Avuncular American

Citizen's Arrest!

Today I longed for the America of Mayberry NC, that imaginary Sixties town where even as dumb a citizen as Gomer Pyle could shout "Citizen's Arrest!" at law breakers and hope that justice would be served.  Even though the Andy Griffith Show is long over, apparently the notion of citizens reporting traffic violations continues in Rockville, Maryland, a Washington D.C. suburb where we once lived.   There, citizens - hopefully public-spirited and not mean-spirited - can W.R.I.T.E. (Witness Report in Traffic Enforcement) their local police, filling out an online form, which covers everything from excessive speed to reckless driving.

Reckless driving - I guess that's what you might call my encounter this morning while walking back home from the bakery.  On a busy two-lane Brussels street, I chose my crossing point judiciously.  A "zebra" crossing, where, in Belgium, the simple placement of a foot from sidewalk to pavement is supposed to result in traffic coming to a halt to let the pedestrian cross.  In this case, it was even better: a city bus had stopped to pick up passengers immediately before the crosswalk.  I needn't even look left - the bus was in that lane - and the car in the other lane was slowing down.

But skeptic that I am, I did look left, and lo and behold, a big black 4 X 4 with two testosterone-laden young men out to prove that they can pass a stopped bus - a violation - and run down (almost) a pedestrian in a crosswalk - another violation - is bearing down on me.   Luckily, they weren't willfully homicidal, and they did stop at the sight of a bespectacled fifty-something holding up his hands in what - a Gomer Pyle gesture?  I noted down the license plate, the place, the time, and proceeded to walk home.

Now, I realize that I am in the land of 7 parliaments, 3 geographic "regions" overlaid with 3 linguistic "communities," with 10 provinces and their governors and 589 communes with their bourgmestres, and that English common law and its notion of "citizen's arrest" carries no weight.  But I wasn't prepared for the answer to my phone call to the local police station.

"No, monsieur, only a policeman can report an infraction of the traffic code."  Oh, I see.  What if I had been run over?  How about the bus and tram drivers, who daily witness multiple "incivilities" that run the gamut from blocking their route to running red lights?  "No, only police can note violations."  As the lady said, just shoot me.

Napoleon and his Code did rule Belgium before it became Belgium, but even in France, the authorities appear to encourage local initiatives for road safety.  Not here: my police station call desk person wasn't even interested in knowing about a major intersection where just posting a cop would result in daily or hourly or minute-ly red light-running tickets.

Aren't they even interested in a little revenue generation?

Splits, Belgian Style

This post was almost entitled Les fleurs du mal, but I couldn't associate these beautiful bluebells with anything negative.  The walk in the woods yesterday, in Halle - the "H" in BHV (of which more below) - was as usual devoid of politics, though as expected in this part of suburban territory southwest of Brussels (a.k.a. "B" in BHV), all the trail signs were in Dutch.  We have adopted a formula when encountering fellow hikers, who could either be Flemish or French-speakers (or maybe even other foreigners) - my wife says bonjour, and I say goeiedag, like the Aussi "G'day!"  A perfect example from the foreigners to the locals on how to use their unique linguistic situation to positive effect.

What, you might ask, is all this BHV stuff?  It's shorthand for a federal voting district, the only one remaining in Belgium that crosses linguistic lines.  Brussels, Halle, and Vilvoorde, which in almost any other country would simply be called "Greater ______" and here should be called "Metropolitan Brussels," remain stitched together in a throwback to the days when Belgium saw itself as a unified country.  The goal of most of the Dutch-speaking political class is to "split" (that's also the Dutch word) BHV, leaving the officially bilingual but mostly francophone Brussels even more of an island in Dutch-speaking Flanders.  The French-speakers see that as a dangerous step towards splitting the country (they call it scission, which does conjure up the word secession).  

Belgium does "splits" rather naturally, though the results are never as clean as log-splitting being prepared here in the Hallerbos.  We know a couple from neighboring Luxembourg who studied in the ancient University of Louvain when it was located in Leuven, a lovely Flemish town east of Brussels.

They were there in the Sixties, when Flemish nationalists succeeded in chasing the francophones away, who then proceeded to build Louvain-la-Neuve, a soulless concrete new town dedicated to housing the French half of the university.  Right down to the books.  Just think of Harvard's library, divided along, say, color lines: "green books stay here, red covers off to Cape Cod Community College."  Our friends and many others wept at the mindless sectarianism, which back then even included violence.

These days, the separatists appear to be using nitpicking linguistic laws rather than brute force, and the cumulative effect is probably as efficient.  Some francophones who would brave the linguistic divide in search of better housing or cheaper prices run up against laws that are written with linguistic purity in mind.  Some discriminative practices set up by the Flemish authorities have run afoul of the Council of Europe, the human rights watchdog, notably over the "Wooncode" which makes the needy pass a Dutch test to become eligible for social housing.

But how about the current political crisis, you ask?  Oh yes: last week a report on BHV triggered the resignation of the Prime Minister, which brings us full circle to summer 2007, when elections started a cycle of interim PM, interminable negotiations to form a coalition, Leterme I government, resignation and another governement, followed by Leterme II, followed by his second resignation...  I've actually left out a couple of resignations.

As Julian Stares says in today's London Observer, there's an apocryphal story about how British leaders "give their Belgian counterparts less time than others at EU summits because they know that within a year or two they'll be dealing with someone new."  That would certainly be true in the last three years.  Think of the economic cost to Belgium of this protracted political instability - would you invest here?

Belgian politicians, it would seem, abetted perhaps by a news media that gives inordinate amounts of coverage to the most obscure of quarrels over linguistic-regional issues, blithely ignore the toll their games are taking on the image of Belgium.  If anything, they should be worried about "Brand Brussels," which is the international hook that draws foreign investors and visitors.  But to many Flemish politicians, Brussels is a kind of Gomorrah of immigrants, crime, and French-speakers.  They don't like it, but they don't want it to leave their embrace.

At least we can go for a walk in the Flemish forest.  Goeiedag.

The Expatriate Condition: Potentially Permanent

Note to readers: this is an abridged version of an article appearing in the current issue of Together Magazine, a glossy Brussels bi-monthly catering to the Anglophone expatriate community.  Sheet music cover from "The Singing War" of Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries.

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Some of us have made this expat business our life’s work.  In public service (I’m most familiar with diplomats and the military), multiple postings abroad are often the norm.  And Brussels is brimming with semi permanent expats whose professional lives revolve around the EU institutions.  But I’ve known lots of private sector people too for whom a life overseas is the culmination of a dream, and who have trouble going back.  It’s an old problem.

How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm? (After They’ve Seen Paree) put to song the dilemma facing American soldiers who’d been sent to France in the Great War, survived the trenches, then met a pretty Parisienne on a weekend pass.  Some, like Ernest Hemingway, stayed on for a while, and a similar thing happened after the Second World War.  Less dramatic, but no less of a quandary for today’s HR department: how 'ya gonna send ‘er back to Baltimore, after she’s seen Bruxelles?

This expat thing gets into your blood, and it may be hereditary.  Ever notice how many expats are children of expats?  It comes from going to school with classmates from every continent, and from growing up with a different – if not downright confused – sense of nationality.  There are strident nationalists in every grouping, but as a class expats are probably more inclined to see at least two sides to every question.

“Far away fields look green” goes the adage, which makes almost every destination potentially appealing.  Born and raised in the United States, I’ve spent most of my adult life outside my native country.  Mine is a conscious choice, a sort of “reverse migration” for someone whose parents came to the US from County Mayo, Ireland.  But I know a Frenchman, an interpreter, who chose to settle in the US because he finds it “exotic.”  And he lives in suburban Washington D.C.!

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe,” reminisced Rutger Hauer’s dying replicant in Blade Runner; “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”  You don’t have to be an alien to feel like you’ve come in from outer space.  Just be a typical expat returning home to family or old neighbors, who feign interest in your international life for a few seconds before changing the subject back to local matters.  They probably don’t share your reverie about the good life abroad.  Which is why many expats befriend other expats, who can at least relate to a life lived outside the boundaries of “home.”

Oh yes, Home.  Many of us have a clear, unequivocal notion of where that is.  Others aren’t so sure.  Where home is, when home was a certain house, who was at home… home can be, as another old saying goes, where the heart is.  Expats don’t necessarily live out of a suitcase, but they often have a more flexible idea of what “home” means.  When I consider Brussels as home, it doesn’t mean I reject my Pennsylvania upbringing, and feeling “at home” in Ireland is more an emotional link to the memory of my parents than anything territorial.

All of this is not to build up the expatriate condition as a universal solution.  After all, not everyone can or should leave the land of their birth – you might not really want your embarrassing younger brother to show the flag abroad, at least not in your presence.  I remember puzzling over some of my fellow diplomats who persisted in living abroad when their time there was spent largely in the company of their countrymen.

That can be a challenge, mind you – not just getting to know some locals, but actually befriending them.  In a place like Brussels, people have seen scores of expats come and go, and may shy from establishing friendships that risk being broken by a subsequent transfer.

And if it’s hard on the locals, it’s also hard on the itinerant foreigner.  Just listen to the BBC World Service program “From Our Own Correspondent” and you’ll hear the occasional heartfelt goodbye to a place a journalist has called home for years.  Hard as it is to say farewell to foreign places and people, it shouldn’t keep us expats from making local bonds, as the whole experience of living in another country is so much richer with the knowledge that host country friends and neighbors can provide.

So, is there a cure for the expat bug?  I’m in my sixth decade, living in an adopted country, married to a French woman, with a dozen countries I’ve called home, and the siren song of foreign fields still beckons.  Is that living the dream or postponing reality?  Not sure, but it’s in my blood.

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A Country Is a Terrible Thing To Waste

Apologies to the Ad Council and the United Negro College Fund for my deforming their long running "A Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Waste" ad campaign.  But the sentiment fits my message.

Further mea culpas to nationalists in both the United States and Belgium for what I'm about to do.  But I care deeply about both countries, being a citizen of the former and a resident of the latter.  Both have the potential to be greater than their current national selves, and both are suffering from an institutional malaise that causes the national machinery to break down - literally, in the tragic case of the train accident this week outside Brussels.

Just keep the trains from hitting each other

How so, you may ask?  As soon as news of a head on collision between two commuter trains hit the press, questions started to be raised: was this another example of linguistic confusion between traffic controllers?  Was this a "black day for Flanders," the scene of the accident, as the head of the Dutch-speaking region said?  No, not just Flanders, for there were probably as many or more Francophone wallons on the trains, part of the massive daily national exchange of populations across the "linguistic frontier."  But everything in Belgium is eventually linked to the thorny linguistic community question.

If anything, the breakup of the national train service into several entities, with crucial responsibility for infrastructure and security spun off to a company that holds no responsibility for making the trains run on time, is probably at the root of the problem.  But the political finagling underlying the breakup of something that had been a coherent whole is apparent: the newspaper photo captions identifying the supposedly technocratic bosses of the several entities that comprise the Belgian train system carried the political affiliations of each.  They are party creatures, carefully selected to reflect the correct ideological and linguistic balance.  But can they run trains?

Governments are supposed to govern, no?

Across the pond, meanwhile, political science dictionary writers are going to have to come up with a new term that goes beyond gridlock.  Terminal hold?   Rigor senatis?  Fili-busted?  Republicans appear to only know how to say no, and Democrats appear unable to understand that more than fifty percent of anything is a majority.

Blame games are for losers, and as Democrats and Republicans trade charges over their collective inability and/or unwillingness to get a move on, the Chinese, who have neither Republicans or Democrats but just Commie-capitalists, get to play Monopoly by themselves.  Monopoly over much of the world's industrial production and creditor to their biggest customer for cheap goods, the United States.

This, and the long term standing of the world's oldest democracy is what our elected officials should be dealing with.

With Belgium's regional and linguistic tensions always present in debate on the future of the country, the threat of division is never far away.  The "Belgian compromise" is legendary in Europe, where at the 11th hour a Belgian middle way is found to save the EU deliberations on sometimes obscure issues.  But domestically, this compromise has tended to compromise chances for good governance.  Cutting the train system into parts, insisting on a four-lane highway because the other region has one, proliferating parliaments to create jobs for politicians - you can compromise your way into a dysfunctional state.  Remember, Solomon only threatened to cut the baby in half.

In the US, at least no one other than a few fringe Republicans is calling for the breakup of the union.  Nostalgic for "American empire?"  We need to be taken down a peg or two if we think we can continue indefinitely in our unsustainably wasteful, greedy, consumerist ways.  But American democracy is quite another thing.  If today's politicians so disgust the citizenry that voters leave the business of elections and elective office to the crazy fringe, then the world will have lost very much indeed.

A country is a terrible thing to waste.

 

Les Barons - Nabil Ben Yadir

Driving a BMW While Arab...

... is no problem in downtown Dubai, where wealthy Arabs own the place, and driving anything less flashy would be suspect.

In Brussels, however, where Arabes are largely relegated to buses and the metro, people might get the impression that the car's either been stolen or bought through drug deals.  This cliché-overturning image is at the heart of Nabil Ben Yadir's understated comedy.

In the case of "Les Barons" (official site), this group of mostly unemployed guys from the "ghetto" (variously known in French as le quartier or la zone) just want to show off and pick up girls.  So they've chipped in with 8 unequal shares from their welfare allowances or black market jobs to buy the upmarket car.

This good-hearted story of underdogs who might just do well was not the broad, obvious comedy that we sort of expected to see.  Much of the humor consists of inside jokes, often dealing with the delicate territory of relations between first and second generation Moroccan Belgians, whose parents have high hopes for them to follow in their footsteps: blue collar job security, filial loyalty, semi-arranged marriage followed by grandchildren.

But what if you want to be a standup comedian?  Is browbeaten Hassan, played with subtle grace by Nader Boussandel, going to stick with his dreams or obey his father, a salt-of-the-earth immigrant who wants his son to get an honest job?

Some of the brothers and sisters from the hood do well, especially Malika, Hassan's childhood sweetheart who now presents the evening TV news.  The impossible dream?  Well, not really: here in Belgium, both of the main francophone channels' TV news programs are anchored by women of maghrebi origin.

Director Nabil Ben Yadir has fun with other insider references, both to films and to Belgium's complex mix of languages, ethnicity, and regions.   His casting of veteran Flemish actor Jan Decleir (star of the excellent 2003 thriller The Alzheimer Case) is a nice touch: here he plays greengrocer Lucien, whose vegetable stalls make a nice lounge for our Barons with time on their hands.  This time, it's not Alzheimer's but Parkinson's disease that afflicts the actor.

Likewise, Baron-wannabe Franck is played by non-Arab Julien Courbey, who wanted to be an Algerian in the 2005 comedy Il était une fois dans l'oued.  Poor Franck, he just wants some "respect" from his maghrebi friends, but it's just like Steve Buscemi's hangdog "Donny" in The Big Lebowski - everything he says is dissed.

Les Barons comes at an interesting time, when Belgian media are contrasting the relatively benign (or at least laissez-faire) attitude of Brussels' francophones on the question of urban security with an alarmist (some might say racist) view among many in the country's Dutch-speaking Flemish majority.  In truth, as a 2008 article showed in Le Monde Diplomatique, many of the young immigrant-origin Belgians - even though born and raised in the country - are "foreigners inside their own city" and rarely leave le quartier.

This is also Nabil Ben Yadir's own story - he knows how difficult it is to take that step away from the confines of the urban immigrant ghetto: "If you leave le quartier, it's a bit like treason... the first step is complicated... for me, it was making my first feature film."  Read his entire interview here (.pdf, in French).

Ben Yadir's first step is no baby step.  This is a very subtle, funny, and touching film.  One that deserves wider international distribution than it's likely to get as "the first comedy on Belgium's immigrant neighborhoods."

(Poster from Films.ma) 

Climate: Earth's Recirc Button Still On

Whatever just happened in Copenhagen - and I reserve judgment 'til I've read a comprehensive debrief - the underlying problem of carbon overproduction hasn't gone away.

One thing is for sure: this post and millions like it, and the millions of emails and spam mails sent daily, will add their share of greenhouse gases to our planet's already full atmosphere.  I read somewhere that the spam sent to Hotmail accounts alone consumed the equivalent of the production of 5 nuclear power plants.  Only they're more likely to be coal-fired plants...

It's like we're in one big airplane, folks, Earth Airlines, breathing in that stale air constantly recirculated around us.  The flight never ends, and fresh air is a relative concept.  So am I going to cease blogging?  Hardly.  I'm already using public transport for most movement throughout Brussels, and I try to climb the staircase vice using the elevator in my building a good half of the time.  But I still am dependent on electricity coming - in the case for Belgium and France - from a mix of nuclear and coal-fired power plants.  I"m in the grid.

For Brussels and its surrounding countryside, the solid waste equivalent of the closed circuit effect was illustrated this past week with odoriferous obviousness.  The private sector contractor in charge of the city's main waste treatment facility decided, apparently without consulting the city (capital region) authorities, to shut down the facility and dump Brussels' untreated effluent into the rivers flowing through and out of the capital.

Into someone's back yard, that is. The backyard being the Flanders region, already prickly about the presence of the million Francophones, expatriates, and immigrants who make up Brussels, in their midst (Brussels is entirely surrounded by Dutch-speaking Flanders).  Every time I flushed the toilet, I felt like saying "excuseer mevrouw en meneer" or some such thing.

The Francophone Brussels environment minister even had to scurry home from Copenhagen to handle the PR mess, since all she could do about the other mess was to frustratedly order the contractor to re-open the plant, which will be done - eventually.

The affair shows, with visual and nasal effect, how no man is an island, or how "down the drain" doesn't end when you flush the toilet.  Homeowners with septic tanks know that the honey-dipper must come or the system backs up; for those with municipal sewerage systems, it gets more complicated.  But someone else always lives downstream.

Maybe politicians weren't the right people to send to Copenhagen.  How about some HVAC technicians to explain that polluted recirculated air remains polluted unless filtered?  Better yet, stop polluting the air in the first place.  Or plumbers, who know that garbage in will result in garbage out, unless purified to an acceptable level.

When it comes down to it, perhaps even in the hearts of the most die hard climate change deniers, it should be common sense and a sense of self-preservation that forces us to do the right thing.  But as last week's ballyhoo in Brussels over solid waste flowing downstream should show us, governments cannot count on their contractors to do the right thing or even the most basic of civic-minded actions.  Not without controls, oversight, rules and regulations.  The job of governments, and the people who elect them.

The Luxury of Sunrise and Sunset

Note to readers:  This essay (non-political, for a change) appears in the current issue of "Together Magazine," a glossy Brussels bi-monthly distributed to the legions of EU functionaries and "advocacy" people (lobbyists) in this city.  UK spelling and references to £ and € reflect the generally Brit readership among the anglophone expat population.  The magazine's theme for the issue was "luxury."

Mont St. Michel, France

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Luxury – especially if its antonym is “discomfort” – cannot surely be all bad. Carried to extremes however, its pursuit can become, in the term coined by 19th century economist Thorstein Veblen, “conspicuous consumption” that is, wasteful, unnecessary, and – in these days of economic down-turning – downright despicable.

Perhaps that’s why certain advertising agencies have banned the “L” word from their lexicon, as Adweek recently suggested. This has happened before: luxuria, or “lust” in Latin, was the first of the original Seven Deadly Sins; search Google for contemporary usage and you’ll find certain British rock groups and dodgy Italian politicians.

What this will mean for all those products – Electrolux® appliances, Unilever’s Lux™ brand line – with the sinful suffix is difficult to say. As a prefix, “lux” is another matter, however – nobody accuses Luxembourg of lustful excess, though the Grand Duchy might have to go some extra lengths to prove that it is no longer a haven for all those luxury-seeking tax cheaters.

Flaunting your luxurious lifestyle to excess can sometimes result in trouble – if your conspicuous spending mismatches with your tax contributions, it can even bring the taxman to your door. The French have a term for that: “signes extérieurs de richesse” – there’s a delicious moment in the excellent 1998 comedy “Le Dîner de Cons” where the imminent visit of an inspector has the tax-avoiding leading man scrambling to stuff all his expensive artwork into a broom closet.

“Ostentation is a godsend for the fiscal authorities,” says a leading expert. But in some places, flaunting wealth is de rigueur. The Principality of Monaco actively courts URIs – “Ultra Rich Individuals” – who help fuel that casino “country” on the Med. But now, even URIs are facing straitened circumstances. The Economist, which recently ran a special report on “The Rich - Under Attack,” notes that luxury goods spending has plummeted some 34 %. “Bling on a budget,” apparently, is now the way of the wealthy. The Economist’s cover illustration is a Delacroix spin-off: French Revolutionaries led by a bare-breasted maid carrying a “Get the Rich!” placard (check the anachronous Blackberry on one of the fallen aristos). Poor dears.

Okay, there are the rich, the super-rich, and then there’s you and me. For Slumdogs who aren’t yet Millionaires, paying-to-poo in the relative comfort of a Mumbai latrine might be the height of luxury. Somewhere between that – and paying £35,000 for a diamond-studded cocktail in London’s Movida nightclub – is where I’d situate the luxury range for most readers. So here’s a suggestion: start thinking of luxury in strictly personal terms, instead of what you think those famous Joneses are up to, for you’ll never be able to keep up with them, and will be unhappy even trying.

Instead, carve out your personal luxury space and revel in it: a distinctive Belgian “beer-of-the-month” perhaps, taken in a local bistro, in a part of Brussels you don’t yet know. A €4.50 day-long public transport ticket, to crisscross the city in the quest for that special beer… (Note: non-alcoholic pleasures are permissible, but they escape me for the moment).

Here’s my personal cheapskate luxury favourite: find a seaside (or lakeside) location facing east, make a thermos of your preferred hot beverage, buy or bake some yummy pastries, and get up early enough to watch the sun rise. Variation: trade the breakfast fare for smoked salmon on fresh bread, accompanied with appropriate bubbly, and watch the setting sun opposite Ostend, or the ever-changing play of light over Mont Saint Michel.

It will set you back a couple of euros, but so what? If unstructured time, the sound of silence, and good company are precious commodities, you’ll be able to enjoy countless luxuries that those “URIs” can only dream of. Webster’s alternate definition of luxury: “a pleasure out of the ordinary allowed to oneself.” Doesn’t sound terribly sinful to me.

1920s beach scene from RootsWeb, Ancestry.com (Creative Commons)

Journée Sans Voitures - No Car Day In Brussels

This is an experiment, attempting to do a post by email. I am cheating, because to insert this nice "No Car" sticker from the Boston bloggers "Choosing No Car," I had to log on to my Typepad account.

Okay, enough geeky detail. The important thing is this: for the nth time in recent years, Brussels, seat of the European Union, is turning itself into a carless capital. "La Journée Sans Voitures" is a joy for anyone who values fresher air, walking IN the streets, and peace and quiet.

Not that our leafy neighborhood is noisy, but this morning, going out for fresh bread, it was like the final scene (minus the scary post apocalyptic music) of the end of the world in "On The Beach." No sound, empty streets. That will have changed when we take the tram a little later; last year our tram could barely move for all the cyclists and pedestrians clogging the city's many cultural and historic venues.

Brussels, a city of only about a million people, can go carless thanks to its wonderful integrated public transport system, where one simple ticket gets you on to trams, buses, metros, and trains. We almost never go into city center by car. So, looking for inspiration for a post-Detroit future? Come to Brussels next September and savor what it's like to spend a day without The Car.

Industrial Infrastructure - Not Just For the Museum

Throughout August and September, Europe’s cities, regions, and nations have been marking various “heritage,” “open house,” or “patrimoine” days. This weekend it is Brussels’ turn, but we also intend to take in some sites in northern France. Value for money doesn’t get much better: most of the sites are free, and some only open for this event.

Last weekend it was the turn of Belgium’s two largest regions, Flanders and Wallonia. We checked out several places in Wallonie, concentrating on the rich industrial heritage of what is now a region known for its depressed economy. In the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, it was quite the opposite.

As you can see from the photo of the stupendous canal elevator at Strépy-Thieu, Wallonie and Belgium have seen fit to create marvels of the 21st century, just a few kilometers from the UNESCO world heritage site of its 19th century predecessors. Strépy-Thieu and its attendant infrastructure show how investment in transport alternatives for trucks clogging motorways exist, and can be made to thrive again.

For those who still know what a factory is, and who know that “industrial zone" doesn’t only refer to prefab warehouses to store Chinese goods destined for our shelves, check out the “European Route of Industrial Heritage” (ERIH), which has a store of information on its website.

One of Belgium’s most interesting ERIH stops is the Ecomusée (eco as in economic) du Bois-du-Luc, in the former coal belt of La Louvière south of Brussels. The road signs still tend to say “musée des mines,” but once you find the place, there’s no missing its purpose. It’s a veritable company town, built when capitalists had a paternal hold over their workers, even providing housing, shopping, and medical care on site. Quite an innovation for the 19th century.

But the paternalism only went so far. That impressive entrance you see in the photo, separating the courtyard of the mining site from the “cité ouvrière,” separates more than residential from industrial. That heavy steel gate between the brick towers is called, rather ominously, a “porte guillotine,” and though it may not have chopped any heads off, the message was clear to striking workers: do not try anything stupid. A far cry from today’s impunity with industrial property, when strikers in France kidnap management or strap homemade explosives to the machine tools.

But I digress. Much as I laud the work of these institutions which safeguard the industrial past in all its forms, I want future generations to admire what should be our industrial present. And that means retaining an industrial base, no matter how “yuppie” or gentrified our cities might become.

Recently I read in Belgium’s Le Soir (”Industries SDF à Bruxelles?“) that space for industry in Europe’s capital is disappearing at the rate of some 8,600 square meters per month, which, says journalist François Robert, “means there won’t be anything left, if this rate is maintained, in less than a year.” Sorry, folks, that just won’t do. Brussels, or Belgium, or any country for that matter, cannot live by bureaucrats and university students alone. And as much as tourists like to admire Brussels’ impressive sites like the Grand Place and the Atomium, I have yet to see a country achieve 1st world status (or retain it) via package tours.

So admire these wonders of the industrial world that have been preserved for posterity, but avoid crying “not in my back yard” when some entrepreneur wants to set up a little workshop down the street. Your future economic health may depend on it.

Belgium & Bolivia: Surfeits Of Democracy?

Other than a dusty bilateral maritime trade treaty involving guano (in 1836 both countries were in the first bloom of independence: Belgium was only 6 years old, and Bolivia 11, and it still had a coastline), I don't suppose there is a whole lot linking the two countries.

But this morning on the BBC, I learned of President Evo Morales' plan to grant autonomy based on ethnic lines (read "indigenous population," from which he hails).  Many countries have such arrangements, and Bolivia no doubt has much to atone for in its treatment of its Indian population, who constitute the majority.  But here's the catch: apparently this will create what amounts to five layers of government.

This is where Belgium comes in.  Belgium is probably a world leader in layers of government, which at times can border on the surreal.  There is the national (federal) parliament in Brussels, the city which is also home to a Flemish regional assembly that doubles as a body for the Dutch-speaking speaking community.  Then there's the Brussels Capital Region assembly, and finally the Francophone community's parliament.  Not to be confused with the parliament of the French-speaking region of Wallonie, which sits in Namur.  I may have left something out.

Oh yes, provinces.  Actually, I've been living on and off in Belgium for upwards of a decade, and other than ubiquitous road signs announcing the limit of this or that province, I had never thought of them as jurisdictions, with administrations and therefore administrators.  But yes, Belgium probably leads the world in the number of people on the payroll of one level of government or another.

Don't get me wrong: I am a former public servant, and see more of a role for government in addressing society's ills than most of my compatriots.  But there are limits to representative democracy, and there's a reason that the United States is a republic rather than a direct democracy.  You can have too much of a good thing.

Even in the US, there are way too many jurisdictions.  Just look at a map of, say, the Miami area, and you'll see the city of Miami, neighboring Miami Beach, and Dade County, but also a bunch of mini-municipalities that insist on having their own government structure, replete with a police force where, I bet you, the chief of police has four stars on his lapel or shoulder, in the best tradition of some foreign armies, where a sergeant can have as many stars as General Petraeus.

So, all power to the Bolivians, but maybe they should rethink those extra layers of government.  They haven't done much good for the Belgians.