Holidays in Heck Read online

  All things ought to be, as far as I’m concerned, the way they were on Michael Thompson’s farm. When the dinner after the stag hunt was over, at one in the morning, Michael got up from the table and said, “I’m going to change my trousers and have a look at the lambing.”

  More than 1,000 of his ewes were giving or about to give birth. A vet comes with a portable machine and gives them sonograms—better service than yuppie moms get. If a ewe is having one lamb, she can be left on her own in the fields. But twins can confuse a ewe, especially if it’s her first lambing. She may not know if both or either is hers. Michael went into a shed the size of a modest railroad station, where hundreds of sheep were in twenty or so pens. Then he climbed onto a wooden railing separating two banks of pens and, though he is seventy and had done as much justice to the wine at dinner as I had, walked the rail’s length looking for newborns. When he spotted a pair, Michael would jump among the sheep, hoist each lamb by a leg, and begin backing toward the pen’s gate. This would cause at first a few, then a couple, then, usually, just one of the ewes to follow him—the others dropping back with, frankly, sheepish looks as they (I guess) realized they hadn’t had any lambs yet. Then mother and children were put in a stall to bond.

  The lambs were still damp from birth, making their first steps, quad-toddling with each little hoof boxing the compass. They were adorable. Also, rather frequently, they were dead. Scores of dead lambs lay in the aisle of the lambing shed, nature being profligate with adorability. As man is. The living lambs would be dead soon enough. Delicious, too.

  Tempting to meditate on how vivid and real the lambing was compared with politics. Except that Michael’s farm is itself a political construct. Sheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies the green grazing in the valley of the River Exe would be gone. The handsome agricultural landscape of which the British are so proud, carefully husbanded since Boudicca’s day, would be replaced by natural growth. The most likely growth is real estate developments. There’s room for any number of charming weekend getaway homes where the tired politicians of London could get some relaxation and perhaps provide their constituents with a bit of sport—of a noncontroversial kind. According to the Hunting Act, “The hunting of rats is exempt.”

  5

  MY EU VACATION

  Reading the European Constitution on a

  French Beach, Guadeloupe, May 2005

  The French referendum on the EU Constitution was a story that demanded to be viewed and understood from a thoroughly European perspective, so I went on vacation.

  Guadeloupe is a full-fledged département of metropolitan France. Here the European Union could be contemplated as the sociopolitico-economic masterwork of a civilization, an edifice of human hope. And never mind that previous attempts to unify Europe by Hitler, Napoleon, and Attila the Hun didn’t work out—it had been a cold, rainy spring in New England.

  At passport control there were two lines. One official sat complacently in a booth doing nothing until all the EU citizens had been processed at another booth by a second official, who, in reciprocation, sat complacently doing nothing while the first official took his turn. When, at last, the first official deigned to examine a non-EU passport he walked across the aisle to the second official’s booth, borrowed the visa stamp, walked back, stamped the passport, and returned the stamp to his colleague. He did the same thing for each subsequent passport. At customs, on the other hand, there were no officials.

  All around the island billboards read “OUI” or “NON.” They were equal in number and identical in color and typography. The fairness doctrine debates of the U.S. election must have hit home in the EU. Obviously rigorous, uniform rules on campaign media had been instituted. I mentally composed several indignant paragraphs about how John McCain will be advocating this soon in the United States before I noticed that the billboards were advertising a cell phone company. Say “NON” to service charges, “OUI” to free minutes.

  Real pro and con referendum posters had to be looked for. They were on special hoardings outside schools and municipal offices where the pasting up of expressions of free speech was officially sanctioned. Campaign rhetoric had a certain subtle European sophistication. At least I guess so. The slogan on one “Oui” poster was “L’Europe—à besoin de notre.” According to the dictionary I bought for high school French, this translates as “The Europe—to, at, in, on, by, or for need, want, or necessity of ours.”

  Guadeloupe is a volcanic island of soaring, majestic beauty upon which the French have turned their backs to build everything as close as possible to the damp-spritzed, wind-butted beaches with sand the color of Hyundai fake wood trim and a profusion of foot-piercing volcanic rocks. Also, what’s French for “Every litter bit hurts”? Some of the older buildings have a limbo-party-at-the-Phi-Delt-house charm. They will be torn down as soon as the French economy finally revives and more reinforced concrete is poured in the European Bauhaus style. Form follows function. The function is to grow tropical mold.

  That said, Guadeloupe’s main city, Pointe-à-Pitre, is nice enough, with no glaring slums, no glaring locals, and only the Caribbean minimum of starving stray dogs. Plenty of new Citroëns, Peugeots, and Renaults grace the traffic jams, although Guadeloupe’s per capita GDP is only $8,000. The people are sleek and fashionably dressed. The streets are well-swept by the standards of the tropics and well-paved by the standards of New York. Some gang graffiti are visible but only in easily reached places where paint can be sprayed without ruining school clothes. Guadeloupe seems like a swell place to be poor—if poor is what you like to be.

  Perhaps the benign and comfortable atmosphere is a result of French culture and values, such as those the French imparted to Haiti. More likely it’s the result of the large subsidies evident in the excellent road system that extends to every place on the island including places no one goes. And Guadeloupe has more impressive government buildings than an overseas département with a population of 450,000 could need, enough for a minor European country (which France, now that it’s rejected the EU Constitution, has arguably become).

  As beach reading that constitution fulfills one criterion—it’s 485 pages long. And Danielle Steele could not worsen the prose style: “The institutions of the Union shall apply the principle of subsidiarity as laid down in the Protocol on the application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality.” Every aspect of European life is considered in exquisite detail; vide Annex I, pages 403 and 404, clarifying agricultural trade regulations for “edible meat offal” and “lard and other rendered pig fat.”

  I slathered myself, instead, in Bain de Soleil and spread my towel between pumice and discarded Gauloises packs. Timing ten pages of attentive reading, I calculated that it would take seventeen hours and three minutes to peruse the full document, by which time I should be quite tan.

  According to its constitution, the EU is (or was) to have five branches of government: the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, and the Court of Justice of the European Union; plus two advisory bodies: the Committee of the Regions and the Economic and Social Committee; and four additional independent institutions: the European Central Bank, the European Investment Bank, the Court of Auditors, and the European Ombudsman. Here we have a system of bounced checks and vaudeville balancing acts.

  Part II of the constitution, “The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union,” gives us an idea of what “rights” are supposed to mean in Europe: “Everyone has the right to life.” This, on a continent where there’s more respect for Dick Cheney than for a fetus. The charter prohibits “making the human body and its parts as such a source of financial gain.” No more French actresses showing their tits on the movie screen, and Botox injections will be available only through National Health. There is a “right” to “an annual period of paid leave.” (I was having mine.) And a declaration that “The use of property may be regulated by law insofar as is nec
essary for the general interest.” Lenin couldn’t have put it better. What there was in this constitution that a subtle, sophisticated European could object to eluded me, as did reading the rest of it.

  I was getting bored. I could go hiking in the mountains, except it was ninety-five degrees. I could take a refreshing dip, except the ocean was ninety-five degrees. Guadeloupe’s painters and artisans are almost bad enough to get into the Venice Biennale. There was nothing in the stores but European stuff at European prices, and, anyway, the stores were, in European fashion, closed most of the time. I began to get American thoughts about Jet Skis, water park slides, and vast air-conditioned malls. Guadeloupe is lovely. But there isn’t much to do except eat. Every third building seems to be a restaurant. I chose one of the most prepossessing establishments. The Big Mac was delicious.

  For some reason (and judging by the EU Constitution, it was an elaborate one) the referendum in Guadeloupe was held a day before the referendum in mainland France. I went to a polling place at a reinforced concrete school where “Joyeux Noël” decorations still hung in the corridor, and interviewed . . . somebody. She seemed to be in charge of something. I said, “Parlez-vous English?”

  She said, “Non.”

  Actually, I claim that there’s a tremendous journalistic advantage to covering politics when you can’t speak the language. You aren’t misled into reporting what people say; you’re forced to report the inexorable truth of what people do.

  The people of Guadeloupe weren’t doing much. They certainly weren’t voting. I counted ten voters in the Joyeux Noël school and none at the next two polling places I visited. The streets of Pointe-à-Pitre were crowded. The stores were open for a change, but the crowds seemed to be standing around more than shopping. Of course maybe they were standing in line. Guadeloupe provides a very European level of service.

  The next day, back in Europe itself, France rejected the EU Constitution because (CNN International informed me) the French were worried about competition from eastern Europeans for French jobs. According to French unemployment figures, the French don’t have jobs. In Guadeloupe they’re more self-confident about doing nothing. The département voted “Oui” in the referendum, albeit with a do-nothing 22 percent turnout.

  At the airport, leaving Guadeloupe, I talked to a mainland Frenchman, Antoine. We were standing in line. A reggae band was on our flight. The band had drums. Detailed consideration of the weight and measurements of the drum set had brought seat selection and baggage checking to a halt. Antoine went to buy a bottle of rum and came back twenty minutes later. “This island!” he said. “The airport is full of people and every duty-free shop is closed.” Our line hadn’t budged. “I have a business friend who lives here,” Antoine said. “He was in a line like this at the post office in Pointe-à-Pitre. No one advanced in the line for more than an hour. At last he went to the front of the line and said to the postal clerk, ‘Nobody is moving here!’ She said, ‘Oh, no?’ and put up a sign that said ‘Out to lunch,’ and left.”

  The French are well advised to worry about competition. But not from the Czechs and Poles. Some citizens of their own country are better at being European than they are.

  6

  ON FIRST LOOKING INTO THE AIRBUS A380

  Toulouse, June 2005

  Sometimes it seems that the aim of modernity is to flush the romance out of life. The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by the computer’s cheap glow, pesky chirp, and data spillage. Who born since 1960 has any notion of the Near East’s exotic charms? Whence the Rubáiyát? Wither Scheherazade? The Thief of Baghdad is jailed, eating Doritos in his underwear while he awaits hanging. As for romance itself . . . “Had we but world enough, and pills,/For erectile dysfunction’s ills.” And nothing is more modern than air travel.

  As a stimulating adventure, flying nowadays ranks somewhere between appearing in traffic court and going to Blockbuster with the DVD of Shrek 2 that my toddler inserted in the toaster. Thus the April 27, 2005, maiden flight of the Airbus A380, the world’s largest airliner, did not spark the world’s imagination. Or it did—with mental images of a boarding process like going from Manhattan to the Hamptons on a summer Friday, except by foot with carry-on baggage. This to get a seat more uncomfortable than an aluminum beach chair.

  What a poor, dull response to a miracle of engineering! The A380 is a Lourdes apparition at the departure ramp. Consider just two of its marvels: Its take-off weight is 1,235,000 pounds. And it takes off. The A380 is the heaviest airplane ever flown, 171 tons heavier than the previous record holder, the somewhat less miraculously engineered Russian Antonov An-124.

  A million-and-a-quarter-plus pounds is roughly the heft of 275 full-size SUVs. And, at approximately 90.5 miles per gallon per passenger, the A380 gets much better mileage than my Chevrolet Suburban unless I have a lot of people crammed together in the rear seats (as the A380 doubtless will).

  The A380 can fly as fast as a Boeing 747-400 and farther, and the twin passenger decks running the full length of the its fuselage give it half again more cabin space. However, the only expressions of awe about the A380 that I’ve heard have been awful predictions of the crowd inside. These tend to be somewhat exaggerated. “Oh, my God. Southwest to Tampa with a thousand people!” said a member of my immediate family who often shepherds kids to Grandma’s on budget carriers while their dad has to take an earlier flight “for business reasons.”

  Airbus maintains that with its recommended seating configuration the A380 will hold 555 passengers, versus about 412 in a 747-400. The U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate, the president, the vice president, the cabinet, two swing-voting Supreme Court justices, and Rush Limbaugh can all fly together in an A380. (And maybe that statistic will create some popular excitement, if they fly far enough away.) But the London Sunday Times has reported that Emirates, an airline with forty-five of the new planes on order, “would pack as many as 649 passengers into the A380.” The president of Emirates, Tim Clark, told The Times, “Personally, I’d have liked to put 720 seats in.” And the chairman of Atlantic Virgin Airways, Sir Richard Branson, has bragged that each Virgin A380 will have a beauty parlor, a gym, double beds, and a casino—three out of four of which sound worse than 719 seatmates.

  The headline of The Times piece—“New Airbus, Same Old Crush?”—captured the tone of the, to use the mot juste, pedestrian A380 media coverage. Reporters devoted themselves to city sewer commission–style articles considering which tarmacs at what airports could accommodate the A380 and how much gate modifications would cost. Would hub-to-hub markets grow, favoring Europe’s Airbus consortium with its A380 capacity maximization? Or was the profit center of the future in destination-to-destination thinking, making the American Boeing corporation’s smaller but farther-flying 787 Dreamliner the wise investment choice? As if I were going to buy one of these things.

  Airbus itself, in its own promotional literature, did not help. A 302-page corporate publication—“Airbus A380: A New Dimension in Air Travel”—contained such drably titled articles as “Airports Need to Optimise”; “A Vision of the 21st Century” (subtitled “The Future: Forget Speed, Enjoy the Arm-rests”); and “Airlines Need to Find a New Way,” which began:

  Aviation has lost its glamour. On the one hand, progress is now measured by sophisticated ratios that make it abstract and no longer the subject of dreams. On the other, air transport has become a commodity. . . . Everything has conspired to kill public enthusiasm for new commercial aircraft.

  I consulted an old friend, Peter Flynn, who is the sales director for Airbus North America. He assured me that the A380 is an incredible airplane. It didn’t sound like mere professional assurance. Peter was a U.S. Navy helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War and remembers when flying was a stimulating adventure, and then some.

  Two months to the day after the A380 first became airborne Peter and I were at Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France, i
n the A380 systems-testing facility. The outside of the building is as blank as a supertanker hull and about as big. Inside we stood on a glassed-fronted balcony three stories above the main floor looking at something called the “Iron Bird.” This is a full-scale installation of all the mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic connections within an A380 and of all the moving parts to which they are joined except the engines. The Iron Bird was very busy trying out the levers, gears, cylinders, struts, and things-I-don’t-know-the-names-of that work the landing gear, rudder, elevators, ailerons, and things-I-don’t-know-the-names-of-either.

  We think of a passenger plane as a pod, a capsule wafting through the atmosphere containing mainly us and, if we’re lucky, our luggage. Jet power plants are simply automatic typhoons, effortlessly blowing hot air. And, while we fervently hope the jets continue to do that, it doesn’t occur to us that an airliner has a greater confusion of innards than anything we dissected in science class, even if we went to med school. I wonder what the ancient Romans would have divined from such entrails. Certainly not aviation. The Iron Bird couldn’t have looked less avian. Nor—airplanes being made of aluminum and carbon fiber composites and such—was much ferrous metal involved. The iron in the Iron Bird was in the steel ramps and ladders branching over and through it so that engineers could go to and fro.

  Our corporate tour guide, the cheerful and patient Debra Batson, manager for “scientific media,” pointed out the Iron Bird’s most important components. These looked to me like a tangle of extension cords from an overambitious attempt at outdoor Christmas lighting. Airbus was the first producer of commercial aircraft to make its planes all fly-by-wire. That is, there are no rods or cables—nothing that can be pushed or yanked—between the flier and the flown. Everything is accomplished by computer command. And I trust that the nosewheel pays more attention to its e-mail than I do to mine.