We had a delightful dinner last night with two young Frenchmen. We were in a small hotel in Trient, Switzerland. We sat at a long table, my wife and I sharing corners with the two. There were perhaps 30 people there. On the menu was rice and beef. My wife and I were sharing a beer, which turns out to be important.

We are not served individually for the main course. Instead, a large bowl of rice and a large bowl of beef in sauce is passed around each table. (It was delicious.) As we served ourselves and ate, the more vocal of the two men toasted us, seeing that we too had a beer. The conversation was choppy at best. My wife has some memories of French and the more outgoing young man had some English in his memory even as he had dropped out of college in his second year. So we got by.

Here’s what he learned from us:

American jobs are very insecure. If you lose your job you also lose your health care.

American unions are very weak.

American public pensions are very weak. Most people don’t get enough from them to survive, and have to continue working in some fashion, above or below the table.

Colorado is not a city. Colorado’s mountains are beautiful but not like the magnificent Alps, which have formidable and massive glaciers.

Here’s what we learned from him:

You don’t want to be overeducated in France, as employers don’t want high skills to fill low jobs.

Education is not free in France (post-secondary). You have to earn your stripes with good scholastic performance or it can be costly.

France is not a beautiful country, and our friend does not like Paris’ or any big city. He loves Britannia (Brittany, France), which is somewhere on the English Channel. The water there is too cold to swim in.

The French Riviera is too cold for swimming, oddly. I said I liked girls in bikinis and that swimming itself was not an issue. He agreed and said that it was better when they did not bother with bikinis. At that point his friend interjected that sunglasses are useful, as if women did not know that ploy.

His parents are retired on 800 Euros a month, and that is enough to be comfortable. Prices are very reasonable in France.

He said McDonalds’ food is tasty but he does not eat it as he thinks it makes people fat.

We asked him if we could immigrate. Not very damned likely.

We have spent the last two days hiking the spectacular Italian and Swiss Alps, with very much climbing and descending involved. We have climbed and dropped 6,100 feet in two days. I am very pleased at our ability to do this in our advancing years. This morning after a 2,800 foot ascent I was able to run up a hill to fetch my pack, and it felt very good to do so, as if I still had 20 year-old knees. Sadly, going down these hills, the knees are very much aged 61.

I was thinking as we walked today about “The tragedy of the commons,” a Malthusian essay put forth by Garrett Hardin in 1968. In it the author speculates that any time we have unregulated access to resources of any kind, that each individual’s tendency to maximize his own advantage invariably leads to over-utilization and eventual destruction of the resource.

It’s got two things going for it that right wingers love: One, Hardin claims that we can go on for centuries before tragedy sets in, so that they can always claim to be right in the future even if wrong in the present. Second, they have a ready-made solution to the problem: Privatize everything.

I have seen overuse of the commons in the US, where ATV’s, snowmobiles and four-wheelers destroy habitat, each one contributing just a bit. Ranchers always want more grazing rights. Our highways are overrun by vehicles so that each city is it’s own nightmare and there is hardly a thoroughfare anywhere that is not noisy and polluted.

So Hardin is on to something useful, though the American right wing is, per usual, off an a nut-bound tangent. We do need to regulate use of the commons. In that I include air, water, airwaves, land and health care.

And usually the best means by which we achieve and fairness in use of the commons is government. Hardin’s local pasture had no governing force at work, but a town council with open meetings would easily, even if noisily, have solved that problem.

The reason this all comes to mind is two days of hiking through pastures that have been tended and shared for centuries, and that are as healthy and verdant and any in the world. We have ridden on efficient and affordable buses and trains. The Internet is everywhere and easily accessible and powerful. They have excellent and affordable health care here, accessible to everyone.

The simple truth is that competition is a destructive force that needs to be hemmed in and contained. Competition is destroying the American health care system. Competition forced Wall Street rating agencies to overlook seriously flawed investments, knowing that issuers could shop around for the best rating. That aloneu nearly brought down the economy. Competition forces lying in advertising, monopolistic behavior and dishonest business practices. It’s entirely a false religion forced on us by hucksters who are paid to theorize by the very people who need to be reined in.

Europe works. It’s not perfect. They fight and screw up and get things wrong. But they do so many things better, including infrastructure, transportation and health care. It’s going to be hard to go back to the US and re-enter our lives now that we’ve seen how well it works elsewhere.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me to be no other than human inventions, set up to enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. (Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason)

Galileo said things that were plainly true and yet the astronomers of the court did not respect him. They knew of what we now call official truth. They quietly mocked him, as they were on the correct, if not accurate side of truth. These things come to mind as we see the massive cathedrals and palaces – these buildings do not represent faith. They are about power. Who would know about Jesus were those things implanted in our minds as youth? I was afraid to be disrespectful of him a young age, and also knew about the tithe. It was the spoils of war and the tithe that built these buildings. It was power speaking.

I have little run-ins now and then on the blogs, and I hear people speak the words that power put in their brains. The swear allegiance to parties and country. They know about Washington, Jefferson, Jesus and Lincoln. Each party swears the other is dishonest. Each mirrorrs the other.

We are products of power. Our “churches” are the cathedrals of Washington. They are built with the spoils of war and tithing. Both parties believe in the buildings and the ideology they represent. If someone says that ideology is bunk, like Galileo, exile awaits. But we are gentler now. Exile means that we do not advance in our career or do not get appointments. If we are really truthful about our emperor, we are called conspiracy theorists. That is the ultimate insult. The very accusation invites ostracism, perhaps confinement to an apartment for the rest of our lives. Certainly our careers are dead, unless we learn to shut up and look at our shoes and pretend not to know things that we know.

Ellul says tha after WWII, Italy stopped doing propaganda, or at least agitprop. Propaganda can be benign, after all. Agitprop is different – it seeks action, aggression, movement towards the ideas that the state wants us to move to – invade this or that country, hate this or that group.

After the war, religion ceased to important in Italy. Today is Sunday, and the churches are empty. I wonder if the two are connected. The US is swimming in agitprop and fear with police everywhere. Everything and everyone is branded. Metal detectors are as common as hot dog vendors in Times Square. We routinlely have our possessions inspected. We are as religious as any Muslim state. We are also a police state. The trick is to make it appear as though police protect us as they watch our every move. That takes propaganda, in the form of fear; what Mencken called “hobgoblins.”

Italy is peaceful. Police are rare. People do not fear one another. We walk the narrow corridors of Venice and we are not afraid of muggers. There are no guns. I think that this what we become in the absence of agitation propaganda: peaceful, happy people. Italians are well-educated, content. There are no signs of war even as, at US insistence, Italy is part of the NATO attacks on Pakistan and Libya. You’d hardly know it. These people are not at war. They are at peace with themselves and the world.

All in the absence of fear.

What with the London and Madrid terrorist bombings, Eurail security is intimidating. Walking through the Rome staton, police were every… Well, actually, hardly to be found. I did see two. They were very friendly as we quizzed them about the location of customer service.

People come and go, get on and off, and are not harassed, body-scanned, told to shut up, or privacy-invaded by WalMart cops.

Damned fools! Don’t they know they are supposed to be afraid? Don’t they know there are hobgoblins out there?

Medievaled out, I am. Toured Uffizi today, a wold-class collection of art from the 13th century forward. That is my wife’s passion. The painting is magnificent indeed, but as with all museums, it is sensory overload with me. So I am looking for other things going on.

Apparently the image of Christ had been established in people’s minds by the 1200’s, making a transition to bodily form. Who knows what went on in the so-called “Dark Ages.” That expression is no longer in fashion, but it is a period for which there is not the abundance of written and artistic expression that there was before. Things sort of dry up. The library in Alexandria is burned down, possibly by a pope in the fourth century. I wonder if the darkening of that age was retroactive, with Christians destroying anything pagan, which is the best word to describe the dominant religions of that age. I cannot imagine that people stopped writing and sculpting and painting, but can imagine that the new dominant icons and the assumption of power by the Roman church could have darkened things. Christians, even as we see today in the US, are oppressive.

Florence is magnificent. Leonardo, Raphael, Dante, Galileo, Machiavelli all lived here at various times. The Medici family was the most powerful force in the Middle Ages, and commissioned art and powerful churches and fortresses and palaces. Many still stand. There is one bridge over the Arno, Ponte Vecchio, that was not destroyed in WWII. Others have since been rebuilt, but Ponte Vecchio is open to foot traffic only, and is lined on either side by expensive jewelry shops. There must be a hundred of them.

We saw a “Athlete’s Foot” here today. That and a “Colors of Beneton” are the only corporate chain outfits here. Everything else is family or locally owned. it is largely a city of shopkeepers, as Jefferson once imagined the US would be. The grocery store Is right by our hotel, and is very reasonably priced. Ice is a rarity, so that we cannot keep anything cold in the room. Want a scarf or handbag? Come to Florence.

We also found a farmers’ market nearby, and next to that is a gigantic fresh food court, and a few outfits selling prepared dishes. We found one called “Virginia’s” that offers deli-style meals that are very good and inexpensive. Other than that all the restaurants are identical in both price and menu. Food is oddly non-spicy. I thought Marco Polo had fixed that.

70+ steps to our room.

We rode Eurorail from Roma to Florence. We are finally acclimated, though I still curse and swear at Steve Jobs. The iPad is amazing, but typing on it, especially when tired, is a task.

We have the lay of the land, we are rested. We found our way around Rome with ease. Their bus system is very good and easy to understand, and one Euro allows 75 minutes, anywhere. (Just now I wanted to type “allows” and Steve Jobs inserted “allosaurus.” Wtf? I was thinking about the allosaurus earlier today! Creepy!)

Eating in Rome is a challenge. People here don’t eat much, no 2200 calorie triple whoppers with a pound of fries and catsup. Sodas and mild beer are everywhere, and frequent public water fountains too (often very ornate), so we just carry a bottle and fill up now and then. We are eating little but are not that hungry.

People here are thin and attractive. Women dress provocatively, but I get used to it. (No I don’t.) I saw a store this morning that caters to “big” people. The mannequin in the window looked like an NFL lineman. In the US we used to have “big and tall” stores, but now that we are all “big,” though not tall, WalMart serves all needs.

There are No old people working the trains and cafes. I think they get to retire and receive pensions here, and become what American right wingers call “parasites.” (I thank Swede for that insight.) In America if you work hard, if your productivity increases, your wealth-creating master creates even more wealth, by osmosis. And you have to keep on working all of your life because you know that the master will stop handing down his wealth to you if you stop. Memorize that now students. You don’t create wealth by working, parasite. Working merely allows you to collect wealth from people above, who create it by putting it in the bank after it appears like manna from heaven. Econ 101. Right wing economics is not voodoo!

The countryside is all developed here, of course. There are no wild lands, which disappeared centuries ago in Italy. But they farm and the landscape is well tended with abundant trees. It’s got its own kind of charm. (Please go away Godfather music!) It is hard to tell what crops are growing as we speed by fields. I did see sunflowers. Off in the distance are small villages on hilltops. Why did they do that? There is always a good reason. It might be to defend the village, or simply to keep farmland undeveloped to feed themselves.

Florence we are told is small and walkable. I’m all ‘ruined’ out, and glad to be getting away from that part of the trip.

Wine is very good in Florence, our waiter said this morning. We had Chardonnay these last two days that was excellent, though we don’t know from wine. All I know is that my wife liked it, and she generally gets a burning sensation from most wines. We just bought two bottles at a store here in Florence for less than six Euro – it was all very low-priced.

I am tired of standing and eating and drinking cappuccino. But if we sit down, we get a waiter and prices go up my more than a third. Most cafes offer self-service or sit-down. Naturally waiters are always enticing us tourists to have a seat.

If a customer is unhappy with service, the custom here is to bury a coin in the leftover food. It is the ultimate insult. As our waiter cleaned the table next to us last night he found a Euro in the remains and was livid and deeply insulted. He said that if the person who did that was nearby, he would throw the food in his face.

Waiters are all Italian, as are all in the service professions. There are people of all cultures here, so it would be hard to know who is an immigrant. But they have a minimum wage, strong unions and public-funded education through post-secondary. They also have publicly-funded health care, and excellent infrastructure. The trains run on time. The one we are on is smooth and quiet and comfortable. The Internet here is excellent, speedy wherever you can get on. In American motels, unless you get up at 3:00 AM, the net is usually slow to very slow. Motels don’t invest in large networks, and so more than half a dozen online is the limit. Not so here.

I tell you, this socialism Is awful! People are so unhappy here Swede! They all want to be Americans. They are in denial, of course, as the word American doesn’t pop up much. This is my proof that they are in denial – they don’t talk or think about us, which must be a conscious act on their part because we are America and everyone wants to live in the USA. Italians probably wish we would bomb them, butnit only happens in their dreams though.

We are in Florence now, and we are waiting till it cools down a bit to climb the 463 steps to the top of a church tower. The church here, the Duomo, is amazingly beautiful. As I understand, they finished all but the top of the dome, as they did not know the techniques for that architecture. Michelangelo, who lived here, helped finish it and then use this dome as his model for St. Peter’s.

We spent the day in Rome today, hitting the Borghese Museum and the Roman ruins in the afternoon. It’s pretty much mandatory.

Cardinal Scipione Borghese was the nephew of Pope Paul, appointed so in a nepotistic move in 1610. He set about collecting Roman works of art, commissioning others and sponsoring Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose works are in the center of most of the great rooms. I was surprised yesterday to
learn that Jesus as we know him didn’t appear until that time, and also that the Roman generals, statesmen and emperors were sculptured during the 16-18th centuries. That Roman Empire was in vogue and ally educated men of that time studied Latin and Greek civilization.

Bernini did remarkable work, carving in marble with astounding detail and managing to convey both action and emotion in his work.

Enough about that. Museums are hard for me with aching back and information overload. Other than Napoleons’s sister, Pauline, sculpted in the nude and quite voluptuous, the women, even though naked, are not so hot. Painters seemed to concentrate on the male form, natnurally rippling muscles and magnificent buttocks. I’m not gay, mind you! But they did very fine work.

The Roman Ruins, Colosseum, Palentine Hill – it takes imagination to picture life and color in the ruinous settings, and to imagine the thousands of men and and animals that died in that arena. It was not working for me. All I saw was an engineering feat. I could not hear the roar of the crowd or sense death. It was just a rundown down stadium with all of the lower rooms under the area exposed. I know that people were brutal back then, but I am an American, and so know that we are still bloodthirsty bastards.
kely to argue with people that cuff them or tase them. The culture of police state does not seem present here as it is in the US.

People don’t smile – they don’t not smile either. Whenever you see a toothy grin for a photo, think American. Americans also wear emblems of corporations or worse yet, military units, while other cultures amply wear shirts without emblems. I have looked for clothing without advertising in the US. It is hard to come by.

Medieval religious art is impressive,but a little goes a long way. These are the learned piieope of that time, and their minds had been completely captured by the church, which dictates the icons of the age, much as American corporations give us ours. 

Brain not so fried. Long day, very tired. Walked many hot pavement miles. iPod is very annoying this evening. Forgive the typos. It’s Jobs.

We flew to Atlanta, four hours, and then to Rome, ten hours. We arrived here at 8:30 AM Rome time, 12:30 AM Denver time. We decided to deal with jet lag all at once, and so had a full day today. We found our hotel, and then headed over to Vatican City for the grand tour.

It is wise not to see all of that stuff while jet lagged. It is overwhelming! The Church has miles of long rooms lined with statues from the Roman era. Just one room must have 200 statues and busts. Some of them are of mythical beings, many of real historical figures such as Augustus Caesar and Trajan. Add to that identical long rooms filled with tapestries and maps, and several rooms painted Sistine-style by Raphael, and then the Sistine itself, and even a non-fried brain is overwhelmed.

Add to that more current art work (there is one by Dali – I swear he was making fun of them. His Madonnas and Jesus haver no faces.) There is lots of that as well, and then St. Peter Basilica – a statement of the power of the Catholic Church in medieval times. The Church still has moral suasion, but commands no armies besides its silly Swiss guards. But there are flocks of oddly dressed groups all over Rome – brothers in robes, priests in long flowing gowns, nuns of all stripes, and assorted groups from all over the word wearing t-shirts to memorialize their trip to the Vatican. As we viewed the Star Wars-like canopy* that stands seven stories over the alleged tomb of St. Peter there were groups around us praying the rosary. Creepy. But then there were happy and carefree groups like the young people from Guatemala, having the time of their lives.

A word to the wise – after seeing all of those statues today, I would advise young men to wear a catcher’s cup – those penises that had not been covered with fig leaves were mutilated. Only the really tiny ones were left alone. Catholics seem to have a little angst about the that organ.

My fried brain took it all in, but perhaps I was hallucinating as I realized tyhat Christianity is am amalgamation of pagan religions, most centered around the Sun. The array of gods was reduced to three by the Catholics, who later added a fourth, Mary. It made sense – to primitive people, the sun was the giver of life. It traveled through the sky during the course of a year, and ancients divided that journey into twelve parts, which became in literature twelve tribes and twelve apostles and is still with us today as astrology. Jesus, one of many ‘sons’ sent down to visit, was ‘born’ on the fourth day after the solstice – it takes three days for the earth to begin to tilt back the other way after solstice – get it? Dead three days and then rises?

I was struck today by solar imagery – the halos around the heads of saints, the ‘crown of thorns’ representing the fire of the sun – the golden ring during a total eclipse. Apollo has a round face completely surrounded by his hair, resembling the sun. Surely all of this religion from China to Salt Lake City to Rome has but one origin – the sun and moon and stars.

Someone will have to check me on this, but as we walked through all the antiquities, I was looking for extant references to Jesus. There are none in all of the roman statues and architecture. No symbols, no references. He doesn’t really turn up in any literature until the gospels, four accounts from the first or second century, each in disagreement with the others on important facts.

The image of the man Jesus does not turn up at all until the 16th century in what we saw today – that’s when da Vinci and Raphael personified him as a European. I wonder if Jesus-centric faith is even more current than the second century. Was he even the center of the religion before that time?
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*Designed by Bernini, the sewing machine guy.

We need to catch a plane here, but I wanted to toss in this Cockburn bomb before we leave. He is suggesting that Mitt Romney might be a wise choice for the office of The One next time around. Logic is familiar to me.

Start with Obama. Of course he blew it. Whether by artful design or by sheer timidity is immaterial. He blew it. Two days before the United States was officially set to default on its debts on August 2, Barack Obama had the Republicans where he wanted them: All he had to do was announce that he’d trudged the last half mile towards a deal but that there’s no pleasing fanatics who reject all possibilities of compromise, who are ready and eager to shut down the government, to see seniors starve and vets denied their benefits. So, Obama could proclaim, he was invoking the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution which states that the “validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.”

Obama could have done that, but he didn’t. At the eleventh hour and the fifty-fifth minute he threw in the towel, and allowed the Republicans to exult that they’d got 95 per cent of what they wanted: cuts in social programs, a bipartisan congressional panel to shred at its leisure what remains of the social safety net, no tax hikes for the rich, no serious slice in the military budget.

As America plummets into phase 2 of the double-dip recession Obama’s deal has stripped the country of all available remaining defenses: no jobs program, no hope of stimulus money for stricken states and cities across the country. It’s as bad as the Republicans’ onslaught on Franklin Roosevelt’s programs seeking to prise America out of the great Depression – a Republican onslaught that launched the terrible downturn of 1937, from which America was extricated only by the vast war spending after Pearl Harbor.

Read the whole thing, just for shits and giggles. I’ve been reading Alex for two decades now, and his insight is always two floors above me. Love the guy!

OK. We’re outta here!

We are off on the trip of a lifetime, starting in Rome, working our way up the boot, followed by five days hiking around Mt. Blanc. From there we head to Interlochen, and I hope to be able to spell it correctly by the time we leave. We ride Eurorail overnight to Budapest, and from there to Prague, and then home. We elected to skip Vienna to extend our Swiss stay.

I’m going to try to write some as we travel, offering keen and unique insight. Or, I might just write like I normally write. It’s going to be good to get away from our circus here, our orchestrated politics, our controlled media and mindless hackery, and get into theirs. I mean, are people really that different in other places?

Anything I write will be on the iPad. I’m not very good on it, and don’t know how to move photos up to a blog. Maybe I’ll figure it out.