The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (10 page)

What is so contrary about Europe's liberal antipathy to America is that any visiting Venusian anthropologist would see with the merest cursory glance that America and Europe are far more similar than they are different. The threads of the Old World are woven into the New. America is Europe's greatest invention. That's not to exclude the contribution to America that has come from around the globe, but it is built out of Europe's ideas, Europe's understanding, aesthetic, morality, assumptions, and laws. From the way it sets a table to the chairs it sits on, to the rhythms of its poetry and the scales of its music, the meter of its aspirations and its laws, its markets, its prejudices and neuroses. The conventions and the breadth of America's reason are European.

This isn't a claim for ownership, or for credit. But America didn't arrive by chance. It wasn't a ship that lost its way. It wasn't coincidence or happenstance. America grew tall out of the cramping ache of old Europe.

 

When I was a child, there was a lot of talk of a “brain drain”—commentators, professors, directors, politicians would worry at the seeping of gray matter across the Atlantic. Brains were being lured to California by mere money. Mere money and space, and sun, and steak, and Hollywood, and more money and opportunity and optimism and openness. People who took the dollar in exchange for their brains were unpatriotic in much the same way that tax exiles were. The unfair luring of indigenous British thought would, it was darkly said, lead to Britain falling behind, ceasing to be the preeminently brilliant and inventive nation that had produced the Morris Minor and the hovercraft. You may have little idea how lauded and revered Sir Christopher Cockerell, the inventor of the hovercraft, was, and you may well not be aware of what a noisy, unstable waste of effort the hovercraft turned out to be, but we were very proud of it for a moment.

The underlying motif of the brain drain was that for real cleverness you needed years of careful breeding. Cold bedrooms, tinned tomatoes on toast, a temperament and a heritage that led to invention and discovery. And that was really available only in Europe and, to the greatest extent, in Britain. The brain drain was symbolic of a postwar self-pity. The handing back of Empire, the slow, Kiplingesque watch as the things you gave your life to are broken, and you have to stoop to build them up with worn-out tools. There was resentment and envy—whereas in the first half of the 20th century Britain had spent the last of Grandfather's inherited capital, leaving it exhausted and depressed, for America the war had been the engine that geared up industry and pulled it out of the Depression, capitalizing it for a half century of plenty. It seemed so unfair.

 

The real brain drain was already 300 years old. The idea of America attracted the brightest and most idealistic, and the best from all over Europe. European civilization had reached a stasis. By its own accounting, it had grown from classical Greece to become an identifiable, homogeneous place, thanks to the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. Following the Dark Ages, there was the Renaissance and the Reformation, and then the Age of Reason, from which grew a series of ideas and discoveries, philosophies and visions, that became preeminent. But at the moment of their creation here comes the United States—just as Europe was reaching a point where the ideas that moved it were outgrowing the conventions and the hierarchies that governed it. Democracy, free economy, free trade, free speech, and social mobility were stifled by the vested interests and competing stresses of a crowded and class-bound continent. Migration to America may have been primarily economic, but it also created the space where the ideas that in Europe had grown too root-bound to flourish might be transplanted. Over 200 years the flame that had been lit in Athens and fanned in Rome, Paris, London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Stockholm, Prague, and Vienna was passed, a spark at a time, to the New World.

In 1776 the white and indentured population of America was 2.5 million. A hundred years later it was nearly 50 million. In 1890, America overtook Britain in manufacturing output to become the biggest industrial economy in the world. No economy in the history of commerce has grown that precipitously, and this was 25 years after the most murderous, expensive, and desperate civil war. Indeed, America may have reached parity with Britain as early as 1830. Right from its inception it had faster growth than old Europe. It now accounts for a quarter of the world's economy. It wasn't individual brains that made this happen. It wasn't a man with a better mousetrap. It was a million families who wanted a better mousetrap and were willing to work making mousetraps. It was banks that would finance the manufacture of better mousetraps, and it was a big nation with lots of mice.

 

One of the most embarrassing things I've ever done in public was to appear—against all judgment—in a debate at the Hay Literary Festival in the mid-'90s, speaking in defense of the motion that American culture should be resisted. Along with me on this cretin's errand was the historian Norman Stone. I can't remember what I said—I've erased it. It had no weight or consequence. On the other side, the right side, were Adam Gopnik, from
The New Yorker,
and Salman Rushdie. After we'd proposed the damn motion, Rushdie leaned in to the microphone, paused for a moment, regarding the packed theater from those half-closed eyes, and said, soft and clear, “Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby . . . Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love.”

It was the triumph of the sublime. The bookish audience burst into applause and cheered. It was all over, bar some dry coughing. America didn't bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be. It set aside the canon of rote, the long chain letter of drawing-room, bon-mot received aesthetics. It was offered a new, neoclassical, reconditioned, reupholstered start, a second verse to an old song, and it just took a look at the view and felt the beat of this vast nation and went for the sublime.

There is in Europe another popular snobbery, about the parochialism of America, the unsophistication of its taste, the limit of its inquiry. This, we're told, is proved by “how few Americans travel abroad.” Apparently, so we're told, only 35 percent of Americans have passports. Whenever I hear this, I always think, My good golly gosh, really? That many? Why would you go anywhere else? There is so much of America to wonder at. So much that is the miracle of a newly minted civilization. And anyway, European kids only get passports because they all want to go to New York.

FROM
The Believer

 

Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett

 

U
NTIL RECENTLY
, wars had a venue. They had a front. Wars had a beginning, and often came to a clear end. Then the war against terrorism came along. This war was everywhere and nowhere; it could pop up anyplace. And although the war was more manifest in some places than others—Afghanistan and Iraq, for example—it remained elusive. Then the financial crisis hit, and proved every bit as elusive as the “real” wars at the start of the 21st century. The crisis, too, was everywhere and nowhere, but it did have a single nation at its epicenter: Greece.

Not at Lehman Brothers, which collapsed in 2008, and not on Wall Street; Greece was where the fire broke out. One heard the word
contamination
again and again, but this time it was no imperial cultural contamination, no creeping process of civilization. This time the crisis was a contagion: debts and obligations that would never be repaid, a gradual deterioration of the financial immune system.

And so, in the darkest days of winter, I decided to set off for Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city. Cities like that are often at least as interesting as the capital, and if God is in the details, then the truth is going to be revealed at the periphery. In conversations with people working in various capacities to regenerate Greek social and economic life, I would try to assess the collateral damage from this newest international conflagration. But I also went to Thessaloniki to meet its mayor, Yiannis Boutaris, who had recently rocketed to international stardom. In newspaper articles he was portrayed as a “good Greek,” a man who wanted to combat corruption, who did not compare Angela Merkel to Hitler, who did not blame everything on capitalism, and who had no desire to defend in veiled terms the country's nepotism and status quo. In those articles one detected an unmistakable relief at the fact that a good Greek had been found.

I would spend Christmas in Thessaloniki—the light in the darkened world of the crisis.

 

I. Kostas

 

About a 15-minute walk uphill from the sea—Thessaloniki has an upper city and a lower city—is the RentRooms Thessaloniki youth hostel. In the cafeteria there I meet with Kostas Terzopoulos. He has a little beard and kindly, not-quite-shy eyes. Kostas is wearing a gray sweater that looks like it's been washed too often. I've been told that he organizes the Totally Naked Bike Ride in Thessaloniki. Why wear clothes in a climate like this? Clothes, too, are something on which one can economize.

We both order tea. “To start with, it's an ecological thing,” Kostas says. “I'm a member of the Green Ecological Party. It's a small party. In the last elections we just made our quorum—we ended up with 2.93 percent. And in the second round of the elections we only made 0.88 percent. People had no more confidence in us then. It's a pleasant party. We have a representative in the European Parliament, and there's also someone on the municipal council in Thessaloniki; he's been misbehaving lately, though, so we're trying to drum him out of the party.” Kostas talks to me as though I'm his friend, or at least as though I'm rapidly becoming his friend.

“I'm unemployed these days, but it all started back when I still had a job. I did the IT for a radio station, and I was a part-time DJ. At school, all the cool guys had scooters, and later on—like lots of Greeks—my car was one of the most important things in my life. I did all the things you're not supposed to do: I parked wherever I found a spot. My car meant everything to me. Like a lot of Greeks, I had the idea that I didn't have to do anything and that the government had to do everything for me. The change in my mentality started when I became a nudist.”

“How did that go?” I ask.

“I was always very shy, especially in the bodily sense. But a few years ago I was with a few friends at a lovely, quiet beach. One of them said: ‘Let's go skinny-dipping.' I hesitated, but I finally took off my clothes, too, even though I didn't really enjoy that yet. A few weeks later I actually started as a practicing nudist. At first only at home, where I walked around naked as much as possible, but later also outdoors, in natural surroundings. I didn't do any nudism in an urban setting, not yet.

“Then, I guess that was in 2007, a colleague said to me: ‘Why don't you ever come to work on a bike? It would make it a lot easier to find a parking spot.' I bought my first bike, an Ideal Megisto, something between a mountain bike and a regular bicycle. At first, biking was an experiment, like nudism.

“I haven't eaten all day; would you mind if I ordered a sandwich?”

“Go right ahead,” I say.

“I wanted to combine my two great passions,” Kostas tells me, “nudism and cycling. That's how I stumbled on the Totally Naked Bike Ride. I called some friends and I got a lot of help. People liked the idea. Thessaloniki's first Totally Naked Bike Ride was held on June 27, 2008. There were about a hundred participants; ten of them were women. The police said they were going to arrest us, and they actually did arrest a couple of participants who were totally naked, but we kept protesting until they let them go. Not everyone, by the way, has to be totally naked. Some of the participants wear strings, others wear body paint. Each year, more and more people take part in the Totally Naked Bike Ride. In 2009 there were 350 riders, in 2010 there were 700, in 2011 there were 1,300, and in 2012 we had 2,000 participants. The Totally Naked Bide Ride originally started in Vancouver, but it's spread all over the world.”

Kostas takes a few bites of his sandwich.

“It's a social movement,” he says. “We have three objectives: to promote cycling, to increase environmental awareness, and to promote bodily freedom. I always have to explain to people that nudity has nothing to do with sex. Nudity isn't at all sexy. I've gone through four phases myself. It started with nudism, then I discovered the bike, after that I became a vegetarian, and in 2013 I'm going to go vegan. But the Totally Naked Bike Ride isn't the only thing I do. I also organize the bicycle carnival. Thessaloniki has no carnival tradition, which is how I hit on the idea. The floats will all be pulled by bicycles. This year's theme is ‘anti-gold'; there are plans to give a Canadian company permission to start a gold mine near here, and we're against that. The new mayor likes us, but the church doesn't.”

“And what about the crisis?” I ask.

“I'm thirty-eight,” Kostas says. “And like I said, I'm unemployed. I live alone, but in a house that belongs to my parents, so I just get by. But I'm going to stay here. Ever since 1974”—the year the Greek military junta collapsed—“we've been stuck with politicians who keep on failing. But the crisis also brings out good things in people. They do more things together; sometimes they even do things for each other. They talk to each other more, because that doesn't cost anything either. Soon I'm going to organize a totally naked event where people come in and take off all their clothes.”

“That doesn't cost anything either,” I say.

Kostas nods.

I feel sympathy for him.

Walking back to my hotel, I realize that I forgot to ask him if it hurts when you sit on a bike naked. I e-mail the question to him and receive a reply almost immediately: “It depends on the seat. My seat is very soft, and therefore very comfortable.”