c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

NAPLES, Italy _ This irritating day of travel begins at a Westin hotel on the Grand Canal in Venice, where I confront a perfectly ordinary breakfast buffet costing 79,000 lire, or $36 _ a spread that most hotels in Italy would include in the room charge.

At the desk, a haughty clerk informs me I can take the hotel’s motorboat to the airport at a cost of 600,000 lire, or $273. Or if I really must, I can walk five minutes to Piazza San Marco and take the public waterbus at 17,000 lire, or $7. “It takes an hour and five minutes,” he sniffs. “The next boat leaves in an hour,” he lies. It actually leaves in 20 minutes.

After a delightful ride on the waterbus, I learn at Marco Polo Airport that I cannot check my bags until just before departure because an airport routinely flooded by tourists has a tiny baggage-handling system. What happened to the zeal that sent explorer Marco Polo to China or the ingenuity that built a maze of canals?

Boarding the airplane, I find a man occupying my window seat. He shrugs and motions me to take the empty aisle seat. I show him my boarding pass. He shrugs again and gives way. During the flight, he keeps an elbow planted in my side and periodically flings into my face the newspaper he is reading.

At the rental car lot in Naples, I find my assigned vehicle penned in by a car that a former lessor just abandoned. I am forced to push the car aside.

So here I am back in southern Italy, whose former emperor would set up the “desolating sacrilege” (probably a statue of a Roman god) in Jerusalem’s Temple to show the Jews who was boss. When you see that sacrilege in place, said Jesus, flee to the hills. Drop everything and run. The end is near.

From what would they be running? The Temple had seen far worse than a statue. One former king of Israel performed pagan sacrifices on the Temple roof. Low-level commerce sullied its hallways. Invaders periodically demolished the Temple, as the Romans would do again not long after Jesus died.

The issue, I think, wasn’t the Temple’s sanctity, it was the devastating assault of arrogance, that casual arrogance which imperialist powers act out when they see their subjects as a lower order of humanity, to be enslaved if necessary, tolerated if convenient.

There is no safety with such arrogance. In Berlin last weekend, a massive display observed the 65th anniversary of “Crystal Night,” when the Nazis unleashed their assault on the Jews. Modern Germans _ Jew and gentile alike _ vow regularly that such arrogance will never again tar their land. But it still does, not as official policy or even as a broadly felt sentiment, but as an underlying attitude _ called “skinhead rage” nowadays _ which sees certain others as worthless.

On this travel day, I glimpse small but chilling signs of that arrogance in the haughtiness of a desk clerk who sees a traveler as someone to be fleeced, in the shoulder-shrugging disregard of a man looking only to self, in an unknown driver’s thoughtless solving of his or her problem by creating a problem for someone else.

Personally, I think arrogance of this sort lies at the heart of the election snarl back home. People will forgive incompetence _ a poorly designed ballot, counting done sloppily, polling places not open on schedule, unnecessarily slow lines. But with a wariness born of experience, they watch both parties, their lead candidates and glossy retinues for signs of arrogance, for an attitude that suggests their need to get on with governing outweighs the rights of citizens.

Do these life-long diners at the public trough realize how small they sound as they maneuver for public relations advantage and willfully turn one state’s election-management shortcomings into a crisis?

Whether or not the 2000 election produces a demand for more modern voting techniques, it certainly has unleashed an attitude _ a healthy attitude, in my view _ that democracy is about the people, not about the politicians.

DEAEND EHRICH