Not an Obituary? Argentine Satire Lives On

In the early 1980s, when I first visited Buenos Aires, Argentina was still under control of a vicious military dictatorship that kidnapped and killed tens of thousands of its political opponents. I had visited Argentine Patagonia in early 1979, and had some unpleasant encounters there, but in the capital the tension was still palpable. I recall, for instance, seeing city buses stopped and riders searched on the ride into town from the international airport at Ezeiza.

That said, Buenos Aires still had a vigorous street life and nightlife – unlike Chile’s Pinochet regime, the Argentine military never imposed a curfew on the public. In Santiago, you couldn’t be on the street after 11 p.m., so parties would start early and go until daylight, but there were no such restrictions east of the Andes.

In Buenos Aires, one of my most memorable experiences was seeing a performance by the musical comedy group Les Luthiers, which came to mind recently when I read the obituary of founding member José Rabinovich (the Creative Commons photo at top advertises a performance in Montevideo). At a time when repression was the norm, Les Luthiers dared to speak out satirically – when I saw them, they spoofed the introduction of a series of general and admirals occupying the country’s highest posts, with one exception: the minister for education was a virtually illiterate corporal. In the clip above, with Rabinovich in the middle, they bemoan Argentina's border problems with Norway - obviously an oblique reference to nationalistic manipulation of the dispute with Britain over the Falkland Islands.

In the English-speaking world, I might compare Les Luthiers with the Bonzo Dog Band, who also created their own instruments and satirized British society, though they were rarely so openly political. In one instance, though, the threat of a libel suit obliged them to remove a reference to Conservative politician Quintin Hogg – in “The Intro and the Outro” (see above), a modified version of Duke Ellington’s “C-Jam Blues” (see below), they had credited Hogg with contributing a “piggy grunt” to the song. In cases like this, British defamation laws are far more rigorous than their North American counterparts, but the Bonzos were never in danger of being jailed or anything more serious.

I never saw the Bonzos live and, when I saw Les Luthiers, my Spanish wasn’t good enough to understand everything that was going on, but their act was visual enough for me to get the gist. Even without Rabinovich, the surviving members will continue to perform and, if you’re in Buenos Aires, elsewhere in Argentina, Uruguay or even Spain with the opportunity to see them – well, don’t miss it!

Antarctica, Foresight, and Fram

Recently, I wrote about my experiences in the Antarctic and the sub-Arctic, calculating the latitudinal extremes I had traveled in my lifetime – probably putting me in the one percent in a sense, but not nearly so great as Norway’s Roald Amundsen (pictured above), the daring leader of the first party to reach the South Pole, in 1911. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ll never get so far as Amundsen’s Fram (pictured below in an Antarctic diorama), the wooden ship which probably reached farther north (85°57') and farther south (78°41') than any other vessel of its kind. Ironically, Fram (“Forward” in Norwegian, pictured below in a museum diorama) was built of tropical hardwoods from South America.

Nearly three decades ago, during a year in the Falkland Islands on a Fulbright-Hays grant, I spent much of the winter with documents from the local government archives, to which I had unparalleled access – honorary archivist Sydney Miller would just loan me the key, and I could peruse volumes of official correspondence at home at my leisure. Just about anywhere else in the world, that would be considered highly irregular, and access today is not nearly so liberal.

That wasn’t my only reading material on long winter nights, though – the Islands’ capital of Stanley also had a small but admirable public library that provided plenty of background material and a specialist collection of books on local and regional history, including Antarctica. There I borrowed Roland Huntford’s The Last Place on Earth, a comparative account of Antarctic polar expeditions by Amundsen and the famous Englishman Robert Falcon Scott. Huntford's was the first book to really arouse my interest in the white continent.

Before reading Huntford, I barely knew Amundsen’s name, even though he reached the South Pole before Scott and, unlike Scott, Amundsen made it back alive. Huntford brilliantly contrasted Amundsen’s meticulous preparation and detailed planning with Scott’s reckless improvisation. This was a controversial book that enraged Scott’s admirers in England, who considered him a tragic hero, while Huntford painted him as a disorganized romantic fortunate to reach the Pole - let alone expect to get his crew back safely.

Amundsen, in contrast to Scott, served a long Arctic apprenticeship under his countryman Fridtjof Nansen, and also spent winters living with the Canadian Inuit before tackling the Northwest Passage (n.b.: the “London” cited in the next to last link is in Ontario, Canada, rather than England). Amundsen was a skilled cross-country skier, traversing Antarctica more easily and rapidly than Scott’s inefficient man-hauling, and also made ample use of dogs. Nansen and Amundsen considered man-hauling “futile toil” that burned valuable calories and probably contributed to Scott’s failure.

An aside: on his way south Amundsen, who had disguised his departure for the south because he did not want to alert other explorers, nearly ran out of money in Buenos Aires: “The Fram Expedition was apparently not very popular at that time, and our cash balance amounted to about forty pesos (£3 10s)…” With help from Norwegian immigrant and diplomat Pedro Christophersen, he managed to arrange delivery of fuel and other supplies – perhaps suggesting that Amundsen was not quite so well-organized as Huntford insists.

On my recent trip to Scandinavia, I had the pleasure to visit Oslo’s Frammuseet (website in English), which preserves the vessel built for Nansen’s Arctic expedition of 1983-96 and used for Amundsen’s Antarctic effort (1910-1912, when they wintered aboard). Now enclosed in a protective building, at the peninsula of Bygdøy, Fram actually allows visitors to board and explore her – not comparable to reaching the South Pole, obviously, but enough to help imagine what it might have been like to spend an Antarctic winter aboard.

That said, Fram was more spacious than I expected, as the photograph of the kitchen below might suggest. Still, spending an entire winter in close quarters with 18 other men in Antarctica’s total darkness must have been a challenge.

It’s worth adding that the Frammuseet is not merely an expression of Norwegian hero-worship. It also offers a simply eloquent approach toward today’s global warming crisis as shown by the decline of polar pack ice: “When such bright surfaces change to water, soil or vegetation there is a strong feed-back, as these absorb much more solar radiation than snow and ice. Thus the land and the sea heat up.”

The museum website also shows a cautionary statement from Amundsen, perhaps directed at Scott: "Victory awaits him, who has everything in order - luck we call it. Defeat is definitely due for him, who has neglected to take the necessary precautions - bad luck we call it." That might also serve as a warning in the current climate crisis.

Going to Extremes? Boreal v. Austral in Scandinavia and (Beyond) Patagonia

Whenever I speak to audiences about the Southern Cone countries, which I do with some regularity, I always point out that the continent’s geography can be misleading – at nearly 56° S latitude, its southernmost point of Cape Horn (pictured above) is comparable to Edinburgh in the Northern Hemisphere. Once, while researching the Falkland Islands (51° 42’ S) in London’s Public Records Office, I came up a 1952 article from the Daily Telegraph that referred to the Islands as a “British colony near the South Pole.” Fair enough, if you’re willing to describe London (51° 30’ N) as “an English city near the North Pole.”

Thus, on my first major trip to Scandinavia, I've gotten to thinking about the extremes of my South American and European travels, on my first visit to Europe since 1987. Last Sunday, as we rented a car in Oslo and drove north, we headed to Lillehammer (pictured above), site of the 1994 Winter Olympics and, more recently, the comical Netflix gangster series set in that tranquil ski resort about three hours from the Norwegian capital.

At 61° 8' 0" N, Lillehammer became the most northerly point I have ever visited, and we greatly enjoyed Maihaugen (pictured above), which must be one of the world’s finest open-air museums. Its assortment of classic Norwegian folk constructions, many of them dismantled elsewhere and re-erected here to form a mock village, provides a vivid glimpse into early sub-Arctic architecture and the people who created it; role-playing actors occupy some of them, and a former Oslo postmaster is a true scholar who explains the post office’s role in uniting the country through the railroad system. I might add that all of them speak fluent English.

Lillehammer’s reign was brief, though – the following day we drove east and then north to Trysil (pictured above, at 61°19' N), my father’s mother’s birthplace. Like Lillehammer, Trysil is now a ski resort, but in my grandmother’s day – she left for the United States in 1904 at the age of 21 – it was a verdant valley of mid-sized farms along its namesake river, which flooded from snowmelt just a week or so before our arrival. With help from local historian Olav Tangen and others, we located Akre Gård, the farm on which she was a pige (household servant) before moving to Minnesota and marrying into my grandfather’s family. She was the only one of my grandparents whom I knew well, since she moved with my aunt and uncle to a location near my own family in Washington State in the mid-1960s.

But how to compare my northern wanderings with my travels in the south? Obviously, Lillehammer and Trysil are significantly closer to the North Pole than Cape Horn is to the South, but I have traveled beyond the continent. In 2004, I flew from the Chilean city of Punta Arenas to King George Island (pictured above, 62° 2′ 0″ S), where several countries maintain Antarctic bases, for a week-long cruise with Antarctica XXI, still the only company that offers a fly-cruise combination to the white continent.

On the same trip, I reached Deception Island (62° 38’ 37” S, pictured above) and Brabant Island (64° 15’ S, pictured below)), which will set the standard for any further boreal adventures. I’m not likely to return to Antarctica but, with numerous Swedish relatives on my mother’s side, it’s probable I’ll return to Scandinavia (though I apparently have no living kin in Norway) and visit more northerly areas.

Meanwhile, we have had spectacular weather, with sunny skies and temperatures reaching up to 25° C (77° F), though snow covers the ground for several months every year. I never experienced those temperatures in Antarctica but, then, there are no penguins in Scandinavia.