Italy fever

For some reason, I've been in the grip of Italy fever lately. I'm liking Italian food, looking for places in Italy to visit, and last week I even started an intensive Italian language course.

I've always wanted to learn Italian just because I like the language, the culture, the place. It always seemed a bit impractical since I don't really need it for short visits and there's really not much prospect of ever living there for an extended period of time. Spanish always seemed more practical because it is so widespread in this country.

But what the heck. I'm not getting any younger and I might enjoy learning a new language just for the fun of it. The Italian Culture Institute in Bethesda offers an accelerated course for people who already speak another Romance language (French, Spanish or Portuguese). The class is small, the teacher is Italian, from Liguria, so it's a fairly ideal situation. We'll see whether I go beyond this initial course of 10 sessions once a week.

I've been to Italy often but it never seems to be enough. I went to Rome and Frascati for a week or so two or three times in my early trips to Europe as a Jesuit seminarian. I spent a couple days in Genoa waiting to board the Michelangelo for my voyage home after my Fulbright year. I traveled for business and pleasure when I moved back to Europe as a journalist, working on stories in Milan and Rome, visiting Venice and Florence. During my time at Institutional Investor, I went to Turin for a bank conference and had a spectacular dinner with white truffles; attended a three-day conference at the Villa d'Este on Lake Como with its glorious scenery and food; and most fun of all spent a few days with a Belgian banker at his villa outside Siena to write a story about his project of doing the ultimate guidebook on Tuscany. I spent a wonderful week over Christmas with American friends in Rome. Finally, to spend more time in Italy I rented a farmhouse outside Perugia for a month, taking day trips to Rome, Florence, Assisi, Spoleto, Ravenna and stopping in Venice and the Alto Adige on the way home. At Bloomberg, I headed the European team covering the G-7 summit in Naples. We stayed across the bay in Sorrento at the Grand Hotel and visited Pompeii. My last trip there was to Venice during my two-month stay in Munich working on a supplement for the Washington Times.

I've never been to the Amalfi coast or Capri, to Sicily or Bari, and I've spent too little time in Bologna and Emilia Romagna in general. But right now we are looking at a rental house in Umbria, this time near Todi. There is this great line in La Dolce Vita when Marcello drives outside Rome and stops at a country restaurant. The setting is so idyllic that as he's watching the waitress he exclaims, "You are like an Umbrian angel." Umbria does not have the best wine or cuisine in Italy, but it has wonderful scenery, Etruscan ruins, the incredible cultural richness that seeps out of Italy, and it's midway between Rome and Tuscany. We'll see.

Calendars

Maggie Oster's Herb Gardens calendar

For some unfathomable reason, I've always liked calendars. I appreciate their decorative aspect -- I like having nice pictures that change every month. Somehow, I must also like the time-monitoring aspect as well. Perhaps changing the page every month helps punctuate the increasingly relentless march of time.

The only place I've found for a calendar in our house is in the kitchen. Last year, I had a herb garden calendar by Maggie Oster that worked particularly well, so I got another one for 2013. There are pretty photos of herb gardens along with a seasonal recipe using herbs for each month and various little facts sprinkled through the days of the month, along with the usual holidays and other calendar items. I don't have available wall space in my office and it doesn't make sense to have a calendar in a room, like our finished basement, where I don't spend much time, so the kitchen is it.

In Europe, there was always a wide selection of very nice calendars in all shapes and sizes. Predictably, calendars have been standardized and commercialized here to the point that they come in more or less one size, so that they fit into the display racks in stores. They generally all follow the same format of unfolding with a photo on the top page and the calendar on the bottom page. So the beautiful big calendars I had in Europe, with large pictures and only a token listing of the days (who really needs a calendar to figure out the date?), are a thing of the past.

As I'm experimenting with Pinterest, I've created an "Ideal Calendar" pinboard with the idea of picturing one to four places where I would like to spend all or part of each month. I already have three for January and one for February. I'm beginning to think the year will be too short to put in all the places I'd like to spend time! I'm trying to divide the photos between places I've been in that month (and, it goes without saying, would like to revisit) and new places I'd like to visit.

In general, Pinterest, with its focus on the visual is a bit like a calendar of one's life -- big photos with few words marking the various interests you have.

Taking peace and democracy for granted

In my MarketWatch column yesterday, I quoted a speech from Jamie Galbraith about the risk of an "explosion of violence" in Europe. He said that Yugoslavia is a model for what could happen, as social and economic rivalries -- not age-old ethnic hatreds -- led to violence when that union disintegrated.

There wasn't space in the column to remind readers that the two countries hardest hit so far by the euro crisis -- Greece and Spain -- are also (coincidentally?) the two latecomers to democracy. Greece was ruled by a military junta from 1967 to 1974, and Spain transitioned to democracy only after Franco's death in late 1975.

This wasn't so long ago. One of the reasons the EU was created was to promote and support democratic rule in Europe and it is a condition for membership. The irony of the joint currency is that it seems to be subverting this overarching goal rather than supporting it. The New Dawn fascist party in Greece has links to the old junta, while in Spain the very concept of a unified nation is being challenged as a result of the economic crisis.

Galbraith goes on to say that another model for disintegration in Europe is the amicable divorce between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. "But I have to ask," Galbraith asks rhetorically, "does any country anywhere in the world enjoy the sane, secure, farsighted moral leadership that Czechoslovakia happened to have had at that time?"

The bloodshed and genocide that accompanied the dissolution of Yugoslavia into the 1990s is still the subject of prosecution in international courts. Merkel, focused so singlemindedly on getting herself reelected next year, takes peace and democracy in Europe for granted only at her peril and great risk to her country and the rest of Europe.

Starbucks propaganda

Ed Kilgore has a pointed blog post about Starbucks' disgusting and hypocritical "Come together" campaign, exploiting baristas to spread propaganda about reducing entitlements that counters their own best interests.

Like Whole Foods, Starbucks is headed by a CEO with decidedly paternalistic and borderline fascistic tendencies. It's disturbing to me that two companies that help make my life in Washington more pleasant are led by these ideological egomaniacs.

Washington unfortunately is lacking in a cafe culture, at least in Upper Northwest, that provides convenient alternatives to Starbucks. I do seek out what alternatives there are -- Marvelous Market, Politics & Prose, the little coffee place at Fessenden and Wisconsin, even the Avalon cafe -- whenever possible. I'm loath to suggest moving our Saturday morning kaffee klatch out of Starbucks because it works so well the way it is.

Whole Foods is harder, though their overweening arrogance in carrying only those products that meet some high-faluting standard they set, for letting a computer decide what products disappear from their shelves, and lately, I'm coming to suspect deliberately, leaving "sale" price signs posted while charging the full price at the register -- all these again are making shopping there less and less enjoyable.

Make Bloomberg gun czar

Chris Matthews has been touting Michael Bloomberg for a cabinet post like Treasury, arguing that a guy with his obvious talents and desire to serve should be put to use. I worked for Bloomberg and dealt with him from time to time. I have a lot of admiration for his good qualities, though I personally would not want to see him as Treasury secretary because he has some primitive ideas about government finance.

However, the tragic killing of Connecticut schoolchildren today makes some drastic action on gun control necessary and Bloomberg would be the ideal person to head up a special presidential task force bringing together federal, state and local officials to figure out sensible ways to keep automatic weapons out of the hands of unbalanced individuals.

Gun control per se is obviously a vexed issue in this country. But a starting point would be to figure out ways to enforce existing laws, to close the loopholes that allow unscrupulous dealers to sell guns in defiance of background check requirements, and to educate people about the proper use of firearms. This has been one of Bloomberg's biggest issues as New York mayor. He is passionate about it, he is savvy, and he is on the side of the angels on this one.

Someone else can finish out his term as mayor. President Obama should appoint him tomorrow with an executive order creating this task force.

Susan Rice's smart decision

Susan Rice made the smart move and got President Obama out of a bind. It was virtually impossible for her nomination to be confirmed in the Senate, leaving Obama the awkward choice of fighting a futile battle -- when he already has so many of those on his hands -- or be seen as caving to Republican opposition.

Liberals are quick to call this a smear campaign, but there's clearly more to this whole Benghazi affair than meets the eye and Rice may not be wholly innocent.

More to the point, however, is that she would have been a lousy choice for secretary of State. She has by all accounts been a bully and a remarkably undiplomatic diplomat throughout her career at State. Her version of Realpolitik with regard to African dictators hardly recommends her. She will doubtless do well in the private sector if she now chooses to leave public service.

This probably opens the door for John Kerry, after all, even with the risk that brings for his Senate seat. There's no reason to think he wouldn't be a very good secretary of State. A lot of us thought he would have made a good president.

Michigan

There's a lot of anguish over Michigan's new "right to work" law -- the one that allows workers not to pay union dues even if they are covered by the collective bargaining agreement reached on their behalf by the union.

I don't know the details of what has been happening in Michigan -- how it is that Republicans control both houses of the legislature and the state house. But it seems to me that you cannot blame the Republicans for this. They have always championed "right to work" and every other measure to restrict or eliminate union activity. It's like letting a fox into the hen house and then being surprised you have dead chickens. It's what foxes do.

Blame, if that's what you want to apportion, would seem to go first and foremost to Michigan voters, and particularly white working-class voters who voted against their own economic self-interest by giving the Republicans control of state government. You can be a single-issue voter at your risk, because you vote for a package of measures when you elect one party or the other. It may be that for whatever reason you don't like a black president who Rush Limbaugh has convinced you is going to take away your guns, so you can vote Republican. The next thing you know, the Republicans have gutted union rights and stripped you of a very helpful protection at work.

The unions are also to blame, of course. Now they say they are going to work "unceasingly" to turn Republicans out of office in the next elections. Again, I don't know how active or inactive unions were in the last round of Michigan elections, but the question does come to mind of where were you then. More basic, though, is the fact that unions have allowed the perception to grow that they are complacent and smug, more interested in protecting their members than fighting for the working class in general. This may be an inaccurate perception, but if so it needs to be combated more vigorously.

It is sad to see union rights eroded after all the heroic effort it took to win them. Hopefully, this will produce a backlash strong enough to turn the tide and lead voters to make choices in their own best interest.