Am I the only one who is getting annoyed with Boing Boing‘s obsession with porn stories? There are interesting stories to be told about the porn industry, but Boing Boing’s current efforts are all a bit too hipster for me. The general tone of these things has that sort of arch amusement, detached irony that I hate intensely, not to mention that I get the feeling that the Boingsters are getting a bit too impressed with their own cleverness.
Football
I’m not what you would call a proper football fan. I don’t go to games, don’t watch them on telly, don’t turn to the sports section first when reading a newspaper. I’m not a football hater though; I quite understand why people like it, even if I usually don’t bother with it.
There’s one exception to my football agnosticism; which is when Holland is playing in an international tournament,like they are doing at the moment in Euro2004. There’s something magical to a tournament like that, something that just isn’t there for me in ordinary competitons. Maybe it’s because there’s both less and more at stake in these games. It’s playing for the honour of your country and your team, rather than for your bank account and your club’s shareholders.
And every time I actually watch a football game I’m surprised again by how addictive these can be. The game last night was a case in point: one of the best games I’ve seen Holland play, even if we still lost 3-2 from the Czech Republic, who were playing quite good themselves. Neither side gave up, with both sides attacking from the first to the last minute, having many more chances to score than there were goals. It was also an exercise in frustration, as the defeat of our team was at least partially to blame on the referee. First, he didn’t award us a penalty we should’ve had, after Ruud van Nistelrooij was held in a bearhug by a Czech defender in the penalty area. And then he compounded his error, by awarding John Heitinga a second yellow card for a relatively minor foul, which left us with ten man and made it easy for the Czech to score their third goal. All the while, there were some brilliant chances for us, all of which just missed or were just saved by the Czech keeper or just hit the goal post… If not for that bloody referee, we could’ve won and we would be through to the next round by now. Thanks to him, we now have to beat Latvia AND trust the Czechs to beat Germany…
Anyway, I didn’t just want to rant about last night’s game. There’s a larger point I’d like to make. If you know the Dutch, you will probably know that we aren’t a very nationalistic or patriotic nation, except when it comes to sport and especially football, when entire neighbourhoods (including my own) are dressed in orange, the traditional colour of the Dutch team. Whenever there is any international sporting event in which there are Dutch competitors, it is not hard to spot their fans: just look for the people dressed in orange, banging drums and making noise.
But this isn’t patriotism in the same way that English supporters, dressed up in red and white and flying English flags is. Orange is not a symbol of the country of the Netherlands; it’s originally a symbol of the House of Oranje-Nassau, long since co-opted by the Dutch people. Which means there isn’t the same kind of double edge to the patriotism that you have elsewhere: because it doesn’t represent the country, it can’t be appropriated by nationalists. Nor is it possible at this point for racists to co-opt it: just look at the team we are supporting in Euro2004…
The orange fans are just an extreme case of a larger trend in Europe: a redefinition of patriotism into something far more inclusive and multicultural. Take the English flag for example: for years this was a symbol for racists and other meatheads; this year it has been taken back from them to such an extent even Asian England supporters have no problems in flying it, as I’ve seen mentioned several times. I think this sort of relaxed, quiet pride in not so much your country as your fellow country folk is quite an improvement, don’t you?
Ronald Reagan died
So Ronald Reagan finally died; the eulogising will start in five minutes. Having seen what happened when that other
embarassement, Richard Nixon died, I have no doubt Reagan will be praised up the wazoo in the coming weeks. And of course, the loonies who want to name everything in the country, from the dimes to airports named after him will only be strenghtened in their efforts.
Now my first political memory is a feeling of disappointment after hearing Carter lost the 1980 presidential elections (I was six years old…), so I’m not entirely unbiased about the guy, but even so the truth is he was a disaster as a president. He wasn’t a president, he acted being a president. He won the 1980 elections because he let his election staff do dodgy deals with Iran. He then oversaw the first major onslaught on workers right and the welfare system in the United States, started a massive and largely unnecessary buildup of the US military, halting Cold War detente even almost causing World War 3 when he forgot the mikes were on and joked that “the bombing will start in five minutes”.
Meanwhile his war on Communism grinded a lot of innocent people up in El Salvador, Nigaracua, Honduras amongst others, while it also made it necessary to trade weapons with Iran illegaly, in order to be able to finance those noble freedom fighters, the Contras. While his wife financed well intentioned but crap comics against drugs, his own administration was making sure cocaine could flow into the country on a larger scale then ever.
And he thought it was a good idea to lay wreaths on the graves of Waffen SS members.
For all those reasons I can’t care less that he died and I can’t pretend its a great loss to humanity. Besides, he got to die peacefully; some people were less lucky, thanks to him.
D-day
Tomorrow it is exactly 60 years ago that the invasion of Normandy started, June 6th 1944, D-Day. That day some 156,000 troops landed on the beaches of northern Normandy: the Americans on Utah and Omaha, the British and Canadians on Sword, Juno and Gold. Over 4,000 of them would die during the landings, with the US forces on Omaha having an especially hard time, thought he Canadians at Juno having not much of a cakewalk either…
But there were not just British, American and Canadian troops involved in D-Day. Also present were French, Chzech, Polish, Greek, Australian, New Zealand, Norwegian and Dutch troops. Even though the bulk of the invasion force was made up of Britsh, American and Canadian troops, it is important not to forget the contributions of other nations, some of which, like the Polish and Czech had been fighting from the start of World War II, first for their own countries, later for the Allied cause.
Therefore I would like to remember the Dutch contribution here. After the Netherlands were overrun by the Nazis in May 1940, quite a lot of people managed to escape to England. Much of the navy crossed the North Sea once it became clear the Netherlands would surrender, including some ships which were still being built in the great naval ship yards of Rotterdam and Vlissingen. The same held true for much of the Netherland’s merchant navy, whose ships would serve with honour in the various convoys to Russia.The airforce had lost most of its planes during the invasion, but several pilots managed to escape anyway and served in the Dutch squadrons of the Royal Air Force during the rest of the war. Finally many soldiers and civilians alike fled to France and from there to England with the retreating French troops, which had reached the southern Netherlands at the time of the Dutch surrender [1].
At D-Day, Dutch B-25’s bombarded targets in Normandy, including the headquarters of a German armoured division; eight of them were lost on operations in June 1944. The Dutch gunboats Hr. Ms. Soemba and Hr. Ms. Flores supported the invasion, targeting German positions on the landing beaches; they were valued so much by the British they gave them the nick name “The Terrible Twins”. To counter the threat of German torpedo boats, the dreaded “Schnellbote”, Dutch motor torpedo boats were active, while Dutch minesweepers were making the Normandy coast safe, one of which, the Hr.Ms. Marken was destroyed while doing so on 20th May 1944, sinking with only one survivor. A Dutch cruiser, the Hr. Ms.Sumatra was deliberately sank as a wave breaker for the two artificial harbours the Allies constructed at the Normandy coast. (Some of the caissons built for the construction of those harbours and not needed for them were later used to mend Dutch dykes damaged by Allied bombardement later in the year, as well as after the 1953 flood.) Finally, a large number of Navy and merchant marine people and ships were of course used to transport Allied soldiers and supplies to the beaches.
The international remembrance of D-day is happening today, at which Dutch veterans will also be present. There will also be a Dutch remembrance tomorrow, at Scheveningen, at which Dutch, British and Canadian veterans will be present.
[1]: When the Netherlands surrender on May 15th 1940, this did not include the province of Zeeland, where French troops where still present and fighting the Germans. This led on May 17th to the bombardement of Middelburg, my hometown, whose historic centre was completely destroyed in it. Fortunately, much of it was restored after the war.
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