Evangelical Escapees Around the World

When I travel, one of the categories of people I meet are Evangelical Escapees. Sam fits in that category.  He grew up in central Ohio in a family that was in Church twice on Sunday, Wednesday, and his teens youth group on Friday put him in Church at least four days per week. Three times a year, the big Church had a weeklong salvation event. In the summer, the whole family traveled around the south. His father was teaching and preaching at Camp Meetings. 

Sam, of course, had no choice about attending any or all of these services. For him, childhood was managing boredom attending events he had no interest in.  He was interested in science. His dad was a high school principal for a day job, but Sam was walled off from advanced studies because he had so many commitments outside school. “I never had time to really do homework. I did okay in school, but I wasn’t like the kids who took advanced classes.”

Sam left home after high school and eventually became a professional mountain bike racer. He married a researcher with a PhD in bioinformatics who got a job at French pharmaceutical company. Sam opened a bike shop in Paris.  He has a clientele of amateur athletes and some professionals on the French national team. He is a perfectionist who does bike fitting for people who want top performance. 

Sam is in his early fifties, tall, thin and fit. He is a strong rider who is very much part of the cycling community in Paris.  He speaks French with an American accent. He has a strong voice and speaks slowly. When I have heard him speak to clients, I can understand him a lot better than the native French speakers he is interacting with.

Sam says his parents really lived the faith they proclaimed. His problem was with nearly everyone else in his Church life. He learned racial epithets at Church before he heard them in “the world.”  And in the kind of Church he grew up in, Creation Science, the arrogant lunacy of asserting the earth is 6,000 years old was the only science. 

Better than Brainwashing--a convoy leaving Camp Adder, Iraq.

Sam is very far from his childhood: physically, spiritually, culturally, but not as far as a soldier I served with in Iraq. David heard me arguing with some Creationists in the mess hall before we deployed. He came up to me later and asked, “Can you really be a believer and not believe all that [Creationist] shit?” He had been told the opposite all through his childhood. He enlisted because he wanted to get away from home and Church, but he could not to a secular college. So, he turned 18 and headed for Iraq.  War was better than brainwashing. And after deployment he went to college with the GI Bill. 

David went back to his childhood hometown after serving in the Army, but got the secular education he wanted. Sam keeps in touch with his family, but is happily staying quite far from home.

   

SIXT is My Favorite Car Rental Company in Europe

When I rent cars in Europe, I try to rent from SIXT if I can. It’s not always possible.  Sometimes they cost more than the competition, sometimes they have no availability, and most recently they had a mileage limit when no other competitor did. 

But my best car rental experiences have been with the bright orange German brand.  I first rented from SIXT in the Frankfurt Airport on a business trip to Germany in 1999.  I had rented a plain vanilla Opel. I greeted the guy at the counter in my barely remembered German from 20 years before. He smiled, spoke English noting my horrible accent and offered me an upgrade. 

He said, “For an additional $10 per day, you can have a BMW 750i.” I blinked. “Really?” I said. “Yes. No problem. Silver. Would you like to upgrade?” I would and did. I went to the lot and there was a silver BMW with a 5.4-liter, 322hp V12 engine. It had a five-speed automatic. I usually get stick shifts in Europe, but I was too happy to care about the transmission. 

On the A5 Autobahn at 2am I verified that rental cars have a governor or speed limiter set to 250kph (155mph). The two-ton sedan was glass smooth at that speed.  Twenty years before I drove that same autobahn in a $400 ten-year-old 1969 VW Beetle with a 40 hp 1200cc flat four. With a tailwind I could get that car just over 100kph.  Everything passed me in the Beetle. In the BMW, I passed everything. It was awesome. 

The next time I went to Germany, I again reserved a plain vanilla Opel with SIXT. I asked for an upgrade and for roughly $10 per day, I got an Audi A6 Turbo.  And that night I checked the speed limiter. 

In November at the end of my last trip, I rented a from SIXT. No upgrade, but very friendly service.  It was a day trip from Paris to Le Mans. After seeing Ford v Ferrari in Paris, I was jazzed to see the site and museum of the most legendary 24-hour race. 

I have rented with Europcar more than SIXT because they tend to have the cheapest cars, and some of the places I go, like Latvia and Georgia and Israel, no SIXT cars were available. 

But the orange logo of SIXT will always be my favorite.

Visit to the Museum at the Site of the Nuremberg Rallies

Hitler at Nuremberg

On the same day my friend Cliff and I visited the Dachau Concentration Camp, we also visited the museum of the history of the Nazis in Nuremberg. 

This Bavarian city was the site of several Nazi rallies before Hitler took power in Germany and became the spiritual center of the Nazi cult (Fuhrer cult) after the Nazis took absolute power in Germany. 

Fuhrer Cult 

Our visit began at a museum build inside a semicircular, multi-story building that was to be the site of meetings for thousands of Nazi leaders.  Nearby are the fields that were once the site of the infamous Nuremberg rallies.  The tens of thousands of Hitler worshippers who crowded this huge field were not enough of an audience for the Nazi cult, so they enlisted Leni Riefenstahl to make the award-winning film “Triumph of the Will.” 

The film focuses solely on Hitler, the one man who embodies the Reich.  Watching the film reminded me of a guest speaker in media class I took 40 years ago.  The videographer who addressed the class talked about his work and his career path and mentioned some of his clients. One client in particular caused a few of the students to catch their breath—a particularly loathsome politician. 

One of the students asked, “What about values? How do you pick your clients?” His answer, “Whoever the client is, I maintain the highest production values.” The class was over at that point.  Riefenstahl did the same on a much grander scale.  Whether she was a true believer or an opportunist, she made an award-winning film. She maintained production values promoting one of the most evil men that ever lived. 

After we saw the film about “Triumph of the Will” and the images and film of the Nuremberg rallies, Cliff said, “The Trump rallies really are sad events compared to these.” I agreed. Ten thousand racists yelling “Lock her up!” are hardly the grandeur of Nuremberg. But the spirit is there.  The American President call the press the “Enemy of the People” (Hitler’s lugenpresse or lying press is much the same) and calling Americans who oppose him human scum, another echo of Hitler’s calls for extermination of the Jews, really are in the Nuremberg spirit.

There are differences besides scale. Unlike Hitler, Trump whines like a baby. “Witch hunt!” he says declaring himself the biggest victim in world history. Whining will not lead to a hundred thousand Seig Heils.

America First Nazi Rally in Madison Square Garden 

on February 20, 1939

The echo of Trump in the 1930s American Nazi phrase “America First” looks very ominous when touring the spiritual home of the Nazi empire. But Trump is a coward and a bully who slinked away from service as a young man when Hitler volunteered for the most dangerous duty in the terrible trench warfare of World War I. No one will make the movie “Triumph of the Whine.”

In the area surrounding the museum are places that would have been developed into imperial sites for larger and more elaborate rallies as the Nazis conquered the world.  The conquest failed and when the war began, money for lavish parade sites dried up. 

Now one of the main rally sites has some massive blocks surrounding what is now a soccer pitch.  The sites are incomplete, grown over and inhabited by people walking, hiking and playing games. 

Because Nuremberg was the spiritual center of the Reich, the Allies chose it as the site to put the Nazi leaders on trial for war crimes. It is strange to think that even at the end of their wretched lives they were given the justice they denied to millions.