I was born as the Golden Age of Train Travel in America was ending, and railroads were being eclipsed by airplanes and the interstate highway system. As I grew up, the passenger rail system was shriveling, many grand downtown stations were being torn down, and cities like Columbus were being left with no rail service at all.
Still, there has always been something evocative about trains. When I traveled through Europe after college, I enjoyed the train experience — the jostling and rocking, the whistles and bells, the clickety-clack of steel wheels on steel track, and the aging smell of the cars. I enjoyed the chance encounters with complete strangers that a communal travel system offered. It was stimulating and added to the feeling that I was really getting exposure to the cultures and people of the countries I was visiting.
I enjoy driving, but there is a lost romance to train travel that the interstate highway system just can’t match.
Here in Nashville, the backdrop to the registration desk in the spectacular lobby of the Union Station Hotel is an old train schedule. Just look at the names! The Dixie Flyer! The South Wind! The Hummingbird! The Azalean! The Florida Arrow! The Pan American! Who wouldn’t want to board one of those trains, as porters hustled by and stacks of luggage were loaded, as steam huffed from the engine and warning whistles screamed, in search of adventure?
So it is with the Supreme Court health care ruling. We now know that the Affordable Health Care Act (h/t to Cousin Jeff) has survived, and when we raise our heads and look around, things everywhere are still stuck in neutral.
In 1984 President Reagan used the occasion of the 40th anniversary of D-Day to give one of the greatest speeches he ever delivered. He stood on the soil of Normandy, faced a group of Army Rangers — the “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” — who had acted with unbelievable courage in fulfilling their role in the battle plan on June 6, 1944, and talked about the deeply felt beliefs that motivated those men, and the brave citizens of every participating nation, to endure the sacrifices necessary to rescue the people of Europe from tyranny. The speech was deeply moving to anyone who felt pride in those sacrifices and profound appreciation for the Boys of Pointe du Hoc and their fellow Allied soldiers.
Rather than simply reaching conclusions about America, Brooks softens his views by addressing both the European and American democratic systems. Does anyone actually believe there are similarities between these “systems”? America has been a representative democracy for almost 250 years; Europe still had crowned heads leading it into a bloody war less than 100 years ago. The balkanized, multi-party, coalition-dependent parliamentary systems in most European countries bear little relation to our two-party system, where nearly every election has a clear winner and loser and a ruling majority results. Until recently, America had stoutly resisted the European socio-economic model, with its early retirement ages and short work weeks and months of paid vacation. And no one in their right mind would equate the European Union with our Congress. The ponderous bureaucrats of the EU will be there forever, impossible to root out; in America, in contrast, voters can easily — as the last three election cycles have shown — toss out incumbents and install new representatives who purportedly will better reflect their views.
Brooks recognizes this. Why, then, does he create a false equivalence between America and Europe? I think it’s because simply stating that America is on the wrong track, and our politicians have led us there, requires more guts than he possesses. He doesn’t want to unnecessarily upset any of the powerful inside-the-beltway types that he hobnobs with, so he writes something that makes it seem as though democracies, generally, are doomed to fail through the sheer force of greedy human nature. That conclusion makes the bitter pill a lot easier to swallow: it’s no one’s fault, really.
Imagine — $1 billion. Even by today’s standards, that is a huge amount of money. What is it about this movie that has made it so appealing to so many people? (Russell, who is here for an all-too-brief short visit, is going to see it tonight, and I’m betting he’ll enjoy himself, too.)
In France, the flamboyant Nikolas Sarkozy was replaced by a Socialist, 
This likely means that the Eurozone concept will fail. Appeals for continental unity only go so far, and hardworking and thrifty German and Dutch voters aren’t going to support the unrestrained spending of the Greek and Italian and Portuguese governments forever. The Euro will end as a unified currency, the responsible northern European countries will return to their highly valued local currencies, and the southern European countries will slink back to their devalued and debased drachmas and lire, look around for new saps to loan them money with no hope of being repaid, and find there are no takers. At that point, the current days of “austerity” might begin to look pretty good, in retrospect.
It’s not hard to understand why European investors are troubled. Greece, Spain, and Portugal all are struggling with serious debt problems, and recently Italy, one of Europe’s biggest economies, also has tumbled into distressed territory. In the meantime, the large, more solvent northern European countries — particularly Germany — have had to prop up their profligate southern European partners. Germany’s financial support of free-spending Eurozone countries hasn’t gone down well with German voters, who delivered a stinging rebuke to the ruling party in regional elections.
One notable adventure occurred in Odense, Denmark. Odense is the third largest city in Denmark and was the birthplace of Han Christian Andersen. It wasn’t on my itinerary. However, I had met a fellow American, a Californian named Dan (last name now unrecalled), and we began traveling together to save a few bucks on rooms. We were on an overnight train from Oslo to Copenhagen that I had booked as a cost-saving measure — if you slept on a train you didn’t need to pay for a hostel, of course — when Dan said he couldn’t sleep on the hard train seats and was going to pay for a sleeper car. I stuck to my guns and dozed on the upright seats. When I saw him the next morning he had made some new friends who had shared his sleeping compartment. They were Danes who lives in an honest-to-god commune in Odense, and they insisted that we come and stay for a day or two. How could we refuse?
My first stop on the continent was Amsterdam. After a day of visiting the museums and the Dam I decided I needed to secure lodging for the night. A travel guide had said the Hotel Kabul was the cheapest night’s stay in Amsterdam, and I was more interested in saving money than anything else. When I arrived at the Hotel Kabul, however, I began to question the wisdom of that approach. The hostel was in a run-down part of town a few blocks from the red-light district. It was dark and dingy inside. But it was inexpensive. I paid for the cheapest sleeping accommodations, which turned out to be the bottom half of a bunk bed in a barracks room filled with perhaps 20 bunk beds and a number of scruffy looking miscreants. The bedding was marginally clean. That night I slept — fitfully — in my clothing, trucker’s wallet pushed deep into my pants pocket, using the shoulder bag as a kind of pillow.
The options were few. I could try to wipe myself off with some of my other clothing and then cart the wet clothes around as I did my day’s touring. I could sit around until evaporation worked its magic. Or, I could resort to the toilet paper towel-off — and that is the option I chose. After first congratulating myself on the solution, I quickly came to realize that this was not the greatest idea, either. The Hotel Kabul’s toilet paper was — not surprisingly — ridiculously cheap. It somehow combined a pulpy scratchiness with gossamer thinness. As I tried to swab myself dry I realized that I was instead being coated with a flaky crust of toilet paper dust and tiny nubbings that stuck to my skin like glue. I tried to remove all traces of my resort to the bathroom tissue option, but you don’t really want to spend a lot of time in a strange communal bathroom picking objects that look like lice off your skin. I know I was unsuccessful in ridding myself of all of the toilet paper trappings. So, I skulked out of the lobby, keeping as far away from the front desk as possible, and relied upon the good manners of the friendly Dutch to refrain from telling me that my skin was streaked with a weird white residue and I was leaving a trail of toilet paper pellets as I walked on.
I’m hoping that Richard will share some of his planning and preparation for his trip on this blog, and then do some additional blogging about his adventures when he is across the Atlantic. In the meantime, I can only give him kudos for excellent travel preparation. He has carefully researched where to go and prepared a rough itinerary of where he wants to go and what he wants to see. He has purchased his Eurail pass and requested the necessary visas. He has analyzed, and in some instances purchased, the lightest, slimmest, most comfortable necessities to take on his trip, and he has further reduced the weight of his baggage by opting for a Kindle rather than heavy and bulky books.
It is clear that unsustainable and unsupportable government borrowing is what led to the Greek crisis and the dire predicaments of other European countries. The choice for the United States is whether to chart a different course and start making serious spending cuts right now and or to 
