An American columnist in France

If there were such a thing as an architectural crime against humanity, Paris' Charles De Gaulle Airport would be one. After struggling through the bottleneck-plagued circular check-in room, you take a moving walkway through a plastic tube the color and texture of a giant intestine to a floor of insipid duty-free shops.\nUp a level, get through security, and you find yourself trapped in a Plexiglas box like those authorities on "The X-Files" use to cage shape-shifting mutants or carriers of extraterrestrial diseases. All to spend hours in a cramped, overheated cylinder watching the latest Martin Lawrence movie; eating food that doubles as a floatation device; appeasing flight attendants, gate personnel, security guards, customs officers and countless other petty dictators. \nAt such a time, most folks just sigh and pray for their luggage. I realized that after nagging you to leave the comfortable certainties of home and undergo the expense, discomfort and risk of traveling to a continent where air conditioning is rare and not everyone speaks English, I never addressed the most basic question involved. So, for this final article about crossing the sea, I'll attempt it: what does Europe hold for 21st century Americans anyway?\nIn 1867, Mark Twain took a trip to Europe and the Middle East, later chronicled in his classic "The Innocents Abroad." Twain does not mince words about the trip, calling it "a funeral excursion without a corpse," yet he recommends that all Americans go abroad because "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts." \nWise words, but today we require more justification.\nFirst reason: the fact that the rest of the world's doings eventually end up on our doorstep. In his time, Twain could report "that a good many foreigners had hardly ever heard of America, and that a good many more knew it only as a barbarous province away off somewhere." This was mainly because policy and geography made America isolationist and isolated, but thanks to modern technology, politics and economics, neither is possible. And with populous industrial powers, advanced technology, languages regularly translated into English and centuries of relations with the U.S., Europe is better situated to monkey with your life than any continent except our own. \nThen there's the fact that modern Europe is one of the greatest achievements in the history of politics. Think about it. Until the late 20th century, Europe was a land of autocratic rulers and brutal conflicts. Twain's description of France's Napoleon III paints the portrait of the time: "Above all things, he has taken the sole control of the empire of France into his hands and made it a tolerably free land -- for people who will not attempt to go too far in meddling with government affairs." \nYet today's Europe is free, peaceful, prosperous, increasingly bound by common laws and values. This is a miracle, something that could one day change humanity, and something that Americans should take as much pride in as Europeans. After all, modern Europe might use local ingredients, but in representative democracy, we supplied the recipe (and if they let me back in after that line, they're not reading this column).\nLastly, you can't understand your American identity without going to Europe. For all our internal divisions, we as a whole are different, and this becomes clearest in the continent so many of our ancestors left behind. As Twain puts it, "Many a simple community in the Eastern Hemisphere ... will remember for years the incursion of the strange horde ... that called themselves Americans and seemed to imagine in some unaccountable way that they had a right to be proud of it"