricky. I might draw the line at a burka covering a woman’s entire face, since here in the West one requirement of an open and egalitarian society is the ability to look each person in the face on an equal basis. So, to my Western sensibilities, that seems different.

And as to whether Muslim women have a real choice in deciding to cover their hair or not, that is also tricky. I’ve heard many on TV profess that they freely choose to do so. Though you must wonder, within the confines of a religious community, how much free will there really is in such matters. Peer and family pressure isn’t easily ignored. Even so, maybe many Muslim women do genuinely take some kind of comfort in wearing the hijab. 

Still, as a completely secular person, I can completely understand how some women born outside that culture might, on principle, not agree to conform to a fundamentalist tradition.

A high-level manager in a company I used to work for was well-known (within the company, anyway) for refusing to make any business trips to Saudi Arabia if she had to wear a headscarf. Can’t blame her.

On the other hand, I can also see foreigners making small signs of respect and etiquette expected by their guests, though they may think these actions are completely silly.

I have removed my shoes when entering Hindu or Buddhist temples. On holiday, I have always taken off my hat when entering a Christian church, and made sure my sons did the same. This despite the fact that I am not a believer myself.

Last summer in St. Petersburg, my wife and I noticed that all the women approaching the grand Kazan Cathedral (a Christian church) had brought light scarves to cover their heads as they entered. You don’t see that in Finland. My wife didn’t have anything similar with her, so she fashioned a covering from a light sweater she happened to have along. It looked a bit funny, but it did the trick. Inside the crowded church, I believe I saw only one woman, rather elegant, without a scarf.

Likewise, in Venice a few years ago we weren’t allowed into the Basilica di San Marco until my wife and daughter, who were wearing shorts, covered their legs with light wrap-around skirts conveniently provided at the entrance.

There are similar strictures at the New Valamo Russian Orthodox monastery in Heinävesi, a popular destination for tourists. Well, for tourists in Eastern Finland, that is. Visitors are required to keep their knees and shoulders covered at all time. This applies to men as well.

Back in the 80s, when I tried to drive onto the campus of extremely conservative Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, we were allowed in only on the condition that my future wife, who again was wearing shorts, remained in the car. No exposed female knee flesh there! I wonder if it’s still the same.

Obviously, modesty in the name of piety is not associated only with Islam. Are these customs ridiculous? Yes, in a way. Do they do any harm to our personal dignity, beyond perhaps, in the case of women, to our fashion sense? Well, I guess that’s for each person to decide for him or herself. 

Albert Edelfelt's "Women Outside the Church at Ruokolahti" (1887).
Note all the headscarves. Lutheran headscarves. 

The Chinese Wildfire Hoax

Friends and family back in Georgia have been dealing lately with something out of the ordinary and outside my own experience -- a series of big wildfires scattered all across the Southern Appalachian mountains. One of the fires, the Rough Ridge fire in the Cohutta Mountains, is said to be perhaps the largest in North Georgia's history. I've seen satellite images of smoke covering the northernmost third of the state, reaching down to Atlanta and Athens. It seems a bit unreal.

If it's the same Rough Ridge area that I once went camping with my father and brother, then it is some very rugged terrain firefighters have having to contend with.

Of course, in the heavily wooded mountains of Georgia and North Carolina, there have always been the occasional forest fire, though none from the past that really stand out in my mind.

Back in the days when my father was young, there was the habit of burning off the underbrush in the mountains in springtime, all the better for the grazing cattle that farmers let range freely during the summer. But that practice ended long before I was born.

As a kid, I can recall seeing just one wildfire, from a distance at night. It formed a crooked orange line in the dark as it burned on the side of Talona Mountain (which we called Reed Mountain, for some reason), an isolated "monadnock" that rose within easy viewing distance of my family's home.

And when I was in college at Young Harris, essentially at the base of Brasstown Bald, Georgia's highest peak, there was once a fire somewhere in the area. It was serious enough that the Forest Service asked for students to volunteer to help with the fire fighting. My classes wouldn't allow me to join, but some of my friends did and came back to school at the end of the day sooty and looking a bit exhilarated. I did envy them for the experience.

In any case, never when I was living in Georgia would there be so many fires burning at the same time, especially in November. Typically, autumns were coolish, and a bit wet, not what I would think of as fire season. 

The photos and reports that I'm seeing now seems like a smaller-scale version of something out of the American West, where fire is often enough an inescapable part of life. I know a family in Colorado who had to evacuate their house a few years ago due to an approaching fire and can still point to the spot just across the road where the flames thankfully came to a halt. And this is not not far from Storm King Mountain, where 14 firefighters lost their lives in 1994, a grim reminder of the deadly and destructive power of uncontrolled fire. 

A couple of years ago, we were driving across northern Arizona when the news came over the radio that 19 "hot shot" firefighters had similarly died at Yarnell Hill some 60 miles to the south of us. Later that night, we could see a small fire burning on Dean Peak in the Hualapai Mountains near Kingman, the faint smell of smoke noticeable in the car as as we sped down Interstate 40. 

Of course, fire is also a huge concern in Finland, a country made up almost entirely of forests. Fire prevention is taken very seriously here, and a typical feature of the evening news in summer is the latest update on which parts of the country are under metsäspalovaroitus ("forest fire warning"), when open fires in woodlands is strictly forbidden. Sometimes the entire country is under such a warning. That was surely the case in the summer of 2006, which was incredibly dry. Finland avoided major fires then, but even in Helsinki you could sometimes not avoid the smell of smoke reaching all the way from across the border in Russia, where numerous fires burned out of control for days, due to the lack of resources or motivation to extinguish them. 

Luckily, no lives or structures have been lost to the North Georgia blazes, and at the moment smoke is the biggest threat to people. But the smoke, if nothing else, is unpleasant and potentially unhealthy. The Atlanta area was placed under a Code Red air quality alert, indicating the smoke can be harmful for everyone, not only children and those with respiratory ailments. 

And conditions don't seem likely to improve. Apparently, there's a chance of rain this weekend for the area, but before that temperatures are still expected to reach 24 C (75 F), which to me seems unnaturally high for a week before Thanksgiving.

Nowadays, when every little thing gets politicized, I'm amazed I haven't yet seen anyone trying to score political points over these unprecedented wildfires, and I hesitate to do it myself (a bit).

I've always been extremely annoyed by conservative pundits or talk show hosts who poke fun at the notion of global warning wherever there is an usually big winter storm somewhere. Erick Erickson comes to mind, declaring something like, "Well, with all the snow covering Buffalo right now, it sure looks like 'Global Warming' to me. Ha, ha, ha!" Or something like that. Appealing to the common sense of the common man.

Hearing this kind of nonsense always makes me want to pull my hair out, thinking "No you idiot, you have to look at the trend, the overall trend. You can't look at just one isolated event and declare that climate change is bogus." Especially, when the event goes against the prevailing trend.

By the same token, you should also guard against making too much of an unusual weather pattern when it seems to confirm the reality of climate change. You never hear folks like Erick Erickson doing that.

That said, rare drought conditions and historically bad wildfires certainly seem to fit predictions of a rapidly warming planet. You would think the warm, tinder-dry conditions in the Southern Appalachians in late autumn would make local people, many of whom voted for Donald Trump, stop and consider that maybe this is a sign of global warming. Maybe it's not a Chinese hoax after all, despite what Trump has claimed over and over again.

You would think they might finally take the issue seriously and be alarmed that the next head of the Environmental Protection Agency might well be a climate change denier.

Or, maybe not. Maybe they'll just breathe in the pungent smell of burning timber and, with a sense of self-satisfaction, think to themselves, "Ah, nothing to worry about. That smells like Trump's America to me!"

Wildfire in California, 2008. 
Photo: Bureau of Land Management.