Free Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics by P.J. O'Rourke

to send his son and daughter to Brindisi, Italy. Prison guards deserted and 600 inmates broke out of Tirana’s central prison. Among the escapees was the head of Albania’s Communist Party, the splendidly named Fatos Nano. (Nano exhibited the pattern of recidivism common to ex-convicts by campaigning hard during Albania’s elections in June 1997. He is now prime minister.) U.S. Marines and Italian commandos evacuated foreign nationals by helicopter. Humanitarian aid ceased. The International Committee of the Red Cross threw up its hands. “This is almost like Somalia,” said an ICRC official. In four months more than 1,500 people died and tens of thousands were injured. Theft slipped into pillage. The railroad to Montenegro was stolen—the track torn up and sold for scrap. Pillage degenerated into vandalism. Schools, museums, and hospitals were wrecked. And vandalism reached heroic scale. Bridges were demolished, water-supply pumping stations were blown apart, power lines and telephone wires were pulled down. Albania came to bits.
     
     
     
    I went to Albania in July 1997, and I know a country is screwed up when I can tell something is wrong with its history and social organization from 20,000 feet in the air. Flying over the Albanian Alps on the trip from Rome to Tirana, I noticed that the villages are not tucked into the fertile, sheltered valleys the way the villages of Austria, Switzerland, or even Bosnia are. The villages of Albania are right up on the treeless, soilless, inconvenient mountaintops. Before ski lifts were invented, there was only one reason to build homes in such places. A mountaintop is easy to defend.
    The Tirana airport had one runway and a small, shabby, whitewashed concrete terminal building with a random planting of flowers outside. There were no visa or immigration formalities. Presumably, few people were trying to sneak into Albania to glom welfare benefits. Customs agents did run my bag through an X ray, however. With all the ordnance available in Albania, it’s hard to imagine what they were looking for. Pro-gun-control literature, maybe.
    I’d found a translator and driver by calling the Hotel Tirana and hiring the front-desk clerk’s boyfriend. I’ll call him Elmaz. He met me in the airport parking lot in his uncle’s worn-out Mercedes. Elmaz said Tirana was thirty minutes away. We drove toward town on a four-lane turnpike that—“Five kilometers long,” said Elmaz—promptly ended. “Is only highway in country,” said Elmaz. The buckled, pitted two-lane road that followed was full of cars, trucks, and horse carts—an amazing number of them for such a supposedly obliterated economy. Scores of wrecked trucks and cars lined the road. Albania has so many wrecks that all the horse carts are fitted with automobile seats, some with center consoles and luxurious upholstery.
    The landscape was the Mediterranean usual, a little too sunbaked and scenery-filled for its own good. But the fields were only half-sown in midsummer, and out in those fields and up along the hillsides were hundreds of cement hemispheres. Each dome was about eight feet across and had a slit along the base. All the slits faced the road. It seemed to be a collection of unimaginative giant penny banks.
    These are self-defense bunkers. Elmaz said there are 150,000 of them in the country. They’re everywhere you look. They are Albania’s salient visual feature. The shop at the Hotel Tirana sells alabaster miniatures as souvenirs—model igloos, though the gun slots seem to indicate flounder-shaped Eskimos. In the cities, some of the bunkers have cement flower planters molded onto their tops, a rare conjunction of war and gardening. Larger bunkers appear along the beaches and at other strategic spots. The mountains are riddled with fortified tunnels, and even the stakes in Albania’s vineyards are topped with metal spikes so that paratroopers will be impaled if they try to land among the grapevines.
    Albania’s