Fear and loathing in Mainz

From Ronald Reagan's farewell address:

• You spend a lot of time going by too fast in a car someone else is driving, and seeing the people through tinted glass - the parents holding up a child, and the wave you saw too late and couldn't return. And so many times I wanted to stop and reach out from behind the glass, and connect.
  

From the Financial Times, talking about President Bush's visit to Germany today (found at Lew Rockwell):

• In a contemporary echo of the Lady Godiva legend, anyone living on the route of the presidential motorcade is being discouraged from taking a peek at the 60- to 80-strong column of vehicles conveying the US president. In police leaflets, residents have been asked to keep their windows shut and stay clear of balconies “to avoid misunderstandings”.

  Stores and restaurants in the “red zone”, the high-security area centred on Mainz's electoral palace, have been advised to close for the day as part of the biggest security operation in the country's postwar history. “They told us we could stay open if we liked but that nobody would be allowed in the area. It did not seem to make much business sense,” said Bozo Vukoja, owner of the Am-Fischtor Croatian restaurant in the red zone.

  Neither driving nor parking will be allowed in the zone, where garages have been emptied, mailboxes unbolted and 1,300 manhole covers sealed.

James Bovard says this:

• The notion that people cannot even look at the motorcade without putting Bush in peril sounds like the president is suffering from medieval superstitions. Mainz was the home of Gutenberg, whose invention did so much to liberate the modern mind. On the other hand, with Bush’s obsession with secrecy and keeping people in the dark, he might hold the invention of the printing press against Mainz.