Vacation Response

I'm out of town for a month or so, with irregular Internet access. So infrequent postings but I have every intention of continuing! So stay tuned...

Curds of Wisdom

From the foreign hostess’s perspective, I’ve found feeding the Dutch, whose culinary habits rival the Poles for bland, stodgy food, an on-going challenge. That’s because the Dutch will rarely ask if you find their food good—what’s more important is having enough to eat, perhaps a fallback to war rationing or generations of Calvinistic denial. But when it comes to Dutch cheese, I eat my words. It’s a failsafe staple that makes everyone happy, which is why I made a triple-cheese lasagna last night for guests.

But there’s something cheesy about cheese and it makes people who celebrate it a bit batty. Like England’s Cooper's Hill Annual Cheese Rolling contest where participants chase after 7-8 lb. of Double Gloucester. Or there’s Quebec cheese-maker Luc Boivin, who sunk 1,700 lbs of cheddar in a lake last year thinking it would improve the taste.

Back in Britain, scientists from the national Cheese Board discovered that cheese actually gives a good night’s sleep. According to their most recent survey, 65% of people eating Cheddar dreamt about celebrities, over 65% of those who ate Red Leicester revisited their schooldays, and all female participants who ate British Brie had relaxing dreams. While I haven’t found a similar study in Holland just yet, this could point to why the country feels so comfortable resting on its laurels, satisfied with the status quo despite its blandness.

When More is Less

Having spent several nights indulging in my ultimate weakness--watching MTV--I've been thinking about sex (unavoidable in just about every video shown on TV), especially in regards to the differences between Holland and the States. It has been shown that in countries like The Netherlands, where many families talk openly with children about sex/sexuality, there is greater cultural openness and improved sexual health among young people.

I would argue that America, despite its obsession with "booty," has fallen into a “sexual recession.” Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, sex was an incredible driving force in America, an emerging axis around which new social and political movements were organized. When AIDS emerged in the early 1980s alongside Reagan’s Christian morality platform, the heady insouciance of previous decades was lost, throwing America into the sexual Dark Ages.

Under Reagan, America experienced an organized backlash against sexual freedom—witness the Meese Commission’s tactics to investigate pornography. The Commission, a virtual who’s who of the Religious Right, blamed porn for everything from child molestation to drug culture, but its findings were largely rejected.

Today, as America drifts steadily into a Republican era of hypocritical sexual conservatism, it’s always good to remind the folks at home exactly who they voted for. There’s former Oregon Sen. Packwood, who set the records for Congressional sexual harassment, John Ashcroft, who touts less government save when it comes to “moral” issues such as abortion and homosexuality and, of course, Bush, who cut off funding to international family-planning organizations his first day in office. Bush renamed Roe vs Wade’s January 22 anniversary “National Sanctity of Human Life Day.” This was a huge insult to feminism.

The issue of sexual freedom is developing along staunchly partisan lines. According to a survey conducted by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, states unsupportive of sexual health/rights are those that largely voted for Bush. While Republicans are focusing most of their energy on the war effort and passing laws to benefit the wealthy, future elections will probably be waged on issues of sexual freedom.

Also to consider: sexual images have supplanted the “getting some” credo of previous decades. By the time the average American teen graduates from high school, s/he will have spent 15,000 hours watching television, (compared with 12,000 hours spent in the classroom,) and viewed nearly 14,000 sexual references per year, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Public Education. Are we getting less even though we’re watching more?

Racial Tensions

Understanding the social relations and political backdrop of a new country always presents a challenge. While the Dutch are reticent to admit it, they’re actually quite racist--or becoming more so despite their liberal intentions (which, ironically, are the very basis for the current situation.) Much of this tension rests with the Moroccan population, which seems generally frustrated and unhappy here. Whether that’s due to an inability or refusal to integrate or a history of being treated like vermin in their own country, is difficult to say. In my experience so far, they are not particularly approachable people, and being religiously conservative, lack tolerance of their new environment—a great paradox considering how the Dutch pride themselves on this quality.

Many Moroccans came here decades ago to make money and leave, only when they returned home, an impoverished, hot stretch of land, they discovered they couldn’t go back. Only they hadn’t gone forward, either. They had failed to integrate, which left their children without an identity—not Moroccan, nor Dutch—lacking language skills and contact with their host culture. So now the Moroccans are regarded as the "new Jews," scapegoats for everything going wrong in Holland, although the flailing economy is a more appropriate culprit. I read an excellent editorial about this where the author called everyone a Jew, especially the Dutch, he said, who are cheap, business-minded and turned a godforsaken patch of land into a profit-making venture. (As a non-practising Jew, I certainly take no offense.)

Myself, I can’t reach any hard conclusions as I’ve had no on-going contact with Moroccans, save the women I see walking in the streets, several children in tow. They rarely give eye contact and seem to inhabit a world of their own. I’ve felt like they see me as part of the landscape—a tree here, a post office there, a non-Moroccan entity (that’s me) and then, their community. It’s terribly sad for me to see this kind of interaction (or lack of it) after experiencing years of multi-cultural exposure in New York. There's very little connection here and the insularity will do nothing but backfire because despite professed ideas of tolerance, the proof in in the pudding. Very few people seem to remember that during World War II, the Dutch were also Nazis.

Dutch Compliments

I learned a phrase—meant as a compliment—that is the English equivalent of: you odd nose blower. They are a direct people (if they weren’t the country would be flooded), far removed from romance. Calling someone an ass or little shit is an endearment in Dutch. An insult runs more along the lines of: “aso,” (meaning asocial, you're outside social mores) or if something sucks, you say it’s “a ball sack" i.e. a scrotum, which seems to have universal associations.