recently a good value if you avoided hotels like the Connaught in London.

But no more. Just when we’ve demonstrated beyond a doubt that our military can whup anyone anywhere as long as we can find them, our deficit (current accounts, budget, trade, all of them) has started to climb again along with our unemployment rate (to near European proportions), and the Bushies in their infinite wisdom have apparently decided that the answer to the ills that yet another tax cut won’t cure lies in making buying and coming to America cheaper. Thus the plunge in the dollar.

I’ve traveled quite a bit over the past forty years—in the past two weeks alone to Antwerp, London, Tokyo, Osaka, Hiroshima, and Kyoto—and not since 1968 when Lyndon Johnson begged us all to spend our money at home have I felt like such a subversive. Instead of bolstering the local economy by eating out or buying a new car, I headed off to points east and west, in the first instance to do business at bargain basement dollar denominated rates, in the later to visit my daughter who is spending the year