edible derangements

Picture me, if you will, as I settle at my desk to begin a Golden Girls episode, and feel free to use the introductory paragraph from this New York Times Magazine article as your template. I mean, I have.

Shorto’s (henceforth known as Shawty) article on the Dutch welfare state jived with the conclusions I’ve drawn while leeching off a Northern European society for eight months. Just add an extra e and s to Dutch and, ta-da, you’ve got a fine piece on Germany society and collectivist culture. Pros: history, bikes, community, bakeries, social safety net. Cons: lack of go-get-’em-ness, “individuality” (I know it’s nit-picky but the scare quotes stay), 24-hour businesses, sun.

But ultimately Shawty prefers the Dutch social system to America’s, concluding that true freedom is security: knowing that becoming a redundancy won’t inspire cardiac arrest which would send you off in an ambulance and, guess what, you don’t have health insurance and now what’s going to happen to your family and the many mouths to feed? Basically, Shawty say the nation that she was with ain’t shit.

Which is a conclusion to which, after a whole winter of thought, I can’t cotton. It’s possible here that Dutch isn’t synonymous with Deutsch, and collectivist Netherlands truly is the promised land. But Germany isn’t. It seems to me that, since the German government in many ways babies you — it sets up your play dates (here, we’ve decided where to place your playground and, here, your community), hands you your allowance, and provides a cheap yet unshameful low-income crib   — you can grow up lacking a certain initiative that need or a sense of individual responsibility inspires. A Dutch dude in Shawty’s article agrees: charity, for example, is handled by the governement; individual citizens don’t and wouldn’t give to the poor, because the government already taxes their income to give to the poor. Choice and action is out-sourced to the state.

More discouraging is the pressure to conform in German society (huh, who knew!). Even Shawty comments on the Dutch’s “tendency to become slaves to conformity” and the dwindling ranks of risk-takers. Trust me: this is true. Now this isn’t a cool thing to say, but I do admire (aspects of!) America, and here’s sort of why: those inspiring nut jobs, going out on a limb because that’s where they need to go. Germany’s got no dude in the desert building Salvation Mountain, no man rushing the stage at the Britney concert, no Leona Helmsly and her trust fund dog. The singular nexus of creativity seems to be Berlin, which is like half American at this point. Dull, right? Keep America weird!

Seriously, I think that’s  why Europeans are so hung up on Obama: he’s emblematic of a certain type of sea change — a breathtaking turn in national identity — that is obsolete in modern-day Europe. Every element of German society is so durchdacht: well thought out, but maybe to a fault. Like Tyra says, hyper-analysis limits the possibility of movement and creativity. Time will tell if this U.S. fickleness, this malleability, is good or bad — seems to go both ways.

Still, I can’t 100% discredit the European collectivist culture: when you visit LA for a week and see how utterly alone you can be, how utterly alone everyone is in their bars, in their cars, arriving home to a drippy faucet,  you return to a collectivist country viewing it as a end-of-the-rainbow sort of land. Do we want a collectivist community or a country of lonely inventors, these solipsistic cowboys of the American West?