el antitesis nordico-mediterraneano

since 'national stereotypes' are on the family menu this week, i won't be one to miss an opportunity. that being said, though there's precious little material more fun than national finger-wagging, that doesn't preclude us from looking further into the magician's hat for old, if not beloved, tricks. the nation, as every good grad student knows, is but an imagined community - a 17th century trojan horse of traveling salesmen, an 18th century swindle to shore up a budding bourgeoisie, a 19th century scour upon the international labour movement. several chatanooga-bound train stops shy of civilizational skirmishes, however, there lies a fading formality of cosmo-provincialism: the time-tested prequel to 'when mediterranean harry met nordic sally' (i'll let the ACLU and Anti-Defamation League settle that one). yes, we're going there - from the dasein of the deutsch dandy to the cogitations of the catalonian caper; au dela de la critique weberienne to the original north-south divide; what makes dutch parliamentarians ride their bike to see their mistress, whereas italians might bring a cousin-clad motorcade; why the visigoths were able to bypass roman import quotas on alcohol, tobacco and firearms with rapacious, albeit pre-modern, efficacy. bien, perhaps not quite that far - but you get the point.

greek financial crises aside, the new world usually provides an ample supply of civilizational fodder to the age-old debate surrounding 'cultural variations' within 'euro-white civilization' - and argentina is by no means an exception. if it's 'popular' in some sense to have irish blood in the U.S. (a trend that i've been told is rather bothersome for those actually born in eire), it's positively 4/5 up the 'respectable' fence of humanity in argentina. not that it's in any way disrespectable in north america - it merely means you can write, fight, govern/police, booze and be a bigot - and that you're probably mobbing deep. in argentina, it just means you're northernish-white, linguistically-hegemonic and not english - which, however unmerited, gives you unspoken advantages in this part of the world. but getting back to the point of our discussion - how argies, or at a very minimum my spanish prof, define the geo-cultural divide.

bibi tonnelier is a character if ever i've met one. at the ripe old age of 21 she set out on a 17-year self-imposed exile to switzerland, spain and greece to avert what she (somewhat) accurately predicted would be menem's neo-liberal inferno that first came to power in 1990. with the kirchners in office, however, she could finally return to her native land of facho's (i'll elaborate momentarily) - and enjoy the 'petty bourgeois' comforts of a proletarian wage teaching english to various krauts and yanks downtown. her grandfather originally fled from pas de calais, in the north of france, whence he'd dodged the great war draft and made off like a central american dictator on his way to miami - albeit minus the bilingual parrots, family caskets and cachets of cash-money. nonetheless, la patrie wasn't having any of that and, in turn, shipped his 16-year old brother off to the front - an act the younger frere would never forgive. years later, the latter would follow the former as far as uruguay in a fit of fratricidal rage; unsuccessful in his first fatal attempt, he took his own life a year later in cordoba. an familiar ode to modernity, i know. bibi, however, wouldn't learn any of this until well into adulthood, when - after making a misguided attempt to apply for french citizenship - her application was rejected for consanguineous treachery nearly a hundred years after the fact. gaullic memory, it shall be noted, apparently doesn't fade as fast as in our culturally miscegenatious new world republics. but back to the lesson at hand.

from the little i've seen thus far, argentine cinema is generally quite good, if not subtly despondent. that being said, the majority of good pictures outside (and within) the US usually are (call me a doleful downer - it's true. if the americans have one talent, it's their ability to give the cinematic impression that the state of the world is generally quite good - which, as we all know...). in any case, i asked her why this was. "in general, we're a very meloncholic people." this is not the first impression one has of argentines (nor the intermediary, nor the last, for that matter - if such a thing exists). well fed and read? it would appear at first sight. vane? not nearly to the extent that outsiders claim they are (which just goes to show just what kind of neighborhoods even the relatively indigent international traveler can afford to live in here). extremely class-conscious? amongst the educated, most certainly. a tad facho at times? in the running. but melancholic? i wouldn't have said so. bibi continued: "all mediterranean peoples are melancholic; the argentine merely expresses it with more grace and a keener sense of separation." true, i would rather pay my dues to the temple of sadness at her aegean, rather than patagonian, outpost. that being said, the generalization, whose form i usually relish, still doesn't seem to fit. "let me elaborate," she assured me, "on the dichotomous value system that separates the nordic from the mediterranean entity:"

el sistema de valores nordico se base en la dicotomia "deber-culpa," en tanto el sistema mediterraneo se basa en la antitesis "honor-verguenza." por ende la actitud de las personas frente a la vida difiere muchisimo.

how so? the reader is curious to know. though bibi's a fabulous teacher, she had a tendency to arrive 35-45 minutes late each day. seeing as my opportunity cost of each three-hour lesson was the equivalent of a week's worth of groceries (or, consequently, two lobster dinners - or - twenty three packs of cigarettes - or - thirty five liters of quilmes, you get the point), i took it upon myself to mention that we try and make up for lost time the following week. "on the one hand," she reminded me, "nordics tend to be consumed by notions of duty and guilt. schedules, times, meetings, appointments - they are the superstructure of nordic efficacy-worship. mediterraneans, on the other hand, live through the antithesis of honor and shame and are infinitely more concerned with quality over quantity. a nordic student, for example, might get his panties in a bunch over missing several minutes of an hours-long class. mediterraneans, however, are more concerned with embodying a general paradigm of qualitative excellence. we do not fret over small beer but, rather, remain intimately concerned with the bigger picture. i will not give you a reading assignment and then sit there and watch you read it. what a complete and utter waste of time." though i was mildly taken aback, you have to give her credit. to arrive 45 minutes late to a three hour lesson two days in a row and then call you a nordic time-worshipping rule-monger in a one-on-one conversation course is an impressive feat. and not that we don't get along - we're the best of mates. a cultural difference i both admit and even reluctantly envy. if only i wasn't paying for it.