Bonfire of the Vanities

Last night quite a few of important things happened in Tartu. It was the last night of the spring student week. Which is a big celebration of the end of winter for all the students in the university. The first of May is a traditional big holiday, so, people like to 'ring in' the first of May with all kinds of celebrations and fun. Everyone is quite happy that the long winter is over, and now spring can begin. They brought a large barge filled with wood out onto the middle of the river. They hid fireworks among the wood, so as it burned it would shoot off fireworks at random. They had a band that played music and beat on big drums. It was quite a tribal feeling.


The last major event of the night is that this is one of the few times in the year when the Corporations open their doors to the public. Well, at least most of them do. There is supposedly a 'guest list'. However, it seems very subjective to me. At the fraternities there are generally guys in suits carrying unsheathed swords. They control entry into the fraternity. There is a bit of a dress code, and also a bit of male territorial posturing. It's all quite silly in the larger scheme of things.



One male fraternity we were at is known for producing the next crop of Estonian 'leaders'. There is obviously a qualitative difference between a leader and one who hungers for power and wealth. However, I'm not sure if these guys could tell you much about that distinction. I observed many men in their late 20s, drunk as a skunk. The first year fraternity guys, or 'foxes' as they are called in Estonian, are made to do all the remedial chores of the evening: Cleaning, serving beer, and the like. Two really drunk fraternity guys spilled beer all over the place and made one of the foxes come and clean it up, and watched with glee at the power they had over him.

We went to one fraternity, and they would not let us in. They wanted to know if we were 'academically organized'. Obviously this a euphemism for a member of their particular network of fraternities. I think Liis asked Jacob if he was offended that they would not let us in. He said something along the lines that it is hard to care about a tiny exclusive circle within another insignificantly exclusive circle. Earlier Liis also asked Jacob if he was hungary. He said that in Germany there is a saying that goes something like this: "a beer is like a small schnitzel" I had to laugh at that. Later on, Jacob saw one of the fraternity fellows that he met the last time the fraternities opened their doors. This guy had a long talk with Jacob about how much he admired what Hitler did, and generally made many more very ignorant and racist remarks to top it off. Obviously this a biased representation of the local fraternity men, however, it is generally not so surprising here. I had a high school kid tell me one time that he considered himself to be a racist. People here generally just don't have much experience with multiculturalism. I think there some underlying concern about Estonia's ascension into the EU, and what that will bring. I think soon Estonia will be asked to take on some asylum seekers from Darfur, and other places around the world. As witnessed by the recent riots in Paris and many other places around Europe, immigration is pushing the European social system to the edge of what it can handle. The new members of the EU do not have the burden of a complicated and bureaucratic social safety net. I predict that someday the countries of Slovenia, Slovakia and Estonia could well surpass their western European counterparts in GDP per capita.

It is interesting to see Europeans dealing with some of the issues that have been facing Americans since, well, the founding of the Republic. The history of America is a history of ethnic tensions and immigration. The history of Europe is perhaps much more involved with the Aristocracy and the machinations of political power rather than demographic power.