Hamsterdam

 When Baltimore police in "The Wire" try to explain the concept of a geographic area where drug sales and use are tolerated, one of them tells an uncomprehending corner boy, "It's like Amsterdam: Everything's allowed there."

Central Park, NYC

The locals, of course, hear this as "Hamster-dam," and that becomes the name for this experimental enclave where the police have herded all the drug dealers, users, freeing the rest of the city from the blight of the drug culture. 

Later, the author of this radical experiment, Major Howard Colvin, a Black police officer who is sick of the hypocrisy, ongoing impotence of the city's policy of "drug war" gives the future mayor a tour of Hamsterdam and he says, "It ain't pretty."  In fact, as the camera follows the future mayor along the streets of Hamsterdam, it looks like something out of Dante's inferno, with parentless children wandering lost among fighting adolescents and adults, druggies staggering, falling down stair stoops, crashing onto the pavement below and bodies lying, ignored on the streets.

Allowing anarchy to devolve into chaos ain't pretty. Civilization, for all its restraints and oppression, may have something to offer, after all.

Mad Dog is currently wandering, like Mayor Carcetti, through the dazzling streets of the actual Amsterdam, its rows of pristine townhouses and shops and it's impossibly tall people.  It looks like the polar opposite of Hamsterdam. 

So far, the major danger is the bicyclists.  "You need to put your head on a swivel," his brother in-law had warned him, and within seconds of setting foot on the street, Mad Dog understood the sagacity of this advice. On the brick sidewalks, along the defined bicycle paths which line the streets where cars and street cars stream by, bicyclists shoot by the pedestrian, like comets,  from every direction. Silent, swift and lethal, the Dutch bicyclist is an ever present death threat. 

And Mad Dog loves bicycles and owns five. 

These Dutch bikes are very civilized, even if their drivers are a menace. They all have fenders which prevent mud splatter and bikers can dress in office attire and arrive for work without a splash on their clothes.

Above, an August Macke painting, A German artist inspired by VanGogh.

At least in Amsterdam, the Dutch look like a fit lot, especially compared to the rotund New Englanders Mad Dog lives among, who drive their cars to go a single block to Dunkin Donuts for coffee. In Amsterdam, as in New Amsterdam, the Dutch walk everywhere they do not bike.

Dutch, heard along the street, has the same cadence as--and many cognates with-- English, so you find yourself trying to eaves drop on conversations only to realize they are not conversations in English. 

Parks weave in and out of the city streets, but mostly what makes Amsterdam different is the concentric circles of canals. You walk a few blocks and you find yourself crossing a canal on a bridge overpass and trying to figure out how many circles from the hotel you have traversed. 

If there are multiple circles of Hell, that idea did not likely derive from Amsterdam, as the place is not Hellish at all, unlike Hamsterdam. 

It may not be Heaven, but it is certainly one of the best cities in the world, at least on short acquaintance.

As in any free society, there are different opinions, and the Dutch version of Trumplings are evident--they even look like Trumplings, with slogan embroidered baseball hats and a bloated, beaten look. Geer Wilders is a sort of messianic Dutchman would be cult leader, a blonde Hitler wannabe, who rails against Muslims rather than Jews, but still sells the same load of the "other" who wold defile and destroy the real Dutch with an alien stain. The Dutch, like the Scandinavians have a part of the body politic which has reacted to the influx of dark skin immigrants with horror and revulsion. It's a changing world and they want to circle the wagons and defend their white, insular world against the dark other.

Today's plan is to visit the Van Gogh museum, which is placed among several other museums, but is the most difficult to gain admission to. Van Gogh was a revolutionary in his time, eccentric and misunderstood and underappreciated, having sold almost no paintings in his life time. 

But he speaks across the ages to us today and Mad Dog can hardly wait to commune with him.