roommate at Georgetown, and Mrs. Siebert is a good friend of Hillary’s. I went into a deep funk over the nasty things I’ve written about those blathering highbinders, the president and first lady. (I got over it.) Hardly an evening passed without hospitality of the full-blown seated-dinner kind. Although this was a mixed blessing. There are many delightful things about Sweden, but almost none of them are meals. The Swedish idea of spicy falls somewhere between Communion wafers and ketchup. Cream sauce is everywhere. I went to an Italian restaurant that had on its menu spaghetti Bolognese with cream sauce, linguini al pesto with cream sauce, and fettuccine Alfredo with cream sauce, even though fettuccine Alfredo is nothing but cream sauce, anyway. The city guide in my hotel room noted these “typical Swedish dishes”: anchovy au gratin, nettle soup with eggs, baked eel. And here are some suggested entrées from a Swedish cookbook called A Gastronomic Tour of the Scandinavian Arctic: smoked reindeer heart with seasonal salad, noisettes of young reindeer with creamy green-peppercorn sauce, and reindeer tongue with a salad of early vegetables. What’s that, Blitzen? I can’t understand a thing you’re saying. Maybe the problem with Swedish food has something to do with the almost obsessive Swedish interest in fairness. Maybe if fairness is a society’s most- esteemed value, then “average” becomes a great compliment. Mmm, honey, that was an average dinner. In fact, this is nearly the case. The word in Swedish is lagom, which translates, more or less, as “just enough” or “in moderation” or “sufficient.” And lagom really is used as a compliment. I went to interview two Swedish leftists, a cabinet minister in the ruling Social Democratic Party government and the chief economist for the Landsorganisationen, or LO, the principal Swedish trade union. And they both harped on fairness, though in the nicest way. The lobby wall in the big art-deco LO headquarters is covered with a mural depicting a blond, shirtless buff dude wielding a glowing ingot of pig iron. There is an art history dissertation waiting to be done about the connection between Calvin Klein ads and socialist realism. The economist, Per-Olof Edin, told me, “Inequality creates violence and crime in the United States.” And it probably does, although one can only wish it would create more violence toward Donald Trump.‡‡ Nor did this explain why, in Sweden, where there’s little inequality,
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