The World We Live In

In the early 90s, I was likely one of the few Americans working for a certain big Finnish IT company. In my case, it was part of a team in Helsinki writing user manuals for server and system software (very little of which I actually understood, it has to be said).

At some point, another American I’ll call James joined the company as a project manager. Apparently, he had been an exchange student here in his youth, and memories of those days had prompted him to make the unlikely move to relocate to a place where he had practically no connections.

He was, in some ways, the odd man out. He was older, unattached, and more buttoned-down than my other colleagues. And unlike the other expats I knew, he hadn’t moved to Finland because of romance, which was a bit rare in those days. This was long before the golden age of Finnish high-tech, when the chance of working at dynamic, cutting-edge firms (at least one in particular) was enough to draw smart, geeky foreigners, like James, to the cold, dark north.

Among ourselves, we joked that James must have been a spy. Remember, this wasn’t that long after the Cold War, when the working assumption among many was that Helsinki was a natural fault line for East-West espionage. (I still recall how the downtown office of the Teboil service-station chain was widely seen as a front for the KGB.)

I’m sure James was no spy, but with his deep roots in the IT world, he did know things. One conversation I remember from those days was when he explained the function of the super-secret National Security Agency, an outfit I’d probably never heard of before.

James described the giant dish antennas on the East Coast used by the big US telecommunications companies for the downlink of all trans-Atlantic phone traffic. He went on to tell about a second set of dishes directly behind the first, perfectly positioned to scoop up the very same overseas phone traffic and feed it to the NSA supercomputers that then searched this torrent of data for words of particular interest to the American government. Perhaps even back then, this was no real secret, but rather public knowledge to anyone interested enough to find out. I don’t know for sure.

Anyway, maybe that’s why, when calling my parents from Helsinki, I used to half-seriously envision that someone in the depths of the US intelligence apparatus might be listening as we chatted about the most mundane things imaginable. After all, mine was part of the “foreign” communication that the NSA was tasked with intercepting.

Things have changed since then, and in some ways, they haven’t. Washington is now in an uproar of the first magnitude over the revelations by a former CIA/NSA tech support guy, Edward Snowden, about the extent of the data harvested nowadays by the NSA from domestic phone and Internet traffic. It’s huge, and it’s not just foreign traffic.

Some Americans suddenly feel their liberty has been violated by the fact that information (metadata, mind you, not content) of every phone call they make is being routinely collected by the NSA, and not because any of these people are suspected of any crime. Not yet, anyway.

It’s a fascinating case. For one, the shock and outrage of some people is curious, considering that the broad outline of NSA’s expanded activity has been public for years. It was a key part of a new reality that Americans seem ready to accept after the horror of 9/11. (The Patriot Act, which expanded the NSA’s surveillance powers, sailed through Congress barely six weeks after the Twin Towers fell.)

And it reflects the new reality of an online world. In the Internet age of Google data mining and voluntary exhibitionism on Facebook, it seems almost quaint to find people suddenly so concerned about privacy.

It seems I’m not one of them. I belong to the majority of Americans (56% according to a recent poll) who tend not to be too bothered by this new reality.  Maybe I should be. At least, some people tell us we should all be.

It’s not as if my entire life is an open book, but generally speaking, I have nothing to hide. (And I do recognize how boring that sounds.) Well, I do have some secrets, but there is nothing I wouldn’t want surfacing in an NSA intercept. Nothing that I might talk about on the phone or do online is going to get me indicted, unless it’s a crime to spend too much time surfing the net. I’m not the kind of person the NSA is interested in.

That’s not to say that people who are skittish about the invasion of privacy are guilty of any kind of wrongdoing. It’s just that they have a more finely tuned sense of mistrust and personal liberty than I do. They are, in a sense, more principled. They will argue that the Fourth Amendment constitutional guarantee against unreasonable searches (without probable cause) applies just as much to law-abiding citizens as it does to people who do have something to hide, maybe even more so. They will argue that giving up even a small measure of this privacy for the sake of more security is unacceptable. Until now, however, they seem to be a minority in the US.

Still, there is a certain segment of the population, for which privacy is an overwhelming fixation. I know people who are a bit freaked out that their house is visible on Google Maps Street View, as if that is significantly different from someone being able to see it in person from a public road.

There are people who chafe at the sight of security cameras at every street corner. (Once, I saw spray-painted in large letters on a wall on a London street the text “One Nation Under CCTV” – a terse commentary on the huge concentration of video surveillance in that city). Personally, I don’t mind being watched all that much. Apparently, others do. 

An especially telling example of this at the moment are the people in my home county in Georgia who are fretting that unmanned drones will soon be flying overhead, spying not only on moonshiners, but also on the ordinary citizenry.

This fear seems to stem from certain technology and business interests in Georgia trying to establish a center for drone research in the state. Why my hometown should feel especially threatened by this isn’t exactly clear to me, unless it’s a case of local officials trying to drum up business by offering the county as a potential site for the drone facility. To me, it sounds like a paranoid response.

It’s not as if concerns over privacy are always based on reality. Once, back when everyone in Helsinki still had a landline phone, I was complaining to a co-worker about how phone bills in Finland are not itemized (by number called, duration, etc.). I was surprised by her reaction.

In the days before cell phones, a common experience for American college students was the settling of the monthly phone bill. Going down the list of long-distance calls made with the phone you shared with your room- or house-mates, you would tally up who owed what for which calls. We’d also often discover calls charged to our phone by mistake (or “by mistake”, if you didn't necessarily think the phone company was trustworthy). Itemized bills helped keep both roommates and the phone company honest.

This is what I was complaining to my co-worker, about how you can’t do this in Finland because all charges, both local and long-distance, were presented together in one lump sum. I told her how I’d prefer to see all long-distance calls I’d made itemized in the bill.

Out of defensiveness, I think, over a foreigner like myself daring to criticize how things are done in Finland, my co-worker instantly exclaimed, “Well, I wouldn’t like that at all. I wouldn’t want anyone to know who I had been calling.”

I didn’t say it, but of course this is a ludicrous way to think. If there is anyone who knows precisely which numbers you have called, it would surely be the company routing those calls (and charging you for them). If you object to the phone company having this information, you might want to rethink whether you should be using a phone at all.

Of course, that was an extreme (and to be frank, stupid) example of an exaggerated sense of privacy. Now, with all the news about the NSA leaks, such concern over privacy is the one thing that some people will no doubt be all too willing to share with others.  ¶

A Slow Slog through a Book

In my long slow struggle with the Finnish language, I sometimes run across little examples of what makes it so difficult, for me anyway.

In the past, I’ve looked for books in Finnish that are at the right reading level, yet interesting enough for me to actually make the effort to slog through pages of sometimes baffling text. After some false starts with children’s books (sigh) and detective novels, I’m now trying a little book I found in the library a couple of months ago, “Pitkä kävely Meksikonlahdelle”.

It’s a Finnish translation of “A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf”, an account of legendary naturalist John Muir’s 1867 journey on foot from Indiana to Cedar Key, Florida, on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

I was aware of this book earlier, but have never got around to reading it. This feels like a perfect story to hold my interest, even if I have to keep referring constantly to my Finnish dictionary (okay, okay, actually to Google Translate – there, I said it, I am lazy). This classic chronicle by Muir, who went on to found the Sierra Club and was a driving force in the creation of Yosemite National Park,  combines three pet interests of mine: natural history, long treks, and the Southeastern US.

Anyway, on page 34 of the book, as Muir is progressing on his journey from Kentucky into Tennessee, I encountered a couple of examples of what makes Finnish so frustrating.

One was the simple word tennesseeläismaanviljelijältä. That is one word, 29 letters long. Geez. It doesn’t quite trip off the tongue like hölkyn kölkyn (Finnish for “bottoms up”).

As I’ve said before, Finnish often offers up its words in big meaty hard-to-chew chunks. To be fair, the word ”Tennessee” contributes nine of those letters, but the other 20 are down to the way Finnish grammar sometimes packs as much meaning as possible into single bloated monoliths of language.

The word means “from a Tennessee farmer” (20 letters total), which, for me as an English speaker, is much easier to get my head around. If you look carefully enough you can make out the word for farmer (maanviljelijä) in there somewhere. The suffix “-lta” gives the meaning of “from”, and tennesseelais- tells us that the farmer is a Tennessean. (Curiously, while in English we would say “American” farmer, we would never say “Tennessean” farmer. At least, I wouldn’t.)

The other two words that struck me as prime examples of the maddening complexity of Finnish were contained (in bold) in the following passage from Muir’s book: 

“Suurenmoisimpia Kentuckyn kasveista ovat sen ylväät tammet. Ne ovat sen rehevien metsien mahtavimmat asukkaat.”

(The most magnificent of Kentucky’s plants are the noble oaks. They are the most spectacular residents of the lush forest.)

In English, if you want to say that oaks are more magnificent than the other plants of any particular state, you just put “most” in front of “magnificent”. Easy. It’s only slightly more complicated if you wanted to heap the same amount of praise on oaks by using a simpler word like “noble”; you would say “noblest”.  

That’s English superlatives in a nutshell. Either add “most” or “‑est”. Again, simple.

Superlatives in Finnish are also simple in theory. All you do is add “–in” to an adverb or adjective as in suurenmoisin (“most magnificent”) and mahtavin (“most spectacular”) and you’ve got the superlative – in the basic form, that is.

In practice, it’s another story, since in Finnish almost no word is spared being from transmuted almost beyond recognition into one of some 20 variations. The original suffix “-in” is used only in one of those variations, and is replaced by “-imm-” or “-imp-” in all the rest.

Still, once you know this, it’s not hard to recognize that words like suurenmoisimpia and mahtavimmat are superlatives. Even I can manage the passive act of reading and understanding those words.

What is still beyond me is actively using such forms properly in written language, and I’m light years from being able to pull a word like suurenmoisimpia out of my brain when speaking. I’ll probably never utter “Suomalaiset saunat ovat maailman suurenmoisimpia.” “(Finnish saunas are the world’s most magnificent.)”.

I doubt I can perform the mental gymnastics needed to figure out on the fly which form of suurenmoinen is required for that particular example, which in this case would be the partitive plural of the superlative. It even sounds like rocket science.

If you are strictly process oriented, you can work your way from the basic form to derive the correct form in four "easy" steps (making the changes in bold):

suurenmoinen (basic form) ⇒ 1. suurenmoisen (genitive) ⇒ 2. suurenmoisin (superlative nominative singular) ⇒ 3. suurenmoisimpaa (superlative partitive singular)  ⇒ 4.  suurenmoisimpia (superlative partitive plural)

Of course, you could also simply memorize suurenmoisimpia, accepting it as it is, a perfectly formed word emerging from the dark mystery of Finnish grammar, without trying to understand the convoluted path that brings it into existence.

Or, you could do what I’ll probably do – avoid ever speaking in Finnish about anything that could be even remotely considered to be the most magnificent. At least, that should be easy. ¶

Some Gneiss Granite You Got There

I have an unfortunate weakness for really lame inside-family jokes, something my wife and kids will certainly vouch for.

There is one such joke that I unfailingly trot out whenever we travel somewhere where the landscape is especially rocky, for example, the Canary Islands or Utah. I look to my wife and say, “There’s a lot of geology around here.” She cringes.

This is, of course, not a “joke” in any sense other than it exasperates my wife to hear this again, as she has pointed out long ago and repeatedly that there is the same amount of geology everywhere, in the same way there is the same amount of weather everywhere.

That is true, of course. Geology is everywhere; it’s just that it's more noticeable and interesting in some places than others, Finland being one of those.

Devil's Churn at Pihlajamäki.

Here in Helsinki, we live atop the Baltic Shield, a remnant of the Earth’s crust that has been around some for 500 million years since the Precambrian period (that is, before life really got going).

Coincidentally, I stood last summer on the edge of the Canadian Shield, another giant layer of Precambrian rock that, in the vicinity of Ottawa, ends in an impressive 270-meter (almost 900-foot) high escarpment overlooking a flat plain along the St. Lawrence River. See, geology is everywhere.

And in Finland, the Baltic Shield is everywhere, not that most Finns would think of it that way. For most people here, the visible parts of the shield is just the ordinary bedrock (kallioperä) that you find practically everywhere, if not fully exposed as naked stone, then just barely out of sight beneath the ground. (When we built an extension to our house, we were dismayed to find just how near the surface the granite bedrock in our backyard was. It eventually took three attempts to blast out a pit big enough for a small basement.)

The kallioperä is often covered only by a thin layer of soil, which has consequences beyond basement excavation. Trees here can be toppled in winds far below hurricane strength because their grip on the Earth is especially tenuous when their roots can’t penetrate much below the surface.

Tree toppled by winds last autumn.

Often the bedrock is the surface, with exposed granite taking the form of dramatic shorelines, barren islets and the countless rocky outcrops (kalliot in Finnish) that punctuate the generally flat landscape all over Southern Finland. These hills of solid rock often have to be cut in half to make way for highways, leaving some impressive road cuts that in winter are plastered with impressive columns of ice. It also means that Finns have a special expertise in carving out portions of the Baltic Shield to suit their needs.

In the lush, forested landscapes of my native Georgia, exposed rocky surfaces are rare, except for most notably places like Stone Mountain, a giant dome of granite near Atlanta – and a place I have still never visited. Typical, isn’t it?

Any lushness in the forests of Finland has been hard won in the last 10,000 years or so since living things started to reclaim this part of Earth bulldozed, sandpapered, scraped to the bare stone by a layer of ice three-and-half kilometers (over two-miles) thick. Signs of the so-called Weichsel glaciation, which covered most of Northern Europe, can be seen everywhere here.

One such sign was uncovered, and almost destroyed, a few kilometers from my home, when some roadwork was undertaken twenty years ago on the side of a kallio in Pihlajamäki. A portion of bedrock was being prepared to be blasted when a passerby noticed the outlines of two large “giant’s kettles” (called hiidenkirnut in Finnish, or “Devil’s Churns”).

Baltic Shield bedrock is never far from the surface.

These “kettles” are potholes formed when fast-flowing water carves out a round cavity in bedrock through the twirling, grinding action of stones that become trapped in the hole. I recall seeing miniature versions of these in the mountain creeks I fished with my father back in Georgia.

The giant’s kettles in Pihlajamäki are much bigger than those, the larger one being almost 7 meters (23 feet) across and eight and half deep (28 feet). They were formed over 50,000 years ago as the retreating Weichsel icecap unleashed torrents of meltwater lasting hundreds of years, eventually digging a hole spacious enough to dump ten VW Beetles.

This massive pit wasn’t the only geological fingerprint left by the retreating ice sheet, not by a long shot. Besides the gouge marks left on exposed rock by glacial scraping and scouring, evidence of the Ice Age is easy to spot in the innumerable glacial erratics (siirtolohkareet), eskers (harjut), and kettle holes (supat).

Erratic and uprooted trees in Helsinki's Central Park near Paloheinä.

 Erratics are isolated boulders, large and small, torn from their original location and carried off by glaciers before being dropped in a new neighborhood as the ice sheet vanished. Eskers are long narrow ridges of sand and looser glacial debris that can wind for miles, sometimes with lakes on either side, as with the scenic Punkaharju in eastern Finland. They are sometimes mined for building material, creating large sand pits that have also been used (at least once) as locations for Finland’s own low-low-budget versions of spaghetti Westerns.

Kettle holes (not to be confused with giant’s kettles) are large cauldron-like dents in the ground where giant blocks of long-gone ice left deep impressions in the sandy deposits around them.

Still, the most impressive holdover from the icy Weichsel episode is the one that is the most subtle, in fact, practically impossible for mere mortals to see except near the coast.

With the Baltic Sea on two sides, Finland has a long coastline that is rustic, rocky and, well...rising. In many spots you can find the rocky beds of ancient beaches well inland from the modern shoreline, signs that the waterline was once much higher than now.

Erratic near the seashore at Sipoo.

The reason is that frozen water doesn’t weigh nothing, and terra firma isn’t always as firma as it seems. An ice sheet two-miles thick exerts punishing pressure on the earth’s crust, which it turns out is a bit spongier than you might think. During the last Ice Age, parts of the Baltic Shield were pushed down by this tremendous weight. After the icecap disappeared 100 centuries ago, the Earth's crust started to bounce back – slowly.

It’s still rebounding today, at a rate in some places of a meter (three feet) every hundred years, most notably at the, ah, poetically named Merenkurkku (Throat of the Sea), the 25-kilometer-wide chokepoint in the Gulf of Bothnia between Finland and Sweden. (By the way, Merenkurkku should not be confused with merikurkku, “sea cucumber”, a distinct possibility thanks to Finnish’s odd use of kurkku to mean both “throat” and “cucumber”. Why not, it’s their language?)

Most likely, even in my lifetime some rocks that were once merely hidden boating hazards in the waters of Merenkurkku have now emerged to be visible boating hazards. Because Merenkurkku is only 25-meters (75-feet) deep, it’s possible that, if the rate of rebounding remains the same, you (okay, let’s be honest, someone who is not you) will be able to drive across dry land straight from Vaasa to Umeå, by the year 4513. Give or take a lifetime or two.

Typical rocky Finnish seascape.

Cuba Libre

Over the last few years, as I’ve watched the melodrama of US politics play out, I’ve been impressed by the number of my fellow Americans who seem to obsess over freedom. America is, after all, the “land of the free”.

I’ve come to believe that freedom is a little like good health. You don’t think much about until you no longer have it -- end up in prison and you’d probably think about it a lot. For some people, this also seems to be true when they just think they’re in danger of losing their freedom, whether or not that really is the case.

After the Republican party was booted from the White House in 2008 and (gasp) the Democrats took over, there has been constant warning and ranting from some folks about the loss of freedom that was about to descend on the nation.

The relentless message from many conservative commentators has been that President Obama is actively scheming to turn the US into a European socialist hellhole by eating away at freedoms that Americans enjoy.

The subtext (and sometimes actual text) behind this way of thinking is that no other country in the world, especially no effeminate European country, enjoys the kinds of freedoms that red-blooded Americans take for granted.

This abundance of freedom, so the thinking goes, is one of the innate blessings that comes from living in the greatest country on earth and sets America apart from the rest of the world. This is what most Americans are brought up to believe. Many, if not most, are not inclined to ever question it. Maybe they never have a reason to do so.

Living, as I now do, in one of those European “hellholes”, I’ve occasionally been thinking about this and trying to work out exactly what freedoms I’m being deprived of here in Finland.

Malecón waterfront in Havana. Photo: Antonio Malena.

I haven’t looked into the question in detail, but no conspicuous lack of liberty comes to mind, except for maybe the freedom to buy a military-style rifle that I don’t need and wouldn’t even want. Even that may not be entirely the case, and there may be other, less trivial infringements. But, as I say, I haven‘t really delved into the matter yet.

However, a bit of celebrity news recently made me realize that there’s a flipside to the question, that is:  what freedoms do Finns have that America denies its own citizens?

Surprisingly, there does seem to be at least one such liberty – Finns can vacation in Havana without flaunting the law. Americans can’t.

This was illustrated when super-star couple Jay-Z and Beyoncé made an unsanctioned anniversary jaunt to Cuba and caused a small uproar. It was a reminder that citizens of the US need a permission slip from our government to travel to a neighboring country only 90 miles off the tip of Florida, permission that Jay-Z and Beyoncé apparently didn't bother to get.

It seems strange to think this is still true in the year 2013. Much like the Castro regime itself (and all those vintage 1950s America cars prowling the streets of Havana), America’s policy toward Cuba seems like a fossil from a vanished era.

The rationale for the travel ban is that, since the Cuban regime has complete control over the country’s economy, any tourist dollars spent there supports the government’s violation of human rights. I doubt this rationale has been applied to any other authoritarian country (there was a similar proposal for Myanmar, but it went nowhere), and certainly not applied so stringently for the last 50-odd years, though since 2009 it has been loosened slightly for Cuban-Americans wishing to visit their homeland.

The difference, of course, is that the US doesn’t have a sizable contingent of émigrés from Myanmar, or from China, Egypt or other authoritarian country, exerting a powerful and very focused influence on US politics. It does, however, with the large community of Cuban exiles in Florida, vigilantly waiting, ever hopeful, for the eventual downfall of Castro’s communist state.

This diaspora, which started when the decidedly communist turn of Fidel Castro’s revolution alarmed many affluent and professional Cubans, reached as far as my childhood home in the Appalachian Mountains some 1300 kilometers (800 miles) from Havana.

When I was young, our town’s only surgeon was a doctor who had fled Cuba after the revolution. One of my classmates had likewise left the island nation with his family, settling in our little town, where his father was the county’s only veterinarian, or the only one we used.

(I still have an image in my mind of Dr. Oliva, under the beam of a flashlight, sticking his arm deep, up to his shoulder in fact, inside one of our cows as he tried to turn around a calf that was trying very hard not to be born. Or maybe that particular image is actually of my father when he, on a later occasion and recalling Dr. Oliva’s example, had to perform the very same messy procedure.)

Anyway, before this most recent celebrity foreign-relations news squall (the other being Dennis Rodman’s weird diplomatic mission to North Korea), I haven't had much reason to think about Cuba. Then there was also the news that the original Sloppy Joe’s Bar (fabled hangout of American expats and celebrities pre-revolution) has been renovated and re-opened after some 50 years. Suddenly, Cuba seems like a place I should think about visiting. Someday. Maybe. (My list of possible places to visit is already really long.)

At least two friends have visited the island, one an American who legally travelled there from Florida when, as a medical student, he took part in a humanitarian mission to deliver free medicine donated to the people of Cuba. The other is a German who has been there at least twice, in no small part because he is a cigar aficionado. Naturally, Cuba has special appeal for him.

Other people I know in Helsinki may have also made the trip, taking advantage of the package holidays to Cuba offered by Finnish tour companies. It would be tempting. My Finnish wife would have complete freedom to do it. I, on the other hand, would be violating US law, though I have heard that the Cubans don’t stamp American’s passports, so it might be a case of what happens in Havana, stays in Havana.

As I say, it would be tempting. Anyway, from what little I know about the matter (that’s a disclaimer), I have always felt that the US embargo against Cuba was unwise and counterproductive. If Cuban exiles wanted US-style democracy to take root in their homeland, wouldn’t more exposure to Yankee capitalists help move that program forward?

After all, nothing undermines communism like consumerism. Just look at China.  ¶

Federal Expressions

For some reason, I’ve found myself on more than one occasion in Finland forced to explain a certain fundamental concept of the United States, through the example of the humble driver’s license.

I have a Finnish driver’s license, which is valid until my birthday in the year 2026 – an all too scary-sounding date, to be sure. (I also briefly once had a Cook Islands license, but that is another story. They also had three-dollar bills there. It’s an odd place.)

But my non-American friends, mostly Finns and Brits, are often surprised to learn that, although I started driving in the US at the age of 15, I have never had a United States driver’s license. That’s because there is no such thing.

And this is where a fundamental concept of America – federalism – comes in. When I lived in the States, I drove on a Georgia license, not a US one. The decision on who can drive a car, like many other aspects in daily American life, are left up to Georgia and the other 49 individual US states. It’s federalism in a nutshell. Americans love government so much it seems that they’ll put up with at least three layers of it (national, state, county/city).

Finland, on the other hand, is a unitary state, with authority applied uniformly by the central government, which controls the amount of power that can be held by sub-divisions, like Finland’s 320 kuntia (counties).

The same is true for the United Kingdom – which is not the same as England, though for Americans it’s easy to conflate the two. Trust me, any Scotsman will bristle at being called “English”. Just try it.

While on this subject, I have had a recurring debate with some of my British friends over whether England is really a country. It’s a surprisingly touchy subject. Brits will often stress, in no uncertain terms, that the UK is made up of four separate countries: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

I contend that these are countries in name only, in reality no different from US states. Though I haven’t taken the time to research it completely, I suspect individual states in America have more actual power and sovereignty than the “countries” of England or Wales. Okay, Scotland does have its own money, but anyway the land of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce (love that name) seems determined to make the leap to real independence, eventually, so maybe it’s the exception. (And maybe I’m just being slightly pedantic about the meaning of “country”.)

Anyway, not even Scotland can issue its own driver’s licenses. Georgia can. Nor can Scotland (unless I’m badly mistaken) decide all by itself to allow same-sex marriage (as New Hampshire and eight other states do), or legalize recreational marijuana (as Colorado recently has), or legally put criminals to death (as Texas and Georgia still do).

It’s this degree of autonomy that sometime surprises people who are not familiar with the US federal system, where authority (and responsibility) over US citizens is divided between the national and the state governments. Washington can issue passports, but not driver’s licenses, and the reverse is true for Georgia.

It’s not always been so cut-and-dried. The question over the proper division of power has driven much of the politics throughout US history – at times even explosively so, literally explosively – even after the Constitution tried to settle the issue in 1789. There have been countless arguments over how much leeway individual states should have in making their own policies, even policies that allow their citizens to own human “property”, as inconceivable and wrong as that seems today. The argument over that barbaric "policy" was finally settled, but it took a horrible, blood-drenched war to do it.

The debate over the national-state share of power shows no sign of stopping even today. In fact, it’s been resurging in the last few years, as the “Tea Party” has gripped the Republican Party in a stranglehold of “states-rights” fervor. The election of Barack Obama as president probably had something to do with that.

Just this past week, some lawmakers in North Carolina decided that, using the excuse of "states rights", they could unilaterally declare that Christianity is the official religion of the state. Their proposal went nowhere. It would have never become law anyway since there are limits on state power and the establishment of a state religion is against the US Constitution, thank God.

Now it seems Georgia has begun to delve into foreign relations, an area I have always thought was the exclusive domain of the Federal government. It has to do with driver’s licenses, no less.

You can legally drive in America with a valid license from a foreign country. At least in most states, Georgia included. I’ve driven on my Finnish license in at least 15 states since my last Georgia license expired in 1998. Though it’s printed only in Finnish and Swedish (except for the two English words “Driving Licence”, it’s never been questioned at any rental-car counter. (Using it as an ID to cash personal checks at a small-town Wal-Mart is another matter, resulting in hilarious complications.)

Foreign motorists, however, who have lived in Georgia for more than a year have to apply for a Georgia license like everyone else. A recently proposed law would make that easier by allowing them to skip the normal driving exams, provided their home country and Georgia have reached a “reciprocal agreement”. This means the foreign country would extend the same courtesy to Georgians living abroad.

Maybe US states negotiate these kinds of one-to-one agreements with foreign governments all the time, bypassing the State Department. I’ve just never exactly heard of it.

Anyway, I’d be surprised if Finland ever agreed to such an arrangement. For one thing, it’s much harder to get a license here, since the standards are stricter than in Georgia (at least back when I got my first driving permit). I’m not sure the Finns would see it as an equal trade.

Also, I wonder whether Finland – over something as pedestrian as driver’s licenses – would want to go to the trouble of making similar, but separate, agreements with 50 individual states, all just because of the fragmented, and sometimes cumbersome, nature of American Federalism.