Volume 13

OCTOBER 2004

13. 11: HALLOWEEN SCARE TACTICS 10.31.2004

“Accept Christ as you personal savior, or go to hell when you die.” [Hell House]

Another Halloween is imminent. It's a time of year in which we like to scare the hell out of each other. All Hallows Eve has its origins in religious beliefs and superstitions, but it has become something of an occasion to dress up, party, to dust off horror films and play trick or treat.

Scaring ourselves is something that goes back to the fundamental origins of religion. Religion is based in fear, fear of the unknown. It goes back to our earliest human origins, when we sat around at night in the penumbra of campfire light and wondered what the hell was making those scary noises beyond our vision, what creatures those luminous eyes belonged to, what happened to the clan members who wandered off and disappeared. Our ancestors made “sacrifices,” literally tossing food to those snarling creatures to buy them off; they made incantations, wore amulets, and eventually (much later) refashioned those creatures into gods, and then into a God, one that looked like themselves.

But people never quite got rid of the fear, because they could never get rid of the unknowns; what, for example, happens to us after we die (among other mysteries). Fear makes for good business (good politics, too, if you have been listening to Bush “terrorizing” the electorate with the “evil” terror card), and shamans, priests, gurus and other religious “authorities” knew that it was the basis of their business. Like Bush they learned how to terrorize in the name of fighting terror, and they conjured – and I do mean conjured – what was necessary to retain their influence over the lives of the terrorized.

Despite the fact that not one single person in history, not the Pope, not Mother Theresa, not anyone, has ever died and come back to tell us about the other side, whether there was a heaven or hell, or even an afterlife, an elaborate fiction was composed in most faiths about paradise and perdition, and the gods, angels, and devils that inhabit them. Oh, there's the story of this Yeshua bar Yusef (aka Jesus Christ), who some say pulled it off, but there's no proof.

Well, it's a familiar story, the only debate being whether one thinks it should be filed under fact or fiction. So what has it to do with Halloween. Just this: for the past several Halloweens there has been a fundamentalist Christian organization that sets up what are called “Hell Houses” for kids. They apparently come in, innocently thinking they are in some scary house with witches and goblins, but the scenes are of women who have had abortions, gays and lesbians being tortured in hell for eternity, and a person being sacrificed in a satanic ritual. After being exposed to the fundamentalist Christian's version of hell, the patron's, usually impressionable kids, are told that's what awaits them if they don't accept the salvation of Christ.

Nice folks these extreme Christian evangelists. As far as I'm concerned they are the best reason there is why we could really use a place called “Hell”.

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13.10: AMERIGEDDON 10.28.2004

I'm thinking that I just might have to vote for Bush this time. Oh, you think I'm leading with that just in a cheap gimmick to get your attention, like using the word “sex”, or using a graphic with Paris Hilton and Michael Jackson doing “it”?

Nope. This is about Armageddon. That's right, Armageddon. I think I have finally been won over by all that Biblical Revelation rot, all that nutcase Nostradamus nonsense, with a frosting of that Left Behind stuff that falls out of the behinds of bulls. I just might be ready to believe that what this corrupted country of mine (that probably won't be able to manage avoiding another rigged election result) just might need what all those Jeremiahs are warning about – Armageddon. America just might need a damn good Amerigeddon .

Now as much as I like John Kerry, he doesn't have the intent or the stuff to bring on a good Amerigeddon . He wants to fix things. He wants a “fresh start.” But that's going to be difficult. Bush would be handing him the biggest deficit in history, millions more in poverty, unemployment, and without health care than at the end of Mr. Bill's tenure, a world that pretty much hates us, a quagmire in Iraq and a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, in short, a huge mess. Can he dig us out of that mess in four, even eight years, with a Republican Congress obstructing every inch of the way? If he fails, the Right Wing will be right back in four or eight with tax cuts for the rich, gay bashing, putting women in legal burkas, and screwing up education, medical research, and the rest of their medieval agenda.

So maybe it's a good idea to let Bush and his cronies have another four, to really take us all the way to the bottom of full out Texification . Sure, the Bush cabal will get rich and run off to their off-shore banks with as much as they can loot from the society, from Social Security, from their sweetheart deals with the Saudis, from their Halliburton no-bid contracts, from Iraq'a “reparations” paid in oil. They'll be allright, but the country will be wrecked, really wrecked . That will be our Amerigeddon , and even Karl Rove won't be able to spin the GOP out of that one. But that's what American really needs – a purification – then it can rise like a phoenix into a bright new morning in America (haven't I heard that somewhere before?).

It would be cleansing. Maybe there would be revolts, assassinations, chaos, riots, bombings, mayhem in the streets, you know, something like the “peace and freedom” Bush has brought to Iraq. No one should wish for these sorts of things to be visited on America, but those prophets of Armagedon seem to think the world and that includes America—needs or deserves something like that. If the Bible and the saved people of the Rapture think this way who am I to gainsay it. And who better to deliver us into Amerigeddon than George W.Bush.

Mind you, there are saner people than me, many of them Democrats, who think that another term of W might not, in the longer run and larger picture, be a “bad” thing. They believe in the cleansing of America, the Amerigeddon , too. And even some Republicans believe that another term of Bush will so sunder their party that it might take decades to come out from under its Faustian pact with the Religious Righteous. Then there could come the second coming of Mr. Bill (hey, knock it off , you Clinton bashers!).

Amerigeddon would be a heck of a price to pay for our country, and would be a heavy price to pay for me to check Bush/Cheney on my precious ballot. But maybe mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Amerigeddon , the great cleansing of our sick and divided nation.

It will be a close election, and Bush just might need my vote so he can take us to the Amerigeddon. Now wouldn't that be something: Bush needing my vote. Wouldn't it be something if he knew he needed my one vote to win? Wouldn't it be great if he asked me to give him that vote? I'd have to think that one over; I really believe in Amerigeddon .

Well, if it comes down to my one vote, screw Amerigeddon. Bush can kiss my . . .

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13.9: WHAT'S HAPPENED TO SMALL TOWN AMERICA? 10.26.2004

John Kerry and George Bush are contending for the hearts and minds of America's electorate. But that battle also has its regional dimension, with some general divisions of support from the urban-cosmopolitan voters for (Francophone, wine-drinking) Kerry, and the hinterlands and small towns for (somewhat illiterate, phony down-homey) Bush. To some extent the reflect a rift in the American cultural identity between the big city and the small town.

The Paraclete watches over a derelict small-town church in Haliewa, Hawaii

© UrbisMediaProductions

Pearl, MI, West Paduka, KY, Stamps, AK, and most recently, Jonesboro AK. They're not the names of places one might form an immediate association with urban violence and mayhem. Not like the Bronx, East LA and Chicago's southside, those notorious big city battle zones. Not places where one might become the victim of a random act of homicide.

They're small towns; places we might never know existed were they not thrust into the klieg lights of national media by events that are out of character with our impressions of the cherished American Small Town. Small towns are only supposed to make the front pages of big metropolitan newspapers and lead national newscasts when Miss Podunk wins the Miss American Pageant, or a bunch of kids from a wide spot in a two-lane highway sweep the Little League World Series. Not when two young boys who ought to be practicing their hitting and fielding are instead taking target practice on their schoolmates with automatic weapons.

After all, the idea is still very much alive that the essence of America is not in the metropolis, but in the idealized small town: an almost utopian preserve composed of Andy Hardy type kids playing happily on elm-lined streets with white picket fences. The ideal small town has little red school houses, town squares with band gazebos, the requisite general store and Protestant generic clapboard church. Everybody knows everybody (perhaps a little too well). It's the polar opposite of a menagerie of social marginals in a sea of cosmopolitan urban anonymity. There are, in addition, the cast of small town social archetypes: the pastor, the school marm, a town drunk and town floozie, the two old maid sisters who live in the big Victorian house on Elm street, the sheriff, the publisher of the Elmtown Gazette, and, a chorus of solid, small town families knitted together by unshakable allegiance to the Bible, the Flag, and romantic-familism.

There's a host of people to whom we can credit these images: regionalist painters, Samuel Clemens, sociologists of the early Chicago School, Norman Rockwell,and Frank Capra films, among others. They have been effective images; surprisingly large percentages of Americans still say they feel that small towns are the best places to live and to raise kids. Many a suburban development and what has been called ‘neo-traditional' community planning try to market those images to the urban-disaffected.

But more and more, such places exist (maybe only ever existed) in the nostalgia-misted recesses of the American mind. There is the occasional of a revival of a small town here and there, fueled by disenchanted brokers and executives emigrating from the hyper-urbanism of New York or Chicago to oppidan retreats in Vermont or Oregon in search of the grail of American small town life. But the demographics soundly demonstrate that for most of us the metropolis is the habitat if not always of choice, at least of necessity.

These days the ‘dark side' of the American small town, that side of it that has seeped out in the writings of Tenessee Williams, Faulkner, and Capote, in those black and white newsreels from the early days of racial integration in southern small towns, and in films like In the Heat of the Nigh, Easy Rider, and Mississippi Burning , is formulating a counter-image.

The rhapsodized reputation of the American small town has been tarnished by the same sources of myth-making that exalted it, and administered a coup de grace by school kids with automatic weapons.Today, when we assay this bedrock of American idealism we find it adulterated with a mixture of myth, reality and revenge. The same mass media that gave us the idyllic small towns of Any Hardy and the Waltons has also fed our imaginations on a staple of Peyton Place and the generic small Southern towns of mean-spirited, bigoted, xenophobic, reactionaries. Andy Hardy has grown up to lead a gang of unemployed, sexually-frustrated, small town punks ready to commit atrocities on any alien they can chase down in their gun-racked pickups. And it is unlikely that they would be deterred by the obese, cigar-munching sheriff who is blinded by his mirrored sunglasses to any malfeasance he can't snare in his speed trap.

Maybe this negative imagery has come about in the same way as the idealized myth of small towns because the small town has failed to live up to its mythology as the American Promised Land. After all, if Elmtown turns out to be a dreadful place, then there is indeed no place with those “old-fashioned American values.”

Cnservative politicians, xenophobic law enforcement and gun-toting citizens can't keep out exposure to non-small towns values. TV, films, CD's and the Internet have woven the small town into the metropolitan, even global, fabric as surely as if a gay and lesbian contingent joined the Fourth of July parade down Elm Street and heavy metal rockers took over the band gazebo. Once July connects to the Internet she and Todo are surely not in Kansas anymore.

But small towns will likely, if only in mythic form, remain a bastion against the evil forces of modernism. They are our cultural innocence, our national virginity, and no matter how cosmopolitan we become, there will probably always be, if only in our imaginations, a small town somewhere in each of us.

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13.8: FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Part 4 10.20.2004

It seems paradoxical that the very cultural differences that form much of the attraction in romantic travel can become daunting when one considers actually living with them. There arises a point in the romantic travel encounter when the sober and rational side of one's mind kicks in with the suggestion that the very impermanence, the fact that the fantasy remains unfulfilled, may be what the romantic traveler is really seeking. Commitment is the emotional equivalent to putting your luggage in the attic.

For the traveler a “destination” is not an end point, it's a point between trips. Thus the foreign love affair is the equivalent of a trip, contained between arrival and departure but ultimately just a diversion from one's “real life”. Moreover, it seemed that I had made Gwen into part of the landscape of a city that I loved, a way of getting “closer” to it as much as to her. That she didn't see it (how could she?) in the same terms as I did was only the beginning of admitting that there were differences that might fester in a longer relationship.

These were all thoughts that were only partially formed at the time and, admittedly, owe something to a couple of subsequent romantic encounters. Experience is often the best teacher, but one has to be a good student.

And so here we were in the early morning at Waterloo Station in an absurd twist to those movie good-byes. That wasn't me waving from the coach door, torn from my lover's embrace by the vortex of war. That was me on the empty platform, holding a plastic cup of cold tea, and too embarrassed to return the kiss Gwen blew off her fingertips. I could only smile weakly and stupidly raise the cup of tea in an awkward toast.

I watched her until the train was out of sight, and I headed for the Underground, wondering as we clattered beneath the awakening city what the previous two days might have been like had I not stepped into that phone booth in Trafalgar Square. I only knew for certain that I would henceforth see London in a somewhat different light, and that the city would always carry the anticipation for me that on some future visit I might encounter Gwen coming around a corner, or catch a glimpse of her sitting at that bench near the statue of Winnie The Churchill. I couldn't promise myself for certain that I might not even one day venture into that phone booth in Trafalgar Square and “ring her up.”

When, a bit bleary-eyed, I pulled myself into the seat on the coach down to Dover one of my students inquired: “And where have you been the past couple of nights, professor? At the movies?”

“Sort of,” I replied, and eluded further questioning by taking a nap.

We'd be in Paris by the late afternoon.

* * *

I cringed at Doug's good-bye scene. He had about thirty-five people attending his romantic farewell, everyone of whom had a hypothesis about how it might end. As our coach pulled away from the hotel in Frankfort with Doug's and Lisl's eyes were locked in an embrace through its tinted glass window. They had been inseparable for days, and maybe some nights, although neither Doug's roommate nor Lisl's sister had offered any confirmation. And now they were being torn apart. A few of the women in the group were near tears. It was as though they were in the last pages of some tragic romance novel.

There had been a good deal of speculation since that rosy-fingered-dawn in the Ionian Sea a week earlier. It had come out that Lisl had a husband and a young child back home in Austria. This information had been prized out of brother Gerhardt by some of the pack who took turns “toasting” him in the ship's bar. As to whether or not she was estranged from her husband, or even divorced, was never made clear, which might just have been Gerhardt's way of keeping the busy-body packers running up their bar bill on him. And Lisl's home was, it turned out, a rather small Alpine village, not Vienna. If, and when, Doug learned these little “realities,” they seemed not to have diminished the aura of ardor in which the couple moved about right up to this moment of ‘sweet sorrow'.

I, and no doubt many others, wondered at his thoughts, as Lisl, her parents and sister grew smaller in the rear window of the coach. No one dared look directly at Doug. He could have changed his return ticket, stayed on longer, followed her to Austria. But then what? Was there really a husband there, after all? Did he know that? And if not, an Austrian village was not LA. There would be none of the anonymity, the cultural pluralism, the open-endedness of California; quite the opposite. And there would be no jumping off the ship on a romantic Greek isle, but rather her going off to teach English at the local gymnasium. I was right there with Doug. I could almost feel that cold cup of tea in my hand.

But these were my ruminations, not Doug's. I never heard from him after we said 'so long' at LAX, nor did anyone else in the group to the best of my knowledge. Maybe he did return to Austria later, without all the snooping, speculating fellow travelers around. Maybe he, or she, or both, thought better of trying to make more of it than a “shipboard romance,” and treasure their time together as a souvenir.

Maybe Doug got a leather cover for his notebook, like mine. Maybe Lisl will be the model for the heroine of his first novel, or the subject of a poem. Maybe he'll abandon the safe and certain again to the enchantments of the romantic travel encounter. That's how foreign affairs begin, with a “maybe,” and that's how a lot of them seem to end.

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13.7: FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Part 3 10.18.2004

Why it should be Gwen who came to mind at that moment is only known to the little psychic gremlins that delight in scrambling synapses. But as I stood on that ladder watching a couple in silent communication, my own thoughts transported me back to a rail platform in London's Waterloo Station. It was very early that morning as well, and the light was just beginning to stream through the grimy panes in the huge vaulted train shed that spanned several platforms. An empty outbound train slumbered alongside one of them, coach doors open. Except for a conductor far up at its head, Gwen and I were alone on the platform.

The air was chilled and steam rose from the cup of tea I got from the station buffet. We traded it, and a cigarette, back and forth, each waiting for the other to say something, but neither finding the words to begin. Gwen had cried softly a couple of times on the walk down from Bloomsbury, but she smiled now and, breaking the silence, asked me to repeat the little joke I'd heard and told her the evening before.

“How does it begin again?” she asked. Somehow it didn't seem it would be as amusing today, but I went ahead just the same.

“There's these three English businessmen who are meeting for lunch and each one of them is trying to impress the other with their social credentials.”

“That's it,” she put in. “Then what?".

“You know it already, it won't be as funny so soon after,” I insisted

“Yes it will. See, I'm smiling,” she replied, forcing a grin.

“OK. So these guys are boasting to each other how they had relatives that served in this war or that war, or this government or that government.

“Right.”

“Finally, one of the guys proudly announces: ‘You know, I had a great, great uncle who lost a leg at Waterloo'. To which one of the others says: ‘Oh, pity. . . , which platform?'”

Gwen repeated ‘which platform' right along with me. She laughed aloud but then added, soberly, “I'll remember you every time I tell it.”

But my train station mood was closer to Anna Karenina . This was going to be a train-station parting with no definite date of a possible reunion. I couldn't help think of all those train-station partings in English films: guys going off to war, tearful wives and lovers on the platform, bands and flags. This thing with Gwen was turning out a lot like a movie, compressed into forty-eight or so hours, and now the credits were about to roll. It had all passed so quickly.

The two previous romantic evenings actually had their genesis a couple of years earlier. We had met in a professional capacity. Gwen was in the government and had arranged some appointments for me and my students in various departments. Since that time fate had changed my life considerably, and I was mired in its aftershock and loneliness. Here I was in London again, with another group of students from whom I had escaped for a few hours, and the fates nudged me into a phone booth near Trafalgar Square to look up her work number.

I had found myself attracted to Gwen at our first meeting. There was the accent, of course, but it also had a suggestive, sultry undertone. She was not the ‘peaches ‘n cream' English girl; in fact she was Irish-English, and the Irish part had olive-complected and dark-haired elements that were more Latin in appearance. Gwen was pretty, but somehow I had the feeling that she had been rather plain as a girl and might even return to plainness in her later years. But, then, in her early thirties, she appeared to be in what Miss Jean Brodie would have regarded as in her “prime,” though hardly any more experienced with men. She gave clues to all this as we exchanged biographies over coffee; but how much my imagination added or amended in the intervening couple of years is unclear.

When I phoned her office her workmate told me not to “ring off”. While she went to “collect” Gwen I gazed up at Nelson on his column and mumbled “Should I be doing this?” Nelson was probably the wrong guy to ask I reconsidered, thinking of the Lady Hamilton affair.

I had no reason to expect that Gwen would be interested in anything more than a friendly “social” engagement with me. Except for a brief and proper chat over coffee we had a couple of years earlier I only knew that she was “un-attached,” and lived in Sussex. But there was a faint sense of “what-if” when we parted company that time. So I thought, and so had nursed a growing interest in the prospect that there could be more between us if we met again.

Then, too, I wondered whether I was just fascinated with the notion of a “foreign affair.” I liked listening to the sing-songy way that English women spoke, the quaint Masterpiece Theatre phrases of “ringing-off,” “queuing-up,” the differently-accented syllables, the way even their declarative sentences rose in tone at the end, conveying a vaguely interrogative “don't you agree?” There was something simultaneously proper and sexy about such speech that I'd filed away since my first Greer Garson film.

“Of course I remember you,” she said, “who would forget that lot of well-tanned Californians you had in tow. I needed a holiday after them.”

I explained that I had another “lot” of them, but at the moment they weren't “in tow,” and surprising myself with my own directness, I announced that I was quite prepared to offer her dinner for the pleasure of her company. I winced as I awaited her reply. She could have gotten married or involved since I last spoke with her. “Unless. . .” I began.

“Lovely! Shall I come to you?” she said without hesitation and a touch of enthusiasm.

“I'm right beside St. Martin's-in-the-Fields” I said. “How about splitting the difference, say, Parliament Square. There's a bench near Winnie's statue.”

“The Pooh?” she asked

“Who?”

“The Pooh, you said. Winnie, the Pooh?”

“Oh, ah, no. Winnie, the Churchill, you know the statue. . .?” I could hear a slight giggle, what I deserved for trying to be cute. Does 6:30 give you enough time?”

“Lovely, ‘til half past six then.”

I pushed open the phone booth door, took a deep breath and looked up again at Nelson, still unsure of what I was doing. If it was just going to be a dinner, a rendezvous at a “tube” station would have done nicely. But no, I had to suggest a square, a bench and a statue, all presided over by Big Ben. I tried to recollect if I had seen the whole scene I'd just “created” in some movie.

Dinner turned out to be “grub” at The Coal Hole, an old theatre district pub along The Strand that Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean was reputed to have given impromptu performances until overtaken by the spirits (distilled variety). But already it seemed that both Gwen and I had appetites for more that pub food. We'd both understood that from an embrace under the gaze of Winnie the Churchill that was too-tight and too-protracted to qualify as a friendly greeting. There seemed from that moment a mutual sense of inevitability to the evening.

How such an easy obviousness could become so quickly and unambiguously established amazed us both, I think. Perhaps a dormant seed of potential relationship had been planted in that brief meeting a few years earlier, a seed whose genetic instructions were: “if and when you're back in London . . . .”

We thought it an adventure to smuggle Gwen into my hotel room, which required avoiding an encounter with any of my students as well as any persnickety hotel personnel who considered it their responsibility to know who was a guest and who was not. This “cloak and dagger” stuff seemed to elevate the furtive foreplay of squeezed hands, lingering touches, and hungry glances.

Things always look somewhat different in morning light, and sneaking-out didn't have the prankish, or romantic appeal the sneaking-in did. At the Underground station I asked Gwen if she would like to get together again in the evening. Part of me wanted to just let the whole thing drop. Neither of us seemed to feel all that comfortable with this sort of assignation, in spite of the fact that circumstances seemed to dictate it. Gwen was really a country girl from a village southwest of London, where she still lived with her widowed father and older brother. She might have taken on the looks and sophistication of the other office and government single women workers in the big city, but each night she returned to the comforts of her family and village life. Nor was she motivated to have an ephemeral “good time” which she could casually set aside.

Our night together had had more dialogue than an editor for pulp romance would allow. Most of this was an exchange of thoughts and information on a variety of personal subjects. Clearly, we were both wondering if there might be more to this than a shipboard romance ashore. Casual one-night stands do not trouble themselves with such details.

I got us a room that night at a small bed and breakfast near Russell Square.

The following morning the city was gray, chilly, and deserted as we walked down Southampton Row toward Waterloo Station. We walked mostly in silence, and though I had always liked the area around Russell Square it now seemed a bit tawdry and tattered. Contemporary buildings were replacing some of the Georgian structures, some with garish signs on franchise restaurants. Maybe London seemed disappointing because of my own disappointment. I didn't know how Gwen felt. She wasn't saying much either.

Pretty much everything had been said hours earlier. We had fallen “in like” and exchanged tender sentiments, but rather than just “letting things be” we allowed ourselves to speculate on the prospects for a more elaborate and extended relationship. In a way, there might have been difficult obstacles even if I didn't have a home, two daughters and a career eight time zones from what I referred to the evening before as “Gwenich” Mean Time. Moreover, I'd learned that Gwen was far more “English” than might be comfortable in the scale and cultural compost heap of Southern California. She had only smiled politely when at dinner I had made a politically-revelatory remark about the British Empire sometimes having been more “brutish” than British. And, though I associated her with London, she admitted that she really didn't like big cities and preferred the countryside where she could have a garden and animals. A few months after I arrived home, she sent me a book of pictures of British villages, which looked to me like nice, pretty places—to visit. [to be continued]

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13.6: FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Part 2 10.15.2004

At LA International Airport I introduced myself to the group that I would be escorting through Europe for the next thirty days. They were, as mostly they had come to be in the late 1980s, couples in that category the travel industry calls “mature travelers.” That made Doug an exception to the tour's demographics.

At first I didn't think he was one of our group. But he noticed me jotting something in my notebook, and told me he admired the leather cover I had on it to withstand the rigors of travel. Patty had the cover made for me years earlier, and many a notebook had worn the thick, brown hide with its Buffalo nickel snaps to keep it closed when not in use. Doug resolved to have one made for his notebooks when he returned home from this trip.

In that same conversation Doug revealed to me that he wanted to be a writer. He'd studied business in college, and went into ROTC afterward, neither of which satisfied, as he put it, his need to “have a more self-reflective life.”

He was from some unremarkable archipelago of suburban subdivision in LA's carboniferous sea. Now, at twenty-seven, he and his less remarkable notebook were making their first foreign trip to Europe.

Doug was a compressed sponge, poised to absorb it all. Of slight build and pleasant looking, it seemed he would be easy and non-threatening for people to talk to, open up to, traits useful to a writer. What he required was “stuff” to write about, experiences and atmospheres, he said, and Europe promised plenty of that. I liked his “self-reflective” impulse, his yearning for new places and people and most of all, his desire to capture as much of it as he could in his notebook. I couldn't help liking Doug; for in many ways he reminded me a little of myself, not too many years earlier.

Still, a package tour might not seem the ideal vehicle for a ‘wannabe' Herodotus, Haliburton, or Hemingway. But an enterprising romantic traveler can make use of its conveniences and avoid enough of its constraints to achieve enough of that essential “solitary-strangerness” for reflection and inspiration.

As things turned out I didn't see all that much of Doug beyond brief chats on the coach now and then, mostly answering his questions about where he might take an excursion off the tourist pathways. He avoided many of the group meals in the hotels and, as often happens with groups, his absences became the subject of speculation.

He therefore came to be regarded, in gossipy speculations, as “gay,” a “doper,” “anti-social,” or a “prowler of tenderloins.” Like most gossip, it was off the mark and said more about the authors than the subject. Doug had been spotted at the Tate Gallery in London, the Orsay in Paris, a café near Santa Croce in Florence, and always alone. Though he was friendly and helpful at the times he was obliged to be with the group, he volunteered no stories of shopping bargains, comments on the son et lumiere the evening before, or drooling descriptions of those topless French beachgoers at Nice. What his notebook recorded, I don't know.

As I was bound to tour leader responsibilities, I envied Doug's ability to get away from the pack. Some unusual experience might befall him, something I might read about in a novel or travel article years later. His absences didn't alarm me. He seemed too smart to fall victim to a scam, a mugging, or pay twenty dollars for two drinks because the pretty girl who sat next to him at the bar was indeed a ‘student,' but of the arts of Venus.

As it happened, however, it was Venus (or more appropriately her Olympic version, Aphrodite) that provided a dramatic turn to Doug's quest for experience, in a very corporeal form. And it happened in the full view of the pack.

Our tour, after three all-too-frenetic weeks on the ground from London to Athens, was now ready to embark on what was billed as the “relaxation” phase of the trip: a week's cruise in the Greek Isles. There is little need to note that cruise ships figure prominently in the lore of romantic travel. Select any cruise ship brochure or ad and young couples (and occasionally some fit and handsome older ones) nuzzle at the railings in crisp nautical casuals, cavort on disco floors, smile longingly at one another through champagne flutes, and frolic in pools and spas in attitudes foreshadowing the implied intimacies to come in their luxurious cabins. Primed with such images, the sentimental soul, bathed in sea air that Paris and Helen once respired, and with cares and ‘significant others' back on some distant shore, the sentimental heart is easy prey to the legendary “shipboard romance”.

Our Austrian tour manager, Gerhardt, had managed, by some negotiation, to acquire some berths for his parents and two sisters, one of who, Lisl, taught English at an elementary school near Linz. She was perhaps a couple of years senior to Doug, but if that came up during the tetes-a-tete they were soon seen having at a table by the pool, or at the rail on the promenade deck, it didn't seem to dampen what was beginning to look like a shipboard romance worthy of a cruise brochure.

Lisl was a pretty woman, though not in an obvious way. She was slim, and only mildly curvaceous, fair-complected, with a simple coif of short dark hair. It took a little study to see that she was very attractive in a wholesome, clear-eyed, and fine-featured way, much more the girl next door than the siren; though she might not always draw her drapes. She and Doug were the same height, as there was frequent opportunity to notice, and seemed to complement one another in other physical features.

Others on our tour saw it much the same way. There was no escaping the gossip, the prying eyes, the knowing smiles. Except for their escapes on rented bikes or mopeds when the ship called at Mykonos, Crete, or Rhodes, their every move was the subject of intense speculation, and no small amount of envy.

I can still see them in my mind the morning several of us arose early to get our Homeric “rosy-fingered-dawn” photos. The evening before we had gathered at the open air bar on the aft deck. We were passing the coast of Albania the barman informed us, although there were no lights on shore to be seen. Apparently the communist regime was so restrictive that even light could not escape from this black hole of the Balkans. We would be in the Ionian Sea in the morning, passing Ithaca, Odysseus' home island. What better place for a Homeric sunrise on the “wine dark sea.”

From an evening of exchanging toasts with Italian grappa I learned that Gerhardt was on good terms with most of Europe's bartenders and facile at finding occasions that ‘required' alcoholic libation, brought a bottle of some sort of “schnapsi” rot gut to toast the sunrise. For a guy who was reputedly making his way through medical school between gigs as a tour manager Gerhardt seemed to be around rung five on the seven-step program to alcoholism. He had managed to ferret out a couple of boozers on the tour as regular bar company and arranged to keep the wine flowing so profusely at one of the group dinners in Tuscany that nearly the entire group had to be poured off the bus. The physician-to-be countered a complaint that he had allowed smoking on the return trip with his unique medical philosophy that “it would be a waste of life to die with a perfect body”. Gerhardt taught me how I might turn a tour into a non-stop party, but I also picked up the observation that travel can be good cover for people with problems of substance abuse.

About nine or ten of us showed up before sunrise, and I have to admit that the “schnapsi” stuff did serve to ward off the damp chill. Before it warmed my bones, I had been considering retiring to the coziness of my cabin bunk and later substituting a sunset photo since at sea it's almost impossible to tell whether the sun is rising or setting.

Homer would have been pleased; the sun rose from the sea just the way it was supposed to, well, close enough for a blind poet. We snapped furiously as it sent a yellow-orange carpet rolling across the placid Adriatic straight at our ship. I had never dreamed those many years ago when I struggled with translating The Odyssey in Fr. White's Classical Greek class that I would one day sail in Odysseus' fabled wake, even if it was in a cruise ship. I was glad I decided against faking the sunrise photo. It was a high moment for me, lacking only a Penelope to share it, she being far away and, I trusted, fending off suitors until my return.

Some others were less moved to romantic reverie, or perhaps more fortified with the schnapsi stuff. There were waggish references to its being “a dawnzerly light” and the skies being “forspatious,” so I left my Philistine countrymen and headed up toward the Boat Deck, camera in one hand, a cup of the schnapsi stuff in the other.

It was when I came up the ladder to deck level that I saw them. Doug and Lisl were at the rail. They were staring longingly into one another's eyes, their hands clasped, not in an embrace but at their sides, their bodies just touching.

I froze, not wanting to disturb their moment, but still wanting to witness it. I took a step down the ladder so that my eyes were just level with the deck. I watched, and as I did my memory raced back, not to “Penelope,” but to Gwen. [to be continued]

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13.5: FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Part 1 10.14.2004

The girl on the cover of the Hawaiian Air inflight magazine wears an expression somewhere between Bernini's St. Theresa in Ecstasy and the leer of a porn queen. She is also wearing a swimsuit because she's in a palm and fern-lined pool with a waterfall splashing over her ebony hair. The muscular coverboy, oozing testosterone from every suntanned pore, holds her in his arms in a posture of imminent ravishment.

Romance and travel are reciprocals. Open a newspaper's travel section, or survey the ads in a travel magazine or cruise brochure and the photos of beautiful, young, active couples (or somewhat more mature in the cruise brochure), betray the travel industry's dirty little secret: travel is a “turn on”. Frolicking in the surf, lounging in sumptuous hotel suites, smooching at the rail of the Love Boat, and gazing longingly at each other through wine glasses at dinner—these are some of the relentless libidinous themes of travel advertising. There are other images promoting nature, adventure, art and culture, but the top three are sex, sex, and sex.

So what else is new? Sex sells a lot more than just travel.

Yes it does, but it is travel's rather special ingredients that give its libidinal attractiveness something more than the pitch for a sportscar or deodorant. When we launch ourselves into cultures with other customs and mores and so we become strangers in strange places, far removed from the everyday sanctions that govern our moral lives. There is an air of unreality to the circumstance of being in a foreign land, one that becomes confounded with the novel and the film. If for only a while, it seems we might become the lead in that romantic film, the character in that Harlequin romance, or half of that couple on the cover of the inflight magazine.

As with many things in life there is a continuum; and so it with romance and travel. At one level is the much-touted sentimental romantic interlude for the young courting couple, or the married couple seeking escape and rejuvenation. At the other there is the blatant “sex tour” in which First World moral defectives charter jets to Bangkok, Eastern Europe or other venues where the surplus of mistreated women constitute the vector for a global game of HIV roulette. It is simply a jet age version of the love ‘em and leave ‘em approach to out-of-town sex that predates even Hernando Cortez, or the boys from the Bounty.

The romantic end of the continuum is perhaps less dangerous; at least more interesting. The romantic traveler is looking (maybe not looking, but open to finding ), more than sex. Travel is a plunge not only in to far away places, but also into mental recesses that harbor fantasy lives that might-have-been, and hanker for the chance encounter that might open the door to an epiphany. If the transient experience of the sex tour is serologically perilous, the romantic's vulnerability is existential. Either can be life threatening.

Travel long enough and far enough and you will encounter someone who falls within these parameters. And there's always the chance that the someone could be yourself. [to be continued]

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13.4: The Goebbelsization of American Media 10.11.2004

Joe, the Gullibleizer, warms up the party faithful. UrbisMediaProductions

A dear old friend of mine enjoys whipping up descriptions of what he likes to imagine went on in the Oval Office, renamed the “Oral Office,” between Clinton and Lewinsky. The narrative would spark the prurience of even the likes of pornophile Kenneth Starr. Bodily fluids are flying about, sacred spaces and furniture are being desecrated by having sexual acts performed in and on them, there are cigars, stained dresses, well, you get the idea: this is how Republicans get off. If I open his emails when he's in a particularly heightened Clinton-hating frame of mind my computer seems to get all sticky.

I confess that I begin with this suggestive paragraph to get the reader's attention (Republicans please cease touching yourselves inappropriately for a few minutes and read on).

In the 1930s Germany, still bristling under the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, suffering enormous inflation, fearful of the Bolsheviks to the east, and feeling their lebensraum pinched by the losses of Alsace-Lorraine and the Sudtenland, allowed itself all too willingly behind the maniacal ravings of Hitler and his National Socialists. Hitler galvanized those fears and feelings under the banner of Aryan racial superiority, gave them and internal vent in the persecution of the Jews and set his country on a journey of “preemptive” strikes against his lethargic neighbors.

No need to repeat more of that history here. Except to extract a couple points from that history that are the focus of the present theme. (And you thought it was going to be pornography; we it is, of a sort.) The paranoia of the Third Reich resulted in, as political paranoia almost always does, a doctrine that the end justifies the means . Throughout history that has been expressed in the notion that the very survival of a people or a nation is at stake, and when combined with political and military power, it has resulted in the military means of preemptive strikes against enemies, real and imagined.

The second element I would like to extract from the Third Reich is the prime focus of my theme: the management of the media by the repetition of lies. The master of this process was Hitler's head of the Reich Ministry for People's Enlightenment and Propaganda, Dr. Josef Goebbels. And it was Geobbels's prime dictum that you must repeat a lie until it becomes “the truth.” And telling a lie to defend the end of survival is a justified means.

If you have come this far you are probably already wondering what comparisons I am going to draw between the Third Reich and the Second Bush Reich. There are, of course, great differences between the last years of the Weimar Republic and the America at the beginning of the 21 st Century. On the eve of the 21 st Century America was enjoying nearly ten years of peace and prosperity. The Cold War had ended and it did not feel threatened by any nation-state. It needed no physical room to grow, and even its old scapegoat, the African-Americans, were finding a slow way to integration. The new “threat” to the White blood of America from immigrants of other races was largely tolerated except by extreme Nativists and bigots. But there were some disturbing parallels.

Seething beneath the surface there had been growing for some years a strong and organized fundamentalist Christian-Right Wing putsch. Not in the beer halls, but in the pulpits and church halls and in the extreme reaches of the Republican Party. The movement formed its roots back in the cultural revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s, when the threat of a “godless society” reared its head in the Civil Rights movement and particularly in the Women's movement and the so-called “sexual-revolution,” and was fertilized by the national fissure of the political divide over the Vietnam War.

Political conservatism, which had always been a prominent part of American politics began to be invaded by those who saw “conservatism” as a bastion for those who were rankled by the perceived threats of the new found freedoms and behavior and expression. The threat of a “godless society,” one in which women might be able to control what is done to their bodies, where children might not be able to pray in school and learn that creation took six days, where those who “chose” the homosexual lifestyle have rights like “families” with a fifty-percent divorce rate; where public officials don't have to pass a “Christian” litmus test, where the cross and the ten commandments are not displayed in every public building, where taxes and liberals and UN kiss-up multilateralists are code for people who are un-American. Those are huge threats to God's end plan for America to be born again as an Fundamentalist Evangelical Christian Conservative Society. And that end justifies any means to achieve it. A lie, a deception, whatever it takes, in service of that end is in play, is “justified.”

If that is the message, then to win the media must be controlled. The first thing to do is to apply Goebbles concept of the “big lie” to the media: keep calling it liberal (also read in Jewish) dominated, even as more and more radio stations [put in reference here] are right-wing talk shows and Christian evangelical programs. Use Hollywood as a whipping boy for immorality, depravity, violence and left-wing politics. Enlist large media outlets such as Fox and Sinclair Broadcasting to carry the right-wing agenda as “news” by supplying them packaged “news” items that resemble those of real reporters. Create right-wing media “stars” such as Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity, who routinely lie and distort facts to audiences that are referred to as “dittoheads.” And, when called on lies and distortions, return to the mantra that such charges are example of how the liberals are trying to control the media by cutting off other points of view. With the installation of Colin Powell's son in the FCC big right-wing media owners are now able to consolidate their domination of many markets without any competition.

Joe Goebbels would love it, because the Fundamentalist Christian Right-Wing is dammed good at using media lies and distortions. There are, of course, almost innumerable examples of their proficiency at this, but a few prominent examples can be cities here.

The Clinton impeachment was probably the most egregious example of the use of the big lie for character assassination. Unable to best Clinton politically, the right wing conspired to inflate an act of infidelity into a reason for impeachment, pillorying Clinton daily through its shills on radio, and delivering Starr's salacious report to the Internet.

Before that, however, there was Bush I's disgusting exploitation of the Willie Horton in his ad against Dukakis. Obviously the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree, and Bush II smeared John McCain in much the same way during the primary campaign for 2000.

If you have to lie in person make sure it's before and audience that is controlled or receptive. The former example is the Bush (very rare) press conferences in which White House reporters who are in disfavor are shunned (e.g. Helen Thomas), or intimidated to as virtually inane questions. Elsewhere, appear only before audiences of military (the staged “mission accomplished” carrier landing), or handpicked audiences, such as those on the campaign stump, where participants are screened for their party loyalty and will cheer lustily on cue. If Joe Geobbels were around he'd surely be made nostalgic for those great Nuremburg Nazi rallies.

Fundamentalist Christian Right-Wing also has its preferred list for using the media to do its dirty work. They got media Gestapo Robert Novak to expose the covert CIA work of Valerie Plame, avenging the report of her husband that there was no Iraq-Nigeria yellowcake uranium deal, an act of treason that will probably go unpunished. The end justifies the means.

Other media Gestapo were enlisted to try to smear the military record of John Kerry (and to distract from the dismal Bush military record). Through the Internet, slander books, newspaper ads, and talk show appearances, a small army of ex-military dissemblers did their worst to turn Kerry into an American Dreyfus.

It should be noted that the Fundamentalist Christian Right-Wing works the media for more than Mr.Bush. They used it effectively to impeach the Governor of California. So now we have the Goverfuhrer of Kaleefornia employing the nice Third Reich tactic of impugning the character and Aryan purity of political opponents. Surely “girlie men” are no fit creatures to hold office, much less gain admission to the SS. And lets us not forget that this former buddy of Nazi Kurt Waldheim was virtually given a pass by the major media for his invention of his biographical about seeing communists in his home town, gone into the spin machine with his sexual predations.

So there we are: “what goes around,” they say, “comes around.” But it should be noted that things don't always turn out well for the big liars of the end justifies the means. Joe Goebbels might have had such a thought as he poisoned his half dozen children just before he shot himself and his wife in the Reich's Bunker. But his spirit lives on in the mind of Karl Rove and the mouth of Scott McClellen.

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13. 3: The End of Heroism 10.10.04

There was a time when heroes were people of the exceptional character and behavior. Heroes emerge early in recorded history; Achilles and Odysseus, Moses and David, for example, but every society has, perhaps needs, heroes. There are mythic heroes to fill in the blanks: Spiderman, Mulan, Frodo, some are also referred to as “superheroes”. Heroes were people, real and imagined, who performed heroic deeds, willingly put themselves in danger or at risk, usually to defend a nation, a principle, or even a person.

What do you say to people who have lost a son or a daughter in Iraq? John Kerry fumbled that one the other day, on the occasion of the 1000 th American service person to die there. I knew exactly what he was fumbling about because I'm sure he remembers it from his Vietnam dilemma. The one we all have. How do you say I'm sorry your child, husband, wife, whatever, died in a stupid, unnecessary war. How do you convey a condolence that does not imply that the reason for the condolence wasn't necessary; how do you keep from implying that somebody might have died for no good reason. That could even befuddle a temporizer like John Kerry. Bush just says they are all “heroes”; but then, unlike Kerry, he knows nothing of heroism.

You can't say something like that, even if you know that it's true and that's part of what you are sorry about. If that casualty sincerely believed, as many no doubt do, that they are protecting their loved ones from terrorists and keeping the world safe for democracy and bringing it to the Iraqis, well then, it is sad when we feel they are misguided in those feelings and beliefs, because those are noble, if woefully misdirected motivations. But what of that casualty was a gung ho, let's waste some of those Arab-Muslim terrorists (or at least some people who look like them), and there are some of our people like that over there, and not just in Abu Ghraib. How sorry should we be about them?

It's a dilemma. Like the one I had when, not long after 9-11, New York threw a party in Central Park for the police and firefighters, the “heroes” of 9-11. Except they were cruelly abusive to Senator Hillary Clinton when she got up to speak, and dumped all over actor Richard Gere when he implied that we needed to try to understand why these people did this to us. I admire their guts as first responders, but I have contempt for their brutish stupidity. Some of these guys did perform heroic deeds, but I also know some cops and firemen who are closer to anti-heroes; cops who like their guns, uniforms and the chance to use their authority a bit to much for their own macho needs, and firemen, I have read, who like the thrill factor of their work a bit too much, even to the surprising fact that there are a higher than average number of arsonists among their ranks.

But these days it seems that the title of hero is bestowed rather casually. Cops and firemen are categorically “heroes,” military people are categorically “heroes,” even POWs and those who died in the tragedy of 9-11 have been called “heroes.” Casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are routinely called “heroes” by newscasters, politicians and their loved ones. For some, just being there defines them as “heroes”; but then there are some who clearly do not want to be there. For others a courageous act defines their heroism, but is being killed by a roadside bomb or a sniper, heroism? Which raises the point that was at the center of Kerry's dilemma: when is a “hero” really a victim ? Or both? Are you asking for trouble, or at least seeming unpatriotic, to quibble the matter?

The Chrysler sedan I parked next to in the supermarket lot this morning is what I somewhat disparagingly call a “codger car”. It's big, heavy, and possessed of those sharp, angular features that threaten to slice through a Japanese import like Bowie knife through sushi. I always give them a little extra room.

This codger car caught my attention for another reason: its license plate. Actually this license plate was more like a resumé. The plate read “NAVRET,' which I took to be Navy, Retired. But it also said Pearl Harbor Survivor, and had a Purple Heart on it. A few other little emblems and a bumper sticker disclosed the owners political views and organizational memberships, and a golf hat, facing out from the back window had USS something embroidered on it along with gold “scrambled eggs” on the visor.

I'm not sure what the “message” of this license plate is. All vanity plates advertise something the driver wants us to think about him or her. But should I think this guy is a hero? Maybe he is. Maybe he's just a guy who was lucky enough to get back from Pearl Harbor with enough pieces to be able to drive a Chrysler. Whatever. I wanted to honk for him to pull over and let me pass, but his bumper sticker said: “Pardon My Driving, I'm Reloading.” On this one I'll elect to be a “live coward.”

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13. 2: GOING NATIVE (Communing with Nature, Part 4) 10.8.2004

The “call of the islands” is a compelling summons to the romantic soul. There is no doubt in my mind than an aspect of this curious regard for traveling to commune with Nature owes to the need for many to escape the frenetic, over-organized, high-pressured, urban world most of us inhabit the great part of our lives. “Going native,” especially on some idyllic isle, has had an association with travel, if not been the motivation for much of it, since Homer's Odyssey , and certainly since Typee and Mutiny on the Bouny. For years of my youth I “fantasized” myself to sleep as Alexander Selkirk, the real Robinson Crusoe , and in later years as a Gauguin, painting island lovelies by day and conjoining their Polynesian DNA with my Milkamagnesian genes by night, our glistening bodies lattice-striped by the shadows of weaving palm fronds as we imprinted the cooling sands with our ardor. (OK, sometimes I had trouble getting to sleep.)

These days I reflect upon my too brief forays into the places of those fantasies, to Caribbean and Greek isles, to the sands of Hawaii, Bali, and the beaches of Phuket's islands. And especially, Figi, where, at a modest seaside resort I leisurely read books, watched geckos scurry over the walls of my hut, and walked among the corals of the reef at low tide. Each afternoon the rains came with monotonic precision to briefly cool things off and to provide a level of humidity to ensure a soggy nap. No schedule, no appointments, no phones and faxes, and not much to do but get up to the sounds of the south seas.

I can still almost hear that conch horn in Fiji, with its deep and breathy Ooooouuuuoohhhh caught on the early evening's on-shore breeze. Then the player calling out a summons that seemed to harken to the times his ancient people took to outriggers to cross endless seas: “ Haahhhpppiiiyaaar, haahhhpppiiiyaaarrrr.” Then again the horn: Ooooouuuuoohhhh, as suggestive as Bloody Mary's plaintive “Baaaaliiihaiii, come to me, come to me.” Surely this was the sound that sent shivers right down to Fletcher Christian's loins; the lusty songs of Polynesia, a call to a feast of sensuality, to aphrodisiatic foods, to sweet scents of exotic flowers, to the beating of cardio-rhythmic drums, to naked lovers racing across the moonlit sands into cool lagoons. (Whoa! the ole computer was starting to overheat there.)

Haahhhpppiiiyaaar, haahhhpppiiiyaaarrrr.” When I first heard it, the sound called me as to some ancient ceremony. How many tattooed and grass-skirted denizens of this island had responded to that call over the centuries. Haahhhpppiiiyaaar, haahhhpppiiiyaaarrrr. Surely I, the palangi , the haole , the pupa, would be welcomed among them and come to know their recondite island ways. I would live out my days in carefree Edenic simplicity and splendor, garlanded with a fresh lei each day from an adoring island lovely. I, too, might be honored one day to sound the sacred conch and call Haahhhpppiiiyaaar, haahhhpppiiiyaaarrrr.

Ah, but I had listened too closely to my fantasies and not well enough to the sounds of the islands. Alas, in a world in which most everything becomes a commodity, even escapist fantasies are corrupted. I made my way to the sound of the conch and the mysterious refrain of haahhhpppiiiyaaarrrr. There, near the palm-thatched bar, flanked by tiki torches stood a tall Figian in traditional garb. He blew the conch once again: Ooooouuuuoohhh, Ooooouuuuoohhh. And then he called: Haahhhpppiiiyaaar, haahhhpppiiiyaaarrrr , and sunburned French tourists, laughing Aussie surfers, and assorted other palanagi , filed up to the bar.

Haahhhpppiiiyaaar, haahhhpppiiiyaaarrrr. Now I understoond. “Happy Hour, Happy Hour.” But my island fantasy was not fully dashed, like star-crossed ship on a coral reef, not until the conch player added, with solemnity: “You here for good time, not long time.”

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13. 1: COMMUNING WITH NATURE (Part 3)

There are other approaches to communing with Nature than by the Xtreme Sportsman's bravado of showing it “who's the boss.” Dominating Nature, if it is ever achievable, is a momentary exhilaration. Those who do not get their thrills from “conquering” Nature can get them from natural wonders, what might be called the “wow effect”—to encounter Nature at some remove, to see it in all its grandeur, majesty, immensity, and power. The primary exertion is to summon superlatives equal to the height of a Hawaiian waterfall, the vastness of the Sahara, the depth of the Grand Canyon, the colors of a coral reef or the power of a breaching humpback whale. But often the most common utterance at such natural wonders is the simple, if apt, “WOW!”

But is this “communing” with nature? As I see it, Nature doesn't “commune,” it just does pretty much what, to be somewhat tautological, Nature pleases. It asks no quarter and gives no quarter. It can delight or kill us with equal indifference. Nature does a lot of things, but it doesn't commune. Communing is our idea, our way of perhaps expressing the subliminal fear that we have somehow lost touch with or natural past, or our guilt over the mess we have made of much of the natural environment. Mother Nature can get a little bitchy when we don't write or call, when we just take her for granted.

Look at a mountain. It represents eons of time, compressing our little insignificant lifetimes into the comparative span of a mayfly. Nature inevitably prompts in me thoughts of mortality. The ocean, in particular, does just that. A walk on the beach can be like a ride on existential surf. The ceaseless waves seem to be repeating: we've been doing this long before you were here, and we'll be doing it long after your gone, dude. The beach becomes the sands of time, and every bit of washed up coral, sea shell, or rotting sea creature is a memento mori . The sea and the mountains are humility inducing, and maybe some of that is a good thing for us arrogant humans. And if the sea and the mountains have this effect on you, don't ever look up into a clear night sky.

Alfred North Whitehead observed that: “Time is in Nature”; not the reverse. Therefore, we can only measure time by the changes in nature, which elucidate another difficulty I have in communing with Nature.

Consider a photograph of the sea, or a mountain. Unless it is a daguerrotype, or a scratchy old black and white shot, one would have difficulty dating the photo. Its subject matter offers no indication; being relatively “timeless,” it might have been taken a millennium ago or yesterday (only the comparative occurrence of changes in the photographic process itself “approximates” the time of the photo). When I hear that a redwood tree is 500 years old it is somewhat meaningless to me until I “translate” the years in “human” terms. That the tree was a sapling when Leonardo Da Vinci was painting the Mona Lisa has more meaning for me than the bare numbers.

However much we think we may be able to commune with Nature, its purpose, its plan, however it got there, wherever it is going, has eluded us. We may assign origins and destinations to Nature, but they are, however rationally-contrived or mystically-conjured, mere creations of our own. We may inspect it, dissect it, or just play around in it, but our communing with nature is with an autistic, indifferent partner.

Nature doesn't regard us with the same “superiority” we assign to ourselves. We may have achieved some deliberate “interaction” with Nature as science has revealed some of its mechanisms and behaviors, but each “discovery” and achievement is wrapped in layers of greater mysteries and enigmas. And Nature seems to find occasional cause, or necessity, to teach us some humility, whether with earthquakes or viruses. In Nature, plate techtonics and virulent bugs have equal rights with us.

Consider, too, that most Science Fiction dealing with nature—giant tarantulas, goofy Godzilla monsters, oversized apes with a ‘thing' for blondes, fanciful extra-terrestrials that look like fetuses or preying mantises—these are more extensions of our fears and imaginations than our understanding of Nature. The science fiction writer or special effects designer is made to look a rank amateur against the evolutionary adaptations in a single drop of sea water.

The most recent human affront to Nature has been the success of Survivor television programs. There is a perverse genius in the producers who came up with the idea of putting a group of greedy, self-absorbed, socially-vicious a**h***s in a jungle and encouraging them to perform in a manner that, had they been the first humans a millions or so years ago, the world would now be ruled by kindlier and more amiable rats and roaches. Instead, the idea behind such programs is to determine, with the prospect of emerging from the show with a million bucks to the lone survivor, who might be willing to eat a roasted rat, or snack on a fist-full of roaches. Now that's entertainment!

Mother Nature must be getting a real chuckle out of that one.

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