Two Questions
What did the thousands of moths who kamikaze my porch lights do before there were porch lights?
And, what did four year old boys obsess about before we invented cars, trucks, trains and planes?
[wik] The highly educated and fearsomely well-read NDR sent me a brief footnoted note to the effect that a thousand years ago, Swedes were killing each other over religion.
One thousand years ago Sweden was, in fact, in the midst a protracted process of conversion (as well as throughout Scandinavia). Until the late 12th century there were still bloody encounters between Christians and pagans. These conflicts form the backdrop of Bergman's Virgin Spring and Undset's Gunnar's Daughter.
To which I replied,
I think you misunderstood my intentions in that post. Yes, they were in the midst of a protracted religious struggle. Exactly. They were killing each other, so the issue of "trying to assimilate" would have been a complete non starter.
And, they were Vikings then, not watered down euro-weenies. It's only in the last few hundred years that Swedes (or anyone, for that matter) have realized that when your only tool for argument is an ax, all problems look like necks.
I didn't have any movies to quote though. Thinking a bit further on the matter, religious conflict is, by way of gross misunderestimation, a huge problem globally and throughout history. Most people seem to imagine that most conflicts are about greed or economics. Of course for the Marxists, that's being redundant. If not money, then power or political ideals. This may be true for some leaders. But the people - and many leaders - are not quite so cynical as we are. Many of the leaders in the Thirty Years' War certainly claimed that they were following God's will in smiting the heretics. And there is little doubt that many were convinced of the truth of their religious beliefs, to the point of motivating them to follow those leaders regardless of their "true" motivation.
In the whole world, there are only a few places, and only for the last four hundred years, that have proved even mildly immune to the temptation to go a-smiting. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine where the home countries of those recent immigrants to Sweden fall in that classification scheme.
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B,
B,
Of only remote relevance to your thought here is something I learned about cross-cultural obsessions.
My boy, as you might have guessed, is living the life of the firetruck. Everything is fire trucks, including the 25 minute DVD that came with his favorite firetruck toy. We have spent time looking at firetruck video on youtube. And if he's bored of these diversions, he'll just say "firetruck" over and over again.
What Lady Lethal found interesting though is that in Engrish, "firetruck" is a pretty simple compound, both to pronounce and understand. In Polish, the word is...eh, she only said it once and I couldn't pronounce it now if I had to, let alone spell it. Too many syllables, not enough vowels.
But suffice it to say that little Polish toddlers don't run around saying their equivalent of "firetruck", any more than our toddlers run around gleefully calling for "extraterrestrials!"
So I guess they obssess over things thay can pronounce, which in Polish might be a short list for very young children.
Oh, and your thinking about
Oh, and your thinking about what moths did before there were porch lights made me think, again, about that custom- which we are led to believe is ancient and honorable- among certain muslim peoples of letting go relentless volleys of rifle fire in the air at weddings.
Because, by my thinking, the widespread proliferation of military weapons to the broader community can only be about 5, 6 decades old.
So before Mr. Kalishnikov came up with a better way to kill Nazis in the '40s, were these muslims left with...what, left over British Lee-Enfields or American Garands? And before that, were weddings content with occasional blasts of musket fire? And before that, with...archery?
I don't get it.