Souvenirs by the Dutch artist Dick Bruna featuring the bunny nijntje, called miffy in English (engels). Wooden shoes are klompen. nijntje dances, looks up at the stars (sterren), plays with a ball with her friend nina, bicycles past windmills (molen). I haven't been to the Netherlands since 2003, and I miss it terribly. For all its recent troubles and worries and political slide to the right, this is still the Land of Spinoza, a place safe for unusual and brilliant ideas and thought, a safe place for all religions, a place where refugees have always been welcome, and where they truly believe they get a fair shake and opportunity among their neighbors and from the Royal Dutch government. I am extremely fond of the Dutch Queen and Royal Family.
I don't have a drop of Dutch ancestry, didn't speak a word of Dutch, knew almost nothing about the place, but the moment I stepped off the train and walked out of Amsterdam Centraalstation -- I guess the first time was 1988 -- I felt this place personally welcoming me. Ever since, no matter where else in Europe I want to go, I find it terribly hard to leave Amsterdam.
There's a very strange relationship between English (engels) and Dutch. The grammar, spoken rhythm, cadence, accent are so similar to English that you're positive the Dutch people sitting at the table behind you are merrily conversing in English, just like your aunts and neighbors. You just can't understand a thing they're saying, but can't figure out why. The earliest root of what became English came from the North Sea province of Friesland,where they say: English and Fries / Like milk and cheese.
Amsterdam, when last I checked, has 28 mosques (locally pronounced muh-SKAY) and its mayor is, or recently was, a Jew named Cohen. On my first trip I stumbled into a street of all Middle East stores and restaurants, Arabic windows interspersed with Hebrew windows. I had lunch in an Egyptian guy's place. He gestured across the street at an Israeli restaurant. "We don't all love each other," he said. "But we all came here because here our kids don't have to kill each other every twenty years."
This is a Practical Utopia, worked out and tested since the Dutch won their freedom from Spain in the 16th century, after a long, brutal war, with a "temporary" coalition of Protestants of all sorts, Catholics, Jews, and Europe's first freethinking atheist intellectuals. When freedom (and huge commercial prosperity, from Pacific spices and tulips domesticated from the wild Turkish variety) was achieved, the parliament didn't end the temporary wartime religious and intellectual tolerance, they decided to see what would happen if they kept it for a while. Tolerance has been working pretty well for these folks for nearly 500 years.
Since then, whenever parts of the Earth have exploded in religious and political violence, intolerance and injustice, people -- often the most educated and talented and skilled -- have fled to the Netherlands (Spinoza's father brought the family to Amsterdam from Portugal during an earlier holocaust), and found tolerance, safety, and the opportunity to help make the Netherlands, and themselves, even richer and more prosperous.
The best source in English for this amazing history is "The Rise of the Dutch Republic" by John Lothrop Motley, and you just might be able to read it for free HERE.
If this is all crap, just Bob's hashish-laced mistranslated tourist fantasie, and you know lots of Dirty Poop about the Real Truth about the Dutch, Leave a Comment. Most of their Euro neighbors are convinced the Dutch are chilly, snooty and puritanical, and the cheapest people on the planet. I have never found any of this to be the case.
When American intellectuals need to skeedaddle for one reason or another, they traditionally flee to Paris. During the McCarthy Red Scare years of the 1950s, the poet Robert Lowell expatriated in Amsterdam instead. I don't know why, but I think it was a wise choice.
To the extent that the human residents of Planet Earth have any choices to make about the future we're all going to be stuck in, I strongly recommend the Dutch experience as a model to study and to emulate very closely.
Oh, the naughty drugs and sex. Isn't that just shocking!
Don't kid yourself. Unless you live in Antarctica, you have plenty of that stuff, too. You hide it, and not very well, so you have sex slavery and child sex and pimps and police corruption and untreated addiction and blood-borne diseases (HIV/AIDS and hepatitis) and drug-gang violence. In Amsterdam you can't pay enough to get unprotected sex, and the sex workers are all un-enslaved adults whom the police and health authorities protect rather than predate.
And I'll bet there's been sex-for-cash and drug busts in Antarctica, too. I'll ask my nephew Ice Cube.
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