I was enjoying the sharp and angular writing at Taki’s Magazine, an online journal that offers delicious little appetizers, or as the website puts it “Cocktails, Countesses & Mental Caviar”.
Yes, caviar—tasty and salty.
In a fun, rambling piece about . . . well, about lots of things, the magazine’s impresario, Taki Theodoracopulos, mentioned Cardinal Walter Kasper’s remark that arriving at London’s Heathrow Airport is like arriving in a Third World country.
It wasn’t a politic thing for the good cardinal to say, and his staff clarified with boilerplate about the good qualities of multi-cultural societies, which Taki briefly riffs on.
I suppose I’m mistaken, but that’s not how I reacted to Cardinal Kasper’s comments. I assumed that he was referring to the crazy jumble of Rube Goldberg transportation and baggage handling systems at Heathrow. The first time I changed plans there the whole operation struck me as crowded, rickety, and barely functional.
Compare this with landing at the Munich airport, all lovely glass and steel. I can understand the cardinal’s sentiments. London is after all the financial capital of Europe. You’d think they could put together an attractive, efficient airport rather than forty or fifty years of additions, improvements, and modifications piled on top of each other.
But Heathrow is a veritable Parthenon as compared to the New York airports. Landing at LaGuardia and exiting the jet bridge, a first time visitor could be forgiven for thinking that the plane had been hijacked and he has just landed in a ramshackle Third World country on the edge of economic collapse.
No, that’s not fair to the Third World. I think one would have to fly far and wide to find an airport as crowded, dingy, and uninviting as LaGuardia.
I spend a fair amount of time in LGA these days. (Kennedy I avoid like the plague.) I’ve come to think of it as the Penn Station of airports. It’s an embarrassment that, contrary to Taki’s impressions, has nothing to do with a multi-ethnic clientele and everything to do with the apparent ineptitude—or just plain negligence—of public authorities
