SWEET LAND

...Their alternative choices, like mine, would be martyrdom or expatriation, and, like me, they are not martyrs and, again like me, they wanna go home...

...Going away from it, and leaving it as it is, in the hands of militarist Republicans and super-militarist Democrats, would be to abandon my post...

...The Swedes are stable...

...As soon as my friend and I paused for breath, she suggested that we adjourn to the parlor and sing...

...And the Swedes, in those days, were no more lovable, no less aggressive, and considerably more awful than they are today...

...Within a month I'm an American apologist, and the vituperations I ventilate at home I leave stored in my suitcase until I get back...

...Besides, I am the sovereign ruler of my country...

...by the fact that there really are no slums, no unemployed, no destitute...

...There is nothing quaint about the Swedes...

...Not that they did not get around to joining the general condemnation...

...burning down Moscow was their idea of a Saturday night, and their brutal ambition to destroy Russia, which was peaceful in those days, and too badly organized to be anything else, got them as far as a strangle-hold of the whole Baltic coast...

...But they stand boldly alone, deserted even by their Norwegian and Danish cousins, of whom the Nazis succeeded in making war-men...

...the business of the Swiss is to rent rooms...

...rather, they despised him for rocking the boat with his loud and loutish talk...

...The edge is off them...

...If it were not for the Swedes, stuffy and shy, where do you suppose we'd all be...

...Nobody loves them...

...If I don't like Russia, India, Spain, I shrug my shoulders...

...I hold no office in Russia, India, Spain...

...Once they figured out what "retaliation" meant, they got the general idea...

...Take the recent occasion of the most marvelous acrobatic event of human history—the article in Life in which Secretary Dulles managed to get both feet in his mouth, his hands at his throat, his head in the sand, and blow himself to pieces...

...nobody but Dulles talks that way...

...But the fact that Sweden will not whore with the capitalist goliath is a communist victory, always tentative, as the fact that it will not whore with the communist goliath is a victory, however unsatisfying, for the capitalists...

...Oh, yes," said the Swedes, "let's sing...

...I wanna go home...

...If they don't specialize in Southern Hospitality—and they don't—they don't specialize in lynching, either...

...Their conversation is even more vapid than ours, for we have the conquest of the world to beguile us, while they have nothing at all to think about...

...by the annual union-management negotiations (with the government as mediator) which, by tacit understanding, are supposed to culminate in a three per cent wage increase and in which, the last time around, with prices rising steadily, one of the unions broke the line and the ultimate increase in wages was as high as 18 per cent...

...And then came the Life article...

...Their churches are empty, their schools psychiatric, and their business-men thrombotic...

...There were four Swedes at the table...

...And neither have the Russians...

...solid...

...He was talking, doubtless, the way he thought the Russians talked, or at least the way they listened...

...IV The Swedes hate the Russians for the same reason the Germans do: we hate the people we have injured...

...neither the Russians nor the Americans would dare put the shameless pressure on the Swedes that they have put on stronger, less stable peoples...

...They have stainless steel sinks, picture windows, Marilyn Monroe and/or juvenile delinquency, and alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous and new cars...

...Twice in five years have I seen the Goddess, tarnished of face and fame, fade (as she does so surprisingly soon) in the fading harbor...

...Being an apologist for my country is full-time work abroad, even here, in Sweden...

...Why not stay home and get an occasional laugh...

...like all middle-class Swedes (and Americans), they agreed with my friend that the greatest curse on earth is the "cost of labor" (as if labor were a commodity and not a man...

...III Convinced of their own unimportance—a conviction which accounts for their shyness, which, in turn, accounts for their reputation for arrogance—they are the most useful people in the world today...

...The struggle for the world is a struggle for a world of desperate poverty, a world which, one way or another, is going to be socialized, even if, as it seems to, socialization means dictatorship...

...And the whole history of war, in which kings all gloried, peasants all died, and merchants all prospered, is enough to make an American wanna go home, providing that the American peasants pull the rug, while the pulling is good, out from under their kings and merchants...

...Like cats on the net at a tennis match, they turned their heads frantically from one end of the table to the other as first my friend slammed the ball at me and then I lobbed it back over his head...

...Sweden is, in point of fact, only a symbolic prize that the communist and the capitalist goliaths covet...

...Twice have I gone away from home to add my authentic American rasp to the world's chorus of unappreciative and indiscriminate criticism of the land where land goes begging for population and a man without a car is a man without a leg...

...We never sing in Sweden...

...Unlike the lovable Italians, they neither dance in the streets nor latch on to II Duce...

...Mas-sa or maza, it seems to have meant a cake (thus, too, the Hebrew matzo, more specifically a barley-cake baked in a mound or heap, and so, finally, in every language, anything heaped or piled high...

...And these are hard lines for a pacifist to write: that the rest of the Europeans, crushing themselves and one another with poverty, war, and still greater poverty, are better company than the two peoples (the still duller Swiss are the other) who have achieved the ideal of peace and prosperity...

...The one-third prosperity is represented by the cradle-to-grave welfare state...

...Against the world's criticism —which was once compounded of contempt and envy and is now compounded of envy and fear—I raise my authentic American rasp...

...And so I understand why Germans, when their country is Nazi, are Nazis, and Russians, when their country is Communist, are Communists...

...By contrast, the Swiss refusal to join UN reveals the uselessness of their refusal to join NATO...

...I got into a dinner-table argument here with an American who hates the unions...

...Massively cool...

...The goliaths could overrun them, not in hours but in minutes...

...I have no responsibility to improve them...

...as they did, with war and victory...

...They are the Americans of Europe...

...But all Europe (with the possible exception of Russia) listened and trembled, not at his majesty but at the inflammatory irresponsibility with which he chucked loaded words around, like a six-year-old with a loaded revolver...

...But the Russians did not talk that way...

...You never talk, either," I said...

...The Swedes' neutrality, like other peoples' belligerence, may be selfish, but it is aggressive...

...If they are un-heroic, they are also unafraid...

...Mostly," said one of the Swedes, "we're too busy...

...I tell them that we're young and bumptious, short-sighted and isolated {and therefore uncomprehending) through no fault (or virtue) of our own...

...My friend's wife, like all middle-class American (and Swedish) wives, doesn't like arguments...

...How they got that way, too busy to talk, too busy to sing, too busy to smile on a subway or excuse themselves when they knock each other down, I do not know...

...It was the usual middle-class bleat: my friend couldn't see why Dave Beck should be a university regent or why Tom Girdler shouldn't be...

...I can only suspect that the cause of it all is a century of peace and prosperity...

...Why should I go to Russia and exchange the dreaded FBI for the dreaded NKVD...

...This poor triumph is the Swedes' par excellence, and we Americans, who have forgotten both how to live and how not to die, can learn, if not the first, then the second, from them...

...II What good are the Swedes, then, if they are only dehydrated Americans...

...The two-thirds inflation is represented by the lagging of the new construction, by the current price-rise to the American level...

...They are only seven million people in a completely exposed position...

...even the Dag-ens Nyeter, the best and biggest paper in Sweden, which tries to support American policy against both the Swedish government and the Swedish people as a whole...

...of liberty or no, it doesn't matter...

...It would be too much to say that they hated Secretary Dulles for his doctrine (as he would call it...

...The Swiss are rich, too, but the Swiss are still quaint...

...what do you do...

...Sweet land...

...The answer is not far to find, in a world spiraling faster and faster downward into the vortex...

...In order to convey the European—but not the Swedish—reaction in Europe's own words, I will have to begin by displaying my philological erudition...

...It may not be much, but it's mine and I love it...

...At home my countrymen tell me that if I don't like it there, why don't I go to Russia...

...They will not join NATO because it is a military alliance, but their whole heart is in the UN because it is a conference table...

...If they are unimpressive, they are also unimpressed...

...Sweden is irrelevant to that world, just as it is to the capitalist world, which can continue to exist only with boundless natural resources and boundless foreign markets guaranteed by force...

...Where every day is Sunday, Sunday is just another weekday...

...The Swedes, reporting the red-hot reaction of the rest of the world, were keeping cool...

...by the continual new construction...

...And the Communist and Capitalist goliaths, in their struggle for the world, stand respectfully at the Swedish border...

...I wanna toast for breakfast and that good tasteless frozen orange juice diluted with two parts chlorine and one part water and a morning paper that a man can read...

...They got that way by admiring us, and it's a terrible way to be...

...Their resources, like ours, have all passed from within to without...

...if I don't like my country, I improve it...

...What have the Russians got that we haven't got, including chain-gangs...

...Home makes jingos of us all...

...The Swedes have not forgotten what they did to the Russians, and neither have the Germans...

...having no sorrows, they have no joys...

...I hold its highest office, the office of citizen...

...But by the time I get to the foreign shore my rasp has given way to a sigh, and the sigh to something very like a sob...

...Still, it is better to be blown up at home than abroad...

...But it is not a useful people's business to be loved, but to be useful...

...I tell them that they don't understand our problems, that it isn't our fault that we're rich, and that soon we'll be poor like them, having ruined ourselves...

...From the English "massive falsehood"—with special reference to the claim that England agreed to intervene in Indo-China—to the French "massive stupidite," to the German "massive Dummheit," to the Italian "massiccio idiotismo," the poor old dolt who was going to bring the mountain-tops down on the world was given the verbal works...

...You may say (as they themselves do) that they amount to nothing...

...But not one of them said as much as one word during the argument...

...The Latin and Greek words for "massive"—as in "massive retaliation"—are so much alike that the word is substantially the same in every Indo-European language...

...The Swedes are the Americans of Europe...

...The only thing that can ruin Sweden is prosperity, which, as it is everywhere, is one-third prosperity and two-thirds inflation...

...The Europeans, including the Russians, took over the French word massif literally, to signify the dominant central mass of a mountain range...

...at the last Olympics, in Helsinki, the crowd cheered whenever the Swedes lost, no matter who beat them (even if it was the Russians...

...But their condemnation was characterized by constraint of a sort that will, I think, go down in political history as Swedish Frigid, much as American Colonial has been established in period furniture...

...It is a very poor world, today's is, and a people should be judged not as having learned how to live but as having learned how not to die...

...The trouble with the American peasants—with us American peasants—is that we want to be kings and merchants and we'll blow ourselves up in the effort...

...I wanna go out after breakfast and pass people to whom, instead of saying, "Goddag," I can say, "Hi," people to whom "Hello" means "Hello" and not "Hey...

...His figure was now a massive monstrosity, and his bully-boy phrase of yesteryear reverberated in new array...

...Ganging up on huge, inchoate Russia was the European Olympic Game until Peter knocked off the Swedes and Catherine knocked off the Swedes' Christian friends, the Turks, a mere two centuries ago...

...Glum and unsociable (except when they drink too much, which is why they regulate their drinking), they are everywhere in the world, negotiating, mediating, arbitrating...

...But not by the Swedes...

...However faithfully their correspondents reported that Europeans had to understand that anything goes in American politics, and that Dulles was just an election-year Republican, the reaction in Europe was tumultuous...