Tribal identification transcended atheism, too. In the 1960s, twenty-eight of the fifty-two members of the Albanian Communist Party’s central committee were related by blood.
Blood being the key word. Albania is remarkable for the number and persistence of its blood feuds. As soon as a boy is of age, he is liable to become a Lord of Blood, a Zot i Gjakut, with responsibility for killing members of the clan who killed members of his clan, who killed members of their clan, and so forth—a sort of pyramid scheme of death, if you will.
Men who are “in blood” can spend years shut up inside their fortified houses. Girls, however, are let off the hook unless they swear to be virgins and wear men’s clothes. Lest anyone accuse the Albanians of utterly eschewing all rule of law, this takes place under the auspices of the Kanun Lek Dukagjini, the Law of Lek, a voluminous compendium of tribal custom and practice dating back at least to the 1400s, copies of which may be purchased at book stalls in Tirana.
According to James Pettifer, who wrote an essay on the subject for the Blue Guide to Albania, anthropologists estimate that there are some 2,000 blood feuds going on in Albania and that as many as 60,000 people are involved. (The Blue Guide is one of the few tourist manuals with a good section on the ins and outs of vendetta killing.) In 1992, a man was beheaded with an ax in a Tirana hotel lobby—revenge for a murder his father had committed in a northern village more than forty years before.
The Albanians certainly have preserved their culture. Whether this is a good idea is a question that can be decided only, of course, by Albanians. But in these times of multiculti zeal, it may be worth noting that the Albanian language did not have a proper alphabet until 1908. The country didn’t get a railroad until 1947. The first Albanian university was founded in 1957. And there is an Albanian proverb to the effect that a woman must work harder than a donkey because a donkey feeds on grass, while a woman feeds on bread.
Culture is an important factor in determining the economic success of a nation. But, that said, what else is there to say? Germany got rich with a culture as barbaric—a couple of world wars and a Holocaust prove it—as anything ever seen. Tibet stayed poor with a culture so wonderful that half of the movie stars in America want to move there. And how do you change a culture anyway? We could wire Albania for cable and let its citizens see how the rest of the world lives. Jerry Springer should give them some good ideas.
Albania did not improve upon inspection. Even the animals in the Tirana zoo had been stolen. The monkeys were gone from Monkey Island. The aviary was empty of birds. All the large ruminants had been “eaten,” said Elmaz. Only two lions, a tiger, and a wolf remained in captivity. No one had had the guts to steal them—although several young men seemed to be gearing themselves to the task. The bars on the wolf’s cage had been pried back. One young man stuck his hand inside, shouted, and snatched the hand back. The wolf ignored him, and the men went down the hall to tease the tiger and lions.
In the middle of downtown Tirana, 200 yards from Skenderbeg Square, is a block-long hole in the ground. Garbage fires smolder at the bottom. This is where Sijdia Holdings was going to build Albania’s first Sheraton hotel with pyramid-scheme investments. Only a portion of the cellar was completed. The basement staircase rises above ground level on one side of the hole. There’s a door into the stairwell with a neon sign above it: CLUB ALBANIA. Entirely too symbolic
The nearby apartment buildings that housed the country’s communist elite were built in the clean, austere International style of twentieth-century cities everywhere, but they’re crumbling. Where big chunks of stucco have fallen away, primitive rubble-wall construction is visible, ready to explode with the structures’ weight in the eastern Mediterranean’s next little earthquake.
Apartments for the common folk were built much worse. Elmaz’s mother had had the unenviable job of teaching geography to students who, as far as they knew, would never be allowed to leave the country. She lived in a block of flats with four stories of haphazardly laid masonry courses. Flaking mortar oozed from every joint. The bricks looked like they’d been dug from beds of clay with canoe paddles.
The Hotel Tirana, which went up in 1979, was so badly designed that the Italian entrepreneurs who took it over had to add a separate tower as a fire escape. Short gangways lead from the tower to an emergency exit on each floor. This outside stairway created security problems, however, so the tower was encased in steel mesh. Now if there’s a fire at the Hotel Tirana, the result will be hundreds of guests in an enormous fry basket.
Near the Lana River is a neighborhood called the Block, once reserved for Enver Hoxha’s inner circle. Their idea of luxury was semi-suburban, the kind of semi-suburb you’re trying to convince your parents to move out of before their car gets stolen. But the Hoxha residence looks like the house of a really successful Chicago dentist. There’s something of the Chicago prairie style to its broad but ill-proportioned windows, clumsy, deep-eaved roof, and dumpy fieldstone terracing—call it Frank Lloyd Left.
Hoxha’s daughter Pranvera is, in fact, an architect. I don’t know if the Hoxha homestead was her work, but other evidence indicates she’s at least as addled as her dad was. She designed what used to be the Enver Hoxha Memorial a couple of streets away. It’s an immense concrete Pluto Platter of a building with conical walls used these days for daring cardboard-under-the-butt slides by local preteens. It once contained, says the Blue Guide, “more or less everything that Hoxha ever touched or used.” It now contains the USAID office, dispensing foreign aid. Which of these constitutes the greater foolishness, I leave to the reader.
Elmaz and I drove forty kilometers west of Tirana to Durres, passing a complex of greenhouses from which both houses and green had been removed. We saw two summer palaces King Zog had built for himself, completely ransacked. Someone had tried to take the very paint off the walls.
Durres was, at the time, Albania’s only working port. And in that port were exactly two ships. One was a Chinese-built destroyer that had been “bought” from the Albanian navy. At any rate, $6,000 had changed hands. Now the Khajdi was a discotheque, paneled inside with the same rough wood used in the beer halls and gambling hells of Tirana’s Youth Park. Something had gone wrong in the bilge, however, and the Khajdi was listing so far to starboard that you felt you’d had more than enough to drink the moment you stepped inside. Business was bad, the proprietor reported.
The other ship was a beached freighter missing hawsers, hatches, portholes, and anything else that could be filched, including anchors. A couple of men had shinnied up the foremast and were trying to pry a brass knob off the top. A gang of boys ran around the deck playing pirates or, if you think about it, not actually playing. Technically speaking, they were pirates.
Elmaz said the looting had pretty much stopped, at least in the thirty or forty kilometers around Tirana. I asked him whether the OSCE force had imposed law and order. He didn’t think so. “They are just driving around and sitting in cafés like everyone else,” he said. I asked him if the government had managed to quiet things down. It didn’t have an army anymore, but it still had the secret police, actually the too-well-known police, the Sigurmi, left over from the Hoxha regime and now renamed, with euphemistic masterstroke, the National Information Service. But Elmaz didn’t think the police had done much except pester Sali Berisha’s political opponents.
“Then what stopped the looting?” I said.
“They were finished,” said Elmaz.
A little before curfew on my last night in Albania, I was sitting in a café with the wire-service reporter and a couple other fellow stateside hacks. “Albanians are just like anybody else,” I was saying.
“They’re crazy,” said the wire-service reporter.
“No, they’re not,” I said. “They just have a different history, different traditions, a different set of political and economic circumstances. They’re acting exactly the way we would if we…”
There was an Albanian family at the next table: handsom
e young husband, pretty wife, baby in a stroller, cute four-year-old girl bouncing on her dad’s knee. The girl grabbed the cigarette from between her father’s lips and tried a puff. Mom and Dad laughed. Dad took the cigarette back. Then he pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket, offered a fresh cigarette to the little girl, and gave her a light.
GOOD SOCIALISM
SWEDEN
Nobody was teaching four-year-olds to smoke in Sweden. Nobody was doing anything bizarre there. I was walking through Gamla Stan, the Old Town in Stockholm, when it struck me that Sweden was the only country I’d ever been to with no visible crazy people. Where were the mutterers, the twitchers, the loony importunate? Every Swede seemed reasonable, constrained, and self-possessed. I stared at the quaint, narrow houses, the clean and boring shops, the well-behaved white people. They appeared to be Disney creations—and not from the new, hip, PG-13 Disney rumored to be opening a Scotch-and-Water Park. This was the Disney of the original Disneyland. Gamla Stan had the same labored cuteness, preternatural tidiness, and inexhaustible supply of courtesy from its denizens. I half-expected to turn around and see someone dressed as Donald Duck. Instead, I turned around and saw someone dressed as the king of Sweden. Which, in fact, he was. King Carl XVI Gustaf was riding, in a gilded coach-and-four with footman in knee breeches holding on behind, right down the middle of the street in a country renowned the world over for its utter egalitarianism.
I’d gone to Sweden in February 1996 to find a socialist paradise. I was looking for someplace that had the prosperity of Wall Street without the chaos of Albania, someplace where wealth was better spread around than a free market tends to spread it, and where economic life had fewer shocks and alarms. And I’d gone to Sweden in February on the theory that anyplace can pass itself off as paradise on a balmy summer weekend, especially a place where nude volleyball was pretty much invented. But let us look at paradise when the days are so short that if you take an afternoon nap, you not only wake up in the dark, you miss sunrise. And as for the temperature: “It’s not so cold,” say the Swedes. “We’re right on the water here, so it never really gets that…Darn it, hand me the hammer, Rolf. The Mr. Coffee has frozen solid again.”
But a socialist paradise was what, indeed, I found—“folkhemmet,” as it’s called, “the people’s home.” This sounds like the latest sensitive renaming of the local poorhouse, but the word has perhaps more charm in the original language. Sweden is a welfare state from cradle to grave, and further than that. Between elaborate sex education and the constitutional status of the Lutheran Church, Sweden provides for its citizens from, as the Swedes put it, “erection to resurrection.”
Medical care is available to everyone in Sweden at nominal cost, even to tourists, though I was not personally lucky enough to have an accident or disease while I was there. A visit to the doctor costs between fifteen dollars and twenty dollars. A specialist gets five dollars more. Hospital stays cost about twelve dollars a night for anything from a twisted ankle to cancer.
Unemployment insurance is 75 percent of your pay, and there’s unlimited sick leave at the same rate of compensation. If you’re completely disabled, you get your whole paycheck. (During a brief period of nonsocialist rule in 1991, a one-day waiting period for sick-leave benefits was instituted. An enormous drop in Monday and Friday worker illnesses resulted—one of the medical miracles of the twentieth century.)
Day care is available for all children from infancy until who knows when. Maybe until they get senile, because I have an official Swedish government report (which I never quite summoned the patience to read) titled The Old Are Youngsters Who Have Grown Older. Parents pay about 10 percent of day-care costs. Eighty-four percent of women work—most of them in day-care centers. No, it just seems that way. A very large proportion of women are employed in the public sector, however. Some of them are in Parliament.
Swedes get five weeks of legally mandated paid vacation. If you have a baby, parental leave lasts 450 days, at up to 80 percent of salary, and either the mother or the father can stay home. An additional 120 leave days can be had to care for a sick child. Thus some Swedes are able to take 570 days a year off from work. And teenage girls who become pregnant can presumably get fifteen months off from school with good grades.
Actually, there isn’t any grading in Sweden until high school, and education is free through the Ph.D. level, with additional “study assistance” money available, plus cheap student loans. This should pretty much carry you through to retirement, which comes at age sixty-five, when you’ll get an annual pension equaling two-thirds of the average income from your fifteen best earning years. And all benefits are indexed to inflation.
Sweden has managed to do these fine things without the usual side effects of collectivism. It didn’t invade Poland and France, or send any of its citizens to Siberia. Sweden’s per-capita gross domestic product is a hearty $20,800. Swedish life expectancy is 78.2 years, even if they do call in sick a lot. That’s versus seventy-six years in the United States. And infant mortality is 4.5 per 1,000 live births, compared with the American rate of 6.5 per 1,000. There’s no poverty worth mentioning in Sweden, and no great wealth. Well, there is great wealth, but they play it down. A Volvo limousine is something to see. Seventy-two percent of Swedish households have a washing machine. Ninety-seven percent have a television set. There’s a car for every two adults. The Swedish system works.
Except the Swedish system is broken. In recent years the Swedish government’s budget deficit has been as high as 12 percent of the gross domestic product. By comparison, at the end of the Reagan-Bush era, when America’s budget balancers had let all the spinning plates fall on their heads, the U.S. deficit was less than 5 percent of GDP. We in America consider our body politic to be perilously in hock, but the Swedish national debt is, proportionately, 40 percent greater than ours. Sweden’s national debt is nearly equal to its GDP—to all the things made and all the work done in Sweden annually. To get even, the Swedes would have to move next door and mooch off Finland for a year. Just paying the interest on the national debt takes 7 percent of everything produced in Sweden. And this despite the Swedes taxing the hell out of themselves. The tax burden is the highest in the developed world. More than half of the GDP goes for taxes. So living in Sweden is like getting a divorce every April 15—a divorce with dependents. And these dependents never outgrow their need for child-support payments; quite the contrary: The Old Are Youngsters Who…, etc. Of an adult population of 7 million, 2.7 million are not working. Most of these people are living off some form of social benefits. Another 1.6 million are employed by the government or in government service agencies. And only 2.7 million are actually paying the bills by working in real businesses.
Public spending in Sweden is equal to nearly 70 percent of the GDP, and the Swedish economy is doing about as well as ours would be if seven out of ten of our economic decisions were made by political types. Would you send Newt Gingrich and Ted Kennedy to do your grocery shopping? How many of those groceries do you think would make it home? For twenty-five years, Sweden’s economic growth has been lagging behind that of other industrialized nations, and between 1990 and 1993 the Swedish economy shrank by 5 percent.
There’s been a small upturn since, but the Swedish Institute (government funded and hence prone to sunny outlooks) admits, “The majority of households have seen their financial circumstances deteriorate in recent years.” For Swedish industrial workers, aftertax earnings adjusted for inflation have stagnated since 1975. And rightly so, since Swedish labor productivity has increased by only 74 percent since 1970, compared with a 700 percent increase in labor costs—many of those costs resulting from government-mandated employer contributions to…well, to the government.
As the 700 percent figure might indicate, inflation has been a problem in Sweden. There have been only a few years since 1979 when Sweden’s inflation rate was below the average for other prosperous countries. Government deficits are partly to blame, but Sweden i
s also a small country moshed up against the Artic Circle. Unless Swedes want their material circumstances limited to wood pulp, livestock, and cod, they have to import a lot of things. The Swedish krona is one of the weakest currencies in Western Europe, Western Europeans being no fools. “Do you want that in deutsche marks, Swiss francs, or day care, family leave, and fifteen-dollar doctor visits?” Thus, imported goods are expensive in Sweden. In fact, everything’s expensive in Sweden because, on top of the other government exactions, there’s an astonishing 25 percent national sales tax on almost all goods and services. Every time you order a burger, you buy the government fries and a Coke. No, actually just a Coke, since the tax on food and restaurant meals is a mere 12 percent. At least tipping is minimal. The Swedish attitude seems to be that all services, even drink orders, should be provided by the government, and the government’s been tipped already.
One thing not causing Swedish inflation is an overheated job market, although full employment has been a principle of Swedish government since the 1930s. (Full employment is not one of my own personal goals in life, but it seems to be important to socialists.) Until 1990, Sweden had an unemployment rate of less than 3.5 percent, which is amazing, considering that 3.5 percent of my bum friends wouldn’t take any job, even if it paid $100 an hour and involved doing inventory for a blind liquor-store owner. But now Sweden’s unemployment rate is 7.6 percent, and, if you add the people in various do-little government programs with names like Youth Training Scheme and Working Life Development, the figure is closer to 13 percent.