Here There Be Giants

(First published in Bali Advertiser, September 27, 2006)

“These people must be very fat.” – Wang Haiyun, the daughter of Chinese cotton farmers, commenting on the Americans for whom she stitches about 600 boots a day at her factory job in Tianjin, China, (International Herald Tribune, August 3, 2006)

America is very clean. Dog poop does not litter the sidewalks and roads. Plastic doesn’t float in the rivers. People do not burn their trash mornings and evenings, sending smoke wafting through windows. Even if two Americans disagree on everything else, they can usually agree that things should be kept generally tidy. Cleanliness is next to godliness, you’ve heard.

It is a shock, though, that the country that practically invented punctuality and timetables has so much trouble keeping air passengers on course and on time. This trip I’ve been flying domestic US carriers for the first time in five years, and it is hard to get used to the routine delays and hiccups. Sitting waiting for one flight that was eventually canceled for a “minor” electrical problem, I heard gate agents announce delays for several other flights, and one agent warned passengers they would be flying without a working bathroom on board their plane. “It’s an hour-and-a-half flight. If you need to go, go now and get back as quick as you can,” the agent said.

It’s the sort of thing one expects to hear waiting for a Merpati flight in Bima. And amid so much American plenty and excess, there is startling pettiness. Except for international gateways such as San Francisco, for instance, few airports provide baggage carts free of charge. The only option for travelers who wish to manage their own bags is to rent carts at US$3 a pop. Then there are the soft drinks and bags of cheap snacks that replace any attempt at food service.

American excess is, of course, what everyone does expect. It seems a sort of cheap extravagance that has consumers demanding super sizes of everything, unlimited drink refills, and no dining experience that isn’t all-you-can-eat. I’ve been here two weeks now, and it is hard not to feel it is a sign of something fundamentally wrong with America, something beyond war and politics and religion. It signifies some sort of spiritual malaise, an inner emptiness matching the expanse of the outward landscapes and no better filled than the Nevada desert is by Las Vegas.

It is as if the room and space that once led Americans to the ever far frontier has now left them frightened and worried since more than 200 years of effort hasn’t completely tamed and filled it. And in some neurotic subconscious linkage, the still empty wide open spaces now only make their stomachs grumble. There is so much room for expansion, and Americans – on almost every level – seem to want to do their part to fill it. Small-scale, small-town Main Streets have given way to mega malls and warehouse wholesalers. Streets are lined with business and stores, each with their own paved acres of parking lots and entrances and exits. It is no wonder that American waistlines are ever expanding under the influence of so much civic gigantism.

It is tempting to mark it all down to selfishness, a collective capitalist greed, an out-of-control sense of “mine-ness.” But there is something more at work here. It is a level of self-centeredness that has everyone claiming the right of the firstborn. More so than ever, individual Americans are isolated in their cars, their houses, their own backyards. Perhaps by cutting down on the cast of supporting characters each one can more easily believe themselves the star of a personal reality TV show. And perhaps the shrinking communities and extended families further drive the space-filling neurosis as each person endeavors figuratively and literally to expand to fill the holes in their lives. No wonder then, too, the American obsession with “living large.”

What will ever fill the American hunger for the biggest ever of everything? SUVs haven’t done it. Double-bacon-cheeseburgers, extra large fries, and 44-ounce soft drinks haven’t done it. Home entertainments systems in “McMansions” haven’t done it. All-you-can-eat Chinese food buffets on every corner haven’t done it. Americans still want it all, and all still always means more.

Where it all ends is no better illustrated than by the company Goliath Caskets, Inc., maker of oversized caskets for more than 20 years. The company’s “Homestead Style” casket comes in sizes up to 52 inches wide – about as wide as a standard double bed. And funnily enough, the man that started the company in 1985, Forrest Davis of Lynn, Indiana, was nicknamed Pee Wee. One imagines the nickname will be long out of fashion 50 or 100 years from now, or maybe it will only be used as an affectionate term for freakishly small people – probably not Americans.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Back to the US of A

(First published in Bali Advertiser, September 13, 2006)

“They took my Blistex.” – Bill Hunstein, 39, of Fairbanks, Alaska, on the ban on liquids, gels, and other personal toiletries on airlines after the discovery of a terror plot in Britain (New York Times, August 11, 2006)

We are preparing for our first trip to the US in three years and I am wary. Maybe there’s some worry about personal inconvenience after the foiling of the airline bombing plot in Britain in early August. Will I be able to keep my laptop with me as carry-on? If we can’t bring our own bottled water into the cabin, will the stewardesses supply enough to keep us from thirst and thrombosis?

Maybe a few times during the flight I will worry about being blown out of the sky by exploding hair gel. Mostly, I expect, I will accept that flying is statistically safer than traveling by car, and that, if anything should happen, it would be over quickly. A few seconds of screaming terror is all.

Six weeks in America is another matter. It won’t be quick. It won’t be painless. The country has grown strange to me the past 13 years. Three visits in that time have barely spanned three months, and I often contemplate “home” with bewilderment. Perhaps, too, I remember the fear on long family trips home when I was an adolescent and suddenly became the outsider who didn’t know what was cool and never got the jokes at school.

And still there is much in America that is confusing and contradictory:

For instance, just how big does a weapon have to be before it is unacceptable to say you won’t give it up until someone pries it out of your cold, dead hands? I mean, why does the premise that concealed weaponry makes everyone safer not hold when dictators and theocrats want to pack nuclear heat? At what caliber does, “Everybody’s got to have guns,” become “Everybody’s got to have guns – but not those guys or those guns.”?

Or how to explain the many US organizations and politicians that say they stand for family values and the protection and nurturing of children with the public outrage when US parenting magazine Babytalk had the “courage” to carry a cover picture of a baby breastfeeding? How can there have been a taboo against showing women’s breasts in parenting magazines in the first place? People can generate the same indignation at a picture of a breastfeeding mother as at a primetime, Super Bowl nipple flash?

Or how can religious Americans not see the illogic of ridiculing and reviling Islamic religious states and “fanatical” devotion to a prophet’s words -- and then working to institute prayer in their own public schools, advocating home or religious schooling to counter secular education, and trying to redefine science because they believe the earth to be 6,000 years old according to Biblical reckoning? Does every religious difference have to be reduced to my-god-said-your-god-wears-army-boots simplicity?

Or how can a country with supposedly the best university and education system in the world have such large numbers of people that apparently believe Elvis, Jimmie, and Jim still live, aliens are keeping watch, The Da Vinci Code is a documentary, Pamela Anderson’s breasts and reality TV are real, and Geraldo Rivera is a journalist?

America leaves me wanting to laugh hysterically or weep, and usually doing the wrong one at the wrong time. When in-country, I constantly worry people are looking at me weirdly and keeping their hands on their pistols. A friend has recommended buying a flak jacket and putting it on enroute. I want to warn my wife to keep her hands away from her pockets and in plain sight in most public situations. Maybe we should wear signboards saying we are not “carrying.”

Yet, it is home, in a historical, ancestral sort of way, and I cannot deny being an American. Baseball was my first sports love. The Dallas Cowboys were my and America’s team in the 1970s. I get cravings for chicken-fried steaks and bacon-beef burgers, and believe home pizza delivery is a fundamental human right. I like to look at the gun and knife catalogs at my uncles’ houses and review my cousins’ new toys that go bang. Most tellingly, I am proud when I hear of Americans doing something noble and self-sacrificing and feel personally embarrassed every time Americans screw up on the world stage.

So back we go to the land of plentiful excess, where Darwin is a myth and creation is a science, where it no longer matters how or what you say as long as you say it on TV, and where everyone shops at Big ‘N Tall. Here’s to safe journeys and returning sound and sane without any bullet holes that cannot be mended. Hold the exploding hair gel, please.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi