contemporary artist and raise the question, Which is worse: vandalism or modern art? We took a very long subway ride, a ride that even in the largest American city would have carried us to the realms of golf and polo (the brand if not the ponies). But when we emerged, we were in a housing project. The residents were mostly Middle Eastern, Turkish, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, a few Somalis—“new Swedes” as they’re called—plus one old Swede, age about twenty-five, drunk in the middle of the day. He was the only dirty or disorderly element in the suburb. Everything else was a perfect grid of apartment house boxes without ornament or identifying feature, all built in 1960s crap-colored bricks, each the same distance from all the others with nothing but a vacuum of snow between, except here and there a tree standing foolishly by itself. And that was it. There wasn’t anything else to see except three or four shops, a dusty café, and a windowless mosque in a drab cement commercial square. The people on the sidewalks—sidewalks laid out straighter than people have ever walked—looked gray, sad, cold. Of that great marketplace which is the Middle East, with all its hawking and haggling in items and ideas, its idling, conniving, its news, gossip, and, indeed, its crime, there was nothing. Only two old Kurdish men selling sweaters out of a box. The sprawling new Swede families were crated up in the dinky flats designed for a working class with 1.9 children per cohabitational unit. “Some of these buildings were even built without windowsills,” said Mr. Gür, “because people would put ugly things on them.” I saw one woman in a chador lean out a sill-less window and spit. And that’s all I saw of humanity. Swedes do not seem particularly prejudiced against the immigrants. There are a few Swedish skinheads, who sometimes gather in numbers of about a hundred at the statue of King Carl XII in Stockholm’s Kungstradgarden. They are regularly beaten up by about a thousand antifascist activists who then break store windows to protest the skinhead outrage. The Swedish government pursues a confused—but fair!—policy of multiculturalism, encouraging immigrants to assimilate themselves into Swedish society while also encouraging immigrants to maintain customs they may not want anymore. “Kids are doing Turkish folk dances that they never would have done in Turkey,” said Mr. Gür. The multicultural policy isn’t working. Unemployment among Turkish Swedes is 25 percent. And that’s of those seeking jobs. Thomas Gür says that as many as 50 percent of Turkish Swedes aren’t seeking them. The number of
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