Flying from the United States to any destination in Germany is not much different from what it was in years past. My wife, Joyce, and I arrived in Munich on the morning of September 24 following an overnight flight from Houston.<\/p>\n
During the long tedious flight from Houston I could have watched at least six full-length movies, but I watched just two. I saw my old friend and former Malibu neighbor, Tatum O\u2019Neal, in her Oscar-winning performance in \u201cPaper Moon,\u201d a movie she made when she was just ten years old, and I saw Orson Welles in \u201cCitizen Kane,\u201d one of Hollywood\u2019s greatest movies of all time.<\/p>\n
As I watched Welles\u2019 performance as a crass, overbearing, egomaniacal newspaper publisher, I couldn\u2019t help but feel as if Donald Trump is a perfect reincarnation of Welles\u2019 character, Charles Foster Kane. Trump and Kane are mirror images of each other. Anyone wishing to understand the political appeal of \u201cCitizen Trump\u201d should simply rent a video copy of \u201cCitizen Kane.\u201d<\/p>\n
After standing in a short line in Munich to show our passports, we were directed to the baggage claim area where our checked bags arrived in a matter of minutes. We then proceeded to two pairs of swinging doors, one marked \u201cpassengers with nothing to declare.\u201d We passed through the doors with a welcoming smile from a lone customs official and minutes later we were aboard a bus bound for a ski resort in Soell, Austria, just 54 miles south of Munich.<\/p>\n
On Friday, we spent a full day in old-town Innsbruck, enjoying a sandwich and a glass of wine in a sunny sidewalk caf\u00e9 across the street from the Hofburg Palace where Marie Antoinette grew up. Although there is no real evidence that she ever uttered the words, \u201cQu\u2019ils mangent de la brioche\u201d <\/em>(\u201cLet them eat cake\u201d), Marie Antoinette eventually became a very unpopular figure in France and was sent to the guillotine on October 16, 1793, during the French Revolution.<\/p>\n The following day, Saturday, September 26, I experienced the joy of driving a 5-speed Ford stick-shift rental car over some 120 miles of high-speed autobahns and just over 100 miles of winding two-lane alpine roads to visit the famed Neuschwanstein castle of Bavaria\u2019s King Ludwig II.\u00a0 With heavy traffic in both directions, the local farmers pulling their wagonloads of silage made passing a frightening experience\u2026 more so for my three passengers than for me.<\/p>\n After riding horse-drawn carts up the mountain to the castle\u2026 I can still recall the days when I walked up the long road to Neuschwanstein faster than the horse-drawn carts\u2026 we shared lunch with friends before descending the mountain and returning to our ski resort.\u00a0 On the way back we came across several thousand very frustrated drivers who were stuck in a 10-mile long traffic jam on a two-lane mountain road.\u00a0 A big Mercedes sedan, pulling a camper trailer, was stalled at the base of an incline with no possibility of getting off the road, turning around, or backing\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 down.\u00a0 And since traffic was heavy in both directions there was no opportunity for those stuck in the traffic jam to turn around and find another route.\u00a0 They may still be there a week later.<\/p>\n In our remaining days we drove to Salzburg, Mozart\u2019s birthplace, where we strolled through the same palace gardens where Julie Andrews sang and danced with the Von Trapp children in \u201cThe Sound of Music.\u201d\u00a0 And we traveled to Berchtesgaden uber Salzburg, where we enjoyed a cold beer in what was once Adolph Hitler\u2019s mountain retreat, the Eagle\u2019s Nest.\u00a0 We also spent a day driving over the Brenner Pass into northern Italy where we were treated to the most \u201cgenerous\u201d wine-tasting party I\u2019ve ever experienced in the vineyards of the Merano-Bolzano region.<\/p>\n Although a principal reason for our trip to Austria and Germany at this time of year was to attend Munich\u2019s Oktoberfest, we decided that, with hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees flooding into Germany from Austria and Hungary, it might be a good idea to avoid Munich and other major German cities.\u00a0 With widespread reports of women dragged from buses and automobiles and gang-raped in broad daylight, it simply wasn\u2019t worth the gamble.<\/p>\n What was most surprising was that, in a week of watching news broadcasts on the BBC, CNN International, and an English-language French network, we saw almost no news coverage of the millions of Muslim refugees fleeing war and brutality in their home countries.\u00a0 To judge by the amount of coverage of the crisis on European TV, there was no reason to believe that refugees were flooding across European frontiers, that boatloads of refugees were dying at sea, or that hordes of refugees were trudging overland from Greece and Turkey to Western Europe.<\/p>\n For the first time it was possible to believe that perhaps the Germans who lived in close proximity to Dachau, Buchenwald, and other concentration camps during the Nazi holocaust really didn\u2019t know what was going on behind the barbed-wire fences and the iron gates that proclaimed, \u201cArbeit Macht Frei.\u201d <\/em> If leftist regimes during the 1930s and \u201840s could keep their people ignorant of the horrors of the concentration camps by merely managing the news, why couldn\u2019t they keep them ignorant of the invasion of African and Middle Eastern refugees in 2015 when leftist control of the media is just as pervasive and even more sophisticated?<\/p>\n But what was most important for me was to see the joy in Joyce\u2019s eyes as she experienced Austria and Germany, my favorite places on Earth, for the first time.\u00a0 On first sight, a newcomer to the German and Austrian Alps might feel as if they are looking at a few miles of Potemkin Villages, where every home, every window box, every lawn, every meadow, every mountain stream, and every highland pasture are manicured to absolute perfection.\u00a0 But it doesn\u2019t take long for the first-time visitor to realize that the perfection in the Alpine region of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland goes on for hundreds of miles, in all directions, apparently without flaw.<\/p>\n In eight days of travel throughout Bavaria, Austria, and the Italian Tyrol, there was not a piece of litter to be seen\u2026 no discarded beer cans, plastic bottles, or hamburger wrappers.\u00a0 There were no automobile junk yards, no garish fast-food restaurants, no highway billboards, no graffiti-sprayed walls, and no dilapidated automobiles.\u00a0 In a word, that entire region of Planet Earth is \u201cpristine.\u201d\u00a0 The roads and highways are completely devoid of potholes and the trains and buses run on time.<\/p>\n But, as in everything else, all good things must come to an end.\u00a0 On Thursday morning, October 1st<\/sup>, we packed our bags and returned by bus to the Munich International Airport.\u00a0 Arriving at the airport with time to spare, we had plenty of time to stand in a long baggage-check line and a much shorter and faster-moving security check line where all we had to do was place our carry-on bags, our wallets, and our pocket-change into baskets for x-ray examination.\u00a0 However, while the return flight from Munich to Washington (Dulles) was some three hours shorter than our long flight from Houston to Munich, what awaited us at Dulles was a most unpleasant end to a spectacular European vacation.<\/p>\n Upon entering the Dulles terminal, we found ourselves inching forward in a seemingly endless maze of retractable crowd-control barriers, at the end of which were three or four surly customs agents checking passports.\u00a0 Passing that obstacle, we were directed to a baggage claim area to retrieve our checked luggage.<\/p>\n After waiting for nearly a half hour to reclaim our bags, we were directed to a second crowd-control maze which appeared to be nothing more than a people-storage facility because there was no discernible movement in the line.\u00a0 After an hour or more, moving just inches at a time, we learned why the line moved so slowly.\u00a0 The line we\u2019d been standing in emptied into a room with some 20 or 30 unattended electronic kiosks which required thousands of kiosk-illiterate travelers to study glowing touch-screens, trying to figure out what was required of them.<\/p>\n Once passengers figured out that they were first required to scan their passports, they were then required to position themselves so that the kiosk could produce a photograph of the passenger, along with a form to be completed affirming that the passenger carried no fruits, vegetables, plants, or seeds; no meats, animals, or animal products; no disease agents or cell cultures; no soil from a foreign farm or ranch; that the passenger had not been in close proximity to livestock; that the passenger was not carrying in excess of $10,000 in U.S. currency; etc\u2026 the very same questions we\u2019d responded to on the customs declaration form completed prior to landing.<\/p>\n Once we\u2019d completed the kiosk interrogation and had our kiosk-generated customs declaration forms in hand, we were directed to yet another waiting area filled with crowd-control barriers.\u00a0 After moving through that maze at a snail\u2019s pace we found three or four bored customs officers sitting behind desks, doing nothing but collecting the kiosk-generated customs declarations.\u00a0 Then, after unburdening ourselves of our customs declarations we were directed to a baggage collection area where we were able to return our checked baggage to United Airlines for the final leg of our journey to Tulsa.<\/p>\n From there, we found ourselves in a fourth passenger collection room with a seemingly endless maze of retractable crowd-control barriers, at the end of which we were required to empty our pockets into trays, along with our carry-on-bags, remove our shoes and belts, and submit to a full-body scan and a full-body pat-down.<\/p>\n To say that the process of reentering the United States was a maddening ordeal would be an understatement, but it\u2019s the sort of thing that happens when the inmates are allowed to run the asylum.\u00a0 As I stood in those endless lines, the most painful and humiliating punishment devised by the fiendish bureaucrats of the Transportation Security Administration, I couldn\u2019t help but think of the millions of illegal aliens streaming unimpeded across our southern border.\u00a0 George Orwell warned us about this.\u00a0 Nineteen eight-four has finally arrived!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Flying from the United States to any destination in Germany is not much different from what it was in years past. My wife, Joyce, and I arrived in Munich on the morning of September 24 following an overnight flight from … Continue reading