Getting Inspired

As my academic visit at Harvard is approaching to its end, I have hard time splitting my time between work and enjoying Cambridge and Boston. On Wednesday I decided to devote my limited time to the latter. I took the metro (or “T” (train) as they call it here) to Southern Boston where you can find state archives, University of Massachusetts and JFK Presidential Library and Museum. My destination was the museum celebrating the inspiring leadership of John F. Kennedy. Obviously, an important and almost obligatory destination for someone studying at the Harvard Kennedy School (JFK himself graduated from Harvard in 1940).

I.M. Pei has designed the great building at the banks of Columbia Point Peninsula (the same architect who did the glass pyramid of Louvre). You can easily spend three hours in the museum and the views over Boston Harbor islands are also worth contemplation.

I think it is difficult to make an interesting museum dedicated to a political personage but JFK Museum was a success (see their excellent website to have a glimpse of the museum and many sources about JFK). I guided myself through the rooms following his career from being a senator to a presidential candidate and to becoming the 35th President of the USA, discovering his vast political as well as ideological legacy. The collection consisted mainly of interesting videos of his speeches, photos, and gifts he received from other heads of states. I don’t know if it was the fact that I knew he would be assassinated in a few years that his speeches seemed somehow extremely emotional and meaningful, I was probably partly reflecting on them in the context of his short presidency. All in all, the museum did a good job in turning me to a JFK fan…

The museum opened in 1979 and a new wing (also by I.M. Pei) was built in 1991. Now a huge American flag hangs there at the end of the museum tour.

Of course the 1960s were full of amazing political happenings from Cold War, discovering the space to finishing racial segregation and Cuban missile crisis, so JFK had many opportunities to make these memorable speeches in a context that in itself was something spectacular. I doubt that passing the health care bill will ever be as emotional event than the moment when the first two black students entered the University of Alabama signalling the end of segregation in the Southern states. However, JFK somehow managed to turn these historical events even more touching using excellent rhetorical tricks and words that even after 40 years make you admire him. His inauguration speech in 1961, during the craziest years of Cold War and increasing recognition of developmental issues in faraway countries, pleaded for peace, freedom and welfare with an idealism and conviction that Obama can only dream of (although you can find many similarities in their discourses, such as the emphasis on hope). It seems that America of today is far from what he stated then: “If society cannot help the many that are poor, it cannot help the few that are rich.” The speech is probably more known of the phrase "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" that I heard small school kids repeating in the museum.

Skip to 4min30 where it starts to be more interesting and still relevant for our societies!

So when, after watching these inspiring speeches he gave next to Berlin wall or in Washington, the museum visitor arrives to the room dedicated to the 22^nd November 1963, one cannot avoid some tears emerging. He was the youngest president in the USA to have been elected and the youngest one to die.

Considering his short presidency, this part of his inaugural address seems even truer and above all, even sadder.

Education in America

In last week's New Yorker, author Peter Hessler writes about how it was like moving back to the USA after living in China for a decade. He enjoyed again listening to Americans telling stories, whereas the Chinese never lingered on interesting details or took pleasure in narrating a good story, in general they avoided personal topics. Instead, Hessler noted, there is no “reliable” small talk in America, any discussion can turn out to be personal, even tragic. I remarked the same thing when I was attending course on poverty and social policy at Harvard. I was more interested in the interaction in the class and how students perceived the issues we were tackling than learning about American social policy programmes. Personal stories and anecdotes about their experiences were common when they were articulating their opinions or questioning the efficiency of country’s social policies. These were often stories that I would have been very surprised to hear in a classroom in Europe, stories that people would consider too intimate, or even shameful secrets, to share with forty other people. One girl didn’t hide that she was a teenage-mother that used to live on welfare (the most stigmatized thing you could think of in America), another girl told us about her growing up in family with substance abuse problems. Maybe they actually were proud of these stories: “Look at me, I was disadvantaged but I fought my way to Harvard!”

This discourse on working your way to the top is unfortunately not imaginable to all Americans. My friend’s American flatmate here told us (European audience) about his background during our late-night dinner. He grew up in Brooklyn where schools are of extremely bad quality and, while many people continue to state college afterwards, he was one of the very rare cases that had advanced to Harvard and MIT, the best universities in the USA. His success in climbing the social ladders was part of luck, good behaviour, and involved parents; some of his smarter classmates lacked especially the last ingredient and didn’t make it as far as he did. It is not just a matter of standing out as a potential Harvard candidate that actually can make you one. When he met other students from Brooklyn in Harvard, he knew that they studied in private schools in Manhattan.

We, as Europeans, were extremely curious about his experiences and the environment in his Brooklyn school. What shocked us the most was the presence of police in the school and the interventions by criminal justice system. He told us about a girl who had scribbled her name on the desk with a knife and was prosecuted of vandalism. At the age of 13 her future was partially determined, with a criminal record, she could never have federal funding for further education; any social mobility would be really difficult after this act of vandalism. Around the dinner table, we were thinking that maybe we wouldn’t have come this far if we had faced similar control at school, if our intellectual capacity had been neglected due to actions that are not that unusual for teenagers. Was the policeman thinking that he was deciding of her future, did he care? The restrictive environment, where the fear of violence increased the teachers’ authoritarian behaviour and possibly unnecessary police interventions made school yet another prison for children who often came from poorer or otherwise disadvantaged families.

The American dream didn’t sound like a possible future for these children. In fact, the upward mobility seems possible only for middle-class children who have the necessary resources and support to make the “good” decisions. I’m not saying that things would be so much better in Europe. If you are born in a Parisian banlieu you are most probably stuck there for the rest of your life. But I guess the examples we discussed showed the contradiction in the American culture where people believe in hard work and equality of opportunity. If you don’t succeed, if you end up living on welfare, it is your own fault, you’re lazy – and you are stigmatized. In contrast, in Europe, many believe that it’s structural problems, government’s bad policies or lack of initial resources that make people “fail” and live in poverty, blaming the individual is less common (while more and more used in right-wing rhetoric). Thinking of the Brooklyn school, I can’t help but wonder how these children could be empowered in a system where they are controlled and often treated as potential juvenile criminals, if their families can’t provide them any resources, how could they fight their way to better universities, even surviving through high school is impossible to so many of them (drop-out rate is around 50 per cent in Brooklyn according to our friend).

Dolphin Watching

I just watched the amazingly terrifying documentary film The Cove that won the Oscar award for the best document of 2009. It certainly was an inspiring film and develops perfectly the theme I wrote about a few weeks ago, namely the animal rights of marine mammals. The film follows, in a half thriller-half conspiracy theory -style, the killing of dolphins in a little village in Japan where the sea water turns into red from September to March when 23 000 dolphins are slaughtered. As the film makers themselves say, they collect their own "Ocean's 11" (name couldn't fit their job any better!) with underwater cameras and two freedivers to gather evidence what is happening there.

While Japan's economy or culinary diet is not dependant on dolphins (or on whales for that matter) it refuses to ban this brutal activity or even tries to cover it up. The Cove shows well the politics behind the attempts to protect these animals on the one hand, and the insistance on "cultural tradition" and over-fishing of the oceans until they are empty, on the other.

Ric O'Berry who is the "hero" in the film partially blames himself for starting the fascination around dolphins as he was the dolphin trainer for the famous TV series of the 1960s, Flipper. After working a decade for the dolphin captivity industry, now a multi-billion business, he has since been working to free these animals. And after seeing The Cove, you really don't feel like going to Miami Seaworld (I've actually been there in 1992) - or even Särkänniemi's Delfinaario - where O'Berry worked and captured the dolphins for Flipper.

Below, you'll find the trailer for The Cove. Probably you'll be interested in watching the entire film, afterwards I'm sure you want to act, so click here for a petition (it's targeted to Obama but I guess the USA has more power in this issue than Matti Vanhanen, although in the film you can see a Finnish representative of the International Whaling Commission).

Welcome Spring, Welcome Bare Legs

When I complain about cold weather people always remind me that, as a Finn, I should be used to it. Well, I know what is cold weather and I know it can even get colder but being born in a cold country doesn’t make me somehow immune to cold. I guess Darwinism doesn’t apply to this case or it’s just that our efficient insulation of buildings has helped those who would have otherwise naturally been eliminated survive the cold winters – so despite the Northern climate even the weakest of us have survived.

However, the Americans seem to have gone through some kind of cold-immunity selection. There is some evidence that this might be even a larger-scale Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. This was especially visible in Florence where the American exchange students wearing flip flops during the most of the year could easily be identified. While their mini-shorts were tacky and inelegant, it didn't seem to bother the Italian men that the streets were suddenly crowded with half-naked American and English tourists when the Florentines were still using their black full-body uniform. I encountered the most extreme case of this phenomenon in Perito Moreno, a glacier in Argentina, where an Australian guy was admiring the sound of falling ice in his flip flops. I’ve never really understood the continuous use of Havaianas as they are ugly, uncomfortable and made for a Brazilian beach party. But the Americans love them and their use is not compromised by winter: you can see people using any kind of sandals or ballerinas even when there is five centimetres of snow on the ground. In the other extreme you have those who are wearing their rubber boots in the perfect sunshine. Though I have to admit that my stand on the rubber boots use – black ones only and exclusively for forest use! – was shaken by the rainy season here that pretty much destroyed my Italian leather boots.

The point I am trying to direct myself here is, however, that of the spirit of spring. The adagio of transforming into a lightly clad summer person should not be disregarded. Step-by-step you get rid of the excess of your winter clothes and you adapt to the new season. You need to enjoy the warming spring to its maximum, first just thinking of opening your coat and then a week later actually doing it, taking off your gloves when the snow starts to melt, and radically changing to spring coat when you can smell the nature waking up again. The American process of welcoming the spring is much too quick, jumping immediately from their North Face coats to a mini skirts and bare legs (some people skip even the North Face period). But you need to advance gradually, otherwise you miss that wonderful moment when you’re taking off the stockings in the public toilets and get blisters in your feet by suddenly changing to bare feet and new shoes (happened today) as you don’t fully understand or remember what kind of temperature is +20°C.

For the sake of the American tradition, I have to acknowledge the positive side-effect of their half-nakedness early in the year, and that is of course the greater production of vitamin D as larger parts of their body are exposed to sunlight (if this happens already in February it might increase the risk of a flu however).

Cape Cod with the Kennedys

As my last note here was somewhat depressing, I decided to continue with the more cheerful Cape Cod theme.

We spent the spring's first perfectly sunny and warm weekend in Cape Cod, the hook-shaped peninsula south of Boston. Going there already in March was actually a great idea; off-season, most places were still closed but Provincetown's main street was nicely calm. A park ranger later told us that in summer, it might take even two hours just to drive through the town (and I'm talking about a town of around 3000 inhabitants).

Cape Cod has been a famous travel destination since the Kennedys spent their holidays here. John F. Kennedy actually initiated the Cape Cod National Seashore protecting around 60 km of Cape Cod’s Atlantic coast, and his son JFK jr. died a decade ago in a plane crash in Martha’s Vineyard, an island next to Cape Cod. Nowadays, you don't need to be a prominent socialite to spend your summer holidays here; around 2 million visitors block the beaches and roads alike every year.

Cape Cod's coast is lined with beautiful long beaches and the nature alters between arid dunes and sea taking over the swamps. Artists praise the sun light as more intense, more blue, just like in Southern France. Cape Cod's Cezanne is of course Edward Hopper who spent 40 summers painting in his studio here. Indeed, the landscape feels somehow familiar: light houses, cottages, and the treeless land. The colour of the sky is "hopperian" and you have a sudden urge to paint as well. And there must be demand for the art as Provincetown's main street is packed with dozens of art galleries.

Provincetown is known for its art and gay scene (the first gay bar in the USA was actually opened here) but its amazing fudge industry has not received the attention it deserves. Forget about those boring vanilla or rhum flavored fudges, I'm talking about cranberry-walnut or smarties-marshmallow fudges...

Whale Watching

That week wasn’t very good for sea animals.

Photo: The Humane Society of the United States.

On our way to Montreal we read that the Canadian government was protesting against EU’s decision to ban seal imports. The EU thinks that killing baby seals is inhumane: during a couple of weeks in the springtime, almost four hundred thousand seals (usually less than 3 months old) are killed in Canada in the largest hunt of marine mammals in the world.

Photo: Encyclopedia Britannica's Advocacy for Animals.

Canada thinks the EU is being silly and to prove its point, the government organized a seal dinner ­– this action being as mature as the baby seals they were eating. Here libreal leader Michael Ignatieff is eating seal appetizers. Even he doesn't seem to be enjoying.

Photo: Reuters.

Had I known more about the issue earlier, I would have never bought that Canadian lobster in Cape Cod. While I have to admit that my first lobster ever was delicious I’ll be boycotting Canadian sea food until the slaughtering stops. If you want to sign a petition against seal hunting, go to Humane Society International.

Canada was equally cruel against the other cute white animal, polar bear, in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). In the same convention, Japan’s commitment lead to the refusal to protect bluefin tuna (the proposal for protection was supported by the EU and the USA among others). Bluefin stocks have fallen by 80 percent over the last 40 years in the Atlantic Ocean and the EU had agreed to ban trade on bluefin tuna earlier this March. So, Japan boycott, anyone??

Japan also defeated the protection of sharks in the convention. Sharks represent the greatest share of threatened marine species but only three out of 50 vulnerable or endangered shark species are protected internationally. 73 million sharks are killed every year, mainly for their fins. Shark fins are considered as a delicacy in China that is the biggest consumer of sharks in the world. So, let’s add China to our boycott list (and even if you don’t care about sharks, you can add it for some other reasons; maybe protecting tigers is your thing!).

All in all, not very successful meeting for marine creatures, in fact it was more like a Tragedy of the Oceans. Despite all these sad news, we were lucky in Cape Cod when it comes to marine life. We were able to observe a troop of endangered North Atlantic right whales from a beach close to Provincetown. Around 60 whales have been spotted there and that’s good news since last year there were much fewer whales around this time of the year. We were indeed fortunate to see them because there exist only 400 whales of this specific species in the planet. And the sunset was gorgeous as well!

Cup of Tea?

Boston is proud of being the cradle of liberty and freedom, the most important American values; even the license plates of Massachusetts say “Spirit of America”. One can say that it was here that the history of independent America starts. Indeed, one of the founding myths of the country is about the Boston Tea Party, the iconic moment of the resistant movement. In 1773 as an action against the British government, heavily taxed tea was destroyed and thrown into water in the Boston Harbour. Today we are witnessing another kind of a tea party movement growing in the USA, but I hope this one is not leading to a revolution.

The replacement of the late Ted Kennedy by the hard-core Republican Scott Brown in the senate was a shock in the state that is considered as one of the most Democrat and liberal in the USA. Together with the rise of the Tea Party movement, it has been one of the big political topics of the year. I had been quite comfortable with the observations of my political environment (Obama ‘08 bumper stickers, Harvard intellectuals, legacy of the Kennedys) until I read about the contemporary Tea Party (see article in the New Yorker). Even when ignoring the goofiest climate change sceptics, creationists, and pro-life activists of the movement, it presents ideas difficult to understand from a Nordic welfare state perspective as they are against all kind of social spending.

Last Saturday, a day before yesterday’s exciting vote on the Obama health bill, some people had gathered in front of the Boston city hall to demonstrate against the health care plan that would guarantee health insurance for millions of uninsured Americans. At first, it was an entertaining sight, but eventually the horrifying reality behind it shocked me: the man carrying the sign “don’t spread my wealth, spread my work ethic” was actually being serious. What kind of people would spend the beautiful and sunny Saturday in order to manifest against everybody’s right to health care? Something I learnt already during my first year of social policy studies was that the health care system in the USA, excuse my French, sucks: it is the most expensive in the developed world and has huge gaps in coverage. Taking away universal access to health care in Europe would be unimaginable; here 50 million people are without health insurance. Hard to imagine how it is to call your parents: “Mum, you need to sell the car and the TV, I broke my arm…”

New York Times reported a Republican asking the Democrats yesterday: “Are you so arrogant that you know what’s best for the American people?” I’m out of words and I shouldn’t even bother because the whole health care discussion has been so unbelievably stupid and frustrating that no logical arguments seem to work (it’s like following the comments on newspapers' on-line discussions). Call it arrogance or elitism, but yes, those people not needing to sell their house in order to cure cancer in the future will be better off.

Here's Mike Peters' cartoon (in the New York Times) mocking the country's possibly greatest idiot, the conservative libertarian Glenn Beck who hosts a TV show (Fox News Channel, of course) where he presents his dilusions about a maoist-nazi-stalinist plot that is taking over the USA in the form of Obama government (What more do you need as proof than a proposal for almost unversal health care? Of course, discourse on social justice leads to dictatorship.) Jon Stewart dismantles his arguments using Beck's own corrupt logic in Daily Show (a part of it shown below), it is hilarious. Or actually, it is pretty shocking, because Glenn Beck really exists and lots of people probably believe in what he's saying (and not just probably because his book "Arguing with Idiots" is a New York Times #1 best-seller, though, I don't know if the title is referring to himself and his followers in the Tea Party movement) even if he sounds more like a parody in a sitcom.

F**king Matt Damon

I'm embarrassed (but also slightly proud because I know this will make anyone, or at least any girl, jealous) to admit that the highlight of our visit to New York was spotting a celebrity. But not any kind of celebrity; as we were crossing Central Park on our way to the Metropolitan Museum, Matt Damon jogged around the big pond on the same path. I missed him as he passed us the first time (I was busy taking the photo above), so we waited for his second round to see him again (naturally, he was fast!).

Matt Damon, oh, Matt Damon. I thought I was above this kind of Hollywood euphoria but no, seeing Matt Damon made my day and during the rest of our trip I just hoped to see more famous people (I understand how sad this is as I write it down). While the huge posters of Matt Damon, advertising his new film Green Zone, hunted us all over the city, the only glimpses of celebrities we got were those of the Oscar ceremony. Matt – I think it is appropriate to call him by his first name by now – was there as well showing his big white smile (we couldn't stop singing the Sarah Silverman & Matt Damon duetto during the rest of the day, the video is below).

You could think that visiting a museum after seeing Matt Damon couldn’t possibly be interesting. For a moment I was hesitant as well (“couldn’t we just go hang around near the Hollywood actors’ places?”) but visiting the Metropolitan Museum proved to be an excellent occasion to remember that there’s more in life than Matt (yeah right, I still prefer having Matt in my living room than a Rembrandt…). Honestly speaking, the MET is probably one of the greatest museums I’ve ever been to. It has an unbelievable collection of European 19^th and 20^th century art – actually, you almost feel annoyed that an American museum should have such a huge collection of the painters that you are happy to see every now and then in the European museums. It is overwhelming and the four hours we spent in the museum were certainly not enough to explore even some of the collection’s masterpieces. I have to say that I enjoy discovering art in smaller quantities; like the Louvre, the MET just exhausts you and you feel frustrated that you cannot contemplate each painting with the concentration it deserves.

Later, we also visited the Frick collection, an interesting private collection of Mr. Frick in a beautiful house next to the Central Park. While the size isn’t as impressive as in the MET, you can carefully go through the collection with the help of an audioguide and without an immediate museum fatigue.

Instead the Guggenheim museum was (again) a disappointment. The architecture of the museum in itself is exciting (above) but there’s hardly anything on the walls. There were no Kandinsky’s or Miro’s works on display (and that is obviously the reason why visitors go there), instead we saw a boring performance of a young couple doing some kind of a sexual interaction dance on the main lobby. So 15 dollars for seeing Frank Lloyd Wright’s white walls… I missed Matt.

Added 13 March: Reading today's New York Times, I realised what we actually paid for in Guggenheim. When we entered the museum, a young boy of around 8 years old came to talk to us: "Do you want a guide?" he asked us in his slightly shy way. We refused his sweet offer and continued the spiral way upwards thinking how courageous he was to ask us. However, it wasn't just some kind of a school exercise but the most talked-about artwork of the season (according to the NYT). After reading the article this morning I understood that we had missed Tino Seghal's artwork where visitors are supposed to discuss the idea of progress with child, teenager and adult guides in the museum. The show has apparently been extremely popular, gathering more than 100 000 paying visitors: I just wonder how many actually understood that they were part of an artwork. We weren't the only ones to turn down the unexpected offer, as one of the guides put it in the article, many visitors replied: "I think we’re here for the art". Unfortunately, the walls were emptied for this particular interactive artwork. Instead of Kandinsky, you got a philosophic discussion with an 8-year-old (I'm sure all the parents were excited about this exchange...).