We woke to a really magnificent day–sunny, warm and breezy, and no humidity. We strolled though Uzupis and Old Town, stopping at
A couple of the ubiquitous cafes and doing lots of people watching. Lithuanians are a remarkably attractive people–many of them resemble Scandinavians ( since they are neighbors, my guess is they’ve intermarried).
Lithuanians also seem fairly prosperous. They dress well and I have been impresses by the tidiness and condition of their public spaces. I’ve seen very few abandoned properties and many, many buildings under renovation.
If there has been one disappointment, it has been the lack of evidence–historic or otherwise– of a Jewish presence in a city that was half Jewish before the second World War. I had hoped to learn more about the community from which my great-grandfather emigrated in the late 19th century, but at least in our brief time here, we’ve seen nothing reminiscent of the community once known as a center of Jewish life and scholarship.
We leave tonight for Dublin. (Our itinerary is an odd collection of places we’ve previously missed–after Dublin comes Berlin!)
We’ve been in Vilnius two days now–hardly enough time to see a city in any depth, but enough time to form impressions, so here are mine:
Unlike many other historic cities, Vilnius is a genuine metropolitan area–not a museum. While there are scads of tourists, you don’t get the feeling that the city or economy revolves around them. It isn’t a place that seems fixated on homage to the past.
This is an enormously attractive, sophisticated, urban place. Why? Much of the city is walkable; there is ample public transportation and taxis are plentiful. There are lovely parks everywhere. New buildings blend well with the old, without aping the older, and the architecture is generally very good. And there is ample evidence of attention to the city’s infrastructure–not just maintenance, but use of quality paving materials to begin with. As a result, the built environment has held up well. (This is a pet peeve of mine in most of the US–we tend to use the cheapest possible materials for public improvements. It’s a phony way to look frugal, because the work doesn’t last, and re-doing it is expensive.)
We walked a few blocks to one of the quirkiest parts of Vilnius–an area that proclaims itself “the Republic of Uzupis.” It was established by artists, who wrote a ‘constitution’ and posted it in several languages. The constitution proclaims ‘rights’ like “a dog has a right to be a dog,” and “everyone has the right to be an individual.” it is an area filled with galleries and cafes. Vilnius has cafes everywhere, and most have outside seating. That, too, adds to it’s charm.
We also visited the Holocaust Museum, and were surprised to see how much more emphasis was placed on the soviet occupation than on the Nazis–even though the latter murdered 240,000 people–200,000 of whom were Jews. (Admittedly the soviets were here much longer.)
Finally, I have to repeat an earlier observation–people here are thin! I don’t think I realized just how obese Hoosiers have become until I watched people here. Lithuanians are attractive people to begin with, and I have yet to see anyone truly fat.
It has been a couple of days since my last post, because we’ve been traveling…I am writing this from the bar in our hotel in Vilnius, Lithuania–the Shakespeare, a hotel I enthusiastically recommend. Vilnius is a wonderful city, alive with cultural actvities, buzzing with commerce, and very walkable, at least in the old city. There is even an artists’ area they call the Montmarte of Vilnius.
We flew to Chicago, then Heathrow, then Copenhagen, where we discovered our direct flight to Vilnius had been cancelled and we had to fly through Riga. All in all a very long travel time–we calculate about 36 hours in all.
Some observations:
people are much thinner in Europe.
customer service has been uniformly excellent–everywhere we’ve been, airline personnel and waiters, etc., have been helpful and courteous and multi-lingual.
it is hard to miss the degree to which the world has truly globalized.
To the naked eye, everyone looks American–we dress alike, shop at the same stores, express common mannerisms….True, we’ve lost a great deal of the charm of indigenous cultures, but it is impossible not to recognize how rapidly globalization is homogenizing the world–at least, the western world.
blogging will be sporadic, as we will be traveling pretty consistently for the next month.
I rarely read George Will’s columns, and I stopped completely when he wrote one that blatantly lied about the findings of a university research center in an effort to debunk global climate change. (The center involved issued a statement protesting the mis-characterization of its research, but if the Washington Post ran it, I didn’t see it.)
Evidently, Will used a recent column to resurrect a horse that should have been dead long ago. When the housing bubble first burst, conservative pundits immediately blamed the whole mess on the CRA–the Community Reinvestment Act. The big bad government had forced lenders to make bad loans out of a misplaced “compassion” for non-creditworthy slackers. I knew this was bullshit, because I’d spent several years as a real-estate lawyer, and was well-acquainted with the Act and the practices of the banks that were covered by it.
“There is not much ambiguity in the story of the housing bubble. The private financial sector went nuts. They made a fortune issuing bad and often fraudulent loans which they could quickly resell in the secondary market. The big actors in the junk market were the private issuers like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Lehman Brothers. However, George Will and Co. are determined to blame this disaster on government “compassion” for low-income families.
The facts that Will musters to make this case are so obviously off-base that this sort of column would not appear in a serious newspaper. But, Will writes for the Washington Post.
The first culprit is the Community Re-investment Act (CRA). Supposedly the government forced banks to make loans against their will to low-income families who did not qualify for their mortgages. This one is wrong at every step. First, the biggest actors in the subprime market were mortgage banks like Ameriquest and Countrywide. For the most part these companies raised their money on Wall Street, they did not take checking and savings deposits. This means that they were not covered by the CRA.
Let’s try that again so that even George Will might understand it. Most of the worst actors in the subprime market were not covered by the CRA. The CRA had as much to do with them as it does with Google or Boeing. …”
A lawyer friend of mine recently sent me an email commenting on the Recount Commission’s ruling on Charlie White’s residency.
“Contrary to what I repeatedly heard from the Commission members yesterday, mostly Wheeler, Indiana law does not state that residence is totally a function of one’s intent. While important, the Supreme Court in the Evan Bayh case said these things about the role of intent in domicile cases. First, it said that “a self-serving statement of intent is not sufficient to find that a new residence has been established.” (“I intended to live at Broad Leaf at the home of the woman I divorced 3 years earlier, while I was engaged to another woman, and after I’d leased and then purchased a condominium with a 30-year mortgage and paid all the utility bills while my fiancé was living there.”) Second, the Bayh case held that residency requires both intent and “evidence of acts taken in furtherance of the requisite intent, which makes the intent manifest and believable.” In other words, one’s professed intent, to be made believable, requires conduct that is consistent with that professed intent. And third, the Court in the Bayh case emphasized that a location cannot be one’s domicile unless it is one’s “true, fixed, permanent home,” not a place (like one’s ex-wife’s home) where one goes occasionally to “crash”, i.e. a purely temporary arrangement.”
The Commission essentially ruled that all White needed to do was profess an intent to reside at his ex-wife’s home. But as my friend pointed out, his ex-wife explicitly testified that the arrangement was “never intended to be permanent but only temporary.” Furthermore, White’s contemporaneous conduct and the circumstances surrounding his divorce and engagement to another woman was–in any world most of us inhabit or recognize–totally inconsistent with his testimony that he intended to take up permanent residence with his ex. He leased and then purchased the new condo and moved his fiancé into it at no charge to her; he represented to his lending institution, to his future employer, to his prior employer and to the IRS that this condo would be his permanent residence. If this were a made-for-TV movie, the obvious question would be: “Were you lying then or are you lying now, Mr. White?”
As my friend conceded, the process is and was intended to be political rather than judicial in nature, so that a political rather than a judicial outcome would result. And that is precisely what happened here. If White thinks he will have as easy a time of it when the criminal charges against him are heard, he’s likely to be very disappointed.
The great irony is that, by refusing Republican and Democratic demands that he resign, White is continuing to embarrass the same Republican party that provided him with last week’s Pyrrhic victory.
