New Geography

Author: Matthew Stevenson

  • Eastern Europe Heads For A Brave Old World

    Will a unified Europe survive Britain’s vote on Brexit? The referendum of last June pointed the country out of the European Union. Will France or Italy follow suit? If so, it could doom the structure that began in the 1950s as a customs union, if not an uneasy economic alliance to keep Germany from rearming and dominating central Europe. And will a consequence of Brexit be the re-emergence of Russia as the dominant power in Eastern Europe? Or will the European Union last long enough to bring prosperity to the forgotten countries of Eastern Europe?

    I thought about these questions when I recently boarded a night train in Zurich. Switzerland has never been a member of the European Union, but it coexists with the EU through a series of bilateral agreements, similar to those that Britain will now seek. I was heading east on a series of sleepers that took me through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria, precisely those countries that a unified Europe had aimed to lift into prosperity.

    I expected to find an absence of trade barriers, and see lands benefiting from the common currency, the euro, which is used by nineteen of the twenty-eight EU members. Instead, I felt as thought I was descending into a Brave Old World, that of a Europe with guarded borders and separate currencies, a land best imagined as lying on the far side of an economic Iron Curtain rather than a political one. Here’s the view from the train window:

    Austria: Along with its capital city, Vienna, Austria has been an EU winner. Into the 1980s Vienna was a cul-du-sac of the Cold War; the dead end, final stop of Western European laissez-faire economic polices that nestled against the dragon teeth and barbed wire of the Soviet sphere of influence.

    After the wall fell, Vienna became a glittering capital of central Europe, the ideal city for both corporate headquarters and long weekends at the opera. Its banks and companies flourished, and much trade with the new countries of the East began and ended in the Austrian capital, which lies on the western edge of the great Hungarian plains.

    Without the EU, however, Austria would be at risk of becoming a more dynamic Slovenia.

    Slovakia: A stepchild of the Soviet dissolution, Slovakia is the rump state to the east of the Czech Republic, the other half of divided Czechoslovakia. Its capital is in Bratislava, which is something of a Viennese suburb. The rest of the country, surrounded by Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine, is best understood as a heavy machine shop of collectivization, where there is now more demand for imported jeans than for Comecon turbines.

    An EU member in the Eurozone — that is, a member that uses the euro as its currency — Slovakia is betting its economic future on the basis of its low-costs and proximity to Austria, which has attracted a number of Western car companies, including Jaguar. A nice hotel room is €45.

    Conversely, Western consumers are indifferent to Slovakian products, goods, and services, which has positioned Turkey as one of the country’s leading trade partners.

    I spent an evening with a Slovakian who is fixing up his house. His solution wasn’t to order British or French fixtures from within the EU, but to import a container full from Istanbul, complete — so he implied — with Turkish workers to hitch up the low-cost appliances and lighting.

    Hungary: In the go-go years of European expansion, Hungary was the France of Eastern Europe, a proud civilization that dates back more than a thousand years. Its capital city, Budapest, is a place of grace and sophistication.

    London bankers invested their bonuses in Pest apartment flats, and discount airlines flooded the Buda hills with wandering tourists.

    In the soon-to-be-reordered European Union, Hungary could become neither here nor there. Its nationalist, right wing parties (70 percent of the recent election) dream of a Hungarian greatness that was lost at Trianon after World War I and in Transylvania. But the Hungarians have no idea whether its salvation lies in turning east toward Russia, north toward Germany, or west toward a fragmented EU.

    Without a lodestone that inspires optimism, Hungary finds it easier to blame its problems on gays, immigrants, Viennese bankers, and the EU, not to mention the protocols of the elders of Zion.

    Serbia: My overnight train from Budapest to Belgrade was covered with graffiti, giving it the air of a wayward New York City subway train from the 1970s, although one with couchettes and without break dancers.

    NATO bombed Belgrade in spring 1999, in support of Kosovo’s independence. Legally, Kosovo is an autonomous region of Serbia, but in practicality it is a NATO protectorate, the love child of Madeline Albright’s and Richard Holbrooke’s air campaign.

    Among the casualties of that air war was Serbian enthusiasm for all things American and European. The isolated, rump republic of 11 million Serbs has become an orphanage of disaffected Europeans who remain locked away from Western prosperity with a stillborn economy.

    In theory, Serbia, the nearby republics of Macedonia and Montenegro, and perhaps even a new republic in Kosovo were to rise into the middle class through membership in the European Union. In reality, the EU has no more appetite for Serbia’s tottering banks or pig farms than it does for more Greek debentures.

    Bulgaria: Sofia, the capital, is 225 miles from Belgrade, the same distance as Boston is from New York City, but my meandering sleeper took twelve hours to make the overnight trip, which included several hours at dawn on the Serbian-Bulgarian border, the site of many Balkan wars.

    Carved from the Ottoman Empire at the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, Bulgaria could rightfully claim to be both the last piece on the European chess board and the best barometer of EU efficacy in the twenty-first century. Some polls say it is the most unhappy EU member. As a city, Sofia is a pleasant combination of socialist realism, Balkan impressionism, and a few modern glass towers.

    I first visited it in summer 1976, when Bulgaria was hewing the Marxist line with Stalinist devotion. Now, in summer 2016, the oppression comes from a hybrid form of capitalism that mixes Leninist sympathies with mafia business practices. No wonder the EU isn’t in any rush to bring the euro to Bulgaria, although the country is a member of the confederation.

    Bulgaria’s political dilemma is that its gas is a hostage to fortunes in Russia and Ukraine (where all the pipelines originate), while its subsidies and regulations come from Brussels.

    ***

    Sadly, I doubt the EU will last much longer. Brexit marks the ebb tide of European optimism, and part of the reason the British voted themselves out is a wish to send home Hungarian, Slovak, and Bulgarian immigrants who despair of making a living in their own countries.

    Brexit is also a diplomatic move in the increasing cold war between Western Europe and Islam, whose fault lines run precisely through Bosnia, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Turkey.

    When the Brexit vote took place, Europe was in the midst of a terror spree that had Muslim fanatics opening fire on shoppers in a Munich mall and driving a truck through a Nice street fair on Bastille Day. Is it any wonder that Britain, staring at refugees camped out in Calais, would raise the draw bridge?

    Brexit is also a victory for Putin’s Russia and its gangster capitalism. Until the invasions of Crimea and Ukraine, Russia felt encircled by NATO in Turkey and by the EU in the Baltic States. Now, however, Europe has the look of what diplomatic histories used to call a “dead letter,” leaving much of Eastern Europe vulnerable to a modern Russian Risorgimento.

    In the EU, only Germany is earning any money, and it is only a matter of time before Angela Merkel is voted out of office. A new leader there — appealing to nationalist sentiments — will ask German voters, “Why are you working for 4.5 years, on average, to pay the subsidies that are handed out to lazy Spaniards, Greeks, and Italians?”

    As someone who admired the European Union, riding trains from Zurich to Sofia reminded me of the downside of old Europe. I hated changing money in train stations, and being woken up by border guards at forlorn crossings like Dimitrograd (Serbia) or Kalotina (Bulgaria). More disturbing was to see, in Belgrade parks or along rail lines, Syrian refugees living like cattle that is drifting north across an arid plain.

    The EU was created to embrace free trade and freedom of movement across a continent of 400 million that, in the past, has failed to compensate for overlapping national claims by adjusting borders.

    Brexit is one overt expression of dissatisfaction with Europe. But EU failures can also be seen across countries that have changed little since Bismarck, an early Pan-European, said the Balkans were not “worth the bones” of a single Prussian grenadier.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of, among other books Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, and Whistle-Stopping America. His next book, Reading the Rails, is due out in August. He lives in Switzerland.

    Flickr photo by sbrrmk: Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria

  • Brexit: Why the Brits Will Stay… Or Go

    On June 23, Britain votes on whether to remain in the European Union or to leave it. Either way, the point has been made and registered around the European continent that the British have more faith in the white rabbits of political fairy tales than they do in the sinkhole of Brussels and its economic policies.

    Even though the vote is mostly a creature of English party politics — Prime Minister David Cameron chose to have a showdown with the noisome “Eurosceptics” who make up half of his fox-hunting party — the negative consequences of the vote both for Europe and for Great Britain will exceed any advantages that he wrings from the party’s recalcitrant right wing.

    Punters, who in Britain predict outcomes more successfully than pundits do, have been giving a slight advantage at the polls to the so-called Leavers. But the senseless killing by a Neo-Nazi of the well-liked Labour Minister of Parliament Jo Cox, who was campaigning in Yorkshire for Britain to stay in Europe, casts a pall on the Leave position. With more than thirteen percent of the electorate undecided and unlikely to make up their minds before they vote, the referendum on Britain and Europe could still tilt in favor of the Union.

    Who wants Britain out of Europe? The main constituencies for leaving the EU are working class Labourites tired of losing their jobs to Slovenian immigrants, and right-wing nativists. Leave supporters include UKIP, the British Independence Party, which sees all good things British (David Beckham’s right foot. . . David Beckham’s left foot. . .) going up in the smoke of endless regulations from Brussels, or being overrun by a long line of immigrants who have ‘clogged up’ local social services.

    That the French city of Calais has become a Syrian refugee waiting room for those on their way to England is another reason some Britons would like to retreat to their “island fortress.” “We want our country back” is the typical refrain of Leavers.

    In economic terms, Britain sends the EU about $20 billion a year, and gets back (directly) about $7 billion. Thus the English contribute about $13 billion to the Union, which, depending on how you look at it, buys them either continent-wide peace and prosperity, or welfare payments to Greek civil servants retiring at age 52.

    But it would be naïve to assume that Britain gets nothing more from the European Union than some milk subsidies. For starters, even though the country kept the British pound instead of adapting the Euro, the financial center of Europe remains in London. Banks, brokerage firms, and other financial intermediaries trade more Euro-based investments in the city than in any other EU capital.

    Compared to London, Paris, where they still take long lunches, has the feel of a prosperous regional market, and Frankfurt has the air of twentieth century Cincinnati, a well-to-do merchant city on a river.

    As EU members, British companies — to a degree that is difficult to quantify — also enjoy a huge competitive advantage for their sales into Europe.

    Nevertheless, some British workers only see the negative influence of the EU on their job security and paychecks. Large ships are now more likely to be built in Gdansk than Glasgow, much the way Airbuses are pieced together around the continent rather than in United Kingdom hangars. Officially, Labour is opposing Brexit, but that party itself is fractured on the question.

    In voting to leave the European Union, the skeptics believe that Britain can maintain its positive trade relations with Europe and its global financial position, while still booting out Bulgarian émigrés living on the English dole. They also believe they would save $13 billion in subsidies to Italian vintners (et al.) who knock off for lunch not long after the their third morning coffee.

    But how forgiving would Europe be with bilateralism if it were trashed by Brexit isolationists?

    Politically, the historical arguments are lost on the iPhone generation. For them, the European militarism that has been a fixture since the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century (if not before), and the Franco-Prussian wars of the nineteenth and twentieth century, are as distant as formal tea service on the job at 4 PM.

    If Britain does decide to exit the common market, chances are good that a Doomsday scenario in Europe could unfold as follows:

    —With Britain out of the European Union, the Scottish Nationalist Party — the most dominant party in Scotland — would likely call for another referendum on Scottish independence, which this time would pass, just before Scotland applied for membership in the EU.

    —Britain’s exit from the EU would also strengthen the far right in France’s next presidential election in spring 2017, as the French would see themselves as the only counterweight in Europe to German dominance, which is never a good idea.

    —Brexit would also be a huge victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is no fan of David Cameron, Barack Obama, or NATO policies that have pushed the borders of the European community into the Baltic States and close to Ukraine.

    —Putin would be likely to view Britain’s exit from the community as clear evidence that the United States has little influence in Europe. He could use the moment to menace Latvia, Georgia, Ukraine or Moldova.

    —Finally, Brexit could hasten debt default not just in Greece, but in other Mediterranean countries that for the moment enjoy the full faith and credit of all major European countries. If the backstop is reduced to Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party, the chances are good that her government would fall to parties on the right, and her successor would probably be less keen on having Berlin backstop all the questionable loans in southern Europe.

    If you want to criticize the EU, do so because it did not spend much time, if any, on the question of dissolution when drafting the articles of incorporation. That’s made it easy for one country, in this case Britain, to have a simple yes or no vote on membership, almost sixty years into the experiment on common economic polices.

    In retrospect, the EU could have demanded a two-thirds voting majority or a confirmation vote in the European parliament. Or it could have mandated that the exit period take place over ten years or so.

    Instead, on June 23rd, Britain votes on the future of Europe, and those holding the keys are, among others, unemployed fisherman on the North Sea coast, where EU membership is a license for Dutch or German trawlers to fish in the local waters.

    Ironically, among those most supportive of the EU are London millennials, for whom Europe remains “cool.” The problem with this bloc of voters, according to press reports, is that few of them know when the vote will be held or have registered to cast a ballot (“…whatever. . .”).

    In many respects, Leavers are the spiritual heirs of appeasement, the belief by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and others that there was no reason for England to become entangled in European affairs. As he put it when Hitler wanted the Czechoslovak Sudetenland in 1938: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

    In response, Winston Churchill (never to be confused with the Leavers) scoffed that the British ruling class liked “…to take its weekends in the country while Hitler takes his countries in the weekends.” Alas, Brexit is this generation’s Munich, and with Europe in the midst of the wettest spring in 100 years, there are umbrellas in the air.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author, most recently, of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays, and Whistle-Stopping America. His next book, Reading the Rails, will be published in 2016. He lives in Switzerland.

    Flickr photo by Paul Loyd: Brexit

  • Paris: Are the Banlieues Still Burning?

    Press coverage of the recent European violence often draws a line from the Arab slums around Paris to the violence that has recently engulfed Brussels and Paris. According to this theory, Arab refugees from Morocco and Algeria, and, more recently, Syria, who have settled on the impoverished outskirts of Paris, are to blame for the terrorist attacks because France and Belgium have been reluctant to assimilate Arabs into their European cultures. And youth unemployment rates in the banlieues — suburbs — of Paris and Brussels are, indeed, more than fifty percent in some districts. Is it any wonder, the thinking goes, that disaffected Arabs have taken to fitting themselves with suicide vests, or spraying AK-47 bullets into crowded cafés?

    Living on the Swiss border with France, and spending many days each year in France, I have long heard these urban-decay theories of political violence. I decided to investigate the link between unassimilated Arabs in the banlieues and the violence that has shaken Europe.

    I made the trip in March with my bicycle, so that I could easily get around such notorious suburban ghettos as Clichy-sous-Bois and Le Blanc-Mesnil.

    I couldn’t see every street or every crumbling apartment complex in the banlieues, obviously, but I did cover a wide swath of the Paris exurbs. And I tracked a course that, at least during the 2005 riots, would have followed the smoke of burning tires.

    I include the above qualifier because many friends (most, I would say, have never explored the suburbs on a bike) don’t believe my conclusions, which are that the banlieues are not nearly as desperate on the ground as they are on television reports.

    Especially after a terrorist incident, local media will invariably show pictures of dilapidated high-rise apartment buildings on the edges of Paris, and action shots of the police dragging suspected terrorists from these underworlds. The causes and effects would seem clear. But my observations led to conclusions that question that French connection.

    Setting out from the Chelles train station, I had expected to come across 1970s-era South Bronx-like slums, only with an Arab motif. But as I rode through many Islamic neighborhoods, what surprised me is how different the banlieues are from the violent shadows on the evening news.

    In those dispatches, the suburbs might well be an Arabic Calcutta.

    Instead I found the these areas to be in the midst of urban renewal. Where ten years ago there were overturned cars and burning tires, I came across rows of working class houses (most well kept) and some new strip malls. On many corners there were the outlets of national franchises—as many McDonalds as mosques.

    Clearly, France has spent millions in the banlieues; think of the construction that went on in American cities after the urban riots of the 1960s. The French government has replaced some of the post-war, high-rise towers of despair with smaller scale apartment buildings, what American city planners call “scatter-site housing.” Clearly, the sociologists have come to have more sway than the civil engineers.

    Not every street I went down in places like Sevran or Aulnay-sous-Bois looked like a contemporary planner’s urban-renewal model. But more than I expected did.

    So why has the violence moved from the halal shops in Clichy-sous-Bois to the Boulevard Voltaire in Paris?

    Most articles about terrorist violence in France and Belgium make the point that Arab immigrants have yet to be integrated into local culture. Social isolation remains one of the possible causes of the new urban wars, and it is well documented in many descriptions of Arab culture in Europe.

    Left out of these explanations for the Paris or Brussels violence is the extent to which an existing criminal underclass has committed itself to Islam, and not the other way around.

    According to some candidates in the American presidential election, the European bombers and attackers are the kamikaze of a new religious order, taking their orders from the ISIS central command in Raqqa in the east Syrian desert.

    It is true that many of the attackers have had the support of military planners, such as those from Saddam’s Baathist officer caste, who were ostracized when the US invaded Iraq.

    But the aspect of the attackers that never gets on the evening news is the extent to which many of the bombers embraced Islam only after lives of petty crime, if not debauchery, in the same clubs they are now attacking.

    The killers failed at school, in after-school programs, and at various low-level jobs, only to find the warm embrace of a prison imam speaking of injustices done to co-religionists on the Syrian frontier.

    These rebels finally had a cause, however distant it was from their lives of street crimes. Their route to eternity, however, only passed through Raqqa by chance and convenience, not by providential design.

    While I was in Paris, I made it a point to bicycle over to all of the sites that were attacked on November 13, and to the site of the earlier shootings at the magazine Charlie Hebdo.

    I thought that by riding the stations of such a sad cross I might get some insight into what had motivated the killers.

    The editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo have moved from the location of the attack. But on the side of the old building, a portrait of the slain editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, has been drawn. Of earlier threats he said: “I would rather die standing than live kneeling.”

    The mournful side street near the center of the Paris gives no clue as to how the French rank the importance of press and religion in the hierarchy of its political freedoms. Would France feel the same about Charlie Hebdo if it had attacked Judaism as it did Islam?

    Around the corner is the Bataclan nightclub, where almost 100 young French concertgoers were shot down in cold blood. Some flowers were propped against the closed doors. Otherwise, the pagoda-shaped building had the look of a failed theater, down and out in the latest economic depression.

    Standing in front of the killing zone, I envisioned the Bataclan assassins less as holy warriors—jihadis on their way to martyrdom—and more as street thugs or contract hitmen.

    Looking at the bullet holes in the plate glass windows of the nightclub, plus at some nearby cafés, I saw the gunmen as absent of any ideas or ideals. I thought more about Baby Face Nelson and the Dillinger gang (sometimes called the Terror Gang), with their running boards and machine guns, than I did about what candidate Ted Cruz calls “radical Islamic terrorism.”

    I grant you that the killers were Muslim and that many had roots in the Paris suburbs, but I don’t think the poverty of the banlieues alone explains why anyone would attack a nightclub with automatic weapons, any more than crop failures in Sicily or Catholicism explain the violent rubouts committed by the mafia in the last 100 years.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author, most recently, of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays, and Whistle-Stopping America. His next book is Reading the Rails. He lives in Switzerland.

    Photo of the Bataclan nightclub in Paris by the author.

  • Super Bowl: Super Subsidy Sunday

    Imagine what it would cost to fly from New York to Los Angeles if the country tolerated a National Airline League? Answer: about what a “personal seat license” will cost at the new City of Champions Stadium in Los Angeles, say $28,000.

    In the latest shifting of NFL deckchairs, the League raided St. Louis, San Diego, and Oakland — cities that need things to cheer about — and told team owners that they are free to move to Los Angeles, the city of tomorrow, because of its willingness, today, to chip in on the construction of a $2.66 billion stadium in Inglewood, a city within Los Angeles, for the Rams and possibly the Chargers. Around the opulent new stadium the league will even have an NFL campus, maybe for all those ‘communications majors’ who play in the game?

    Rather than take subsides on its construction bonds, the new LA stadium prefers to limit its local taxes until “costs are amortized.” That way it can boast: “No tax dollars or public funding will be used for the construction of the City of Champions Revitalization Project, including the new stadium.” The operative phrase is “for the construction.” Afterwards, the football depletion allowance will kick in, big-time.

    The reason that the National Football League can move around its franchises is because Congress, in the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, deemed professional football a sacred national resource and conferred an exemption from anti-trust rules on the manufacturers of professional football.

    Instead of running a sport where there is no limit on teams or competition, the NFL is the pigskin equivalent of OPEC, and its main function isn’t to govern a league of competitive teams, but to protect monopoly pricing and practices.

    The National Football League runs on backhand payments to athletic organizations, sweetheart contracts, and monopoly pricing, in addition to screwing over its fan base by moving teams around. Its reward for urban price fixing isn’t prosecution for collusion under antitrust laws (it is exempt). Instead, it is awarded a national day of reverence, Super Sunday, during which 30 seconds of ad time costs $5 million, and the strategic national stockpile of guacamole is severely threatened.

    The owners don’t actually own teams, but are general partners in a football trust, which allows them to share equally in all television revenues and collectively ‘bargain’ with concussed players, who are only free agents after five years of indentured service. By then, most are broken men. The league’s attitude toward the declining mental of health of its retired players could be summarized as “So sue me”.

    Yes, a few stars make big money, for a while, but teams are rarely on the hook for long-term guaranteed contracts and salaries are “capped,” they say, “in the interest of competition.”

    Although NFL teams wave the flags of their home cities (best understood as their allocated captive markets), hometown fans have no sway over their local teams, which can pack up their pads in the night and move, as long as the new location is authorized by the League.

    Nevertheless, St. Louis will still get the pleasure of paying off $100 million in outstanding debt on the Rams’ Edward Jones stadium, even though the team will be playing in LA.

    What keeps NFL teams constantly on the move? Promises of state and city subsidies for new, multibillion stadiums, and then the granting of nearly all local revenues to the owner.

    The new Santa Clara stadium, home to the hype of Super Bowl 50, has $950 million in hidden public finance, even though while the deal was being made the city was laying off teachers and firefighters.

    According to Stadium Subsidy Trickle-Down Economic Theory, a new NFL stadium helps to ‘revitalize’ some downtrodden city. In reality, stadiums add little to urban life other than mountains of debt and part-time jobs for Sunday ushers and parking lot attendants.

    The reason that NFL teams do little for their home cities is that the league’s economic model is akin to strip mining or wildcat drilling. Unlike coal or natural gas, though, the price of the harvested commodity is controlled at the league’s head office, although still for the benefit of absentee landlords. National revenues are shared, while local revenues flow into the pockets of the team’s owner, often a billionaire.

    If, instead of a football trust, the US had an open market for gridiron services, when there was a demand in a growing city for a pro team tryouts would be held for players, and shareholders would gather to invest in the new franchise. Maybe when the franchise got good enough, it could compete with more established teams.

    Think about it: if the city of Green Bay (population about 104,000) can support a championship team which is owned by the fans, it means that there are 278 larger cities in the country that could well duplicate its model and host professional football. Instead, only 31 other cities have pro teams, thanks to the league’s attitude toward parity and level playing fields. Metropolitan areas with populations greater than two million that don’t have a team include San Antonio, Las Vegas, Portland (Oregon), and Orlando, St. Louis and, possibly soon, San Diego and Oakland. Many other large American cities could easily support three or four professional teams.

    All that these outlier cities can do to get a franchise is to promise the NFL ownership monopoly stadium subsidies and political tolerance for continuing the anti-trust exemption. Cities that want to keep their teams (such as San Diego) can pay ransom money in the form of a new, subsidized stadium and other favors. Challenge this payoff system and the league will vote away your team faster than you can say antidisestablishmentarianism.

    The irony of Los Angeles now becoming the holy grail of two, or even three football teams is that, in the past, the city has had several franchises —ironically, the Rams, Chargers, and Raiders — and all left because the fan base preferred the beach and the Lakers to Sunday afternoons in the archaic LA Memorial Coliseum.

    What has changed since Sid Gilman coached the Los Angeles Chargers in 1960 is that shared NFL television contracts make it irrelevant whether fans show up or not for the in-studio fan game experience, although generally most stadiums sell out.

    What of the cities that have ransomed their future to an NFL team? How have they fared? Just because Forbes Magazine values pro football franchises at between $2 and $3 billion does not mean that the citizenry sees much benefit from having a team.

    For example, the Hackensack Meadowlands Giants are now said to be worth $2.8 billion, but New Jersey taxpayers are still paying interest on the old Giants Stadium, where the end zone was rumored to be Jimmy Hoffa’s resting place, and which was torn down so that a new stadium could be built in its place (“without public money”).

    Most cities get a paltry rental stream from their subsidized ballparks, and that’s it. From the Seahawks, owned by Microsoft bigwig Paul Allen, Seattle gets $1 million a year in stadium rental income, while the team rakes in more than $200 million. And state taxpayers are on the hook for some $300 million in outstanding CenturyLink stadium bonds. (The 12th man abides.)

    No wonder Allen’s $160 million yacht has been out tearing up the coral reefs of the Caribbean. Even to Hoffa, that red zone opportunity would be worth some dabbin’.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author most recently of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays, and Whistle-Stopping America. His next book, Reading the Rails, will be published in 2016. He went to his first professional football game in 1960, and saw the New York Titans plays the Dallas Texans. He lives in Switzerland.

    Flickr photo by Mike Morbeck: Cam Newton of the Carolina Panthers

  • Discount Airlines: The Cheap Seats Challenge

    Market forces in the airline business are, for the moment, a battle between state-owned carriers like Alitalia and Aeroflot, and start-up discounters like Ryanair and AirAsia. The conflict between state monopolies and under-capitalized start-ups is a perfect metaphor for the economic debates over subsidies and competition that divide much of the industrial world in America, Europe, and Asia. When my dreams come true, carriers like these will encircle the globe with two-hour, $49 short-hop flights.

    With the Internet marketing sky-high seats in real time, travel pricing has become an endless bazaar. Airborne seats are one futures market that everyone understands. For the moment, there’s no clear winner in these fare/service battles, although many state airline companies are functionally bankrupt. The monopolists fly the latest jets and check bags without ransom payments, while the discounters, going nearly everywhere (Pristina, Erbil, Kochi, and Perth are among their many stops), find leg room, hungry passengers, and reclining seats annoying.

    For now, don’t expect the large airlines to cave in to the budget carriers. Competitive round-the-world tickets, using established airlines, can be found for about $1500-2000, although only for about $3000 can you visit all the places that may interest you and still move around the world.

    Is it possible to travel around the world using only one-way, discount airlines? To try, I would start by heading east — from my home in Switzerland — to Dubai or its suburb, Sharjah, a hub of low-cost carriers. Wizz Airlines, an Eastern European carrier, can get me there for less than $100, although it means a connection in Cluj-Napoca, the capital of Transylvania.

    For a little more money, I could trade my Romania stopover for Istanbul’s Sabiha Gökçen International Airport (way out of town), and get to the Persian Gulf on Pegasus, a Turkish low-cost airline that links Europe to the Middle East; use it to get to Baku, Tehran or Turkish Cyprus.

    From Dubai, the trick is to find a Middle Eastern budget airline — Air Arabia and flydubai are two of my preferred magic carpets — that overlaps with the vast network of Asian low-cost carriers, which include, among many others, Air Asia, Cebu Pacific, and Jetstar.

    India and Sri Lanka offer a few of the “crossover airports,” where I could change, say, from flydubai ($120 to Colombo) and enter Air Asia’s low-cost paradise ($80 to go on to Kuala Lumpur).

    Fortunately, nearly every Asian country — especially India, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines — is a discount hub. For less than $300 it is easy to go from Delhi to Japan on lines such as Tiger, Vanilla, IndiGo, and Lion. You will have to change somewhere, but that provides a chance to stretch cramped legs or visit Chittagong.

    It is somewhere way east of Suez that my round-the-world discount dreams start to blur.

    The Pacific Ocean does not lend itself to puddle-jumping airlines. The only ‘local’ among the long-haul trans-Pacific flights is United Airlines #155, which in leisurely fashion connects Guam (get there on Cebu Pacific for pocket change) to Honolulu, with stops in Truk, Pohnpei, Kosrae, Kwajalein, and Majuro, atolls that the Marines liberated in World War II.

    Air Micronesia (affectionately “Air Mike”) used to fly this mail run across the central Pacific, but that carrier became Continental and now is part of United, which no one will ever confuse with a low-cost carrier. As best as I can determine, just to fly from Guam to Honolulu on the island hopper would cost about $1500, which is a lesson in monopoly pricing.

    Without a discount airline to get across the Pacific, the only option is to search for one-way tickets on established airlines, which sometimes offer fares for about $400 to $500.

    Technically, these airlines are not discounters and many of the cheap trans-Pacific fares involve cumbersome changes en route; low-fare-paying customers are routed on emptier flights. Some Pacific layovers are for about nineteen hours in places like Wuhan or Incheon.

    Once you are in Los Angeles or San Francisco (LAX is the cheaper option), it’s easy to embrace the discount networks of JetBlue ($159 in mid-January) or Southwest ($147) to hop across the United States.

    One-way trans-Atlantic plane tickets are expensive. Generally, on the big carriers they cost the same as a round-trip tickets, sometimes more. To get home to Europe on a budget, my two best choices involve Scandinavia and Iceland.

    Norwegian is a low-cost airline that has one-way flights for about $300 from New York to London Gatwick, Oslo and Copenhagen, and then connections into a wide European network.

    The cheaper option is WOW, an Icelandic discounter that flies from Boston to the continent with a stop in Reykjavik (okay, you purists, Keflavik).

    In mid-winter, WOW can take me across the Atlantic, although not back home to Geneva, for less than $200. To get home I would then be at the mercy of EasyJet, which is technically a low-cost airline but, to my mind, a full-cost baggage hauler, which charges crazy prices for checked luggage, with its rudeness toward paying customers thrown in for free.

    On a direct line north of the equator, this trip might have cost me $1500, and would have taken me, depending on a few choices, through Romania (Cluj-Napoca), Dubai, Colombo (Sri Lanka), Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur), Seoul, Wuhan (China), Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Reykjavik, and Copenhagen. The total time in the air would have been about fifty hours.

    For most of us it would be the trip of a lifetime, and it can be done for less than $1500, provided you are not checking a bag.

    What could go wrong? The exposed flank in my travel plans is the Pacific Ocean. Only by plugging and playing with a lot of combinations of cities and dates can I find those one-way $400-500 fares. They only show up briefly on carriers such as Evergreen, Korean, or Air China, and just as quickly vanish.

    Try as hard as I have, I cannot find a discount Russian airline, not even the alluring S7 or Yakutia, to make the land bridge from Siberia across the Bering Strait to Alaska. Even if I did get to Anchorage I would be out of luck finding a cheap airline to the lower forty-eight, except to Minnesota in mid-summer, on something called Sun Country.

    Nor have I been able to find local airlines to take me across the South Pacific on, say, the path Ahab took in Moby-Dick. Fiji Airlines has some promise, but gouges whenever the opportunity arises. Jetstar, owned by Qantas, does make it possible to fly for relatively low cost between Cambodia and New Zealand. So, for now, the trans-Pacific discount trail grows cold after Fiji. Although I can think of worse places, including Cluj-Napoca, to run out of gas.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author most recently of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays, and Whistle-Stopping America. His next book, Reading the Rails, will be published in 2016. He lives in Switzerland.

    Flickr Photo by dreamcatcher-68: Wizz Air HA-LWF Airbus Z320-232.

  • Traffic: Rome’s Not-So-Smart Car Squeeze

    Who would have thought that city planners in Oklahoma City would be more bike and pedestrian friendly, and better at taming car traffic, than those in Rome? In Oklahoma City, Mayor Mick Cornett has reordered the city’s transportation priorities away from cars, and toward exercise and fitness. Speaking of OKC’s car-centric era, the mayor said “We had built an incredible quality of life, if you happen to be a car. But if you have to be a person, you are combatting the car seemingly at every turn.” By contrast, Rome remains wedded to the automobile, to the point that it’s turning into the Eternal Parking Lot.

    Cornett has added sidewalks and bike lanes, and even put in some kayak parks downtown, leading OKC residents through a collective weight loss campaign that he estimates to have totaled one million pounds. Rome, meanwhile, must rank with Moscow, Dubai, and Lagos as one of the most automobile-dominated cities in the world.

    What madness possessed me to take a bicycle into Rome? I had biked from Florence to Siena, across the heart of Tuscan wine country, and was simply continuing on two wheels. The reason I know: I went there on a bike.

    Outside the classical city I could skirt cobblestones and ride in bus lanes (Rome has a few bike paths, but they begin and end nowhere, a bit like the country’s politics).

    Once inside the famed city gates, slick cobblestones made biking feel like a ride on a roller-coaster off the rails. As I headed into central Rome I knew the cobblestones and the taxi drivers might make it a rough journey, but I had forgotten the extent to which Rome is the world capital of lane-changing, that frantic need to get around every slow or parked car.

    Knowing Rome fairly well I switched to back alleys and one-way streets, where I discovered that not only does the city’s traffic have aspects of colliding atoms, but that the emergence of economical Smart Cars and small electric vehicles has made it possible for many more Romans to squeeze their motorized vehicles into the city’s historic corners.

    No matter which historic piazza I crossed or which road I took I came face-to-face with one of the motorized creatures — some the size of golf carts — that Romans drive literally everywhere.

    If Caesar’s assassins were now to stalk him near the Forum, I am sure they would do so in tiny Fiats and, while stabbing him, park on the sidewalk with their emergency lights flashing.

    Everywhere I went in Rome, cars were littered. There were cars all around the Vatican, in the small squares of Trastevere, around the Colosseum, and up against the Forum.

    Not only is Rome the empire of errant cars, its sidewalks — perhaps laid out to confuse invading Huns — have to be the worst in Europe. Walking two abreast is impossible. Instead, between the cars careening around medieval piazzas or parked against doorways, pedestrians must walk single-file, like a retreating army.

    The solution to Rome’s clogged arteries is to ban (during the waking hours) cars, trucks, motor scooters, tour buses, four-by-fours, and Harleys from the historic downtown, and to return the small cobblestoned streets to their rightful owners: classical architecture and pedestrians.

    For traveling through and outside the original city center, Rome has an underground metro, trams, and many buses which could stick to the main avenues. It might inconvenience some, but for the majority, and that includes the global heirs of the Roman republic, the city would again be a delight.

    Venice solved the problem of burdensome traffic by filling its streets with water. Other European cities — the old town of Dubrovnik, Orleans in France, and Copenhagen come to mind — have successfully put pedestrians and bicycles first.

    If its cars were evicted, Rome would become one of the world’s great open air museums, on a par with the old city of Jerusalem, parts of Marrakech, and with some sidewalk areas in Paris, although I doubt Rome will ever break with the automobile.

    Rome is sinking under the weight of its exhaust pipes not only because of its traffic. The city shares the nation’s political problems: one hundred and fifty years after its independence, Italy is still best understood as a fragmented state, the Yugoslavia of the European Union, with a dysfunctional judiciary, parliament, executive branch, and treasury, and the fear that the center will not hold.

    To understand the level of executive and parliamentary incompetence, consider that, since the Fascist government was toppled in World War II, about forty-three men have served as prime minister, and the parliament has had more than sixty changes to its governing coalition. Only one government in this period has served out its five-year term.

    The biggest reason for Italy’s political stalemate is that the country’s north-south divide has remained unresolved, some would say since Garibaldi marched on Rome in 1862.

    Northern Italy has a prosperous manufacturing base, a balanced budget, low debt to its GDP, dynamic cities (Milan, Turin, Venice, Bologna), and strong tourist and export revenue. The south, which includes Naples and Sicily, is a huge consumer of government subsidies, heavily reliant on inefficient agricultural systems, and has less manufacturing than the North. Rome is a nether world between the two blocs.

    Youth unemployment in Naples is said to be 50 percent, and GDP per capita is some $40,000 less in the south than in the north. Sicily today may have less to fear from the mafia, but greater danger from joblessness.

    The specter of Italy dividing along its north-south seam — as if after an earthquake in the Apennines — is, I believe, the reason that no one wants a strong federal government in Rome. Little government is thought to be less offensive to most than at even some degree of functional government would be.

    Rome is the symbol of this fragmented state, with its allure of past and future greatness, and its present vanishing under a layer of soot, corruption, and waste.

    David Gilmour ends his excellent history, The Pursuit of Italy, with, “Yet the millennia of [the Italians] past and the vulnerability of their placement have made it impossible for them to create a successful nation-state.”

    In Oklahoma City, my favorite mayor can expand the sidewalks and lay down more bike lanes, much as he can argue for a balanced budget. In Rome, however, no one can take on the car lobby because no one, politically, is out strolling arm-in-arm. For one thing, the sidewalks don’t allow it.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author most recently of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays, and Whistle-Stopping America. His next book, Reading the Rails, will be published in 2016. He lives in Switzerland.

    Flickr photo by Andrew Moore: Parking, Italian Style — A Fiat 500 in Rome

  • Berlin: The Imperial Impulse in City Planning

    “He who controls Berlin, controls Germany, and who controls Germany, controls Europe.” V.I. Lenin (but also attributed to Karl Marx, and sometimes to Otto von Bismarck)

    About the time that Syrian refugees were on the march to Germany’s safe havens, I spent a few days in Berlin, which is not only the capital of reunified Germany, but the unofficial capital of the European Union, as well as being hipster ground zero.

    The Europe that united under the EU — the New Europe — was predicated on a weak, federal Germany surrounded by strong members such as France, Britain, and Italy. On paper, the EU has its headquarters in Brussels and, for one week a month, in Strasbourg (to placate the envious French). But the Union’s power emanates from Berlin, where Angela Merkel — the latest Iron Chancellor — has made most of the EU decisions concerning the Greek bailout and Syrian emigrants. The EU has become a ward of the Teutonic Knights, where solvency and peace come only from German diktats.

    Does the modern city of Berlin speak about a resurgent Germany (über alles, so to speak), or about the ability of the Union to tame the excesses of German nationalism?

    Since Germany united in 1989 the success of reunification has often been measured in the bright lights and new buildings that have spread across Berlin, from West to East. Once a Cold War no-man’s land, the Potsdamer Platz is now a crossroads on Architectural Digest walking-tour maps, while the worker housing in the East has been recycled into studios and sidewalk bistros for hi-tech executives and skateboarders.

    For the past twenty years, I have believed that a healthy and vibrant Berlin could only mean good things for the European Union. It meant that reunified Germany was working, that Russia was at bay, and that in the New Europe there were enough new jobs to service the debt on the leveraged buyout of Eastern Europe.

    On this trip to Berlin, however, I glimpsed the other side of the German coin, which is that as Germany succeeds — economically and politically — the European dream will become ever more distant.

    What did I see in Berlin that made me doubt the future of the European Union?

    On the surface, Berlin is a success story, with open-topped tourist buses crisscrossing the city and new restaurants. Old working-class neighborhoods such as Prenzlauer Berg and Kreuzberg have gotten facelifts, and the city’s infrastructure of railroad stations, banks, and conference centers glistens.

    In other, more subtle ways, however, the city seems to be fulfilling the dreams of Adolf Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer, to turn Berlin into a capital of the thousand year Reich, even if, for now, it is a dream of admirable intentions.

    Take the $600 million gilded palace of the Humboldt Forum that is being built on Museum Island, just off Unter den Linden, the imperial boulevard of Prussian dreams.

    Swathed in marble frontage, the reconstructed palace dwarfs much that is nearby, including several classical museums. The web site descriptions make it sound like an elaborate visitors’ center, however, with nebulous goals:

    The Humboldt Forum is a novel centre for exhibitions, events, and human encounter in the heart of Berlin. Museums, a library and a university will pool their competencies and create a lively place where knowledge about the cultures of the world can grow and be exchanged. In this, the Humboldt Forum distinguishes itself from the traditional idea of the ethnographic museum.

    It’s difficult not to recall that Hitler, when he spoke to Speer about the purpose of the nearby New Reich Chancellery on Voss Strasse, said, “On the long walk from the entrance to reception hall they’ll get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich!”

    * * *

    On this trip, I had the use of a bicycle — until it was stolen — to ride around the city, including along Unter den Linden. Graffiti is still visible on the last fragments of the Wall; elsewhere, I came across some posters of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), with turbaned immigrants and the tag line: “Have a good flight home.”

    I first saw united Berlin in December 1989, a month after the Wall came down, when it was a city in liquidation. As if in the Berlin airlift, I flew on a Pan American jet from Frankfurt, and in a friend’s small Trabant toured West and East Berlin, which felt, respectively, like Manhattan and Brooklyn, in the days before gentrification. The Kurfürstendamm had the brand-name franchises of New York’s Fifth Avenue, while East Berlin felt like the far reaches of Bensonhurst.

    This time, on foot (post-bike theft), I saw a united Berlin, but one with many cracks in the sidewalks. I found a street on which the English writer Christopher Isherwood, whose fiction inspired the play and movie Cabaret, had lived. His building was destroyed in the war, and the replacement speaks of the temporary housing that became permanent. If writing now about the city’s decadence, he might describe its bureaucracies — Humboldt is run by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation — rather than its cabarets.

    Another thing I did was go around to Berlin’s bookstores, and was surprised at how mediocre many were. Yes, they had book club novels and Hitler histories, but everything looked second-hand, not fresh off presses with any new ideas about the European Union, Mrs. Merkel, or Berlin. Has Germany discovered the end of history?

    * * *

    Before the bike vanished, I did take it up and down the Wilhelmstrasse to see what remains of Hitler’s and Bismarck’s Berlin. The city doesn’t have much from Bismarck’s era as the head of the German government. He wanted Berlin at the head of a unified Germany. When he got what he wanted in 1871, he realized (although it was too late for him to do much about it) he had the rest of Europe as his enemies.

    Likewise, the imperial masquerade of Speer’s Berlin went up in the smoke of the World War II. Hitler mandated him to draw boulevards wider than the Champs-Élysées, and reception halls vaster then the cathedral at Rheims. It was to have been Rome on steroids.

    In his memoirs, published in the 1970s, Speer describes a Hitler consumed with architectural ambitions, as if his military and political aggression was just to make the world safe for his city planning. The two spent countless hours discussing castles in the air, or an imperial way from the south Berlin station to a Great Hall near the Reichstag.

    There was to have been an oversized Arch of Triumph, and various Nazi ministries housed behind those faceless façades of National Socialism that spoke of government by diktat. Looking back on his dreams, however, Speer wrote of the Grunewald forest, “Of the whole vast project for the reshaping of Berlin, these deciduous trees are all that have remained.”

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author most recently of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays, and Whistle-Stopping America. His next book, Reading the Rails, will be published in 2015. He lives in Switzerland.

    Flickr photo by Nigel Swales: Billboard announcing construction on the now-completed Schlossplatz – Berliner Schloss (Humboldt Forum); a modern building housing museums and offices, but with the façade of the original city palace.

  • NFL Fantasy Meets EU Brexit

    Will Britain vote before the end of 2017 to stay in the European Union? Or will it leave, launching the much-debated Brexit? As the Lions face the Chiefs this Sunday in London, a perhaps related question is whether London should be awarded a franchise in the National Football League. Many Londoners would love nothing more than for the city to be granted a team, even if that team turns out to be the Jacksonville Jaguars, who are considering whether to become the first NFL exiles. If Britain were to leave the EU but join the NFL, maybe the last act of the American revolution will be a reverse takeover of England.

    Before explaining the English romance for what they call “American football,” let’s briefly review why Britain is getting cold feet about the EU. Keep in mind that the United Kingdom is an EU member more in spirit than on the ground, as Britain kept the pound as its currency, and has yet to embrace the Maastricht treaty on open borders. About all it conceded to the Union on immigration was a relaxation of the quarantine for cats and dogs.

    Britain liked the EU when it meant that Brits could easily buy condos in the south of Spain, or import duty-free claret from Bordeaux. It has had less enthusiasm for providing social services for Polish emigrants or bailing out insolvent Greek banks.

    The chances are good that Britain will be the first major power to bolt from the Union. For the moment, those supporting Brexit span the political spectrum, and include left-wing Labour socialists—angry at Europeans for taking away British jobs—and Tory rebels, for whom the EU is yet another melting-pot being dumped on traditional English values.

    Nor has the Balkanization of British politics helped the European cause. Prime Minister David Cameron, whose Conservatives enjoy an 8 seat majority in the House of Commons (but have 98 seats more than Labour, with many fringe parties taking up the balance), supports staying in Europe with some “fundamental” modifications to the terms of British membership. But if the price of power for Cameron means ditching the Europeans, he might be the first to whisper “wogs out” at the Tory club bar.

    Cameron’s political luck, so far, is that his term in office has coincided with the self-destruction of the Labour party (from 256 seats down to 232) and the near-extinction of the Liberal Democrats, who in the last election went from having 56 seats in the Commons to 8.

    In the 2015 election, Labour also found itself bounced out of Scotland, with its supporters going to the Scottish Nationalists. Then it replaced opposition leader Ed Miliband with Jeremy Corbyn, a dyed-in-the-wool, North London, Tony Benn socialist who dreams of nationalizing industry, and possibly — although not probably — reinstituting 1970s coal miner strikes and BritRail cold pork pies.

    After their electoral losses, the Labour faithful decided to vilify their last prime minister, Tony Blair, now the most unpopular man in British politics, for abandoning socialism in favor of his New Labour concoction, which was the British equivalent of Bill Clinton’s cozy triangulation with House Republicans in the 1990s.

    Labour’s lurch to the far left has put the Tories in position as Britain’s leading national political party. But they cannot find much consensus around centrist, pro-European opinions, as Conservatives have the dichotomous challenge of keeping Scotland and maybe Wales in the United Kingdom while watering down the appeal of nativist, skinhead nationalist parties.

    The most visible European opposition to EU membership comes from the right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP), although it only has one seat in the Commons. Scottish Nationalists, who went from 6 to 55 seats, for the moment are pro-EU, and a negative vote on Europe might renew the push within Scotland to leave the United Kingdom.

    With the center unable to hold, it is no wonder that London has embraced the National Football League as if it were a wartime support convoy. My younger son and I recently went to Wembley Stadium to watch the New York Jets play the Miami Dolphins, and at the same time see how London views the NFL. We were part of a throng of 83,000 (keep in mind that UKIP’s entire membership is only 47,000), few of whom seemed much concerned about the future of the European charter.

    To be sure, the crowd included diehard Jets and Dolphin fans who flew in for the game. Seated in front of us were three older guys (I could have been one of them) wearing Klecko, Namath, and Maynard jerseys, and no one would mistake them for moonlighting Arsenal fans taking in some American “footie.”

    Many of those in the stands wore American football jerseys from the closet depths. Wembley Stadium was temporarily transformed into a NFL Halloween parade with the likes of Rodgers, Roethlisberger, Montana, Rice, Gastineau, Luck, Romo, Marino, and Peyton Manning astride the stadium ramps.

    I associate British football (okay, soccer) fans with drunken hooliganism, but this sober crowd stood to sing “God Save the Queen,” and it applauded the Dolphin cheerleaders as if they were a road opera company.

    Unlike a European soccer game with all the advertisements jammed into halftime, the Jets and Dolphins “match” took almost four hours to complete.

    During the long afternoon there were booth reviews, thirty-second time outs, injuries, instant replays, concussion protocols, pauses after each quarter, and the two-minute warning, which felt like three-week business trip (“Hey Queen Elizabeth, this Bud’s for you!”).

    So frequent were the official time-outs for beer and car commercials, after a while Wembley had the air of the Universal Studios back lot, and the Jets and Dolphins looked like extras, hired out for a day of filming.

    The Jets beat the Dolphins, although for much of the second half they tried to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. (It is, after all, the 45th year of their rebuilding program.) Mercifully for Jets fans, the refs littered the “pitch” with penalty flags, and they nullified a Dolphins drive that started one yard from the Jets’ end zone.

    During many time-outs, I wondered why the British might vote out the European Union (and its time-efficient, free-flowing soccer matches), and vote in the NFL, or at least lobby it for a local franchise. In British soccer the clock never stops, not even for injuries, and the game ends in two hours. Neither side has cheerleaders in sequins.

    My guess is that that the London romance with the NFL speaks to UK ambivalence about the continuing embrace of the European Union.

    American football might be, as my British friend Simon Hoggart said, “random violence interrupted by committee meetings,” but unlike the European Union it has clear winners and losers and ends with a Super Bowl, as opposed to a wobbly common currency, milk subsidies, and Greeks on the dole.

    Will London trade EU membership for an NFL franchise? My guess is that it will. During the ill-fated NFL Europe attempt, London had the Monarchs, who could not keep pace with Düsseldorf’s Rhein Fire, and the league folded. This time, among the team names they should consider are the Queens, Kings, Beefeaters, Towers, Guards, and Tussauds. I can’t quite come to terms with the London Jaguars. It sounds like a car dealership.

    Would 83,000 fans have turned up for a Jeremy Corbyn or David Cameron speech on Brexit? I doubt it. Who really knows if Britain wins or loses by being in the European Union? It’s one of those political issues that is impossible to decipher, except on an emotional level.

    Or, as Joe Namath, the legendary New York Jets quarterback and counterculture figure, said of an earlier dilemma, “I don’t know if I prefer Astroturf to grass. I never smoked Astroturf.”

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author most recently of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of travel essays, and Whistle-Stopping America. His next book, Reading the Rails, will be published in 2015. He lives in Switzerland.

    Flickr photo by Tony Webster: NFL on Regent Street, London

  • Iran’s Urban Future: Tehran and Beyond

    With Iranian-American nuclear relations back on the front burner — make that front and center — I was able to secure a visa and travel counter-clockwise by train around Iran, covering more than a thousand miles. In American headlines and Congressional outbursts, Iran is thought only to be grappling with its nuclear dilemma. But I came to the conclusion that Iran’s future is tied more closely to its cities, where some 60 percent of the population lives, than it is to its nuclear capabilities or its revolutionary doctrines.

    By the time I left, a few weeks ago, nothing I saw lined up with its sinister reputation for revolutionary violence or near-fascist religious zeal. Mostly, I saw a developing country — like China in many ways — moving its young population sideways from the countryside into the cities (usually in an old car, spewing fumes). Herewith, an urban rundown:

    Tehran: I flew into and out of Tehran, the city that dominates the life of Iran. Even at 3:00 AM the traffic was heavy, and when I went around on the metro, there was never a moment when I wasn’t as squeezed as canned caviar.

    For a city of never-ending tenements (similar to Queens or Brooklyn), Tehran remains comparatively calm. I never heard shouting, car horns, or confrontations, just as I never saw an armed police officer (except at the airports) or Revolutionary Guard. Omnipresent portraits of ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei are the only symbols of sidewalk politics.

    Diplomats and wealthier Iranians prefer to remain crowded into North Tehran, which feels like an alpine village, given the snowcapped peaks that soar in the background. This is where the last two Shahs had their palaces (which are now open as museums of imperialist decadence). The poor live in the desert flatlands to the south. I walked outside the embassy complex where in 1979 the American diplomats were held hostage; its twenty-seven acres looks like an 1850s textile mill in Pawtucket.

    For reasons few can explain, Tehran works well as a city. The subway trains — while packed — come and go on schedule. The bazaar is a mall of plenty, even with all the sanctions; the university attracts the best students (including my gifted guide), and even the dense traffic seems to move.

    Tehran may lack architectural grace, central focus, cozy neighborhoods, restaurants (I saw few), tea gardens, and sufficient parks. But it doesn’t feel as if it is on the edge of a fundamentalist abyss, as it’s portrayed in the Western press. It struck me more as an endless block party.

    Mashad: Iran’s most holy city. With a population of three million, Mashad is holy because it is where the remains of the Eighth Imam (Reza) are entombed. Pilgrims from all over Iran and Iraq come to the shrine, which is at the center of a large complex of mosques, museums, minarets, and open courtyards.

    Before the 1979 revolution, Mashad had an old-city feel, with the shrine at the core of narrow twisting lanes and alleys. Now the shrine is at the center of an open, polished-marble mall that would be a skateboarder’s dream, were dudes ever called to prayers.

    Faith is the serious business in Mashad, and most of the women I saw wore black, no-nonsense chadors and hijabs. (In Tehran, younger women, especially, wear their headscarves as fashion statements, and wrap themselves in vibrant colors.)

    What surprised me is how welcoming the shrine is to non-believers. I came and went from the courtyard at all hours. Inside the shrine, I was free to sit on the Persian carpets, take pictures, read my book, or check my iPhone. Who knew that Iran’s holiest site doubles as a vibrant city park?

    Esfahan: Iran’s cultural capital. I rented a bicycle to get around this city of seventeenth-century splendor that fans out from the vast Naqsh-e Jahān Square (think of an enormous college quadrangle). In one direction are the warrens of the grand bazaar, while off at other angles there are palaces, mosques, and the incomparable mosaic dome of the Sheikh Lotfollah mosque (the inside of a Swiss watch, done in turquoise comes to mind). I was reminded of Florence (the good and bad), sensing that someday, when Iran has rejoined the travelers’ universe, bus tours will overrun the delicate Renaissance balance of the city center.

    The new city of Esfahan is bland by comparison to the old town and the bazaar. It stretches into the desert on the other side of the Zayandeh River, arched by an iconic bridge. There is also an old Armenian Quarter, which testifies, if on a small scale, that Iran is a polyglot mix of Persians (51 percent), Azeris (24 percent), Gilakis and Mazandaranis (8 percent), Kurds (7 percent), and Arabs (3 percent).

    Yazd: Southeast of Esfahan, in the center of Iran; an oasis of sorts. Come the restoration, Yazd — a city of mud-colored palaces and soaring minarets — will become the end of the rainbow for Persian Empire tourists, complete with five-star boutique hotels set around interior pools (there are some already) and rooftop gardens that serve tea at sunset and deliciously warm bread for breakfast.

    Shiraz: Near the ruins of Persepolis, the Persian showcase city in the desert. After the intensity of Tehran and Mashad, Shiraz came as a relief, with its palm trees, wide sidewalks, cool interiors, laid-back atmosphere, and many places in the shade to drink bottled water. Travelers come much as they used to pay homage to local vineyards that gave the world (but no longer Iran) Shiraz wines.

    Traffic is detoured from the city center, although on the edges it has the confusion associated with American cities in which interstates blaze their way through downtowns. Only the car speaks to most Iranians. While I loved my trains, they were largely for school kids on excursions and pilgrims on the move. VIP buses are for intercity connections. For the rest, there are cars, a gamut from clunkers to new SUVs that run on $1-a-gallon gasoline.

    Qom: The city of mullahs. South of Tehran by about 100 miles, and not far from the new Imam Khomeini International Airport, which was built to serve both cities. The clerics who control Iran from behind veils of secrecy live in Qom, which is — so to speak — the Vatican City of Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini lived here for much of his life, although later the Shah had him deported.

    Qom surprised me with its Disney-esque qualities. I had expected mullahs ready to flagellate themselves, or perhaps angry crowds of the faithful eager to demonstrate their spiritual purity to the ayatollahs. Instead, it brought to mind what might be thought of as Allah’s Asbury Park, complete with blinking lights, souvenir stands, food stalls, cruising teenagers, and a summer holiday atmosphere. Even inside the shrine I watched mullahs checking their iPhones and small boys playing tag.

    Even in Qom, as elsewhere throughout the country, Iran did not strike me as obsessively religious. Yes, the chadors and hijabs give the impression of a devout society. But those answering the call to prayers struck me as a minority. For example, nobody did anything in the metro when the muezzin was piped over the intercom. (Eternity just sounded like another stop.)

    When, at sunset one evening, my train stopped at a station for evening prayers, only a few passengers went into the platform mosque. The rest, it seemed, bought chewing gum.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of, among other books, Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited and Whistle-Stopping America. He has just returned from Iran, and lives in Switzerland.

    Flickr photo of Tehran at night by Loizeau.

  • Roadmap to Surprises of the Rustbelt

    Back in New York, no one quite believed my accounts of urban renewal across the Midwest, through a piece of the Rustbelt, and then back — that St. Louis is the Brooklyn of the heartland, or that even downtown Buffalo has charms. I tended to be on safer ground when I described Targeted small towns in Ohio, or drive-by shootings in Chicago.

    Despite the skepticism I knew I would eventually encounter, my idea was to go intercity with mass transit and to get around locally with my bike. I found that the downtown areas of many Midwestern cities are vibrant, rust free, and often ideal for biking, as well as for hotels, trendy restaurants, and funky businesses.

    It’s on the periphery of these Potemkin-convention cities that the bright lights dim on the porches of ramshackle wooden frame houses. That’s where the new ghettos look less like rundown public housing and more like rural shanties that have washed up in earlier working-class suburbs.

    Does it work to travel from Chicago to New York with a folding bike on trains and buses? Give or take, I managed fine. Amtrak grudgingly accepts folding bikes as normal luggage (it is easier to take a gun on board Amtrak than a full-sized bike), and intercity bus drivers (many are cheerful souls) are indifferent about baggage stowed below.

    The bigger problem in my planning was that few trains other than freights cut across the heartland from St. Louis to Cleveland. While buses do make the connections — say, from Terre Haute to Bloomington, Indiana — many of my departures took place between 5 and 6 a.m., the time that a friend calls o’dark.

    Nor were the intermodal connections seamless. Routinely, I was dumped off the bus at a Hardee’s in Nowheresville. Between Quincy, Illinois, and Hannibal, Missouri, the only place open at lunchtime was an adult superstore, but I hadn’t worked up an appetite for lace underwear.

    Herewith, by city, are some observations from behind the handlebars:

    Chicago: I went all over Chicago on the bike, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s show-homes in Oak Park to the South Side slums (where that weekend twelve people were wounded in assorted shootings). I also made it to the old stockyards, Haymarket Square (of anarchist fame), and the Hyde Park home of President Barack Obama, which now is unpleasantly hidden away behind tall trees, concrete anti-terror barriers, and snarling guards, giving it the air of a Beirut embassy.

    Beyond the elegant Loop, lakefront, university districts, and various solid neighborhoods, Chicago has endless stretches of abandoned warehouses—no man’s lands between the city and suburbs, belts in search of manufacturing.

    I felt better when I found where the Marx Brothers had lived when they were still playing vaudeville; Ernest Hemingway’s boyhood home (when he sported curls in what he famously called that place of “broad lawns and narrow minds”); and a magnificent bike lane that sweeps along Lake Michigan. I even found myself agreeing with former vice president Dan Quayle, who said “It is wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago.”

    St. Louis: Few city downtowns are as pleasant as that of St. Louis, which struck me as having a perfect mix of parks, restaurants, stadiums, hotels, and office buildings converted into residential lofts, many with views of the Mississippi and the Gateway Arch. I biked out as far as Clayton, Missouri, through the incomparable Forest Park, and looped around several universities, hospitals, and museums, all of which add to the city’s infrastructure luster.

    Most of what I saw was white St. Louis, as gracious as a southern plantation, although coming and going I went through northern and eastern satellite suburbs — Ferguson is one of many — where the local economy seems to revolve around selling tires, check cashing, and all-night convenience stores.

    Indianapolis: On the way from St. Louis to Indianapolis, I stopped in Springfield (part of a Lincoln haj) and Terre Haute. My bus into the Indiana capital left me at the “downtown transit center,” a dreary cave of broken vending machines, now that the former railroad station is an elegant hotel.

    The rest of downtown Indianapolis sparkled, and I spent the best day of my travels ducking into the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, drinking coffee on sunny terraces, following bike paths, exploring the canals, and touring the city’s many universities, Butler and Indiana-Purdue among them.

    Only when I went out on the bike that night looking for the boyhood home of writer Kurt Vonnegut did I find the other Indianapolis, which is camped out in dilapidated wooden frame houses or low-rise housing projects, clearly off the convention-city grid. No wonder Vonnegut wrote “So it goes.”

    Canton: So poorly is Ohio served with public transportation that I was forced to rent a car to go from Dayton Trotwood (a sad shopping center where the Indianapolis bus dropped me) to Canton and Cleveland. I stuck mainly to the secondary roads, often clogged with traffic and slow lights. Unless someone can add a dome, Astroturf, and The Gap to Hometown USA, it will be lost.

    Canton was the saddest city on my travels. Not even the presence of the Pro Football Hall of Fame or William McKinleyism can put a positive spin on the vacant lots and boarded-up storefronts.

    Cleveland: I was back on the bike, and loved much of what I saw downtown in the canyons of Art Deco office buildings.

    Cleveland is more of an extended suburb than a city — if not a state of mind with a football team — although it can quickly change from blocks of lakefront mansions to rows of seedy body shops… emphasis here on the word “body”.

    Buffalo: On my night bike ride into the city from Amtrak’s suburban Depew Station, I passed through a series of depressing slums and at one point had to out-sprint a highwayman who wanted to steal my rig. (“Give me that fucking bike,” is how he introduced himself.)

    The new ghetto arose from the old working class neighborhoods; a nether world in the shadows of subsidized convention centers and urban renewal towers. Buffalo at night is a ghost town, although I loved riding north along Delaware Avenue to the state university.

    In upstate New York, I made a loop around the Finger Lakes through such rustbelt stalwarts as Corning, Binghamton, Syracuse, and Auburn. The delight was Elmira, with its local college that has the Mark Twain writing studio in which he wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Ithaca is a labyrinth of universities and dead-end streets that gets my vote for the most confusing city grid in America.

    Syracuse at night — on the bike or waiting at the bus station — felt like the set of a sci-fi movie in which everyone has been vaporized. Binghamton aspires to hipness, but, well, it’s Binghamton. At least Auburn has the prison, and at midnight its strange aurora borealis of klieg lights made my bike vest glow like medieval chain-mail.

    A series of buses and commuter trains took me down to New York City. I had booked on Amtrak, but its Lake Shore Limited was routinely seven or more hours late. One conductor blamed the delays on the weather from the previous winter, although my seat mate said impoverished locals robbed the copper from the track signals.

    At the end of my riding, I think I came across as someone as morose as the novelist Theodore Dreiser, who took what he called “a Hoosier holiday,” at a time when, as he wrote, “America was in the furnace stage of its existence.” But I defy anyone who doesn’t take heart from a Lake Erie sunrise.

    Photo by the author: Downtown Cleveland from Lake Erie

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author, most recently, of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays, and Whistle-Stopping America. His next book, Reading the Rails, will be published in 2015. He lives in Switzerland.