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Destination: Switzerland

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Communalism in a Red Bull Europe

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Throughout my travels this summer, I’ve been struck by the different ways societies and great cities handle their challenges. Everyone wants to live well.

Denmark is so expensive, yet so efficient. People live better than their income would suggest — in fact, they seem to live extremely well. I don’t understand the inner-works of a society, but Danish society seems to be a social internal-combustion engine in a glass box. High taxes, all interrelated and connected. It seems Scandinavians have evolved as far as socialism can go without violating the necessary fundamentals of capitalism. Communalism.

What happens when a tune-up is needed? “Who does it?” I ask. My Danish friends say, “The government.” What does government represent in Denmark: corporate or the people’s interest? Clearly the people’s. Danes say, “If our government lets us down, we let ourselves down.”

In a Danish village, you are allowed to pick berries and nuts “no more than would fit in your hat.” I saw Danish communalism in the reaction a friend had in that village when the biggest hotel in town started renting bikes. They don’t need to do that — it is Mrs. Hansen’s (who runs the bike-rental shop next to the gas station) livelihood. Of course there’s no law forbidding it…it was a matter of neighborly decency.

Switzerland has its own approach to persistent social problems. Once someone pointed out Switzerland’s syringe-vending machines, I saw them in every city — big, blocky vending machines which, if you read the paint-overs carefully, originally sold cigarettes, then condoms, and now syringes. The same syringes cost 1 Swiss franc in Bern and 3 in Zürich. I wondered why.

Another little difference I noticed in Swiss cities is their system of garbage collection. People buy bright-blue bags for 2 SF ($1.50) each. Each plastic bag includes pick-up service. They just fill the bags with garbage, put them on the curb, and they’re picked up.

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As I travel, I have picked up these ideas in conversations. They’re not clear to me. Perhaps you can help.

Someone told me that war doesn’t shape history, successful systems and economics do. Maybe it’s roads and free trade — freedom to learn and challenge — that makes history. War powers like Sparta, Prussia, and the Third Reich have left relatively little for today’s sightseers — the warrior cultures ultimately have had little impact. English is spoken because England (and later the USA) had (and have?) the best system. Rome’s impact was thanks to trade and roads–not its centurions.

Societies advance in a Darwinian way. Like Adam Smith’s invisible hand directs the evolution of economies, what makes people happy directs the evolution of social and political systems.

As I headed to the airport earlier this summer in Zagreb, people were running to catch their trams. At the airport coffee shop, a manager had his staff scurrying to provide high-priced drinks to fast-paced, Red Bull-slurping Croats. Above the cash register was a photo of Pope John Paul II smiling on and tenderly touching the flag of a new and free nation — Croatia.

Surrounded by a shiny, new, and affluent Croatia, it was clear to me that when left to grow — nourished by democracy, capitalism, and national pride — the cultural garden of Europe (and lands beyond) can be both diverse and fruitful.

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Cleaning Up as I Prepare to Fly Home

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Here are a few random notes from the past few weeks as I near the end of my summer travels:

My Swiss friend, Olle, takes me on my annual walk through the village of Gimmelwald. We see a rack of scythes. He demonstrates how they are sharpened not with a file, but by pounding. A sharp scythe is critical for a farmer — it cuts through hay like butter. Across the way, old boots with studs nailed on them for a grip on the steep slopes are nailed to the wall of a hut with their new use — alpine flower holder. In this case, traditional alpine culture survives…but only on show.

Traveling to the remote Czech backwater of Moravsky Krumlov to see Mucha’s Slavic Epic, it occurred to me that the Czechs keeping this grand series of canvases here is like keeping the Mona Lisain Walla Walla.

I never dreamed of wearing socks more than one day until my cameraman suggested it. After 10 minutes, you don’t notice.

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Copenhagen’s streets were noisy with grads filling decorated trucks, screaming and drinking as they went from family to family for beers at a progressive graduation party hosted by their parents. They can handle the alcohol and have promising futures. Then I saw the Greenlanders. Young people from Greenland with the best prospects often travel to Copenhagen, their colonial capital, for a higher education (there’s none in Greenland). Hoping to build their young lives, they often fail — ending up unable to handle the temptations of Danish life. It’s a sad sight — wasted Greenlanders littering the square.

I didn’t realize that in central Rome, there are no buildings from after 1938. Looking for restaurants, I noticed vines climbing the buildings and it occurred to me that the places I like to recommend have roots. Places whose regulars remember when the place was their father’s favorite. Places named for the man whose faded photo is now on the wall…or who is so old he can only pretend to contribute, and shuffles around grating cheese on the pasta his grandchildren are cooking.

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Scaloppini or Kalbsschnitzel?

There are two kinds of Swiss restaurants — with and without cooked cheese. The Swiss eat out at a “cooked cheese restaurant” because they don’t want to stink up their house with the smell. But, when eating out, the Swiss carefully avoid a “cooked cheese restaurant” if they are not having fondue or raclette. Also, only tourists eat fondue in summer. I just saw the sorriest sight in all of Luzern: a fondue restaurant in August serving two lonely tourists.

Being just over the border from France and Italy, the Swiss seem to have an inferiority complex about the quality of their restaurants. My Swiss friend brags, “In western Switzerland, our restaurants have the most Michelin stars per kilometer.” I say, “Perhaps that’s because Michelin hides its money here.” My Swiss friend says, “Let’s talk about the weather.”

At an Italian restaurant in Luzern the menu listed everything in Italian and German. The Italian sounded more appetizing than the German to me: I was all set for scaloppini…until I read the German name (Kalbsschnitzel),and went with something else.

I asked the waitress to translate “Autruche”on the menu. She said, “It’s the one that puts its head in the sand.” She was German, from Berlin. I asked how she liked working in Switzerland. She said, “Good, except we get only four weeks vacation here. In Germany, workers all get at least six.”

I bought six liters of water for the crew at supermarket for the cost of three half-liter bottles at a convenience store. Convenience stores all over Europe are convenient…but supermarkets are a far better value.

Driving out of Beaune, in Burgundy, we came to a blight of roadside billboards and it occurred to me: Europe is generally free from highway billboards.

Driving through the Swiss countryside hoping for good weather tomorrow for filming, we notice fields blanketed in fresh-cut hay. The farmers don’t cut hay unless they figure the weather will stay dry. Love to see that cut hay. We’ve been blessed with perfect weather for the production of two TV shows in a row.

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Wilting War Memorials

It’s interesting to think how sightseeing thrills go cold with time. I was just at Luzern’s much-vaunted Swiss Transport Museum. A huge photo-realistic map of Switzerland showing literally every building in the country (which slipper-wearing visitors would walk on as they explored their country) is now (after Google Earth) quaint and underwhelming. We went in with the camera ready to roll…and left having dropped it from the script.

The stamp museum I just saw in Liechtenstein, while as good as a stamp museum can be, was just so 20th century. “Sound and Light Shows” were theafter-dark extravaganza throughout Europe a generation ago. Today, they are essentially extinct.

And as time passes, the immediacy of war memorials wilts, too. As everyone’s “Greatest Generation” passes, the pain of WWII will fade. I know many refuse to accept this…but the pain of WWI faded just like the pain of the Franco-Prussian war and the pain of Napoleon’s Russia campaign faded. Pretty soon those photos of our heroic loved ones will join the others in the three-for-a-dollar box at the flea market.

The city the Nazis burned and murdered in 1944 four days after D-Day — Oradour-sur-Glane — has been intentionally left as it was by the Nazis. With my last visit, it occurred to me that it is intentionally left “as is,” and that is evocative and good…except for the fact that the elements are literally wearing it away. As rust and rot gnaws at France’s Martyr-ville, time does the same to our WWII memories.

Six hundred years has failed to put a stop to the night watchman in Lausanne. Every night since the 1400s, on the hour, a night watchman steps out on the top of the church spire and hollers in four directions, “I am the watchman. I am the watchman. We just had ten o’clock. We just had ten o’clock.” He’s a human cuckoo clock in the land of Rolex and Swatch. He’s so irrelevant — he actually repeated his shout at 10:16 so we could film him a second time from street level…and no one noticed.

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Alphorns, Clean Needles, and Fireworks

It’s August 1st — the Swiss National Holiday — and we’re in the capital city of Bern. The lakeside park is packed with beautiful people. I follow the steady stream of bathers hiking up the river to jump in and float down — the city’s wet, urban paseo.

Even with thousands in bathing suits and under a glorious sunshine, the Swiss are subdued. The most enthusiastic expression is the happy shudder I make as I plunge into the fast-flowing river. It’s a wonderfully free float until you near the post positioned so bathers can rescue themselves from the swift current and get out. I don’t know what would happen if someone missed the post — but you paddle like mad to grab it. This was great fun for TV.

Later, in the town, the sun is low. A Turkish girl and Swiss girl drink wine out of bottle under a flower-filled fountain featuring a medieval maiden pouring water from a jug. Trolley tracks, glinting in the sun, shoot like a bottle rocket up the cobbled lane.

A listless guy sits in a shipping container converted into a bike depot. The city has sponsored a free loaner bike program to both cut car traffic and create work for the hard-to-employ.

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A threesome lies on the grass in shade of the national parliament building, passing a joint. No one cares. The new big Starbucks has a code for the toilet downstairs: 1122. Opening the door, I step into a very blue space. Blue lights make it impossible for junkies to find their veins. The last public WC I was in had a garbage box with a lid labeled “syringes.”

Down the street, I study the layered ads and labels on the coin-op dispenser. I see it was a cigarette machine, converted to a condom machine, and finally converted again to become a syringe dispenser — offering heroin addicts cheap and clean needles.

Just next to the Museum of Fine Arts, a heroin-maintenance center has a yard filled with people fighting their addictions. A steady stream of people step up to a window to get their needles. Filming that was really tricky…but extremely rewarding to bring home to the USA — a “harm-reduction” approach to drug policy. For more on this and other issues related to the European drug policy — and how it differs from ours — read this article I wrote recently for a talk I gave at an ACLU convention.

We tend to see Switzerland as so efficient and impossibly successful. But they have the same problems other countries do. Just like they opted out of the EU, and just like each of their states or “cantons” is fiercely independent, they deal with their problems their way…openly and creatively.

The city center is traffic-free except for taxis and quiet trams flying flags. The streets are filled with people, mostly young. It’s quiet enough to hear the splash of the fountains. As darkness settles, the town’s artful floodlighting becomes evident. The noise of firecrackers grows. Leaving my hotel without my camera, I knew something fun would appear. Sure enough, I came upon an open-air performance by a jazz band whose lead instrument was a long alphorn. Very cool. It would have been a fine photo bridging tradition with the present. Later I joined what seemed like half the city on the big bridge to watch the fireworks show. It was just like a Fourth of July show back home — with the same oohs and aahs for the best explosions. But the pyrotechnics were underwhelming. They’ve been celebrating the First of August since 1291…being a bit jaded would be understandable.