Next Time, I Go by Land and Sea

(First published in Bali Advertiser, October 25, 2006)

“There is not much to say about most airplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. So you’re grateful.” – Paul Theroux in ‘The Old Patagonian Express’

Forty years ago August, I made my first trip overseas on one of American President Lines’ last remaining passenger liners. I was too young to appreciate it. We traveled the way civilized people should travel. We had separate places to eat, sleep, and relax. We could exercise and dance and run riotously on the decks. We had time to get to know our fellow travelers. At a slow, measured pace, our bodies adjusted to the day and night rhythms of our destination. Even our worry over any potential shipping disaster was more relaxed than the instantaneous terror spikes and white knuckles that come with every bump and shudder of an airplane.

I used to enjoy flying before it became a horror of delays, cancellations, security checks, and fears for the worst. Now I face the full brunt unprotected, without resort to unlimited beers and bottomless wine glasses, no longer cheerfully shuffling my way through airports and connections, oblivious to the havoc of modern air journeys. I am husband and father and responsible for the safe and healthy travels of wife and son. This has its compensating pleasures, but the airline attendant who wished me to “enjoy” my meal does not the know the rant she almost invoked in the middle of a 12-hour flight from a responsible, nauseous husband and father tending a sick, incapacitated wife and a bored two-year-old.

How could I have enjoyed my meal? Even if it had been good, I could not have eaten it. I was too busy making sure my son did not poke his eye out with a fork or dump his yogurt into his mother’s hair. And even if I had been able to eat it, it would have come up again – as had everything I had eaten in the previous 20 hours.

The only possible way to fly with enjoyment is to fly single, in business class, on someone else’s tab. Civilized air travel is otherwise too expensive for all except Gates and God. At the moment, recovering from this last trip, if I were looking for a job, I would work without pay forever if offered business class tickets for all work and leisure travel. Economy seating is for fools and sardines. Economy food service is for anyone who thinks McDonalds sells hamburgers.

Why do people subject themselves to such misery for unessential travel, for another notch on a suitcase handle, for more pictures for show and tell on their return? My wife, son, and I were traveling to see family in the US, a price we have to pay every so often for my oversea expatriate life. Most vacation travel these days, on the other hand, isn’t about maintaining family connections or even about relaxation; it’s about going somewhere, anywhere, other than home, another form of our age’s trend to selfish indulgence.

Holidays did not used to be just about going somewhere. Middle class fathers drove days across country to spend two weeks with Aunt Edna, Uncle Herb, and the cousins. Well-to-do fathers would send their families to the beaches in the summers and continue to work and live in the city during the week, and maybe join the family for a couple of weeks or a month at a cottage or hotel returned to year after year. Poor fathers took their families fishing and camping on the weekends, because weekends were the only real holidays they ever got. Holidays and vacations were not about exotic distances. That was for the luxuriously wealthy, poor travel writers, and well-heeled adventurers. Holidays and vacations for the rest of us were about family and real rest.

Why in this age, too, of instant, practically-there, on-line, in-your-ear communication, do businessmen still rack up the annual airplane mileage? Only because it’s good to brag at the club about being just in from Beijing? Or because it really is fun to fly up front, in business class, when all the poor, unsuccessful, lesser blighters are back in cattle class where they belong?

We economy flyers have let ourselves be fooled by long distances and speed. If life is a journey, and the journey is the thing, then the only journeys that count are the ones that are taken well, no matter the destination. No one really gets anything from two weeks in Thailand one year and two weeks in France the next – at least nothing in comparison with two weeks at the same camp site year after year, or summers at the same lakeside cottage for generations. It is not where you go or where you live, it’s in how slowly and deeply you drink the waters -- of the local farm pond or the Nile. The pyramids can teach only as much about life as the 100-year-old Lone Star Cemetery on Rattlesnake Hill Road outside Brooksville, Oklahoma. They are both graveyards after all. And both reveal their most important secrets only to anyone lucky enough to drive or ride by them on the way to work everyday for a lifetime.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

The Demise of America

(First published in Bali Advertiser, October 11, 2006)

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1933 Inaugural Address

Coming home takes time and I don’t usually feel it until I’m doing 70 miles an hour down an Oklahoma blacktop, Merle Haggard on the radio. Each trip home, though, there is less to return to, less to see. Relatives and friends die or move away. Old familiar haunts close down and disappear. Towns crumble back into the prairie, and the rusting remains lie in weedy neglect.

America is dying. Its innards are shriveling up while its intellectual life – as evidenced by glazed-over television eyes – creeps into senility. And Americans are afraid, although they manage every now and then to rise to a weak old man’s bluster. They are afraid terrorists will strike the US again. They are afraid of what their government is doing to protect them. They are afraid of oil and house prices and interest rates. They are afraid they are too fat; they are afraid they are too skinny; they are afraid Mexicans and Asians are taking over America; they are afraid someone will take away their guns; they are afraid their no-credit-bad-credit, payday loans for their cars, houses, and RVs will eventually bankrupt them.

Democrats and Republicans fear each other and believe every political opponent is working to destroy the country. The “mainstream media” and bloggers warn that the practices of their news market foes signal the deterioration of American rationality, fairness, perspective, and objectivity. Christians and pagans shake their heads together over the path to hell that the other has chosen. There is no doctrine, belief, ritual or its opposite that wasn’t ordained by God, founded by tradition and the forefathers, and which, if neglected, won’t lead directly to the destruction of the nation.

America has been even more strange and confusing than I imagined it would be. First there was non-stop coverage of the death of an ex-playmate’s son. Then there were three school shootings that claimed the life of nine people (at present count). Babies have been snatched. Children have been found drowned in a washing machine. A congressman has resigned over e-mails and instant messages he sent to teenage congressional runners. An ex-president has sparked both love and loathing in a confrontational exchange with a TV interviewer. A whole state has been up-in-arms for two weeks over a blown call in a college football game. And somewhere hidden in the news each day is the report of how many dozens died the day before in Iraq.

For outsiders and baffled returnees, it is like trying to understand cricket knowing only the contest rules for baseball. Everything at first seems to make a kind of sense, but every TV news “personality” presents the news with a smirk and a wink that implies we both know what any given story is “really” about. Straight news reporting has given way to a brow-beating badgering to put across a particular viewpoint. And when not flogging one brand of propaganda or another, news anchors are working to stir the faithful to a righteous indignation over the latest crisis.

The problem is that there are too many of these assumed “shared” viewpoints, with adherents of each believing in a universal acceptance that doesn’t exist. When most Americans lived in the now dead and dying small towns or at least were born in them, there may have been a homogenous American belief system. But the death of those towns and that broader community has been replaced by a big-city cacophony amplified and broadcast and dictated coast to coast.

It may in the end result in a healthy change – a broadening of a narrow, nationalistic, parochial outlook. For now, many Americans still cling to the illusion of a monoculture that no longer exists – that has disappeared along with Selman and Slapout and Paruna and the thousands of other towns and communities that have passed on in Oklahoma and the rest of America.

America’s earthy, country-boy vitality has been sapped. All that remains is a big-city, American Idol cheesiness that used to be just the polish on the apple. Now there is only the polish, no apple – a shiny, red wax job and no ’37 Coupe underneath.

America’s small towns and communities were its strength and base. Rural America provided the boys and men that fought and won two hot world wars and one cold one. Rural America provided the common, down-to-earth sense that kept the national political and intellectual life from divergent extremes. Without that solid, massed center to keep the balance, America is cracking apart at the cross beams -- like an old-time playground seesaw overloaded with modern, American-sized school children at each end.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi