My (straight) brother in Amsterdam sends me this email with the subject, “blue is pink.” In Amsterdam, the gay pride boat parade is for everybody:
Happy Gay Pride!
Do the police not have a gay parade boat where you come from?
The inflatable hat is a nice touch. Caption on the boat says, “The police are for everyone,” meaning, as I interpret it, gay cops and gay citizens.
Andrew
This is so bizarre I first thought it was satire: A robbery victim gets arrested and the robber gets fed wine and cheese! Classy. But it’s not satire.
Trots op NLmeans “Proud of the Netherlands” and is a fringe right-wing political party that is playing on racism and fear of crime.
Is white people drowning in a swimming pool too subtle for you? “But I do like,” writes my wife, “how because it’s European, the white-people-about-to-drown image has a certain avant-garde-theater vibe to it.”
The video is all in Dutch. If it makes you feel any better, I can’t understand a lot of it, either. But the visual is good enough to get the message. Party leader Rita Verdonk is going to make the streets safe and you proud of the Netherlands. Some parts I can understand has her saying:
This is the Netherlands. It’s not safe anymore on the streets…. This is what our daughters put up with everyday.
…
We’re fed up! Government makes the wrong decisions for years and hands you the bill. Out with bureaucracy. No welfare for those who don’t want to work. No more foreign aid. We need that money here for elderly and handicapped.
…
Too many regulations. Too much tax. Out with the tax agency. One tax rate for everybody: 25%!
Why it’s a regular Dutch Tea Party!
My emigrant brother says, “The only unexpected thing is her pitch for one tax rate. Now it is 42% (or 52% for the wealthiest). The poorer have a few lower levels, too. I’m not sure how she will pay for her plans.” Brother Andrew continues, “The funniest thing is the people that live in these (targeted) neighborhoods are not in fear of crime.”
Even with all her happy Dutch supporters (the butch, the baker, the candlestick maker), Verdonk doesn’t even pretendto hang around any racial or ethnic minority. I mean, even Republicans politicians like getting photographedwith black people standing around, even if almost no blacks actually vote Republican.
“The only distinctively ‘Dutch’ people she can muster at the end,” continues my wife, “is the chick in the silly white bonnet? You’ve got to admit, it’s sort of flimsy in terms of national icons.” Indeed. But Americans might have to be reminded that this is supposed to represent conservative Holland. To my American eyes, it looks like the start of a crazy liberal costume party in Portland or something. I mean, somebody even biked there on an orange bike!
I’m not a big fan of crowds. Mobs do stupid things–both intentionally and through panic. I always like having an out.
Interestingly, I’ve always felt a little more claustrophobic in Dutch crowds. I think they’re used to less personal space so they get tighter together (which is also a sign of their general civility). The Dutch also sometimes seem a little less willing to move out of the way in crowded bars (and yet I willget to the bathroom.). Though it might be just that the Dutch are so damn tall. I’m 5’9″. I feel short in Amsterdam; I can’t see over anybody! (In Mexico, though, I feel like a giant.)
My mom was in this crowd. There’s English in that link from the BBC. Here’s the Dutch:
My mother wrote this:
Today is Remembrance Day for the victims of WWII. Queen Beatrix and other dignitaries lay wreaths at the National Monument on Dam Square. The city of Amsterdam observes two minutes of silence at 8PM.[Actually I think it’s the whole country and it’s a very respectful and moving tradition.]I biked over there, locked my bike a short distance away and was standing in front of a building from where we could see the huge screen and follow the event. It is a moving experience to be present at this kind of gathering, I don’t think I have ever witnessed this huge amount of people gathered anywhere.
Just after the moment of silence, a very loud shriek could be heard not that far away from where I was standing. Immediately, a huge amount of people started to move away from where the sound had come from. It was scary when this mass of people attempted to run away from the shout. It had not reached the stage of panic. I was somewhat protected/cushioned by three rows of people in front of me, but I could easily imagine what could have happened once the mass of people had really been in motion. Someone shouted in a very comforting voice “rustig” for people to remain calm which they did in my immediate area. Someone next to me remarked that he did not hear a bomb go. Just the thought of it. Moments later I could see police officers leading a person away and things returned to normal. An hour later, once I was home again, I listened to the news on the radio. It was reported that fifty persons had been injured.
Ahhh, the joys of drug regulation and the strange wonders of Dutch drug policy.
The ultimate crime seem to be that this place got too big for its britches. But they nailed them for keeping a stock of more than 18 ounces of marijuana. That is a limit that most if not all coffee shops violate. But this place was busted with 440 pounds of weed in house.
I honestly have never heard of Terneuzen. But I am off to Amsterdam tomorrow for Spring Break to visit family (my brother, his wife, and kids), friends, and boats.
Stay safe. I’ll try and stay out of trouble.
Hot off the virtual presses, here’s an article I wrote appearing in this coming Sunday’s Washington Post. I talk about the difference in policy and police attitudes toward drugs in Amsterdam and in the U.S.:
In Amsterdam, the red-light district is the oldest and most notorious neighborhood. Two picturesque canals frame countless small pedestrian alleyways lined with legal prostitutes, bars, porn stores and coffee shops. In 2008, I visited the local police station and asked about the neighborhood’s problems. I laughed when I heard that dealers of fake drugs were the biggest police issue — but it’s true. If fake-drug dealers are the worst problem in the red-light district, clearly somebody is doing something right.
and
History provides some lessons. The 21st Amendment ending Prohibition did not force anybody to drink or any city to license saloons. In 1933, after the failure to ban alcohol, the feds simply got out of the game. Today, they should do the same — and last week the Justice Department took a very small step in the right direction.
Here’s an interesting website about my brother’s home of Amsterdam. It’s specifically in response to Bill O’Reilly’s lies about Amsterdam. In case you think everyone is always wearing orange and dancing, Queens Day only happens once a year. But it is a pretty impressive day. And the boat-ride video makes me kind of homesick. I know those canals well. But I particularly like American tourists discuss Amsterdam. I also know American tourists well.
This just in over the transom:
Went to Loveland Festival in Sloterpark yesterday and a great time was had by all except [name removed] who was found by security to have two pills [of ecstasy] on him. Without saying a word, the security guy brought him to cops who took him to the station. After 90 minutes of waiting (no cell phone use), a cop came over, talked to him, and said two pills with no record, you’re free to go. No record was made of the incident. That could have gone worse.
This account of the party scene in Amsterdam is from a person who enjoys such things. He’s lived in Amsterdam for the past 17 years.
The Sensation dance party, Wicked Wonderland, held in the city’s largest football stadium. The dress code was all white. The party goes from 10pm to 6am. Tickets cost about $100 (69 euros).
The placed is filled with thousands–probably tens of thousands people–dancing. [Update: there were 40,000 people on each of the two sold-out nights. Public transportation was excellent, night train schedules were posted in the bathrooms, and special free busses were running between 1 and 5am when the metro is shut down] Top DJs spin. It’s an upscale rave. Does that mean people are taking drugs? Of course.
Nobody overdoses. Nobody dies. A good time is had by all. Many if not most of the people are high on marijuana and/or ecstasy. There’s also a full bar.
[click on the picture to get an idea of the scale of this event. It is HUGE.]
Because of our war on drugs, there’s no equivalent to this DJ-music party scene in the US. It’s actually illegal. Nobody can make money on such a large scale event because they all get shut down by police. It would be like closing down Yankee Stadium in the 1920s because people were drinking at baseball games.
In Europe, this party scene is a job-creating industry. This one sounded like fun.
Sensation White was the best or at least the most impressive dance music party I have even been to. It was at the Arena, but they did it up really nicely. The stage was in the center with four thrust parts going into the four corners. That meant that your section of the audience was broken up and smaller and there was stuff close to you.
They did the place up so well with details and hiring hundred’ of models to work there. Everyone was actually dressed all in white, and the atmosphere was superb. And so many hot 20 somethings. Mmmmm. And 30 somethings and 40 somethings too. It was an exciting mix actually. And it sounded good. There, it’s official, a stadium set-up can sound perfect. I want nothing less in the future, please.
Unlike two years ago where police in plainclothes were harassing party goers and arresting joint smokers (for what I’m not sure), this year they were present, helpful and in the background.
It should be noted that two years ago the Amsterdam police were not actually going so far as to take people to jail for drug use. But they were taking people out of the party and giving them citations. Taking any action for marijuana in Amsterdam is pretty much unheard of. Much less “harassing” people who otherwise were not causing trouble. This year was more laid back.
We did one e before getting on the metro and I had two more in my shoe. In the other shoe I had a joint and left a decoy joint in my pockets. When I took it out at the frisking, they said it wasn’t allowed. “Why?” I asked.
You are allowed to have 5 grams [about 1/5 of an ounce] of weed in a bag and roll your own. But not a pre-rolled joint because, “We don’t know what is in it.”
“You can go outside and smoke it right now if you want,” a second security helpfully offered.
I thought that was very reasonable, but let them take it. I smoked the secret one over the evening in their classy, not stuffed, not smoky smoking room. The football stadium had windows the opened!
I wrote back and said I was shocked that anybody in Amsterdam would have to resort to a “decoy joint.” It’s “just not mokum,” I said. His reply:
On one hand it is ridiculous that I would bring a decoy roach. And it’s not Amsterdam. On the other hand, I think it’s still nice that I can bring a decoy roach just to see what the police/security will do and not be worried that anything bad will happen. Of course I know they are not going to make me take off my shoes, so drugs get in.
Is this man a blight on society? A junkie? A long-haired hippy freak? Quite the contrary. This man, who may or may not be my brother, is a husband, a father, and employees lots of people. He is a businessman.
Were it not for the permissive and successful drug policy of the Netherlands, he would not be in Amsterdam providing jobs and paying taxes. He never would have visited in the first place.
If you’re a right-winger who wants to call the European social-welfare state “socialism,” so be it. Use whatever word you want for a system that provides housing and health care and education, helps poor people, and keeps the streets safe. I’ll take it.
Take the Netherlands, as Russell Shorto does in an excellent article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.
In Holland there are still businesses and rich people. The Dutch are capitalists. Arguably, they invented the system. But they also believe that the collective power of the state has the ability, even the duty, to help those least able to help themselves. In the end, virtually everybody benefits. The Dutch system isn’t perfect, but it’s very good.
It’s not all good. In the Netherlands, like most of Europe, there’s a problem with immigration. The issues of immigrants in Holland (and generally all of Europe) make me proud to be an American.
And then there’s the Dutch weather. It’s horrible. The brilliant Dutch light that inspired so much beautiful painting is real. And it comes as a result of clouds and being so far north. It can be cold and rainy at any time of year. And it never gets hot. One summer I was there, summer never came. I couldn’t take the prospect of another dreary winter without a summer.
That’s the down side. But I imagine when Republicans complain about Obama being socialist, they’re not talking about the weather.
Along with doing police research in Amsterdam and working for time at my brother’s theater, I also started a non-profit boat club. It’s still there and whenever I can get back, I take out a lot of tourists on the beautiful canals.
Americans are constantly amazed that a city could be so livable and so beautiful (and pedestrian and bicycle friendly). I am always quick to tell them we could do that too, if we wanted to… and were willing to pay half our income in taxes.
Their collective approach could be the result of much of the country being below sea level. It could also be some strain of Calvinist Protestantism. The Dutch, contrary to public opinion, aren’t liberal. They’re tolerant. If anything, they’re amoral. And since morality generally does not make good public policy, things in the Netherlands generally work. And if they don’t, they spend money and fix them till they do.
I’ve lived in Amsterdam. My brother still does. He was first attracted by their permissive attitude toward legal marijuana. While partaking in that, he and a friend had the brilliant idea to open a business, a comedy theater.
He did. Amsterdam is now home for him now. Seventeen years later Boom Chicago is the fruits of his labor. Now that my brother is a business man, he frequently complains about Dutch labor policy. Like the fact you really can’t fire workers. Ever. Even bad ones. And then there’s a tendency for these workers–in what has to be one of the least stressful countries on earth–to go out on employer subsidized sick leave because of, you guessed it: “stress.”
And workers, and even the unemployed, get an extra month salary, “vacation money,” for their annual month of paid vacation. This is so hard for Americans to conceive of that I’ll say it again: Dutch workers get a month paid vacation and during that month, they get an extra month of salary. Otherwise, the thinking goes, how could you afford to go on vacation?
But because taxes in our country are considered socialist (or worse), we don’t. I lose close to 40 percent of my paycheck every other week. I would be happy to give up another 10 percent of my income for all the benefits the Dutch get from their taxes.
Anyway, read Shorto’s article. Especially if you’ve never been to Europe but instinctively nod in agreement whenever people criticize their economic policies.
Here’s a sample:
Then there are the features of European life that grate on an American sensibility, like the three-inch leeway that drivers deign to grant you on the highway, or the cling film you get from the supermarket, which clings only to itself. But such annoyances pale in comparison to one other. For the first few months I was haunted by a number: 52. It reverberated in my head; I felt myself a prisoner trying to escape its bars. For it represents the rate at which the income I earn, as a writer and as the director of an institute, is to be taxed. To be plain: more than half of my modest haul, I learned on arrival, was to be swallowed by the Dutch welfare state. Nothing in my time here has made me feel so much like an American as my reaction to this number. I am politically left of center in most ways, but from the time 52 entered my brain, I felt a chorus of voices rise up within my soul, none of which I knew I had internalized, each a ghostly simulacrum of a right-wing, supply-side icon: Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Rush Limbaugh. The grim words this chorus chanted in defense of my hard-earned income I recognized as copied from Charlton Heston’s N.R.A. rallying cry about prying his gun from his cold, dead hands.
Interesting story here.
Meanwhile, in Amsterdam the move to re-criminalize psychedelic mushrooms has been postponed another year. They’re still sold legally in stores.
Some of my friends in Amsterdam (from where I write this) are E.R. nurses. They complain to me about the summer influx of drugged-out people to the hospitals. They’re all tourists and mostly casualties of shrooms and spacecakes. They live. But they annoy the hell out of the nurses.
Health care in the Netherlands, by the way, is notfree for tourists.