Tag: social comment

History Hates Pessimists

One of the problems optimists have these days is telling their story without sounding like somebody’s half-witted grandfather.  Cynicism is de rigueur in the 21st century, and anything less than “ain’t it awful” is seen as Jack trying to explain the magic beans to his mom.  According to most pundits, it’s going to get a lot worse in our world before it really gets bad.  Depending on who you’re listening to, the future is unfolding as a close race between hordes of blood thirsty jihadists, dogpaddling across rivers of poached polar bears to get at us, and China giving North Korea the green light to blow us to smithereens.  That is, of course, if we don’t bankrupt ourselves first in a sea of consumer gluttony and public debt.  And that’s just the big picture.  There are tons of equally gloomy little snapshots getting taken every day.  As Tip O’Neill once said, all politics are local and you should hear what the neighbours are saying about my city.

While I’m not opposed to looking at the world through soot-coloured glasses (if you haven’t noticed I do a lot of complaining) I do know enough about history to understand that nobody should pencil in the apocalypse just yet.  Besides, there’s a big difference between saying Barack Obama is a dolt and saying we’re all doomed.  Barack Obama’s place in history hasn’t been decided yet, and I can call him what I like.  But predicting doom and damnation is a serious business that has consequences — first of all, people start believing that crap.

Here’s the situation: our world is in a hell of a mess; there’s no denying it.  However, name me a time — since Lucy and her girlfriends started walking on two legs — that the world hasn’t been in a mess.  Hark back to the euphoria of your youth if you like, or even beyond, and you’ll still find the forces of evil breaking windows and tearing up the grass.  History is like that: there’s a long line of ordinary people who just want to eat, drink and watch the ballgame (or the joust) on Sunday, but then there are always a few jerks who want to make it hard on the rest of us.  We just happen to live at a time when the few jerks have the upper hand.  I’ll grant you most of this is due to our own stupidity, but that’s no reason to throw in the towel.

History shows us that bullies tend to push when they think they can get away with it.  We’ve seen that from Alexander the Great to Adolf Hitler.  Alex’s hoplites were pretty badass at the time and so were Hitler’s panzers.  Yet look around you, folks: I don’t see either one of them strutting the streets these days.  My point is there were probably plenty of Persians predicting the end of the world when the Macedonians hove up on the horizon — and doom merchants peddling their wares in 1940 when Hitler cried havoc and loosed the tanks of war on Western Europe.  However, despise their dire warnings, we survived because history also shows us that bullies make themselves scarce whenever somebody pushes back.  The problem our world has is nobody’s pushed back in an awfully long time.

Unfortunately, this pacifism breeds pessimism.  Since nothing ever seems to get fixed in our world, we begin to believe our enemies are ubiquitous ghosts, difficult to catch and impossible to kill.  The equation runs like this: people are starving in Africa.
Send them aid.
They’re still starving.
Send them more.
They’re still starving.
What the hell’s going on?  Do they best you can.
This is only one example, but there are tons more.  And as the list lengthens pessimism grows — exponentially.  Our neighbourhoods are collapsing under the weight of illegal drugs.  Our financial well-being is being hijacked by amoral greed.  Poverty and homelessness are expanding faster than the economy.  The planet itself is choking to death on our waste — and on and on and on.  These are serious problems, but the real problem is as you read that list, can you imagine solutions – armchair strategies that you know would cure our social, political and economic ills?  I hope you can.  In our time, many people can’t.

There are no all-consuming armies breathing fire on our borders — no Visigoths to focus our attention on.  Our enemies are financial and mercantile institutions with no conscience, corporate NGOs that have become part of the food chain, recent graduates with time on their hands and sorry politicians whose vision extends only as far as the latest opinion poll.  These are the bullies of our time.  They’re our Tamerlanes, our Genghis Khans and our Mussolinis.  They are just as real and just as dangerous as every other madman or general who thought he was beyond the reach of history.

At the risk of sounding like Pollyanna I say we will defeat these enemies.  Maybe not in my generation or the next — but one day, people are going to climb the wall, Lech Walesa style, and push back.  We will sweep these bullies into the sands of history.  Our future is not written in black ink.  One day, Africans will feed themselves, debilitating drugs will not be socially acceptable, our energy needs will be controllable — and all the rest.  Most importantly, though, we will believe in our ability to manage and change our society.  Pessimism will not be a fashionable ploy and
the long line of ordinary people — who just want to eat, drink and go watch a ballgame — will continue.

Ray Bradbury and Me

I’m not a big science fiction fan, but I stopped for a moment the other day when Ray Bradbury passed away — as we all do when we lose parts of our youth.  Honestly, I didn’t know he was still alive.  I thought he was like the rest of them — Heinlein, Asimov and Arthur Clarke — dead and gone.  These writers were the much-discussed trio of dire warnings from my high school and university days.  There isn’t a nerd over fifty who doesn’t know that HAL, the renegade computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, is only one letter off IBM or Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics – in order.  (They’re more than willing to remind you of both, at every opportunity.)  Oddly enough, though, it was Bradbury who made the biggest impression on me — even though Heinlein’s Glory Road is my favourite science fiction tale ever.

Like most non science fiction readers of my generation, I never actually read much Bradbury.  He was around, but most people didn’t take him that seriously.  Basically, the guy was considered all rayguns and rocket ships.  However, this all changed one evening in 1967 when, in a blast of utter irony, Francois Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 hit the big screen.  The movie was almost universally panned at the time, but the cult film world and academia jumped all over the Bradbury bandwagon.  Forgotten 50s sci-fi rolled back into the independent movie houses, and people looked longingly over their shoulders at television’s Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone.  Practically overnight, Bradbury joined the big three futurecasters as another oracle warning us about our perilous ways.  In fact, some critics even spoke about the ABCs of science fiction (Asimov, BRADBURY and Clarke) leaving Heinlein out there to fend for himself.  As an author, Bradbury’s reputation was made — even though most people outside the science fiction community hadn’t actually read any of his stories.  Even today, many people are unaware that there are significant differences between the Fahrenheit 451 narrative they think they know; the movie they half remember and the novel they never read.  Regardless, Fahrenheit 451 is an astounding bit of fiction that is now part of our cultural fabric.  As with every other dystopian big hitter — Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World, for example — everybody knows the basic tale, even though they may not have gone cover-to-cover with the author.

I’m very much a creature of my generation, so Bradbury’s influence on me started with Truffaut’s movie.  It was the first starkly serious film I ever saw; before that it was all James Bond and John Wayne.  I’ve got nothing against those guys, even now, but I realized with Fahrenheit 451 that sometimes it’s not just about cinemagraphic popcorn and soda pop.

In 1967, Montag’s futuristic world was not so physically different from my own.  (Truffaut filmed it at a British Housing Estate.)  It wasn’t Star Trek fantasy; just a glimpse into the future; the near future; perhaps even my future.   I could see the tentative thread that held Montag to his society and the embryonic rebellion against what for me (when you’re a teenager, it’s always about you) was the Wilderness of Lies the characterized the 60s-going-on-70s.  I remember the sad anger I felt that people could be so governed by their own ignorance.  And I remember leaving the theatre determined to keep that anger intact – and do something about it.  It sounds adolescent and maudlin now, over forty years later, but I was an adolescent then, much influenced by my surroundings.  It was physically painful to watch the “Firemen” burn books.  (Actually, it still is.)

Eventually, Bradbury’s influence with me and my generation waned.  His books sat on the shelves or went to the yard sales, when Kurt Vonnegut took centre stage.  However, in the mid 1980s, Bradbury re-introduced himself to another generation with The Ray Bradbury Theatre.  New people, who weren’t even born when Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953, took note of Bradbury’s stories and his characters.  Of course, no one (probably not even Bradbury himself) can escape the one incredible irony.  Most of the people lauding his literary achievements — and praising Fahrenheit 451 as a pivotal work of fiction – are familiar with his written work only because it was adapted to the visual media of film and television.

Jet Lag and Culture Shock

Every travel writer since Herodotus has penned a line or two on how to get over jet lag and culture shock.  Don’t drink alcohol; suck Meyer lemons; wear those weird tight socks that turn your toes into Vienna sausages, etc. etc.  There is only one cure for jet lag, and you heard it here first: outlast the bastard.  Go about your business as best you can; eventually, time will re-telescope and you’ll get back to whatever normal looks like at your house.  Culture shock, on the other hand, is a completely different beast, and for some people, there is no cure.  They’re scarred for life.

Culture shock is your mind rebelling against a massive shift in your comfort zone.  It’s as if somebody set off a bomb in your inner baby carriage, and all the things you know and trust — like Boogy Bear and Blankey — are gone.  The air smells funny, the food tastes strange, the people around you are odd, and you spend half your time being lost.  Invariably, your senses simply overload and shut down.  This is a natural reaction that happens to even the most seasoned traveller, and you don’t have to go halfway around the world to get it.  Any sociologist will tell you, for example, there are some serious cultural differences between cities and their suburbs, or even between neighbourhoods.   Of course, it’s all relative.  Taking a trolley to the ‘burbs to visit Aunt Helen and hiking the Karkaar Mountains of Somalia are noticeably different experiences – depending, on your Aunt Helen.  My point is culture shock is unavoidable; it’s how you handle it that counts.

Speed Rabbit, my guide to the Latin Quarter

It’s been my experience that most tourists start fading out around Day

Five.  This

is when the ruins all start looking the same, the quaint local Corn Dance seems remarkably similar to the Wedding Dance and it’s too much trouble to read every plaque on every wall.  At this point, most tourists go back to the hotel and get heavily into the Tylenol™.  However, a select few, stop, find a bar, sit down, take three deep ones and look around.  They might look like they’ve just been given an overdose of Novocaine (it’s the vacant eyes) but they’re actually looking past the crumbling ruins and the colourful costumes.  They’re seeing the guy serving the drinks, the two women having lunch and “What the hell is that gorgeous smell?”  These people have instantly become travellers, and they’re never going to be anything else.

Travellers understand that people in different places do things differently, and while it might take some getting used to, it’s neither better nor worse than what we do.  They wonder how the waiter got to work and why the appetizer is moving — not how much the dessert costs in real money.  They see the sights (like everybody else) but they notice that somebody has to cut the grass and they wonder how they do it.  While tourists assume that their destination is a carefully planned theme park, travellers understand that every place they go is filled with ordinary people who live, breathe, cry and go to the bathroom.  (In some parts of the world, it’s very important to know where and how.)  Travellers are there because they’re curious.  They see the world as a gigantic playground with swings and slides and kids they haven’t played with yet.  I’m not knocking tourists; I just think they’re missing out on a lot of stuff.

Culture shock is the slap in the face everyone gets when they travel.  For tourists, the cure is a return to the familiar comforts of home, but for travellers it’s an addiction that will never go away.  Like James Kirk, they have a burning need to “seek out strange new worlds…and boldly go [etc. etc.]”  In short, travellers travel and tourists go places.  Tourists bring photographs and souvenirs home with them; travellers bring their experiences.  But the main difference is travellers also get a mild case of culture shock when they get home.