The gentle burning of the cheap DeWars they serve on transatlantic KLM flights reminded me of the sun I’d felt on my skin not six hours ago in the Old South of Amsterdam. I’d been sitting on a comfortable cushion in the open courtyard, sipping a typical Dutch latté while I waited for an old friend at the College Hotel near the museumplein of the old Dutch Capital.
But for whiskey to feel that way you have to drink it right. And it’s complicated. Draw half a breath, and then take a sip. And remember, it works best with the middle to low tiers of whiskies, or any scotch younger than ten years. Twelve is too old, too smooth for the right effect. You need the harsh stuff for the right kind of burning. When the liquor is in your mouth, swirl it a bit, but not too much. It’s not wine, dammit, and isn’t activated by oxygen, but rather by settling into itself. So swirl it in your mouth just enough to coat the interior of your oral cavity with the liquid gold and then open your lips and take another slight breath, stopping just before it burns to the point where your cough instinct takes over. Don’t let that happen — that’s bad form and you’ll look like a freshman jackass, so avoid it at all costs.
As soon as you feel yourself reach that burning point, stop inhaling and begin slowly letting the air out. If you can, simultaneously begin swallowing the whiskey, or rather, letting it fall down your throat. You’ll think of the sun on your skin right away, and you’ll know what I mean.
You’ll feel hairs tingling as your skin cells expand from the sudden warmth. Comfort will set in on your exposed arms first, and then your face. As the warmth penetrates your clothes, your core will begin to equalize, and if it’s summer in Amsterdam, you can go from chilly to too hot as quickly as a cloud can roll past the sun in high wind. It’s a frightening show of how fickle and dependant our bodies can be on the planet. But for those first five or ten seconds, it also feels damn good.
Which is how I felt in that morning warmth, just before it got too hot and my back started sweating against the courtyard cushions. I’d been sitting there for a while, drinking ice water while I waited for 10:30 to come. That’s when Vera, my agent and lead in Amsterdam, had agreed to meet me. She preferred that kind of setting, an open courtyard in a classy hotel in the chic part of town by her office, where you can have a fresh morning drink to interrupt your work and “feel as if you’re abroad,” as she put it. Or maybe she’d meant ‘a broad’, which is accurate too, I guess, for her.
Me, I prefer dark old pubs and bars with aged oak railings that carry the names of their proprietors’ grandfathers. Places where the floor sticks if you don’t step in the right places and where coffee is served only to water down the bourbon.
But I guess at 10:30 in the morning, this place was more appropriate — yeah, I can see that.
Unmistakable, whether from a distance or from across a few empty tables on a Friday morning, Vera loves to wear yellow. From brights to dulls, she has yellow blouses, skirts, shoes, gold bracelets, pendants, earings, purse, car and on colder days, leggings. She loves it. Even her credit card is yellow. She wears a grey scarf and red sunglasses, which disturbs me in terms of continuity, but suffice it to say, I didn’t miss seeing her in that empty gravel courtyard and waving her down towards my table.
I’m not a fan of that kind of attention, of course, and I prefer for my leads to be slightly more conspicuous. Those of you who know me know that my profile is kept low for reasons that involve contact identity protection issues, statute of limitations in certain countries and a general sense of paranoia which, despite its social inconveniences, has kept me in business all these years. So keep your comments to yourselves.
We started off with the usual chit chat about the Dutch and our mutual dislikes for some of their habits, such as waiting tables and actually bringing you what you ordered. See, Vera is no more Dutch than I am, and atheist Israelis of Polish heritage have a warmth about them that I just can’t ignore, and actually identify with. As if she were the Jewish Grandmother I never had, only younger. Our common distaste for the often obtuse mannerisms and cold tact of the Dutch had brought us closer together than either of our companies had meant for us to be. It was supposed to be all business. But there we were, a year after our last official dealing had gone down, two friends just meeting for old times sake and a fix for caffeine.
But instinctively, we gravitated towards our most common aim — Politics.
“What’s this deal I’m hearing about MSNBC and FOX news?” she asked me, after our chatter had subsided. “I’m hearing all kinds of gibberish from ThinkProgress about some kind of truce between those two networks. As if that can be good for anybody.”
“ThinkProgress?” I chuckled. “Why the hell do you still read that stinking hippie tripe?”
“Oscar, are you drunk? It’s 10:30 in the morning. Are you not sleeping enough?” She asked me, with a very straight face.
“I never sleep enough,” I told her. “You know that.”
“You also drink too much, and I’d put an end to that too, if I didn’t think it’d affect your writing negatively,” she said. “I swear you get off on it.”
I didn’t respond, except with a tight-lipped shrug of the shoulders.
“Hippie tripe…” she trailed off, and then snapped at me from across the glass of water I’d been drinking. “ThinkProgress is just about the most reliable way to get a lead into a story the main press will likely ignore these days. Where do you think I get half my ideas for followups?” I stared into the ice in my water.
“Christ, I’m glad I got out when I did, then,” I said.
“Got out?” She asked. “What, ‘got out’? You didn’t get out. You’re neck deep in this nightmare, probably worse than me.”
I sighed after she’d finished. “Tell me about it,” I said, leaning back on the cusion in my woven bamboo chair. “No — I mean, got out of this local scandal shit and into the global scene,” I said, pausing, “you know, business dealings in Africa, socialist policies in the EU, Labor conditions in the MercoSul, humanitarian issues in China, real ground conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq and who’s profitting from it…that kind of thing. The real news.”
She grinned at me with tightly pursed lips and then burst out into a hearty laughter, a heartfelt glee I hadn’t witnessed in quite some time. She belly laughed for a quarter minute or so before she became coherent enough to stammer a reply.
“You’re daft!” She chuckled, raising her hand and waving down the waiter. “‘the real news…’ — listen to yourself. You know who you sound like? You sound like those tikes from Rolling Stone, idealistic as if they still wrote for their school newspapers.” She put her hand on her chest and recovered, “Oh…my,” she sighed.
“What?” I protested. “You’d rather I be wasting my time covering what Rupert Murdoch wants me to spread about MSNBC and FOX news being civilized to each other?” I drew a breath.
“First of all, like you said, it’s gibberish. More importantly, it’s self-serving. Who benefits from that? People who like drama’s who. There’s no drama as good as quarreling lovers, and a peace accord is just a sign of a larger battle to come. Who knows…maybe Murdoch is planning on buying MSNBC as well. It doesn’t server the people at all.”
She was still laughing. I accepted it, and toned down my rhetoric.
“But who cares, right?” I said, sort of giving in. “Nothing does anyway… but that’s not news, it’s theatrics. That’s show business.” I thought about it for another moment. “And what’s wrong with being serious about journalism for a change?” I asked her, still feeling somewhat challenged.
“No,” she said, “It’s politics.” She took a deep breath. “Look, there’s nothing wrong with writing it, I guess,” she finished chuckling. “Just keep your expectations of your readers low. Nobody reads that stuff, Oscar. Nobody cares.”
“Fuck caring,” I snapped, “they just need to know. Then they’ll care.”
“Sure,” she said, “why not? But in the meantime they’re too comfortable in their routines to be outraged by ‘the real news’, as you so astutely put it. Enough of them haven’t been near enough to real oppression for some time now, I’d say since — oh, I don’t know…Carter?” She looked at me as she flagged down the waiter again. “I thought you’d have learned that by now.”
“Carter?” I coughed. “Why Carter?”
“Well, I’d say Clinton, because he didn’t do anything, but then I’d be tempted to go back to Bush Sr., since he got away with that ridiculous war in the Gulf on the same repeated premise of Vietnam, not to mention Panama and his involvement with Reagan in the Contra affair. But then I have to go back to Reagan since he got away with much more than the Contras, like Nicaragua and Guatemala and the effective elimination of taxes for the upper classes, pretty much dooming everyone into the world we have today by creating the conditions for the drug war the US has with Central America and the Religious war the US has with the Middle East.”
I was eying her hard now.
“From there I have to bounce back to Carter, who needed to flex his muscles for the business world as the new Democrat. Did you know that in spite of running on the Demoractic platform, he actually raised military spending from what Nixon and Ford had set during their regime, as has every administration since, regardless of the need or mandate?”
Now I was just impressed at her reservoir of deplorable historical knowledge and smiled coyly at her. “No Vera, I did not know that.” I loved how pointed she could be with her facts, which is, of course, why she was my main lead for stories on this kind of issue.
“So I’m tempted to go back to Ford and Nixon, but that seems not only obvious since they were republicans in the middle of the Vietnam War but they also got their share of protesting in that day and age, when people still had it in them. So I bounce back on Carter, who had the chance to change it all, to bring real democracy to that land of yours and instead kept the same old system that serves the rich by means of many avenues, most pointedly, the military industrial complex, while keeping the population from rebelling, revolting, protesting or even just paying attention simply by giving them enough crumbs to keep them more interested in solving their petty problems while ignoring the larger ones that cause everything else in the first place.”
“Fascinating,” I said to her, smiling.
“My point, Oscar, in all seriousness, is this: no reporter, newspaper, network or any other agency has been able to break through the public’s disillusionment with the establishment for well over thirty years. And even disillusionment is not enough to cause revolution…”
“Just a coup, probably,” I interrupted.
“Right. For a revolution you also need outrage, which comes from desperation, from passion, from the inhibition of the human condition. The desire to break free. If enough people have enough desires satisfied, or at least, enough of what they think are desires satisfied, then you’ve crumbled that people’s ability to rise together, where their numbers matter, where their opinion counts for something. The civilized world of the US has lost its ability to outrage,” she eyed me, glaringly now.
It made me a little uneasy.
“So tell me, world traveler; what the hell do you mean by ‘real news’?” She asked me. “Get a grip, man.”
The waiter finally came over and took our orders. Vera ordered a triple espresso, to which I raised an eyebrow before deciding to make it two. Fuck it, I thought. It’s business as usual, I guess.
“So what else did ThinkProgress say?”
—
Several hours later, in business class seat 1A of the 747 bound for JFK, I smiled as I thought of what we’d said. With Amsterdam safely behind me and all caught up with the latest headlines from my several sources, I sipped my scotch and coffee, without mixing the two. That’s another trick I’ve learned about staying focused when you need it. Irish coffee, which is fun and comes at you easily and curvacious the way the continental shelf around Ireland does from 40,000 ft, is not a drink for focus. You have to keep the coffee and whiskey separate, much like your style and objective.
And if we can have both style AND objective, there would seem to be no limit to what we can reach when we drink enough whiskey and then put pen to paper.
Posted in Anecdotes, Politics, Rants, Travels | 1 Comment…
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The left mouse button on my notebook was missing, and the other one was stuck. The rest of the right side of the keyboard was overheating right where the processor sits, whiring and coughing pathetically like a sick child at three in the morning. Typing anything that involved letters on the right half of the keyboard meant first degree burns. The drive holding two weeks of already useless work was now missing, corrupt from god-knows-what-error, making the last two weeks even more useless. To boot, the food here sucks, the economy is costing a lot of people that sit around me their very secure jobs, I’m frustrated about travel schedules I can’t make because of other people’s blunders, I’ll probably miss meeting some very important people in New York next week and all because I’m here, doing nothing for nobody.
No wonder I’m pissed.
—
In a split-second I couldn’t control, my feet exploded against the floor, throwing my torso into the air. My throat grunted a war whoop, my hands grabbed my PC and heaved it clear across the room, smashing it against the wall with a violent garble of plastic and metal being shoved against each other and uncomfortable angles. The hard plastic around the case cracked in one sharp snap that sounded like a femur splitting in two. I stood at my desk, breathing heavily, my sleeves rolled up and my top two buttons on my shirt already undone. I bared my teeth, totally out of control. A coworker was looking at me for obvious reasons and in a rage of animalistic rage I pointed at him aggressively.
“What the fuck are YOU looking at?” He and I work for the same company and I know his shitty equipment has had days of poor performance like this. “Don’t pretend like you’ve never wanted to do that with this stinking equipment they fucking give us. It’s a travesty,” I filled in the silence. The bewildered Dutch man kept looking at me silently. Dutch people don’t like scenes and it makes them uncomfortable to be thrust in the middle of one. And I’d never acted like so like the mos American person in the room.
“Besides, it’s YOUR fault,” I shouted, and pointed to the one across the table from him. “And YOUR fault, and YOUR fault,” I shouted indiscriminately, pointing to everyone in the room and making angry faces at the frightened bunch. “YOU - miserable twats put up with discomfort and wretched computer equipment and bad processes and retarded policies all because YOU don’t want to stick your neck out! YOU don’t want to be the one to make a wake, to change the color in this grey world. YOU frightened lizards that duck and stare empty-faced at every obvious conflict thrown at us from anyone higher than us. You SUCK!”
I waited a second for it to sink in, looking around the room and eyeing the door.
“YOU fucking useless inanimate objects,” I finished, throwing my hands up in a wild craze. “React, Goddamnit! Say something away from the fucking coffee machines!”
Nothing. I looked at the fattest one of the bunch and threw my mouse at the fat rolling over his waist but he recoiled like a mole. “Fuck you!” I yelled, and ran into the woods outside the building. The mouse bounced onto the floor.
—
I was furious that night when I went out for a run. Which I do when I can’t handle some of the things I hear. I’d heard of a little political story that was being kept quiet by Murdoch’s empire of media and then some, and I couldn’t find Dylan to get it off my chest. So it festered.
I’d already been losing it on the tube, in my car, even at the pub. Things were getting weird in a way you only expect during election season. The always important but continuous loser of politics, health care, was being ousted from the media waves by a combination of republican affairs scandals, the typical scurry of the appointment of a new Justice to the Supreme Court of Klowns and some inane tripe of fabricated batshit about Obama’s birth certificate that for some reason even Rachel Maddow was talking incessantly about. The intellectual property trial against a mother and student had, individually awarded record companies upwards of half a million dollars for downloading thirty-something songs. This was with a judge and jury. And everytime I re-read the article about Alberto Gonzalez and the continuing decadence of the Justice Department it struck that cord of dissonance that wishes death to those in the establishment as the only solution to getting out of this maddness that’s settling in over us.
In retrospect, I guess I should’ve known that just blowing the largest spores clean off the fungus that is our DOJ wouldn’t have done shit to stop the decay of the thing. But I just couldn’t get over it. The thick mucus of resentment that builds up in my mind when I hear enough bullshit sometimes constricts my breathing, or at least my ability to think straight. When I can’t wrap my mind around the absurdity I see and hear I tend to collapse into myself and that’s when other things, more extroverted in me, come out and the shit hits the fan.
That’s probably not what led to the the aforementioned work-related disaster but it wasn’t helping things either. Running violently into whatever jungles I happen to be inhabiting is just about the only thing I can do in times like that and I think that if it wasn’t for all the whisky, I’d be in amazing shape.
Earlier in the day I’d gotten beligerent, and yes, done horrible things to company property in front of my clients and coworkers. But so what? Let them sit in stale offices drink horse tranquilizers in the middle of the woods and slobbering figureless numbers onto their keyboards if they like, but they know I was right.
Besides, that shit felt good.
—
Later, back in my tiny hotel room I calmed down by closing the curtains, running the shower at full blast as hot as it goes and closing the bathroom door. I stripped naked and lay on the cold tile, feeling the steam of fifty degrees celcius build up in the enclosed space and fall on my face. My iPod sang Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and wailed a bunch of Muddy Waters and my blood pressure dropped to its normal levels of 140/90.
But that was all work stuff, the very same bullshit I usually avoid mentioning here because, well, shit, you don’t care. What made it relevant enough today was not so much the fact that I’d flipped my Compaq clear across the room and just high enough to miss giving two very tall Germans very clear USB marks across their temples, though I knew at the time that scene would make for some good theatrics. What made it significant was the why of the matter — the raison d’être; I’d finally seen the invisible hand of Adam Smith at work and it was jerking off my corporate employer while the other one slapped around some very good friends of mine.
And we’ll leave it at that. There’s no way to go further into it without getting into some very thick and ugly mud and right now I just can’t find the hours in the day to get into.
Because I’d calmed down from the work thing. I wasn’t belligerent anymore, yelling things at the radio or debating healthcare policy with my TV, though I was getting there. See, politics had come on the iDesk, one of the only good shows put out by CNN, and as if it wasn’t enough that the tentacles of Alberto Gonzalez hadn’t dried up after leaving the DOJ in shame and shambles, the goddamn things were still manipulating, twisting and otherwise creeping things out.
Anyway, the story was that after months of not finding work ahead of the trail of destruction he left behind in his former job, homeschool finally landed at Texas Tech in northern Lubbock.
Yeah, I know. Imagine that — Lubbock, TX. One more for the file of “Duh”, eh?
And I tried to get over the fact that he’s going to be getting a salary of 100K (when regular full-time proffessors with real PhDs and actual experience who teach more than 15 students a semester often get half that). I tried to get over the fact that students formed groups and petitions and even facebook efforts of getting rid of this taint on their education, all of which went ignored (help ‘em out, by the way — how’d you like it if you walked into class and Richard Milhous Nixon was your teacher? Same thing. Here’s the link: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=114577517744).
I tried to get over the silence of the faculty, and later their own ineffective actions when 45 of them signed petitions that will certainly fall on deaf ears of administrators who “don’t make decisions based on petitions”.
Of course not. Not when it’s not fun for the people who pay you to play nice with them.
I even tried to get over the fact that the school’s Chancellor, Kent Hance — who considers Gonzales a “good friend” — said that he received a “substantial number” of supportive e-mails about the hire, and just nine critical ones, and then added that “he wasn’t dwelling on the negative ones because they didn’t come from loyal university donors.”
I mean, shit. I tried. But the shithead that runs that ill-fated school didn’t even bother trying to mask the ugliness of his cronyism. And it’s fucking with education. That’s where I draw the line.
————————————————————————
There.
But it’s been a bad time for idealism. It’s been a bad time for hope and optimism, at least when it comes to government and life within this system based loosely on something that was once referred to as democracy. You know, back when we didn’t know any better. Or maybe we did. They did, anyway.
So yeah, I tried. But I was already on the verge of completely freaking out, so I did the only thing that has a documented track record of success in these situations — which is not, by the way, throwing laptops. That kind of lunatic behavior is revolutionary radicalism and you should be very aware of your surroundings if you even want to think of trying that on as ‘therapy’. Besides, I’ve only tried it once so I’m not sure of the scientific soundness of the theory.
But I was furious, my reason twisted like theirs and I needed to go for a violent run. It was raining hard too, and the lightning had gone wild, which is perfect.
Yes, I’m aware of the dangers of running in lightning. I went anyway.
Trees flew past my face like spiderwebs and I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. The green faded to black, the explosion of the summer woods veiled by the night. With my hands outstretched I felt like I was floating through the leaves, and who knows where I imagined I was?
The wet rubber of my soles against the smooth pavement squeaked and gripped until it warmed up, until the steps themselves molded with their environment. My feet were marching drums in synch with themselves. I could almost hear the trumpets of war over the heavy shield of the thick trees, over the hills that approached but never arrived until they were right underfoot. A steady rumble in the dark clouds above was in consonance with the heavy drops that already splashed over my cheeks, blurring my vision as I ran. I shook my head and the water drained from my face only to build up again in a few seconds.
But I ran.
My pace quickened, the steps growing louder. The path ahead of me was hard to see in the dark but it seemed to stretch to a point at infinity. It excited the hell out of me and I ran wildly into that green blackness. I thought I was alone but between what I thought were drums in the distance there seemed to be cars. The dim semblance of approaching headlights would appear between the bushes ahead and I turned away, onto another path. I tried to run deeper into the thick dark, avoiding as much knowledge as I could of the world outside myself, outside those woods, that rain.
But the deeper I ran, the more often came the headlights in the distance, the more of them there were; the closer they seemed. I turned to run in the opposite direction, but no thinning of that evil-tempered traffic could I find. They were coming from all sides, at all speeds, violently stripping the forrest of its solitude, of its haven. I stopped running.
I just stood there, and marveled at the traffic I could not escape.
—
I feel you don’t really know a city until you’ve run it in the rain, and this I’ve done in many places. Brooklyn, Geneva, Brasilia, Amsterdam, Oslo, London, Vienna — in the rain, through empty streets, void of the bullshit and other distractions there is more intimacy with a place. In the wet dark of a violent storm, there are thoughts you dare to think that normally would stay shut away in twisted crevaces of the mind, untampered with. You notice things you’d otherwise miss, like the echo under a stone bridge while your trainers seem muffled underfoot. You run into things that would otherwise not be there, like the lit up eyes of stray dogs, giving you looks full of evil and insanity, quite aware.
Fields of fireflys aglow in the downpour, flexing god-knows-which-muscles. It seems a lie.
No, I haven’t hit the rum yet. But maybe I should. Rum’s good.
Speaking of which, I’m glad I enjoyed that last bottle of Jack Daniels, because it’ll be my last. No, no, I haven’t quit drinking or found Jesus or anything crazy like that…it’s just that I recently heard they donated over twenty million dollars to the Bush campaign. Sure, I heard that from an English comedian in New York, and yes, the entire liquor industry probably leans toward “Republican Leanings”. And though the Dems aren’t any better when it comes to being friendly to business before being responsible and accountable to the people, it’s silly to base a political opinion on this little — oh, what the hell, let’s call it a fact — everyone else does it.
But this whole rant has been about cognitive dissonance, hasn’t it? And just to illustrate the point of how well esconsced in the matter we are, I’ll be giving up that particular Tennesee Whiskey. And I’ll be getting my inspirations elsewhere, thanks.
Isn’t that just the bitch about the truth? It comes out in the end, doesn’t it? It may be late, it may be stretched thin and pale from being hidden in deep places inside the human-sized safes in old men’s closets and offices. But it comes out.
And you’d think cognitive dissonance would be unpleasant enough to be a deterrent, or obvious enough to be a detergent, but no. The evolutionary abilities of men with power based in the establishment to rise above that most basic and inconvenient of human traits is quite incredible.
Posted in Anecdotes, Politics, Rants, Travels | No Comments…
I guess I’d had a bad feeling about the whole thing from the moment I’d seen the teletext on the airport flatscreen back in that September air: “Pelosi — we have a deal.” Jesus. That’s horrible to even think about in today’s climate.
Looking back on that scene is like looking at a crowd of idle jesters with a Metor careening over the skyline overhead. If you’d listened to the report CNN put out that day you would’ve thought that the vote itself was a mere glorious formality, and that our capitalism was all but fixed and saved. Then I read the thing.
Yeah, I read it. It had a dank stink to it that I couldn’t describe. There were no specifics, and there was no substance; a thing totally open to interpretation; an animal of no instinct or nature. Just cold politics with a hot breath on the public, a fine mist that hung over their eyes just long enough to let the creeps get away. An old joke on the people it was about to rape.
Fuck, I thought. The end is near.
Now, who-knows-how-many-billion dollars into the affair and so many other mad accusations thrown into this mess that I’ve had to buy two full-length books to wrap my mind around it and I’m still sorting through all the names. By the way, please note that in order to cover my expenses for these extra efforts, I will have to charge a small fee of $5, that can be payable by PayPal, even if you don’t have an account. The fee can be payed right after you finish reading the article…
What? No, sorry. That was a scam I ran into on craigslist the other day, but we won’t have any of that here. Those evil bastards could probably give the DOJ a run for their money, eh?
Anyway, the same senseless monsters that managed to get the economy from trillions in surplus to a full one-eighty in the red in just two administrations are now driving some of the efforts at opposing Obama’s massive relief efforts, spending projects, federal budget…whatever label you want to put on it. And all the crazy talk has dropped us off here, where the rubber meets the asphault, and the crazy meets the news. In a half-mad fury of head-turning craziness, Chris Matthews, of all the spinning, talking faces, refused to let that god-damned waterhead, Tom DeLay, get away with smooth talking nonsense about “fighting like a Texan”.
“You can’t seCEED from the UNion,” Matthews said, talking right over DeLay’s crap. “That’s the kind of talk we heard in 1861. Why are you talking like this, Tom?” He dropped his tone a bit, seemed disappointed. “Mr. DeLay, you know this isn’t a real conversation. This is not serious business.”
Which begs the question: what the hell happened to Chris Matthews that he suddenly decided to quit the machete game to become a journalist, eh? Did he just like Obama that much? Did he stop yelling long enough to discard the talking points from the White House and stand now where he belongs — between the executive and the legislative branches, shielding the people?
Well, once again, we’re back to that basic question, aren’t we? What side are you on?
Ain’t nothing rhetorical about it, kids. Get yourselves an answer.
Posted in Politics, Rants | 1 Comment…
Last week, standing in a tree on a ziplining platform forty feet above the St. Lucian rainforest, I let my mind drift between the chopping winds of the Atlantic Ocean and the calm waters of the Caribbean Sea.
“Would it be at all funny,” I asked Laura, “for some American stand up comedian to do a bit on carbon dioxide and deforestation?”
“On what planet,” she leered, “would that be funny?”
“I was thinking something along the lines of American attitudes. You know, ‘we’re producing all this CO2 and the trees are the ones benefiting,’ kind of a thing. Then they’d say something about cutting down more trees to discourage the trees from using so much of the CO2 we produce. Like, ‘that’ll learn ‘em‘. Could that be funny?”
She looked at me for few seconds, and as she started shaking her head the guide pushed her off the platform. She let out a short yelp of surprise and careened on the zipline down to the next tree while I felt a breeze wind its way through my sweaty helmet. The vibrating sound of the zipline faded out over the forest canopy until I could hear the birds again. Then they strapped me in and I followed, flinging myself out into the jungle.
Not a week later now, back in the city and hounded by taxes, car commercials and obnoxious ringtones, I’m faced with the raw and brutal truth of reality; that embarassing fist in the gut that explodes in your throat when you think you’re in the middle of telling a savage joke but it turns out that there is no joke. You’re living it.
–
“It’s plant food,” Rep. John Shimkus said at a House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. “So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?”
No way, I thought. I was just kidding. And besides, when I said ‘comedian’, I certainly wasn’t thinking of the House of Representatives as a Monday night comedy club.
…though, now that I just wrote that it occurs to me, why not?
Rep. Shimkus (R-IL) is among the many half-mad greedheads that try to argue that the United States doesn’t need a cap-and-trade system to limit CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. Frankly, cap-and-trade is not my tag line — I’m alright with just ‘cap’. But as an issue, my general position on it is that we have bigger fish to fry.
In any case, I was struck dumb by the terrible babbling that continued. Is it possible that this cheap clown on television is just that ignorant and stupid? Or is it the usual evil, pushing through a failing agenda, even at the cost of common decency?
Is there any way to know? Can we continue to laugh, or was Mohammad Ali right when he said, “there are no jokes. The Truth is the funniest joke of all”?
Posted in Anecdotes, Politics, Rants, Travels | No Comments…
“My Kingdom will survive only insofar as it remains a country difficult to access, where the foreigner will have no other aim, with his task fullfilled, but to get out.”
- King Abdul Aziz bin Saud, c. 1930
Boy, if that was true back in 1930 then I’ll venture to say that in the almost 80 years since then they must’ve been working tirelessly to perfect their finely honed objective in Saudi Arabia…
Protectionism. What an ugly word. It strikes a tone of anxiety in a song of fear, conjuring images of caged rats, each lashing out individually in frightful fits, ultimately helpless when pitted against a striking viper. A pointless endeavor, especially in the world of the 21st century, where connection is everything and everything is connected. In today’s world, a state and a people left to grow only from within will develop as well as a Star Trek geek playing World of Warcraft in his mother’s basement.
We’ve gone too far with our urges for interconnectedness to slam on the brakes now. As the world becomes more mobile and global, access will be paramount to development and obstacles to connectivity should not be tolerated. It’s disturbing then, to see that so many travel hubs like hotels and airports still try to charge complicated fees for internet access.
It used to be that you could tell how much a person travels for work by their mileage accounts, or their hotel points, or if all else failed, the wrinkles and bags under their red, sloppy eyes. However, you can now tell who’s been around by looking at the list of wireless networks to which one has connected, or attempted to connect.
And if wireless connections were whores at port, I’d be a goddamn sailor.
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And speaking of whores, let me get to the point of this little rant. Even as times are changing, outdated notions of a quick profit are being attempted in the spirit of capitalism and Adam Smith’s fucking invisible hand.
There was a time not too long ago that in order to compete for the business of business, hotels offered their corporate guests free internet connections with either a DSL line in the room or in some cases even a direct T1 line. But you’d be connected - on the grid, as it were. You know — in the parlance of our times.
But then came T-Mobile. And Swisscom. And, fucking, Joe’s corner WiFi, or whatever. Like a wildfire it spread. Today, in hotels across Europe and North America you can get a whole box of exotic teas, coffees, water bottles, towels and even a nice desk set, if you pack efficiently. Just for checking in. I’m not advocating theft of hotel property, you understand — I’m just saying it’s an easy option.
But you can’t get free internet.
Which is weird. You can get it in hostels. You can get it at bed & breakfasts. You can get it at mom & pop cafes, though not at places like Starbuck’s. And of course, god bless the few and the proud who still keep their wireless signals open and blissfully unencrypted to those wandering on the streets, unafraid to check for good souls.
Obviously there is a dollar to be made by letting a single company have exclusive ownership of your wireless real-estate. But there’s something about free WiFi that can keep people lounging in a place indefinitely and I’m not sure why these large hotels and café chains aren’t on board with the concept yet. It’s the reason why I can sit in a dingy, grimy dark pub in London that smells of greasy sausages and spilt ale and have breakfast, lunch and tea while I work. It’s also why no matter how nice the scene from a café on the Zürich waterfront, if they’re going to charge me 80 CHF for the day, I’ll be moving on, thanks.
I’m not normally optimisitic for the future, but in this economy, I can’t help but hope that there will be massive investments into infrastructure, like there were in the 30’s after the Great Depression. They built highways and bridges and I hope that in a way, so will we. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to the current internet infrastructure and we are due for a a revamp of the hard lines if we are going to advance in this endeavor. Otherwise we’ll be stuck with Al Gore’s invention and Orin Hatche’s tubes for another few decades.
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