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The Dutch have managed to create a country where life is very pleasant. And for real national scandals there's always a solution: the doofpot.

Ethel Portnoy

Like some people who claim they were born in the wrong body, I decided early in life that I had been born in the wrong place: I felt I really belonged in Europe. For the past thirty years I have lived in Holland, which in my opinion is the closest humanity has come to creating heaven on earth with the rather faulty material at hand.

There are many things about the Dutch that suit my personality. Like them I am sober, practical and frugal. Alas, unlike me, they are prone to somber fits; they lack frivolity and a sense of style; they can be blunt or heavy-handed - and that's only the women! But joking aside, despite these minor failings they have managed to create a country where life is very pleasant.

How about fitting in? To become Dutch it's not enough to speak the language fluently, ride a bicycle and hang a birthday-calendar on the door of the WC.Foreigners are welcomed and made to feel at home to the extent that they have pale skins and come from countries with a Judaeo-Christian background. With all others, the Dutch try to be friendly but their efforts at being multi-cultural seem forced.

Having grown up in the USA,it's hard for me to understand this. The USAtook unto itself all kinds of economic migrants, asylum-seekers and even human garbage. Once such folk are naturalised, they instantly are considered to be one's fellow-Americans. But this atmosphere of immediate acceptance is not present in Holland - nor, to be fair, does one find it in many other European countries. Perhaps because their citizens carry in their hearts the weight of centuries of national history - often a dark history at that. Or perhaps because they don't feel that their countries contain the limitless space and boundless opportunities one can find in the USAXX.

Despite the many decades I have spent as a citizen of the Netherlands, as far as I'm concerned the honeymoon between us still isn't over. Yet all honeymoons must eventually end with one coming down from Cloud Nine. Since I am a Dutch citizen - and thus have every right to do so - I should like to point to a number of things in the Netherlands that sometimes cause me to raise my eyebrows. No doubt, in my views on them, I still reflect the impact of my upbringing in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

One of the things that gives me pause is the sentencing practices of Dutch judges. (There are no juries in Dutch courts.) A schoolgirl who recently pushed one of her classmates under a train was sentenced to a number of hours of community service. The victim's family must feel some outrage at this. What happened to the notion of retribution? Shouldn't the punishment fit the crime? Yet in a way I can understand the reasoning of the court when it says in essence: Go thou, and sin no more. The culprit is not a hardened criminal. She will probably not make career of pushing people under trains, thus she will not be a danger to the community. Yet she will never be allowed to forget her deed. The opprobrium she will encounter will be punishment enough. Only in such a small country as this - really a kind of village - can such reasoning be applied.

But this case is a reflection in miniature of what happens in Holland on a wider scale, when questions of punishment or even simple prosecution arise. Time and again in the past few years my jaw has dropped as I have watched corrupt or incompetent officials step down after their misdeeds have been found out, without having to face prosecution, as high functionaries are not even brought to book for gambling with public funds. Compared to the United Kingdom, here libel suites are more or less laughed out of court and damages for medical malpractice are derisory.

As for Dutch politics, they seem to me to be a hotbed of cronyism. In the USAmost government officials are elected - here mayors and judges are appointed, governors of provinces are parachuted into cushy positions as a reward for service to their parties. The plum jobs are handed around by the parties themselves. The people when voting are allowed to make their preference for some party clear, after which the party takes over and distributes the spoils.

Of course old-boy networks exist in the USA as well (Gore Vidal has told us plenty about this); in the USAit takes money to get elected, often big money, and thus officials may be tempted to sell out to their economic masters. Once in office, elected officials can turn corrupt: look at the mayors of Chicago in the past. But in the USAthe electoral wheel turns every once in a while and at least there the public feels it can occasionally take a hand in its fate.

As for real scandals, I've seen them being hushed up time and again. The Dutch even have a phrase for this kind of process - putting the affair in the doofpot, the way one pushes a firebrand into a barrel of sand. They use this phrase a lot, for they seem to need it frequently.

The Netherlands is famous for being a society that runs on consensus; it is even praised for this, but not so much praise or attention is accorded to this habit they have of smoothing over unpleasantness. Occasionally a parliamentary committee will be set up to investigate some matter and apportion blame. After which nothing happens. The aim is to keep society running quietly and on an even keel. The Dutch have a saying: zo zijn onze manieren - that's the way we do things. Why rock the boat? For the time being the doofpot policy seems to be working, as the citizens of the Netherlands live on in their comfortable, happy snooze.

Born in the USA,Ethel Portnoy came to Europe in 1950. She publishes her writing in Dutch in the Netherlands, where her twentieth book will be appearing this autumn.

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