Musing's musings

Planes, trains, and automobiles

I think we can take it as a given that there are some issues with our current preferred modes of transportation in the United States. First off, obviously, our automobile-conscious (or should I say "automobile-fetishization"?) culture comes at a tremendous penalty to our balance of trade, given the hundreds of billions of dollars each year we send overseas for the sole purpose of buying the oil to turn into the gasoline to fuel those automobiles. Then there's the fact that fewer and fewer of them seem to be built here at home, with concomitant declines in our manufacturing sectors that make the sorts of things car manufacturers need to put into our cars.

There's also, of course, the huge environmental costs--in terms of pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, the amount of space in landfills taken up by junked cars or car components, etc. Those costs are further complicated by the need to transport the raw materials for our fuels (and the fuels themselves, once they're distilled from crude oil) to our shores, and thence from the refineries to where we buy our gasoline and oil and whatnot. For cars that aren't made here, we also have to transport those vehicles to our shores from wherever they were put together.

Those salient facts are complicated, however, by the fact that we've more or less engineered ourselves into a corner on this issue. Beginning after the Second World War, the phenomenon of suburban sprawl has reigned unchecked for the better part of three full generations, as more and more people moved farther and farther away from city centers in search of a nice home with good schools and low taxes. (I won't bother to do more than point out the obvious inconsistency of such criteria here; that can be another post, someday when I have more time.) Even as we moved out into the sticks and started to pave them over to make them car-friendly, we started tearing up our rail lines and cutting back on passenger rail service. Why take the train, we seem to have thought, when it's so much more convenient to drive?

Except that it isn't, always. Case in point: when I was a sophomore in college, one of my cousins got married back home in the Chicago suburbs. She asked me to be in the wedding, which meant that I had to be there for the rehearsal, a day ahead of the actual ceremony (which, if memory serves, was to be on a Saturday, with the rehearsal on a Friday). I didn't have a car of my own at the time, and my alma mater really didn't encourage students to bring their cars onto campus even if they had them, and the folks couldn't come and get me. Ergo, I had to find another means of getting home.

My first thought was that I'd take the bus back. It was only about 120 miles from school back home, so that shouldn't have been an onerous trip, and a bus ticket should be affordable even for a starving undergraduate's bank account. Just one tiny fly in that ointment: Galesburg was served by Trailways; DeKalb was served by Greyhound. There was no direct bus from where I was to where I wanted to be. Still not too much of an issue, I thought: until I looked at the schedules. I had to be in Elmhurst for the wedding rehearsal by 5:30 p.m. on Friday (if memory serves; this is 25 years ago now!). The Trailways bus left Galesburg early-ish in the morning, made the short hop to Rock Island--where I would then have to wait three hours to catch a Greyhound to DeKalb, which would get in at just about 5 p.m.--not nearly enough time to get me to the church on time, as 'twere. It would only cost me around $12--but instead of having to miss just one day of classes to go, I'd have to skip two.

Time for Plan B. Fortunately, Galesburg is a railroad town. Originally served by both Burlington Northern and Santa Fe, it's now a one-line town since the two lines merged in 1996. It's also still an Amtrak stop, with two trains a day heading for Chicago, and two coming back. Fortunately for me, there was an intermediate stop at a suburban station (I want to say it was in Aurora or thereabouts) that was reasonably convenient both to my home at the time and to the place I needed to be--and the train trip only took a couple of hours. The ticket cost about twice what I would have paid for the bus--but I didn't even have to miss a full day of classes. I paid the fee, happily--and grew to like traveling by train. For the remainder of my time in school, whenever I needed to go back home and didn't have the opportunity to wait around for someone to pick me up, I took the train.

Were all these reporters at the same event?

Vice President Biden flew to Germany yesterday as the U.S. representative at the annual Munich Security Conference. He gave a speech there early this morning (U.S. time). Thus far, I have been unable to find an official transcript of his remarks on the White House's site.

This is something of a problem, given that, depending on which media outlet you read, Biden either ratcheted up the pressure on Moscow by insisting that the United States will continue working on the controversial missile shield in eastern Europe that has the Kremlin seeing red, or else he backed down from that position and offered an olive branch. I should think that, while the details of the coverage might vary slightly, all media outlets actually present for the speech would be able to agree upon whether the vice president argued for a continuation of the previous administration's policies (which seems prima facie unlikely) or offered to make a change in some new direction.

You would be wrong in thinking that, however. According to The Guardian, Biden offered an "olive branch to Russia" and will put its European missile-shield plans on hold. The New York Times begs to differ, saying that Biden said the U.S. "will pursue missile plan Russia opposes." The Beeb temporizes, saying in its lede that Biden called for striking a new tone in U.S. foreign relations and noting that he called for "press[ing] the 'reset button' in ties with Russia," but also asserting, further down in the article, that the U.S. "would continue with its plans for a missile defence shield in Central Europe." Le Monde was vague, perhaps deliberately, noting that Biden said the U.S. was determined to set a new tone in its foreign relations, also citing the "reset button" remark, and then adding, with regard to the missile shield, that Biden "restated the prudent position adopted by Barack Obama" and quoting him as saying that "We will continue to develop our anti-missile defenses to counter the growing capabilities of Iran, as long as the technology works and the benefits outweigh the costs. We will do this in consultation with you, our NATO allies, and with Russia." Agence France Presse quoted that last sentence, but said nothing about whether or not Biden called for a continuation of the work on the missile shield or offered to stop it altogether. The WaPo claims that Biden said the technology would go forward only if the administration is confident that it will work, and "only in consultation with Europe and Russia."

So there you have it. Our vice president either did, or did not, offer to back away from a bone of contention with Russia, and either did, or did not, offer to work more closely with them on a serious sticking point.

Is it any wonder that fewer and fewer people are paying attention to the news?

Update: The New York Times has now changed its headline on the linked story. It now reads "Biden Signals U.S. is Open to Deal with Russia on Missiles."

Je reviendrai!

It's time to say au revoir to la belle France. As always, I'm torn at times like this. I like an awful lot of things about this country, and I've had a very productive trip and a ton of fun while I wasn't working in this or that archive, pawing through dusty files or poring over microfilm. On the other hand, it's been nearly a month since I slept in my own bed. I'm tired of living out of a suitcase, of not being able to keep up with all my favorite television programs (my TiVo is going to be full when I get back!). I even miss my job and my coworkers, to say nothing of my friends and family.

All in all, I'm ready to go home and glad that the day for doing so is nearly here. The cab will pick me up early tomorrow morning, and then I hope to have a safe and uneventful flight home, though the weather forecast for Chicago and vicinity isn't looking terribly good for tomorrow--there's supposed to be a monster storm front moving in late tomorrow evening, which will produce strong gusty winds (in the 50 mph range) all day. That could complicate a landing, so I hope they'll let us take off and that there will be just enough of a window of good weather at the right time to get us down. The last thing I want to do after a 9.5-hour transatlantic flight is get diverted to Milwaukee or Detroit and have to wait for the weather to calm down--which, according to the in-house meteorologist at my university, won't be until Friday.

I will probably have a wrap-up post covering the whole trip, and some more pictures, sometime this weekend. First I've got to get home, fight off the jet lag, take care of the laundry, get the mail service resumed, get reacquainted with friends and family, and then on Monday it's back to the usual routine. Plus, I've got an overdue paper on the Russian Revolution to finish writing this summer, and I've been asked to expand on the paper I presented last October in Minneapolis for consideration for inclusion in the conference proceedings. So no rest for the wicked--or the terminally busy.

Catch you on the flip side.

Not the best reading over dinner

I'm ready to come home. Today was not my best day in Europe. Awakened at 5:30 by the fire alarm in the hotel. (Turned out to be a false alarm, but couldn't get back to sleep for love or money.) Consequently, I was late catching my train this morning. Probably due to the confusion caused by lack of (a) sleep and (b) food for some 18 hours, I mis-read my map and wound up at the wrong station, headed in the wrong direction. After walking through what seemed like a mile of connecting tunnels, and climbing or descending approximately 47 staircases, I managed to get to the proper correspondance, only to find the line absolutely clogged with morning commuters.

All of which meant that, instead of having time to sit down and read the morning paper over a fairly leisurely breakfast before registering at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I got there, hot and sweaty, just in time to register ahead of the last-minute rush before the first entry at 9 a.m. They had the files I'd requested on Friday ready for me, but then wouldn't let me take pictures of them--if I wanted copies, I had to pay to have them photocopied or microfilmed. So I transcribed. All day. No breakfast, no lunch--and no dinner the night before. Finally on the way home, I seemed to wind up with every slowpoke, every elderly or handicapped person, God love them because I surely wasn't!, and every lost or confused tourist in Greater Paris directly in front of me or between me and where I wanted to go.

Got back to the hotel, and while the internet was working, it wasn't working well. The shuttle company that I'd found this morning to take me to the airport on Thursday so I don't have to manhandle a suitcase, a briefcase, and a shopping bag full of goodies through the Metro and/or the RER on the hour's journey to Charles de Gaulle, informed me that because my hotel was in the suburbs and not in Paris proper (a condition not mentioned on their website), it would cost me 90 euro instead of the 27 they'd advertised. I said "No, thanks." Went to the local pizza chain for dinner and asked the waitress for a quiet corner where I could read the paper and sip my wine in peace, only to have a talkative family group and an anxious baby seated within spitting distance of me--and I was about ready to spit, by that point.

Fortunately, dinner (and more importantly, a quarter-liter of a nice rosé from Provence) arrived and I became less interested in infanticide and more interested in the pleasures of the table. That's when I turned to page 9 of today's issue of Le Monde, and started breathing threats and murder again. Follow me below the fold for a discussion of why that happened.

"Where was God?" Right there all along

The Sala Stampa, the Vatican press office, has not yet posted the text of Pope Benedict XVI's remarks today at Auschwitz, so I may have to revise this mini-rant later. But given that Auntie Beeb, the New York Times, and Reuters all have substantively the same text for the kernel of his remarks, I think I'm on reasonably safe ground. From Reuters:

Benedict said it was almost impossible, particularly for a German Pope, to speak at "the place of the Shoah."

"In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence, a silence which is a heartfelt cry to God -- Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?

"Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?"

Humans could not "peer into God's mysterious plan" to understand evil, only "cry out humbly yet insistently to God -- Rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!"

I will respectfully suggest to His Holiness that his questions are misplaced. A more cynical person than I might even see in them a little self-serving deflection of personal responsibility.

L'alliance est morte, vive l'alliance!

Pulled this one out of my clippings file. In an interview with a European radio station last week, French Minister of the Interior Nicholas Sarkozy more or less wrote the obituary of the Franco-German alliance:

"In a Europe of six members, the engine was obviously Franco-German," Mr Sarkozy told Europe 1 radio. "A Europe of 25 needs an engine of five at first and probably six, with Poland."

The others would be Britain, Spain and Italy.