Understand Your Fellow Human Being: The Low Countries
Americans are frequently criticized (usually by Europeans and American liberals) for being insular people who don’t have any knowledge of the outside world. Well of course we are! If you lived here you wouldn’t see any reason to learn anything about your inferiors either, Frenchy.
Nevertheless, as a public service and a means of handing an olive branch to my esteemed colleagues across the pond, I’m now presenting a primer on geographical anthropology to you, my three readers.
Next up: Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg. All entries in this series can be found here.
I don’t really know what these countries bring to the table. As far as I can tell it’s waffles, hookers, and a place you can go to legally blaze up the reefer. Oh yes, and a convenient route to use for an invasion if someone has fortified only part of its eastern border.
In other words, they’re like the French only without the history of importance on the world stage. A lot of their land is below sea level, so in another way they’re like New Orleans without the Cajun food. And the successful athletes. Let’s face it, if your national sport is speed skating, you might want to rethink your nation’s athletic future.
But they’re really good at pretending they’re important. The international criminal court – such as it is – can be found here, as can the headquarters of NATO. Although why we’d put the NATO headquarters in the middle of Belgium escapes me. I’m pretty sure the Smurfs were invented here too.
Which leads me to digress. Why is the plural of “Smurf” Smurfs? Shouldn’t it be Smurves? Stupid Belgians. Add in the fact that Michael Caine, as Austin Powers’ father, absolutely hated the Dutch, and I think we can pretty much write off the Low Countries except for the fact that George S. Patton’s most glorious moment occurred there. Sixty-five years ago.
Luxembourg? I’m not sure they actually exist. I think they’re a joke played by France and Belgium on the rest of the world, just waiting to see if anyone would be brave enough to call them on it. I see it going something like this.
Canada: We’re aboot to go on vacation, eh? Whereaboots you think you wanna go, eh? (because all Canadians end every single sentence with “eh”)
Great Britain: I say, dear boy, let’s tarry ourselves away to Luxembourg, I hear they have the most phenomenal tea and crumpets. (because all Brits crave tea and crumpets the way zombies crave brains)
France: Ahhh ha ha, English pig-dogs! Zere ees no Luxembourg! Ahhh ha ha! (because Monty Python and the Holy Grail was the most accurate depiction of the French ever made)
The Netherlands and Belgium are the kids who sit next to the Scandinavians and pretend they’re really important. They’re a member of every single extracurricular activity (not counting, you know, sports) and are in charge of the school yearbook. They do the announcements on the closed-circuit school television every morning and they go out of their way to make life uncomfortable for the kid who sits in the back of the class and gets A’s despite not studying or doing homework. You know, they try to socially ostracize them and tell the teachers about their less-than-studious ways. In other words, no one would miss them if sea levels went up a couple dozen feet and they had to grow gills.
Understand Your Fellow Human Being: Scandinavians
Americans are frequently criticized (usually by Europeans and American liberals) for being insular people who don’t have any knowledge of the outside world. Well of course we are! If you lived here you wouldn’t see any reason to learn anything about your inferiors either, Frenchy.
Nevertheless, as a public service and a means of handing an olive branch to my esteemed colleagues across the pond, I’m now presenting a primer on geographical anthropology to you, my three readers.
Next up: Scandinavia. All entries in this series can be found here.
Let’s face it, when most people think of Scandinavia they think of blonde-haired people riding on reindeer or skiing, possibly with a horned helmet on their heads. And they’re right. That is all they do. But there’s a little more people could learn if they wanted to. For example, did you know that the captain of Sweden’s women’s curling team looks kind of like a blonde and female version of my father? I bet you didn’t.
Also, Scandinavia is where they give out Nobel Peace Prizes to people who haven’t really done anything in the pursuit of peace. For example, someone won one for making apocalyptic predictions that the weather is going to get warmer in the future, and it’s all our fault. Even if he was right, how does that promote peace? But Scandinavians are funny in their own way, else they’d call it the Nobel Druidism Prize or something.
Scandinavians are one of a very select group of people to have inspired the name of an American football team. Wow. On second thought that’s not all that select a group, is it? Well, I tried. They did give us the band Hammerfall, which in turn gave us the awesome song “Hearts on Fire” from Rocky IV. Upon further reflection, this is probably the most awesome thing Scandinavians have ever done.
To fit the Scandis in with our analogy from a prior post, they’re like the kid who sits up at the front of the class and studies really hard. They suck up to the teacher all the time and everyone sees right through it but no one really cares all that much because they’re nice enough. Plus they tell good stories, even if they’re aimed at a bit of a younger audience. Weirdly, their bikes are missing parts and fall apart occasionally. Plus their sisters are pretty hot. They get along with pretty much everybody which is good because they’re kind of wusses so they wouldn’t bring a lot to the table if a huge fight broke out.
Feel free to comment at this time.
On Canada, Family, Et Cetera
Sorry I haven’t posted all week. The US Curling teams’ horrible failures really bummed me out. I just came out of my room this morning after four days of being curled up in a dark corner sucking my thumb.
The US-Canada men’s hockey game on Sunday was great, and I don’t even particularly enjoy hockey. I do feel bad though, because after we won on Sunday I said something to the effect of “Sidney Crosby can suck it! USA! USA!” and then after Canada’s women’s team beat us today for the gold medal their fans were like Air Force Academy football fans at the medal ceremony, all cheering loudly and enthusiastically for the US players as they got their medals. Canadians are better winners than Americans, I guess. Then again, maybe they just haven’t won enough things to be bad winners. Being gracious in victory is something that gets tiring after a couple hundred years of awesomeness. Canada may discover that someday. And in all honesty, if we can’t win something I guess it’s okay if Canada wins, unless Australia can win instead.
I was wondering the other day why I always find myself rooting for Australia if the US isn’t a contender to win something. In fact, I’d rather see the Aussies win than Canada, New Zealand, OR the Brits. We’re not even going to discuss anyone else because I don’t root for people who don’t speak English as a first language. I know, I know, I’m a xenophobic bigot racist, but what are you gonna do? It’s not like I can go back in time to last year and vote for Obama, can I? Of course even if I could, I wouldn’t. Because I’m a xenophobic bigot racist. Also, I prefer a President who can do things other than talk about how awesome he is. If I wanted to hear someone go on and on about how awesome he was, I’d record myself in an everyday conversation and play it back through some headphones.
But I digress. Why do I root for Australia at the expense of the other Anglophones in the world? I think I’ve figured it out. The Brits are like our snotty older brother who used to pick on us when we were little but stopped once we hit puberty and beat their ass a couple of times. Now they’ve got a PhD in sociology or something useless like that and always kind of look down their noses at us, but we know we could always call them if we really, really needed anything. We’d just kind of hate ourselves for doing it, and they’d probably never stop complaining about it, even if we’d bailed their ass out of jail a few times ourselves.
The Canadians are our little brother. They’re always there, sleeping in our room, making annoying clicking sounds when they eat, and getting all the praise from our parents. Of course, we can’t really blame them for resenting us a little, considering we do stuff like set their stuffed animals on fire and “accidentally” push them through plate-glass windows, not to mention that we rarely fail to jump on the chance to mock them when they do something stupid. But we’re so close that we kind of get sick of the sight of each other, and when we fight, we don’t mess around. Hell, we tried to invade them twice and that didn’t really work out. They retaliated by inventing hockey and being really good at it, and we responded by stealing their hockey teams and putting them in places like Phoenix, which is like the opposite of Canada. Anyway…
New Zealand? They’re like a distant cousin who lives across the country and is into weird crap like the Dalai Lama, patchouli, and organic food. They’re nice enough, but we don’t really know them all that well, so we don’t give them much of a second thought. Also they’ve never really done anything with their lives other than make their own bio-diesel and learn to play the acoustic guitar.
But Australia? They’re our cousin who’s pretty close to our age and does all the cool stuff we WISH we could do. You know, they were roadies for Metallica (Speed of Sound Tour) and ride around in bad-ass motorcycles and sports cars and seemingly have hot chick in bikinis around them all the time. We don’t get to see them too often, but when we do we have a damned good time. And we usually end up hung over. And when they’re gone we look in the mirror and ask ourselves why we aren’t as cool as they are. Never mind that they’ve been working as bartenders for the last fifteen years and still live with their parents. They’re still kind of our heroes in a way.
And that’s that. I think I captured the gist of international relations within the Anglosphere pretty handily, don’t you?