Americana...

Last weekend I had a most surreal experience. In a way, it was another one of those outings that has won me the nickname 'Magellan', an aimless wandering off into unknown territory just to see what I might find--a 'Bambosh' as it is known in my family. However, it turned into a cultural experience like no other--true 'culture shock'.

It began as a simple Saturday evening stroll through Stockholm's north side. It is lovely just to wander the streets, listen to passers-by speaking Swedish with all its wonderful melody. To catch the delicious aromas wafting from the streetside cafes and restaurants, and to admire the ornate yet tasteful European architecture. There is so much energy brewing in Stockholm, especially on a Saturday evening. The bartenders are all busy setting out extra chairs, lighting candles, and stacking fresh beer glasses for the coming crowds. Stockholm has its own sort of 'Saturday Night Fever' and as I strolled those streets, I could almost feel the temperature rising. Then, all of a sudden...

... I was caught in a crowd of people wearing American flag bandanas, jeans and cowboy boots, and black leather vests with Confederate flags stitched to the back. There were handle-bar mustaches, mullets, mutton chops, fu-manchus, and sideburns. The crowd reeked of beer, gasoline, and burned rubber. Aging hits like "Bad to the Bone" and "Rebel Rouser" blared from blown-out speakers, almost smothering the din of drunken shouting, clattering beer cans, and a familiar rumble of engines......."Glory be, American cars! Cadillac, Dodge, Chevy, Ford, Jeep, Nash, Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile.....It has been so long since I ..... Wait. What is all this doing in Stockholm?... Where the hell am I?... Am I back in Illinois?

It was 'culture shock' if anybody ever had it, let me tell you. Not just to unexpectedly encounter icons of your own culture abroad--although that definitely threw me for a loop. Nor was the real shock even in the fact that I was able to look at my culture from an outside perspective (I've now been outside the US for over 8 months). The really shocking part was that it was not American automotive culture but rather a cartoon of it. Everything--the beer, the hairstyles, the clothing, the love for the Confederacy, the beat-up Buicks with (ceramic) cow skulls hung on the grill and ropes lashing the hood down-- it was all a cartoon, a cartoon these people really seemed to feel was genuine Americana.

I must say, it was fascinating to see what aspects of American culture people latch on to over here. I certainly did not expect American 'rednecks' to be iconic emblems that thousands of Swedes of all ages would strive to emulate.

Of course, the root of this phenomenon lies in the universal appeal of machines to mechanically-minded individuals all over the world. These people were mechanics and auto buffs first; auto-junky rednecks second. Their passion was clearly under the hood--as that is where a great many of them were spending their evening in the big city--and I can see how a love for machines, focused on a love for American machines, would invite the inevitable love for American machine culture. That can lead to only two places--museums and private collections full of pristinely preserved cars and airplanes or the like, ....or....to country redneck car-junkies.

Swedes falling into both categories of machine-lovers were there in force to show off their projects, but the latter group definitely had numerical superiority.

They are known as raggare here and the word appears to apply to them and no one else. This cartoon more or less sums them up. By definition, raggare are "gangs of young males riding around in large American cars (preferrably from the 1970s) trying to pick up girls." That dry, official explanation is only the half of it. Beyond that, raggare are generally defined by loud, drunken, and generally lewd behaviour in their barely-operable piece-of-shit cars--much like their role-models in the American Midwest and South. Yet the vital difference remains; raggare are not American redneck car-junkies. They are cartoons, caricatures, of American redneck car-junkies.

Now I don't say that because I am an elitist or because I am American and they are not, but rather because I have lived in Beloit, Wisconsin where true American redneck car-junkies still flying the Confederate 'stars and bars' are readily found. I've had a taste of that culture. I've been to the Pecatonica Raceway's "Night of Thrills--drag racing, demolition derby, roll-over contest, school bus racing, Dollar Beer Night." So when I say that raggare are not real American redneck car-junkies I have some sense of what I am talking about. The difference is that they are cartoons of American redneck car-junkies, taking every stereotype of the American redneck car-junky and making it into a defining element of raggare culture. Every urban-legend becomes fact and every bonehead idea becomes a paragraph in the Swedish police reports. It is Americana on steroids, really.

...and this is what I had the dumb-luck to wander into one night on Stockholm's north side.

Well, as it turned out, what I had found was the Wheels Magazine annual Stockholm Pow-wow (I'm not sure if they used that name 'pow-wow', but it wouldn't surprise me. You ought to see the Indian immitators selling South American flute music while wearing full Plains Indian garb--complete with headdresses--in central Stockholm).

The streets were clogged for blocks with vintage cars dating from anywhere between 1925 and 1995. There were Chevy vans jacked up on gigantic tires, low-rider Cadillacs with fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror. There were massive Buicks with drunken people hanging out of every orifice in the battered metal body--including the trunk. It was chaos, like a bad dream written by Hunter S. Thompson or a Mad Max movie.

There were other cars there, mostly antiques like 1957 Chevies and earlier vehicles, that were beautifully restored by skilled craftsmen-mechanics. There were a few WW II Army vehicles in mint condition like and old Dodge Army ambulance that came sputtering and grinding down the thoroughfare. It was an impressive parade that crept down Sveavägen. Three lanes of iconic car bodies ranging from gorgeous to shitty and spanning half a century of the American experience.

Lots of the cars were sporting special features like tinted headlights, Lacoocooracha horns, and fox tails. However, as darkness fell--as did many of the most obscenely drunk raggare--all the refinements and detailings were lost in an eerie haze of headlight-illuminated exhaust fumes. I had really forgotten how much more American cars pollute--especially those aircraft carrier-sized 1970's sedans. The back of my throat began to burn and just when I thought I had found a nice haven where fresh air blew in from an intersecting street, two guys on motorcycles began spinning their tires on the pavement to make a smoke screen for the crowd. Cheers and whoops went around as a column of acrid burnt rubber smoke climbed into the air.

By then the ambulances were weaving through the old cars every few minutes. Raggare being raggare, there were plenty of people sliding around ontop of moving cars, drinking beer with their make-up-caked, NASCAR-clad girlfriends, raggarebrud. It was only a matter of time before people started getting carted off to the hospital...but in a way, that's a part of the life. That's part of being in or emulating the American redneck car-junky existance.

And honestly, I could see in their grease-streaked faces and their bloodshot eyes that for them, this was their night. They had come to the big city and taken over. They were the sensation of the town, filling the night air with the sound of rumbling engines, squeeling tires, and the haze of exhaust as only an American automobile can make it. They were revelling among their fellow automobile lovers, here to show off their treasured machines--their blood, sweat, and tears, everything they fought for--here in the national capital. It was a night to be proud of and to remember for all time, 'the night when my Cadillac convertible shot flames from the tailpipes and peeled out down one of Stockholm's main avenues to the defiant growl of "Bad to the bone".

And so fittingly, Sweden's raggare celebrated their big night, breaking out the beer and loud music, having a tailgate party and checking out other people's machines.

Yet for the happenstance American onlooker still confused by the sudden appearance of an American auto show in central Stockholm, it would take some time to absorb the highly-familiar yet somehow 'not quite right' sights and sounds of the evening. It was a bit like witnessing a catastrophic car accident. It all seemed real enough at the time, but there remains an aftertaste of disbelief, a sense that it was all an illusion, right down to the the raggare with the 1947 Volvo "Pilsner" having a round of its namesake. This brush with an exaggerated, 'idealized' Americana honestly left me with a bit of 'culture shock' and I must admit, a wistful longing for the freedom and down-to-earth people of Wisconsin.