So I’m back from Sweden! Not a bad little trip. I hung out with my sister and stepbrother, ate lots of my stepfather’s delicious cooking, drank wine, snapps and whiskey in copious amounts, and got lots of great Christmas booty including a beautiful molybdenum steel chef’s knife.

On the way home yesterday I sat next to a middle-aged man who struck up a conversation this way: “An American? But you are drinking wine!” I laughed and started talking to him, and at first it was interesting; he was a former submarine sailor with the Swedish navy and had traveled pretty much the whole world. After a while, though, I picked up a whiff of extreme right-wing bullshit coming off the guy.

I run into these people on transatlantic flights all the time: the Disenchanted Swedes. They always seem to think that as an American, I must be deeply in love with the Capitalist system, and that I should expect them to apologize abjectly for everything that Sweden does differently. (In fact, I love my country, but I think we could do a lot of things better.) This guy spent a lot of time lecturing me on immigrants and welfare abuse in Sweden; something that made me profoundly uncomfortable since there were many foreign-born Swedes sitting all around us on the plane. Although I made my bleeding-heart tendancies pretty obvious by pointing out things like: the corporate-dominated economy has destroyed all but the top-tier of American cities, leaving most of small town America jobless and depressed while small town in Sweden are busy and thriving, and: the American educational system is so underfunded that most Americans can’t locate Canada on a map, let alone Sweden, whereas most Swedes speak two foreign languages, the guy didn’t seem to notice that I didn’t agree with him that Sweden sucks. In fact, I don’t think he was listening to me at all.

Here’s where the hilarity ensued, though: they guy actually told me that New York was an example of “a clean city, with no litter or homeless people.” I literally laughed out loud. Is there some other city called “New York” that I don’t know about?