Transterrestrial Musings

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My Dinner With Instantman

Well, actually, very little of this post is about that, but it got your attention didn't it?

I haven't been posting much because I've been on the road, but you long-time readers know what that means--you're going to be tormented with a long and tedious transterrestrial travelogue.

I rented a car in St. Louis Sunday night, to drive back east, to DC, and Michigan for a wedding on Saturday. I'd reserved it at Thrifty through Travelocity--unlimited miles in an "intermediate" car (meaning in this case a Daimler-Chrysler Sebring), with a weekly rate of $179. When I got to the rental counter, I saw a notice taped to it. The car could only be used in the neighboring states: Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Arkansas and Iowa. I had no interest in Iowa or Arkansas, and in addition to the other states on the list, I wanted to go to Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and, of course, Michigan. The penalty for going outside the designated area was non trivial--thirty two cents a mile for all miles driven, which would be about six hundred bucks for a couple thousand miles. Suddenly my rental car deal was looking like less of a bargain, and Thrifty wasn't living up to their name.

What to do? How did they enforce it? Was it the honor system? Was I honorable?

I asked, casually, not as if it had any relevance to me, you know, just out of curiousity.

"We have tracking devices."

Oh.

Is it true? Are they bluffing? I know that it's certainly technically feasible, and in these days of sub-one-hundred-dollar GPS receivers and cheap cell phones that could call in locations automatically, almost certainly affordable. I yield.

"You know, they didn't mention anything about that restriction when I made the reservation. I was going to a wedding in Michigan, and to a meeting in DC. I can't afford thirty-two cents a mile."

He says he'll see what he can do. He taps at the keyboard, and says, "We can give it to you unrestricted for two seventy eight. Plus tax."

A hundred dollar premium for what I thought I had already made arrangements for. He's got me by the short ones--I've been dropped off, and to shop around, I'd have to take a shuttle over to the airport, and then to another rental place, adding at least another hour to my ordeal, and it's already ten o'clock at night. And there's no guarantee that I'll get a better deal, or at least a better enough one to make it worth the hassle. I yield again, and he rings up the sale.

I get to the car, and discover it's red.

I have a problem with red cars. I'm convinced that they're cop bait. They just look like they're going fast, even when they're parked. If you're cruising down the freeway at ten over, along with a bunch of other traffic, how's the cop going to discriminate among all the cars?

Is he going to ticket the white Corolla that doesn't look like it could do eighty downhill with a twenty-knot tailwind? How about the silver Caddie with the bluehaired little old lady who can barely see over the dash? Or the pale blue Volvo with the fading Gore-Lieberman bumper sticker (well, maybe in Texas).

No, he's going to pull over the guy in the bright red sports car (which has become a sports car merely by dint of its tint--as someone who wasted much of his pimply adolescence repeatedly tuning and rebuilding MGs, Triumphs, Alphas, Sunbeams, Vettes and Jags, take my word for it, a Sebring is no sports car)--he's obviously the speeder.

I trudge the luggage back in.

"Do you have any other colors?"

He gives me a strange look, and starts key tapping again.

"I can give you a white one, but it's four bucks more a day. It's full size."

More money for a bigger car, that won't handle as well, and will burn more gas and be harder to park and represent a larger target for all the lousy drivers out there.

I give up and head back out to the red demon.

In the morning, I point the car south from St. Louis down toward Cape Girardeau, Rush Limbaugh's home town. Before I actually enter it, and can identify any Limbaughish characteristics, I cross the river over to East Cape Girardeau, in Illinois.

Now there are some state lines that are really obvious on the ground. You can tell them on a map, because they're squiggly, rather than straight.

When you get on a bridge, and drive over the mighty Mississippi, there's no doubt in your mind that you're leaving one state and entering another, even if the landscape on the far bank is similar. I see no river traffic in either direction.

On the other side, I head south along the river, and see a large flock of what I guess are snowy egrets in the marshland. I stop and get out to take a picture. They don't seem to mind the traffic, but when I get out of the car, they get agitated and some of them take off. I stand still for a minute or two, and they settle down, and most return. I take the shot.

I pull off in Thebes, which still has the feel of an old river town, and shoot a couple pictures of the river--one up, one down. The peace is disturbed by a long freight train rumbling over a railroad bridge to the south. I try to imagine the river a century and a half ago, with no bridges--only ferries, and with steady steamboat and flatboat traffic up and down. It a pastoral scene, and a peaceful one, as the young nation transitions from agriculture to industry, punctuated only by the occasional (and all too frequent) excitement of a deadly boiler explosion.

I get back in the car, and head east, upriver along the Ohio, and come to the southern Illinois town of Metropolis. I know from my adolescent comic-book memories that this is the adopted town of Superman. But he is nowhere to be seen--perhaps one needs to stage an emergency. I (very) briefly consider looking for a skyscraper from which to fling myself, with the prospects of being rescued in midair. But anyone who knows me knows that I'm no Lois Lane, and Superman would know that better than most. And even if I were, I decide that I don't like the chances. After all, there might be more than one Metropolis.

So, visions of meeting my childhood superhero dashed, I cross the Ohio, in another unambiguous and dramatic state change, into Paducah, Kentucky.

I'm running a little behind, so I stick with the freeway from now on. I miss the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, because there's no river--just a line on a map.

I'm listening to Rush on the radio. He's having an off day.

He's complaining about Senator Dorgan's proposed legislation to give a tax credit for campaign contributions. Now, there are a lot of problems with this, but one of the ones that he comes up with is really brainless, and I'd like to think that he'd retract it with a little thought. He says that if you give money to elect Senator Foghorn Leghorn, and then get your tax refund, so you've been made whole, that when you then call the Senator, to call in your chit, so to speak, to ask him for, say, a new highway bypass or an increase in your mohair subsidy or expedited action on your tax rebate or better ammunition for your son's weapon as he slogs through the jungle--you know, the kind that doesn't jam your gun as opposed to the standard issue?--or to approve a judge or to remove a corrupt President or...whatever, the Senator will say, in his Foghorn Leghorn way, "well, son--I say, son--you got your money back, so I don't owe you a consarned thing."

Ummmm, Rush? Ever heard of a concept called "opportunity cost"? The obvious rejoinder to the Senator, were he really sufficiently politically suicidal to say such a thing, would be, "Excuse me, Senator? I could have given that money to your opponent, and gotten just as much of it back. I guess I'll do that the next time, since it seems to be all the same to you, and he might be more likely to appreciate it..."

Like I said, dumb.

He also goes after the Guardian for their idiotic piece about how we'll have to colonize two planets in the next fifty years because we're running out of resources here, and we can't afford to support everyone in the manner to which Americans have become accustomed.

A caller calls in and says that, yes indeed, the article is dumb, but that just because they're economic ignoramuses, and are just using it as an excuse to bash America and The West and all that is Good And True, doesn't mean that we don't have real problems with things like fisheries. He says that we really are running out of cod, which is true. And Rush says, I'm not kidding, that's because not enough people eat cod. Things that people eat, like steers and chickens, he says, there's no shortage of. If we ate black-footed ferrets, they wouldn't be almost extinct, we'd be overrun with them.

Which is generally true. But he doesn't seem to understand that that only applies to animals that are actually husbanded--not hunting-gathering, which is effectively what deep-sea fishing is. It remains the last bastion of massive wild-animal harvesting, and the fact that the Grand Bank cod population has collapsed is a failure not of capitalism, but a failure of actually applying it, which is the point that he should have made, instead of the dumb thing that he did say.

There are no property rights assigned to schools of fish--it's every fisherman for himself, and it's a classic example of what Garrett Hardin called the "tragedy of the commons," in which, absent property rights, everyone is incentivized to maximize their own use of the resource, resulting in its lack of maintenance and ultimately its depletion.

So when the watermelon environmentalists complain about how capitalism is raping the earth, and point to the cod population as an example, they are actually buttressing the point that it's a lack of capitalism that's the problem in most cases. Without private property rights (including assigned rights to pollute or to be free from pollution), you get, well, places like the former Soviet Union or China, which have huge messes to clean up, and compared to which the US, for all its problems, is a pristine paradise.

And by the way, just in case anyone didn't get it, they weren't really proposing that we colonize space. They were actually poking fun at the idea. They were really (cleverly in their little minds, and stupidly in mine) saying that we have to reduce the population of the earth dramatically, and quickly. They weren't specific as to how this should be accomplished, but some notable examples from the last century might provide a hint--the effectiveness of the Khmer Rouge in reducing those verminous hordes of intellectuals and engineers and teachers and other enemies of the people in Cambodia, as just one example, is illustrative of something that they might not find totally unpalatable, as opposed to the obviously much more dreadful alternative of actually allowing all of earth's people to aspire to and achieve a US-type lifestyle.

As I come into Nashville, I hear the radio announcer describe some crime event in Albany, Georgia. His voice has the same flat midwest tones as most radio voices--I guess the big-city broadcasters have shed their regional accents. What's worse, he pronounces it Aaaallbany, like the one in New York, with the accent on syllable numero uno.

I recall that the late folk singer and storyteller, Gamble Rogers, once said, "Son, you go down to Albinny Georgia and call it Aaaaalbany, they'll hit you on top of the head so hard you'll have to unbutton your shirt to eat." I guess that the announcer had never been to Albinny--he didn't sound as though he was talking through his teeshirt, and if he had, he'd probably pronounce it right.

He also says that the Afghans are really upset about the shooting-up-the-wedding thing. Well, I guess they have a right to be, though shooting guns into the air in a war zone seems like a Darwin Award effort to me. And tragic as it is, it seems like another instance in this war of life imitating Monty Python. I can't help but think of the wedding scene in The Holy Grail, after John Cleese cuts down half the wedding party with his sword as he attempts to rescue the prince...errrrr...princess.

"Now let's not bicker and argue over 'oo killed 'oo. Let's just let bygones be bygones."

Maybe the folks at Foggy Bottom can send a copy of the video over to the Afghan embassy as an example of how to settle such things.

I'm always intrigued by place names in America (and Australia), but I particularly like the ones in the South. A little ways east of Nashville, I cross over a flowing body of water called, no kidding, Falling Water River. I scan the horizon to see if I can find a geographical protuberance named Big Pile Of Dirt And Rock Mountain. Or Standing Water Lake.

Now the news is saying that the Worldcon...errrrr...Worldcom execs are blaming Arthur Andersen for the mess. Yeah, that's right, pin it on the dead guy. Isn't that convenient?

The major issue in the Tennessee senatorial campaign, as far as I can tell from the radio ads, are plaid flannel shirts. Alexander's opponent is apparently making fun of his predilection for them, and Alexander is running ads taking umbrage at the fact that he's doing so. Maybe he could have a press conference, a la Nixon's "Checkers" speech, or FDR's defense of his poor little dog Fala. "This is where the politics of personal destruction leads. I don't care what they say about me, but my shirts have feelings, and can't defend themselves. Have my opponents no shame?"

I pull into Knoxville, and meet Instantman for dinner, something that I haven't done in several years. Fortunately he doesn't live up to his name, and it's a leisurely one, with conversation at least as good as one would expect, and perhaps twice that. (For her sake, one hopes that his wife never has occasion to call him that...).

The food is good, but mislabeled.

The stout is not stout at all--it's spindly legged, pale, a wan ghost of an amber ale, rather than the robust too-thick-to-drink, too-thin-to-plow, black-as-the-proverbial-knave's-heart-in-a-coal-mine malty brew that normally goes by that appellation. But it's not bad for a mere beer, as long as one has no higher expectations of it.

And worse, my chimichanga is unfried. Many places, even non-Mexican places, now serve things they call chimichangas (and most people are unaware that a chimichanga is no more Mexican than rice-a-roni or chop suey are Chinese, or french fries French, or turkey Turkish--it was invented in Tucson, Arizona). Properly prepared, a chimichanga is a flour tortilla stuffed with stewed and spiced meat, and then submerged into very hot liquid fat (originally cholesterol-skyrocketing, artery-stultifying, cardiac-and-stroke-inducing lard, just like the frijoles, though it's become more recently acceptable to use canola, thus keeping the customers around a little longer) until it is as crunchy as, and more delicious than, an egg roll. This one is...baked. Which means that the tortilla skin is neither soft like a burrito, or crispy like a true chimichanga--it's just...dry. Also, it's a little light on the protein, much of the meat having been supplanted by black beans. But it's relatively healthy, and good regardless.

Anyway, in both cases, as Lionel Hutz once put it, it's the most blatant case of misrepresentation since The Neverending Story.

After dinner, Glenn repairs to Casa del Instapundit, and I drive the red car up into the hills, toward Cumberland Gap, which I've never seen.

As I drive up, I note that the denizens of northeastern Tennessee seem particularly concerned with the end times. Every mile or two I see a warning that "JESUS IS COMING," or an exhortation to "PREPARE TO MEET THE LORD." I consider stopping to ask for more specific instructions, but suspect that it will take more time than I'm presently willing to devote to it. I'll just have to take my chances and hope for the best.

I drive through the tunnel under the famous pass into Middleborough, Kentucky, and stop for the night at the Boone's Trail motel.

Lileks would love it. It's a genuine piece of Americana, and it's run by Indians. Not the Choctaw and Cherokee kind with whom Dan'l Boone had so many famous and occasionally fatal disagreements, but the kind from India. I don't understand what nefarious plot has resulted in the American motel industry being taken over by the Asian subcontinent, but whatever it is, it's been quite successful. It seems to work out OK, though. When I check out in the morning, the proprietress says, in her best lovely sing-song Apu voice, "Come again!"

[To be continued]

Posted by Rand Simberg at July 10, 2002 06:12 AM