Impressions of Italia

2024 Summer Travel Log

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Our big Italian trip was supposed to be in 2020. During that spring of declining hopes of a return to normalcy, our tour company kept delaying a final decision. Italy, like Canada, was one of the last countries to drop vaccination and/or quarantines for travelers. Europe more or less gave up three years of tourism revenue, as most countries made last-minute decisions to open up in mid-2022, well after anyone wanting assurance of a normal vacation would have needed to book travel.

In preparation for this trip, I put in five weeks of Duolingo. Italian is a fun language to learn compared to French, though I’m not sure how useful my learning was. Besides the inherently confusing aspects of Duolingo’s tacked-on American woke ideology when attempting to learn a gendered language — wait, lei ha una moglie alta? — the experience in the app confirms my previous impressions that “adaptive learning” is mostly garbage hype.

Duolingo is the largest education company in the world, with no meaningful constraints on its internal development resources, and the experience was painfully slow and non-challenging. As far as I could tell, their adaptive learning consists of reviewing missed exercises and allowing for testing out of modules. Most of the content was overly repetitive and did not get noticeably harder even as I aced levels. My ability to progress between exercises was slowed by goofy animations, possibly wasting at least 20% of my limited learning time. Even the vocabulary matching, after several rounds of perfect scores, never added new words, which could have proved useful. Like most tech companies, Duolingo is likely optimizing for user engagement, not user learning, and that for the typical user, not someone who wants to learn quickly. A friend later told me that Rosetta Stone is much more respected among serious language learners¹, so I may try that next time.

Firenze

How much my basic learning matters was yet to be determined. Our first stop was Florence, and everyone there speaks almost perfect English. It seems weird and awkward to attempt to speak imperfect Italian when it’s quicker for everyone involved to speak English.

We flew into Bologna to save on airfare and were transferred by Samuele, a young man about 25 years old and a native of Florence. He drove us in a Mercedes V-class van of the type we had ridden in before on previous European trips, a great design larger than a minivan but smaller than a Sprinter, and unfortunately only marketed in the states as a commercial vehicle.

I broached politics with Samuele, asking him if he liked the lady prime minister, Meloni. He said no, he considered her a fascist and came from a long line of proud Communists including his father and grandfather. He explained that Italy has the largest Communist party in Europe but that they were not revolutionary-type Communists, but rather expected to form coalitions in the fractured parliamentary system as opportunities emerged. He had two siblings, a large family for Italy, so these were fecund Communists; interesting! The drive into Florence was through a series of very impressive tunnels, which Samuele said opened in the past couple of years, on highways with a 80 mph speed limit. I told Samuele how awesome this was, that in America we no longer build things because of bureaucracy. He liked the tunnels, though I suppose that would require him to admit that Italy’s right-wing governments of recent years accomplished something.

Florence is, of course, as beautiful and impressive as one would expect. I could bore you with my banal observations, that it’s amazing that this particular building (the Duomo baptistry) was Dante’s favorite, and had been around for centuries when he enjoyed it, or that the “new” sacristy in the Medici complex is the one designed by Michelangelo in the 1500s.

Our first couple of days were for jet lag recovery, and we were relieved to see that our VRBO on Via de Benci was, if anything, nicer than advertised. Our Italian hosts ran it as a small boutique hotel. These folks understand the absolute necessity of coffee upon waking, and generously provided two bags of drip coffee (necessary for our party size and length of stay!), a drip coffee maker, nespresso machine and pods, filters, sugar, and milk in the fridge, mercifully saving us from a grocery trip our first night just to get caffeine essentials.

Friday was our scheduled day of tours with a guide, all of whom are licensed by the government, attend a special school, and must pass a rigorous exam on Italian history. I ask a lot of unintentionally weird questions of any tour guide and I was unable to stump Paolo on anything.

The amount of beautiful art and architecture is simply overwhelming. This is a place with accumulated cultural capital going back thousands of years, and it’s really difficult to not feel rushed taking it all in. I can only give a few relatively uninformed impressions.

The Medici chapels, which also serve as an elaborate crypt for the family, were surprisingly unfinished. The family, though dominant first as merchants and then as rulers for 250 years, eventually died out for lack of legitimate heirs, and ran out of money to finish their family monument. It’s a stark reminder of the difficulty of planning much beyond one’s lifetime. The Hapsburgs, with whom some had intermarried, were invited to rule in the mid-1700s in a friendly takeover, and remained in power in Tuscany until the unification of Italy in the 1860s. I did appreciate the extreme lifestyle design efforts of one of the Medici rulers, who built a private, one-half-mile long enclosed walkway above the city connecting his estate, the administrative offices, and city halls, such that he could conduct all of his daily business while avoiding the crowds on street level.

Dome of the Medici Chapel

Mosaics in semi-precious stones of the coat of arms of each city under Medici rule

We also, of course, toured churches and cathedrals. Florence features Europe’s fourth-largest cathedral, and Milan the third. Even the smallest churches feature astounding beauty. If visual persuasion is the most powerful modality, it’s easy to understand why Catholicism remains the largest Christian church. Rod Dreher famously abandoned his rural Louisiana Methodism for Rome upon seeing the beauty of Chartres. I am happy to report that my Protestantism remains intact. Assuming the Gothic cathedral in Milan is reasonably similar to Chartres, while powerful aesthetically, I found it all a bit overwhelming, perhaps overdone. The most beautiful churches I’ve seen remain the Protestant, Anglican cathedrals of England and Ireland. The Anglicans, to my view, historically have the best aesthetics in nearly everything, though that might be my extended phenotype talking.

That said, it still seems undeniable that the Holy Spirit was at work in motivating these monuments to Christianity. One of the reasons I am content in my Reformed worldview is that it acknowledges a continuity with the historical church, and more importantly, a recognition that God does what He wishes, and while the Reformed camp is particular about theology, it makes wide allowances for errors without casting people outside of the church. To paraphrase Lyle Lovett, the Reformed view is, “that’s right, your theology’s defective, but Jesus loves you anyway.”

Lower-church Protestants who get hung up on a particular understanding of salvation — by grace alone, according to their specific formula — as itself necessary for salvation is somewhat self-refuting in requiring a work, a particular belief about the one’s salvation being free of works, for that salvation to be effectual. The analogy I make is that one does not need an electrical engineering degree to use a light switch, and can have all kinds of misunderstandings about its mechanics and still benefit from the light. This can be true while also acknowledging that having a systematic theology that correctly identifies these mechanics is also good and beneficial.

Even that great sin of Rome, the granting of indulgences, indicates, at least on the part of the buyers, a real faith almost unimaginable to many moderns. Rich and powerful men, aware of their transgressions, were willing to part with significant resources due to a fear of God. Sure, the theology can be criticized as deficient, but the action reflects a real faith. And I think this is one of the strengths of Rome, in linking actions to faith, avoiding the navel-gazing of extreme Protestant “heart religion.” Our subjective feelings of faith are so fickle from hour to hour, and our empirical knowledge of spiritual things so deficient, that there can be something liberating in simply submitting to the authority of the church, and I think this is part of the appeal of Catholicism to many smart conservatives. Historical Anglicanism’s higher view of Communion scratches this same itch, without as much scriptural deviation.

Several of the churches we visited featured the remains of saints, whether in the form of relics or full bodies on display. One, the patron saint of Pisa, is said to have been miraculously mummified and spared corruption. The church of New Saint Mary’s in Florence featured a haunting fresco of a skeleton, stating in Latin, “Io fui gia quel che voi siete e quel ch’io sono voi anco sarete” (I once was what now you are and what I am, you shall yet be). Milan features the famous sculpture of St. Bartholomew, who according to church tradition was martyred by being skinned alive and beheaded; the statue shows him post-skinning.

These macabre fixations may strike level-headed Protestants as gratuitous, but they are powerful depictions that raise mortality salience. The great certainty of any human life is death — as the Avett Brothers put it, “all that comes here, it comes here to pass” — and reflections on death’s inevitability seem healthy. Indeed, they seem to increase the desire for children.

St. Bartholomew Flayed, Milan

St. Mary’s Cathedral, Milan

Our Florence tour with Paulo ended at the Uffizi (offices), once the bureaucratic center of Medici rule and now a museum. Our day was running short, so it was a brief tour. My crew was informed, when viewing the Birth of Venus, that Italians have historically regarded blonde hair and light features as most desirable, and that the young lady depicted in the painting was a sort of supermodel of the Renaissance known for her fair features. This is an aspect of Latin cultures which runs contrary to the spirit of the times. The modern Left has inverted this, and it has not gone unnoticed in my household that blondes in popular media are much more likely to be depicted as dumb or evil.

The crowds in Florence were rather extreme, and they’re likely to get worse as summer progresses. I highly recommend, in any of Italy’s larger metros, RivaReno gelato. Their specialty, a gelato with chocolate-hazelnut ganache, was the best ice cream I’ve ever had; it tastes as if it’s made with nearly 100% cream, and just the right amount of sweetness.

Pisa

The plan after Florence was to rent a car and drive to Pisa on our way to a Tuscan beach resort for three nights. This turned out to be an adventure, hauling luggage in the heat from the train station to the rental car desk a few blocks away to pick up our reservation. Once we arrived, an hour-long line, with no standing room besides the street, stood in front of us. Having grown up myself in a boot-shaped Latin polity with flexible rules, and combined with my feelings of personal incompetence any time I have the misfortune of waiting in a line (I feel like any time I wait in a line I must have planned poorly and should have avoided being stuck waiting with other dumb schmucks), I noticed there was a desk in the back, away from the crowd, at which a young man was taking on some of the load. I hung out until his customer left, and before he could call the next number, I explained our situation of being disappointed at having to wait and flashed 100 euros if he would be so kind as to expedite our rental car. He refused the tip but appreciated the gesture, taking care of us, and we were quickly on our way, hoofing it with luggage back to the underground garage at the train station.

Our vehicle was a Ford Transit with a turbodiesel, quite the relief in terms of luggage and passenger room compared to our barely-adequate Volkswagen minivan in Ireland last year. I was again impressed with the fuel efficiency of these little diesel engines, of course a necessity when fuel is $8 a gallon. I had been warned about driving in Italy, but it was really no big deal, and drivers were less crazy than the refinery guys in their $100k F-250s on I-10 going into and out of Houston. Speed limits in Italy are merely suggestions it seemed, though we took it slow in our giant van. Roads were of mixed quality, and more like Louisiana than Texas, with the familiar bump-de-bump of Latin standards of infrastructure and likely brother-in-law based bidding for jobs².

The tower and church in Pisa are worth seeing, and we were glad we pre-booked with a guide on Viator; they make a small vig that’s well worth their poaching skip-the-line tickets reserved for local sale. The stark white marble and detail on the tower is quite unbelievable, and the experience of going up and down a spiral staircase at an angle pretty fun. At some point in my 40s I lost most of my self-consciousness, so on the way down I was curious to discover the resonant frequency of the stairwell by singing Gregorian chants, much to the embarrassment and perhaps amusement of my crew. I’m not into the punny Dad jokes, so my Dad act is stuff like this and un-woke, mildly offensive jokes (IMO) which are appreciated perhaps 30% of the time. You can take the boy out of Louisiana…

Unbelievably detailed pulpit depicting scenes from the life of Christ, Pisa Cathedral

We made our way from Pisa to our beach resort, which was marketed as a family friendly “eco” resort with all-inclusive dining options; I didn’t need my guilt assuaged by their “sustainability” efforts but with one of our crew needing gluten-free food I figured the Venn diagrams would heavily overlap. Something must have been lost in translation on the website, because besides us, the only people at this resort were people with very young children, we’re talking 2 and under. There was a “train” that ran constantly around the property (useful to quiet crying babies!), kids’ shows, and animal mascots. We were, it turns out, at Italian Baby Beach Camp, as the only Americans and the only people with older teenagers. Now, we like kids, so not a problem, and with all of the families around you wouldn’t know Italy had a demography problem. All in all, the facilities were very nice, as was the beach. It was a nice break from touring in the city.

Our first Mediterranean sunset

Cinque Terre and Milano

Last minute, I planned a lightning tour of Cinque Terre, with an ambitious plan to park the van, buy train passes, see a few of the towns, and get back on the road to Milan, our final destination. With some luck, lots of help from my wife guiding my navigating inches of clearance, and about 15 turns backing into a tiny underground garage space, we succeeded and spent a few hours in what many consider to be the most picturesque scenes in Italy.

We weren’t exactly headed to Milan, but rather to a suburb about an hour outside the city, Sesto Calende, on the border of Lombardy and Piedmont. One of my oldest friends, David, who I’ve known since I was maybe 11 years old, has been a missionary almost twenty years there for a network of churches associated with the American “Bible church” quasi-denomination; these churches are typically very conservative, elder-run, semi-Calvinist, and technically dispensationalist but not crazy about it. David and I grew up together in Louisiana and he came with the small contingent of high school friends that matriculated to Texas A&M from our area in the late 90s. He majored in engineering but was called to the mission field after spending a summer in Milan with Grace Bible Church, among the largest college ministries in College Station. The first night we joined them for dinner at their lovely townhouse, which opened onto a fenced common play area for the children.

The next day we headed into Milan by train, whose station, the busiest in Europe by volume, was designed in 1912 to mimic Washington DC’s central station, but completed in 1931 with um, certain aesthetic touches of the regime then in power. Described as “Assyrian-Lombardy” in style, there are hints of Middle Eastern / Egyptian motifs among the defining restrained classical, colossal style of the era³. There is something profoundly inspiring about entering a space this large, confident, and beautiful, almost like walking into some sort of sci-fi alternative future before buildings were designed to be intentionally ugly and dehumanizing to their users. It seems like you’d really have to hate humanity to tear down Penn Station and replace it with an ugly cylinder of steel, concrete, and glass.

We spent much of our day into Milan traveling, followed by lunch and a tour of the Cathedral. One thing I noticed in Italy, and also in Ireland, is omnipresent graffiti. Like litter, I find this nauseating and myself possibly too severe in my instincts towards it. There’s a part of me would support summary executions for people who do either, but I know that would be wrong.

David and I got to catch up with a lot of conversation on the trains. We talked about the similarities of Italy and Louisiana, culturally, including the difficulty of pastoral advice in a country where laws are seen as suggestions. Any small business owner, for example, who followed the law precisely would be undercut and driven out of trade by rivals with a lower cost structure. Does one have an obligation to follow the law de jure or de facto? In Anglo-Germanic jurisdictions where compliance is relatively high, the relative cost of compliance is also low. But this is a tiny piece of the world, where people are motivated by personal guilt instead of public shame, the rule of law being a cultural artifact only indigenous to a portion of Europe and only successfully implemented elsewhere when imposed by force.

Laws are more consistently enforced against larger organizations, with the result that many businesses in Italy intentionally do not scale beyond a comfortable family level where onerous regulations can be avoided or skirted. One silver lining of this is that there are very few chain stores, with smaller towns being served by owner-operator clothing stores, restaurateurs, and hoteliers. While this is charming aesthetically, surely it must raise costs overall? I’m not sure, given how in America jerks with spreadsheets use consolidated market power to create confusopolies for the poor, what Fitzhugh described as a Hobbesian “war of the wits,” rather than add value for customers at scale. Functionally, it’s very distributist in practice and in my opinion, lovely. Perhaps more carve-outs for smaller businesses, or onerous regulations on larger ones, in American law would allow for similar flourishing⁴.

Italy, like Louisiana, has a deep folk conservatism, historically sincerely deeply religious but not fanatical about it, tempered by a populist streak and flexible culture. Lascia che i bei tempi passino! It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Italy, under Meloni, has become the first country to criminalize surrogacy for Italian citizens, even if done outside the country, and that Louisiana has now mandated the Ten Commandments in classrooms, allowed chemical castration for sex offenders, and passed the first statewide online pornography ban (for those unwilling to upload an ID). Both places have a quiet, organic Catholic conservatism that seems out of place to Anglo outsiders who see a good-times, somewhat morally relaxed culture where you can buy liquor and play slots at the gas station.

We also talked of the difficult circumstances of most Italian families. I noticed how much the people are nickel-and-dimed. Want to get on the highway and drive three hours to see the ocean? That will be 20 euros. Want to take the family to town on the train? 20 euros. Want to fill up your fuel tank? 150 euros. Need to take your child to the bathroom in the city? That’ll be 1 euro or buying something at a cafe. Certain things are cheaper, like rent and food, but I think this is mostly a side effect of being poor. Centuries-old buildings and fresh tomatoes are sunk costs that either fill or become consumed, else they lay dormant or rot. With the essentials of life costing so much, local consumption of difficult or impossible to transport goods indeed is cheaper. One can’t help but see the incredible blessing of America’s natural resources, particularly energy. No one owns a pickup truck larger than a Ford Ranger, and forget about a Suburban. It’s also hard to imagine electric cars at scale here, which require a luxury of space to charge, given most people don’t have a garage and can barely find street parking, and homes are given paltry power allowances.

My friend, in his personal residence, is limited by the government to a 6-kilowatt electrical connection (he pays a little extra because the default is 3-kilowatt); it’s 2024, the whole point of electricity is to free us from biological limitations on human and animal mechanical advantage, and people in a first-world country can’t buy power exceeding about 6X my max output on a Peloton. He has to be careful about running the dishwasher at the same time as the A/C. American homes have a minimum of 12 kilowatts (100 amps at 120 volts), with 24 being more common. We were told by multiple hotel operators that they could not legally turn on their air conditioning until June 20 (thankfully our VRBO in Florence managed to skirt this).

In discussing Italy’s demography problem, David believes Italian culture is uncommonly kid-friendly; most young couples want kids but can’t afford them. A “good job” in Milan, Italy’s equivalent of New York City, might pay $2,000 euros a month, or $25,000 per year. That money goes a little further in Italy due to lower rents and food costs, so call it $30,000 per year equivalent. This is a fraction of what white collar professionals in the United States earn.

This poverty of the population is a policy choice. Despite being nominally densely populated, like in Ireland the countryside is much less developed than in the United States. Children have needs similar to big dogs for access to the outdoors, best raised in a single family home with a private yard. Contrast this with the dynamism of Texas, where I observed, on Hwy. 59 on my way to the airport on the outskirts of Houston, new subdivisions selling 4-bedroom homes in the $200s; they’re not much to look at, but they get the job done for young families.

Similarly, despite having little mineral wealth, virtually unlimited energy via seven-decades-old nuclear power technology is well within the technical capabilities of Italy yet she has zero active nuclear plants, shutting her last reactors in 1990. Anti-growth environmentalists, once they leave their proper lane of preventing air and water poisoning, are the enemies of humanity. Meanwhile, Texas is leading the country in both solar installations and oil production because we mostly let people do what they want with their own property. Undoubtedly, in her mineral wealth, “God blessed Texas with His own hand,” but the richest of blessings can be undone by human foolishness.

Without abundant energy, a society is poor and families have difficulty forming, as the costs of having children increase. An Italian thirtysomething professional who’s single and lives with their parents can afford some basic luxuries like travel to create Instagram moments. A family barely has any margin at all. And without the ability to print money as the world’s reserve currency, the government is constrained in what it can do to subsidize families without endangering previous commitments to things like old-age pensions. Energy poverty is then a double bind, both increasing the floor of costs to live and preventing any sort of subsidy for those creating the future⁵. To truly move the needle, Italy would need to do something politically impossible, like cutting old-age pensions in half to help working families.

Italy has also been the primary victim of Hillary Clinton’s misadventures in Libya during the Obama administration. In helping to overthrow Gaddafi in a brutal color revolution, our Department of State brought about a lawless, medieval hellhole with literal slave markets, a porous human trafficking destination for African refugees seeking entrance for the EU’s generous welfare benefits. Italy has the misfortune of being the geographically closest destination for asylum seekers. The government of Giorgia Meloni promised to fix this, but has made limited progress after being presumably jawboned by the EU superstructure.

This puts churches in a pickle in their call to help the needy. If someone is in Italy illegally, wouldn’t the proper response of a church be to instruct that person to obey the law and perhaps help with a plane ticket home to facilitate obedience to the lawful authorities? However, some of the refugees are Christians fleeing Muslim persecution in Africa. The problem is that there are 1.2 billion sub-Saharan Africans and 58 million Italians. I would guess that the normal experience of life in much of post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa would legitimately qualify at least 20% of the population for a legitimate asylum claim if they can set foot on Italian soil; another 20% would presumably relocate if they could for economic reasons. Each individual has a heartbreaking story, yet at some point the capacity to help will be saturated, and Europe will be no more⁶.

The Italian Alps

After touring another city, we longed again for the outdoors so our hosts took us to a beautiful hour-long hike in the Italian Alps, about 75 minutes away, featuring a dramatic canyon and lovely river with waterfalls and wading pools; this is a typical outdoor experience for them. One of the things they love about northern Italy is the nearness of hundreds of day-trip options like this of incredible natural beauty, and the geography of the entire country is really lovely; like Ireland, ordinary scenes looked like something in an American national park.

On the way back down the narrow, 18’ wide “Huey Long” style mountain road, I did have a close call with a solid rock wall when attempting to move over to let another car pass, hitting the mirror. I discovered the hidden utility of the ubiquitous hairbands that accompany us everywhere to continue our trip.

We finished our time in Sesto Calende at a local American-themed restaurant called Old Wild West, where we enjoyed, finally, copious ice in our drinks.

Our final destination before the Bologna airport was Como, where we ate lunch and rode the reticular train to the village of Brunate above the city. Our waiter saved us from waiting in line due to knowing a guy in the train office, so with a little tip for him and his friend we were on our way before the crowds got crazy.

Three of our four flights ended up being on Lufthansa, including both of our return flights, and we admired the German efficiency “checking our papers” both ways in Frankfurt⁷. On one of the flights, they were short a meal for one of our party, and came to apologize profusely for the oversight and offer an alternative of some pastries. Being nice Americans, we said “no problem, it’s fine,” to which the German stewardess replied, “No, it’s not fine, we should have counted them accurately before takeoff and we are very sorry.” That’s admirable intensity, which makes me look forward to a future visit to this hyper-competent country where 5 minutes early is on-time and on-time is late.

Coda: Italian Food

A local friend of mine, a fellow Louisiana ex-pat, told me before I left that, “everybody talks about the food in Italy, but don’t get your hopes up. It’s not as good as our food.” I’d have to agree with that as a summary. There’s a reason New Orleans and Houston are the fattest cities on the planet!

That said, like in Ireland, the quality of ingredients is noticeably higher. Simpler dishes taste better with better ingredients. I had the same experience as in Ireland, which was a willingness to gain a little weight on vacation, but an inability to do so. Food just seemed to stay in my stomach longer, and I wanted less of it, than at home. I never experienced anything like the aggressive hunger that often shows up before I eat supper. In Italy, the obesity rate seemed about half of ours, and childhood obesity virtually non-existent. There is certainly less food variety, a form of The Boring Diet, as almost all restaurants are Italian restaurants serving the same food. After a week, it’s not all that exciting to decide which pasta and sauce to order.

It could have been jet lag messing with my appetite, but these twin experiences make me wonder if some food additive or adulterant is increasing gastric emptying speed in American food. One of the treatment effects of Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs is simply slowing down digestion so patients remain physically full longer. The regulatory capture of Big Ag in American agriculture is a failure of our country’s leadership. There’s plenty of food in the EU and they don’t use questionable chemicals like Roundup to make it.

1. I suppose I, more than most, should have known that an education company seeking an actual profit serving customers would be superior to a Silicon Valley engagement-farming app.

2. When my Dad and I visited Texas A&M for the first time when I was a high school senior, we were amazed by the quality of the roads compared to home.

3. This style was certainly not unique to the fascists, but seems to represent a conservative response to the beautiful manic styles of 1920s Art Deco. To make classical forms forward-looking, the rococo ornamentation of the past was softened, restrained, and streamlined, merging the best ideas of Art Deco and classical architecture. Among my favorite examples of the style are the Supreme Court Building, and more provocative in its restraint and heritage-informed modernism, the Federal Reserve Building, ironically, given my opinions on the currency, IMO the best-looking office building I’ve ever seen. Historical Concepts of Atlanta does similar work lightly reinterpreting the traditional architecture of the American South.

4. The most reliably Republican business lobby is car dealerships, creatures of protective state laws preventing direct sales of vehicles, and represent the modal millionaire in the country. If the Stupid Party were smart, it would think of more ways to create a political clientele of local elites earning $1-$2MM per year through regulatory carve-outs instead of simping for corporations that hate them. Might I humbly suggest regulating Amazon as a public utility as a first step? Project 2025, call me…

5. We see traces of energy poverty in American life as well, though limited to minor annoyances. Appliances such as dishwashers, washers, and dryers don’t work like they used to, with effective settings often hidden in sub-menus to achieve “Energy Star” status. I recently rented a new Honda Odyssey on a trip and expected the nostalgia of driving the “BMW of minivans” I recalled from our earlier days as a family. The software would barely allow effective acceleration, and the auto-engine-stop nagged me to turn the air conditioning down to save fuel, while killing the power steering at intersections before making a turn.

6. I suspect that the sustainable solution is neither the open-borders of neoliberals nor the isolationist instincts of the nationalist right. If the West survives, it is not in our nature to ignore suffering people. It seems a return to some sort of privately administered government for failed states would align the proper incentives. If we reformed some of the laws restraining American private interests from managing their property rights in foreign jurisdictions, the market might solve the problem. American oil companies, for example, would be more than capable of raising private security forces to create free provinces, call them “opportunity zones,” in Nigeria where Christians would be welcomed and well-governed under a private, Western-aligned regime, and everyone profits from an orderly society engaged in positive economic activity rather than grift. Service in private security forces would create an alternative to the increasingly woke conventional military for Western young people with an impulse to earn good money, see the world, and truly, sustainably help the oppressed.

7. On the flight in, they had a bus system for transferring us between planes and the terminal, with a precise number of passengers allowed per bus. I was last, told to stop pretty assertively at the line, and had to ride the next bus, so I quipped to my family that my first experience of Germany was being separated from my family while they loaded us onto cars. And that would be an example of my totally inappropriate and often unappreciated Dad humor.