“HERE,” HE SAID. “If you need a place to stay for a while, you can go to Ghislaine Maxwell’s apartment in Peconic City.” My father placed the set of keys into my hands and told me the address, which was 9 Nantucket Avenue, and drove me to the station. The trip out to Peconic City wasn’t long. He told me that the house was located next to a money broker. Atlantic Union, I believe. When I got out into the station, I turned left, as I had been instructed and found myself in a kind of shanty town made up of small shacks set up inside the building. “It’s not much,” I recalled my father telling me, “but no one will look for you there.” Was this “Nantucket Avenue?” I walked by the shanty town, where indigent women were out selling flowers and other things. I asked an old flower seller how to get to Nantucket Avenue, and she told me I had to go outside the building, through the station’s back entrance, and turn right.
I checked my possessions. A single gym bag full of clothes, my phone, my wallet, a paperback. I walked through the central atrium of the station and out the back entrance, just as instructed, and walked down a sidewalk to the right until I saw a series of modern homes set back from the road with green lawns, even in winter. Down one of these lawns, a whole parade of media figures and cameramen came in my direction, one woman speaking loudly in those clipped, made-for-broadcast tones about the plight of Ghislaine. At that moment, I wondered how my father had even had come to possess Ghislaine Maxwell’s keys or why he had sent me there.
Even at a distance, I could read the words “Nantucket Avenue” on one of the houses, all of which had peaked roofs and were built to incorporate Puritan architectural elements, a sort of House of Seven Gables for the big money age. Did my father really think this was a good place for someone like me to hide out? In front of one of the houses, someone had strung up some effigies of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, except had given them vampire fangs that dripped red blood. “Death to the Rich,” a sign read. Some yellow-toothed vagrants stood around the Epstein and Trump vampire effigies, panhandling, hoping to get a dime out of me.
The interior of the house was dull and contemporary and all of the walls were covered with large photographs of Ghislaine and Epstein vacationing in the Caribbean, wearing bleached white shirts that were so bright they made your eyes ache, khakis as crisp as morning toast, blue jeans that were so blue, they looked as if they had only been worn once and then tossed away. Epstein’s gray hair was always that unruly mop, trimmed to a desired, specified length. Ghislaine looked like she had once starred in a 1990s Bond film, perhaps as the sexy villainess who gets killed in the end. One picture though made my heart sink. It showed Epstein, Ghislaine, and British diplomat Peter Mandelson clustered around the deck of a yacht as Jorma Kaukonen played guitar. They were on the sea somewhere, drenched in a pink orange sunset.
Jorma was in on it too? Later, when the revelations came out, Jorma Kaukonen, the white-bearded, Finnish Hemingway-looking ex-lead guitarist of seminal San Franciscan psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane, who had transitioned into the rough-and-tumble bar room blues act Hot Tuna in the 1970s, denied all wrongdoing. Instead, he said that Epstein had been a fan of Hot Tuna, and that he had performed for him and his guests on occasion and was always well paid. “I’m just a blues musician,” Jorma said. “Simple as that.” When asked what Epstein’s favorite Hot Tuna song was, Jorma acknowledged that it was “Hesitation Blues.” “Epstein made me play it two times during every set,” Jorma had said in a beachside interview. “It started to annoy me.”
In the interview, Jorma wore his white fisherman’s sweater and seemed at ease in his skin. He had his glasses on and his arms were at his sides and he seemed to be hiding nothing. It was hard to believe that he had ever been anything other than a minstrel to the evil rich.
I WAS INVITED to give a talk at the new community center in Tartu, across from the Lõunakeskus shopping center. There I stood, in a small modern classroom, lecturing on the fate of the Eastern Algonquians to a small class of perhaps a dozen curious Estonians, an American flag hanging in the corner, when a middle-aged man who looked like Flava Flav in a blue jumpsuit walked in and began shouting slogans. “We have to get behind Trump!” he said. “To own the libs and end woke!” The students backed away, not knowing what to do. Then in walked Obama, calmly, coolly, boldly. He stood at the center of the classroom dressed in desert khakis, like a soldier from Operation Desert Storm and said, “Please go ahead with your presentation. I for one found it to be most informative and, in my opinion, quite patriotic.”
After Obama and the man who looked like Flava Flav left, I walked home, whistling, hands in my pockets. How could it be that Obama was in Tartu? What was he doing here? Later I found out that, under pressure in the US from the Trump administration, the Obamas had decided to rent a house on the periphery of Tartu. Obama had been to Estonia several times and found it a most welcoming place. He was particularly impressed by its sauna and singing culture and enjoyed a mouthful of moose pasteet. Obama and Michelle would cycle to the market in the warmer months to inspect the eye-watering array of cucumbers, tomatoes, and berries. In the cooler months, Michelle would fill her basket with handfuls of glorious chanterelle mushrooms and prepare at home for Obama his favorite dish, chanterelle sauce with potatoes, laden with dill. Obama would smack his lips. “Michelle, baby,” he would say, wrapping an arm around her waist. “You’re the greatest woman who ever lived. This kukeseenekaste is just perfection.”
The Obamas became a fixture of Tartu life after that. Somehow, even though he was from Hawaii, or Indonesia, or Kenya, or Chicago, or wherever he was from, he fit right in to the city’s free and inventive-thinking population. He would wave at university students as he rounded the turn onto Kroonuaia Street, his arm lifted joyously in the air. He took part in fencing matches at EÜS. Michelle could be seen at H&M in Kvartal, digging through the sock bin, or weighing deals on cosmetics at Tradehouse and Douglas. They were true Tartu lovers.
Then it so happened that I was dispatched to the house of a soothsayer or witch on the opposite side of the River Emajõgi, set back deep in the pine and birch forests. I went there to undergo something called constellation therapy. When I got to the house, a white colonial built at the top of a hill, something immediately felt off. It was winter by then, the snow hardened and iced over, and there was an eerie stillness, even in the light of a February day. The front door to the house was ajar. As I approached it, I began to hear the cries of wolves coming from the woods. Not knowing what to do, I went inside. Its interior was full of expensive lifeless furniture, the kind that wealthier people acquire not knowing what else to get. White couches and dark wooden tables. Some tasteless art beside the cold fireplace.
At its back though, I encountered an old university friend, Chas Flaubert, an architect from Charleston, South Carolina, who had gone to high school with Stig, an Estonian expatriate. Small world indeed. Chas informed me that, during his time in South Carolina, Stig had lived his life as a gay man, but had a sort of reverse coming out experience, suddenly discovering at the age of 20 or so, that he was a robust heterosexual, and that he only had feelings for women. After that, the posters of Fabio, Madonna, and Ricky Martin in his teenage bedroom came down and were replaced by pinups of Farrah Fawcett, Sally Field, and Miss Cheryl Tiegs. “I’m not sure how that happens,” said Chas in his molasses drawl, while puffing on a marijuana cigarette, “but that’s the truth.” “It’s very funny, because Stig is probably the straightest hetero I know,” I said. A suave, one-man nightclub variety show act nicknamed “the gray fox” for his striking hair, Stig Sandbrook was known to have lain with women from Lake Tamula to Lake Titicaca. “He’s more hetero than hetero,” I went on. “Do you mind if I hit that joint, Chas?”
Our conversation was interrupted by the howls of the wolves. Looking out the window, we could see three or four of the shaggy sinister beasts beat a line toward the backyard. “We’re done for,” I told Chas. “Once they get inside, they’ll eat us all for dinner!” We stood there at the windows, awaiting our certain doom. There came a loud crackle and a kind of zipping sound. One of the wolves toppled over, then the next. After four crackling sounds, they were all dead.
It was then that I saw who had shot them. Obama descended the slope in winter hunting gear, rifle in hand. He waved to us. “God bless that Obama,” said Chas. “Where would any of us be without him?” “In the belly of those wolves,” I replied. Obama whistled and a flatbed truck came down the slope. With an Estonian friend, he loaded in the wolf corpses. After sharing a smoke with the driver and some chit chat, Obama climbed into the truck and they drove off.
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER CHARLIE KIRK MEMORIAL. The “stadium tour” had been a boon to the president’s sinking approval numbers. And with each pyrotechnics display, each series of rousing speeches, one could almost forget that he had promised to end the war between Ukraine and the Russian Federation in one day, or to reverse inflation, or to do many other things that never seemed to bear fruit. This however did not dissuade young women like Elspeth from watching the Charlie Kirk Stadium Tour. Rather, she curled up on her couch with a box of tissues, sobbing each time they showed the Charlie Kirk “That’s why I am a Christian” montage, pieced together from diverse podcasts and various debate spats. After drying her eyes, she would clench her fists and stammer something angry about the “radical leftist left.”
“But it’s not just the left that has its radical elements,” I would caution her. “Think of Bison Man and January 6. Surely, you must admit that the Proud Boys were just as hostile an element in US politics.” This might have made sense in a less emotionally fraught situation, but not to someone who had just lost, as she saw it, the 13th apostle of Christ. I felt ever more like a unrepentant, mate-sipping Che Guevara. And like Guevara before me, I leaned in and began to work my vulgar Latin socialist charm on Elspeth. There have been passionate kisses in history. Think of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra or Cleopatra and Mark Antony. But this sudden melting away of toxic political distress into a very steamy couch lovemaking session won them all.
On the TV set, there were more pyrotechnics. One of Trump’s rotten children cried out, “Je suis Charlie!” By this time, I was just about to consummate my relationship with Elspeth. She was a flaxen-haired, freckly lass of Highlands descent. A Presbyterian turned evangelical, a dedicated follower of god. She was unsure though and she called in her assistant, a young Siamese woman who carried an appointment book with her. “Miss L. can you tell me how far I am into my cycle?” Elspeth requested. “Yes, madame,” said the Siamese assistant, who quickly paged through the book. “It is an inauspicious time for making love, madame,” she said. “Thank you, L., that will be all,” she told her assistant. “You are dismissed.” The woman bowed and left.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Elspeth whispered to me on the couch. “But I just don’t want to risk it. I do hope you understand.” “That’s all fine,” I said. “I’ll just lick your breasts.” “Fair enough.” Elspeth pulled up her t-shirt, revealing two very soft, very pink breasts. They looked like a treat you might find in a Helsinki bakery, tucked in between the cinnamon buns and fluffy Napoleons. “You know,” Elspeth said a moment later. “This is probably the best sex I’ve ever had. And we don’t even share the same politics! If more of us just had sex, we could reconcile all of our differences.” I kissed Elspeth, pushing back her sunny-colored hair, and said, “You’re a genius.”
Soldiers of the Continental Army, a 1781 sketch by a French officer
THAT SAME DARK, misty, and evil-feeling November night when the outcome of the American elections became clear, I fell violently ill. I’m still not sure if it was because of the election results or because I had eaten too many pumpkin seeds. It took me weeks to recover. Half of the time I was couch ridden, staring up at the ceiling, the other half, I sat in cafes peering out of windows while strangers tried to engage me about politics. All of November passed by like that in a half dream. I was numb and I felt at that time that something had broken or had died. Something had vanished. But for all eternity? What the hell was going on?
November has become the line though, the line between before and after. It’s only recently that I have understood that everything that has happened since is mirroring what came before. Everything that has happened after has happened before, but in other ways. We’ve just forgotten about these things, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t happen. Why we now have to relive them is lost on me, but maybe this is all necessary. Maybe we have to relive all of this.
As I write this now it’s a bright March morning. The daylight is streaming through the curtains and the coffee has come to a sumptuous boil. The alarm clock told me that it was six when I woke but the news has informed me that I must be still dreaming, because the news is absurd. Trump’s envoy to Moscow Mr. Witkoff says that Putin is a wonderful person. Maybe he would like to say that to my neighbors who fled a bombarded Kharkiv three years ago? Vice President Vance and his wife Usha and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz are en route to Greenland where Usha will take in a dog-sledding event and Vance and Waltz will visit a military base. The Greenlandic prime minister has already called this a provocation. He’s from there. Greenland is home. So why do the Americans then say that they have the right to take it away?
By now, I don’t remember how many times Trump has said that Canada could be America’s 51st state. They could keep their national anthem. The American president has promised them at least that. He’s such a generous man that he would even allow them to keep their flag too. America would cherish its 51st state in the same way that it would cherish its Gaza hotels and casinos, he has said. For Trump, Canada is an illogical political entity. For him, the Canadian and American border was drawn at random “decades and decades ago,” as he said recently in the White House. In reality, the border was fixed in 1846 between Great Britain and the US. In reality, the US received its independence from Great Britain in 1783. It was not Canada that drew that line, because Canada did not have its own prime minister until 1867. The math tells me that this all happened 180 years ago. Eighteen of those many “decades and decades.”
That was all in reality, but reality is no match for Trump. He also said that a Dane once sailed to Greenland 200 years ago and that’s why Denmark doesn’t have a legitimate claim to Greenland. But the Scandinavians were living there in the Viking era, and those who remained joined the Inuit. That Danish ship sailed 300, not 200 years ago. Why do I even waste my time arguing, I wonder. Everyone knows that reality doesn’t matter. Trump said in his March speech that we will get Greenland one way or another, and the Republicans only stood and applauded. Trump even has his own explainers and supporters in Estonia who appear each day on social media to explain to the Estonian people why the Orange One is always correct. It’s been strange to witness how they do this and they do it with such enthusiasm. Maybe they had nothing better to do than to hand over their souls in exchange for nothing. A shame, because America was in its bloody moments of birth against authoritarianism, or so I was taught.
When you read Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, it’s all well explained. Americans no longer wished to live under a hereditary monarchy, Paine wrote. Their desire was liberty. “Give me liberty or give me death,” were the words of the Virginian Patrick Henry in 1775. Henry also said, “There is no retreat but in submission and slavery.” But some Americans want to be slaves. They wish to share their slave joy with their Canadian and Greenlandic brethren. Even when they don’t want to be Americans, they shouldn’t have the right to decide on the matter. Rather, they should be the competent, loyal slaves of their spiritual master. This is their logic.
The same logic also underpins Russian foreign policy. The Ukrainians have forgotten how wonderful it is to be the slaves of Moscow. One day they will forget who they are and they will only think the thoughts of their tsar and speak in the language of their tsar too. This is how the Russians think, but can the people who think in such a way really be Americans? America isn’t just flags, eagles, guns, and money. America is, or was, an idea of the Enlightenment. Just as Estonians still live in part in the 1920s with their land reforms, bowties, black cars and state officials, because that is when their country was created, Americans have one foot in the end of the 18th century when debates raged over the Rights of Man. I must admit, I am starting to understand the tumult of that era more. The old questions are resurfacing. We have been here before, haven’t we? We’ve just forgotten all about those days, but we are remembering them.
When Trump speaks about Canada, I am reminded of General Benedict Arnold’s ill-fated expedition to the north in 1775. It was the desire of the Americans that Quebec would join in their cause against the British. Two armies were sent to Canada the summer before American independence was declared. One army went north from New York. This was the army of Richard Montgomery. Arnold’s army went through the wilderness of New England. At first it must have seemed simple. If you look at a map, it looks that way. But the route was treacherous and there were a lot of waterfalls. Arnold’s forces carried small boats along the way, with the hope they could use them upstream. A third of his army deserted him. The others fell ill and were starving. In the end, just half of his army made it to Canada. In the pitched battle at Quebec City, Richard Montgomery was slain and Arnold was wounded.
The Americans had to retreat back home.
I don’t know why this one event stands out in my mind. Most experts are talking about Germany and the 1930s these days. In London, there are even signs on the Tube that show Elon Musk giving the Roman salute and which proclaim his Teslas can accelerate from “0 to 1939 in 3 seconds.” People look at Elon Musk and think about Adolf Hitler. I listen to Donald Trump and think about Benedict Arnold’s futile march through the wilderness into Canada. Some thought the Canadians would be on the side of the Americans, but it was all an illusion. They were deceived by their fantasies. The Americans did control Montreal for some time and the French disliked them because their administration of the city was poorly organized. When Trump now talks about how Canada could become the 51st state, I wonder if he has even read any history? Of course not. He will continue to tell us his tall tales. We must sit uncomfortably on the couch, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio during the infamous meeting with Zelenskyy, looking for a way to hide ourselves inside of the furniture. Surely this current discomfort will pass. Surely our generals will realize that it was foolish to invade Canada.
By now, you might have figured out that I have read a little too much about the American Revolution. But the Revolution has always fascinated me since I was a little boy. All of that bloody drama and all of those three-cornered hats. All of those bayonets and buxom ladies in poofy dresses. At that time, I probably wanted to live through such a momentous period of time. As I write this, I’m not so sure that was such a good thing to wish for anymore. I am often asked as an American here what I think and I have to answer that all of the uncomfortable questions about the American project are now resurfacing. All of the old ghosts have been stirred and are restless. We are starting to sense these ghosts and to understand them.
The greatest question raised by these restless ghosts concerns America. Because, while we talk about the right of Canada to exist, the right of Greenland to exist, the right of Ukraine or Taiwan to exist, one also wonders what right the United States has to exist. An America true to the ideas of its founding exists as an idea, and therefore as a kind of country. An America denuded of its basic premises, one that deports people without due process, just as the British Empire removed the French from Nova Scotia, is no longer its old self, but just a bunch of territories patched together, where the president is something like the owner of a large estate. It loses the qualities that distinguish it as a country and so it becomes cosmetic, the kind of fake country that Putin railed against in his mad rambling treatise on Russians and Ukrainians.
Without its ideas, America is just the land it took from its indigenous peoples. No matter how many nuclear warheads it has, or how many people it deports, or how many federal workers it lays off, no matter how many dissidents are jailed, this truth cannot be ignored. Here I am reminded of an interview I heard not long ago with Joe Stahlman, a scholar and researcher of Tuscarora descent, who remarked on the attempts of his ancestors to create peace with the restless Europeans who had turned up on their shores. They called these Europeans “younger brothers,” because they were the newest peoples to live on Turtle Island. In the belief systems of the Natives, it was believed that the Earth existed on the back of a turtle and that this giant turtle was swimming through space. “They tried to educate their younger brothers on how to conduct themselves on Turtle Island,” he said, without remarking on whether or not this attempt had been successful. Probably not. Perhaps someday. It is hard for me to watch America without thinking of that troubled younger brother who couldn’t be reasoned with.
They tried to teach their younger brother how to behave, but he just didn’t listen.
An Estonian-language version of this article appears in Edasi. Special thanks to Dea Paraskevopoulos for helping to translate it, and to Joe Stahlman, for advice and wisdom.
TRUDEAU, whatever you may think of him, gave Canada a face for 10 years. Everyone in the world knew who the prime minister of Canada was. For me, it elevated my first name from “Canadian pop singer” to “Canadian prime minister” status. Justins the world over were no longer ashamed. Due to some vague, beer goggles-induced similarities, I was even asked a few times if I was the Canadian prime minister. And I didn’t even need to don blackface or fall backwards down the stairs.
Quick, who were all those prime ministers before Trudeau? What? Can’t remember? Maybe it was the ultraboring Stephen Harper, the even more boring and boringly named Paul Martin. The last one who rings a bell is Jean Chrétien. Brian Mulroney? I mean, please. The last interesting Canadian prime minister before Trudeau was his father. And now he’s getting out to avoid online bullying by The Orange One.
In Trudeau, we saw pieces of ourselves. Our interfamilial vaccine feuds. Our health and fitness obsessions. Our hyperfocus on appearing youthful and ageless. Our smiling selfie poses. Our attempts to look respectable. Our collapsing marriages. Our bizarre Indian government assassinations. Nobody’s happy, but there was a brief thought that if the world was run by happy people, its leaders might very well look like Trudeau and Macron, youngish Frenchmen who it seemed just wanted to hang out and have something good to eat. And maybe go skiing.
north! 