Agent Provocateur

I got a notice in the mail some time ago that read:

”Varaamasi aineisto on noudettavissa valitsemastasi kirjastosta alla mainittuun päivään asti.”

Considering how long I’ve lived here in Finland, I can’t take any special pride in simply comprehending this short passage (though I do just a little bit – take pride, that is). I fully understood the meaning, even without resorting to a dictionary.

“Your reserved material can be picked up at your chosen library until the date mentioned below.”

Looking a bit more carefully at the text, however, I realized that despite understanding the gist of the sentence well enough, two words were in forms that were totally unknown to me.

Varaamasi and valitsemastasi were close enough to the root words (varata “to reserve” and valita “to choose”) that the basic meaning was obvious. But why was there a ”-ma-” inserted in each? Why did those two letters transform the words into “reserved” and “chosen”? It was an unexpected mystery.

You would think that after all my years of studying Finnish, off and on, I would have run across (or at least noticed) every possible quirk of grammar that Finnish has to throw at me. Apparently not.

To discover what exactly was this part of speech I’d been missing all this time, I started browsing through my favorite Finnish grammar book of the moment, Suomen kielioppia ulkomaalaisille, by Leila White. I can highly recommend it.

And there it was. A little gem of grammar I never knew existed – the agenttipartisiippi (agent participle). It turns out it’s very commonly used. Now that I know what it is, I see it everywhere. It haunts me.

After reading the explanation in White’s book, I realized my initial interpretation was slightly off the mark. Instead of “your reserved material”, varaamasi aineisto strictly speaking translates to “material reserved by you”. But, you get the idea.

An agenttipartisiippi is a word, formed from a verb, that modifies something (an object) by indicating an action performed on that object by an "agent". Though that sounds complicated, it does have its uses. It allows you to concisely pack a bit more information into a few words.

In the common Finnish expression (well, not really), lentävä sika, the word lentävä ("flying") modifies sika ("pig"). This is an example of the preesenspartisiippi (present participle), not the agenttipartisiippi, but we'll get there eventually. 

All we can derive from this phrase is that the sika is flying. As far as we know, the pig is simply flying under its own power. Well, why not?

But if we want to paint a slightly more realistic picture, where pigs don’t actually have wings, and talk instead about what (the object) the pig is flying, we can employ the agenttipartisiipi.

For “to fly”, that would be lentämä, which is formed by taking the third-person present plural of lentää (lentävät) and replacing the “‑vät” with “‑mä”. The “agent” doing the flying, in this case a pig, takes the genitive form, sian.

In my letter from the library, the “agent” – which would be me, since I’m the one who reserved the material – is indicated simply by the possessive suffix “‑si” in varaamasi. This allows you to dispense with using a separate word (sinun, in this case) for the agent. Damn simple stuff!

Returning to my flying pig example, all we have to do now is specify what the pig is flying, for example, a jet (or suihkukone). Putting it all together, we get sian lentämä suihkukone, “a jet flown by a pig”.

Another whimsical example would be prinssin suutelema sammakko (“a frog kissed by a prince”), and a much, much more serious one would be ihmiskunnan aiheuttama ilmastonmuutos (“climate change caused by humans”).

To be sure, there’s a certain economy in using the agent participle, though you can also get the same idea across by just saying “a jet, which a pig flies” (suihkukone, jota sika lentää).

That would surely be the easiest approach for struggling Finnish speakers such as myself, especially considering that the day I actually learn to use the agenttipartisiippi in speech – and not just recognize it when I see it – is the day that frogs, kissed by princes or not, will surely fly (Katso, prinssin suutelema sammakko lentää!).

Maybe even alongside pigs, with or without jets. 

A lentävä sika, if I've ever seen one.
Credit: Azu Toth

A Sick Business

The other day I ran across an article in the Atlantic Monthly that perfectly illustrates something that seems could happen only in America. I literally had to shake my head.

The writer, Olga Khazan, explains how the convoluted American insurance-based health care system is rife with pitfalls even for folks who have what is normally considered adequate insurance. For someone like me, who doesn’t have to deal with this sort of thing, it was an eye-opening read.

The main thrust of Khazan’s story was that fully covered Americans can still face unexpected medical bills, hassles with hospitals, and legal tussles with their insurers, all due to the byzantine nature of the American system.

One of the cases Khazan cites involves a Texas woman with a history of heart disease who began to have chest pains one day. When she and her husband became alarmed enough to seek medical help, they first shopped around. Finns reading this might be puzzled, but that is exactly what the couple did. They used a smart-phone app provided by their health insurance company to find a local health-care provider that would accept the woman’s insurance.

This is the approach reportedly advocated by some health-care experts and high-profile conservatives. Jeb Bush, the stealth GOP candidate for president, recently touted the “there’s an app for that” approach as the optimal alternative to Obamacare. The thinking is that what works best is a completely market-based system, where choosing medical treatment, even emergency treatment, is just like any other consumer choice – just like finding the shampoo or deodorant that suits you best. 

With the help of her phone app, the woman in Texas settled on a particular “stand-alone” emergency room, not a hospital, to treat her chest pain. Stand-alone ERs didn’t exist when I still lived in the US, and I’m sure we don’t have them here in Finland. I recall seeing one in a shopping center in my hometown on one of my more recent visits to Georgia. It’s like a branch of a bank, a smaller facility conveniently located for suburbanites. As such, I guess it’s not a bad idea, but they seem to share some of the unfortunate business practices of much larger facilities.

Luckily for the woman in Texas, there was nothing wrong with her heart, as was borne out by an EKG and some blood tests. Her visit to the stand-alone ER was short, but it came with a hefty price tag. When totaled, the bill came to $4600 (€4100), which seems staggering enough to me. Only half of that was for any kind of medical procedure (for example, the EKG was $300). The other half ($2258, or €2030) was just for the use of the ER itself, “facility fees” similar to those charged by full-fledged hospitals.

While her insurance covered most of the invoice, she was still on the hook for $500, which she was evidently able to reduce by negotiating a lower sum with the bill collection agency (hired by the ER to get its money). 

Apparently, when you’re sick in America, it helps to be a persistent haggler, as well as a smart shopper.

Another story Khazan shared in her article involves a Dallas man who suffered two strokes within a period of six months. The hospitals he was taken to in both cases were “in-network” for his insurance plan, meaning they had existing agreements to accept the man’s insurance. There was no worries about whether his treatment would be covered. Or, so he thought.

Apparently, individual doctors working in American hospitals often can charge separately for the care they provide to the hospital’s patients. And, they don’t have to necessarily accept the same insurance plans accepted by the hospital itself. This appears to be why the Dallas stroke victim received completely unexpected bills for “out-of-network” care not covered by his insurance. Three years later, the man is still in the midst of taking legal action over the extra charges.

I’ve heard of many stories similar to these. For many people, coming home from the hospital is often just the beginning of the next hardship to overcome, a protracted fight with insurance companies and bill collectors.

The very idea of this way of doing things seems alien to me after living so long in a country with a completely different approach to health care. Perhaps the best way to show what I mean by this is through a little example of my own.

Three years ago, I experienced a very minor health scare. Normally, I don’t like to share such personal (and let’s face it, trivial) details, but I’m trying to make a point here.

It was a Monday in July. I had just had an ocular migraine, in which your vision is temporarily obscured by shimmering “lights”. This in itself was no big deal. I have these ever so often. It’s not painful, but you essentially lose much of your vision for a few minutes due to something happening inside your brain.

This time, however, immediately after the migraine subsided, my left arm went completely numb and I had some pain in my chest. I was not even able to lift my arm above my head. That had never happened before, though in the past I have had occasional numbness in my arms due to pinched nerves.

I was sufficiently freaked out by this combination of events that I decided to see a doctor right away.

I didn’t shop around first, but I did need to make a call to decide where to go. The default choice would be the Paloheinä Tervyskeskus, the city-run health-care center closest to my home (about a mile away). Paloheinä is closed in July, however, when many services are scaled down in mid-summer when Helsinki almost turns into a ghost town, so I called a central health-service number to find out which other nearby clinics were operating. I was directed to go to Maunula, less than three miles away. I know the place well, since that's where I usually see the dentist. 

When I got there, a nurse checked me out and did an EKG, which showed nothing alarming. As it was near closing time, she asked me to come back the next day, a Tuesday, for blood work. On that second visit, she performed a second EKG (which seemed a bit unnecessary, to be honest). No change from the day before.

On Wednesday, I got a phone call from a doctor at Maunula with the results of my blood test. Nothing to worry about there, either. Still, he wanted to see me and booked a time for me the next afternoon. When we met, he explained that whatever had caused my symptoms, it wasn’t heart-related (a relief) and was most likely due to the kind of neck problems I had needed surgery to correct back in 2005. Thinking that this previous condition might have again deteriorated, he made an appointment for me with a neurosurgeon at Meilahti Hospital.

About six weeks later, I had an MRI done at the hospital. People who have undergone this procedure know that patients often have choice of music to listen to while encased in the incredibly noisy MRI machine. As it was a Sunday afternoon, I asked the technician to tune the sound system’s radio to Yle Mondo, which I knew at that time of day would be broadcasting National Public Radio from the US. Lying inside that huge machine, in a space the size of a coffin surrounded by powerful magnetic fields, I listened to the familiar soothing voice of Garrison Keillor on “Prairie Home Companion”. That is how I like to spend my Sunday afternoons.

The consultation with the neurosurgeon a few days later was short and sweet – no drastic changes showed up in the MRI. Nothing to worry about, and in fact, a similar episode of sudden numbness has not occurred since. Knock on wood.

A few weeks after all this happened, the bills started rolling in. The first was for the visits to the Maunula clinic. It was €13.80. The next, from the hospital where I’d had the MRI and neurosurgeon consultation, was almost double that, €27.50. The total came to €31.30 (about $40 at the time).

These two bills were basically office fees, comparable in some sense to the 2000-dollar-charge levied on the Texas woman for her brief visit to the stand-alone ER. For the EKGs, blood tests, doctor consultations, even the MRI, I was charged nothing. Zilch. This is what we pay taxes for.

Thinking back to my own experience on that July day, the differences to the American system could not be more glaring.

I didn’t have to shop around for the health center that would take my insurance. It’s a moot point. I don’t have insurance. I don’t need insurance.

I didn’t have to worry about sticker shock from unexpected bills because some of the professionals providing me care don’t accept my particular insurance plan. As said, I don’t have insurance. Don’t need it.

I didn’t have to haggle with an insurance company or collection agency to get my unexpected out-of-pocket fees reduced. There would be no insurance company to haggle with anyway, and besides 30 euros was something I could manage to pay without undue hardship (duh!).

To be sure, it is possible to buy health insurance in Finland, and there are private health-care providers here for folks who prefer that and are willing to pay the higher costs. Most people I know don’t use them, unless paid for by their employers. Most Finns I know usually use the public, single-payer system.

As it happens, the US Supreme Court is set to make a ruling any day now that could be a major blow to many Americans who finally have health insurance thanks to what Republicans, out of ignorance or naked ideology, love to call "socialized" medicine (a.k.a. Obamacare). It's not, not by a long shot.

Even though Obamacare is an improvement over what came before it -- and I do hope that the nine justices leave it untouched -- it’s good to remember that many liberals consider it, in reality, to be a half-assed compromise that relies on keeping the private insurance industry intact. 

I’m sure many of us would have wished that in 2010 Congress had instead enacted a single-payer system like Finland has. I'd like to think most Americans, if they actually thought it through, would prefer the same.

Or maybe they just prefer making things really, really difficult.

Dustin, Is That You?

In the last couple of weeks one of my sons and his girlfriend have both spotted, on separate occasions no less, David Hasselhoff on the streets of Helsinki. In one case, he was eating an ice cream.

Now, this sort of thing isn’t quite as mind-blowing as you might think, not in Helsinki. It’s not even so surprising that Hasselhoff can be found roaming the streets of Helsinki, since he’s been spending time here taping the “David Hasselhoff Show”, a talk show that he hosts on MTV3. If you thought that a Finnish TV talk show featuring David Hasselhoff is a bit incongruous, you’d be right. It’s a quirky show, to say the least. However, there is a precedent, since Hasselhoff hosted a similar show last year in Sweden.

It’s not as if Hasselhoff doesn’t have a sizeable fan base in Finland. I think he probably does, though that wouldn’t necessarily include me. I’ve probably never seen a single complete episode of either “Night Rider” or “Baywatch”. I have no idea if Hasselhoff has ever starred in a feature-length film, or not one I recall seeing.

Still, I do know very well who Hasselhoff is. After all, he is a celebrity (or in Finnish, julkkis), which sadly sometimes means you’re someone famous for simply being famous, even if the reason (justified or not) for being famous in the first place has been lost in the mists of time. That’s the only explanation (or excuse) I can offer for knowing who Kim Kardashian is. She’s famous for something or other. I suppose.

One thing about celebrity-hood is how incredibly insular it can be on a country level. I realized this some years ago while leafing through some foreign magazines at our local library, back when it still had them. I recall being stuck especially by some Spanish gossip magazines. Page after glossy page were plastered with photos of people with insanely broad smiles, all apparently arriving at some glamorous gala or lounging on a beach or smartly dressed for cocktails at some villa – obviously the crème de la crème of Spanish celebrity. I didn’t recognize a single one of them. Okay, except maybe Rafael Nadal, I guess I would recognize him.

I’m sure it’s the same everywhere. Every country has it’s “flock” of local celebrities (or “pride” or “herd” or "gaggle", there should be a word for this – a “prowl”, maybe), most of whom are unknown outside its borders. I’m sure many of the Swedish celebrities are unknown in Finland, and vice versa.

It's different with the US, the pop-cultural hegemon of the world. In America, celebrities are a cottage industry, a national export. They’re not so easy to spot in the wild, though it can happen, even for me.

When I was a kid, on vacation in Cherokee, North Carolina, we happened to be eating dinner a couple of booths away from the boy who played Daniel Boone’s son, Israel, in a TV series popular at the time. He must have been on some kind of publicity junket to the rugged mountains where his screen character’s father once blazed trails, probably making an appearance at Ghost Town in nearby Maggie Valley. Naturally, we interrupted his meal with his family to ask for an autograph.

In the early 80s, I was visiting Los Angeles, where many a celebrity, if not actual stars, are born. A dapperly dressed man, whom I later came to think might have been Dustin Hoffman, kindly waved to me to point out that the hem of my future wife’s long hippy skirt was stuck in the door of my car.

Considering the fact, however, that he was filling up his car at the same self-service gas station as we were, I suspect he might actually not have been Dustin Hoffman. More like a Dustin Hoffman stand-in. Or, more likely an aspiring Dustin Hoffman stand-in.

Many years later, boarding a plane in Baltimore with my kids, I spotted sitting in first class one Richard Belzer, the cynical Detective Munch of “Homicide: Life on the Street” and later “Law and Order”.

Much more recently, about ten years ago in Vegas outside Cesar’s Palace, I happen to see the unmistakable and unsinkable Don King walking to his limo. I have to admit it was kind of cool.

I saw Mike Stipe of R.E.M. a couple of times in the 80s, once at a Saturday afternoon matinee showing of Lasse Hallström’s “My Life as a Dog” at a theater in Athens, Georgia. But this shouldn’t be so remarkable, considering that I once lived literally right up the street from R.E.M.’s office.

Coming through Heathrow airport with our daughter a few years ago we noticed everyone around us focusing a lot attention on a young woman going through immigration control with her husband, baby and nanny. When I asked the border guard who she was, he replied, “She said she was someone called ‘Pink’”. We later realized it was actually Gwen Stefani, passing herself off as Pink, for some reason. No doubt being a little cheeky there.

And then there are cases of celebrities I wouldn’t recognize if my life depended on it. A few years ago in New York, we emerged from the Guggenheim Museum to find a film crew occupying the sidewalk across the street, filming a scene from “Gossip Girl”. We hung around for a few takes to get a glimpse of some of the show's leading actors, none of whom I would have been able to name. Suffice it to say, that wasn’t the case for my teenage daughter.

The thing about living in a place like Helsinki, compared to where I grew up in rural Georgia, is that spotting celebrities, or at least locally famous people, can be fairly routine. Helsinki is, after all, the New York, Washington and Los Angeles of Finland, all wrapped up into one city.

The julkkiset I’ve randomly seen in Helsinki, or elsewhere in Finland, include:

Ben Zyskowicz (Kokoomus parliament member, getting out of a taxi at Stockmann Auto in Pitäjänmäki), Renny Harlin (Finnish-born Hollywood director, in downtown Helsinki posing for some publicity photos), a former Playboy playmate (at a music-school recital -- she was a lot shorter than I thought), Kauko Juhantalo (politician, waiting to cross a street – this was some time ago), Hannele Pokka (politician, also waiting at a crosswalk, and also a while back), Alexander Stubb (the outgoing – in every sense of that word – prime minister, at a triathlon in Joroinen), Lauri Ylönen (singer for The Rasmus, at the Tammisto City Market), Elastinen (rapper and Voice of Finland coach, at our local grocery store), Seppo Hovi (veteran piano player and entertainer, at the Paloheinä library), Pekka Haavisto (openly gay Greens politician and 2012 presidential contender, shopping at the Tammisto Bauhaus, more than once), Ville Valo (singer for the band HIM, standing with his back against the wall at O’Malley’s bar), Matti Vanhanen (former prime minister, pulling into a parking garage near parliament), Anssi Kela (singer-songwriter, at Gigantti shopping for a vacuum cleaner), and Tarja Halonen (then president of the republic, at a jazz show in Espoo). 

And then last week, I saw former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Matti Ahtisaari attending a lecture by the arguably even more famous paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey.

However, when it comes to randomly spotting the world-famous, my wife might hold the top prize in our family. 

In the 1970s, enjoying a summer’s day in Stockholm, she chanced to see crowd of people crossing a street blocked off by police. Among them were two men deeply engaged in conversation. One was Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister, who was later killed by an assassin’s bullet. The other was Henry Kissinger, who at 91 is miraculously still alive today. 

Kissinger on the streets of Stockholm, 1976.  Source: Our family photo album.

Losers and Winners

It’s been 19 days since the Finnish parliamentary election, and there is still no government in place. At least, not quite. This isn’t unusual. 

And, I should point out that by "government", I mean "cabinet". The actual functioning bureaucracy of government is still there, intact. 

Compare this situation to the US, where you have a built-in two-month lag time between the election of a new US Congress and its actual installment in the Capitol. For presidential elections, the constitutionally decreed “lame-duck” period between election and inauguration is even longer.

Though we’ve still been waiting for the final makeup of the new Finnish government, the results of the vote itself were clear within hours of the polls closing at eight three Sundays ago.

As was widely expected, the business-friendly Kokoomus party, the biggest in parliament going into the election, lost its dominate position, apparently the victim of general voter dissatisfaction over the anemic economic recovery (if it can be called that). In its place rose the Keskusta (Center) Party, the party of the legendary Urho Kekkonen who presided over Finnish politics for a quarter of a century during the Cold War.

Keskusta, led by self-made millionaire Juha Sipilä, won 21.1% of the vote nationwide, giving it 49 seats in the new parliament, a huge increase of 14 from four years ago. Keskusta took most of those seats from two parties: Kokoomus and the Social Democrats, which got 18.2% and 16.5% of the vote, respectively. It was an especially hard blow for the SDP, since its loss wasn’t so widely expected. They were blindsided.

One especially bright spot in the election was the five seats picked up by the Greens, bringing its representation up to 15.

Still, the headline news was the “rise”, relatively speaking, of the anti-immigration anti-EU Perussuomalaiset party. I say “relatively” because the 17.6% of the vote garnered by PS meant they actually lost one seat, ending up with 38. The level of support for PS didn’t change significantly. PS was propelled into the Number Two position simply by the collapse of Kokoomus and SDP.

(The fact that PS came out one seat ahead of Kokoomus despite getting a half-percentage-point fewer votes is down to the D’Hondt method used to allocate seats.)

Voter turnout, despite the apparent huge interest in the election, was a somewhat disappointing 70.1%.

And now another inevitable comparison to America: turnout in the US mid-term election of 2014 hit a scandalous post-war record low of 36.4%. Okay, mid-term elections always attract fewer voters than do presidential races, but even in the 2012 vote – in which many conservative zealots I know lusted for the chance to turn Obama out of office — only 58% of Americans bothered to vote. Some democracy. 

Meanwhile, back in Finland, turnout was higher in Helsinki than for the nation overall (almost 75%), and I was pleased to see that my neighborhood did even better, with a turnout of 82.4%.

The earnest voters of this part of suburban Helsinki, where I live and voted myself, went overwhelmingly (almost 40%) for Kokoomus, followed by SDP (16%), the Greens (15%), PS (12%), and in fifth place, Keskusta (only 9%). In fact, Keskusta won only 7% of the vote in Helsinki overall, showing that there is something to the idea that Keskusta is still mainly a party of the countryside.

Since Keskusta's big election night victory 19 days ago, Juha Sipilä has been trying to put together a coalition from among the biggest winning parties, apparently a meticulous process of negotiation. There’s been lots of speculation about who will be included in the new government. The biggest worry among more mainstream establishment types is that, with its second-place finish, Perussuomalaiset will now demand a prominent role in the cabinet, something they didn’t seemed inclined to do four years ago.

With the announcement yesterday of an agreement finally being reached, those fears were proven to be well founded. The next government will indeed be a mashup of the rural Keskusta party and the more nativist Perussuomalaiset party, joined by Kokoomus, though this all remains to be formally finalized next week. 

The SDP was left out completely, as was the smaller, moderate Swedish People’s Party, which has had a role in every government for almost forty years.

The question now is how well will the Perussuomalaiset handle being in government, as opposed to just sniping at it. 

The Small Difference One Little Letter Can Make

To improve my Finnish language comprehension, I’ve been gradually reading through one of my kid’s old lukio (high school) textbooks in history. This sluggish task is made easier by the fact that, in general terms, I already know most of the subject matter. It does help.

So, I was initially a bit confused when I ran across the following sentence about developments in Cuba and the fates of political dissidents (“toisinajattelijat”) there:

Kuubalaisia toisinajattelijoita tuomittiin 2003 pitkiin vankeusrangaistuksiin yhteistyöstä Yhdysvaltojen kanssa.

I understood the individual words well enough and the overall meaning of the sentence, at least the first part. What tripped me up was the word for “cooperation” (yhteistyö). You very often see this word used in the sense of “in cooperation” (yhteistyössä). (The inessive suffix –ssä denotes “in”.)

My first thought was to take that as the meaning for the word in this instance, in which case, the sentence would translate to:

Cuban dissidents were sentenced in 2003 to long prison terms in cooperation with the US.

What? “…in cooperation with the US”? That certainly sounded odd. When did that happen?

After a more careful re-reading of the sentence, I realized my mistake. The word is actually yhteistyöstä, not yhteistyössä, as any idiot could plainly see. 

Unlike -ssä, the –stä suffix, which is used in the elative case, denotes “from” or “about” something, or in this case “for” something. 

The correct translation...

Cuban dissidents were sentenced in 2003 to long prison terms for cooperation with the US.

...makes much more sense.

A tricky language, this Finnish, when a single-letter substitution – buried in a 12-letter word – can turn the meaning of a sentence topsy-turvy.

Side note: the Finnish word for “dissident” (toisinajattelija) is a compound word literally meaning “otherwise-thinker”. I like how plain and descriptive that is.