[Note for TomDispatch Readers: This classic 2016 piece by Ann Jones on what the Scandinavians once had (and still have) that (sad to say) we don’t — an article then shared with the Nation magazine — seems particularly appropriate to run today as a “best of TD piece” in the all-(un)American world of Donald Trump. It’s also appropriate because Jones has just published a fascinating new book, Democracy Lost and Found: USA and Norway, that I only recently finished reading and that lays out vividly the relations of those two countries from the nineteenth-century moment when significant numbers of Norwegians began emigrating here to late last night. In summary, Jones suggests in her book “that today’s Norway, which surely would have impressed my ancestors, should also inspire Americans. That may be a tall order, however, for Donald Trump, now a convicted rapist and felon, has once again danced and blathered his way to the presidency of the United States of America. He has been propelled by many more powerful plutocrats, led by billionaire Elon Musk. Trump had already announced to his followers that, if they voted for him in 2024, they would never have to vote again. It may help Americans to remember that Norway was once subjected to a deadly forcible occupation and emerged stronger.”
So, check out Jones’s TD piece and then give some thought to getting your hands on her new book. Now, read Nick Turse’s 2016 introduction and then the piece itself. Tom]
Water drips from a leaky roof. The heat brings on a “moldy, rancid odor.” A child volunteer is tasked with killing giant roaches. Welcome to the Detroit public school system, which, according to a recent New York Times report, is “run down after years of neglect” and “teetering on the edge of financial collapse.” And yet, last Thursday, this was the closest thing to a “good news” story about Michigan on the front page of that newspaper. A companion piece covered the even more dismal “water crisis in the poverty-stricken, black-majority city of Flint,” a penny-pinching state “austerity” measure turned public health emergency that has left children there with elevated levels of lead in their blood, putting them at risk of lifelong adverse health effects.
How did it come to this? An America dotted with feral cities left to decay into ruin? Man-made catastrophes spawned by harebrained austerity schemes? A country of crumbling roads, unsafe bridges, failing schools, a woefully neglected mental health system whose ample slack has been taken up by a disastrous criminal justice system? Take your pick when it comes to rotten institutions and rotting infrastructure, since the list goes on and on. Presidential candidates are vowing to “make America great again” or talking about “reigniting” its “promise,” but perhaps a counterfeit, sepia-tinged trip to the beginning of the road that got us here isn’t really the solution to twenty-first-century America’s problems. TomDispatch regular Ann Jones has a different idea. In her latest piece, a joint TomDispatch/Nation article which will appear in print in the new issue of that magazine, Jones takes a welcome detour to a place where welfare isn’t a dirty word, the social safety net isn’t the preferred place for budget cuts, and axe-wielding children are — believe it or not — fostered, not feared: Scandinavia.
A world citizen who has journeyed across Africa, spent years living in the Afghan war zone, and was most recently a Fulbright Fellow in Norway, Jones examines how a couple of Nixon-era decisions led the U.S. down the road to ruin, while Scandinavian nations charted a different course, embracing principles of uplift, equality, and humanity. Yes, some American-esque values seem to be seeping into the Scandinavian scene of late, from the rise of anti-immigration sentiment in Sweden to a Danish town attempting to stick it to Muslims by way of pork meatballs in school lunches. But even far-right parties in these Nordic nations champion a robust welfare state and a generous social safety net. So let Jones, an intrepid journalist whose latest book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars — The Untold Story, is already a classic of Iraq and Afghan War reporting, help explain why Norway, Denmark, and Sweden invariably top global indexes when it comes to affordable housing, education, health, life expectancy, and overall citizen satisfaction, while the United States has ended up with failing cities, crumbling schools, and poisoned water. Nick Turse
American Democracy Down for the Count
Or What Is It the Scandinavians Have That We Don’t?
Some years ago, I faced up to the futility of reporting true things about America’s disastrous wars and so I left Afghanistan for another remote mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family.
It’s true that they didn’t work much, not by American standards anyway. In the U.S., full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20% clocking more than 60. These people, on the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they weren’t away on long paid vacations. At the end of the work day, about four in the afternoon (perhaps three in the summer), they had time to enjoy a hike in the forest or a swim with the kids or a beer with friends -- which helps explain why, unlike so many Americans, they are pleased with their jobs.
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