Sixteen Volts

Here in Toronto, you probably really couldn't notice that it is May Day. Back in Finland this would be much easier to tell, since pretty much every place of business is closed, as is usually the case at even the most obscure of holidays. (As atheistic as the Finnish trade unions generally tend to be, they mystically find religion every time the employers want to make some St. Michel's day to be a workday.)

There is also the huge contrast to yesterday, since in Finland the May Day's Eve in April 30th is the general day of uncontrolled boozing, public urination, casual hookup sex, vandalism and "what the fuck are you looking at" -initiated street fights. My American readers probably can't even begin to imagine what it's like when practically the whole nation between ages 13 to 50 is drunk, but you could try imagining St. Patrick's day but about twenty times worse. May Day is then the day to cure your hangover by eating a herring breakfast then and pretend to be a culturate and civilized person by drinking mead and taking a stroll in this lovely Spring day. If you ever got a high school diploma and passed the matriculation examinations, you get to wear your little black-and-white hat that symbolizes this achievement. Admittedly, this practice used to be less ridiculous in an earlier era when the high school diploma actually meant something. To compensate, the university students use techniques to emphasize that they are university students, and the losers who couldn't get in the real universities but had to go to the polytechnics try to emulate these rituals as well as they can.

May Day is the holiday for university students and especially the technology students, whose rituals pretty much tend to concentrate on this day. It is the day when the freshmen are officially baptized to become real tech students after their first year away from home. A month or so earlier, technology students have printed their annual May Day publications for their students to sell in their home towns in preparation for the May Day celebrations. These publications contain extremely crude, sexist, homophobic (which in practice equals anti-Swedish, since we all know that all Swedes are fags) and racist humour to the extent that if the students of some American university ever did the same, they would end up pretty much like the Duke lacrosse team or Principal Skinner in the yesterday's episode of The Simpsons. For example, I can still vividly remember one particular cartoon where a thick-lipped black man was depicted smiling with a thought caption "Nice country, man!" with a sniper's crosshairs scope superimposed on him. I wonder what would happen if some top-tier American tech university printed such publication and sent its students to sell it in their hometowns. Naturally, the Finnish intellectuals and students of humanities and other pseudoscientific fields tend to despise these publications and the people who make them, but really, what can they do?

Of course, May Day used to be the day of the communists and socialists who pranced around and pretended to be "workers" and "proletariat". Which, by the way, is why the immigrants' rights groups in America chose this particular day for their little protest and boycott. Now that socialism has pretty much collapsed to the extent that the very title of this post, which is a question of an old joke whose answer is "the May Day parade of the Finnish Communist party", we should still remember that millions of intellectuals and humanists out there absolutely love to pretend to be morally superior simply because they are progressives and socialists. Catallarchy's post "May Day 2006: A Day Of Remembrance" reminds us of what inevitably happens whenever the socialists grab power. Jane Haddam has a series of essays "Why Intellectuals Love Marx", Steve Dutch has his essay "Treason of the Intellectuals, Volume 3" and Eric S. Raymond has his post "Today’s treason of the intellectuals", which together explain why intellectuals outside the real sciences tend to be lapdogs to dictators and totalitarians: since their ideas and policies always fail the simple free market test, their only chance to change the society more to their liking is by coercion and force. And of course there is the bitterness towards the West and America for being so successful, the bitterness towards the real sciences that constantly fail to admit that everything is just social construction that is infinitely malleable by enlightened progressives, etc. As Jane Haddam puts it:

Intellectuals love Marx because they have to love Marx. They hate "Americanization" because that's the name they have given to a social order in which they will become irrelevant. The good news is that there's nothing they can do to stop it. The bad news is that they can cause a lot of harm along the way.

In the meantime, the rest of us should stop letting them get away with portraying themselves as compassionate, idealistic reformers who only want to relieve suffering and poverty in the world. That's not what they are, or what they're about, and we know it.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, May 01, 2006 at 10:42 AM