Thanks, Euro-Lefties!

It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.

- Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

Take an elite, convinced by class and birth of their fitness to rule Lesser Men. Let them set themselves the task of joining a continent, formerly mired in blood up to its knees into a New Jerusalem, a counterbalance to the Yankee Cowboy across the Atlantic. Give them the power to tax at will, and to spend that lucre extorted at the point of a gun on Grandiose Projects, intended to raise their own self esteem (and hopefully unite the formerly divisive peoples under their new pie-in-the-sky Utopia). What do you get?

Mini-Europe.

Mini-Europe is a park located in Bruparck at the foot of the Atomium in Brussels, Belgium. Mini-Europe has the reproductions of the most attractive monuments in the European Union on show, at a scale of 1:25. Roughly 80 cities and 350 buildings are represented. The park is renowned for the quality of its models, some of which cost as much as €350,000 to make (the Brussels Grand-Place). The park contains numerous live action models (train, mills, eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Airbus, cable cars, etc. A guide gives the details on all the monuments. At the end of the visit, the “Spirit of Europe” exhibition gives an interactive overview of the European Union in the form of multimedia games. The park is built on an area of 24,000 m². The initial investment was of €10 million in 1989, on its inauguration by Prince Philip of Belgium.

It's better than it sounds, especially when you visit there like this:

Yes, I looked goofy, but you knew that. Yes, I had hair (kinda), but I wore a Younger Man's shoes back then (1998). Yes, I had my family with me on a business trip. I do good work, don't I?

Life doesn't get any better than that. Thanks for all the tax money, European folks!

Schiller was right, at least for me. But then, I'm an old softie about this sort of thing. You knew that, too.