Meandering through Europe

Perspectives change as the years go by. Of course, of course. The difference between a sojourn to Europe in 1972 and 2006, among other things, is that the Uncertainty Principle assures me that the Reality I See is different not just because Europe has changed so much, but because I have too. The Observer and the Observed. Most Europeans are now younger than I am, and it feels a little foolish to be much in awe of an ancient culture being run by a bunch of kids, particularly kids who hyphy out to the same music as at home, who wear the same Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts, who drive at insane speeds on the same high-end Japanese motorcycles.

I don't think I encountered much in the way of anti-American sentiment, but then again the primary interface of an American tourist is with the mercantile segment of European society who need the American's poor, pathetic, devalued dollar more than ever. Who's got time for chauvinism under circumstances like that? When a sandwich costs $12 and a beer 8 bucks, they'll overlook a few hegemonic impulses.

I got through Customs at both ends, not that I'd done anything wrong (I hasten to reassure the NSA), but that momentary glitch at SF International, when she ran my passport through the magnetic reader...and looked at the screen, wrinkled her brow, and then ran it through again...Just a paranoid flash, I'm sure. At the luggage carousel, I read the electronic board with its saccharine reassurances about how the Border Control was just there to help. The Memo has been circulated, in other words; we're tough now, but we'll put it out there in a sort of menacingly nice way. Play ball and nobody gets hurt. The Bushies are in control now, and you wouldn't want to leave something off your customs declaration and wind up rendered in an extraordinary way to Syria. You think you got jet lag now? Wait till you've been up for 8 straight days in Damascus, scumbag.

It was interesting to sit in a hotel breakfast room in Lyon and read about the courageous stand of the defiant Republican Senators, the "insurgents," who refused to knuckle under to Bush's demand to gut the War Crimes Act. The International Herald Tribune covers such stuff pretty well, mixed in with a quasi-European perspective. Arriving home, I realized it was simply more kabuki theatre from McCain & Co.; the main thing Bush wanted, the retroactivity of the amendment to get himself off the hook for authorizing war crimes, with its haunting long-tail statute of limitations, the Senators are sure to give him. The rest is persiflage. Bush doesn't care about interrogation "tools" for harassing inmates at Guantanamo; he knows as well as anyone 90% of them have nothing to say. But facing serious jail time himself for roughing up a bunch of Muslims...that's intolerable, or "unacceptable," as he said in his press conference, talking about "this program," meaning his gulag set-up for disappearing the flotsam and jetsam of the war on terror.

No one anywhere in "respectable" journalism points out the ludicrous premise of Bush's demand that this legislation be passed now, so that not another day of delay ensue. This demand, after sitting on the heads of most of these prisoners for the better part of 5 years. Yep, we'll lose the war on terror if we don't get Khallid Sheikh Mohammed in the dock by the middle of October. Few and far between are the reporters who dare to point out that Bush has just a few days left with a reliably Republican Congress to secure his get-out-of-jail-free card from McCain & Co. THAT'S the reason he was so animated, so solicitous of the interrogators who were simply doing their jobs in a "thorough and professional" manner. Professional manner? What profession is that? Marqui de Sadists? But, as ever, the Decider had procrastinated until the last possible minute, and now he needs to get a year's worth of work done in a week.

Not much has changed, in other words. I wasn't gone long. Couldn't afford to be, actually. The dollar is becoming the New Peso. A kind of scrip. I'm back in the Bush Leagues, now, waiting for the next bizarre turn of events, the next strange piece of legislation to slither up from the Congressional Well.