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by Michael E. Campana
(being a semi-truthful account of my sabbatical adventures, designed to amuse and to be read with a dose of skepticism)
19 May 2003
Since a lot of you probably don't read beyond the first paragraph, let me just say that this is the LAST sabbatical report, from Vienna or anywhere else. I appreciate your indulging my fantasies as a writer. If I take another sabbatical, perhaps I will do these again. Many thanks to UNM for giving me this opportunity, and special thanks for Mary Frances for holding down the fort with no complaints. Okay, now hit 'Delete'.
I arrived here on 10 May, flying into Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport and thence to Vienna via KLM. I had never flown into Schiphol before, which along with Frankfurt and Charles DeGaulle, is one of the major air hubs on the Continent. Schiphol is less an airport and more a shopping mall that happens to have an airport attached to it. It is not as ostentatious as Dubai's (Do-Buy) airport duty-free mall (I did not see any 1 kg and 5 kg gold bars stacked for sale) but it sure has a lot of stuff. 'See Buy Fly' is the slogan. As I took the moving walkway along 'Holland Boulevard' I was amazed at what I saw. In the distance I even saw a big sign that said 'WMD'. I immediately thought: "Gosh! Wait'll Dubya and Rummie learn that 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' are being sold by the Dutch!" But upon closer inspection I saw that 'WMD' really stood for 'Want More Dinero?', a currency exchange promising the highest rate. Whew! Dutch hair stylists are certainly on the cutting edge of hair coloring science. I saw several colors and combinations that are NFV (Not Found in Vienna). One of the bars had a drink called the 'Princess Margarita', named for the Dutch princess who has publicly trashed the royal family. The drink was touted as having a taste that was "rich, but bitter". And one of the slot-machine parlors advertised a 'Bill Bennett Special'. Yes, USA citizens got 5 free pulls for every 30 pulls on the 1- or 2-euro slots.
Not everything coming out of The Netherlands is funny. A Dutchman has posited that the reason the USA invaded Iraq is to gain control of its oil because it is afraid that OPEC will soon start demanding payment in euros instead of dollars, which would be disastrous for the dollar, which is already down 22% against the euro in the last year. So we seized Iraq as a hedge against this possibility.
Since I mentioned Bill Bennett, you realize that as 'penance' for his gambling (Ooops! I mean 'gaming'!) excesses, he has endowed a chair, The Bill Bennett Chair in Game Theory, in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at UNLV. The chair has some unusual perks: permanent residence in one of the high-roller suites at The Mirage; unlimited drink tokens good at any casino; weekend use of a chauffeured limo; and free admission anytime to Wayne Newton's show. The ultimate perk is the opportunity to play poker with the Billmeister himself, double-or-nothing for the chairholder's salary (paid in chips, of course). UNLV officials are touting this new chair as on a par with the highly-coveted Jerry Tarkanian Stool in Sports Ethics. This is just further proof that UNLV is committed to possibly becoming perhaps the top urban university in any city whose name consists of two Spanish words located in a state with no income tax that has statewide legalized gambling (Damn! Gaming!).
Just as I thought I'd get a breather from Jennifer Lopez (she was all over Central America), I picked up the KLM in-flight magazine only to see J.Lo on the cover. It was the usual puff-piece article. Yes, the woman has talent, beauty and smarts, but this "I'm still just 'Jenny from the block'" mantra wears thin, more so than my reports. The article reported that the girl-next-door-from-the-South-Bronx travels with an entourage of 20, always requires Egyptian cotton sheets with a certain density, white lilies, and a black Mercedes limo with a male driver, among other things. What, no ban on red M&Ms? Come to think of it, she never did say from which 'block' she came. Hope she and Ben find bliss, for a couple of months at least.
So the IAEA committee meeting in I attended in Vienna was real exciting. Piotr, my Polish mathematician friend who works in Munich and decries the drop in German sense of humor as you go north from Bavaria, greeted me with "Ah, American terrorist! Wie geht es Ihnen? (How are you?)". I countered by threatening Germany with 'Axis of Evil' status, since there was now a vacancy that had to be filled with a non-Muslim country. The Syrian delegate cast a nervous glance my way. We're also taking bets (Bill B., where art thou?) as to how soon there will be a Muslim theocracy in Iraq. We also learned from our Turkish friend that Turkey refers to its Kurds as "mountain Turks". So he said (with a smile) that Turkey does not have a "Kurdish problem", just some pesky mountain Turks! Never a dull moment at the IAEA! At least I got paid in euros instead of dollars.
Piotr mentioned how, in his travels, he encounters many students from the former East Germany. Many of them feel disaffected and "nation-less". To them "reunification" has meant "colonization". Over $600 billion has been spent in the East since reunification, yet unemployment is still over 20% versus 8% in the former West Germany. For no good reason I recalled the case of Katarina Witt, the former East German Olympic ice-skating star, who became a media darling in the 1980s. Sure, she was pretty and talented, but what really put her on the map was the fact that she was a pretty East German woman athlete, and in those days East German women athletes were the butt of jokes - steroid-soaked, bulked-up Amazons. But when East Germany was absorbed, Katarina became just another talented, pretty, German woman. So what? Piotr seemed puzzled by this, lending further support to my belief that he has done one Fourier transform too many.
Piotr was beaming because Poland sided with the USA in the Iraq war, and was now being "rewarded" by the USA by being assigned the authority over a portion of Iraq. The Poles could not resist asking the Germans if they wanted to "contribute" some troops to this effort - under Polish command, of course. Chancellor Schroeder apparently had to be scraped off the ceiling upon hearing this.
Although most did not support the Iraq invasion my colleagues here were not upset that Saddam was overturned. But they are worried about the future and are not particularly optimistic, fearing that USA will lose its will or fail to "nation-build" and that Iraq will lapse into civil war. A few people have wondered aloud where all the WMDs are. Hey, we'll find them.
One thing I learned here is that during the orgy of looting in Iraq some materials were "liberated" from nuclear waste dumps that the USA failed to secure. Nothing really dangerous, mind you, just material suitable for dirty bombs.
Not to dwell on the negative, but another Rwanda-style genocide may be brewing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Ituri Province where the Hema and Lendu live in close proximity. Did you ever notice how countries with "democratic" in their name are not?
At a reception for our committee in the UN's restaurant one of the Agency's DDGs (Deputy Director-General) made an appearance among the hoi polloi, and promptly launched into a lament about his new E-series Mercedes, which wasn't as good as his 5-series BMW, but cost more. Just as we were done commiserating with his misfortune, he launched into his analysis of why the world has been turned upside down, and we soon realized why this guy was a DDG and we were not. "A white man is the world's best rapper. A black man is the world's best golfer. The Germans don't want war. The Italians want fiscal responsibility. The Poles ask the Germans to "contribute" to their military mission. The French think the Americans are arrogant." We all thought of a few things we could add ("Starbucks is in Vienna, across from the Hotel Sacher") but a forthright colleague said it best: "And an IAEA DDG buys a round of drinks." The DDG left after that, saying that he had to get his E-series from the shop.
The IAEA ranks its professional (i.e., the ones who work) staff as P1, P2, P3, P4, etc. So what does this mean? Well, the agency is considering rearranging office walls (not cubicles, but walls) in their buildings so that a person's numerical rank corresponds to the number of windows he/she has in the office (could I make this up?). This presents a dilemma, because there are at least two windows in each office, so what do you do with P1s? Put two in one two-window office? No can do - the IAEA would then have too many vacant offices, which it could then lose to some other agency. Put up a barrier to "split" the window? Do away with the P1 category? There is a committee dealing with this predicament. And people wonder why the USA doesn't pay all its UN back dues.
This is my fourth trip here in the past 4 years. Some observations: each time Vienna seems to have a few more homeless people, a few more people who cross against the red light, a bit more tagging (a lot, actually), and subways and stations that are just a bit dirtier. But it is still much better off in these respects than any USA city I've seen. And there is a fourth Starbucks - at the airport. I finally took a ride on the Riesenrad, the giant Ferris wheel. I rode in the Orson Welles car, especially reinforced.
So while biking on the Donauinsel (Danube island) I had an experience with FKK, short for "Freikoerperkultur", or "nude lifestyle". Yes, there is a nude beach on the Donauinsel, well-marked by FKK warning signs. Wieners of all shapes and sizes hang out here. May 11 was a beautiful day, sunny and in the high 70s, so a lot of Wieners were out. One older Wiener was apparently lost, as he was far beyond the limits of the FKK, in more ways than one.
Auf wiedersehen aus Wien. It is now time to go, for good.
--MEC
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