A recent suggestion by the British government contains all the wisdom of the ages; my only regret when I heard about it was that we in America had not thought of it first. Here it is, written in plain English and handed out in leaflets to all illegal immigrants residing in that rainy old place: “In Britain, rape is generally considered a no-no, and so, if at all possible, you should try your best to avoid it.” Or words to that effect, as I have not seen the document but have heard and read about it.
Gott im Himmel, as the Germans say, why couldn’t we here in the New World have thought of it before those snobby Brits, and saved so many unlucky American women from being raped by uncivilized illegals? Americans are supposedly more modern and more with it than the British, after all—and just think of the benefits a short, sharp note to the illegals pouring in would have had when Obama and Biden opened up the borders.
Mind you, there is a hiccup to this ingenious British anti-rape pamphlet, and that is the following: The newcomers, however illegal their arrival, are given free lodging in hotels, provided with free meals, and also issued free condoms. The UK’s National Health Service insists on the latter. This giveaway to 18-year-olds from countries that consider women to exist for serving men certainly does not help matters. Even if in Britain rape is considered a no-no among gentlemen.
Joking aside, I’m old enough to remember Europe without immigrants. Driving through Italy, France, and Germany into Austria was a delight, the empty roads lined with auberges—small, family-run hotel-restaurants of two rooms. The food was delicious, the wine was even better, there was no crime, and an overnight stay was dirt cheap.
I drove around this delightful continent through the late ’50s and all of the ’60s until the mid-’70s, the Yom Kippur War and the beginning of the Arab embargoes. Things got worse after the Iranian revolution that brought in Khomeini. Uncle Sam had picked the wrong side yet again. The real disaster, however, as far as Europe was concerned, was the later open-borders policy imposed by a bunch of fat EU bureaucrats. While they lived the life of Riley in Brussels and Strasbourg, the Greek islands came under attack by thousands upon thousands of immigrants fleeing the wars in Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and the rest of Africa.
Italy was next due to its proximity to North Africa, with myriads of Eritreans, Ethiopians, and Libyans—all from lands once part of Italy’s colonial empire—flooding that beautiful country. I remember the exquisite Italian train stations in Milan, Rome, Florence, and the like overrun with refugees sleeping, hustling, begging, and robbing people. France was already chock-a-block with Algerians escaping dictatorship and granted citizen rights in the Hexagon, which had considered Algeria part of metropolitan France until 1962. Germany’s problems were self-inflicted by bringing in millions of Syrians and Iraqis, after having invited hundreds of thousands of Turkish “guest workers” into the country starting in the ’60s. (Men were needed to rebuild the country after it lost 8 million in the Second World War.)
Humanitarian impulses aside, the heartbreaking sights of foreign-looking people either begging or threatening have put a damper on European travel as far as I’m concerned. The last straw was in Venice, where my friend Michael Mailer was shooting a documentary, and where once upon a time I had attended glamorous shindig after shindig in various palazzi on the Grand Canal. I almost exchanged blows with someone attempting to take off with a bag of mine, then was literally crushed by a myriad of Chinese tourists attempting to get an autograph from some braindead Hollywood actress.
Having fought in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Afghanistan in order to have millions of people from these places living among us, we’ve made travel yet another casualty of these useless wars that have brought misery to all involved—miseries like surveillance, censorship, and repression, not to mention outright hate by tens of millions for interfering. Europe was the most enchanting of continents until total war in 1939–45 ruined the magic. With Uncle Sam’s help the place came back in a hurry. Then Africa and Araby decided to move north and the dream ended.
Nor is this change restricted to Europe. When I first arrived in the United States for school at 10 years of age, there were 150 million Americans. Now there are 350 million and counting. Travel has become torture and cities are ridden with crime.
If I had one wish concerning politics, it would be to see again an America that I first encountered long ago. Statues of heroes like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson stood proud in Virginia, where I went to university, and the government did not subsidize “shows” featuring bondage and partially unclothed prepubescent children. Nor did anyone in the media and the arts blur the distinction between heroes and murderers. But that was long ago.
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