The white-trashification of Latvia?

My recent post about public transport wardens (based on a blog post in Diena) illustrates something that is part of a broader problem -- societal degeneration in Latvia or more bluntly, the rise and persistence of what one could call white trash subcultures.
One increasingly used concept is that of the urla. I am not sure where the word comes from, but it describes a kind of uniformly stupid, dissolute,sometimes shave-headed or short-haired, largely-substance abusing youth whose uniform is shabby counterfeit-brand jogging outfits. Most often the term urla is applied to Russian speakers, but there are those who argue that there are Latvian urlas as well. I definitely think there are, but since the society as a whole is ethnically mixed, the urla percentage is useful in defining what one could consider the social degeneration of the society as a whole.
Fellow blogger Aleks Tapinsh wrote a few years back that urlas are a dying-breed, but I would dispute this, because it sometimes seems that the proportion of urlas is increasing (if not their absolute numbers). This could be because a large number of “normal” young people have emigrated, the urlazation of the social environment being one of the contributing factors. A related English slang term might be mook.
Above and beyond the urlas, I think that the proportion of what I would call seriously strange individuals is increasing. This perception may result from living downtown and working just across from the central train station. Train stations are magnets for the strange and deviant. In Frankfurt, Germany, I worked a block from the train station and once I passed a person lying in a large cardboard box several days in a row.
Mind you, this is not a pleasant strangeness, rather, it is a disturbing aura of expressionless defeat, surliness, depression, empty despair. This plays out not only on the faces of the babuska-beggers one sometimes encounters (for them, having some kind of expression is a useful misery marketing tool), but on many young people. In another context (maybe it was the LatviansOnline forum) I described these as “thin, lizardine young men in baseball caps”. I coined the phrase “lizardine” to describe a lizard-like behavior of expressionless, motionlessness broken by a short dash to another position, there, to reassume the “lizardine” stance. Dark urla or semi-urla wardrobe goes with this type of creature (I am wondering if these are not grown-up “booze babies”, like the developmentally disrupted crack babies produced in American ghettos).
I had noticed all of this long before the economic crisis set in, so that is not the cause of these sights. The urlas and others were already there. They add to the ghetto-street-life atmosphere that I already described back in 2000 in an essay I circulated on the internet (pre-blogosphere days) and excerpts from which I reprinted in an earlier post. I also used the term mutt to describe such people, although in terms of a total lack of ethics, parts of the educated and “upper class” Latvian elite could be described as mutts
To the urlas and the generally strange I should add the regular encounters one has with staggering drunks at inappropriate hours. After midnight on Friday, one understands, but Wednesday mornings at 9 AM?
The overall picture one gets is of a society that, perhaps, has passed a tipping point and with the added pressure of the economic crisis, will suffer the lethal drag (to any rapid recovery or normalization)of this social substrate. In more prosperous societies, it is possible to reallocate social services and education resources to pull some of the mutts and mooks out of their condition, but this is unlikely in Latvia.

There is a website in Russian with photos of urlas. 

The mentality problem

In 2000, I wrote a rant called Transition Society Fatigue and A Crisis of Post-National Identity. I won't repost the whole thing, just some of the observations I made then, almost 9 years ago. The bit about post-national was a musing on what to do with one's exile Latvian identity when you start to doubt whether you want to identify with Latvia as it turned out:

LATVIA: ANNO 2000

OK, the first few years, you can make allowances for. But after a while, the sleazy, incompetent, inferiority-complex-blossomed-into-arrogant know-nothing style of running things, at least at the governmental level, becomes tiresome and damned irritating. The ignorance, drunken helplessness, sullen passivity and psychological squalor of a substantial part of the population do not exactly brighten the “civil society” side of things, either. Many of those who have made money use TV reruns of “Dallas” as a literal guide for spending it and as a handbook in business ethics. Underneath the facade, Latvia is too often a pretty sordid and sorry sight.
What the governing institutions lack in corruption they often make up for in ineptitude. Once some aspect of Latvian administration manages to avoid both, it is forced into some new form of bizarre behavior by the legislative Goon Show that is called the Saeima. The revised Child Protection Law that practically denied the children of single parents or divorcees the right to travel is but one example. Another case in point is the requirement that all vehicles owned by legal entities (as opposed to physical persons) can only be operated with a notarized power of attorney. This means that there will be hundreds of thousands of lats of business generated for the country’s secret special interest group – notaries public – from the pockets of trucking companies, other companies with fleets of service cars, and anyone who has bought a car on a leasing arrangement and left title to the vehicle with a bank.
These may sound like petty matters, but it is the massive level of petty, seemingly incurable stupidity that makes Latvia in 2000 a demoralizing place.

I am afraid that things are little changed 9 years later. On the streets, even before the economic downturn, one could see that the intractable underclass was still around, perhaps even gaining relative weight now that Latvia has been in the European Union for almost five years and it is very easy to move to live and work in another EU country.

One still sees the disturbing presence of able bodied beggars and young, dissipate, purposeless men (the new, perhaps racist term urla/as it is mostly applied to Russians, though there are plenty of Latvians who fill the bill/ comes to mind). The whole society, it seems, is sprinkled liberally with urlas.

In my earlier essay, I also used the American slang term mutt, which is broader than urla, as it can apply to ruling elite as well as to street people and marginalized groups.

Back in 2000, I wrote:

I often feel a strange familiarity in much of the street level behavior I have seen in Riga. People casually and carelessly strolling or staggering into traffic, hanging on street corners, lounging or sauntering in parks, the ever-present beer bottle in hand, the totally shameless intrusions into strangers’ personal space in queues and other crowded situations, and so on. Then I realized – these were the same behaviors and vibes one gets in a depressed black ghetto. This is Harlem or South Bronx street life-- Baltic style, and fortunately, without the Uzis.

There have only been subtle changes. The intrusions into personal space, as I remember, were from older, often blank-faced women, and in the intervening years, this particular subgroup may well have simply died off. Then again, I no longer ride public transportation on a daily basis, where this behavior was the norm when waiting in a small crowd (not a queue) for a tram or trolley bus. I have been able to walk to work for the past six years or so. The staggering into traffic-- I saw two urlas nearly taken out near the Central Station, at least one of them shit-faced in some multi-intoxicant haze.

Now that Latvia is facing its first really devastating economic downturn, what I wrote about social problems earlier seems more relevant than ever:

My guess is that around 30 % of the population of Latvia is “ghettoized” and probably beyond redemption, quite sullenly content to live in a haze of semi-ignorance, wounded pride interlaced with an inferiority complex, self-pity and passive resignation occasionally obliterated by alcohol or solvent abuse. For any society, there is a critical mass of degeneracy at which the society self-destructs or spirals into a long, agonizing stagnation characteristic, perhaps, of Third World tribes subjected to intolerable culture shocks. I am not sure that Latvia has reached this critical mass, but I have a feeling that it is dangerously close to it.

I have nothing to add. The feeling is the same. The country had 18 years, for fuck's sake! In that same time span, the US moved from the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit of 1950 to the counterculture and student revolt of 1968. The world now moves even faster and Latvia is simply letting itself be left behind road kill on the ever higher speed limit highway of history.

And I also can repeat and endorse what I wrote in 2000:

I expected a renewed Latvia and Latvians to move much faster, not necessarily in unison, but in close step (not deliberately tripping each other), toward self-evident goals like efficient government and markets, an open and fair society, and rapid, intelligent adaptation (not blind mimicry) of Western methods, values and institutions that, in the 50 year contest that was the Cold War, proved incontestably superior. I did not expect the muddle, the corruption, the ignorance that makes Latvia a psychologically often uncomfortable and disconcerting place.