I left Saskia to her own devices, bidding her farewell. I tried to be kind in doing so, but all I could manage was gentility. It was enough, really. She had been at peace the entire time we were sitting together. We even enjoyed a conversation about tulips for half an hour. Well, flowers in general, but it started with tulips. I had asked her why the Dutch love flowers so much as an attempt to distract myself from my own thinking, to find a neutral and safe territory in which she might know much more than I so I could be the one sitting silently with my eyes closed in the shade.
To my delight, Saskia knew quite a bit about tulips as she was raised in Flevoland where her father had worked in the tulip industry. I wasn’t sure if he was a farmer, trader, tour guide, or what, exactly, because it was sometimes hard to follow Saskia’s English. Nevertheless, she was passionate about flowers so I was able to finally relax and let her fill my head with flower trivia to prevent my own thoughts from disabling me. On a warm day on the cusp of spring in Holland, flowers seemed an appropriate topic for discussion.
After providing a few details about life in Flevoland, an area of Holland I had never been and apparently the tulip growing region of The Netherlands, Saskia asked me if I had ever been to the Keukenhof Gardens. I shook my head no. I remembered the name, but I had never considered visiting. An out-of-the-way trip to visit a flower garden had never seemed all that appealing. I had thought Keukenhof was near Alkmaar or Enkhuisen and I didn’t want to take a train-and-bus trip for the sole purpose of flower gazing. Saskia, though, said that Keukenhof was near Schiphol. How had I gotten that wrong?
I interjected, “Yeah, but the garden is only open a couple months each year.” Saskia nodded her head and said, “Yes, middle March to middle May.” Shit, that was just a couple weeks away. I realized that I had never been in The Netherlands in the spring. Seeing the tulips had been one of the few things my ex really wanted to see. I was more than happy to go, but work and law school schedules had prevented spring trips.
“Is it worth seeing?” Saskia vigorously nodded her head. “Yes, very beautiful.” I enjoyed strolling through the Singel flower market, but I hadn’t thought of visiting flower gardens for the aesthetic experience. How had I missed that idea? Other priorities, I guess. Saskia explained that Keukenhof wasn’t exclusively tulips and there weren’t the big fields like there were in Flevoland. There were many different types of gardens and walking paths throughout. I asked her how big the gardens were. “I don’t know. Very big.” I needed to look up the Keukenhof as well as Dutch happenings in the spring.
“There is castle, too.” A castle? That pretty much sealed the deal. Who didn’t love a fucking castle? Fucking castles were great. It had been years since I had seen a castle and nearly a decade since I had walked around inside castles. I had viewed medieval castles along the Rhine from a boat cruise, viewed them on the way to Trier while on a cycling excursion along the Mosel, toured inside them throughout Germany, France, and Austria, and spent a weekend in a castle that had been converted into a hotel. All of that seemed like ancient history. I needed to see a castle again. Flowers would be a bonus.
Saskia told me a little about the beginnings of Holland’s romance with tulips. It wasn’t very romantic. In fact, I felt my stomach turning as she told me that in the Golden Age tulips traded for ghastly sums. “One bulb sell for fifty kilometer square.” What?! “Not all bulb, only one.” I was a little confused, but I got the sense that one bulb had sold for a massive amount of land. Speculation had driven up the prices. It sounded like a tulip version of the tech bubble, a precursor to modern capitalist abstractions of value. The necessities of life have to be in such abundance that rare baubles become exorbitantly more valuable commodities than land, shelters, food, and means of transportation. It doesn’t have to be the case for everyone in a society, but for those who could take those basics for granted, spending excess wealth on what, in lean times, would be considered frivolous stupidity. That was a parlor game best known as status acquisition. No wonder there was a castle in the midst of the flower gardens.
The Dutch were the ultimate traders and had as much to do with the onset of capitalism as any country. Capitalism was a good system to get the economics ball rolling, to push society into creating an advanced infrastructure, but once it got going different economic systems made much more sense, especially in lieu of advanced technology. The Netherlands seemed to get that to some degree and had incorporated many socialist policies to complement their capitalist economic system. Still, I believed it was time to take the next step and, through my introduction to autonomism through Sterre, I thought a transition was due. The problem was the will of the people, the will to change, the will to look beyond one’s own self-interest to the interests of the community, the community now global through economic and technological expansion. Perhaps other steps were needed, though, before really transitioning to a system like libertarian socialism.
The problem was the four cornerstones of the Washington Consensus developed in the 1970s, a project of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund: 1) deregulate financial markets around the world and allow capital to flow freely from one country to another; 2) liberalize trade flow by breaking down trade barriers that had been put in place by developing countries to protect local industries; 3) reduce taxes to cripple the ability of sovereign states to intervene in economic affairs and protect the interests of citizens; 4) require states to privatize their industries in such a way as to ensure that the industries were sold below their real value to foreign investors.
This was another strand in the web of my thinking gleaned from indexing over the years. The Washington Consensus first began being implemented, in a broad way, in 1980, the beginning of the Reagan-Thatcher economic transformation, the onset of contemporary economic globalization, the process that was ongoing in developing countries (now known as emerging markets) and a process that was still in the early stages in the western nations that first supported these policies: Japan, the United States, and the countries of western and northern Europe.
I could see no way to reverse this process without eradicating or overhauling the international nongovernmental organizations such as the IMF, World Bank, and European Union. In addition, the Western countries of the United States, Europe, and Japan had politically supported this system since the 1980s, a system that was designed solely to benefit global banking, the global financial sector, and multinational corporations. Most of the wealth in the world was funneled to these institutions and corporations as well as the individual and family investors in the system, less than one percent of one percent of one percent of the top one percent of individuals in the world. So no matter how the middle class citizens of the Western world spend their money, they would not make enough of a dent in the global financial system to even be noticed because the money spent would be sucked into the stratosphere of the wealthy. The middle class in Europe and the United States would likely become the working poor then the poor and then the destitute.
Back to square one: powerlessness. I was picking up on a theme, macro-powerlessness and micro-powerlessness. I knew so much about how macro-processes worked, but there was no realistic way for me (or perhaps anyone) to change the dynamics. On the other hand, I understood so little about micro-processes and yet I was seemingly in a realistic position to address and change them. I had been doing that, to some degree, but my approach seemed doomed to an individualist effort and that wasn’t sufficient if the micro-processes that caused the greatest consternation involved relationships with others, particularly women. The only option that combined an individualist and communal approach was the autonomist/social anarchist movement. Even in that case, I wasn’t sure, but it was worth further exploration.
When my thoughts settled, Saskia was talking about communal gardening. Who knows what else she had been talking about while I was in economic la-la land, but I told her I had seen communal gardens from the train when leaving Amsterdam to travel to Haarlem in the past. It was a huge communal activity in Holland, especially cities as big as Amsterdam. I remembered my first trip to Europe seeing random people sitting in lawn chairs outside their garden huts—some quite elaborate—enjoying the sunshine and reading the paper amidst growing flowers, vegetables, and plants. It looked idyllic though I couldn’t imagine how it would be peaceful to read with trains whizzing by every few minutes. Maybe they used ear plugs or iPods.
I had removed myself from consternation and internally bitch-slapped myself for ruminating. I did want to explore what gave rise to beliefs about micro-relations, beliefs that only seemed to arise in situations of emotional distress. There was something there and even though I had an intellectual inkling of what was happening, I needed to focus some attention on the issue because I was tired of the self-loathing that arose from time to time after relatively minor events. It was almost as if I was suffering from posttraumatic stress related to my divorce and a few words or even looks from a woman could set me off if I was in a vulnerable emotional space.
The same never happened with men so I figured it had to be related to sexual or intimate relationship dynamics. I had come out the “loser” in a number of relationships; it disturbed me that the thought of “winners and losers” would even arise when thinking about relationships. Maybe I had been acculturated through Pat Benatar music videos from the early 80s. Or maybe “Love Is a Battlefield” was more than a simplistic cliché. I was probably just fucked up. That had been what I had thought for a long time. I wasn’t sure, but it dawned on me that shrooming might help me find what was hidden from view. That had been working for me; no reason to stop now.
That was my cue to say goodbye to Saskia, to thank her for the conversation and wish her well. She stood up and she kissed me on the cheeks before she walked with me to the bikes so we could unlock them. As I got ready to ride I asked her what she was going to do the rest of the day. She shrugged and smiled. “Hopefully nothing.”
I rode south on Van Woustraat through Ceintuurbaan, but I got tired of riding along with so many cyclists next to cars and trams so I turned to the west on Kuipersstraat, a narrow but entirely residential stretch of street. However, given the direction the cars were parked on either side of the street I was clearly cycling the wrong way so I cut to the south first chance I got to Rustenburgerstraat, a similarly narrow residential side street with cars parked in the direction I was riding. The street was pleasantly clear of car traffic and there were only occasional cyclists. The only pedestrians I saw on the street were walking on the sidewalks on the other side of the parked cars. I needed the respite from busyness.
I couldn’t place the ages of the buildings. Some seemed more than a century old, others possibly less. I had no idea, but the styles were somewhat modified versions of the old canal houses in the city center, though certainly not as ornate or grand. As usual, most were about four stories high. If there had been more green space and trees between the buildings and the street as well as walk-up stoops and wider streets I could have easily pictured these buildings in Lincoln Park or even Wrigleyville. Some, though, were rather bland from the outside, but the narrowness of the street and the large size of the street-side windows gave even the less flattering buildings an old-world feel. It was obvious that they were nice apartments. I was pretty sure I was still in De Pijp, but not positive. Either way, this close to the center, the apartments and condos were undoubtedly pricey.
I passed what appeared to be a neighborhood elementary school. There was also one on Plantage Middenlaan and I was interested to see that the windows of the building had the same yellow and blue trim. Maybe that was the designation to mark that it was a school; I wasn’t sure. It was pretty obvious even without the color-coding, but maybe it was useful for the kinderen walking to school. There were children and adults outside and I heard a mixture of Dutch and French.
I pedaled onward to the west, enjoying the hell out of this narrow little street. The blocks were long, but even the intersections were lazy. More trees popped up, ivy growing on walls, and ornate iron balconies. Then I noticed the cars were facing the other direction again. Fuck! Granted, no cars driving on the street, but still. I had planned on cycling the length of the street no matter how far it took me. The air was still warm, but the shade from riding east-to-west kept me cool. I didn’t want to change directions so I backtracked to the last intersection, turned north then west again on Van Ostadestraat. Sure enough, it was a narrow one-way heading west. I had to squeeze my way past a delivery truck parked in the middle of the street—there was only room for a “middle-of-the-street”—but I kept pedaling onward along an equally quiet road.
The buildings seemed slightly older. Weird, it was only a block to the north, but some buildings even had the hooks that stretched out from the top floor that were used as pulleys to transport furniture, pianos, and the like to the windows above the first floor, usually a sign that the building was older with narrow staircases. I passed a grand old church that may or may not have still been a church. It didn’t look like it had been converted at all. That was weird. It wasn’t so old or unusual that it would be a historic landmark and yet it still looked to be a church. A functional church in Amsterdam? Did people actually attend it? It looked like it could have been Catholic or Lutheran, but I couldn’t tell for sure. I couldn’t find any signs with a name or times for services, so maybe it wasn’t functional. If it was, well, that would be a shock. I wondered if the Dutch who attended Christian church services covered their faces by pulling rain coats over their heads, hid under newspapers, or wore dark veils, all in an effort not to be seen by those who knew them as rubes who believed in a God of lightning bolts and thunder or, worse, believed in condemning “heathens” for using condoms and burning atheists and Jews at the stake.
I had lived in too many large urban areas to find the absence of churchgoers unusual, but even cities like San Francisco and Berkeley couldn’t hold a candle to Amsterdam. In all my travels throughout the city and throughout Holland I had never seen functional churches except for the huge, ancient churches like Nieuwe Kerk that were well known as tourist sites. I rarely thought about it, but it was striking when I did. Perhaps it was because I grew up in the United States as a Catholic and the overwhelming majority of people I had met were either Christians or had grown up Christian before realizing they didn’t believe in God—or at least the Christian God. But it was also my knowledge of history. Even in Europe there wasn’t a long history of atheism or non-Christian or non-Judaic belief. The recent generations were as much historical anomalies as the advent of personal computers. Disbelief hadn’t been around as a cultural norm for very long at all.
I wondered about the confluence of advanced technology and greater autonomy as individuals, if they were factors diminishing the historical need for community to survive, especially before the Industrial Revolution but even before World War II. It was really post-war prosperity that created the conditions for an abandonment of religion. Who needed religious community in a world or refrigeration, microwave ovens, and television sets? Interestingly, there seemed to be a demise in union membership and union effectiveness that coincided with the demise of Catholicism and mainline Protestantism in the west. The more recent Christian evangelical movement didn’t have anything that matched the rigorous doctrines and complex beliefs of the former churches; they were more about partisan politics and the momentary ecstasy of “feeling the Lord” in congregations of thousands than dedication to helping the poor, recognizing suffering as a way to maturity and empathy, caring for the sick, building strength of character, and so on. They seemed to have adopted the worst aspects of the old religions such as subjugation of women, fierce anti-abortion politics, hatred of homosexuality, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, militarization, and so on, but without any of the good aspects that older religions provided.
Like every change of mammoth proportions, the baby may have been thrown out with the bath water. Community was lost in the process, care for the poor and suffering as well. But that described the United States rather than The Netherlands and northern Europe. I didn’t know enough to be able to understand why that was and, as of yet, I hadn’t met anyone locally who had an answer. It was true I hadn’t posed the question much, but now that it was on my mind I wanted to know. Weird how interests shift throughout a day. The environment, always whispering or shouting to keep eyes and ears open. Seeing a church displaced consternation about one-way streets and curiosity about the perplexity of women.
I kept riding along, enjoying the relatively quiest streets, but decided to turn on Dusartstraat. It was marginally busier, but still narrow and went one-way to the south. I cycled a block and came to a delightful little intersection with streets crossing at slightly odd angles, the convergence of two narrow streets with cafés and pubs on the corners. The one across the intersection on the right had outdoor seating. I decided to stop, parking my bike at the rack on the side of the street. It was late afternoon, slightly cooler, but the seats were in the sun.
Just as I was about to cross the street, though, I noticed a coffeeshop called Ocean, appropriately colored white and light blue. I had forgotten to bring my dugout and the thought of getting high sounded good. I walked into the place and up to the counter. I looked at the menu and was shocked at how much lower the prices were than at coffeeshops in the center. White Widow was about three Euros cheaper than I had seen it anywhere else. Still, I wanted a pre-rolled joint since I had no pipe or bat. The woman behind the counter was friendly and greeted me in Dutch and I responded in kind. I tried to order in Dutch but gave up and asked for a pre-rolled mixed joint (part tobacco and part weed) and two grams of White Widow.
I noticed the seating area was empty and that I was the only customer inside. I asked about that and the woman shook her head. “I don’t know.” I asked her about the café next door, if they minded people smoking at their outdoor tables while ordering food or drinks. “I don’t know.” She didn’t know much, this woman. I asked her about churches in the area, if they still functioned as churches. She shrugged her shoulders. She remained pleasant throughout, but I was going crazy. I asked a question that could not elicit anything but a firm response. “Do you think I’m sexy?” She looked at me for moment, not sure how to respond, and then started laughing. Well, at least some emotion.
“You Americans, you are funny. How did you find this spot?” I mentioned I was just roaming around because it was such a nice day. “Yes, but this is far from the center, the tourist areas.” Oh, yeah. “Well, I live here. Not in this neighborhood, but in Amsterdam.” She nodded her head, but said nothing. I took a good luck at the White Widow in the container. “You know, this is really well cut. You do a good job here.” She thanked me for saying so. “Are you paid well for working at a coffeeshop?” Again, she looked at me as if perplexed. “You ask a lot of questions.” I looked around; still nobody else in the place. “Is there somewhere you have to be?” Even though I was smiling she looked exasperated. Amused, but exasperated. “Okay, okay. I’ll leave you in peace. Thanks for the dope.”
I walked out and considered sitting at the café while lighting up but there were a few too many tables filled and I didn’t want to be a jerk. I didn’t know the protocols at outdoor tables. I suppose I could have asked, but I decided to walk down the street while toking. Even in the late afternoon the weather was still great. As I slowly ambled, I thought about how great it was to pay for weed with a credit card. Shrooms, too. I had used both debit and credit cards. I liked the idea that I would receive a statement showing purchases from smart shops and coffeeshops. I thought I might frame them when I returned to the States.
I wouldn’t be leaving Amsterdam for over a month, but as I thought that I felt a pang. That was not a thought worth having. Not yet. Definitely not yet. One of the beauties of this stay was that it was long enough not to think about leaving. I took a long drag off the joint and stopped in the middle of the block to clear my head. I told the woman at the coffeeshop that I lived in Amsterdam and while that was true in a way, it also wasn’t true at all. It didn’t matter. I repeated it to myself again: It didn’t matter.
I took another puff and kept walking. I had a nice high going, about two thirds of the way through the joint, as I walked up to a café with a much larger outdoor seating area at the other end of the block. I put out the joint, returned it to the plastic tube for later, and took a seat at a table near the road. The building came to the corner at an angle, but a good twenty feet from the curb, making a nice triangular space for seating. The positioning of corner of the building stopped at an odd angle from the intersection, provided sun for the whole terrace even with the sun much lower in the sky. I angled my seat away from the sun—I hadn’t worn shades; I wasn’t used to needing them—and waited for a server.
When she came, smiling and carefree, I ordered a Belgian beer from the menu. She asked if I wanted it in a glass and I said yes. Off she went and I sat with my backpack next to me. I remembered that I had a newspaper inside so I took out the International Times and perused. I leafed through and had a wake-up call from the United States. Semi-Super Tuesday, primary voting in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton still close. In a way, Whoever won between those two would clobber whoever won the Republican nomination. John McCain? Mitt Romney? Please. After the Democratic beatdown in the 2006 congressional races and the utter fuckups of Bush in his second term, Republicans were doomed.
I was pulling for Obama. For one, I didn’t want another Clinton. Hillary seemed more conservative than Bill and Bill had abandoned universal health care like a hot potato when it looked like it might cost him political points. Fucking pussy. On top of that, he was the most pro-business Democrat I had ever witnessed in my lifetime. NAFTA, transfer pricing, turning his back on unions, cozying up to Wall Street. No, no more Clintons, thank you very much. I didn’t exactly buy Obama’s “Hope” and “Change You Can Believe In” mantras because he backed it up with little other than universal health care and ending the war in Iraq. Still, I believed that as an African American he might be a real progressive and liberal who would shake up the status quo in Washington. I also thought those factors would put him ahead of Hillary in the Democratic primaries. People were clamoring for real change and Clinton was part of old problems that weren’t going away.
I turned out to be right about Obama winning the nomination and general election, but I was dead fucking wrong about him being a progressive or a liberal. His first moves in office were to bail out Wall Street and shore up the banks. He turned out to be worse than Clinton as a pro-business Democrat. It was laughable that he was called a socialist because he followed the Washington Consensus to the letter. I knew his father worked for the CIA and that should have been a red flag, but I didn't realize until after the election that his mother was a deep insider in Washington's political game. What could I have expected from a child of the CIA and a mother who headed the microloan program in Indonesia? A woman heading a microfinance program for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia in the 1960s? Come on, there was no way to land a position like that without being a player. Peter Geithner oversaw the Ford Foundation’s Asia operations, including the microloan program in Indonesia. Timothy Geithner, Peter's son, was Obama’s choice to head the U.S. Treasury. Obama was so far inside the inside that the fact that he was able to brand himself as an aw-shucks golly-gee I’ll-change-things-for-ya candidate was an epic public relations coup. Even into his second term, neither Democrats nor Republicans see him clearly as he is; well, not as far as the general public is concerned. I'm sure they are all well aware of who he really is within D.C.
I didn’t know any of that in 2008, though. I just knew he was a black man who seemed progressive and had a damn good shot at winning the presidential election. More importantly, though, my beer came and it tasted damn good. I turned my chair just enough to watch the sun lower behind the buildings as I drank a couple more brews with my dinner. The pot may have been cheap, but the De Pijp cafes were not. At least not this one. Hard to complain sitting outside in the warm sunshine of early March. As dusk came along and the sky darkened, I paid my bill, walked to my bike, smoking the rest of the joint on the way, and cycled back toward the city. I was just high enough to make cycling dreamlike. I felt like I was in love and. at the moment, it was with De Pijp. Women sometimes made me forget what I valued most. Sitting alone at an outdoor café drinking beer and reading a newspaper as the sun set reminded me that my true love was Amsterdam.
