In my profession of a fisherman, during 35 years I have tangibly had to deal with a phenomenon called food hygiene. One's experience is always a clear object-lesson, which illuminates the common stages of development, in this case one of the occurrences of degeneracy of cultural history.

When I was a little boy, my home lake Vanajanselk� was surrounded by dozens of fisherman households with their red strand cabins. My grandfather's public servant courtyard had a large generation to be fed in summer-time, and from time to time, on the long bench of the farmhouse livingroom, sat Hilma Silvo with a fish basket at the end of her feet. I thought it was a magnificient basket, black alder branches shining on the top, and when you opened it slightly, an even more exiting sparking-plug of big pike-perches with glowering eyes emerged. However, the majority of fish was taken to H�meenlinna, where there were long rows of fish salesmen in the market hall. In the chip basket beneath the black alder branches the fish was transported to the town. Along the middle of the lake the fishermen rowed to a liner which slowed down, and the basket was taken in. The ship stopped off to the quay at the armpit of every cape and arrived at irregular times. The hygiene was never discussed, the fish was bought on hot weather as well as cold, and the buyer was the one to top and tail it. In the evening the fishermen rowed to the ship, and the basket was lowered over the bulwark, an envelope and the day's wage in a shingle's chink.

Those memories, in which my senior career bretheren have aided me, are of the wealthy time of the 1930s. Then came war and years of distress, and at least then the concept of hygiene wasn't connected with eating business. We ate what we got, and especially the most expensive delicacies, the black market wares, may have gone through a long process of hauling and ripening. No one knew of vegetarianism, though it had been an old folly in Europe, but I can't understand where it sprouted over the tough times; I suppose it died off completely and was resurrected later. In any case, we all have read from health statistics that the Finns were healthier during the war time than ever in history, if the bullet holes are excluded from the statistics.

When I followed the role-models of my childhood and became a fisherman, I was ten years late, I missed the golden time of the troubled years. At that time even the fisherman of Vanaja was anticipated by the missuses of Valkeakoski and H�meenlinna, the hungry and slender, in a queue, and everything was good enough, roach, blue bream, and white bream. But of course the fish was valued even back then in the late 1950s, when I started; today it's shocking to see that time's high real prices in catch diaries. The fish were transported by a bus in cardboards and crates to the market salesmen of ��nekoski and Jyv�skyl�, and still I hadn't heard the word food hygiene.

I fished whitefish, the most sensitive Finnish fish to get bad, in lake P�ij�nne, and an ice cellar was an absolute requirement for the hot weathers of July-August. But when you instantly threw the whitefish from net into the ice and smashed some new ice to the crate in the evening, it lasted well the travel with this from city, and sometimes through a long business cycle to the buyer's kitchen with this treatment. Back then even the city-dweller was rooted in nature, wanted it fine and undamaged, scale and gut it by himself, save the roe if he preferred, the liver, maybe the heart, either to remove or leave the kidney. If you tried to offer a gutted fish in the market, they would have thought that there's something fishy going on.

But the Welfare Finland progressed and many kinds of regulations started falling from the tables of the wiseacres. At the same time when the road network expanded and got straighter, the deliveries got faster, and the fish got even quicker from the mesh to the store counters, the government officials thought that it got bad faster and faster. According to the new regulation, all the fish was to be iced also during the transportation until the middle of October - when the experience had already proved using any ice unnecessary already a month earlier. This meant additional expenses and more working hours in packing necessities and transportation crates.

Soon it was found out that cod and flatfish had to be slaughtered and gutted right after the catch and send to wholesale scaled. To my bad fortune, at that time I had just been placed as a sea fisher to the Finnish Gulf and I struggled for my living with flatfish nets in July-August, when there was no other fish to be caught at all. The swiftness of the firebrigade was needed, when at the night we began in half-darkness, and a phenomenally deft fishing buddy of mine, Jokke Turunen, gutted and rinsed like a machine the meshes in the back of the boat and the way home, until we hurried the flatfish crates by bicycles precisely to the departure of the morning bus at seven sharp. We got then four marks per kilo, but in the next autumn the price was already three marks and we dropped off.

That regulation had even less sense than if the trawl fisher was ordered to gut the Baltic herrings right on board: a kilo of Baltic herring has as much guts as a kilo of flatfish and cod does, and the Baltic herring spoils much faster. I can't make heads or tails of the letting of blood; blood is valuable human nourishment both in the cold and warm blooded animals. I used much of flatfish and cod in my own household. Homefish got to lie in all stillness in the hallway corner even for a couple of days before it was gutted. He who truly knows the fish like the back of his hand has a lot to cry and a lot to laugh. How many times I have listened to my guests thanks for my burbot soup: "Oh, it was wonderful this fisherman's own soup, at least once fresh for sure!" Yes, burbot soup is a heavenly dish. Really delicious is also my soup, although it has always been made of depigmented burbots died in the net, the fish which are not good enough for shops. All the burbots on market boards and in fish shops are fresher.

I can remember a young fish researcher who once again took food hygiene one step further. The fish didn't cool enough in natural smashed ice, he found so and so many bacteria from it, we need mechanically produced ice chipping. Full of enthusiasm, he announced cheerful news for the fishers: the sales of the first grade ice flake fish are growing and the fishermen's income rise. It's just too bad that the price of the ice chip machine is the same as the part-time professional fisher's two years' net sales, and the full-time professional fisher would also lose his year's turnover.

The freshness hysteria means nonsensically increasing transportation frequency, in smaller and smaller quantities, and more and more expensive equipment, equally in the trade of all foods. When I see those cold-vans that cost a million or two, I get chilly. My friend, a potato farmer, takes the new just earthed potatoes to shops thrice a day. It's charming, the potatoes shine like emeralds and almost make sounds, but just how much does it cost? The most moronic buyer refuses the bread if it's cooled. Those shops have cold desks and chest freezers and social spaces and tiles and sinks. Most of the shops of my youth had nothing, there's no shop either, they were closed in the first assault of the hygiene inspectors. I know that any shopkeeper and farmer could tell a report like mine, the case records of the Finnish society. And when I once more hear moaning about the food prices, I think that it damn sure costs after all this fussing.

Sometimes I make the mistake of going to the warm south with my bicycle, to Hungary, to France: I see the common joy of life of men and flies at market squares and shops and no sign of the hygiene fuss. It only flourishes in my country which is frozen half of the year and almost frozen for another half, and where the arctic bacteria are regardless having a hard time. Long life has taught me that the vast main part of man's all doings are humbug, that the greatest multinational corporation is the Humbuger B�rs. But why has it caught my country the most perfectly in its pincers?

My humbug is that I continuosly try to make so-called sense and in vain. In laboratories, we can find countless bacteria, poisons, heavy metals and botulin on any given thing. But these have nothing else than academic interest. In living life it is only a question of resistance. Hygiene won't stop a salmonella epidemic from emerging but causes it. A child which is allowed freely to sweep and to lick on the floor, on the street and the compost hill has a good start for human life. During my lifetime all the foods have been declared as poisonous in their turn. I myself have clarified all the nutritional controversies, meats, vegetables, salt, butter, sugar, into one comprehensive statement: if you don't eat, you die, and if you eat, you survive. It's enough for the only clarification that objects which harm teeth and intestine organs, such as iron nails and glass fragments, are to be avoided.

Juice and jam always get a layer of mold in the good and humid cellar and on the porch shelf; I mix it into the jam and eat it with a good appetite. Sometimes after a long trip I find a half a loaf of bread, which has turned green, from the back of the shelf; I won't waste god's grain. There is no lake nor stream in Finland from which I wouldn't drink: thirst is terrible torment and the vast scale of tinges is a real delight. I press the fen with my boot until so much water trickles out that I can snatch it with a cup or my cap. I have a few kilometer precaution boundary downstream of pulp mills - it goes there where lye caused chapping of lips hinders more than thirst. Until this day I haven't peeled a single apple - and my stomach hasn't been nipping. Now they of course say that I have born with an iron stomach. In the name of truth, I'm sure there isn't much variation in human anatomy and physiology, even the proportions of body and body parts don't vary much. The great differences only lie within one's head, there either is space or not for a staggering amount of different beliefs and delusions.

Will the hygiene terror continue, maybe the Humbuger B�rs is loosing its grip on some matter? There is gossip about that there's an economic depression in the country which would encourage finding savings. A week I was called by a fisherman friend of mine who is one of the rare who still struggle in the dying profession in the pressure of raised fish, cheap import, and costs rising at every field. He and our remaining colleagues have had to give up the traditional deliveries to the fish wholesale store, which due to the growing rate of costs couldn't afford to offer a price that would make a living for the producers. They have had to mobilize the last resources of the family in follow-up processing, smoke-curing ovens, filleting, and most of all their own market store, alternating days in different regions. It's intensive, when you are supposed to have the time to do the fishing, too. But somehow they have managed it. However, now it seems that the final unpassable gate is ahead. According to the new regulation the temperature of market fish musn't, instead of the old eight Celsius degrees, rise over three degrees. It's practically an impossibility, every man already has a fine for threatening in their pockets.

If only I had as much power as will... I would at least deport the hygiene inspectors to the last soul to the same landfill where they have chartered nation's good food produced with hard work.

1993

In spring I participated to the nation-wide sport days which were christened as Sporttip�iv�t [internationalized Finnish --ed. note] in the discount sale of Finnish language. Physical fitness is a very dear subject to me and an early run-through of Vaasa led by the young city manager, listed in the program, was a real treat for me. But, but... The seminar must have had some five hundred sports- and exercise persons from around the country and thirty of them showed up at the take-off - and even of these half had entered for the walking team of the shortened route. Perhaps my example wasn't particularly good, the run was on the second evening of the seminar, and the previous night program may have taxed the participation with good reasons. Nevertheless, my narrow-minded gaze picked too many typical Finnish men, reddish faces, thick cheeks, suspiciously bulging jackets and windcheaters. Though, there were vigorous bodies as well. I had a glance at my fellow lecturer Harri Holkeri's jogging and Baltic herring diet with delight.

Professor Vuolle from Jyv�skyl� University did show us excellent numbers of the Finns' sports hobby. As a student of nature there, however, old rancour rose for these sociologist's survey forms. I felt that the results more aptly represented the positive attitudes to exercise. It's good that way too, sure, but I doubt that the temptation for a small cheat was great, so that spectator sports and one's personal accomplishments easily mix up. What if the study had been made by surveying concretely the day's schedule of a shot of people? My fragmentary and inaccurate data, gathered according to this principle, tells that the Finnish body is degrading at a fast rate due to the lack of usage and that females are - even in this term - in better shape and that the upper social strata hold their posture better and that the person of population center walks more than the countryman.

The real problem child is the countryman who is a total slave for the machine from a shockingly young age. General inspection must overlook the exceptions. It's impossible for any power to get the typical Finnish countryman, up from fifteen years, on the bike saddle, to skiing or oars - or sport fields. The magic of car and its pre-stage - moped - is unbelievable. The young man travels a hundred meters to the strand sauna by car, backs, turns over, maneuvers in the yard and sauna, opens and shuts garage doors; it's not a matter of saving time. What especially comes to the farmer is that the more technology advances, every fertilizer sack is lifted with a tractor or truck's lifting bucket and feeding and removal of manure becomes mechanical in barn, will the bodily feats be limited to taking few steps in the yard and climbing on the sauna benches. The lumberjacks have already been brushed away with the multitasking machine, the fishermen sail trawls, lever their trawl sacks with a winch, their nets with a net lever, and their Baltic herrings from the open fish trap with an aspirator.

The biologist, to whom man is a balanced integrity, to whom muscles, bones, sinews and veins are equally important as brains, observes the destroying of physical work and physical shape upset. When a curious figure entered the daily politics, Martti Ahtisaari, my biologist friend Olavi Hild�n - a man of university, who still after his 60 years of living fostered his physical fitness as the apple of one's eye - became really furious. "How can such man be considered as the president who even can't walk but crawls forward by stepping along strangely!"

If one has the patience to cool down, he will have to admit that there are charming personalities among stocky people, many brilliant life-works have been done from within large layers of fat. But still, it frightens in particular to have a person in the office of the president who has completely allowed his will power and discipline to slacken at one sphere of life. And the setting is made really unpleasant if you believe the sociologists according to whom it's not (anymore) about the ideals the candidates represent in the presidential election, but the images they offer. Does the popularity of Ahtisaari arise from that the typical Finnish male with his sauna sausages and beer bottles feels him as his buddy and that the typical Finnish female sees her own safe hanging-belly life companion in him?

When was the Finnish body taken out of function? It happened fast in the same decades, as did all the societal structural changes grounding the (eco-)catastrophe, beginning from the 1960s - and the final remains are still dropping off. When I recall my 1940s in a secondary school in Helsinki, all the spare time was bare racket of movement - despite that the school's gymnastics and sports were hated. It was an absolute necessity to have a day-long skiing trip on winter Sundays - street-cars to their end stops in Munkkiniemi and Arabia were full of clank and clatter of ski bundles. During weeks we spent shift evenings in the skating rink of Johannes or slide in Kaivopuisto, at least half of the class, girls and boys. Waiting for the late evening, we had huge snowball fights on the cliffs of T��l�, you dropped out if you took two hits. I can still remember the statistical miracle when I succeeded in destroying the opposing team alone with eight hits.

Sure we spent evenings indoors and, taking turns in each among the classmate's house, we had social occasions with the official title "fight night", in which we wrestled or fought tournaments of knight pairs the whole evening. Luckily the old houses of the middle city had roomy apartments and good soundproofing. The only peaceful program among my peers, which I can remember of those nights, was few nights of sitting down and playing Monopoly. But the percentual share of those evenings was insignificantly small compared to the monitor staring of the pale school boys of this time.

Remembrances like this which have the leitmotif of the superior quality of olden times are anything but original, they are common to every aged person. But settling them as trivial "blather of old men" is a stupid phrase and mistake. They are historiography, depictions of objective, calculatory differences in condition and ways of living. That, to which measure and according to what points of view are these changes positive, negative, or harmless, must be discussed separately - and always seriously. Likewise, which factors depict irreversible long period changes, which factors perhaps short period wave-motion.

I see terrible prospects in man's separation from his body, the separation of direct connection of perceiving nature's laws in general. It's not about a small issue, it's about whether man is man or machine. And the question is about even heavier, the heaviest matters of all. The last hand question of fate in every human action of this era is the degree of nature's strain: growth or saving? And the progress of exercise and not exercising really does not offer reasons to celebrate. Substituting muscle power in work with industrial energy means, of course, great increase in the strain, the fiasco of fiascoes. But let's separately inspect the "eco-balance" of hobby exercise, and get back to school boys.

The health care moment may have not yet gotten much of an addition from district rallies, mopeds, and waterscooter - at least not immediately, not at that age. When the front wheel of bike broke loose in a downhill of Espoo, I regained consciousness in the Red Cross hospital in T��l�, without front teeth. Our court hospital was the Surgeon in T�htitorninm�ki, fittingly close to both the field of Johannes and Kaivopuisto. There my long handsome nose that I broke while skating was patched up, but still a bend was left on it. Much longer time was spent by Jussi Lihtonen who was carried from the slide, later the famed reporter of Lapland's local radio, the creator of original, lingering, elegiac fell programs; I can remember well how he was given Gunnar Granberg's great illustrated work of birds in the hospital, as a token of the class' sympathy.

It's also true that what comes of instrumental costs, the "old system" failed sometimes. A bitter memory relates to the virgin skiing of my new wooden skis from Merisatama to Suomenlinna. After twenty minutes the other one broke apart in the front of binding on smooth ice and I quickly counted the expenses: 9 900 marks/hour. But an exception it was, in reality the sports and outdoor activities equipment, skates, sleighs, footballs, bowls, and high jump stands of that time were cheap capital and essentially were handed from generation to generation and from sibling to sibling. Undoubtedly the bikes of boys of our class were put on hard trials by our invented ball game for spring and autumn season which had the rules of football, the players riding only on bicycles. But bikes were extant, indispensable equipment on way to school, nevertheless.

When we go to see the equipment supply of the modern exerciser, may he be a downhill skier, ice hockey player, or sport fisherman, we are dealing with nasty squander. The mind and plot of the whole spare time hobby has changed. In my youth hobbies couldn't and mustn't cost much about anything, often really nothing, if not patches to trouser knees. Schools and institutes do have had gyms and ball playing halls for a long time, but in the new era of madness the square and cubic measures of sport halls have no sense at all. Winter sports in ice stadiums during summer, football in winter, the Finn has defeated his climate. Everything of this has the direct line into wasting and straining nature: fabrication, transportation, energy, emission, fallout, shrinking green area, climate change, ozone depletion. The whole "ecologist's" old song and choruses, which persistent repeating and harping one must not tire to, for the sake of life. One must again and again have enough strength to remind that motor sports is the worst class ecocrime - so long, until it is finally banned by law or suffocated with a heavy environmental taxation.

Every individual who walks, runs, rides bike, swims, rows, paddles, skis, shovels, hoes, establishes a focus of defence against the attack of madness, the machine, in the best case a bit of defence line if he as a parent, grandparent, teacher, youth mentor, exercise instructor manages to pull a few along with him.

1993

In August 1962, after the all time greatest mole summer and the subsequent summer festive for owls and hawks, I earned a decent vacation after the hectic bustle of ringing. I biked with my wife first through Sk�ne and then through Denmark - or not exactly, for the relentless west wind of the North Sea blew from day to day with such a fury that we never got to the destination of our dreams in the beaches of Jylland. Still we adored the grand beech forests - and spent our nights there - and the enormous green fields with cow herds, and lapwing and mew flocks. We ate countless cherries and apples at every fruit counter in which one had to insert as many pennies into the carton as indicated in the sign. We also got to know towns and population centers. I remember from those the armadas of old black bicycles and how the situation of the bicyclist is completely different in traffic than in homeland. And I remember how I once made the error of ordering glasses of non-alcoholic wine and when the bill came we noticed that we had lost half of our trip funds. To this day it's the most expensive food item I have dealt with.

But the greatest source of amazement for us in Denmark were the cities' shop windows which had large placards of discounts of regular food items: "kun 95 �re", "kun 2 kr 95 �re". We thought of this as shocking, appalling, and pitiful: were the Danes (except for the special group of non-alcoholic wine) so poor that they couldn't afford to pay normal prices of bread, butter, and sugar? We had never seen any food items being advertised anywhere in Finland, unless it was an announcement about some new product. A pack of butter, Finnish sausage, a liter of milk, and a kilo of oatmeal cost the same in every shop from Hanko to Utsjoki - of course, as much as the milk and the sausage cost. We were also horrified of the ugliness of the windows, we knew that every decent Finnish shop used the services of a window-dresser who built stylish and artistic display windows.

Yeah, right. Now we know otherwise, Finland followed the lead of countries larger than her, the European civilization that Matti Klinge adored. For a long time nor day nor Moon have shone into the grocery store which windows have been plastered full of senseless price announcements ending in 95 pennies. (Should we still be happy from little: in last summer the prices in Germany ended, not in 95 but 99 pfennigs?)

What is negative and miserable in this? First of all the cityscape turning gross and dilapidated. Beauty is always a central and inalienable value after which values such as economy come light years behind.

The other bitter effect is that the people's thoughts are aggravated, their thinking capacity is being bound to trivial rubbish. Every day they are forced to wade through hundreds or thousands of pieces of price data, and to consider where to get the cheapest tomatoes or pepper mackerel, ten pennies cheaper than the next lowest offer. And where do vanish, once again, the devout speeches of paper and energy savings, when daily changing window banners are glued, a myriad of food price catalogues are shoved into every mail box, and every day Helsingin Sanomat is filled with dozens of pages of everyday items and hundreds of thousands of cars are accelerating from one discount house to another around the province after discounts. Oh our land Finland, oh our continent Europe. Oh man, the crown of creation. Now try to love man after all this.

These everpresent giant-lettered sums of money, marks and pennies, truly aren't a small concern, a cause for a causerie writer's merrymaking. They are dire cultural history, the prelude and a part of the extremely material Zeitgeist in which we now live. As long as the human culture has existed, we have complained and disapproved the vein of materialism and tried to get rid of it - for the sake of "higher goals", let us simply say for ideology, philosophy, science, and art. Now we have entered the clearest and most absolute materialism, the dominion of money, that is known by the world.

In my youth even this country had a so called educated class. I got well to know that folk which had completely internalized, as their lives' values, intellectual culture, beauty and style, social responsibility and charity - not the bleak social security of state power but comprehended as personal bestowing. Also consideration and good manners were absolute values, and they had a basic rule that it was never proper to speak about money, even if it had to be moderately controlled in one's own thinking.

As we know, presently the educated class with its values is almost dead, trodden into cracks of the earth. Some old white-haired aunt and uncle still lives in their own minority culture, greets all the flat neighbors, radiates a puzzled smile and friendship to a nation of windbreakers, stops to talk with the janitor.

When was the last time they published poems in newspapers? When did the market news, the account statements of corporations, the orders of factories and workshops broke from Kauppalehti and other professional business publications to main news items in Helsingin Sanomat, Kainuun Sanomat, STT? When did this climax of madness and farce arrive, this Helibor interest? Since when did Helsingin Sanomat head their greatest section with flaring honesty: "MONEY"? I probably won't remember very wrong if I say a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago all this was still unknown in this realm.

From what is the Zeitgeist born, what or who creates the values of society? The answer is ramified, one must write books about it, not newspaper columns. To put it shortly, we may reveal one significant perpetrator, mediators of information, journalists - unbelievably irresponsible, vile, and harmful a profession. Both Mauno Koivisto and Paavo V�yrynen tried to snap its power, and they both were even more right than they themselves comprehended. The journalist isn't just a lemming and monkey, running after the latest trends, copying each other as a herd. The journalist also creates fashion, values. The journalist of this era wrenches the raise of Luxemburg's central bank's basic rate of interest by 0,1 percentage units as the day's headline.

The mediator of information pleads for the same matter as the mark and penny numbers in windows and mail boxes I described in the beginning. The journalists have an incomprehensible ability and desire to fill people's consciousness with rubbish, both trivial and false issues. He creates a mighty wall in the front of serious and important questions. He is the most definite guarantee that the questions of life and death, the questions of population explosion, depletion, pollution, extinction remain as the reader of small special publications - as did the financial news before.

In her book Antiikin nainen [Woman of Antiquity] P�ivi Set�l� reminds us of Queen Cleopatra's state visit to Rome. Cleopatra had a prestigious escort of experts. Outcomes of the visit were, for example, the calendar reform, renewal of the whole water regulation system, and renewal of the library system of Rome according to the model of Alexandria. For example.

Also president Koivisto makes state visits. Nope, not president Koivisto, but the haberdasher Koivisto. He has an unbelievable collection of scumbags, these mining counsellors, commercial counsellors, trade-attach�s, hawkers with him on a "state visit". If he ever did make state visits, he would bring along academics and philosophers, writers, artists, and before all else scientists, historians, linguists, ethnologists, demographers, sociologists, biologists. Some ingenious engineer could pass along, as a warning example.

Even the peddlers may do journeys abroad. Foreign trade has long traditions. The Silk Road of the East, the vikings, etc. But it's so straining on the Earth that it must be forced in other furrows. A common car ferry turn and a good ol' truck with a plywood booth and benches on its bed will be enough for their escort. Both Ehrnrooth and Matom�ki will have plenty of space there with their tissues, and colored and colorless coated fine paper rolls, and Vuorilehto with his shoe phones and other trinkets.

As the creators of the casino game, the journalists have as great a burden of sin as the Finnish National Bank has with its finance-political fumbles. The journalists raised the top figures of the casino game as incomparable national heroes. The magazines were flooding with adoring presentations of Pentti Kouri, Jukka Keitele, the Brothers Uoti, and Sam Inkinen. And the people followed, invested, and played with their lousy pennies. In my circle of acquaintances, as with others, the student world thrilled, even in places other than the School of Economics, rushed or tried to rush into the stock exchange or investment companies. Now the double moral flourishes, we are crucifying a few savings-banks' managers who were just as little or as much guilty as half of the nation - and nevertheless less guilty than the provocateurs of the casino game, journalists, themselves.

The casino game has now been denounced, one surely cannot create wealth by moving money around nor create gold by grinding iron or tin. Will the heroes be replaced by better ones? I think they will only get worse. The new national hero is a genuine lout who truly won't make money with money in a company called Masa Yards - even the name is disgusting -, but with concrete goods, furiously pounding steel. But can there be a more worthless, criminal act than to construct vanity for the world's oceans, waste the last of natural resources on luxury cruises in which the most worn-out carcasses of humanity sail around the Caribbean in their whiskey haze?

Even a dumb person sees that this is not written by a civilized man. No educated person would make noise, rail like this. The civilization is truly dead, even in my family.

Civilization is dead, long live the civilization. Where is that national movement, where is Jesus of Nazareth's little brother who drives out the money-changers from the temple? I would instantly enlist as a disciple, and I believe that after it I can trim my writing.

Indeed, has this filth come to stay? Have we really gotten here, is this the condition of man - and the offering for the life of Earth - after all the marvellous inventions and scientific accomplishments, after all the purgatories? Is this, by the words of Fukuyama, the end of history, the end of cultural history? Or is it possible that something decent can still be recovered? The people's sense of style does cut the longest weeds sometimes. At least we got rid of the brutal titty commercials in the newspapers; how long did that suffering last, only half a year? Lord help us a little, and at least take away the Helibor interest from us!

1994

It occurred that I read the Vuotos editorial of Suomen Kuvalehti while standing, amidst toiling at a strand in November. I began swaying, I had to seek support from a common alder and then sit down on snow. What is this? Text by the most wretched of Kemijoki Oy's engineers, or only a bad dream?

"A l l economical reasons speak for the damming of the basin. (Spacing out was mine.) I do have done my homework, and also read the Government Institute for Economic Research's surveys, which display the Vuotos-project as politico-economically unprofitable.

The writing lowers itself to bring in the employment argument, which is insane, here and always. I'm sure we probably could employ the whole populace of Finland and all the people of the world to dig a hole through the crust of earth to China. The question is never about employment or unemployment, but if the work is nonsensical, in vain or harmful. Unemployment is always preferable to doing damaging labor. And the effects have to be seen to the last of them, over millenniums ahead.

But what arguments are truly weighty in the modern world, the modern Finland - economical? Are Finland, Europe, the industrial world in an economical distress, materially impoverished, lacking food, clothing? "It has to asked where extra energy will be got from." What starting point is this, what is the thought behind it? More energy? More? For what, why?

What scam is this pollution-free hydroelectric power? What is it used for? For brushing teeth, flaring lamps on ever smaller forest roads? For producing material? What goods are we lacking? Or for operating the world's largest paper machine in Rauma?

Is there a shortage of paper, can we not get writing paper from a bookstore, are newspapers not published? Do people hopelessly wait in line for their colored advert brochure, in vain? Is the unemployed of Savukoski truly in material misery? What about Pakistanis and Ethiopians? For what, why? And until what? Extra energy in the year 2000, 5000, 100000 A.D.?

"Still, one would hope that the government would keep a cool head." Most certainly. Actually Finland, Europe, the world, have only one problem, one emergency, one crisis: the collapse of the environment, nature, natural systems. Erosion, asphaltation, forest loss, reduction of green productive area on earth, staggering of carbon and ozone balance in the air. Is this balance mended by the gigantic construction yard of Vuotos with its hundreds of caterpillars that run with oil? Do human marks on the surface of earth not frighten already, the fatal grasps? One more time: what is that water energy, solar energy, of Vuotos being used for? Even a child knows, if willing to, that the fate of the world is not dependent upon how the energy is being produced, but much it is used. The destruction of life is directly and exactly proportionate to the total gross national product of mankind, and not anything else.

The editorial is jeering: "- - what cry would result from drying up a huge natural lake." It has been attempted to yell about them, smaller and larger. About drying the most fantastic of tiny bird lakes into (fallow) fields, even of the Aral Sea. Right right, madness versus reason. Lakes dry, lands into lakes. Lunatic emotional people frenzy with their dams, powerplants, skyscrapers, motorways, material living standards - because those are large, shocking, dominating. Reasonable people try to ask that do not play with fire, for the play is short, the story brief and without honor.

I cannot help it that I have had a penchant towards Suomen Kuvalehti for decades. Come back Suomen Kuvalehti, come to the side of reason, climb up from the pit.

1995

Reality, the everyday evidence, material for news, does its best to stomp the caretaker, "life guardian", "ecologist" into the ground with depression. It is heavy to take upon one's shoulders the worry of creation's and mankind's drift into destruction and extinctions. And it is burdensome to kick back; paralysis is constantly threatening.

However, sometimes we receive glimmers of hope. Some small actual enhancement in some area's natural state, a little saving, some decrement of emissions, some changes in the law towards a conserving course, a new area under protection, some Rio conference. We immediately try not to think that annihilation simultaneously rumbles on elsewhere with manifold results. And we attempt to not notice that a part of these "environmental" actions are masquerade, sanctimony or scam - if we calculate the overall effects and life spans.

But another reason for real consolation is the repeating observation that there aren't so few of us "ecologists". We receive shining ecological perceptions from unexpected directions to see and hear all the time, evermore new unknown names. In the most varied of letters to the editor, columns, gossip, and random encounters with strangers. There is also the prospect in which life is odd and dim, that we "ecologists", nor anyone else, don't know what worldview, what outlook of the society's goals is the majority and what is the minority, after all.

Does the torrent carry the society towards a direction that the majority does not desire at all? In their hearts, how many do want and support such signs as panting competition, efficiency, rationalization, renovation? Attempting for the sake of attempting, running for life, inventing new and abandoning old all the time in the throes of death? Barter for the sake of barter, back and forth the far reaches of the world, chartering to and fro for its own sake? Schooling, courses, adult schooling, re-education; fire on heels all the time?

How many do truly accept that man's thriving, pleasure and happiness flee all the further away upon this path? That this road would be gloomy and dreadful, even if it didn't lead to ecocatastrophes and extinctions at the same time?

I've heard, or myself had, peculiar conversations startlingly often after some municipal council or the like has made a miserable decision. The trustee confesses in a private discussion that he was against the decision, but voted for it, because he knew the position of the majority and didn't wish to shatter the cooperation, mess the flexible flow of things, and stir up unneeded confusion. Then the same thing is brought up with another council member, alone, and the same words are heard. In the end, it may be so that thirty councilors make an unanimous decision that is the exact opposite to the actual standpoint of those thirty.

It is wholly possible that the "opinion of the majority", "the general idea", according to which decisions are made; that the council, parliament, media and editorials follow, is the position of a very small mighty minority. This minority whips the society into rivalry between individuals, enterprises, other societies - to performance, automatization, endeavour, production, consumption, export, import, the stock market, motorways and Pendolino trains. This minority possesses the power and cogency of a shaman, the potency of a fanatic, the mysterious, irrational and persuading strength of an idiot. Perhaps only a few set the pace.

Formally, even Finland is a democracy, and we have a common and equal right to vote; one's word weighs as much as anyone else's in decision-making. And we do see, elections after elections, that the major parties, which are the same thing; the thing of development, progress and money, receive a huge majority of votes - and permission to form the government.

In the end, the first place is taken by the power of habit, which is tremendous - and that strange idea of what is the "general concept" of the society's policy. The Greens' election prosperity is a fitting description about the strength of routine even during the last, final moments: the support is always wider even in gallups in advance to the voting than the final voting itself! People would want to vote for little alternative parties, "but it isn't worth it", "they'll get so few votes anyway that they can't influence a bit".

Some part of voters is able, even in the last moments, to sway midst the "general opinion" and their own conception, and to vote the dissident of a big party. How close to the Ecologic Party is the one who votes for the Coalition, but Sirpa Pietik�inen?

It is both deeply shocking and profoundly absurd game of thought that basically, in their hearts, a great majority of Finns would like to vote for the Ecologic Party! Is Finnish society a tragic comedy, in which both tragedy and comedy are of grand class?

1996

During the autumn it had been discussed about the landscapes of S��ksm�ki parish in Valkeakosken Sanomat (Kari Rydman and the editorial). Writings have been repulsive in their hatred towards trees and nature. The only thing in which so-called progress has been positive in Finland on this century has been the change in the beauty concept of cultural scenery. Yet at the beginning of the century, even in enlightened Tavastia, brutish clearing of trees from around buildings prevailed, originating from fear of beasts and the tradition of settling. The time's photographs of bald yards and villages made one shiver in terror. Manses and manors spread the ideal of yard parks already a hundred years ago, and a change has come to pass everywhere during the last decades. Now Finns love trees, bushes, green and lushness. Should we now revert back to the level of wild men even in this respect?

The editorial's choice of words is altogether rabid: clearing of shrubs is being called "cleaning". No bush, tree or plant can surely be messy, unkempt. And living shrubbery is never "thicket"; felled bushes, pruned branches and logging scraps are thickets.

If talking of preening, with reason we can only mean the clearing of man-produced waste and junk and wretched, desolate buildings. In fact, a building stuck into a landscape by man, whether it was a mansion or a cowhouse, a church or a shed, is always a rigid, rectangular, hard and crass block, a flaw in the scenery. Every tree and shrub is delicate, fluffy, round, fringed, inexplicably diverse and multifarious, architecturally always superior to a chunk crunched together by man.

The picture Kari Rydman painted of the church of S��ksm�ki as a Maya-temple, which can be reached only with the aid of a machete, was very alluring - I'd say: lovely! No doubt it is reasonable to leave a path to the church's door, but otherwise all buildings should be covered with trees and bushes all the way from walls to window frames. And parks such as Voipaala, where a lonesome grass field screams of emptiness midst sparse trees bare from low, should be filled with a layer of shrubbery. It may be the most important to cherish stumps and stubs felled by storm or old age, beside which splendor of lichen and fungus growth all human endeavours on the field of arts are left in shame.

In regards to flower meadows and leas Kari Rydman is on the right tracks. Certainly small areas must be reserved for them, but in the manner that meadows are assuredly pastures for sheep, horses and bovine; they will in no way keep as leas without annual grazing. And grazing animals bring scenery the liveliness without which an open landscape is abhorrent.

Dry and scantily nutritious fields, even richer than leas in terms of flowers, stay as fields by simple annual cutting (in late August!). We did have splendid flower fields on the steep slopes of Kelhi-Voipaala in Huittula, until they were demolished underneath the asphalt of a bicycle road. They should be renovated, as well.

1997

As the ecologist seeks possibilities of survival, farming always holds the key position, is the focus of conversation. Mikko Hovila's wide survey "Agriculture and the environmental movement" in issue four of Elonkeh� was a significant speech - important also because it offered an opportunity to straighten out some rather miserable delusions.

I don't know how the dictionary of foreign words defines the word utopia. Anyway, Hovila uses the definition in the meaning of 'a model differing from the dominating one', or elaborated 'a model that differs from the one that happens to prevail exactly at the time of observation'. The concept is fruitless and deceiving as such.

The words utopia, utopistic are sensible when they describe reveries that are day-dreaming, impossible, deceptive, unrealistic or that lead to ruin. For a long time it has been easy to see that of all known systems of society and economy, the one that is being practiced now is the most purely utopian, as it is based on the logical impossibility of continuous economical growth.

When Hovila mentions the model societies of Pentti Linkola and Eero Paloheimo as "dangerous utopias" and "unrealistic" in an article of his partly similar in content 'Utopian politics is dangerous' (in Helsingin Sanomat), his line of thought is impossible to comprehend. What could be more "dangerous" in the world than the prevailing consistent, straight downhill into a mass grave, our society of economical growth and technology that destroys life around us every second? Whatever else the programs of Linkola, Paloheimo, or Schumacher, who was likewise mentioned by Hovila, may be, extreme realism, anti-idealism and anti-utopism is their basic attribute. They have been specifically - each in its way - built to surely guarantee the continuity of society, mankind and life, point by point. They are as far away from "dangerousness" as infinity is from zero.

An unbelievable citation can be gathered from Hovila "... the utilization of violent methods is a risk. The recent forcible strikes of extreme animal activists are an example of how 'utopians' may discuss with dissenters.' (HS) Is this how Hovila proportions animal activists' subtle and considered mini-violence to the massive open violence practised by fur farmers, or the vast, total hidden violence of the growth society?

Hovila writes rather deftly: "These ... models possess a problem typical to all utopias: if they are not fully realized, they won't be realized to any degree. They have been left meaningless without a connection to the present."

It is tragicomic that Hovila's sentences null equally completely also his own recommendations as gradual amendments (in this case, toward a greener direction in farming). Neither have his compromising suggestions been "realized to any degree": total finishing of agriculture and absolute triumph of performance farming prevails in our present market economy reality. Small adjustments toward a softer direction have not been accepted any more than ecological total alternatives, and integrated farming, or IP-cultivation, does not play any part at all.

A focal principal factor is about Hovila's "connection to the present." The most horrid of cardinal errors a societal thinker can fall in is setting the prevailing system as the starting point. Beginning from an empty tablet, plain paper, is an absolute requirement for presenting a societal program. In historical continuum and likewise in the geographical distribution of the same period, mankind offers a profusely varied mosaic of different societal solutions, and the experimentation that coincidentally operates in the spectator's environment at the exact moment of observation, does not give more materials for building a wise model than others do. Even a slight binding to some societal solution paralyzes the whole of thinking - as is shown by the line of conventionalities in Hovila's writing, among others.

As he disapproves of the green movement because of their opposition to farming, Hovila interprets the past years' feelings of many, also mine, when there still was harmony of small family farms' lifestyle agriculture left. But Hovila could have mentioned even in a subordinate clause the disgusting features of the Finnish farmer that predominated even then: the nonsensical admiration of machines and consequent foul overmechanizing, and the brutish relation to forests. These factors truly have the key to the green man's (whether he was from countryside or city) suspicion towards the farmer.

But what is the state of agriculture nowadays? How the farmer has taken to himself being snuffed out? I have myself lived closely in a farming community for the last fifty years and increasingly terrified, observed the farmer's surrender. Not the faintest touch of the land spirit of Alkio, not to mention the spirit of the Cudgel War, but apathetically submissive yielding to what is given from above.

There are the tens of thousands (tens in my own circle of friends) of farmers who, as humbly as slaughter cattle, give their estates and houses, close the business, move on to retirement- or sickness pension even in middle age, to be 40- or 50 year old idlers. That they do this early being scared by prognoses that promise decline of farming and its profit, in a phase where the milk-, meat- and grain salary is still well sufficient, is most saddening in this.

And then there are these tough guys of agriculture, berserks of performance, who invest, mechanize, widen, buy half of the village's lands without concern for millions of debts and charge to fulfill the wishes of EU with tremendous numbers of cattle, swine or chicken and hundreds of crop hectares. The agribusiness-farming of these walking environmental catastrophes does not deserve the slightest of sympathy.

It will of course be left a permanent fact that our sustenance, our life, will come forever and ever from agriculture. But that force-feeding tastes evermore acrid in our mouths.

1998

The papers tell of disruption and sabotage on highway construction sites. The Finnish Road Administration asks help from the Security Police.

It must be noted that building a motorway in the current state of world is clearly criminal activity, classifiable as major crime by its weight. All kinds of action that spur, encourage, increase, ease or quicken traffic are criminal activity. The smothering of every green, productive are under asphalt is a crime in a situation, where the existence of mankind is on the edge, where ecocatastrophes avalanche.

One of the ecocatastrophes is the climate change, which we witness with our own eyes to proceed faster than any prognoses do. In the near decades it will blight a large share of the globe's crop harvest by drought and make northern regions (like Finland) unsuitable for farming, when the fateful increase of rainfall will obstruct harvest both by machines and methods of handwork. (We got foretaste last autumn: if the continuous rains had resumed for 1-2 weeks longer, about nothing would have been harvested from our fields.) The faltering of the atmosphere's gas balance, in which traffic plays a decisive role, is behind the climate change.

A major share of road traffic has nothing to do with the livelihood of man. 90 % of cargo traffic transports unnecessary and harmful material. 90 % of passenger car traffic is either wasteful driving or the kind of traveling that would be easily replaceable with public transportation (50-500 persons per a vehicle unit).

Trillions or quintillions of animal- or plant individuals are wiped out from motorways. The Jutikkala-Kulju segment of Tampere motorway, observing which has abhorred me, has been the example in newspapers. At the most dreadful of places where they simultaneously build intersections to highway 9, the road to Valkeakoski and wherever else, one can see tens of hectares of plantless moon landscape, gravel and quarry, from a single spot. The crossing of Vanajavesi in Konho has swept a mighty bird colony and river scenery into history. Man cannot accomplish a greater and more total deed of villainy on the face of the earth; in no war have wastelands this large been achieved.

The motorway's decision makers, all those responsible on different echelons should be put to the Court of Impeachment. In that context, f.ex. the inviolability of parliament members should be revoked.

For as long as this does not come to pass, responsible young activists deserve all support in their war of delay against the beasts of the motorway.

The role of the Security Police should be evaluated once again. Is it unambiguously protecting criminality, or could it guard life?

1999

Over the course of decades, I have travelled the Kuhmalahti-Kuhmoinen road hundreds of times on trips between my home and summerlands. This autumn I was shocked on that way in a manner I had never before experienced, even though I have seen the majority of this country's grid of roads and cruised in most European countries with my bicycle.

Both roadsides had been deflowered in an unbelievable way through a trek of tens of kilometers at the side of the township of Kuhmalahti, exactly until the border sign of Kuhmoinen. Even earlier the banks had been cleared of trees and bushes, which calm and protect walkers, agonizingly over the breadth of many meters by the Road Administration's decree. Now the trees and shrubberies have been slaughtered from roadsides so widely that the scenery is turning into a desert.

Thousands of white-bodied birches, lovely willows and bird cherries of the banks sprawl on dikes, being snipped as three-meter logs, a league-long opening. Perhaps they are gathered away sometime - and maybe innumerable pyres of branches and treetops are also cleared off with terrifying expenses; then the desolation is ultimate.

It is being spoken about the "spiritual landscape" of man. How can it be travelled on this road hereafter? The hiker and cyclist are in the weakest position: they go slowly, constantly absorbing the sights and impressions of the sides of road. Also shield from wind is a prerequisite for them. My bewilderment peaked when I heard that the outrage had been carried through with EU's grant for Kuhmalahti's people's applied for it, under the title of "cleaning the village road". My first thought was that there are no limits to insanity, and no boundaries for EU's villainy. That moment I noticed that I had thought a word-play: EU indeed has no limits.

But it is the strangest thing that there isn't a trace of obscenities like this in the core countries of EU. It's the opposite: roads are lined by alleys of trees and bushes, which guard the traveller's eyes from even the most depressive of open fields torn to black soil. Or for example the old motorway of Dresden-Berlin, built by Hitler: deciduous trees' boughs brush the bus' sides, the middle lane grows tall, bushy trees.

When I wandered throughout Kuhmalahti in the 1950s and 1960s, both edges of villages and heartlands (then roadless), I saw Kuhmalahti as the most beautiful and grand out of the about fifteen Tavastian villages that I then knew thoroughly. In comparison with all those villages, its forests were the most magnificent and least felled. Almost untouched old fir woods prevailed; cloud-scraping shield-barked pines and eternal aspens of owls and flying squirrels had remained in every corner of the village.

I gained the most friends and acquaintances exactly in Kuhmalahti; I began to feel as if I had already known almost half of Kuhmalahti's masters, bit older than myself. Eero Penttil�, Lauri Brusila, Martti Sir�n, Tuomo Rauham�ki, Esko Nieminen, Tauno Koskinen, Niilo and Leevi Rauhalahti. Immensely strong Leevi helped me to begin climbing a sturdy pine of ospreys along with my rings by pulling a young spruce from earth, and lifting me on its roots for the first five meters until poleboots began to hold on the shield bark...

Antti of Toivola wasn't a farmer, but all the firmer woodsman, and friend and sage on nature in countless conversations. All others also were woodsmen and friends of nature. The saw did then ring in their woods as well, but sparingly, on small areas and cautiously thinning, so that the forest looked like one even after the felling.

It would be impossible and wrong to speak for others; besides, most of these friends of mine are already deceased. But my own imagination isn't enough to picture that they would have accepted the current course of events in Kuhmalahti. Nowadays Kuhmalahti is actually famous for its opposition towards Natura and its brawls against the wise campaigns of environmentalism. Against the kind of environmentalism, on which prosperity - and only that - also the preservation of human life on earth and Finland is dependant.

1999

November was a bleak month at the S��ksm�ki church.

Per the church council's demand the vivid aspen wood by a road leading to Pappila was cut misshapen. The result is miserable; inconceivable at a place like this. Also Pappila's even already sparse park was thinned, and that and a row of large firs that protected Pappila from the north wind were mangled, even to the shock of the vicar's family.

Next, the ruin befell the cemetery by razing a spruce wall that shielded it from northern and northeastern sides. On the top of it all, the job was done as massive machine logging, which represents the most grotesque kind of noise pollution. The cemetery is now fully bare both to the whistle of the adjoining car road and biting north wind. And there's more: the aim is to finally desecrate grave peace and slay a large group of old trees from the graveyard itself, primeval birches and even sacred rowans. The same people who drive a bellowing tractor on the corridors of the cemetery to carry tiny - easily fitting to a wheelbarrow - loads of chipping to the rubbish heap, are behind this act of sabotage.

It is at cemetery where olden trees are a metaphor for eternity, and they must be let to die a natural death, to collapse down to the ground ill and dried after a time. Like the late ones have fallen underneath their gravestones; not many people who have had a violent death lay there, either. It is then in the power of the relatives to decide if the fallen aged tree is carried elsewhere for burial, or is it let to gather moss and molder midst tombstones. But it isn't a long way from slaying trees of cemeteries to knocking down gravestones. They sprout from the same frenzy of destruction.

We have had priests each more excellent than the other in S��ksm�ki. But what curse haunts the secular branches of the church? Even the previous generation receives little respect: the course center is like a fist in the face of Pappilanniemi. It is an architectonic fiasco with its overly large asphalted parking places. The concrete block-terrace that reaches to Vanajanselk�'s strand is an unbelievable fright.

We do have other communities than church ones in S��ksm�ki. The S��ksm�ki-club worships the village's history and gives medals. Is it interested in the present condition of S��ksm�ki, or is it not part of their job description?

From midst the annihilation of S��ksm�ki I left to a seminar of the bishopric of Str�ngn�s (November 12-15th), to Vagnh�rad and Eskilstuna. I was there to give lectures to Finnish parishes, but first of all to learn myself - earnestness, calm, enlightenment, education. And to see and experience large old trees, everywhere.

There I received a present for the neighboring country: Str�ngn�s' bishopric's pastoral for churches, "an environmental manifest". I will cite its focal part here. It must be noted that parishes own even more land and forest in Sweden than they do in Finland.

"Our will

We wish our responsibility over the whole of creation to dictate our actions.
We wish to protect the diversity of species within flora and fauna by careful planning and tender forestry.
We wish to strive to use as little chemical products as possible in both forestry and farming.
We want to reserve especially precious areas for conservation in cooperation with churches. The parishes of our bishopric must loyally bear the expenses that arise from these actions.
We want to give a chance to try out ecological methods of cultivation.
We want that responsibility of environment stemming from conscious creation theology is characteristic to all work at the diocese's mansion, chancellery and around the bishopric, and that it is visible in both words and deeds.

Our proposition

We wish to issue a request that all church councils:
- check the usage of their premises by considering environmental factors and particularly costs of warming
- inspect their machines and move, if possible, to environmentally economical fuels and equip their vehicles with as efficient catalysators as is feasible
- avoid chemical products
- aim towards using as good purification technology in crematories as possible
- set a team, whose task is to suggest improvements to fields of environmental work. The parish's actions and the usage of their premises must be the locality's paragon in preserving and respecting nature
- seek to join hands with various groups, organizations and authorities in matters regarding responsibility of the environment."

Is the Baltic Sea a border between worlds, between civilization and barbarism?

1999

Last autumn, after a rainy and miserable summer, I received a letter that contained a description, a light article, a report of farm's work and condition during the past harvest season. The following referral letter was included within the article:

"In Unnaslahti 14.9.98. Hello Pentti! - The summer passed and the autumn arrived. To battle the ill feeling I made a report of the farm's work as if we were living the time ten years ago, when New Finland was alive and breathing. Back then perhaps some Helsinki yuppies read my column 'Agriculture's course'. Now it would be even more needed inside the ring road, namely factual knowledge. But New Finland is dead. I have to settle for smaller circulation, as well. This time it is 6 pieces. Fortune was favorable upon You. - Regards, Seppo."

The author is an intellectual farmer Seppo Unnaslahti, who became quite close during my years in Kuhmoinen. On our first meeting on February 1960, the ten year old Seppo showed his home museum, to which he had already collected hundreds of items. Later he became a so-called influential person all the way up to municipal government, and on provincial level in organizational life (starting with the chairman position of the local department of the Coalition Party's Young). A strongly culture-focused attitude, which already the home museum hobby gave clues toward, has been less common: many history surveys, a historical outlook in festival orations.

Seppo Unnaslahti's gifts in writing have been the most close to me, of which pinnacle was the novel "The day rises, the day falls [Nousee p�iv�, laskee p�iv�]" that was published in Kuhmoisten Sanomat as a serial story in the 1970s. (Amusingly, a recently published novel translation by Nobel-author Singer was named the same.) The novel was in literal terms the level that a few, perhaps only two decades earlier it would have come out as a work characterized as remarkable national literature. But fashion had already changed; countryside literature was left aside in publication politics. And there was no demand for a newspaper column on the subject of countryside when arriving to the 1990s, either, even the most brilliant ones.

The farm of Unnaslahti is not one of the ceased, desolate; it is part of the minority that still struggles as an active farm, by widening and expanding, merging the neighborhood's disappearing properties to it, by renting or buying extra land. The society has, as known, put the farmer to a pinch by benefit- and loan politics and by continually decreasing producer prices: either you stop or expand, increase the turnover, when the price of a product unit drops down.

The development of Seppo Unnaslahti's party, the Coalition, is illustrative. I well remember the time when the Coalition had a firm agricultural wing in the Parliament, may have been even half of the members. In Tavastia that I'm the most familiar with, as well as in Ostrobothnia, farmers along with their families sided with the Coalition Party except for the smallest of cottages. Now only one farmer representative, risen from a spare seat, was just at the end a part of the last Parliament group of the Coalition Party... The Western Finnish farmer is indeed for the most part in the Coalition; transfer to the Center Party is only partial, but the number of voters is no more even nearly enough for getting a candidate from countryside through.

The determinate "closing down" of agriculture and countryside in political decision making is mostly familiar. I am also aware that Kalevi Hemil� continues as an Minister of Agriculture in the new government as well, whose main task is decimating the farming folk, removing agriculture from the traditional farmer into the clutches of a few thousand, or perhaps only hundred, gigantic agri-business corporations. It has been written about these matters once in a while in Elonkeh�, as well. Mikko Hovila, for example, has analyzed the multiple fateful effects of the growth of a farm unit.

The snuffing of countryside appears at its most enormous in a recent governmental decision - even though this side has not been stressed at all in endless speculations, as is typical. That the Central Party, winner of elections and the second largest of the great parties, was pushed aside contradictory to all former rules, as if it was self-explanatory, has truly been noted to the point of boredom. But the issue has been examined as arm wrestling between parties, or in the worst neo-moronic manner of media, as a personal battle between party leaders.

The actual reason has been underlined a lot less: the Central Party was pushed aside because it is namely the countryside's party. This depressive outlining becomes certain, and actually even more shockingly, when one looks at the little parties accepted as governing peers. The Christian Union, which got the greatest electoral victory, raised the number of representatives in the Parliament from six to ten, and rose to be practically equally large with the Green League (11 representatives), was out of the question as a governing party all the time, while the Green League was as obviously a governing party throughout the negotiations.

How these two small parties are placed on the map is a clear explanation. They are prettily mirror images of each other. The Green League is more absolutely than before a city party, by far the most urban out of all our parties. Its all Parliament members are from Great Helsinki (Helsinki-Espoo-Vantaa) and three university cities (Turku, Tampere, Oulu). It lost its only seat in outer Finland; the new seat from Southern Tavastia is part of that Helsinki suburb (if we look at voting numbers of localities), which is formed by the H�meenlinna-Riihim�ki-Hyvink�� railroad's side. The Christian Union then again does not have a single representative from Helsinki, and only one from Uusimaa.

The vying for power between the rural area and cities has gone through different phases also in our own country. In Anneli Jussila's broad article 'From industrial production to handicrafting tradition [Teollisesta tuotannosta perinnek�sity�h�n]' (in the book "Into the Ecological Way Of Life [Ekologiseen El�m�ntapaan]", Yliopistopaino 1996). Such periods are described there when the countryside has been oppressed to the extreme at the cost of cities' rights with administrative orders and strict taxing - all the way to uprisings (the Cudgel War!) and partial deserting of rural areas.

Then there have been periods of time when the countryside has got the "upper hand". For example, there was a short glorious term after last wars, when almost anything was paid for food. I well recall from my childhood how bitterly amusedly it was being told of farmer-fishermen from Sipoo, who didn't know where to spend their abundance of money, and hopelessly bought six pianos into their large house...

If only we could follow the turning of history's pages like a distant historian and state that now a phase, when the farmer and countryside is held tightly, is underway in its turn. But sadly we cannot take things with the former calmness, when the world's condition is different and wholly new. Environmental menaces are now world's end-class, and the city values and the consumer's way of life stand for the way to ruination. And as misfortunes tend to feed each other, so now has the desperate defense battle of the countryside led to countryside's, the Central Union of Agricultural Producers' and also the Central Party's horrid attitudes towards nature conservation - utterly warpedly, only to speed the devastation.

1999

This writing's trains of thought actualized in a V�in� Linna-seminar in Tampere on September 2000. The conference was the 80-year anniversary of Linna's birth, so it was understandable in that sense that all dimensions of Linna's work were appraised in an exalting manner. However, the bias of Linna's social and historical conception and their miserable effects stood out for me.

For the sake of clarity, I remind that I am part of the majority for whose Linna is a master as a writer. Even though direct storytelling is cumbersome, dialogue is brilliant, characters extremely intriguing and memorable - lacking the burden of overt psychological deep probing, or nitpicking - and most of all, the plot structure and overall outline of novels is fantastic. It is then a different matter with the correctness of the social outlook.

Likewise when Linna was familiar with emotions and thoughts of only the ranks, not officers, when writing "Tuntematon Sotilas [The Unknown Soldier]", he only mastered the deep masses of people of his material in "Pohjant�hden Alla [Beneath the North Star]". The depiction of the educated class - those wholly untypical caricatures of Mr. and Mrs. Reverend Salpakari and teacher Rautaj�rvi - was based solely upon ill-willed fantasy of his own and the environment. Portrayal of the people is qualified and competent, but also its selection of types is twisted, idealized. The idealist character of the tailor Halme and Koskela's family, excellent in their work morale, are plausible and realistic but not representative. The rabble is not denoted enough.

Linna certainly has the right to characterize the kind of members of educated and common folk as he wishes in a fictional novel. The fault is in his readers and interpreters, who began to manipulate the positions and meanings of various social groups and mold and change the Finnish reality according to Linna's depictions. Although, Linna has likely had something more in his mind to begin with than creating a fictional novel when writing "Pohjant�hti", and in any case, he soon took the place of rewriting history backed by his interpreters.

As is usual, it is left unsolved what actual position V�in� Linna holds in the change of historical concept and opinion climate "from White to Red", and what is held by social opportunity independent of him. I am myself interested in Linna's case also separately, but in this review I observe the settings of the civilized folk and the people from a general point of view.

It has been stated - and was stated in that seminar, as well - that Linna gave a sense of self-esteem to the people. But that bargain ended up awry. The habits, interests and ideals did not change. They are the same as they have always been: bread and circus, nothing else. Instead of adopting education, the people dragged the civilized folk down - with the masses' mauling overpower.

Even as a schoolboy, when I was to become a scientist, I received guidance in composing a research. First, a review of what the presented is based on, is required: data and methods, Material und Methode. When I describe the educated and common people - and the Finnish society -, I first use my own expertise. It is fortuitous for this very theme that I have lived amongst various social groups, ranging from one side to another, during my long life, identifying myself with them in turns. Also the opportunities received to spend several years within communities of only other vertebrates than humans give perspective for contemplations of a valuation-philosophical nature.

There is no brief definition for the educated class, no anymore than for education, either. It has to be listed a bunch of focal characteristics and attributes, of which the image of the educated is formed.

The perspective of the cultured man - I prefer to use the past tense and speak of "the old educated class" - must always reach spheres wider than the own self and family. Creating and maintaining high culture, and ideological activity on the field of the nation, the mankind, the creation in the best case, was essential.

Duty and responsibility were always before freedoms; high morale, self-discipline and -restraint were basic principles. At every turn it had to be striven to be ethically superior to the surroundings - so that the environment would follow the example. Superiority in regards to other social groups had to not display out as arrogance, as friendly and empathetic behavior towards also servants, people of the folk, was an absolute precept; superiority was supposed to show only through example.

It was the mark of education that money was not allowed to be talked about, not even thought about. Business life, "gesch�ft" (nowadays "business") was contrary, eschewed and slightly despicable (although despise had to not be shown offensively here either) to the deeply spiritual life. Surplus money, if there was some, had to be used in supporting culture and charity. Purchasing of art was equally motivated by aiding the poor painter and being attached to art. The consumption level of an educated family was very low, ascetic, in regards to resources.

The philosophical background of sophisticated, fair manners (at conversation, dressing, meal) was the same leading rule piercing the whole of civilization: the quality of your neighbor's life, community's atmosphere always ahead own desire for convenience. The educated man fell silent of sexual issues. "They are matters of the bedroom, and the bedroom door is closed." Again, a life wisdom was behind it: the more the veil obscuring the few truly enchanting things of human life is opened, the more they diminish in fascination. And on the other hand, one wasn't to cause ill feelings and grief, in any way, to those who were lacking those joys for one reason or another, by exhibiting these matters.

A sidenote may be necessary for a young reader, who has lived in another, collapsed world: I did not describe a monastery above, but a relatively large human group that has indeed lived also in Finland; the country's most remarkable social group. But no doubt old-fashioned Christianity has strongly influenced the shaping of its ideals. As Antti Eskola was researching Finnish educated families, he had stated that many of them were priestly families in past centuries (and certainly some still are). The austere morality and Christian-humanist values were preserved, like Eskola notes, even after when families stood firmly after being secularized and knowing their own value, on their own feet, without God.

My depiction fits the mightiest wing of the educated class the best: the official class, people of which were in universities, the educational system, in the church, generally in academic professions: doctors, judges, pharmacists etc. There actually was a time, as unbelievable as it sounds nowadays, when an equality sign could almost be drawn inbetween the educated and academic classes. Often academic trades were inherited within families, and ideals were absorbed in home upbringing. Also secondary schools had their role in transferring the tradition of education. Sometime ago, Matti Kuusi compiled a statistic of the school background of people leading or most noted in various fields of life, and discovered the majority being from a few elite secondary schools. However, Kuusi didn't differentiate between different professions and included leading persons also in the industry, army and the like to his statistics, people who hardly were considerably touched by education.

At trades populated by civilized people the atmosphere was so potent that the same ideals and habits often quickly adhered to those who were recruited through caste cycling. At a time a situation opposite to the one after the later cultural revolution, V�in� Linna and comprehensive school, did indeed prevail: education was gaining ground. The civilized class's dream of the influence of example may have realized even down the class hierarchy. I've often told of the university's janitor, a little official, as a childhood memory of mine, who had learned the values of education so deeply that he saved the institute's ink by cutting it with water, because "de' �' kronans", "it is owned by the state".

The educated class also had their other branch, with somewhat similar ideals, a bit different ways of life: namely educated farmers. It had received influence from Christianity and the clergy even more, and even later. People at mansions and enlightened large estates were part of it - which upright, broad-minded masters the Red scoundrels then walked behind the barn to be executed. The reflections of these tragedies are still alive to me from my home region of Tavastia, near Linna's place of growth. Linna describes those phases from a rather dissimilar point of view...

The third category of education must not be forgotten, either. The term "education of the heart" sounds quite sugary, but still is not an empty phrase. It comes to mind that in somewhere, in the human brain, all human insights have born to begin with, also the ideals and models of Christianity or the good life of the civilized. Why couldn't they spontaneously spring out here and there, even from unfavorable grounds? Linna's tailor Halme is an example of "education of the heart" in literature - whereas Linna himself is an example of swift caste cycling. The son of a poor farm, an industrial worker, soon fully adopted the role of the academic, modest and natural behavior without even the slightest underlinings of success or station; judging by their form, essays of his late season might almost be from the pen of some old family's humanist researcher.

The Red Insurrection was a severe disappointment for the educated class, a severe disappointment and strict lesson. Afterwards it is easy to complain such a foundational error as belief into the decorated image of Runeberg's Saarij�rvi's Paavo, generally belief into the people. All in all, the civilized folk had fallen into that error, and idealist's fate is always harsh.

The Red Rebellion, the Civil War, should not be compared to total wars. In a lucky case one could stay away from it; neither party executed full mobilization. Especially North- and East Finland stood wholly apart from the brawl. But in contrast it was actual reality in Tavastia, the home region of me and V�in� Linna.

The intensity of participation was case-specific with both sides. Even people opposing violence got pulled along by the Reds due to peer pressure. Still, the reason for the insurrection was familiar to everyone, the same as with every Red revolution: furious spite and jealousy towards the economically, and most of all, mentally superior. And brawling, robbing and murder became its practice. Choosing of sides was a truism for the educated. It was also a question of a clash between culture and barbarism.

The rebellion was shocking and traumatic in several ways, but the happy ending was even then a tremendous relief. My mother - who was eleven at the time - tells of the immense experience of salvation, when German brothers in arms freed H�meenlinna from the grip of Red terror in May 1918. It was dazzling when "Ein feste Burg" was being sung together at the town marketplace, Germans in German, people of H�meenlinna in Finnish. My mother's maternal father, old county doctor Karl-Johan von Fieandt, was moved to tears from yet being able to see Finland autonomous, and couldn't keep himself from adding his other dream within the same breath: "If only I could see a woman in the pulpit."

When I attempt to map the relation of the educated to the Reds, I also have to evaluate "White terror", which has been striven stress quite a bit in the newest historical writing. It has to be put clearly that White and Red executions are not comparable with each other at all, surely not on the same axle. The Red Uprising began from the deeply agitating disparity of income- and wealth levels between population groups (even though the bracket in these was incomparably thinner than in present-day Finland), but all in all in a state of peace, when the value of human life is always seen as great. "White terror" instead was firstly a revenge, which always aspires to be manifold in the realm of men. And most importantly, the executions were now made within the atmosphere of war, in which human lives are weighed with utterly different scales than during a time of peace. We can somehow criticize murders committed by Reds from the standpoint of contemporary peace-time ethics; those committed by Whites we cannot at all. (The same of course applies to events during all wars.)

The civilized folk no doubt advocated strict punishments in principle after the Red Uprising, although they did usually leave the tasks of the judge and executioner to others. The most rigid of executions are the work of a few cold-hearted infantrymen, who had "had a taste of blood" already on the Eastern front of Germany. There indeed was only a small share of educated people in the infantry, and there were similar emotionally damaged adventurers in the group as in the foreign legion.

Even nowadays it should be remembered to ask what the consequences would have been if the Red Rebellion had been settled with general amnesty, not with executions and hunger camps of Lahti. Now even the chosen path meant quite a small number of victims percent-wise. In many of the World Wars' individual battles - also on our front - there were more human casualties than in the whole Red Uprising both sides put together. And the minute losses of the Reds were apparent in the first Parliament elections of autonomous Finland, where socialists received a frighteningly large flood of votes.

Sometime in the family archives, I browsed my maternal father Hugo Suolahti's and my grand uncle Eino Suolahti's 1920s correspondence with the state police chief of the time. A deep concern over the danger of a new rise of the Reds is visible in them. I shall tell a bit about these brothers to illustrate the life's work and attitudes of the educated class of the time.

Hugo Suolahti was a professor of Germanic philology and the first chancellor of the Helsinki University for 18 years. He saw it the duty of the civilized people to take part in building the society, and so he worked also as a representative and presidential candidate for the Coalition Party and also in the administrative council of the National Share Bank, in which he had to resolve the outcomes of the temperamental director general J.K. Paasikivi's temper tantrums so that even I recall these complainings about them at my grandmother from the time when I was a little boy.

Grandfather was compliant by nature, fitting as a peace negotiator, and very social in his way of thinking - there was fishing ban put on the family at his officer farm in Tyrv�nt�, at the strand of Vanajanselk�, my childhood setting, because there were fishermen in the village who fished for their living. Pike perch was bought from them throughout the summer to a big household.

Eino Suolahti was of a different kind, hasty and stern (regardless of which the brothers were very close with each other). He was a doctor, the chairman of the Duodecim Society and the Finnish Medical Association, president of Instrumentarium, professor h.c. and much more. During the wars he was the chief surgeon of the Defence Forces as a Major General of Pharmacy. He was an extreme right-wing politician, who thought that Reds should be utterly snuffed out; he was one of IKL's founders and a supporter for the Lapua Movement (the third brother, my granduncle Ernesti Suolahti, "Uncle �nsti", was among the leading persons in the M�nts�l� Uprising).

Folk romanticism didn't bother Eino Suolahti: when spar fences broke under his over a hundred kilos at a grey partridge hunt, he really gave Tavastian peasants a piece of his mind, insulting them as slothful and useless. Still in the 1960s, when I had befriended the residents of Vanajanselk�'s small beachside cottages first as companions in nature activities and then as fishing colleagues, the old generation was bitterly remembering the "butcher general". Even long after the uprising he had had his possessions transported to his villa by boats - also that was in Tyrv�nt� - without payment - most probably for reminding that the cottage people had used the same boats to expropriate the movables of lords' villas.

Should I pull back a bit here, and observe that there are now some analogies found to V�in� Linna's types of the educated. Eino Suolahti was obliged to surrender some of civilization's ideals when temperament came to way, at least tolerance. (I myself I am more akin to my granduncle than my placid grandfather: I also find that tolerance, ignorance by another name, may be an incentive for wrong of the worst kind.)

But my granduncle bore his responsibility over the nation well and held fast to civilized manners still in the 1940s. He saw a doctor colleague of his (who was later actually the personal doctor of the president) approaching from the beach - in shorts - from his summer residence's window. The servant had to tell at the door that the professor wasn't available.

In the light of this, it is surprising that Eino Suolahti agreed to be an equal and hospitable host for the Reichsf�hrer Heinrich Himmler in summer 1942, who, stressed to the extreme, got to a little vacation for resting his mind by pulling a lure at Vanajanselk�. Hitler and his group were actually looked quite down upon, because they originated from the lower middle class, and presentation was analogous to that. This was the case in Germany, too. My father, a professor of botanics and the president of the Helsinki University Kaarlo Linkola, told that his best botanical friends, professors of the Marburg University, took a rather condescending view to Hitler, even though they admitted his grand merits.

I'd presume that the positive attitude towards Himmler was because of the warm and close relation to Germany in general. Germany was indeed the cradle of world culture, science, philosophy and ideas (and only in arts was the leading position held by France, and even that only when excluding music) until the wretched end of the Second World War.

As we know, the Finnish government held Eino Suolahti's policy even 20 years after the rebellion, and held the most devoted of Reds, or communists, in a steel grip. One didn't need but to slightly whisper or print a small flyer, and he/she would end up behind bars in Tammisaari. No matter how I try to identify with the Zeitgeist, I feel tempted, like many do, to argue that that was exaggeration of self-defense in the 1930s. Or was it after all: the Karelian Republic did linger just beyond the border with its own red dreams of Great Finland - before it fell into its own trap, got devoured by Russian national fanaticism in turn.

And history repeats itself: at this moment the slander and hunt of "fascists", old- and neonazis, blatantly overlooking the noble principles of the freedom of speech, is fully identical to the communist persecutions of the 1930s in Finland, as well. There is only the difference that it has been 55 years since the reign of national socialists, and the shuddering at them is already now appalling farce.

I have described the educated class in its days of might and some of its power figures. They went on through the Red Rebellion, having lost some of their idealism; it was well in the 1930s, and times of war were their golden years, as also many of its ideals and life habits were respected. But then the downfall began: industrialization, the welfare of the masses and aggressive self-esteem. The Reds got what they wanted in the end. There are some relicts left of the old civilized folk; we can perhaps already tolerate these few ones.

The defeat of the educated certainly isn't astonishing. It has been endangered for the whole duration of its existence. The cultured people's springy impeccability, abstinence, sacrifice and untiring standing as an example are heavy for human to bear. I shall again snatch an example from close of how even concretely vulnerable the civilization was:

My father Kaarlo Linkola, who I already introduced above, died 53 years old in early summer 1942, during the worst food shortage. He couldn't withstand the complications of a successful prostate surgery, the last blood coagulation entered his heart. According to my mother's hypothesis, it may have been partially because my father was in a weak condition due to malnutrition. He was a large man and in intense movement on his trips as a terrain biologist, but he had the food coupons of the doer of mental work. And the emergency aid that was necessary for many, the black market, was out of the question for the son of a strict family of officials; also the university president's status he recently retired from bounds one to be an example for the nation.

I have spent a long time at the stages of the educated class and my memories of them. What about the other party of the survey, the common folk? I have already said its interests in reduced terms, but I will refresh: own belly, own kids, a partner and a couple friends, the light weekend joys, that's the world. And stuff up to ears. All else is none of our business. Masters take care of it. And the masters are hated as a reward.

It is not difficult to point out where the deep rows of the people flock, where the pariah class gathers. The Trade Union Movement, the monument of greed, incomes policy negotiations. Streets full of clamouring masses waggling miniature flags when ice hockey players have won the bashers from other countries. Rally races, Formula races. Stockholm-cruise, Tallinn-cruise. The supermarket on Saturday.

When a novel department store called Gigantti was opened in the capitol area a year or two ago, which promised gadgets of many colors for the stinking cheap price of 9:90, 99:90, 999:90; the parking field's rafts of metal plated beetles reached the horizon, and the human lines wriggling midst them in tens of thousands surpassed all the records of the good old Soviet Union. As I looked at those newspaper pictures, a tormented scream erupted from my lips: no democracy, for heaven's sake, no democracy! No common voting right, never! No, no, no!

The downfall of the educated is apparent all around us. Even in publications of young schooled people, for example magazines Ydin [The Core] or Vihre� Lanka [The Green Thread], it is seen that magnificent words like "the elite", "elitistic" are being used in a degrading manner - unbelievable, but true. The media is filled with Helibor-interests, Prime-interests, currency and stock exchange courses, profit calculations of businesses - data that wasn't part of news material at all twenty years ago - it was the field of the financial world's special publications, of Kauppalehti [The Trade Paper]. And new prophets travel around the country, preaching the doctrine of unrestricted selfishness to great audiences: "fulfilling oneself", "own life's hero". One cannot imagine an opposite more exact to the old educated people's teaching of life and sacrificing for others, both neighbors and the nation.

Wild circus acts are performed in the country because of the people's will. The golden calf, around which it is being danced, is a frippery boutique named Nokia, which has not produced or sold any gadget that wouldn't be both dull and harmful, not after the makers of rubber boots separated from it. But when its head salesman enters for lecturing to college rectors, they congregate respectfully to listen how the basic research of universities has to be dumped down the well, and how it must be focused on producing techniques and experts for business life. Where is the pride of the scientist, the university's pride? Gone, lost. Lots of shuffling is heard in graveyards, as it is being turned in the tombs.

The Finnish Union of Literature, my trade union, is endlessly tinkering with publishing contracts, percents and their fractions of royalties, marks and pennies, digging gold for authors, who are immensely rich in both international comparison and historical continuum - like all other Finns. And still it is the writers, who master the rapier of words, that the state of the world and earth would cry for to take part in ideological discussion.

At last and finally we receive, like a wet rag to our faces, this neoprimitive "information society", the bubble of bubbles, in which seemingly adult people worship toys; in which means and substance mix into mash; in which computers progress and knowledge lessens. This information society, in which the necessary information drowns without leaving a trace.

As I sink into the depths of misery, I recall that even the meager spark of civilization, which was embodied by the working class' shadow of an education, reaching to the fields of culture, has fallen into the chasm of damnation. Gone are the labor movement's idealistic seams along with their ideas of sobriety and people's enlightenment; gone the thousands of workers' associations' hours of voluntary work; gone the ideal matter of the cooperative shop; gone into cracks in earth like all red capital gathered as collective property - for banks and crooks.

We live the time of the history's deepest depression, the reign of outrageous simplified materialism, of money - that materialism, from which mud man has attempted to struggle up earlier periods, and succeeding partially, as well. Now also former cultured families fuss among the rabble in this inferior, flat, simple and stupid world of stock exchange shares, investment funds, derivatives, options, interest calculations. Professions of the old educated class are in income fights, doctors and teachers - people who are oozing with money and fat from ears and nostrils. What depth of shame!

An ironic may discover something positive within this doomsday atmosphere: honesty. We are openly avaricious. Can you find anymore sincere and fitting names than market powers, market economy? Market: the summary of cheapness, the spectacle of the poorest baubles, pumpernickels, feather fans and balloons, cheapjacks, the festival of the mob.

Civilization and the educated was the little beautiful and noble that the wretched humanity was able to squeeze out of itself. I miss it. I did get to witness it. I do not enjoy anymore.

2000