Just call me the beerman. On second thought, don't.

K used to work in a bar, where she expertly served beer, coffee, beer, wine, beer and a few other drinks (most of which were beer) to the clientele, which in Belgium includes everyone in town, from kids sipping sodas and sweet ice tea to grandparents wheeling their walkers cautiously through the crowd.  (Other than the cigarette smoke, bars are much less seedy in this neck of the woods.)

One of her coworker’s husbands celebrated his 40^th birthday last night, and she asked K and I to tend the bar at the party.  I don’t know squat about drinks, beyond what I learned in college (i.e. that a screwdriver made with tang is really not very good) but since it was just beer, soda, and water, I figured it would be no problem.  “Just beer” sounded like a plausible enough phrase at the time.

As you are probably aware, Belgium is famous for its beer, and I in turn probably should have been aware that being known for expertise in something might mean a more…shall we say “expert” view of it.

Apparently you can’t just put some beer in a glass and give it to a Belgian.  We had eight types of beer on hand, and each one has it’s own particular method of pouring, which absolutely must be followed, or you might as well dump it down the drain.  Additionally, each beer needs to be served in the correct glass, bearing it’s name and logo as well as being the appropriate shape.  Put a Stella Artois in a Jupiler glass?  You fool!  Two days in the stockade!  On half your beer ration!  Okay, we’ll take pity, just the stockade.

(Again, I am not really a drinker, so if this is true in the States too, someone please let me know.  Anybody from Boulder around here?)

It’s a good thing Belgians are generally such nice people.  And that I’m clueless.  At one point I served a dozen pints or so to these two later-middle-aged women, and could understand enough of their conversation to know they were discussing the carnival outside.  (Belgians frickin love their street carnivals.  It seems like half the time we drive across town we have to detour around one, and there was coincidentally one on the same street last night.)

They seemed oddly bitchy though, and after they left K explained to me that “there’s a carnival in town” means there is too much foam on the beer.  Well excuuuse me.  The wine came out of a box, but hand them a glass with an extra half centimeter of froth and they hold the thing like it was seasoned with slowly drowning cockroaches.

By the way, the Dutch word for cockroach is “kakkerlakken.”  I love that word.  If I ever end up owning the combo shop/restaurant I wonder about, I am totally going to serve something called The Kakkerlakken.  Maybe something with candied pecans?

The Big Three of Belgian cuisine are beer, fries, and chocolate.  Unfortunately (fortunately) chocolate was the one missing.  They hired a fries-wagon to park next to the side entrance until 1:00 AM, ladling over fries and mayonnaise to the cheery celebrants.  (Please don’t call them “French” fries to a Belgian, that is insulting, they come from Belgium, dagnabbit!  I’m not sure the Dutch word for “dagnabbit” but when I find it out, I’ll let you know.)

Due to the miracle that is the Taco Truck, I am perfectly amenable to eating food passed through the open siding of a motor vehicle, which is good because these things show up at most events in Belgium.  The bizarre thing to me is that they don’t run on biodiesel.  There is a business opportunity there…

What is charity? Someone please tell me.

What is humanitarianism?  Charity?  Aid?  How do you do it?  Fundamentally, how do you help the “under-privileged” masses of the world?

I would definitely not use words nearly as grand as “humanitarian” to describe it, but last summer K and I were lucky enough and delighted to go to sub-Saharan Africa to lend a hand to a project for a few weeks.  I like to think we helped a bit, though we left feeling rather unsatisfied, that we hadn’t done as much, or given as much of ourselves, as we had hoped to.

Don’t get me wrong, I think they are doing great work down there, and I feel absolutely blessed to have been able to add a tiny bit to it.  Children need love and attention.  They need to see that others care about them and their wellbeing.  Hopefully we could help with these, and the smiles on their faces were well worth the price.

But I can’t help but notice a certain under-current to the projects.  We gave them toothbrushes and toothpaste, toy cars and coloring books.  They made felt flowers and later, jewelry.  In April they decorated Easter baskets.

All of these projects reflect the mistaken Western addiction to materialism.  It’s stuff.  Again, please don’t get me wrong, I am not attacking these programs by a long stretch.  A kid making a bracelet and giving it to Mom is absolutely precious; creative energy, tangible production of something, and gift giving are all beautiful and powerful things important to the wellbeing of the human spirit.

But on a certain level, it’s a plastic trinket.  In can only provide so much benefit, and all the decorations in the world are not going to lift a people up.  There has to be something better than the underlying message that happiness, progress, and success have anything to do with possessions.  But what?

(A quick aside, I now wonder about the wisdom of the tooth brushes.  I didn’t examine any kids’ mouths, but they seemed to have healthy teeth, far healthier without our sugar and high fructose corn syrup.  I am wondering about the possibility of toothbrushes/paste disrupting an oral system that is already in balance, “fixing” something that isn’t broken, then making them dependent on the products.  Kinda like shampoo.  What’s that expression again about “paved with good intentions…”?)

This summer K and I will be volunteering in Nepal for two months, teaching English classes in Bhaktapur.  We are utterly thrilled at the invaluable chance to experience another culture on a level deeper than pure tourism (we’ll be staying with a local family), to get to spend the summer in such an amazingly beautiful place, to meet people there who are not just making money from the interaction...you know, “real” people.

English is undoubtedly useful in the modern world; it is the world’s second language.  At my job in Antwerp we had people from dozens of countries speaking dozens of languages, and the in-house common language was always English.  On the street in Estonia I listened to a conversation between a Korean man and an Argentinean woman…in English.  Business and product slogans in Belgium are usually in English.

English is the default language of tourism and internationalism.  Knowing English will give these kids an advantage in a globalized age.

But what does that “advantage” really mean?  Better access to tourism income, definitely.  Better chance of business or international employment, certainly.  But still!  Is that the best we can do?

That’s an honest question.  Is that the best we can do?

If we brought all these kids into the global economy, would we really be enriching their lives (no horrible pun intended) or just bringing them into an economic system based on the near poverty of the masses?  Are all employed people in the Western World all that happy and fulfilled?

(There are of course intensely significant differences in essentials like access to clean water, food, basic healthcare, and education, and in that sense there is of course a drastic and shameful disparity between First and Third World countries.)

What if we could figure out how to help the “developing” nations develop into something BETTER than the “First” world.  What if instead of injecting materialism and employment rates, we could give them…  What?  An opportunity to build something better.  To teach us.

The paradigm of Westerners going to the Third World to help save the Poor Little Things is rather arrogant and self-righteous.  This, combined with our dedication to material wealth is reflected in the language.  “Developing” countries, “enriching” them so they can reach a “Golden” Age, like us in the “First World.”  (That last one is particularly ironic in Africa, where humans came from.)  We assume we have all the answers, and that everyone else wants to be just like us.

Developing nations.  Developing into what?  Suburbs?  Is that our highest goal?  And on a planet that human behaviour is already wrecking, is that responsible, much less even possible?  I am highly doubtful that the WTO and IMF are humanity’s saviors.

So what else can we do?  (I am not going to touch religion with a 40 foot pole right now.)

Green jobs?  If Nepal became the leading supplier of wind turbines and solar panels, would that usher in a Golden Age?  (Reminds me of this article about 870,000 homes in rural Pakistan using solar panels…and a salute to the World Bank for it’s role there.)

Subsistence agriculture?  Does food security hold the key to success in the 21^st Century?  It is certainly not to be underestimated in the era of Peak Oil.  (Look out, China!)

Last weekend we went to a cultural fair, which included a few tables of people working in projects overseas.  One of these is restoring the gardens of a 17^th century palace complex of the Maharajahs in Rajnagar, India.  The project aims to introduce organic farming there, revitalize the cultural site, generate local employment, and integrate them into the emerging context of sustainable tourism.

Their motto is “For and by the local people” and they are trying to faithfully reproduce the historical agricultural practices of the area, updated with modern knowledge, technology, and environmental awareness.

I think that’s fantastic.  Using the products of our bizarre and self-destructive path to post-industrial First World globalization wealth, maybe we can help the masses (on whose backs and poverty that development partially depended) build something better for themselves.  And then if we’re lucky, and they don’t hold a grudge, maybe they’ll share that better way with us, because guess what, "They" and "Us" are the same thing now.

I don't understand how the Republican Party exists.

I don’t understand how the Republican Party gets more than 1% of the vote.  I dearly want to, but I don’t.  I understand why people would want lower taxes, small government, and a strong economy…  But the Republican Party doesn’t actually offer any of these, except for the millionaires, who get a lower tax rate.

The most aggravating thing is that the Republican Party has somehow convinced a lot of people that taxing the wealthy is bad for the economy.  They have people thinking that if rich people pay taxes, they won’t produce jobs.  How much evidence to the contrary can we ignore?  Remember the booming 1950’s?  From 1951 to 1963 the top marginal rate was 91%!  Except when it was 92%!  Chart here.

And remember the Clinton years?  39.6% and growth was groovy.  Bush dropped it to 35%, the economy fell into the cess pool, and we are supposed to believe leaving it there will fix things?  Meanwhile they do their best to kill Medicare to save money?

How does this happen?

There are extreme cases like GE, which pays NO taxes at all, has massive profits, and has exported a fifth of their US jobs overseas (I don’t recommend thinking about that for very long, even just the first two, or your head might explode) but beyond those egregious cases, the argument that letting the millionaires keep their money will help the economy just doesn’t hold up.  I think it kind of assumes rich people and their businesses work like ethical individuals, that they’ll say “hey, I have an extra million bucks lying around, I’ll create a slew of jobs just to be nice.”  They don’t.  They will always want more money.  Or maybe it’s the slightly more plausible “hey, I have an extra million bucks lying around, I’ll take a gamble on expanding my business now because of it.”  Also no.

Because:

The craziest thing (and please correct me if I’m wrong about this, because I don’t understand how this farce can be supported with a straight face) is that the tax rate they’re fighting about is on personal income.  It’s the personal income tax.  That is, the profit they as individuals make.  Not the company.  Corporate profits are a whole different tax code, which is currently (shamefully) untouchable.

That money we are talking about taxing them on, is the money they made by NOT MAKING MORE JOBS.  For crying out fucking loud!!!  If they did what they are supposed to do, took massive corporate profits and reinvested them in the work force (paging Henry Ford) then they might not add that extra billion to their bank account.  Assholes, man!

(Like LeVar Burton says, don't take my word for it.  Here's a write-up by Mother Jones.  Including, during the years when Bush's tax cuts for the uber-wealthy were supposedly helping the economy: "Between 2002 and 2007, employment increased by less than 1 percent when the economy was supposed to be expanding. Employment growth barely kept pace with population growth. Between the end of 2001, when the country was in a recession, and the peak of the real estate bubble, er, economic expansion in 2007, the US economy performed worse than at any time since the end of World War II.")

This is just millionaires wanting more money for…what?  What are they ever going to spend that much money on?  How many rounds of golf can one play?  How many sports cars can you justify owning?  It’s Nero’s Roman fucking empire for these people, and they are complaining about maybe having a slightly slimmer slice of hummingbird-tongue pie.

But anyway, that isn’t even what I wanted to talk about.  I wanted to avoid anything remotely controversial, because here’s a reeeeally easy one.  God where to start?  The banking collapse?  No, smaller.

You know how when you do anything involving money in the US you have to sign these giant crazy contracts that are written in fine print legal-speak and you don’t have any way of understanding them, but just have to trust that they are business as usual and fair?  Credit card contracts, mortgage contracts, loan agreements?

You have to be a lawyer to understand them.

This is how the banks sold horrible investments to people (all that sub-prime loan stuff) without telling them really what they were investing in.  They were a horrible idea, but only the people making money off them knew how much of a house of cards it all was.  And guess what, rich people like getting richer, so they sold that junk to Ma and Pa, took their retirement, and then oops, collapse and bail out.  Later Ma and Pa.

I went floating on an inner-tube through a cave complex in Belize that was once used in Mayan rituals and religion.  (Stick with me, it’s a short detour.)  Before we could do this, because the business was run by an American, we had to sign a giant waiver/agreement thing saying we wouldn’t sue them if we drowned.  At least I think that’s what it said.  It was pages of fine print, so I really have no idea if I actually legally converted to Satanism and made them my beneficiaries if I actually did drown.

I was there with a lawyer buddy, and I swear (I really hope I am remembering this correctly) that she said these contracts don’t actually hold up in court, because there is no realistic way you can expect a common person to actually understand what they are signing.

YES!  I love that idea.  They give you something unintelligible to sign, then everyone stands around and pretends it means jack shit that you signed it.

Soooo, coming back to the economic collapse because no one understood what they were signing, a brilliant women named Elizabeth Warren thought “hey wouldn’t it be great if we could let people actually know what they are signing, what the risks and rewards actually are?”

So she started working towards the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

According to her visit on The Daily Show 96% of Americans would like to understand what they are signing.  (This begs the obvious question: who the fuck are the other 4%?!?)

Ninety-six percent.  When have you ever heard of ninety-six percent of Americans agreeing on anything?  This is so obviously a good idea it makes my teeth hurt.

So guess who’s blocking it.  Republicans and a bunch of the really shitty Democrats.  How blatantly can someone belong to corporate interests?  They tried to stop it from even being formed in the first place, but people were paying enough attention that they failed and the CFPB, which I genuinely believe is essential to the future prosperity of the United States, was formed.  Buuuut now They are trying to gut it, behind closed doors of course.

They are trying to make it toothless, to limit its powers, it’s oversight, or remove it’s funding entirely.  Another one is “okay, but Warren can’t be in charge.”  She is absolutely qualified, some corporate stooge is not.  Now 44 Republicans have written a letter to Obama saying they will filibuster ANYONE who is proposed to lead the CFPB.  Anyone!

How can this be?!?  Who are these Republicans, and do their constituents understand what their “representatives” are doing?  Did that 4% who likes signing unintelligible forms somehow manage to get 44 Senators to themselves?

Of course, the point of their letter is actually to avoid a public confirmation hearing, or opposing her openly, which would draw attention to her, which they don't because (remember the number?) 96% of people support her plan.  So the schemers say they'll oppose anyone, so Obama has to appoint Warren himself during the Congressional recess, then they can attack her as his personal project, and undemocratic and blah blahdy fucking blah.

The point is, the Republican Party is opposing the will of 96% of the United States, in favor of the unimaginably wealthy special interests (Wall Street) who don't want Americans to know what they are signing.  How does this party exist?

I thought this was about a job interview, but it's really mostly the trains.

Brussels has three train stations, all connected in a nice straight line (unlike some of those other, sillier cities where to get from North to South you have to go East for an hour).  I have usually used Central Station, an unnecessarily functional and dull place which inexplicably only has 6 tracks, set next to each other in an undecorated and somewhat stale cellar.  This in the (administrative) capital city of Europe.  I guess the “Eurocrats,” as the locals call them, don’t have to use such vulgar things as trains.  (Versus the Central Station in Antwerp, which is referred to as "The Cathedral of Train Stations" for good reason.)

On Monday I went to Brussels Noord (North), which is an industrial-scale transit point, 12 (I thought I saw 17) tracks, which purportedly shuffles 200,000 commuters per week, though on my couple visits it always seemed to have only mediocre traffic, escaping through oversized and relatively irrelevant halls where lightly crushed fast food soda cups and candybar wrappers accumulate in the corners.  (Note: not my picture, found it online.)

(Historical note, the first train on a public railway on the European continent departed from the original Brussels North station in 1835.  First train on the continent, and they built that station with 17 tracks; now that's confidence.)

Leaving out of the side exit I was faced with a giant cartoon woman, naked, fuchsia nipples matching the color of the words “peep show” and “live nude girls” covering the massive tinted windows across the street.  Other than that it felt like a normal business day afternoon, black and dark-gray sedans on the streets, individually packaged businessmen on the sidewalks going about their business in a less-beloved European capital…which it is.  The chlamydic grit of Paris’ Pigalle, with the architectural blandness of a Warsaw suburb.

Within a block or two it began to feel very much like Dar Es Salaam and a bit like Tangier.  Pavement ended under red and white construction tape that had long ago fallen down and accumulated with a serpentine writhe in a corner, worn footpaths between uneven heaps of sand on the raw street beyond.  Old radios with extended antennae poured voices wailing in any of several languages over speedy rhythmic music, men strolled around in full-length djelaba robes and matching headwear, and small clusters of women hurried past in robes of strictly conservative design and gaudily audacious colors.

The women, either old or young, none of seduction-prone middle aged, moved quickly through the streets without ever looking up, only their faces showing, while above them women from Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa sat on stools behind windows in bikinis, red lights not visible in the afternoon sun, lazily tapping on the glass with large acrylic fingernails at passing men, none of whom ever look up.

On the back of an envelope I had sketched out a path from the train station to the luxury hotel where I had an appointment, but as I so often do, I inexplicably changed path and headed off in a different direction.  I do not understand why I do this.  I was hoping for a predictable grid-structure to the streets, which of course did not exist, and the atmosphere was not noticeably changing from scuzzy to fancy.

I was considering the wisdom of backtracking when I turned a corner and found the four star hotel, ground floor a chic restaurant with ridiculous prices and stylish furniture filled with butts in expensive suits, butts’owners sipping stylish drinks, a different language at each table.  The website for the hotel shows an entirely different building, set next to a large park, it is not clearly labelled as some other major landmark in the city, though that pic is no longer on their website.  Instead I found this one of the couch-thing we were sitting on.  (Again, not my picture, and am I supposed to formally state the hotel name and website, or would doing so be the problem?  I think the name on the glass is outdated anyway.  Why is the world run by lawyers?  I do not represent the pictured hotel, have no ties to it whatsoever.  Please don’t sue me.)

I was there to meet with a lady who runs a tour guide company.  I want to give that a try.

A couple weeks ago I found a website where you can basically list yourself as a tour guide.  There were only three for Belgium, two in Brussels and one on the other side of the country.  I emailed both the Brussels people, asking if they would like to collaborate, since I live in the northern part of the country, including the waaaay more attractive cities of Antwerp, Gent, and Bruges.

One of them responded that she was interested, and I should join up with one of her tours, so we could all check each other out.  I spoke with her on the phone and she told me how they specialized in small groups, from a couple people to a family, maybe eight people max.

I recognized her from her profile picture when she came in, joined her, and found myself sitting on a not-comfortable-enough-to-linger-on, rectangular-block, sorta-suede couch-thing, vaguely not-talking to nine professional guides about today’s tour, which was for 150 businessmen from across the European Union, who would be packed onto three tour buses and taken to different points in the city before converging like SWAT teams on a high-end restaurant downtown.

Hokay then.

I tried to make myself useful by keeping track of the businessmen as they climbed onto my assigned bus.  They were bland in the way that only businessmen can be, and the other guides lost count.  I used units of ten corresponding to fingers stuck out in my pockets to keep the yuppie-guppies straight in my mind.  (Businessmen/commuters strike me as schools of busy little fish, all in matching gray suits, swimming past, mouths gaping for water, tiny briefcases clutched in fins, though I just looked up what a guppy actually looks like and they are surprisingly stylish fish.  But "yuppie-sardines" isn’t as catchy.)

Oh, and because the universe is Beautiful, they came from some sort of paper company, in town for a paper company conference.  I am proud and disappointed that I refrained from Dunder Mifflin jokes the entire time.

For the next hour I followed along with the tour, not helping, maybe learning?  I was clearly not a guide, and I was clearly not a businessman.  They wore silky suits and loafers, I wore jeans and Cons.  I was neither sardine, nor cleaner shrimp (seems like a logical parallel for the guide, no?) but I’m not sure what I was.  A remora?

Luckily it takes more than simply being out of place to make me uncomfortable any more, so I rather enjoyed the experience.  I  think I could potentially be a good tour guide, and I learned a bit about Brussels, which hopefully I will remember until next September when my parents come to visit Belgium.

There was a non-tour guide conference coordinator, directing the guppies across Europe.  He was Christian Bale, but substantially French.  At the end he said I was invited to stay for a drink with them, and did not try to dissuade me at all when I said I had to go.  I grabbed a falafel and headed to Central Station.

I had 45 minutes to wait, so people-watched in a little courtyard outside the station.  It was one of those perfect evenings, just on the opening edge of summer, the air soft as only air in that season can be, the city not asleep but calm, its mutterings just below audible.  The sun was gone, but the sky was still visible, dark blue, 10:00 PM.

A few travellers came and went, their suitcase wheels sounding the same note across the cobblestones.  Two older tourists in pristine backpacks walked past, cameras held in front of their bodies and looking at no one.  A group of students studying abroad strutted by, chatting louder than Belgians ever do about where to go for a cheap meal.

Under an archway stood that night’s greatest gift.  He was slightly balding, and played that violin with a patient and durable passion that lifted the wait from acceptance to pleasure.  I would have gladly leaned against that wall until he went home.  But I had my own home to return to, so I headed to track six, and swear I recognized the green teddy bear graffiti on the side of the train as it pulled up.  The way home was a broad U, passing through Antwerp, so I ended up coming home on the same train I normally do, just two hours later, last train of the night.  No cars on the road.

Happy Mother's Day!!

Happy Mother’s Day!

So, Mother’s Day was started in the US by women’s peace groups to reunite families torn apart by the Civil War.  Mothers whose sons had fought and died, on both sides of the conflict, came together to heal.

Think we can expand Mother’s Day to the rest of the world?  And can we expand that aspect of it to the nowadays US?

Maybe if we think of mothers as a universal source of unity and humanity we can remember that it doesn’t matter what god/political-group/currency you pray/vote/pray to, that maybe we shouldn’t blow each other up, and just to chill the fuck out and give each other flowers.

Ah crap, once I mentioned flowers I just sound like a hippy, don’t I?  But still, man!

In Dutch class the other day

In Dutch class today we were learning the words for facial features, the teacher supplementing the book with things people actually say, noting that they may not be particularly polite.  Big ears, little ears, flappy elephant ears.  Big nose, small nose, sharp nose, vulture beak, potato shnoz.

In the process of doing this she naturally pointed out the feature she was speaking about on her own face while writing the terms on the chalkboard.  Unsurprisingly, this lead to her wearing a big smear of white chalk on her lower lip.

My current teacher generally does 90% of the speaking in class, so we are pretty used to sitting passively.  We sat there passively while she wore her new chalk lipstick.  Gradually it became clear that she was not wiping it away.

She kept talking, we all held very still.  Started shooting glances at each other.  Are you going to tell her?  Held still some more.  By now she was talking about eyes and ears and curly hair, so if someone said something now it would be clear to her that she had been wearing it for some time, us saying nothing.  Plus now it would be obvious that all of us had been conspirators and accomplices in not telling her.  To say something now would be to betray the code of silence we had all stumbled into.

She moved on to eyebrows and we no longer snuck glances at each other, all just hoping she would happen to wipe it away before seeing a mirror or walking out the door.  If it was still there when class was over I was going to run out the door and not look back.

She told us how to say “cleft chin” and then was telling us the expression for a cleft palate when the giant and extremely serious Pakistani man interrupted- “Uh, sorry mevrouw, uh, you hebt, um, witte…chalk on your…lippen.”

Suddenly I found an urgent need to write down some notes, and look intently down at my paper as I did so.

In Dutch class the other day we were doing an exercise on the present perfect tense, producing sentences like “I have already made an appointment with the lawyer” and “I have already baked a cake.”

The Dutch word for “cake” is “cake.”  Convenient for me, but not for the giant Chechnyan guy.  Apparently the Russian word for cake is not “cake.”  Thus his utterance of “I have already baked a cake” turned into “I have already baked a kaka.” Kaka being of course, poop.  He had a very good sense of humor about it.