George Rebane

(For those readers who missed our frequent posts while in Europe, please see the dated ‘Road Ruminations’ under the Happenings category on the right.  Those not willing to subject themselves to this drawn out but sometimes witty reportage can cut to the chase below.)

Wrapping up the Estonia trip starts with our revisit with friends in Frankfurt where we were deposited by Estonia Air that ended in an extraordinarily smooth landing of our Boeing 737-500.  We were again picked up by the Hans and Gitta limousine service and whisked off to our meticulously prepared room.  Peter and Helga were already there and everything started, as always, with the obligatory coffee and cakes that center all such arrivals in proper German households regardless of the previous condition of their guests’ alimentary canals.  We treasure their friendship that has now reached the half-century mark.

Not to be outdone, Jo Ann and I had scheduled to take all of them to dinner at a place of their choosing which turned out to be a fine restaurant located on one of the hills north of Frankfurt.  The patio dining presented great views of the entire Frankfurt region that prominently included a nuclear power plant on the river Main in the direction of Hanau to the east.  Lots of discussion about ‘atomkraft’ and its role in the years of climate change.

Our formerly English-only ears had to do a real big jump shift from Estonian to German, and just when our ears were getting tuned, it was time for bed.  The next morning we were taken to the airport by our four friends for a long good-bye and promises to visit us next year.  Our American Airlines 767 then made a valiant attempt to follow the summer sun across the sky as we flew over the southern tip of Greenland to Chicago (I’ll spare you the Keystone Kops description of immigration and clearing customs which is now our considered response to militant Islam), and from there to San Francisco, landing just as the sun was setting at about 5,000 feet.  For us almost 24 hours had passed and we hit the sack at the Millbrae motel where our car was waiting. 

The next day, yesterday, we drove home to rescue Leo the cat from three weeks in solitary with minimal visiting rights.  Leo spent the first hour admonishing us as we got our stuff into the house and started to feel normal again.  So what was my takeaway from this trip that I had been anticipating for about 50 years?  The following is a slightly edited version from my journal – Jo Ann and I are both dedicated diarists the benefits of which I’ll cover another time.

Impressions from the trip.  My biggest unknown for years was my own reaction to returning to a free Estonia, and how that would affect the picture of myself – would some latent loyalty make itself known in a surprising and uncomfortable manner?  I have never considered myself to be a hyphenated American and did not want to become one now. 

Thankfully the visit to the land of my birth aroused no pull to identify myself more with Estonia than I have since I was the self-modeled, all-American teenager.  I am still an American who just happened to be born in another country like so many other Americans.

Don’t misunderstand, I am proud of my ethnic roots and would not want to deny or change them.  But the ability to choose and/or allocate my loyalty has always made me a more intensely patriotic American of the ‘…but right or wrong, our country!’ kind.  My friends persuaded by the left continue to find this as one of my more irrational attributes.

Driving around Estonia (and Germany) and talking to its people, again made it very clear that all the peace and beauty of Europe is there only because a benign and good-hearted 800lbs gorilla watches over the whole affair and promises to make it very expensive for someone that seeks advantage through the use of force.  The problem is that the US is taken for granted more and more, and today its role in the personal fortunes of the EU citizens goes mostly unnoticed, or worse.

This level of blindness is reinforced by the American left which seems to believe that diplomacy and goodwill, without supporting force, can by itself work miracles in the geo-political arena.  (And this from a segment that does not even believe in miracles!)  The EU is a fragile structure that grows weaker by the year – witness the recent national votes rejecting the next level of integrating agreements and its eventual constitution.

I believe that as the US begins to disassemble its ability to project power, the EU will suffer forays launched against it.  This prospect must be considered in light of another, more encompassing, proposition that the stability of the civilized world is very tentative and too easily knocked off center.

Russians, living in and out of Estonia, believe that the country really belongs to Russia as it had for centuries.  They have similar beliefs about the entire halo of now sovereign nation states to their south and west.  Estonia has fewer than 2,000 men under arms and could be overrun by Russia in less than a day.  Its current membership in NATO is no more material than was its treaty with Great Britain in the fall of 1939 before the Red Army invaded.

Moreover, if Germany wanted to attack Poland today, its soldiers would have to hitchhike to the frontier.  No EU nation has the ability to defend itself against a modern military let alone project force.  In the meanwhile, the EU is bordered on the east and south by nations that covet its ability to generate wealth.

As the fortunes of these nations wane, they will be impelled to take what they cannot create.  The question then becomes, will the gorilla still have the testicles to hold the barbarians at bay?  To the EU (and poor countries) the attractive alternative of today is a global government that has the power to keep its former sovereign members in line.

Finally, the most significant impression was the visible impact of collectivism – past, present, and intended.  Every problem that some group of humanity encounters always gives rise to the simpleton solution of ‘let’s take from the peaks – by force if necessary – and fill in the low spots’.  The measure of success for the socialist is always the flatness of any metric – income, assets, length of hair, … – taken across the affected classes or population segments.

The collectivists never think of how can we *best* increase the quality of life for the poor and destitute.  All over the EU the visible effort seems to be that if we could just level things, then it doesn’t matter at what level the result turns out to be – it’s OK if we’re more miserable than now as long as we’re all equally miserable.  This, of course, is not the desire of most ordinary people living in the better economies such as Germany and Estonia. To the observant, the derelicts of such leveling policies are evident all over Estonia, eastern Europe, and still much of (formerly East) Germany.

The continued push to re-invent new versions of socialism (“Change!” rings in my ears) are evident everywhere that non-competitive labor meets the marketplace.  And here big capitalism joins this movement because it too is too dumb to save itself.  The careful student of social structures knows that government is not the only organization that becomes destructively inefficient when it gets to be too large so that its internal mechanisms of rewarding merit are distorted or destroyed.

As with any organization whose central brain is too small (i.e. ineffective) for its overgrown body, big capitalism takes on the behavior of big government, and in the process loses its capability to generate wealth at the margins – it then becomes a social function in stasis, aka a dinosaur.

In a free market environment such ponderous giants will ultimately topple.  Knowing this, they instinctively start tying their fortunes to the only remaining crutch to their survival – big government.  The “old Europe” of the EU has mastered this cynical masquerade, creating systems where the large lean on governments while preventing the small, innovative, and nimble from growing into their viable competitors.

Our big corporations are now starting to follow this paradigm in wholesale.  Today Exhibit A of this change is evident from how they are signing on and expecting to profit from ‘climate change’ and the national scams – such as bio-fuels and ‘cap and trade’ –this issue is beginning to spawn.  (Keep an eye on the California Air Resources Board AB32 Scope Plan.)  And while this continues in the developed world, the entrepreneurs in places like the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries are allowed to grow and then compete with our own nascent capitalists subjected to the rigors of humanitarian regulations.

It is hard to tell how this party will end.  The leviathans all want to waltz with governments while helping to call the tunes that determine what dance steps will be allowed.  In the meantime new technologies keep pouring into the marketplace raising the intelligence bar for a growing mass of workers who confuse the promise of an artificially leveled playing field with their own welfare.

As an alternative to the revelations of actual travel, have you ever considered a glass of wine, a deliciously comfortable Ekornes chair, and a National Geographic DVD?