Schadenfreude

Tom Kando

Schadenfreude: German. Pronounced 'shahd'nfroyduh'. Meaning: "Pleasure derived from the Misfortune of others." Tendency of many people on both sides of the Atlantic.Europeans love to exaggerate America's troubles, and vice-versa: I get e-mails from European friends and relatives constantly asking me how I manage to survive, while my country is falling apart. They write things like, "We hear about California. Boy, you are in real trouble over there! Your budget deficit, your drought, your fires, your earthquakes! How can you stand it there?"

When the Northridge earthquake hit in 1994, some Europeans called me up to make sure I was okay - in Sacramento, 700 kilometers away!

During Obama's presidency, the NRC Handelsblad, one of Holland's premier newspapers, published an article predicting that Obama's policies would probably fail, saying that the US was on the verge of total collapse. Read more...

Big Nanny Is Watching You

by Juliette Kando

Now that I no longer live in England, the changes that are taking place there are much more noticeable during my infrequent visits.

In England people are being made to feel completely paranoid by scare mongering tactics all in the name of “security”. We are told it is for our own safety, all because of the threat of terrorism of course, just like the non-existent secret weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, remember?

Here are a few examples: At Gatwick Airport, every time I get to the end of a stretch of rolling sidewalk of a bleeper goes off loudly followed by a female robot voice: “You are now reaching the end of the rolling sidewalk, mind your step!” as if I was a toddler in the playground. Am I blind? No, I am not blind, only tired from a very uncomfortable flight. Read more...

Smile! You are Not on TV!

by Madeleine Kando

One of the most cherished American values is ‘equality’. After all, people came to this country mainly to get away from a stratified, gentrified, classified European society. Here, in America, we are all supposed to be equal.

That is why I find it so difficult to understand our national obsession with celebrities. The word ‘royalty’ might not be an inappropriate term for what we have created here, a replacement for the Louis of France, with their lavish palaces like Versailles, their courtiers, their gardens, dinners, balls, hunting parties etc. Instead, we now have the Oscars, the Hollywood parties, the nominations, the gossip columns, the incessant focus on a group of people that no one knows personally but everyone wants to know intimately. This obsession with celebrities has caused new words to appear in the English vocabulary. Words like ‘Celebrititis’ (an obsession with people that are famous), ‘Celebriphilia’ (an abnormally intense desire to have a romantic relationship with a celebrity), ‘Celebrophobia’ (it either means the fear that celebrities have or the fear of meeting a celebrity. I am not sure). There must be more that I am not aware of.

The origin of the word ‘celebrity’ comes from the Latin ‘celebro’ which means: ‘to go to a frequently visited, populous place.’ In short, a person becomes a celebrity when enough people have paid attention to them. The first celebrities were the Greek Gods. Since the Greeks believed that their Gods had great influence on their lives they wanted to know more about them. This became the origin of Greek Mythology. If you read Homer, you can see how obsessed the Greeks were with their Gods. They gossiped and told the latest juicy stories about them. It was the Greek equivalent of the National Inquirer. I can imagine Greek teenage girls getting together and gossiping about Zeus’ latest affairs or whether Athena wore her toga shorter than the year before.

The next generation of celebrities were the Royalty of the European monarchies. If you didn’t know so and so at court, you were a nobody. The latest fashion trends, styles of dancing, music.. those were all set by the courts. Then, during the Renaissance, artists, writers and musicians became the celebrities. Actors were the last group to claim the title of celebrity. Believe it or not, until not too long ago, actors were slaves, and acting was considered a very lowly and undesirable profession. Robert Mitchum (one of the best Hollywood actors in my opinion), when interviewed about his career, said that he didn’t consider acting as a real profession: “you don’t make anything” he said. He had a lot more respect for carpenters than actors.

There is a group of celebrities that I call the ‘Celebretards’. These are celebrities that either host shows or appear on shows that are hosted by a ‘celebretard’. This group is under the delusion that being in front of a camera makes them somehow sprout new brain cells. They assume to be experts in such diverse fields as politics, the environment, third world countries, the economy, and what have you. I just wish that an actor-celebrity would stick to advising us on acting, or a sports-celebrities would enlighten us with their wisdom about sports. I mean, you don’t call up your plumber when you have a broken leg and ask him to put it in a cast, do you? But the ‘Celebretards’ are more than eager to magnanimously share their limited and flawed insight with us poor commoners.

I confess that I, myself, suffer from Celebrophobia. Only because the more time the media spend on celebrities, the less time they spend on something with more substance. I am a snob, I know. Besides, who is stopping me from changing the channel, you might argue? But let’s face it, there is an incessant intrusion in our lives by the media reporting on the minutest details of our celebrities’ lives. What do I care if Tom Cruise picked his nose during a reception? I don’t know the man from Adam.

I have tried to figure out how people can keep track of the ever increasing number of celebrities. I mean there are so many of them. I am not even including the fly-by night celebrities on the Jerry Springer show, the reality shows, the ‘even though I am a celebrity, I am just an ordinary person shows’, the ‘make-over shows’, the ‘biggest loser show’ and so on. Andy Warhol was a visionary when he said: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

I consider Einstein a celebrity, someone who has had a positive effect on the world. Has Anna Nicole Smith had a positive effect on humanity? You tell me.

In a way the more celebrities there are, the happier it makes me. Eventually, there will be so many of them that not being a celebrity will become a unique phenomenon. You will need to pay a talent hunter to find out strategies for not being famous.
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The Ugly American?

Tom Kando
At the risk of agitating some people, I am going to wave the flag a bit today. I have long been bothered by anti-Americanism, which I consider a variant of racism.

I remember reading the best-selling book The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer in the late 50s. I know how the French and many other Europeans continue to dislike Americans a great deal. I also know how many guilt-ridden Americans also dislike their own country.Whenever I call someone on this, they reply, “Well, it’s not the American people I dislike, it’s just their politicians (e.g Trump). And as far as anti-American Americans go, their position seems to be: “Well, I am a good American, and so are most of my friends, but it’s those other people (E.g those racist rednecks in Iowa) who are bad Americans, and most Americans are that way (forgetting, by the way, that it was Iowa which gave us President Obama).

I can prove to you that it is the American people whom anti-Americans dislike, not just their politicians, no matter their protestations: Why else would they continue to rant about how obnoxious American tourists are?

In fact, a recent survey showed that the worst behaved tourists are the French, followed by assorted other Europeans and Asians. Americans came in the middle of the pack - neither the best nor the worst.

And then, how about the question: How do different countries treat visitors to THEIR shores? I’d say that there are fewer people in the world who are friendlier and more hospitable than Americans. This has been my experience, and it is, reluctantly, confirmed by some European friends who visited me recently. Americans may be fat, sometimes badly dressed, but they sure are friendly. That’s the consensus.

Is it nonsense to generalize about an entire country? It is politically incorrect, nowadays. To every generalization there are many exceptions. But, as anthropologists understood long ago, the study of culture and personality is a legitimate area of inquiry.

There is something which Europeans and other people around the world do not realize: Everything you say about Americans is true, because America is the most diverse country in the world:

Are Americans “conservative and pro-Christian?” Yes. A few million are. But then, we have atheist crusaders suing people left and right.

Are Americans “sexist?” Some are. But there are no more radical feminists anywhere than in the US, and American women are still more liberated than any others. Women got to vote in America half a century before they did in France.

Are Americans “fat?” Yes. I admit that we do hold the record here. However, we also have, unfortunately, the cult of thin-ness, with more anorexic teenagers and models than anyone else.

Are Americans “unhealthy?” Yes and no - our life expectancy is lower than in several Western European countries, but it is higher than in much of Eastern and Southern Europe. We still win the most Olympic medals of any country, so we must be doing something right...

Are Americans “homophobic?” Some are, but there is more gay power in San Francisco and some other areas than anywhere else.

Are Americans “racist?” Some are. But we had the first black president of a major Western nation.

Is “American food bad?” Well, we gave the world McDonald's. But we have more ethnic restaurants than any other country, we have farmers’ markets, we have entire colonies of vegetarians, vegans and assorted other non-traditional diets. The health-food movement started in America .

Is American “(popular) culture bad?” Some of it is. But where does Jazz come from? (Just for starters, and don’t tell me that blacks are not “real” Americans. Don’t even go there!)

So remember, whatever you say about America, it is both true and false. What we have here is called DIVERSITY. For example in California, where I live, I am a minority: European-Americans only make up 46% of the population.
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Trying To Follow The Unwritten Rules

by Madeleine Kando

I came to America in my early twenties, not knowing what to do with my life and yearning for adventure. I didn't know much about this country. All I knew was that it was a lot bigger than Holland, my home country.

My biggest challenge in trying to adapt to living here was to figure out the 'unwritten rules' of American society.It started when I went for my first interview for a job as a secretary. As I was waiting for my interviewer, I heard someone call out: 'Madeleine?' and I thought to myself 'Hey, that's funny, somebody here is also called Madeleine.' But then I realized that they were calling ME! Imagine being called by your first name by a total stranger! I was shocked to my core. In Holland, being called by your first name by someone you don't know is a sign of total disrespect. I was very insulted and almost walked out of the office.

Now that I am a veteran immigrant I have grown to like this custom. I like it because it reflects one of the most basic American values - that of equality. In America, titles, such as "sir" and "madam" are seldom used in business or elsewhere. People in authority, managers, directors, even presidents are addressed by their first name. So why not a lowly interviewee? Read more...

The Geert Wilders Saga Continues

Tom Kando

On February 12, the British government denied Geert Wilders entry into Britain. Wilders is the Dutch parliamentarian who is being criminally prosecuted in Amsterdam because he made and propagated an anti-Koran film which depicts acts of violence by Muslims and because he compared the Koran with Mein Kampf. The British authorities said that “people who carry extremist, hate and violent messages are not welcome in our community.” It should be noted that Wilders was not running from Dutch law. He had been invited by some members of the British Parliament to present his views.Pat Condell is a brilliant British on-line satirist who has commented on the Wilders case in the past. Check him out by clicking on Pat Condell's
In his comments, Condell really lets the Dutch have it. But now, it seems that the British authorities have joined the Dutch in their idiocy and cowardice.

As to where I stand, let me make the following points:

1) The Dutch authorities - and now the Brits - are very wrong. I wont re-iterate the reasons why. Pat Condell discusses them far more eloquently than I ever could.

2) Let’s be emphatically clear that the issue has nothing to do with Arabs (or with Iranians, Pakistanis, Indonesians and all the other people whose majority religion is Islam).

3) The problem lies with fundamentalist religion and religious intolerance, including radical Islam.

4) Condell and others may be fervent atheists. I am not. I am indifferent to religion. I am not as animated against religion as Condell and others. In fact, I am against the harassment of religious people. I find it lame when Macy’s forbids its employees to wish people “Merry Christmas,” when municipalities forbid crèches in public areas, when there is a crusade to delete “In God we Trust” from our money, etc.

I find militant atheism and mandated atheism (as in the former USSR) a mirror image of theocracy. Soulless, scientific materialism doesn’t have all the answers, either. After all, the crisis of modernity is upon us, right now, isn’t it?

Let’s not toss out the spiritual and the transcendental altogether. The question should not be: Religion, yes or no? But: What sort of spirituality? We have much to learn from Buddhism, Zen and other Eastern traditions.

5) But this huge topic is not what today’s post is about. Today, I just want to stress the evils of religious bigotry. Today, militant Islam is the prime example of this, and yet the European authorities are punishing Geert Wilders, who is no more than the messenger.

6) Religious bigotry is evil wherever it occurs, and it also occurs in Christian countries. But currently, US fundamentalists do not stone women to death because they had a cup of tea with a man they are not married to. They do not send 16-year old suicide bombers (often girls, lately) to kill innocent men, women and babies. They only vote to ban such things as homosexual marriage. That’s a bit of a difference.

7) The media have told us about Sharia law, the Madrassas, and the Mullahs. I don’t know with how much negative bias these terms are used in the West. Perhaps some of the religious schooling undergone by young Muslims is okay. But there is no doubt that some of this “religion-based” education inspires the atrocities and the mayhem, including anti-Western terrorism, and that it fuels enormous hatred of Western culture. The greatest obscenity is that the “religious leaders” are often old men, while those they send to blow themselves up are often children. But I suppose that’s always been the way of war - old men sending children to die.

8) So now Geert Wilders becomes a cause célèbre, due to the stupidity and cowardice of (some) Europeans.
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Leaving Is a Little Bit Like Dying

by Madeleine Kando

Some people like the excitement of traveling, while others find it anxiety provoking. I react with a mixture of both, but as soon as I start packing, my bohemian ancestry takes over: excitement wins over anxiety.

This is odd, considering that I have recurrent dreams of getting lost in a foreign city, with the realization that I have no money, no passport and no place to stay. Above all I don’t know anyone. I wake up in a sweat and thank whoever is up there that it was just a dream.But either way the problem of what to pack is a universal dilemma. After all, whether we like it or not, as travelers we have to accept the reality that a suitcase has a finite amount of room. And that in itself makes packing a very zen experience. It forces you to focus on the essentials.

’Partir c’est mourir un peu’ say the French (leaving is a little bit like dying) and packing is a little like preparing to die: you have to decide what is essential to bring with you and what is not.

Most people hate to part with their possessions, and having to decide which little pieces of your life you are going to take with you is a very difficult process.

Standing in front of my empty suitcase, I am ready to start the painful selection processs. I open a drawer where I keep my socks, but I find myself unable to select which ones to bring until the whole drawer has been purged and everything is neatly paired and rolled into tidy little sock-balls.

I am not just preparing to travel you see, I am also preparing to leave. I am preparing to die a little bit. Just in case I don’t come back, I want to make sure that whoever will be looking for me won’t find any smelly socks in my drawer. My house is never as organized and well kept as right before I go on a trip.

At the airport you can judge people’s reluctance to part with their day to day existence by how much luggage they carry. I think it reflects a fear of disappearing. The more you bring with you, the more you think you can prove that you exist somewhere out there in the real world, outside of the airport and the neither here nor there world of traveling.

Aside from choices based on purely practical reasons (I wouldn’t recommend packing an umbrella if you go to Hawaii or suntan lotion if you plan on going to Holland in the winter), packing forces you to get down to basics: do I really need 5 sweaters? How about those 3 handbags: would I be ok with just one?

As I get older, I have noticed that more and more of my finite suitcase space is taken up by paraphernalia that is supposed to keep me healthy on my journey: blood pressure gage, pills, vitamins, thermometer, flue medicine, tempurepedic pillow... Forget the 5 sweaters at my age. I am lucky if I have enough room for one. The irony is that the closer you get to your ultimate voyage on this wretched earth, the more room you need to keep you amongst the living.

With age I have also become more frugal in what I pack. One very practical reason is that I just don’t have the muscle power to lug around one of those monstrosities that you sometimes see on conveyor belts.

If I could afford it I would not pack at all, just bring a lot of dollar bills so I could buy everything I need wherever I go. And I would dress in my pijamas, that being the most comfortable outfit in my wardrobe. What better way to spend countless hours in a cramped airplane seat designed for a lilliputian than in your favorite pj’s? leave comment here Read more...

The Self-Confidence Trap

by Madeleine Kando

A few days ago I did an experiment. I googled the keyword 'self-confidence'. Aside from one pitiful wikepedia entry with some factual information, all I could find was innumerable advise on how to improve, increase or build self-confidence and its counterpart, how to decrease, beat, avoid or overcome self-consciousness.

In general, being confident about something means being certain that it is correct. So does self-confidence mean being certain that YOU are correct?As a child I liked having internal conversations with myself, pretending that I was 2 people. For example: I argued that it was good that my family had left Communist Hungary to come to the West. My other self argued that if we had stayed we could have learned Hungarian and we would not have turned ourselves into political refugees. Does that mean that I was never sure whether I was correct? Does this constitute a lack of self-confidence?

Self-confidence is also having faith in one's own abilities, but the danger of being too self-confident is that it makes you think that you are correct when you are not. How can you improve yourself when you are blind to your own mistakes?

And then there is the unpleasant relationship between self-confidence and self-consciousness. I am fairly confident in my own abilities but when it comes to public speaking for instance, I am so conscious of myself that I become speechless, which poses a slight problem while delivering a public speech.

Very self-confident people have a total unawareness of themselves, especially their own shortcomings. But to tell you the truth I see many positive aspects in being less confident and more conscious of yourself. Here are a few: being less self-confident gives you the ability to listen and learn from others. It means having self-criticism which results in a more objective view of the world. It widens your perspective by embracing other points of view.

Self-confidence should be a temporal, ever changing state of mind, based on what you have accomplished, not based on who you are. You have an A in school, your confidence goes up. You shop-lift, it goes down.

But children these days are told by their parents that they are all special. It is based on the politically correct view that everyone is creative, everyone is a genius in the make. Being ordinary becomes every child's fear. It leads to an obsessive self-focus and breeds feelings of superiority.

The worst by-product of our culture of 'self-confidence' is the inability to identify with the underdog, the 'looser', the less fortunate. If you are told over and over that you should be a success, intelligent, powerful, famous, wealthy, how can you show compassion and empathy?

Believe it or not, there are other belief systems that actually teach the exact opposite. Buddhism for instance warns against taking yourself too seriously. The self is not what counts, it is the interdependence and sharing with others that validates who you are. In that sense, the more self-conscious you are the better. My favorite type of person is one who does not show much self-confidence but has a lot of self-worth. They know who they are, so they don't have to prove it.
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Confessions of a Confused Housewive

by Madeleine Kando

For a long time now I have been struggling to understand why my culture, i.e. Western culture has been forced to focus so much on the Islamic/Arab ‘problem’. Where did that suddenly come from?

My first reaction was: ‘what’s that got to do with us?’ Why do we have to be dragged into the affairs of a culture that is in such a state of chaos? The majority of people who die as a consequence of Muslim aggression are other Muslims, not Westerners. So, let them sort it out, I thought, and leave me in peace already.But when more and more of our attention was taken up by this conflict and more and more suicide bombings took place, my ‘resistance’ turned into ‘resentment’. And after the attack of 9/11 this resentment turned into pure anger.

The Western world has basically been hijacked by a conflict that should have happened some time in the Middle Ages. I don’t see any difference between the days of the Inquisition when witches were burnt at the stake because they were supposedly possessed by the devil and Islamic Fundamentalist organizations that declare Jihad in the name of Allah.

I long for the good old days of the cold war. At least I understood what that was about. It was either US, the free world, or THEM, the commies. I was born in a Communist Country and know what I speak of. But this new thing: this Islam thing.. The majority of our political discussions are focused on terrorism, Islam, fear for Israel’s survival, fear of Islamofascism.. is there any room left for more constructive problems?

You see, I am still under the naïve illusion that history should progress in an upward moving direction, towards more enlightenment, more rational thought, more happiness. Aren’t we supposed to learn from the past? From our history? But for a long time now things have been moving backwards. Rational thought has taken a backseat to dangerous religiosity and attempts at explaining the world through insane theories like ‘intelligent design’. Ethnic cleansing is rampant everywhere. Aren’t we supposed to have left religion and tribalism behind in our more enlightened modern time?

Another source of great confusion is how people use the terms ‘Arab’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islam'. Let’s make an ‘equivalency’ list: the word ‘Arab’ denotes ethnicity, so we can compare it to the word ‘Caucasian’. The word ‘Muslim’ denotes a person of a certain faith, so we can compare it to the word ‘Christian’. And the word ‘Islam’ is a religion, so we can compare it to the word ‘Christianity’. Saying that ‘Arabs should denounce terrorism’ is like saying ‘Caucasians should denounce the Ku Klux Klan’.

I have to accept that simple people like myself are not equipped to fully understand, let alone influence the course of history. On the other hand it is people, after all, that make up societies. There must be at least one other person out there that is as disillusioned with the post cold war direction that the world has taken as I am. We are all going down like a ship in a maelstrom and no one is able to stop it.
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ABOVE THE ATLANTIC

by Madeleine Kando

I am comfortably sitting in my airplane seat on my way back home to the United States. I spent two weeks in Holland and now I have all these thoughts racing through my head, speeded up by the glass of red wine which I just consumed together with the memorable airplane food.Europe... what can I say? With all her shortcomings she still holds my heart, like an old long lost lover. Even in her old age she has managed to rise to the peak of her career. The level of success she now enjoys is astounding. Do I, as an immigrant to the United States,feel a touch of resentment? A feeling that I have it rough and Europe has it easy? And why on earth am I comparing myself to an entire continent?

At 65 years of age, after having raised a family in the US, I am still trying to give my relationship to Europe a proper place, a place of rest and acceptance. I don't know how other immigrants feel, but in my case, I have never lost the feeling that I am trying to bridge the gap between two continents, like a giant standing on two floating icebergs in the middle of the Atlantic. If you ever tried to balance on two wobbling structures, that is how I feel about me living here in the US, but part of me also being in Europe.

I sometimes look at my relationship to Europe as a daughter's relationship to her mother and as we all know, a mother/daughter relationship is very complex. It boils down to the fact that Europe (the people back home) and me, the immigrant, we are both under the illusion that we are the center of the world.

But there is a difference between me and the people I left behind. I realize very clearly that ultimately, I am not all that important, because I am only one link in a long chain. My American children will continue (delete "on") bearing American children of their own (unless they emigrate of course). I was just the seedbearer of a new immigrant plant. Whereas my European friends, Well, would it be presumptuous to compare them to the inhabitants of the two-dimensional beings in the story of Flatland? That, since they have never experienced being immigrants, leaving their homeland, they are totally unaware of a third dimension? An immigrant dimension? They are not aware of what it is like to live anywhere BUT Europe? The world is a small place for those who do not travel. It is a safe place, nothing frighteningly big to compare yourself to. Hence you are more important.

So where does this feeling of resentment stem from? Partly because America is no longer the country I came to a long long time ago. My new found lover has not kept his word, he is no longer taking care of me. America has given me many things, the need to be strong so I could survive, to be creative and inventive so I could fulfill myself. It has always given me the freedom that Europe never did and probably still does not offer. But it gets harder and harder to stay in love with such a dysfunctional lover.

Now I am flying back to my life, my children, my husband, my job. My continent. Being an immigrant makes you resilient. On the one hand it makes you aware of how small and unimportant you are, on the other hand it makes you proud of the fact that you started out in the new world with just one suitcase and a hundred dollars in your pocket. And I had the most valuable asset one can have as an immigrant: I was young. And after all, we all turn to dust, become food for the worms, immigrant or a flatlander alike.

Bye Europe. I do love you though. I guess I will have to accept being part of two worlds until the day I die.
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