Davos Newbies

When we were in Italy earlier this month, my children had a chance to learn something essential about Italian life: lo sciopero. Our plan was to travel from Venice to Rome by train on Monday afternoon, so we could catch our early morning flight back to the US on Tuesday. When we walked into our hotel on Sunday evening, the pleasant concierge asked me if we knew about the transport strike.

No, I didn’t. What was going on? It turned out that from 9pm on Sunday until 9pm on Monday, all public transport in Italy was out on strike. Some trains might run, she said, but she couldn’t get through to the information line that supposedly listed the uncanceled trains. Incidentally, the vaporetti, Venice’s water buses, were also going to be out on strike (so much for our expensive 24-hour vaporetto tickets).

My older son and I set off for the train station in the hope we could find out anything about our train there. The still-running vaporetti took us there reasonably swiftly, where we discovered a long line for the information office. I’ll hazard a guess that the information office employees are used to harassment: they only allow one person at a time into the office, through a locked door. The train station schedule board painted a grim picture. After 9pm, there were no trains listed at all.

When we eventually made it into the information office, I asked about our reservations for Monday’s 16:42 train to Rome. The man looked through a computer print out and declared, “It’s running.” Phew. I decided to press my luck. “Does that mean it will certainly be running? Are there situations when listed trains don’t run?” He looked at me like I was a cretin. “I said it’s running.” “Certainly?” “Are you certain the world will exist tomorrow?” he replied. Everyone’s a philosopher.

In any case, we walked the next afternoon to the train station (as expensive as vaporetti are, you don’t want to even know how extortionate water taxis are in Venice). Lo and behold, our train was there. It was the only train that day running from Venice to Rome. Extraordinary luck, especially since I had tried and failed to get reservations for earlier trains.

So now my children know what a strike is.

Translation of image above: I’m on strike. I don’t want to write anything. Write something yourself.

I loved this Martin Kettle suggestion:

However, senator, we also now advise a late change to your London schedule. The truth is that you have a lot more to offer the UK politicians than they have to offer you. So we propose cutting back your facetime with Brown and the rest in favour of something much more photogenic that we think would benefit you more. That something is a visit to the British Museum’s brand new exhibition about the Emperor Hadrian. This may seem a bit left-field but here’s the reason why it couldn’t be more relevant to you today.

You see, senator, Hadrian’s predecessor Trajan had staked everything on conquering Mesopotamia, which of course is the modern Iraq. At first Trajan successfully persuaded Romans that the war was going well, but in fact the mission was overstretched and gradually his campaign was undermined by a widespread local insurgency. So when Hadrian became emperor of Rome in 117 AD, just about the first thing he did after his inauguration was to withdraw the Roman legions from Mesopotamia, Assyria and Greater Armenia. All this came as a shock to the Roman psyche, which had been nurtured on endless tales of triumph, but in the end it made much better sense to bring the boys home. It meant Hadrian was able to consolidate Rome’s boundaries and concentrate on the military campaigns that truly threatened Rome’s security.

Senator, you should know that not everything about Hadrian was as inspired and successful as the withdrawal from Mesopotamia. There are some sections of the British Museum exhibition that you should definitely avoid visiting until after election day. In particular there is a searing section which describes how he was responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of Jews during a revolt against Roman rule starting in 132 AD. So be certain to say very publicly that Hadrian offers eternal lessons both for good and for evil. Apart from that, the Hadrian visit will be all gain. It will show you understand the world better than President Bush. And in the end, that’s what this campaign is all about anyway, senator.

Charles Arthur passes along the word that US television news is absolutely appalling. That’s not a novel idea in my household, but my wife and I were literally open-mouthed the other evening when we made the mistake of watching the first minutes of CNN Newsroom. On the CNN site, Newsroom is described as “the place to be when breaking news happens”. I just wanted to see the coverage of Obama’s trip and it was the only news program I could find on Saturday night. Instead the anchor was shouting tabloid headlines at us. I reached the power off button before our brains were permanently affected.

I agree with Arthur’s conclusion:

Anyhow, the US TV media’s surely looming death is thus caused by being too shallow; the print media’s impending doom (though not death) by being too dull.