France is the foreign country that I’ve visited the most times, nine since 1980 including a fast trip to Burgundy this month for a cousin’s wedding. Not much of a wine-drinker, I’d never been to that region before, taking an instant liking to the walled town of Beaune, where our hotel was a converted rampart. Having previously thought of France as a state with fewer constitutional guarantees than the U.S., it was good to be in a country that doesn’t deploy masked goons while scraping the barrel for flabby recruits.
Bringing a suitcase that weighed over 50 pounds, containing two hanging bags, was enabled by my wife’s frequent-flier status. It also meant hauling it up the stone stairways to the hotel room, feasible as I can do more than the mere 15 push-ups required, pathetically, by ICE of its recruits. Still, a desire to expedite departure spurred thought of lowering the case from the hotel window onto a back street that was higher than the front entrance, but instead I lugged it down the steps, earning a mild reproach from the young front-desk guy who’d intended to help me. My wife meanwhile carried another suitcase, as pictured.
Entering France, at Charles De Gaulle airport, I used my Austrian passport for the first time, though the line for EU citizens was only marginally faster than the one for non-EU. On leaving and re-entering the US, dual citizens are required to use their US passport. Having a second passport, if you can, is something I recommend, a contingency for troubled times.
Back in the US, I mulled some personal knowledge about heightened caution in media and publishing toward presenting opinions adverse to the Trump administration, on concerns about disfavor such as mass cancellations of agency subscriptions to science journals. Recent executive orders directing federal investigations of broad categories of speech, including expressions of “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” should alarm anyone who’s not a cheerleader for tyranny.
Following-up on my June Splice Today piece about gravitational-wave astronomy, I wrote for The UnPopulist on the politics of that field and basic science more broadly, currently marked by a hostility that differs from previous “war on science” travails limited to issues that had policy implications, such as climate or virus research, or that conflicted with religious or ideological world-views, such as evolutionary biology. To what extent damaging budget cuts are driven by fiscal considerations, ignorance of the programs involved, or malice such as a desire to put bureaucrats “in trauma,” is hard to gauge. In any case, a recent war-on-science book focused on the academic left included what seems to be a “hastily-inserted paragraph” obliquely noting that “much of the current US infrastructure supporting advanced scientific research may be under siege,” without, as one reviewer put it, “acknowledging how this singular fact refutes the entirety of this book.”
For one who’s been traveling to France over decades, my minimal French is a disappointment. I make some efforts to brush up prior to going there but did so only last-minute this time as I’ve been giving priority to my German. I’ll spare some Duolingo time for bolstering my Spanish, going forward, as I don’t want to lose the one foreign language in which I’m currently conversant. I wouldn’t have thought that’s a political matter except, as New York Times columnist Carlos Lozada writes: “Spanish has become a sanctioned indicator of potential criminality in the United States of America,” with the Supreme Court permitting federal agents to detain people, in part, because they’re speaking Spanish.
The possibility of a future trip to Argentina is also motivation for maintaining my Spanish. But I did a double-take on news that the U.S. government is providing a financial bailout to Argentina. That the Trump administration is simultaneously making a mockery of its own America First ethos and of the libertarian principles that Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, supposedly stands for, is confirmation that we’re living in a time of right-wing scams. The good news is a significant portion of Trump voters oppose this bailout, and just might have a dawning realization that they, like everyone but a handful of insiders, have been screwed.