SPRING VARIOUSNESSES

If the English had been the first settlers in what is now New York, it wouldn't have been in New York at all. It would have been somewhere up the Atlantic coast, or inland. The English didn't know how to build on a swamp--but the Dutch did. Lower Manhattan must have looked somnething like home to the first Dutch settlers: flat, a bit on the damp or wet side, right at sea level. They knew how to build on such land--had been doing so for quite some time. So they started building on Manhattan.

What are the least energy efficient machines in the world? Beef cattle, of course. Grain-fed cattle consume about 10,000 times as much energy as we get from their meat. Let's quit raising beef cattle, and give the grain to hungry people.

I live these days in a socialist country. And like most socialist countries, Germany shamelessly provides numerous social services to its people. In addition to such evil things as good health care, good schools, serious recycling services, excellent and speedy rail transportation, and clean safe cities, Deutsche Telecom charges me $6 a month for unlimited calls to anywhere in Western Europe, Canada, and the United States. My basic telephone and internet bill is $30 a month--and my long distance calls to North America--even if I talk all day every day--cost me an additional $6 a month. Isn't that terrible? Just think how much profit is not being made!

President Obama's trip to the G-20 in London and the NATO summit in Strasbourg and Baden-Baden was a giant stimulus package for the United States economy. Well, if you believe that what we need to do to get us out of our economic woes is spend as much as we can, that's what the trip was. He arrived in London with 500 aides and cooks and bodyguards. He had five fully-equipped command helicopters--four of them to be flown as decoys every time he used the fifth, and a three-ton armor-plated limousine. Rumors from London said that Washington also flew in a large hotel and two army barracks buildings to house the 500 people.

This morning in Saarbruecken I saw a car with a surprising model name: "Prestige." I didn't see the make, however. I can't believe that a European auto company would name one of its models "Prestige"--but an American-made car could easily be named such, and quite appropriately. America is fond of "prestige," and things that are "prestigious." From the time of the Romans until the 1930s, prestige had to do with "trickery" and "deceit." The Latin root was praestigium. John Stuart Mill wrote that Napoleon's success was all a matter of prestige; W. E. Gladstone, the 19th century British prime minister, referred to "that vile thing called prestige" as the opposite of honor. But then, thanks to the advertising industry mostly, Americans turned prestige into something supposedly good, and everybody wanted prestige. The once-great University of Michigan became a "prestigious" university during the presidency of Harold Shapiro, who loved the word the way he loved money. . . . I wonder if the car called "Prestige" is made by General Motors or maybe Chrysler? Has anybody else seen one?