Super Tuesday

The Republican presidential race took a great leap on Tuesday when my home state of Georgia, along with nine others, all held primaries or caucuses on the same day.  Against my better judgment, I stayed up to around 3:30 to watch the returns come in.  Georgia was declared a win for Newt Gingrich within minutes of the polls closing at 2:00 a.m. Helsinki time.  No surprise there.  Not even Newt could manage to lose in his home state. 

Gingrich got 47% of the vote in Georgia, to Romney’s 26%.  What surprises me is that Santorum, favorite of hard-core evangelical Christians was only able to reach 20%.  Ron Paul got a pitiful 6%, which I guess shows there really isn’t much of a libertarian streak in the Peach State after all.  Republicans in my home county in North Georgia went for the native son in an even bigger way.  They cast 51% of their votes for Gingrich, giving him a whopping 28 points lead over Romney.  And this despite support for Romney from some of the county’s more prominent citizens that was enthusiastic enough to draw attention from national TV, though not exactly in a good way. 

While Gingrich took Georgia by storm, you have to wonder whether the hurricane force of his personality (read, “blow-hard”) is strong enough to carry him much beyond his home state.  It begins to look like he doesn’t have much of a natural base outside his native south, if even there.  In northern and western Super Tuesday states, like Massachusetts and Idaho, Gingrich didn’t make it higher than 8%.  In Ohio, he did better (15%), but still came in third. 

Even in the South, Gingrich wasn’t a shoo-in.  Neighboring Tennessee, just up I-75 from Atlanta, went overwhelmingly for Santorum, leaving Gingrich in distant third place.  With a less-than-stellar showing like that, it’s no wonder there’s lots of talk that Gingrich should do everyone a favor and quit.  Of course, he won’t.  Not yet.  He’s betting that Georgia and South Carolina weren’t just flukes and is putting all his chips on Alabama and Mississippi, two other Deep South states that vote next Tuesday. 

I have a feeling that the baffling allure of Newt Gingrich does not extend much beyond the Georgia state line, and he’ll lose next week, especially when God-fearing voters in Alabama and Mississippi have the option of Rick Santorum. 

If you ask me, Santorum’s allure is just as baffling as Gingrich’s.  He is not only conservative, but also a true believer.  He’s a deeply religious Catholic with an antiquated worldview that has apparently prompted him reopen a debate that many of us thought was settled over 50 years ago. 

Everyone recognizes that abortion is an incredibly emotional and tangled issue, and one that is still controversial for many Americans.  I don’t doubt for a moment that Santorum, like many conservatives, would like to see abortion disappear.  But what is surprising is that he also seems to feel the same way about birth control, decades after the Pill made planned pregnancies easier and a way of life for most Americans. 

Maybe that’s what bothers Santorum.  He is currently riding the wave of controversy over birth control that would have been hard to predict a year ago.  He has talked about “the dangers of contraception” in America, which he sees as not only unleashing sexual freedom outside of marriage, but also igniting too much sexual pleasure within it.  In Santorum’s mind, sex between a husband and wife is sullied by contraception.  Without the possibility of creating a baby each and every time, matrimonial sex is diminished, reduced to just an act of pleasure stripped of its true purpose, procreation. 

I’ll hazard a guess that most married couples in America kind of like it like that.  In ordinary times, I would say that Santorum is way out of step with his fellow citizens.  But these may not be ordinary times.  Just witness the uproar surrounding Sandra Fluke. 

Fluke, a 30-year-old law student, tried to testify before Congress in favor of forcing church-supported universities, such as Fluke’s Georgetown, to pay for birth control as part of their health-care insurance coverage.  (It was a White House proposal along these lines that first awoke the apparently long-simmering animosity of conservative Republicans to birth control.) 

Fluke told an informal panel of Democratic lawmakers that the lack of insurance coverage for birth control pills could cause hardship for low-income students at Georgetown.  She explained how a fellow student with an ovary condition treatable with birth control pills eventually lost an ovary after she was unable to get the medication through Georgetown University’s insurance. 

Now, some conservatives might simply argue against the policy Fluke was advocating.  (By the way, the public health system in Finland pays when women visit a clinic for birth control prescriptions, but not for the medication itself.  Women here have to cover the cost of the pills, unless they need them for a medical condition.)  Or conservative critics might question Fluke’s objectivity or accuse her of exaggerating the severity of the issue.  Fair points.  But that wouldn’t have been vicious enough for conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, a gasbag of historic proportions. 

On his nationally broadcast show, Rush launched into a personal attack against Fluke where he called her a “slut” and “prostitute” for expecting taxpayers to pay her to have sex.  Rush’s twisted (in every sense) logic was that Fluke was having so much sex that she could no longer afford to pay for birth control herself.  He continued his on-air attacks for four days in a row, at one point suggesting that if taxpayers had to pay for Fluke to have consequence-free sex, then she should provide video tapes of the encounters so everyone could enjoy. 

Even by Rush Limbaugh standards, this is simply unbelievable.  Not to mention totally inaccurate.  Besides being incredibly insulting and juvenile, his rant bore no relation to what Fluke’s actually said, to the issue at large, or the reality of birth control itself.  For example, it would be private insurance paying for the pills, not taxpayers.  Limbaugh also seems to think a woman needs to take a birth control pill each time she has sex.  Chances are he’s confusing birth control medication with Viagra, something he apparently does know quite a bit about. 

Limbaugh finally issued a lukewarm apology when sponsors started leaving his show, but hasn’t faced much real criticism from the right over his comments, least of all from the GOP presidential candidates, who all seem afraid of him.  I would love to think that something like this would force him off the air for good, but the way things are these days, I wouldn’t get too hopeful. 

Happy International Women’s Day?

High Gas

Some recent news from the States has made me think of a time back at the end of 2007 when my sister came over from Georgia for a visit. 

We were returning from showing her something of Helsinki when I stopped to fill up our smallish family-sized car (seats six), which was down to about a quarter of a tank.  My sister offered to pay for the gas, though we’d only been doing normal driving, nothing really extra on her account.  I appreciated her offer, but refused. 

The reason was that, as an American unfamiliar with Finnish gas prices, she didn’t realize what she was offering.  It didn’t make sense for her to pay so much, just because we had driven her around a bit.  That perfectly routine fill-up, as I recall, cost 80 dollars.  For 10 gallons of gas.  Eight-dollar gas is pretty normal for Finns, but not so much for Americans. 

The average price of gas here has gone up even more in the four years since my sister’s visit and is now almost $9 a gallon.  Even that price is deceptively low, in dollar terms.  If the euro weren’t currently weaker than it was in December 2007, the price would be more like $10.50. 

Prices like that make it easy for us in Finland to find reports of folks in the States becoming almost apoplectic over the prospect of five-dollar gas almost amusing.  To paraphrase Dustin Hoffman in “Wag the Dog”:  “Five dollar gas?  That’s nothing!  That is nothing!” 

That European gas is expensive is well known in the States, and may be one more reason some Americans are chilled to the bone when politicians like Mitt Romney evoke the specter of the US turning into – God forbid – “Europe”. 

And it’s probably also well known that this price gap is largely due to taxes.  Take for example, my home state of Georgia.  The current tax on a gallon of gas in Georgia seems to be 29 cents.  Compare that to an equivalent of $3.30 in tax that Finnish motorists pay per gallon, over 10 times more.  Strip away the tax, and the price of gasoline here is only one and a half times the current US price. 

Like most Europeans, Finns are used to high gas and are, in fact, luckier than many others, such as the Italians or the oil-rich Norwegians, who are now reportedly paying a dollar more per gallon than the Finns.  I was recently in Portugal, where we noticed gas prices were about the same as in Helsinki, despite Portugal’s generally poorer economy and lower incomes. 

It seems to me that Finns are quite tolerant of gas prices that in America would almost spark a revolution because, unlike Americans, most Finns see car ownership or cheap fuel as nice to have, but not essential for life itself. 

It’s no secret that government tax policy here is designed to “shape” the behavior of drivers, and it seems to have some effect.  Most middle-class Finnish families have one or two cars, but not more, unlike in the US where on average every family member with a driver’s license has their own vehicle to go with it. 

Those with cars here are also not as quite as impulsive about using them as Americans are.  They’re not in the habit of hopping in the family SUV to drive three or four blocks to buy a gallon of milk.  In our family, we tend to use our two cars more prudently than I would have back in the States. 

Not that we completely deprive ourselves of gas-powered conveyance.  Between daily commuting, shopping trips, and hobby transportation, we certainly get enough use out of our cars, though we do try to avoid really useless trips and combine errands as much as possible.   If we need to run to the store just to pick up an item or two, we usually go on foot (a five-minute walk to the neighborhood grocery) or by bike, or do without until the next day.  Many people here would do the same as a matter of routine, though eight-dollar gas probably does reinforce this eco-friendly mindset. 

I don’t want to sound too smug about it (or Pollyannaish), but I tend to think the higher gas tax is fine.  Any incentive to use less fossil fuel can’t be all bad.  It might not even be necessary, in the case of Finland, where many people’s driving habits might have more to do with their inclination towards a more natural lifestyle than the gas price itself. 

Also, it helps that in Finland, like elsewhere in Europe, there are alternatives to the car.  I wouldn’t say the public transport here is perfect.  For example, when I worked at Nokia a bus commute required two transfers, and took twice as long as driving.  And Finland, like America, has some pretty remote countryside, where bus service is much more limited. 

Still, in Helsinki the bus is often very convenient, especially for trips into town.  A day or two ago, I offered to drive my daughter to my son’s place downtown for a visit, but she refused, choosing to take the bus instead.  There’s no stigma attached to riding the bus, even for teenagers.  Everybody does it sometimes. 

But in the States, the car is king, public transport poor (and mainly for the poor), and a tax, just tax mind you, of $3.00 a gallon would be seen as draconian, cruel even, and practically socialistic.  It’s no great insight that the economic life and lifestyle of Americans have been based on cheap gas. 

If you ask me, they’ve been spoiled – not that this makes higher gas any less devastating for families trying to recover from the Great Recession.  (GOP candidate Rick Santorum has even been claiming lately that high gas was the real cause of the Great Recession.)

I’ve heard that in Iran super cheap gas helps make up for the shortcomings in the political life of Iranians, and it’s tempting to think something similar of the US.  Like “bread and circuses” in ancient Rome, could cheap gas in America be helping to placate a disaffected citizenry? 

Okay, maybe that’s going too far.  But it sometimes seems that way when you consider the distress over the recent spike in gas prices, which has been cited as a new threat to President Obama’s re-election, despite the gradually improving economy.  Gas is that important to US politics.  When the US energy secretary dared to suggest that, in the face of rising prices, greater fuel efficiency should be the country’s goal, not cheaper gas, Newt Gingrich demanded his resignation. 

I doubt Obama’s critics really think he can personally “control” the price of oil (as Stephen Colbert hilariously implied he could do with a single phone call to “the oil companies”).  Still, that doesn’t stop them for blaming him for not opening up every square mile of American landscape to further oil drilling or doing whatever else they think necessary to preserve the God-given right of Americans to cheap gas.

Cold Storage

One of the advantages of winter in Finland is the deep freeze that exists right outside your door.  Not everyone would really see this as a plus, but it does occasionally have its uses, at least for storing food.  For example, once a winter my wife makes sure we carry all our frozen food outside and stack it on the porch while we defrost the freezer. 

That’s not all we use the “walk out” freezer for.  It’s great for all that excess Christmas food that won’t fit in the fridge, not to mention the occasional over-sized pot of soup.  We regularly cook salmon soup, or the equally Finnish “hotdog” soup, in batches big enough to last for two or three meals, which makes it hard to find room for it in the refrigerator.  That’s not a problem during the approximately five months of icebox-like weather.  We just keep the soup outside on the porch, bringing it in to thaw out as needed. 

A few weeks ago, however, we had to rethink the “porch fridge”.  I started to put a fresh batch of soup out for the night, when I remembered that it was something like -25 (-13F) outside.  Needless to say, turning a tasty meal of potatoes, carrots and sliced hotdogs into a solid block of ice heavy enough to have its own gravity would be overkill in the food preservation department. 

Faced with this realization, I came up with the bright idea of using the eteinen.  This extremely common “room” in Finnish houses is unknown in America, at least in the south, where I’m from.  Eteinen translates into English as “vestibule”, but I like to think of it as an “airlock”.  It’s basically a closet-sized space between a house’s front door and an inner door that leads to the rest of the house.  The idea is that when someone enters a house only one of the two doors is opened at a time, so that the warm, cozy interior is never directly exposed to the unforgiving elements outside.  It’s also a good place to store boots. 

And, in our case, soup.  We haven’t heated our tiny eteinen since we added an extension on our house and started using a different front door.  Nowadays, the eteinen doesn’t stay nearly as warm as the rest of the house.  As it turns out, when it’s -25 outside, inside our vestibule it’s only about nine degrees (50F), not hugely warmer than our fridge. 

While I thought my idea of using the eteinen as a poor man’s icebox was a stroke of genius, to my wife it was perfectly obvious.  In fact, it’s a variation of something she grew up with –  the kylmäkomero.  This literally means “cold closet”, and it is, literally, a cold closet.  A kylmäkomero was an otherwise normal closet, with a pipe connecting it to the outside, keeping it cooler than the rest of the house.  When my wife first came to study in Helsinki, kylmäkomerot were still being used in the 60s-era dormitory where she lived. 

Kylmäkomerot might sound primitive now, and I wouldn't want to rely on them for keeping my beer cold.  But, like the root cellars that were traditionally part of every Finnish house in the past, cold closets were a practical, low-tech way of making use of one resource Finns always have plenty of this time of the year – cold air.  

Our pot of soup on the porch.

Election Standards

The second round of the Finnish presidential election was held over a week ago, and I’m only now posting something about it (I’ve been tied up with other projects and chores).  Despite a buildup that included a lot of news coverage, one sedate debate after another, and a fair amount of political advertizing, the whole race seemed to be over in the blink of an eye.  Which it kind of was.  It started in earnest only in December, meaning it lasted all of two months, three tops. 

That’s nothing compared to the US election, which after almost a year into the Republican nomination process, is just now building up a good head of steam, with another seven months of grandstanding, self-serving rhetoric, and over-inflated egos to go.

President-elect Sauli Niinistö
Photo by Soppakanuuna

Finns don’t much go in for American-style glitter and flash, especially in politics, so voters here were spared the Hollywood game-show veneer that campaigning has taken on in the US.  Also, there was none of the negative advertizing that I’ve heard so much about bombarding American TV viewers this campaign season.  And no demagogy – just imagine!  (Well, I can’t say for sure whether there might have been some demagogy on the part of the True Finn’s candidate Timo Soini’s, but I feel sure it never reached US standards.) 

Another amazing feature of Finnish elections is how fast the votes are counted, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising in a country of just over 4.4 million voters.  Still, considering that in America you often hear the election results only the morning after (or in a certain famous case back in 2000, a full month later), it’s amazing how fast it all gets done here. 

Forty-five minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m. on Election Day two Sundays ago the outcome was clear.  The entire tally had been completed in a little over two hours, and well before bedtime the official results were announced, both candidates interviewed on TV, and the whole thing wrapped up.  And keep in mind, these are paper ballots they’re counting.  By hand.  Nothing electronic.

Still, perhaps the most glaring difference between elections here and in the US is the money.  The Helsingin Sanomat reported that Sauli Niinistö’s campaign spent something like 1.2 million euros ($1.6 million) to win the contest.  That’s considerably more than the 710,000 euros that Pekka Haavisto had at his disposal, even after an almost 3-fold boost in donations in the last two weeks of the race, including 80,000 euros raked in by a one-time comeback concert put on by the hugely popular band “Ultra Bra”. 

Pekka Haavisto, Green Party candidate
Photo by Soppakauuna

Compare all that to the roughly $220 million (€165 million) that has been spent in the US presidential race as of December 31, more or less evenly divided between the Democrats and Republicans.  And the race is far from over.  It’s expected that President Obama’s campaign alone will eventually raise a record-breaking billion dollars.  As everyone knows, everything is bigger in American.  Still, whether or not a cool billion is an obscene amount of money, it’s certainly mindboggling, and not just by Finnish standards. 

This Finnish presidential race, though dull by US standards, was more electrifying than recent races.  Niinistö’s win with nearly 63% of the vote would be seen as a landslide in the US, where margins are often very narrow.  But in Finland, voters have almost always rewarded career politicians, like Niinistö, who’ve spent decades paying their dues within one of the mainstream parties.  Over the years, Niinistö has held various high positions in government, almost won the presidency when he ran six years ago, and continues to be popular, so he probably seemed like the most obvious choice for many people.  

Against that background, the fact that Haavisto inspired enough support to force Niinistö into a second round of voting is impressive enough.  The surge in Haavisto’s funding surely helped his campaign, as well as the use of social media by his supporters, such as a flash-mob video posted on Youtube. 

For a first-time candidate from a minor party, and one who’s openly gay (which even in Finland might turn some voters off), Haavisto’s 37% share of the final vote is totally respectable.  That doesn’t mean it’s any less of a disappointment for his supporters, which seemed to have included most people I know (my neighborhood went 40% for Haavisto).  My daughter said she and all her friends would have voted for him if they had been old enough, which should give Haavisto some solace.  Six years from now, with the younger generation coming of age, the outcome might be very different. 

Finnish

One of my favorite words in the Finnish language is aina (always, in English).  Also such words as jos (if), koska (because), kun (when), and ja (and).

It’s not because they’re all short and easy to understand, though that doesn’t hurt.  No, what makes these very common words special in my mind is a rare quality they all share – rare in Finnish, that is.  These words don’t change.  Ever.  They always, always look the same.  This might not sound like a big deal to English speakers, blessed as we are with a tongue so simple that even I once managed to get job teaching it.  We take it for granted that English words can be relied on to stay more or less the same, however they’re used.

I only wish the same were true of Finnish, which I’ve been trying to master on-again, off-again for well over 20 years.  The Finnish language is typified by “agglutination”, a word that by the sound of it alone should be a clue that the language is going to be a pain in the ass to learn.  Heavily “agglutinative” languages, such as Navajo, Turkish, and Georgian (not “Peach State” Georgian), form longish words by putting bits and pieces together to express something that we in English would do with several smaller words.  Finnish does this in spades.

Take the simple English phrase “the big red house”.  In Finnish, this is iso punainen talo.  Fine, so far.  If you want to say “in the big red house”, in English you simply add a tiny word, “in”.  Finnish does it differently:  iso punainen talo becomes isossa punaisessa talossa.  To make the house yours, English only adds another small word, “my”.  In Finnish, you say isossa punaisessa talossani.  Tack on another bit (–kin) as in talossanikin and you get “also in my house”.

I often think of the difference between learning Finnish and English in terms of rice or meat.  For a beginner, learning and speaking English is like eating a meal of rice.  If you drop a few grains of rice here and there, you can still get your point across.  Learning Finnish, on the other hand, is like eating big pieces of meat, which must be chewed and chewed before swallowing.  And some Finnish words require a lot of chewing.

I’ve seen it claimed that the Guinness world record for the longest word is the Finnish epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän.  This, as you can imagine, doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue.  And it’s not a word you’ll likely ever see spray-painted on a wall.  Or hear spoken in the sauna or, well, anywhere.  The word means:  “I wonder if – even with his/her quality of not having been made unsystematized”.  I can say without hesitation that this is a thought I’ve never felt compelled to blurt out to any other human being, even in English.  (By the way, as any check of the Guinness web site will show you, this 48-letter Finnish word has apparently been deposed as the world’s longest by a 195-character-long word in Sanskrit, another language I won’t be learning anytime soon.)

Still, Finnish is full of words that can become maddeningly long and variable enough, as you can see with talo.  While English gets by with only four words to talk about a building where people live (“house”, “houses”, “house’s”, and “houses’”), Finnish requires at least 26 different forms of the word, depending on how it’s used.  These are:  talo, talot, talon, talojen, taloon, taloihin, talossa, taloissa, talosta, taloista, talolle, taloille, talolla, taloilla, talolta, taloilta, taloa, taloja, talona, taloina, taloksi, taloiksi, talotta, taloitta, plus some others I’ve only vaugely heard of.

And, talo is a simple case, where the original four letters remain unchanged, unlike the word for “wolf” (susi).  Instead of “wolf”, “wolves”, “wolf’s” and “wolves’”, the Finnish susi can be changed, transformed, contorted into sudet, suden, susien, suteen, susiin, sudessa, susissa, sudesta, susista, sudelle, susille, sudella, susilla, sudelta, susilta, sutta, susia, sutena, susina, sudeksi, susiksi, sudetta, and susitta.

It’s way complicated.  And then there are the verbs.  While English employs only five forms to get across everything you ever wanted to say about “speaking” (“speak”, “speaks”, “spoke”, “spoken” and “speaking”), Finnish forces you to learn at least 37 different forms of the verb puhua.  I won’t list them here, but trust me, it’s mindboggling.

Of course, there's a system to this madness, and Finnish packs a lot of meaning into these different word forms:  taloon means “into the house”, taloihin “into the houses”, talosta means “from the house”, etc.  It takes a little getting used to.  Also, because of all the metamorphosing, the words you see in actual texts may look nothing like their basic, familiar forms.  Even if you know the words for “wolf” (susi) and “speak” (puhua), you might not recognize them in the sentence:  Pidin häntä puhuvana sutena -- “I thought of him as a talking wolf.”  Just try finding puhuvana or sutena in most Finnish-English dictionaries.  You won’t.

Maybe it’s true that Finnish has an elegant logic and an economical way of conveying a lot of meaning in a few, complicated words.  Maybe even those of us not born into the language can eventually learn to appreciate how remarkable it really is, beautiful even – if only we didn’t have to chew so hard on all those elegant, beautiful words.