europe

From West Baden to Baden-Baden

/ chrismoorman13 / Leave a comment

Baden Baden, Germany 10.5.24

Guten morgen from the famed springs of Baden Baden in the misty hills of the Black Forest. Being a sucker for UNESCO World Heritage sites and natural hot springs, when I needed a place to escape the city for the weekend before re-entering the working world, I immediately thought, “Boy wouldn’t Baden-Baden be amazing?” Turns out it is not only amazing, but remarkably cost effective (author’s note: this is all on a curve and this is still the EU, not 2014 Vietnam)

As Kit and I walked, slightly struggling from a few too many beers at Oktoberfest the night before, through the Residenz Museum in Munich there were a few random intellectual pursuits in my life that came neatly together. The incredible former seat of the Wittelsbach dynasty, the Residenz satisfied the peaceable goal of castle builders, to show in stone and gilt the immense power of a dynasty. Walking past the Bavarian equivalent of the Field of Mars in Ancient Rome, there was a feeling of comprehension when I felt like I’d seen it before. I had, festooned in Nazi paraphernalia from the black and white newsreels of Hitler’s rise.

Whether the Marshall Plan or the destruction wrought by two World Wars or just the petering out of the genetic predisposition, today’s Germans would be considered total impostors to the legacy of the Germanic tribes that were the terror of the Romans:

To quote our old friend Tacitus:

“Statim arma capiunt; non ante deponunt quam senectus. Nulli domus aut ager aut aliqua cura; sola regum liberi libertique armati agunt. Idque proprium et perpetuum signum est libertatis, arma ferre.”

“Arms are taken up at once and never laid aside; no one can go about unarmed. To carry arms is to show you are free.”

“Tamquam mollia et infirmi ingenii corpora labore quaerere quod possis sanguine parare.”

“They actually think it tame and spiritless to accumulate by the sweat of toil what they can gain by their blood.”

Today’s Germans are remarkably domesticated by comparison. A report that came out last week said that in the event of a real war for survival against Russia, the German military would have only two days worth of ammunition. To see that change in the lifetime of my “Grandmother” Mickey is one of modernity’s remarkable transformations.

Now after that digression, back to the point I was trying to make. The Residenz had a hall filled with the busts of Roman emperors and their consorts. It was nearly a full football field long, filled with all those old friends and monsters from Mike Duncan’s incredible podcast, The History of Rome. 

There was Augustus as both a young Octavian and the elder statesman who consolidated chaos into the peak of human civilization that would not again be seen for a millennia and a half. There was Vespasian, that humble soldier who merely laughed as courtiers brought him a family tree tracing his lineage to the gods. There was Marcus Aurelias, the last of the five good emperors, next to his grand mistake and heir, Commodus.

There was Septimius Severus, the first African to be hailed Emperator, and my personal favorite, the black sheep of the Julio-Claudian dynasty Claudius, who attempted to hide in a curtain assuming he’d be killed in the aftermath of Caligula’s assassination, only to be hailed as Caesar and arguably ruled as well as anyone not named Augustus.

To try to piece together the Latin names into the men whom I’ve read and listened to so much about was its own joy, but to see the importance that nearly modern rulers gave to the legacy of Rome nearly two millennia later made me think quite a bit about modernity’s proud disdain for the lessons of history.

From that grand hall to the hills of the Black Forest, Rome is never far away in Germany. There were no shortage of attempts to conquer the Germans. Marius, Augustus, Germanicus, Aurelias all had their run-ins with those warlike giants from the North, but somehow Germany was never fully Latinized. The spot where I sit today had the first Roman baths built in the time of Caracalla, one of the true monsters of the Caesars. The Romans were very serious about their baths, and seemed to set about building them just about as soon as the fighting stopped. This particular spot had no shortage of hot springs at over 150 degrees out of the ground, so it was a bit easier engineering feat than building a central boiler system as they did in other places.

Baden Baden was THE spa town for the European elite for centuries. I’m always a bit hesitant to describe healing properties to waters, but after five hours in one of the complexes yesterday, I can say that I haven’t felt quite this balanced in years.

It becomes ironic that this spot, with its millennia of history, happens to have a corollary with my upbringing in the hills of Southern Indiana. The sulfur waters of French Lick and West Baden brought the wealthy to what could have just as easily been a blank spot on a map. Grand dreams of the Carlsbad of America were hatched by businessmen (circus owners) in the late 1800s. The waters that had been used by Native Americans for healing purposes were commercialized and sold as America’s equivalent to Baden-Baden. Lee Sinclair built the world’s largest freestanding dome, which, at least anecdotally, had to be the tallest structure for 100s of miles. He filled it with neo-classical statues made from local limestone, mosaics to imitate the Italians, and brought plenty of Germans in to ply their ancestral trades as POWs from WW1. His creation brought characters as diverse as Joe Lewis, FDR and Al Capone.

Unfortunately it didn’t have nearly the staying power of Baden-Baden and fell into complete disrepair by the time I was a child.

While Americans don’t have nobility, we do have plenty of homegrown wealth, and in a fit of truly magnificent noblesse oblige, Bill Cook funded the restoration of the resort and dome to preserve these Hoosier architectural marvels in the late 1990s.

To be sitting almost 5000 miles away in the original is a really special experience.

But now its time to figure out how in shape my legs are. There are plenty of wineries in these hills, and I’m about to hire a pushbike to go see a few.

At least I’ll get to have some healing waters when I return.

Border Straddling in Estonia

/ chrismoorman13 / 3 Comments

9.28.24

Prague, Czech Republic

Wenceslas Square

It is 8AM, which might be just about the only time that Wenceslas Square is not packed with people. There’s are still a small herd of Chinese tourists anxiously waiting next to the Astronomical Clock, and the dings of competing clocks are a nice accoutrement to the Dvorak occurring in my ears.

Kit arrived yesterday, and is still catching up on a bit of sleep, so I slipped out to do what I seemingly do best, come to let my fingers run until they find something interesting to tap out about the human condition.

I believe that I’d be derelict in my reportage if I didn’t start in Estonia.

This trip began cleanly enough. I was asked to speak at an EV Battery Recycling Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. Having plenty of reasons to visit partners in Germany/Belgium, that made sense. Then there was the addition of the Netherlands, for some scouting for additional opportunity.

Then there was a 95 degree day in Indiana’s most proudly German town, Jasper, at Strassenfest, that’s when things began getting interesting.

(Side note, as I sit here, I looked up to see a blue jacket with an IU hat on his head. As I do, I said “Go Boilers” to no effect. Being me, I then kept hollering until the guy stopped and turned around. Turns out he’s a Kiwi with one son at IU and another starting his PhD at Purdue in aerospace engineering next fall. The world is small.)

Sweating in the Southern Indiana heat, dancing an endless polka with Betsy, whose heat tolerance must be far more Nordic than her blood, Kit decided that she wanted to go to Oktoberfest for her 30th. Given that I was going to be in Europe anyway, she plied me with another large beer and suddenly we were going on our first joint European adventure. I talked her into Prague with a bit of relentless salesmanship, and she made it contingent on going to Salzburg to live out her Sound of Music fantasies in between. Having booked the tickets, I was then told that I needed to go meet the Estonian sovereign wealth fund. Changing my flight from Prague to Tallinn, I ended up standing on the Russian border in a former Soviet uranium enrichment facility.

Estonia has gleaned my respect for sure. Not knowing much of anything about Estonia besides it geographic location, there was a certain angst in Kit about the fact that I was going to be on the Russian border as the collective wars in Israel, Ukraine, and Lebanon kick off, with the Russians back on their traditional side of wherever the Americans are not.

I assured Kit that Estonia was no more dangerous than Boston, given that her former boss had brought them into NATO 20 years ago. According to Article 5, any issues in Estonia would be no different to the US and our allies than a bomb dropped on Manhattan. I’m not sure that this was a wholly comforting pitch, but it was effective enough.

As I landed in Tallinn, I went for a quick walk around the Old Town before finding something to eat. I ended up eating in a bar carved out of a meters thick city wall (bear dumplings and pilsner.)

The next morning I was picked up by my handlers from Invest Estonia to head to the Russian border. That was about a 2.5 hour car ride, which gave me plenty of time to ask all of the questions that my curiosity demanded. Estonia is a country of 1.3MM people. The fact that it has a unique culture at all is a millennium old underdog story, as for all but about 45 years, it has been handed back and forth between the Swedes, Germans and Russians as a particularly sought after piece of continental Europe. The two windows of true Estonian independence were from the end of WW1 to the start of WW2, and then from the fall of the Soviet Empire through today. Throughout all those changes of ownership, the Estonians have been able to keep a distinct language and culture.

Being that only 1.3mm people are native speakers of Estonian, they have become flexible by necessity in their willingness to open up to the world. Over 77% of Estonian adults are bilingual, with many speaking as many as four languages.  The post-Soviet era has made it one of the fastest growing EU economies, and they have a cultural willingness to look at the situation to find whatever narrow path of advantage that they can.

The two castles straddling the Russia/Estonia Border

Far from being culturally adjacent to Russia, they are much more a friendly Nordic country on the continent. Estonian language is closest to Finnish linguistically with plenty of shared words from German and Russian.

Ilmar and Toomas, my handlers, gave me a history lesson as well as an introduction to Estonian sauna culture. Let me say, as a lover of saunas, these folks have it down. On the beautiful coast of the Baltic Sea, we stayed at a spa/hotel which had no fewer than 7 different types of saunas. Dry, cool, hellfire, salt based, they had it all. They told me that the culture is such that this is a standard place to both have a communal sweat and get business done.

As Ilmar and I walked into the first sauna, there was a 20 something Estonian who could only be described as sturdy, beating guests wearing hats reminiscent of the 7 dwarves with bundles to oak branches, “to open up the skin!” This was followed by plunges in cold pools, introduction of juniper berry extract to the hot rocks, and no shortage of beer.

The competence of a culture that has always had to navigate between powers that were orders of magnitude larger than themselves was on display. These are folks that think through every possibility before deciding that there is a possible path to prosperity and going at it full tilt. Growing up in the warm embrace of the global preeminent power, wherein our errors are typically rooted in our overconfidence, it was a refreshing contrast.

Whether Luke Skywalker in Star Wars finding the one and only ventilation shaft that can bring down the Death Star or watching Purdue lose to double digit seeds in the NCAA tournament, I have grown to have a real respect for underdogs who carefully survey the situation, eliminating every potential path before betting the house on the one asymmetric bet that has a chance of coming in. Estonia is that underdog, and they’ve done remarkably well.

There were also some similarities between Estonia and Indiana that stuck out to me. The question of “What develops a cultural character?” has always been interesting to me. I have long posited that Indiana’s cultural character was forever changed by the Canal crisis of 1848. For those who have not found themselves immersed in Indiana history, I’ll give a brief synopsis.

In the middle 1800s, the success of the Erie Canal in opening up low cost logistics from the interior to the coast was looked at as a model for what is now the Midwest. Indiana, a young frontier state in its 30th year, made an all-in bet on the Mammoth Improvement Project, borrowing heavily to invest in canal infrastructure to help develop the state north of it’s Ohio River logistics chain. London bankers were courted, bonds were issued, and canals were dug from Delphi to Jeffersonville and all points in between.

Unfortunately, this all in bet happened roughly 10 minutes before interior canals were displaced by railroads. Indiana’s massive investment was stillborn, the state went bankrupt, and the lesson gleaned was not, “always search the horizon for the NEXT innovation” but instead, “never get too big for your britches.” Less than a decade later, Chicago became the hub of grain trading in the Midwest, and Indiana settled into a conservative, “don’t lose” mentality that made it a hub for manufacturing for the innovations of others. This might be a bit simplistic, but I don’t think anyone jumped on to  read a detailed dissertation of Indiana’s place in mid 19th century bond markets.

Estonia’s cultural outlook was defined by the fact that it never looked to expand its borders, merely keep the next landlords from entering the fray. As Ilmar spoke about the cultures of the different Nordic countries, he reminded me that Sweden was the only Nordic country that had not been dominated or occupied by any others, and this gave them a certain Nordic swagger not seen by the Danes, Norwegians or Finns.

For all that I know about Swedes, swagger would not have been on the top of the cultural characteristics list by any means, but these are the kinds of things that one learns while wearing a dwarf hat in a sauna in Estonia.

European history is the story of how those characters were formed and reformed over centuries. Whether it was a minor German princess sitting as the Autocrat of the Russian Empire or Vikings(Normans)  reigning as the masters of both Sicily and England, culture is a soup that takes on a bit of flavor from each random ingredient added, whether rulers or migrants or conflicts. Absent totalitarian eradication of a culture (which rarely works absolutely) a people will evolve alongside those characteristics that history has intertwined into their DNA (in both a genetic and abstract sense.)

Well the sun is rising and the tourists are starting to throng the square, so I’d better go find a bit more coffee and roust my beloved wife from bed. It is Saint Wenceslas’ feast day today, so I’d imagine that there’s going to be quite a hoopla that I’d hate to miss.

The 4th in Foreign Lands

/ chrismoorman13 / 4 Comments

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The New Colossus

Happy Birthday America!

238 years old. Quite a respectable age.

You’ve managed to stay intact through a Civil War which nearly ripped you in half.

You fought on behalf of liberty in two World Wars which enveloped you from across the globe, and even in victory, you magnanimously invited the vanquished back into the global community with open arms.

You’ve welcomed, albeit occasionally with gritted teeth, the “huddled masses” and “wretched refuse” of immigrants unwanted in their native lands and assimilated them into a society which has grown to be the richest in the world.

You faced down the threat of nuclear annihilation and the dehumanizing spectre of Communism largely with soft power instead of the destruction that total war brings.

For nearly two and a half centuries, you’ve held true to those most sacrosanct of ideals espoused by your Founding Fathers, “who brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and in doing so have been a source of hope for freedom loving people everywhere.

This isn’t to say that you’ve been blameless. No institution, no matter how grand its codified ideals can stay blameless forever. The stain of slavery, the dehumanization of those we found on this continent prior to European discovery, and the wars of choice fought over the past 60 years have fallen short of your commitment to those high minded ideals in favor of “realpolitik.”

***********

I should quit saying “you.” This isn’t a professional sports team I’ll never play for, this is America. This is the institution which has from my first breath, blessed me with the freedom, safety and mobility to be whomever I choose to be.

I cannot pick those attributes of America with which I agree a la carte, leaving the less desirable remainders for others to choke down. I cannot look at my neighbor and say, “Oh no, this is YOUR President. I didn’t vote for him.”

Men and women who came before me gave their blood, sweat, tears and lives to vouchsafe my ability to make this MY America, one where each voice, no matter its wealth, social status, or color of skin has an equal part to play in maintaining the greatest engine of human freedom and prosperity that the world has ever seen.

But today, another 4th of July abroad, I find myself tired.

I am tired of trying to explaining away the past 14 years of leadership so comically unenlightened that our political system has devolved into a shouting match incapable of legislating.

I’m tired of trying to explain to the Europeans, Vietnamese and everyone else who doesn’t share my passport cover that the policies of my government do not reflect Americans as individuals.

I’m tired of seeing my government encroaching further and further into the lives of its citizenry, of spying on even our allies, and systematically limiting the rights of the individual.

I’m tired of being called “brainwashed” because I believe in the fundamental American right to bear arms, even as another mass shooting occurs.

I’m tired of seeing my fellow Americans try to pass themselves off as Canadians to attempt to shirk a history that while imperfect, is still as proud or prouder than any nation the world has ever seen.

For all the chest beating talk of “American Exceptionalism” I hear at home, I am tired of being in a room of foreigners and seen as the idiot because I am not “properly embarrassed” of my homeland.

I am an American, and God help me if even for a fleeting moment that I deny that enviable truth.

I stand here today embracing the fact that the problems of the nation which has given me so much are inseparable from my own.

************

I look to the members of the so called “Greatest Generation,” who sacrificed lives by the millions against a tyrannical force as twisted and corrupt as any seen in the course of human history, for guidance.

They fought with a single mind against an enemy armed with weapons engineered to make the slaughter of innocents magnitudes more efficient than ever before. They had the same right to vote that I do.

They did not shirk from their duty, or try to hide behind their broken political system. They stood and took the mantle of liberty upon their own shoulders and said, “Liberty will prevail, and America will ensure it.”

What happened to that America?

Why is my generation different from that of my grandparents? Has our democratic right to vote been taken away? Has our voice been silenced by statute or dictat? Do we find men with guns at our doors waiting to silence opposition?

No. The answer is much more humiliating.

We’ve merely disengaged. We’ve taken the spoils that our forebears won for us and squandered our inheritance on iPhones and TVs. On houses that would’ve made even the richest in generations past blush with the embarrassment.

We’ve taken “conspicuous consumption,” once a behavior to be avoided at all costs, and made it into a virtue.

We excoriate politicians for the slightest misspoken word, while giving our hours and eyeballs to such enlightened television as “Teen Mom,” “Honey Boo-Boo,” and the brand Kardashian.

We’ve taken capitalism, an engine of growth designed to reward the hardest working and most creative among us, and corrupted it into a rigged game of three card monte through cronyism and financialization.

Americans have inherited a system which requires constant maintenance, and we’ve left it on autopilot. The adverse results were completely predictable.

Our education system, once envied as the best in the world, now languishes along side such countries as Lithuania, the Slovak Republic, and Russian.

Our middle class has been systematically gutted, our rural communities left to wither on the vine both economically and socially, and our political class has partitioned themselves away from the people whom they are elected to represent, happy to bicker from their DC perches rather than associate with the lower classes in anything more meaningful than a photo-op.

The America that we live in and the freedoms we enjoy are not ours by divine right. It is, and will continue to be an ever evolving experiment, the results of which are determined daily by the diligent effort of those citizens who continue to maintain it through their individual efforts.

It is the sacred duty of each of us to ensure that that inheritance is worth receiving.

America I haven’t given up on you. Your struggles have galvanized my belief in that responsibility George Washington entrusted to Americans 227 years ago.

Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair

Generations of great men and women have both raised and maintained that standard, handing it to their sons and daughters in turn. It is the hallowed responsibility of mine to repair it to its former glory.

Happy Birthday America.

We’ve got work to do tomorrow.