Estonica: Parliamentary

In the entire recent history of Estonian independence, since 1991, there has never been a government that lasted from one parliamentary election to the next. They have inevitably crumbled.

An election is now upcoming. Though held in March, it has already been the catalyst for the sort of ugly infighting and baffling stupidity that you can expect from politicians. In fact it started with the presidential selection a few months ago, a show of force between the two main camps.

A peculiarity of Small Country politics is the unorthodox divide. We do not have clearly defined Left and Right wings; we do not have any credible contenders too far from the center on either side. The general idea is set: a combination of laissez-faire economy with a fairly extensive social system. Nobody with a chance in hell of coming to power will be particularly displeased by this, so the choice of vote is one of details.

At this time, the two biggest players are the Centrist and Reform parties, with smaller ones clustered around them. I'll list them below, in order of significance:

Reform: also known as the bankers' party. The party of current prime-minister Andrus Ansip, despite having less than half of the coalition votes. Consists of business buffs; people who know how to make money. Seems to be rather effective at making money for the country and everyone in it, which gives a lot of brownie points with the voters. Such points have recently been spent on an ugly rumble concerning the statue of the Unknown Soldier, which the Reform-led government wishes to move. The statue is an eyesore because it is used as a symbol by the Russian supremacists. With no actual platform for the elections except "I'm gonna make you all rich", the PM has decided to ignore the disease and treat the symptoms, comprehensively embarassing himself in the process. Election slogan is to make Estonia one of Europe's five richest nations within 15 years; Ansip has his work cut out for him, but with 12% annual economic growth and less than 2% unemployment, people are actually starting to fancy his chances.

Centrist: the one-man party, Estonia's very own personality cult. Part of the current coalition, more MPs than Reform, but only a few ministerial seats. Led by Edgar Savisaar, the Grand Old Bastard of Estonian politics; he was in charge in '91 when the country became independent, and has wanted to be PM again ever since. Will do anything for power, which is why he's not getting the top job: all the other parties will gladly put aside their differences to keep him the fuck out. A force to be reckoned with through personal recognition - a familiar face that many vote for by default. Proportional representation means the husband & wife team of Edgar and Vilja Savisaar get enough votes between them to drag lots of objectionable but loyal creatures into the parliament (and the Tallinn city council, installing a preposterous 28-year-old mayor). Officially affiliated with Russia's pro-Putin party, gives handouts to pensioners and jobs to the boys. Takes credit for all the good things that have happened since the last election. Election slogan is a vague "rich country, good salary".

IRL: a fusion of two once-great forces now individually reduced to insignificance. The union of Isamaa (Pro Patria) and Res Publica; largest single force in the current parliament*, but still far short of the 51 votes needed to control the 101-seat chamber. Res Publica is the former PM's party, massive grassroots success in the previous round of municipal & parliamentary elections, touted itself as the "uncorruptable" party of young guns, unspoiled by insider apathy. Turned out to be equally unspoiled by competence. Pro Patria is the Estonian nationalist party; leader is Mart Laar, distinguished doubly by being both the only person in postsoviet history to hold the top job twice, and by receiving the Milton Friedman award in 2006 for a KISS approach to taxes. IRL is what passes for the right wing around here. Started off the election campaign with a slogan of "money is not happiness", to which a million cynical voices replied, "but its absense sure is misery". Their platform, unveiled today, is for the government to give every high school graduate a new laptop, and cover the interest payments on home loans for young families. Ho hum.

Social Democrats: much as you'd expect - the trade unions' party. Last anyone heard of them, they were suggesting that Tallinn's public transport be made free. Election platform is essentially "spend all the money that the Reform boffins are making". Ostensibly the clear left-wing. Pulled off a great coup earlier this year, installing Toomas Hendrik Ilves into the presidency; he's withdrawn his party affiliation, but isn't fooling anyone. Social Democrats are the Coldplay of Estonian politics: popular by being non-objectionable. In an election where choices have dwindled compared to previous occasions, and the big players all seem like the same old mess, this lot is the reluctant choice of a disgruntled electorate that can't find a particularly good reason not to vote for them.

People's Union: the farmers' party, originally. Their great coup was Arnold Rüütel, the compromise candidate in the 2001 presidency race, voted in by an electoral college of county councils. In bed with the Centrists, but corruption scandals have erased any trace of credibility. Widely expected to flop.

My best guess for the outcome is, another "anyone but Savisaar" block, with IRL and the Social Democrats setting aside their differences (whatever those may be) and rallying around Reform. Centrists and the farmers will stay in a narrow parliamentary minority, waiting for the coalition's inevitable Charlie Foxtrot. The rehash will be more interesting, though the current parliament has 11 independents (over 10%!), and if something like that happens again, these unaffiliated votes will act as the tiebreaker.

In other words, business as usual.

Minor Media Madness

Holiday at Dad's place means I have access to digital cable - including BBC Prime. After several days, it appears that most of British television entertainment these days is focused on two topics: houses (including gardens), and food. Though I don't mind too much - the shows are worth watching and I'm fairly interested in both. Yes, I'm a yuppie.

Except that all the food shows have made the field a bit too much of a media focus. When a TV show host really says of a contestant, a kid of maybe 19 who wants to become a chef - "his cooking is incredible, but not his personality; he's not a star" - you have to wonder.

The superior value of money

Value is a matter of perception - right? A 500 Euro bill is only worth more than the paper it's printed on because governments say so, and businesses agree. In fact even metal money was to a large extent a matter of consensus: in the Middle Ages there were very few practical uses for gold. It was used as money because it was rare (so people couldn't randomly make more) and because it was soft, easily malleable. But because it was so soft, you could not make satisfactory weapons or armor, or nails out of it.

Money is a convenient tool for the exchange of things that have intrinsic value, and allows the seller to split up the value in a convenient way. (You can trade a piece of land for 20 years worth of food a lot better if you use money.) But this convenience in itself has additional value. An item worth a hundred dollars is actually less valuable than a hundred-dollar bill.

A real-life example. I am looking for another car, and there's one being sold through the local Honda owners club that I like. The problem is that it's on an island, and it's a six-hour bus trip one way for me. I could have the owner bring it to Tartu... for an extra thousand kroons. Which is around what a bus ticket there and gas money back would cost me.

Whoever makes the trip, risks losing money if the deal falls through. Him even moreso than me, because the bus fare is a lot less than the ferry and gas costs. But I'm lazy, and the price would still be acceptable, so I expected him to come to Tartu. The reason being that even though we would be exchanging an amount of money for something of that worth, he would be getting liquid assets. He would be getting more value out of it.

And yes, I realize that this is probably something you can find in Chapter Three of most economics texbooks. But in a similar way, the thought has a lot more value if it occured to me independently.

The Sad Bastard Christmas Set

This, I kid thee not, is a matched pair. For the second holiday season running (that I've noticed, at least), you can buy a bottle of Johnnie Red and get a miniature Canadian spruce in a pot for free.

The little piece of glossy cardboard sticking out of the dirt holds care instructions, suggesting that the tree be repotted in a bigger receptacle soon, and in the spring, as soon as the winter chills have passed, it be planted outside. Eventually it is to grow into a lovely, cone-shaped, classical fairy-tale Christmas tree up to seven feet tall.

Which is, of course, just some conscionable copywriter attempting to cut down on alcohol-related suicide spike around the end of December.

The weekend bookstore run landed me with Nick Hornby's "Long Way Down", which is a book about a quarter of sad lonely people failing to kill themselves on New Year's Eve. It's this sort of little coincidence that you notice. The night before I got on an airplane for the first time, or rather three airplanes in succession for a 20-hour trip to San Diego, I watched Pushing Tin, a movie with John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton about psycho air traffic controllers.

Nick Hornby is best-known for High Fidelity. I read the book once, and saw the movie countless times. It has John Cusack in it, and Jack Black. Cusack is a very Christmasy actor, overall. He did that film with Kate Beckinsale.

If I was an existing movie star, I'd be Jack Black.

There's a girl some hundred-odd miles north of where I'm sitting, who would be Kate Beckinsale. Even though she says she'd be Mila Yovovich.

Years ago, around this time of the year, a girl said she'd started to worry about me killing myself. (Months earlier I had told her I loved her; did it in the most cowardly way imaginable, seconds before getting on a bus to another country. I expected her to tell me to sod off, but she didn't. She waited a couple months for that. A few weeks after that, I couldn't talk to her.) I thought to myself that the girl had a bit of an opinion of herself; I'd had much better reasons to kill myself, and didn't. She'd hurt me deeply, but in the grand scheme of my life, she didn't rank.

So no, I'm not going to wash down a tin of painkillers with that bottle of Johnnie Red while looking at my little Christmas tree.

(The Kate/Mila girl and the suicide girl are two entirely different girls, you understand. Polar opposites in most ways, though I met them under similar circumstances.)

I don't really think I've done badly in my life so far. Not objectively. And I'm used to being alone. Spent the first eighteen years of my life around people I never specifically liked, on a personal level, and put a fair bit of effort into being able to live alone for the last four. I've got a job, and I've got friends who like me. Saw six of them after the bookstore run on the weekend. (Well, OK, some were spouses.)

Still, I can't help feeling miserable when I'm alone on Christmas and New Year's Eve.

Gam zeh ya'avor.

It's all so SAD.

Seasonal Affective Disorder - SAD. It's something you are acutely aware of in Estonia, especially this time of year - but I suspect elsewhere in North Europe as well. A mortal combination of apathy, melancholy and irritability, it is brought on by a deficiency of sunlight. This year it has been compounded by an unusually warm November and December. A little bit of frost - enough to cause a few high-profile car crashes - and then nothing, weeks upon weeks of overcast, +8C weather.

For Nordic people, SAD is usually neutralized to a large extent by snowfall, but we've not had any. All we have is rain, and muck, and even Campustown feels dirty; Tallinn resembles an anthill in a toilet bowl. Useful sunlight (defined by the ability to read a newspaper on the street comfortably) is scarce: Daylight Savings Time has made a valiant attempt to at least make people leave for work when it's not dark, but the impermiable cloud cover negates the effect. Proper cold would bring about clear skies at least, if not snowfall. But the forecasts are not pretty.

I sit by my office window all day, overlooking a building site and the intercity bus terminal. The grey-brown mud, the naked trees, the dirty cars all serve to create a down mood. The constant drizzle and the wind mean that people have to wear their winter coats; you are either uncomfortably hot, or uncomfortably wet.

Mutton, ever the cheerful and cheeky Brit, has succumbed to SAD with the rest of us. He's confused by his girlfriend's lack of excitement at a trip he's been looking forward to; and I suspect she's at least partly affected by SAD as well. The syndrome is characterized by an all-encompassing feeling of bleh.

The capital, with its defining aspect of ambition and greed, regales in commercialism, but that doesn't quite do it for Tartu. The street decorations are beautiful this year, but they look wrong without snow; and although the calm, intellectual and family-oriented South Estonian town should find solace in approaching holidays, the general mood isn't uplifted. It is especially hard on the students - not only in Tartu, but elsewhere too - as they are finishing up their semester and preparing for exams. It does make sense, the way the colleges are doing it - no distinct Christmas break, big tests just after the New Year, and most of January off - but it does make people tired and annoyed before the holidays. Makes them SAD.

The point of having Christmas when it's being had, going back to the pagan celebrations that it took over, was to offer something to which you could look forward. Break up the monotony, the rut of the farmer and fisherman who are done for the year and now spend most of their time indoors mending equipment. The entirety of January and February, and most likely March, before we see the Sun again is just too daunting. Hey, in 1918 the locals were so sick and SAD by the end of February that they actually gained independence. Very well-placed holiday, that.

This will be my second holiday season since graduating, but I'm not doing any better than an exhausted college student. Yes, I'm an atheist and a cynic, but I genuinely enjoy the idea of Christmas, the myth of it. The distinct sensation that I'll probably end up alone, on the days when I most need someone to hold and be near, is the most SAD thing of them all.