Draft Four: Falling for a simple story

Looking for someone to blame.

BEFORE WE START: A recommendation: come see Oamenii Dreptății. OD stands for People for Justice, and it’s a live storytelling show that takes you on a rollercoaster of true stories about what it means to have your rights denied, and what it takes to fight for them. The show is a project of Leaders for Justice, a leadership program that trains early career judges, prosecutors, attorneys, and police to become both better professionals, and better citizens.

My job at OD is to commission and edit some of these stories, and it reminds me a lot of the work I did when we were staging live journalism shows with DoR. I’m editing stories about rebranding politics, accepting your body, drugs, clashing with your neighbors, or understanding the problem of bears.

We’re doing three shows this Fall, and they’ll all be different. We’ll have the stories above (and many more), plus music, and wine at the end. I promise you a well spent evening that will send you home beaming. Come check out us out in Brașov (October 14), Sibiu (October 22) and București (November 12). Tickets for all are here. Get them, and tell your friends to get them, too.

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The cab driver is waiting outside my hotel in Bergen, Norway, wearing a rain jacket. It’s not yet 4am. “Hey, man”, he says as he opens the trunk to his white Tesla. “Put your seat belt on, man”, he adds, as I slip in the back. “You want to drive the tunnels or see the sights?”

No sights to see at this ungodly hour, in the dewy fog of Europe’s rainiest city. We drive the tunnels. He yawns.

“Can I ask you where you’re from, man?”

“Romania”, I say.

He thought I was Swedish. The hair, probably. He asks about the war – is it coming to Romania? I don’t know, I say. But we’re more chill about it than we used to be.

Yeah, man, he goes on. Here in Norway they told us to prepare – just received a message. Get some canned goods, be ready for every scenario. An email?, I ask. No, text. A letter will come, too. He doesn’t sound too impressed. I tell him I doubt my government would ever text me to get ready for something – it might send me a notice just as shit’s going down. He likes this.

They’re scaring people, man. Norwegians have everything they need, and they live in fear.

He’s from Tanzania. Been living in Norway for 30 years. “Don’t get me wrong, man, I have a good life here”. But still… Says his first wife was Norwegian – took him away from home when he was 17. “Stole me” – his words. He’s on his third wife. Six kids. Three boys – 28, 26, 24. “They just go around having sex. They say they’re enjoying freedom”. He scoffs. He hoped the boys would pack up, go work in Abu Dhabi or Qatar, “punch the golden ticket”.

“You’re lucky to live in Romania, man. Sorry to say, Europe is a slave state.”

He means Western Europe – where the rules are, where things work. It’s precisely this lifestyle that enslaves them, he believes. He says Norwegians do their 8 to 3 or 9 to 4, then go home. Their houses are owned by banks. Their cars are owned by banks. They live on credit. Says a millionaire took a cab recently, but didn’t have the full fare in his bank account. He’ll wire it later.

The driver is disappointed: if Norwegians don’t go out to eat during the weekends, he says, they think something is wrong with them. But then, he ponders, if all’s so well, why do they commit suicide? (I checked later: Norway’s rates match the European average with no special upticks, so he is projecting).

His three daughters are not like his “punk” sons. They were born here, but don’t like it here that much. Their colleagues – too naked. They drink alcohol and make fun of them for not drinking. Maybe they’ll move to the Middle East – the family is waiting for them.

He says he makes 700.000 Norwegian crowns per year (around 60K euros). Lives frugally. Drinks water, not Coca Cola. Eats at home. Brings lunch to work. Genuinely struggles to understand why people in Norway don’t see they have everything. Everything, man, and they’re still unhappy.

“You turn on the TV, it’s just bad news.” Crime, disaster, wars, warnings. In Tanzania, he adds, you turn on the TV and see “new project here, new project there”.

I’ve heard this story before. The man who lives in the fantasy of a country that would give him land to build a home which he would then own, while driving in the reality of a country where he actually has that home but where he feels like an outsider.

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I have met other disenchanted cab drivers. Also, I think I know what he means about “bad news”, because he believes it’s us journalists that deliver it to him. We are so used to presenting the world in a certain way that we forget it’s mostly through a negative frame. And that negative frame has an impact.

This is what brought me to Norway, actually. To speak at a journalism conference about conflict, why stories need it, and why we should be mindful of its pull and careful how we deploy it. (Some of these thoughts are in last week’s letter.) More than 350 people were signed up for the event – almost all Norwegian. Same with the speakers – the few exceptions were also Northern Europeans, Americans, and Brits. And almost nobody came to my session.

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There is a really unhelpful feeling that sometimes comes over you when you’re from the East. You feel like you’re crashing a party. Yes, you were invited. But still…  

This is hard to write about, but after the cab ride I thought I’d take a stab at it.

There were multiple sessions at once, but not that many during my slot. They gave me a big room – probably 200+ seats. And then, 15 people showed up. One was a friend from Denmark. Another one was one of the hosts, who introduced me. I felt bad.

Maybe I didn’t sell it well enough in the description, I thought.

Maybe the other sessions were more appealing.

Maybe the sunny afternoon demanded people go for a walk and a beer.

But then, as the conference app told me, I also had among the fewest people sign up in advance.

I felt ashamed. It’s cringe to admit it, and awkward to write it, but it’s the truth. Felt bad for the organizers that they took up a slot. Felt my worst fears confirmed: why would Norwegians come to listen to a Romanian when they have superstar Americans and Brits in the line-up? I’d go to see them, too.

Much of this is me having to get over my own background (I said as much last year). Yes, I’m lucky: I get to travel to conferences and be confused with Swedes, I speak good English (which someone at the conference complimented me on), I’m an upper middle class white guy. But part of my identity remains: “dude from Eastern Europe”. I wish I could tell you it doesn’t pack a sense of not being enough, but I would lie.

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What’s hard to articulate for me every time I take a subject like this on is the necessity to live in the liminal space between identities as an antidote to certainty. Certainty is what the cab driver had, and it made him fun to listen to, but it also told an overly simplified story.

I actually wanted to tell one of my Romanian cab driver stories, but ended up scrapping it from my Bergen talk. It was the one from June, a letter in which I also interviewed Amanda Ripley about conflict and community.

That guy in June was angry and looking for enemies: corrupt politicians, corrupt businessmen. In a way, the cab driver from Tanzania was looking for enemies as well. The storytelling echo chambers they surround themselves with, deliver. To the Romanian guy, they say: “everything is corrupt. You’re on your own.” To the Tanzanian guy, they say: “These people don’t know real trouble. Look for a golden ticket out.” One doesn’t believe the country will ever be there for him. The other believes the country he’s in lives in a wrong reality.

Both are vulnerable to cynicism, despondency, a withdrawal from society, and – who knows – an embrace of even more fringe stories.

I’ve found a useful metaphor for how this vibe shows up in Central and Eastern Europe. It comes from the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev: “The light that failed”. When communism fell, its grand narratives crumbled. The one that replaced it is that we need to be like the West. So, we imitated. Then, according to the story we tell ourselves, we did everything we were asked. By the EU. By the Norway Grants that have propped up civil society with millions of Euros for more than a decade now.

But many feel this imitation hasn’t delivered. The light failed. Worse: the West was always dissatisfied by our imitations, and then also proved to be hypocritical – they didn’t like it when we interpreted their calls for our freedom as freedom to come over. Still, close to a quarter of Romanians live abroad now. (For Moldovans I think that percentage is even higher). Inequality is among the highest in Europe. Infrastructure is shoddy. The conditions are ripe for reactionary anti-liberal politics. Krastev writes: “For an eastern European nation haunted by low birth rates and migration, the endorsement of gay culture is like endorsing your own disappearance.”

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Embracing the narrative of the Eastern European as a victim is an easy way out though. That’s not what happened to me in Norway. I was on a conference schedule. Participants didn’t think it was for them. It didn’t feel great, and I won’t gaslight myself that it did. Yet, if there was something at play, it wasn’t personal. It’s tempting to go there. But I won’t.

These are the battles inside our heads these days: so many stories trying to get us to adhere to an identity, or a cause, that resisting them is exhausting. Giving in fully to any one narrative – of a country, of a people, of a movement – is exhilarating, because life becomes easier. But it can also be dangerous.

Throughout this trip I’ve been reading Black Pill, a book on the rise and fall of the American alt-right, written by a dear friend, journalist Elle Reeve (known for her reporting on the Charlottsville racist rally). It’s been a mind-bending trip into what it means to buy into a narrative that goes from trolling all the way to real world violence. For many of the nazis in the book (the lower case “n” is Elle’s choice) it started with terrible childhoods, various psychiatric diagnoses, an escape into the dark online worlds of the 4 & 8chans, going all the way to memeing white supremacy into the mainstream, first as nihilist jokes, then as reactionary political discourse embodied by Trump.

If there’s ever a cautionary tale about buying into a narrative, this is it.

But telling people “don’t buy into this” is pointless. Often, so are facts. When a bunch of alienated males construct their world views through so-called science about racial supremacy, the science you bring to the table is further proof you’re against them.

Nothing is more emotional and self-justifying than believing you are in a worthy conflict.

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I come at this as a journalist, so what I keep dreaming about (maybe naively) is that we can still play a role in making the world a better place, as complicated as that might be (Elle’s solution: don’t stand on the sidelines). What I left my audience in Bergen with are seven questions that might produce less black and white stories that divide. They’re more like prompts for curiosity, and props against certainty:

1. What is your journalism for? Can it be for getting people to care?

2. What are your metrics? Can you measure making people act better?

3. Did you complicate the narrative?

4. Are you sharing power with those you are covering?

5. Do your stories heal?

6. What are the solutions to the problems?

7. If we don’t highlight conflict, then what?

The cab driver pulls up in front of the Bergen airport. I pay by card, get out, and walk to fish my bag out of the open trunk. “Tell the Tate brothers to go back to England, man”, he says to me, and we both laugh.

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SIDE DISHES:

1. One more prop for Black Pill (this is a review of it). Its moral clarity is astounding, but so is the care Elle takes to portray even the vilest people she meets as complicated, contradictory, and, in some cases, victims of their own circumstance. Elle is one of the thoughtful journalists I’ve ever met, and probably among the people most responsible for how I’ve learned to look at the world. I still remember when she showed me what has remained one of the best pieces of writing done on my country – a story about how Ceaușescu loved killing bears, which ends with a question that still haunts me: “What do we do if dictatorship turns out to be good for conservation?”

2. Feast on these two episodes of Hidden Brain that deal with our modern problem: how to better control your time, and how to say “no”.