Europe has a Muslim problem (and I mean that in the best possible way)

Psychological Musings

The peoples of Europe, in creating an ever closer union among them, are resolved to share a peaceful future based on common values. Conscious of its spiritual and moral heritage, the Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality …Human dignity is inviolable. It must be respected and protected. From the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

Europe has a Muslim problem, is something I’ve been thinking of ever since we got back from Europe, and have been afraid to say out loud. Europe is caught between its founding values and being drastically changed. The European Union may have started for economic reasons but common social values have become as important and those values were spelled out with the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997 and then put in concrete with the Charter of Fundamental Rights in 2000. Those values include a respect for human rights and the dignity of the human being. Those values demand that Europe accept the huge number of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa (refugees that were created, in good part, by previous European actions as well as the first world lifestyle that is polluting the atmosphere which has resulted in an increased desertification of these areas). 

The history of Europe is, in many ways, the history of Christianity.  As an aside, sort of, I originally wrote the first sentence the other way around. They are that intertwined. End aside. Every village, no matter how small, has a church and driving through the countryside, the first sight of a village is always the church steeple. Every city, no matter how sophisticated, has a cathedral. These churches and cathedrals are so important to the culture of Europe – France and Germany, at least – that there is even a special tax to maintain them. When we were in Schifferstadt – everywhere, well, in both Germany and France, at least – we were really aware of the church bells.  They start about seven in the morning, go on a morning frenzied binge shortly afterward, and ring every fifteen minutes throughout the day. They are marginally annoying. 

Now, in Schifferstadt, the new Muslim immigrants say that all that bell ringing is too much. I agree with them but the natives grew up with the bells and they like them, they are part of their national culture and heritage. If that weren’t enough, the Muslims want to be able to broadcast The Call to Prayer five times a day including dawn and at night, which is not what the natives want. 

Muslims made up about 5% of the population of Europe in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center and that is supposed to grow to about 10% by 2050 even if immigration stops; because the Europeans are older and the immigrants are having more babies per capita. The pressure to leave the Middle East and North Africa is only going to increase so the immigrant population will probably be much higher. These immigrants also want to be treated as humans, with dignity, freedom, and equality, after all, that is the core value of Europe, that is what makes Europe, Europe. But they are from wildly different cultures. Different religions, yes, but of more importance, different cultures. Their coming to Europe in big numbers will change Europe but keeping them out will change Europe even more. 

 

Un sacrilège*

Uncategorized

I made my first impression of France – or, more accurately, the French – in 1963. In Texas. It was not accurate.

I had been stationed at Ft. Bliss training in the HAWK (Homing All the Way Killer) missile system. In 1963, Ft. Bliss was the training center for HAWK and they trained all the NATO troops – including the French – plus the Japanese and Israelis.

As an aside, when I came back from Korea, I was assigned to a unit teaching the HAWK system to Germans. As an aside to the aside, I had a friend – probably not really a friend, a fellow E-5 sergeant that lived in a room near me – who was from North Dakota and spoke rudimentary German; he taught Israelis. End aside to the aside. We taught outside, in the desert at the Orogrande [Missile] Range, in southern New Mexico. I started in late April and it got hot, really hot by mid-afternoon. To get around the heat, we started classes at five in the morning and ended at one in the early afternoon, before the heat (then the Germans went back to Ft. Bliss and we hung around Orogrande pretty much doing nothing). We were already there, every morning when the Germans marched into the training area. I was in the Army duh – and HAWK was an Army system in the US military, but the Germans assigned it to the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. The Luftwaffe wore grey fatigues with jackboots which had just been relegalized for the military (the Allies had banned them for the German military after the war because the jackboot was identified with the Nazis). I still remember the creepy feeling watching the Germans march into the park – that’s what we called it – in the darkness of the early morning twilight. They marched much closer together then we did – about 15″ apart while we marched at 30″ apart – dressed in field grey, wearing jackboots, singing Deutschland über alles as they marched. End aside.

But that was later, in 1965, and I formed my French impression in the spring of 1963. The French, while still in NATO, had just started distancing themselves by building their own nuclear deterrent, and developing a separate command structure under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle. For reasons that seem incomprehensible now, we – we being the commanders and troops I saw every day in 1963 – thought this was treasonous and that the French people and troops were cowards at best and probably traitors to the cause of saving the world against communism. The funny thing is that, even then, I knew our constant war was mostly bogus but I signed on to the belief that the French were cowards for not slavishly following us (I do take comfort, however, in that I never even thought of calling French fries something else).

France, it turns out, left NATO in the 60s for the same reason they didn’t support the invasion of Iraq, they did not consider it in their self-interest. And there is an additional factor, France considers itself a world power and does not want to be in anyone’s shadow (and, with the US, everyone else is in the shadow). All one has to do is spend a couple hours walking through the Louvre to see why. Look at the sculpture, the paintings, the opulence: money flows towards power and art follows. For most of the last 1500 years, France, or proto-France, has been the center of Europe and that is hard to give up.

That is why I was shocked when I turned a corner in the Louvre and saw this: 

 

*with credit to Gail Cousins 

Confirmation bias

Politics
Democratic candidate Andrew Gillum speaks at a Florida League of Cities Gubernatorial Candidates Forum in Hollywood, Florida, U.S. August 15, 2018. REUTERS/Joe Skipper – RC112547FA80

I ran into an interesting statistic the other day. The fourth district of California, the western Sierra slope from Tahoe to Sequoia National Park voted for Trump over Hillary 54 to 39.3% but they voted for Kamala Harris 63.3 – 36.7%. My immediate reaction was that this confirms my belief that the main problem the Democrats have is that they are running people who are not liberal enough, that they are running the same old, tired, candidates who are indebted to their corporate masters rather than running younger candidates who are willing to fight for Single Payor, a real minimum wage, and free college – in other words, those things the big corporate donors are against. 

But, as soon as I thought about it, I remembered that, in California, the election is between the two candidates who had the highest vote during the primary. In this case, the highest vote getters were Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez, both Democrats and, although Harris was the more liberal and Sanchez is an old-fashioned pol, she wasn’t running against a Republican so the results are not really a good test.

What does seem to be a good test, however, is the Florida race, Tallahassee’s liberal mayor Andrew Gillum verses Trump backed Ronald DeSantis from Florida’s 6th congressional district. I don’t really know much about either candidate – except what I’ve read in the last two days – but my bias is towards Gillum (and everything I read about him confirms that bias, what a surprise).  

Cité de l’Automobile, Musée Nationale, Collection Schlumpf

Cars, Cousins' Trip

I want to tell a story but I don’t know where to put it in context, so I’ll start with the story as an aside. There are a lot of different species of beetles in the world, more than any other species, by far. There are probably more than 400,000 species of beetles, compared to only about 9,000 species of birds. This story is attributed to various people but, in Quote Investigator, they attribute it to British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane: who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, ‘God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.’” End aside. 

Stephen Jay Gould wrote that there are two basic kinds of museums in the world, the old-fashioned museum that is a collection of stuff and the new kind of museum that has much less stuff but much more explanation. As I remember, he used the example of a Natural History Museum in Pennsylvania that had replaced a display of thousands of beetles, all found within a 60-mile radius of the museum, with a couple of the more impressive beetles and a large plastic model of a beetle showing how the hard covering over the wings works. The original museum implied the incredible variety of beetles while the new museum had a note that said there were more species of beetles than members of any other group in the animal kingdom. 

The Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart is a great example of the new museum and almost every museum in France is an example of the old-fashioned museum. The Eauze Musée Archéologique Le Trésor d’Eauze, in Southwestern France – shown in the top picture – which has hundreds, maybe thousands, of Roman coins lined up on shelves with almost no explanation, is a good example. Of course, the Louvre is another example; and the Cité de l’Automobile, Collection Schlumpf, Musée Nationale in Mulhouse, France, is still another..in this case an example on steroids.  

The name says it all – and, I hope, the picture above does also. This is a city of automobiles, the biggest collection of cars in the world (mostly French cars, and, really, mostly Buggatis and racing cars). Now the collection is a French National Museum although it is run by Culturespaces, who says they are the leading private cultural operator in the management of monuments, museums, art centres, temporary exhibitions, and immersive digital exhibitions. The whole experience is very French starting with a new bridge and entry to the museum which is still housed in an old warehouse and then entering the actual inner sanctum itself through a red curtain. 

The Collection itself was started by two brothers Hans and Fritz Schlumpf who were Swiss citizens but lived in the French city of Mulhouse. In the mid-1930s, they invested in a wool spinning mill, eventually took it over, and, over the next 40 years, they bought out most of the rival mills in the area becoming very rich in the process. Both brothers,  but Fritz especially, were collectors. Fritz started with stamps, then tin soldiers, and finally, cars.

There collecting started slowly, in the 50s when a lot of people were selling their old 30s cars during the post-war boom, and then picked up steam in the summer of 1960 with the purchase of 40 cars including ten Bugattis, three Rolls-Royces, two Hispano-Suizas, and one Tatra. 


During the next 15 years, Fritz bought everything he could get his hands on and, as word of the collection grew among  car people, he was able to buy some usually unavailable cars, most of the French Gordini racing cars in existence, several retired Ferrari racing cars from the factory, a couple of race cars from Mercedes, and several Lotuses from the private collection of racing driver Jo Siffert. At one point, Fritz sent a letter to every member of the Buggati Registry offering to buy their cars, in any shape. 

By the mid-60s, the collection had grown quite big and the brothers housed it in a former mill that also housed a large restoration facility and, more or less, kept it out of sight. Even though the Schlumpf mills were losing market share, mostly to plants in Asia, they continued to buy cars many of them financed by selling defunct plants and equipment. By 1976, the changing world caught up with the Schlumpf brothers and they started laying off workers. In March of 1977, after several strikes, the workers broke into the factory only to be surprised by a huge collection of cars. Everything went downhill fast from there ending with the brothers fleeing to Switzerland and the French government impounding the cars for back taxes. Since then, the collection has gone through a series of quasi-private owners ending with Culturespaces which enlarged the collection with the addition of cars from the French National Collection.  

As we got to the end of this huge warehouse, filled with cars, we began to think it was not as huge as we first thought because the entire end wall was a mirror. Except that, behind the mirror, was another room filled with race cars.

I have always thought that, if I had to come down on one side or the other of the old new/museum world, I would come down on the old museum side. Now I am not sure, Michele and I were getting pretty burned out on cars by now, and we had skipped whole rows. Now, at last, we had pretty much come to the end…

except there was a whole nother warehouse filled with luxury cars. This is like the Louvre of car collections and like the Louvre, it goes on forever. The last space, for a reason unknown to me, is much darker than the main room or the racecar room, and walking into it is slightly disorienting. 

We cruised through the last room, only stopping briefly to look at cars that deserved much more attention including TWO Bugatti Royales. One of which is the Coupé Napoléon, one of Ettore Bugatti’s personal cars (one of 18 bought from the family in 1963).   

When we spent the afternoon at the Mercedes Museum, I felt we had pretty much seen it. Would I go back, if I were in the area? definitely but, if I never go back, that’s fine. The Cité de l’Automobile, however, is different. I felt like we just scratched the surface and we were, if not exhausted, pretty tired. It seems to me that the difference between the”old” museum and the “new” museum is who is being serviced (OK, I know this word doesn’t really work, but entertained doesn’t work either, maybe nourished). New museums are trying to teach their visitors, the assumption is that the visitor doesn’t know much about the subject, while old-style museums are more elitist, they assume that the visitor already knows about the subject and they present the material in a way that deepens the visitor’s understanding. That may or may not be true for us after visiting the Cité de l’Automobile, but one thing I now know for sure; The Schlumpf brothers had an inordinate fondness for cars. 

Left Wing of the Possible

Americana, Politics

I’m a radical, but I tell my students at Queens, I try not to soapbox. I want to be on the left wing of the possible. Michael Harrington, a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America. 

The Left Wing of the Possible is also the title of an interesting and very complimentary article on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialist phenom from the Bronx, in the New Yorker (interestingly, the same article is entitled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Historic Win and the Future of the Democratic Party in the online edition). The article is by David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker since 1998, who wrote a very favorable article on Barrack Obama in 2007, painting him as a centrist, that was instrumental in my getting on the Obama bandwagon. As with most New Yorker articles, it is about 75% context, so, if you are at all interested in politics, I suggest you give it a read.

Ocasio-Ortega is running on a platform that, the article points out, is not that radical. She is running on a platform that includes single-payer health insurance, a minimum wage of $15, equal rights for women and minorities, and free college,  but, to quote Bernie: “not the government taking over industry”. As the article title suggests, she wants what she thinks is possible. I think it is possible, too and, I don’t understand why I often read the opposite from the Democratic establishment. Taking a hypothetical Trump voter – who voted for Trump because they don’t like income inequality or are afraid that their middle-class life will not be there for their kids, not a Trump voter who voted for him because they think he is a racist – I think they are more likely to vote for somebody who is pushing free college rather than somebody who is pushing  we will significantly cut interest rates for future undergraduates because we believe that making college more affordable is…important.

I don’t think that the Democratic voter base, including many Trump voters – many of whom also voted for Obama – are against free college and single-payer health care, for that matter, I think the Democratic corporate base is. I think that, if the Democrats want to win back Congress, they are going to have to start listening to the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes, not just their rich financial contributors.  

As an aside, after WWII, education at state colleges was virtually free and remained so at the University of California until 1970 when a $150 “education” fee was added. Now the tuition fee is  $14,460. As an aside to the aside, I don’t think it is a coincidence that, as the number of minorities has gone up at Cal, so has the tuition. I think the governmental and educational infrastructure, consciously or unconsciously, just doesn’t think educating people of color is as important as it was when most of the students were white. End aside.