Nor is the situation likely to change soon, since net investment in the Swedish economy has gone from about 16 percent of the GDP in 1970 to less than nothing recently. People have been going around to businesses, taking their investments back: “Give me that drill press.” In Sweden you can get a better return on your money from government bonds than you can from corporate stocks, and you don’t have to read the financial pages every day to see if the government’s still there. Believe me, it is.
So the Swedish system works, and the Swedish system is broken. This left me with a lot of questions about Sweden. And I wasn’t the only one. “What is Sweden like?” I was asked. A reasonable query, except it was posed by a Swede, and I’d only been in the country for a week. The foreign visitor’s thoughts are always of interest, I suppose. “How do you like Australia?” ask Australians. “Are you having fun in Italy?” ask Italians. “When are you leaving?” ask the French. But never in my travels have I had a native say to me, “Who are we, and what are we doing?”
I didn’t think it would be diplomatic to mention Disneyland. “It’s like Minnesota,” I said. “You know, wholesome, hygienic, polite, cold climate, everything works, and it’s full of, um, Swedes.” (Also, the radio programs are as dull as Garrison Keillor’s, at least if you don’t speak Swedish.)
Actually, Sweden isn’t like Minnesota or Disneyland, but then again, it isn’t much like Sweden, either. The people aren’t all that tall and blond, they don’t talk orgy-borgy talk, the women are no more beautiful than women generally are, and as for the vaunted Scandinavian lubricity, there was exactly one naughty-type Swedish magazine available at newsstands. It had the promising title Slitz, but the only nude photos were of an underfed young lady in appalling eye makeup, and the accompanying copy began with a sentence about “legendariske visionaren och chefredaktoren Hugh M. Hefner.” You don’t need to be a linguist to know where the hot stuff comes from in Sweden.
There is, in fact, formal censorship. I was at a dinner party having one of the precisely two drinks that Swedes have before the meal, when a guest arrived late. This is something no guest ever does in Sweden, not even if he died en route, though sometimes it can be hard to tell. The guest apologized sincerely. “I had to finish watching movies,” he said.
“Jurgen is a film censor,” said his dinner companion, also sincerely. Jurgen reassured me. “We’re only looking for violence,” he said. So Showgirls was okay, but Hamlet was out? “No, no, I don’t believe anything should be censored,” said the censor. “I’m looking for real violence—porno films where women are actually injured. And child pornography.” Wasn’t that more a matter for the police? And it was. But for some reason these moviemakers needed to be censored as well as arrested.
I’m sure I received a logical explanation. And I’m sure I don’t remember it. This is, after all, a country that maintains an entire national state-supported religion, complete with bishops, a synod, and pastors in every parish, and only 5 percent of the population goes to church.
There are huge, splendid, empty, idle houses of worship everywhere. I went to the Storkyrka (Great Church) behind the royal palace. The Storkyrka was consecrated in 1306. It was the site of coronations until 1907, when the Swedish monarchy decided that formal coronations were too la-di-da. Inside is a very big statue of St. George killing the dragon. This was carved from oak by Bernt Notke in 1489 in a manner extremely lifelike, right down to a well-whittled horse anus. (One can only speculate about the shoptalk among the apprentice sculptors to whom this task no doubt fell.) The dragon is rather more lifelike than necessary: a scale-armored, talon-freighted, fang-brandishing spiny reptoid frozen in midslither. It is a fine reminder of the high artistic skills of the Nordic Renaissance and also of Sweden’s strict attitude about drugs. Only 4 percent of Swedish high-school students have tried drugs even once, although the percentage may have been higher in 1489.
The only indication that the Storkyrka was used, other than by us tourists, was a little red table and six or eight wee plastic chairs. A day-care center had been set up right beneath the place where St. George’s lance was popping dragon slime, and you can hardly blame the tots if they never set foot in a church again.
But the dragon isn’t real. It isn’t consequential. It isn’t in earnest, and Sweden is an earnest country. A new storm sewer was being dug in Stockholm’s Kungstradgarden. Posters had been mounted around the site showing the engineer’s drawings and giving details of the costs, building technique, and future benefits of this large drain. At Stockholm’s tourist-information center, a main feature is the Swedish Institute, “a government-financed foundation established to disseminate information about Sweden.” Picture a tourist-info booth in Rockefeller Center stocked with books and pamphlets about labor relations, social insurance, public procurement, and the domestic chemical industry, half of them in Swedish.
I gathered heaps of Swedish self-seriousness. One tome was called Love! You Can Really Feel It, You Know!, a title I can only hope lost something in translation. Love! is “a body of reference material produced by Skolverket (Sweden’s national agency for education) for use in Swedish schools…to provide an overview of how education in the arena of sexuality and human relationships works today.” The chapter headed “The Adolescent Years—Questions to the World” contains these “Questions from Boys”: “How big is the average dick?” and “How many holes does a girl have?” And under “Questions from Girls”: “When will my breasts stop growing?”
When will my breasts stop growing?
Not that the Swedes possess no sense of humor.
“What does Norway have that Sweden doesn’t?”
“Good neighbors.”
I heard that joke several times. But in Stockholm there’s a whole museum of not getting it. The Vasa was, as a guidebook put it, “the mightiest royal warship of her times.” The Vasa’s wreck was discovered in 1956, and she was raised almost intact after five years of work by diving crews. The hull was enclosed in a shed and sprayed with wood preservative for another seventeen years. Then restorations began, and finally, in 1990, the Vasamuseet opened, a noble, copper-sheathed, tent-shaped structure housing the ship and seven floors of displays and exhibits. Which is all well and good. However, the Vasa was launched on August 10, 1628, sailed 1,400 yards, and sank like a brick. “The mightiest royal warship of her times”—her times being August 10, 1628, from 4:30 until 5 in the afternoon.
The day after I visited the Vasamuseet, a crane was set up in front of my hotel. The crane was mounted on a truck bed and extended sixty or eighty feet. It was supposed to hoist some air-conditioning equipment onto the roof. The truck driver was maneuvering the crane in a slow, methodical Swedish manner. And the whole thing tipped over—Plopp (the name, incidentally, of a popular Swedish candy bar).
The crane fell across four traffic lanes, through the roof of a shuttered kiosk, over a breakwater, and into the harbor. And I…I’m an American. I can’t help it. I laughed. The hotel manager was standing next to me in the lobby. She said, “It isn’t really funny.” Of course, if anybody had been hurt or a row of cars had been creamed or a bunch of tourists had been standing in line at the kiosk to buy sea-cruise tickets, then…then it would have been hilarious.
Maybe Sweden is simply incomprehensible to an American. There is no discernible evidence of the economic problems in Sweden, or of a conflict between private and public economic aims. The Swedes, left wing though they may be, are thoroughly bourgeois. They drive Saabs like we do, know their California chardonnays, have boats and summer cottages, and vacation in places that are as much like home as possible, which is to say at Disneyland.
Stockholm is one of the more attractive cities in the world, somber beauty division. It sits on a paisley map of islands, inlets, peninsulas, and bays dividing the freshwater of Lake Malaren from the Saltsjon arm of the Baltic Sea. The city is modern in all the things that should be modern (phones, roads, cars, toilets), while all the things that should be old (royal
palaces, battle monuments, trees in the parks) are as old as they’re supposed to be.
Any shortcomings seem to be problems of affluence rather than want. The sidewalks are slushy. Even with 13 percent unemployment, no one deigns to take so humble a job as shoveling snow. And when it comes to such very modest business ventures as shoe-shine stands (do not bring your best cap-toed oxfords to Stockholm in the winter), there are none.
Sweden is cozy, and Sweden is safe. Baby carriages are routinely left outside shops. Of course, we can’t be sure of the Swedes’ motives in this, and I did see more baby carriages than I saw toddlers or school-age children. But the children I observed were well-behaved despite a Swedish law—this is not a joke—against spanking your kids. “Behave or I’ll reason with you,” however, is, from a Swede, a fairly terrible threat. The teenagers weren’t too rotten acting, either. They had plenty of snot rings and dummkopf haircuts and wore those European sweaters the color and shape of spilled porridge, but actual rebellious behavior seemed limited to looking mopey. I guess when the entire object of your society is to make everything as swell as possible for everybody, the only way you can lash out is by bumming.
Sweden’s litter situation is non-NYSE and un-Albanian in the extreme. There is graffiti in Sweden, but it is neatly confined to bridge abutments and the cement embankments along certain canals. There are no street vendors or annoying public musicians (though perhaps it wasn’t the season). There are no woebegone panhandlers or newspaper-wrapped transients (it was certainly the season for that). The modern structures are maintained. The old structures are restored. The Swedes must levitate their garbage. I never saw a bin or can. When the crane fell over, it was cut apart with torches and whisked away by supper time.
I asked Janerik Larsson—executive vice president and director of communications at a media conglomerate with the conglomeration of a name Industriforvaltnings AB Kinnevik—why Swedes still worked. If they don’t work, they get almost what they would get if they did work. And if they do work, their raises and bonuses are all taxed away. Give Americans a situation like that, and we’d be putting all our economic energy into playing extra cards at the bingo hall. But there was nothing visible in Sweden to indicate much national goldbricking. Mr. Larsson pointed to the window: “You see how it is outside? It’s always like that here.” Over the centuries the Swedish gene stock has been culled. The lazy ones froze.
I asked Dr. Carl-Johan Westholm—the president of the Federation of Private Enterprises (in Sweden, even opposition to central planning is centrally planned)—why Sweden still worked. If Sweden is so poor, where is the poverty? Why aren’t there people at stoplights offering to clean my windshield? Or, more to the point, my shoes? “We don’t have income, but we still have wealth,” said Dr. Westholm. “You may live in a big house, and the neighbors think you’re wealthy. And they’re right in a sense. But they don’t see you going to the bank to take out a second mortgage.” He explained that more than 46 percent of the Swedish government budget is spent on transfer payments—giving cash to people. The budget shortfall is equal to about a third of that 46 percent. To give out three kronors, the government has to sponge one of them. “Sweden is borrowing its prosperity,” said Dr. Westholm.
What happens to Sweden when nobody’s willing to lend it more money and the Swedes finally realize that they really can skip work for four months if the kid pukes? The people of Sweden—like Damocles—are set down to a sumptuous feast, and overhead, suspended by a hair is…not a sword, this is too prosaic a country…a gigantic wet blanket.
According to the Swedish Institute’s booklet On Sweden, “The overall aims of the social welfare system are to redistribute income more evenly over each individual’s life cycle, narrow the gaps between social classes, and provide everyone with a broad selection of public services.” An American reads that sentence and hears, “We’re putting half your allowance in the bank because you’ll no doubt want to buy some Rage Against the Machine CDs and a skateboard when you’re eighty.” Then the American starts thinking about social status. True, Yanni, Marv Albert, and Jenny McCarthy are part of the underclass, but is it because they’re poorer than John Updike? And is this a gap we want to close? And “broad selection of public services” seems to be another way of saying: “To get downtown, you can take the bus. Or the next bus. Or the bus after that.”
But one understands the impulse behind the Swedish ideas. Nobody can contemplate America’s notorious wealth and renowned poverty without thinking, at least once, “Why can’t we fix this?” Give your cell phone to the lady talking to herself in the park—let her talk to someone else for a change. Many underprivileged youths never get the benefits of a college education. The next time you see a deprived adolescent, why not present him with your old bong, fuzzy snapshot taken on San Pedro Island, and tattered copy of Monarch Notes for Bleak House? Impoverished Americans exist in very depressing circumstances, so share your Prozac.
The Swedes can almost make you believe in this. In the first place, they are nice—nicer even than the people in Anaheim who spend all day in Donald Duck masks. At shops, in restaurants, on the streets, everyone is so helpful and pleasant that it frightens an American, since nobody in the U.S. behaves this way unless he’s trying to sell you mutual fund shares. Cabdrivers get out and open the door for you. One night my taxi was cut off in traffic, and my driver rolled down his window, leaned toward the offending vehicle, and said—I quote verbatim—“Tsk-tsk.” Even the hotel manager who told me that the crane falling over wasn’t really funny caught herself and a moment later said, “Maybe it is funny, a little.”
Every businessperson, academic, or politician I called made time to see me (always for precisely one hour, by the way).
The American ambassador Thomas Siebert and his wife, Deborah, are as nice as everyone else in the country. They came by the hotel for drinks, invited me for tea, and were full of information and suggestions. I actually found, to my horror, this niceness infecting me. Ambassador Siebert was Bill Clinton’s roommate at Georgetown, and Mrs. Siebert is a good friend of Hillary’s. I went into a deep funk over the nasty things I’ve written about those blathering highbinders, the president and first lady. (I got over it.)
Hardly an evening passed without hospitality of the full-blown seated-dinner kind. Although this was a mixed blessing. There are many delightful things about Sweden, but almost none of them are meals. The Swedish idea of spicy falls somewhere between Communion wafers and ketchup. Cream sauce is everywhere. I went to an Italian restaurant that had on its menu spaghetti Bolognese with cream sauce, linguini al pesto with cream sauce, and fettuccine Alfredo with cream sauce, even though fettuccine Alfredo is nothing but cream sauce, anyway. The city guide in my hotel room noted these “typical Swedish dishes”: anchovy au gratin, nettle soup with eggs, baked eel. And here are some suggested entrées from a Swedish cookbook called A Gastronomic Tour of the Scandinavian Arctic: smoked reindeer heart with seasonal salad, noisettes of young reindeer with creamy green-peppercorn sauce, and reindeer tongue with a salad of early vegetables. What’s that, Blitzen? I can’t understand a thing you’re saying.
Maybe the problem with Swedish food has something to do with the almost obsessive Swedish interest in fairness. Maybe if fairness is a society’s most-esteemed value, then “average” becomes a great compliment. Mmm, honey, that was an average dinner. In fact, this is nearly the case. The word in Swedish is lagom, which translates, more or less, as “just enough” or “in moderation” or “sufficient.” And lagom really is used as a compliment.
I went to interview two Swedish leftists, a cabinet minister in the ruling Social Democratic Party government and the chief economist for the Landsorganisationen, or LO, the principal Swedish trade union. And they both harped on fairness, though in the nicest way.
The lobby wall in the big art-deco LO headquarters is covered with a mural depicting a blond, shirtless buff dude wielding a glowing ingot of pig iron. There is an art history dissertati
on waiting to be done about the connection between Calvin Klein ads and socialist realism. The economist, Per-Olof Edin, told me, “Inequality creates violence and crime in the United States.” And it probably does, although one can only wish it would create more violence toward Donald Trump. Nor did this explain why, in Sweden, where there’s little inequality, crime has increased fourfold since 1950. Mr. Edin said, “Enormous differences in income, wealth, and power push people toward communism.” And maybe so, but the only people it pushed toward communism in America were ’60s college students who already had income, wealth, and power—or at least their fathers did. And Mr. Edin went on at some length about the social problems and economic inefficiencies caused by competition. Which means, I suppose, that basketball would be a better game if all ten players were on the same side and we lost those stupid hoops.
The cabinet minister was Marita Ulvskog, whose last name translates as “timberwolf” and whose portfolio was Minister for Consumer, Religious, Youth and Sport Affairs, and why not just keep going with a title like that and make her Minister of Hobbies, Boardgames, Gardening and Affairs Among Middle-Aged Married People? Mrs. Ulvskog could see I was alarmed at her business card. “I am dealing with the things that politicians shouldn’t deal with,” she said with a laugh. And then, without a laugh, she said, “At the same time, there is lots of legislation on this.” And in Sweden you can bet there is.
“We don’t want a society,” said Mrs. Ulvskog, “with large differences—in income, in social welfare, in regions, in men and women.” And good luck to the Social Democrats. Try this with animals, and everything would be a cow. Which may explain why the zoo in Stockholm does, in point of fact, have cows in it.
I asked Mrs. Ulvskog if the differences among people in Sweden could be made narrower than they already are. “No, not really,” she said.