I’ve been occasionally borrowing a friend’s truck over the past year – a beat up 93 Ford Explorer that has a busted radio, power windows that operate only occasionally, and an interior light that wouldn’t go off so we smashed it with a screwdriver. It’s the kind of truck where you spill beer all over the floorboard or haul a bunch of dirty firewood and just laugh at the mess you’ve made, never intending on cleaning it up. It’s the kind of truck that you feel manly driving, especially when you are fording a stream or the brakes go out at 60 miles an hour. Recently I looked into getting a newer used truck where the brakes don’t go out at 60 miles an hour and found out a very horrifying thing has happened in this country

We’ve given up on the driving experience.

The marketing push of the last 15 years to get moms out of minivans and into SUVs means that no trucks are stick anymore. Try to find a truck that is manual transmission – it’s nearly impossible. Let’s be clear – Manual vs Automatic transmission is the difference between driving and transportation. Driving stick, you are actually in control of the engine. You don’t roll out into stoplights if you let off the brake. You can start the car with a battery that is completely dead by pushing it and popping the clutch. You can downshift around corners. Automatic transmissions are the lazy man’s transportation. Every time I drive a rental car i feel completely unconnected to the thing. And, automatic transmissions are shit in snow, one of the reasons to buy an SUV in the first place.

The number one selling Porsche in this country is a STATIONWAGON. Automatic transmission of course.

Goodbye American manhood, we’ll miss you.

On the island of Vis, a local takes us up into the hills, to an abandoned airstrip used by British bombers making runs to turn German cities into fireballs. The runway is all vineyards now, only the red and white striped pylons remain. Dinner on a farm nearby with a Croatian family and some of their homemade wine brings stories of the British airmen who, hobbled by anti-aircraft guns and their gunner dead, ditched at sea and were rescued by local fishermen. One of the downed airmen, an 87 year old, returned recently, rented a plane, and buzzed the old vineyard covered landing strip one last time, waving at the leathery farmers below.

There is no love for the Italians. Besides most recently invading and making a drunken nuicance in the summer season, in too recent memory they joined with Germany and invaded local islands and coastal towns with flamethrowers and burned houses to the ground. Hike in the forest along the coast 50 km south of Dubrovnik and you’ll find trenches connecting crude cement bunkers with small windows for machine gun nests on three sides, something I’d only witnessed in a video game until now.

Speaking of video games, in the window – a croatian magazine with John Marston on the cover and a big Red Dead Redemption logo and cryptic Croatian titles – it lured me into a little shop in a sleepy port town. They have more copies coming soon he said. To celebrate, I pick up a few liters of Croatian beer(they sell in 1 and 2 liter bottles, like gasoline) and stumble down the rocky wharf road by old fishing boats, hoping I can get some fish soup and a coke come morning.

Cebit was stellar. I did 30 interviews and will have all kinds of stuff coming up on the Technofile. Laptops with 2 screens, ringtones for your car, LCDs for your pool – there was a ton to see. After CeBit we went by rail to East Berlin, where i was promptly solicited by a prostitute. Good to know i’ve still got what it takes to be noticed by women. The next day we went on a train that looked like it had served the Soviets in the 1960s. This thing was OLD. You could hang your head out of the car and get it knocked off. What a rush.

Everything in Poland looks like the Soviets left 2 years ago and everyone started to remodel. The entire place is under construction, depressing and gray. Once we arrived in Krakow i knew this was now my favorite eastern European city. It’s a great vibe.

An hour and a half from Krakow is Auschwitz.
I have never been in a place that felt so deeply evil in my life. Well, maybe Branson Missouri. The preservation of Auschwitz is stunning, and you can walk for ages across prison camps that stretch for a mile, even stroll into abandoned bunk houses that look like they were vacated yesterday. It’s truly eerie. To make things really vomit inducing, they left the piles of human hair for you to see, literally rooms of the stuff shaved from the heads of people before they were gassed.

The train tracks lead right through the front doors of the place and head to the back where the gas chambers and ovens were.
Most interesting was the museum that showed the propaganda used to win the minds of people. There seemed to be an interesting method.
1. Convince the populace they are threatened by an outside force.
2. Denounce any media that criticises politicians as unpatriotic, liberal and a danger to the country.
3. Announce that certain laws and freedoms are being suspended indefinitely for the safety of the nation.

The parallels were astonishing. Too often people make comparisons to Hitler or Nazis. It’s been said an online political discussion almost always results in someone calling someone else a Nazi. However, visiting Auschwitz was a bleak reminder of how politicians can whip a populace into a frenzy through fear and patriotism to terrifying results. I highly recommend a visit.