Drömmen om Norden

Ibland känner vi i Norden oss en smula amerikaniserade eftersom vi gillar Hollywood, amerikanska TV-serier etc. Den amerikanska vänstern däremot drömmer om att USA skulle bli som Norden.

I The New Yorker skriver Nathan Heller roligt och insiktsfullt om skillnaderna mellan nordiskt och amerikanskt.

Some say that the American Dream is not what it once was: wages are low, retirement is not a parachute glide but a plunge, and those chosen to fix such problems labor at undoing one another’s laws. For these doubters, there are the Swedes. On any given day, a Swedish man—call him Viggo—might be reclining on a sofa underneath a Danish lamp shaped like an artichoke. He is an artist, and he has a pension. He is wearing boldly colored pants. His young wife, Ebba, is a neurosurgeon, though she has never paid a krona in tuition, and her schedule runs between the operating table and the laboratory. Things are busy. She and Viggo have small kids (the government gives them a combined four hundred and eighty days of maternity and paternity leave for every child), and when the younger ran a fever yesterday he needed to be whisked from day care to the doctor (both charged mostly to the state). Now it’s the weekend. They are in their country house. It’s nothing fancy, just a little place among the birches near the Øresund, but Viggo spiffed it up with some IKEA deckware, and their friends drop by for oysters and beer. As dawn comes, he brews coffee. He is listening to a radio report on the Prime Minister, who brokered a budget agreement among six parties, and then Stieg Larsson, who is being memorialized on-air. He turns the dial to the multiethnic band Icona Pop, which has soared across the global charts. Icona Pop sings, “We’re just living life, and we never stop,” and that is what Sweden now means to Viggo. Freedom to follow your talents. Community and coalition-building all around. American life promises liberty, cultural power, and creative opportunity, but by many measures it’s the Swedes who turned this smorgasbord of concepts into a sustaining meal.

Fortsättningen är om möjligt än roligare och han slutar med denna suck:

… it’s hard to envision the Nordic model ever finding a home on these shores. American life is like the American diet—equal parts hopeful and negligent, with something sweet and bubbly on the side. The practicality and the balance of the Scandinavian way, the meat and grain and vegetables of it, isn’t what we truly want, though we would gladly wish a meal like that on anyone else.