Subject:
No place like home, except
New South Wales.
Date: July
4, 1994 07:47
22:07 Blackheath, Australia :: 2 JUL 94
First a couple pieces of business:
Alot of people have been asking permission to forward these entries on
to others. Please feel free to do so. I only ask that you please include
my name and internet address on any entries or excerpts you forward. That
way people down the forward chain can respond to me if they wish.
If you want somebody added to the distribution list, just mail Gayla
Boritz [gmb@dsi.bc.ca] who's acting as my distribution node so I only
have to pay CompuServe for the one copy I transmit to her, not the dozen
or so that actually get distributed. If you're shy about going to Gayla
directly, just ask me and I'll forward the addition to her (name and address
withheld by request.)
A few people have asked me to send 'eMail Postcards.' It's a great idea
but difficult in execution for several reasons. First, though my 486/33
Toshiba T3400 notebook's a pretty gutsy little box, it ain't MPC (Microsoft's
"Multimedia PC" standard) and there just ain't no way to capture
images/sound/video to my hard disk, except to go out to a service bureau
and use their scanner or video capture system and then transfer it to
the Toshiba via floppy disk. I'm certainly not going to add another piece
of portable electronic equipment to an already overweight travel pack.
This difficulty is compounded by the fact that while my camcorder records
in the NTSC video signal format (the format in which all North American
television is broadcast) most of the places I'll be visiting use either
PAL or SECAM. In fact, very few countries use NTSC. I think only US, Canada,
Mexico and Japan, off the top of my head. (Don't bother correcting me,
I don't really need to know.)
These video signal formats are mutually exclusive except on specialty
hardware (read: expensive to access). Even after getting images and sounds
into the notebook, there's still the transmission expense for al that
data. I might go through all this once or twice for kicks-just to say
I did it-but don't expect it to happen often cause it's too much hassle
and bucks. The technology just ain't there yet.
Back to it.
I've been complaining that there just aren't any infobahn connections
available in the cheaper motels/hotels in Australia. If that ain't already
enough headache, the other connection in short supply is "power points,"
which is Australian for electrical outlet.
We're staying tonight in an "environmentally conscious" B&B.
Built within the last year, its units provide excellent use of space,
water and minimize the environmental impact of both buildings themselves
and the guests use of them. However, the bloody units are electronically
indifferent and have only 5 power sockets: the two bathrooms (divided
among four bedrooms, capable of sleeping at least 4 each, and a loft with
2 single beds) have one socket each for appliances; the communal living
area has three with one committed to the heater (brrr, it was cold in
here, 10 degrees C, and the heater's working overtime to try to catch
up) another to the water kettle, and the third thankfully available but
not particularly convenient. The bedrooms are not powered at all.
Every place we've stayed provided barely adequate numbers of outlets.
Often you've got to make a decision between heating water, charging up
batteries, or watching television (World Cup '94 games are broadcast here
without commercials). A tip for the electricly zealous: bring a small
electrical break-out connector using the socket format of your home country.
Bring also one socket adaptor for each type of socket you're going to
encounter on your trip. This way one adaptor will allow you to connect
all your chargers and power supplies to electrical power at one time.
Not only does this save on the number of adaptors you need to carry, but
it can also stretch the rather thin supply of power outlets many accommodation
purveyors provide.
A second thought. You can buy socket adaptor kits containing all the
most popular formats. If you can find one with good quality adaptors,
buy it. When in Malaysia I discovered that apparently the socket adaptor
standard has recently changed and the adaptor I purchased for that country
fits a dwindling number of sockets. The new outlet standard is different
than any of the adaptors I've got.
It's very hard to find adaptors in foreign countries to convert their
sockets to your jacks.
It's about time I got to the matter implied by the subject of this message:
Rain. I've been in Australia for 10 days now and precipitation fell on
every one of the last 5 of them. On a couple of days we've been pummeled.
I've paid $15 for a Sydney harbour cruise, reduced from $22 due to incessant
rain. I've used countless sheets of lens paper wiping splatters and droplets
from the camcorder lens. My new Akubra hat (Snowy River edition) spends
much of its time on my head shedding precipitation rather than in a box
on its way back home to Whistler, BC for safe keeping. Tourist maps promise
wide vistas where only low clouds loom. In short I have somehow managed
to immerse myself in a Vancouver winter after having just escaped one.
Mind you, weather and landscape sometimes need each other. After all,
what is a rain forest without rain? Such was the case with Wentworth Falls
in the Blue Mountains, a deep sandstone chasm rich and ripe with clinging
vegetation. A musty mist rose out of furrow and gum forest up the stacks
of striated sandstone to be engulfed by impenetrable, bruised and sullen
storm clouds. The falls fell in a trickle rather than a rush while the
atmosphere itself was wet, thick with droplets; sky relinquished it's
hoard more willingly than river. The brooding, primal result owed much
to flora and geology but the punctuation was entirely meteorological.
The overlooks on Pacific surf are as spectacular, and as evocative.
On such days it is easy to imagine how the primordial soup stirred as
waves pummeled rock and sand under a toxic sky. Today, sea-spray plumes
rise from beach and precipice to disperse in the already sodden atmosphere.
Against the combined onslaughts levelled by wind and water, low scraggy
brush cling fast to stone and dune, braced for the next charge. They buck
and shudder but tenacious roots hold.
And the salt-wind rips at the coat drawn tight and clasped to your throat
while the fabric ripples like a flag drawn taut. But if you can thrust
your face out into it, letting the wind-driven rain stream over brow and
cheek, nothing can make you feel more alive, more a part of it all, a
fleeting, insignificant, necessary and sufficient part of the whole damn
thing.
This is why sitting behind a desk sucks. This is the part of us lost
in the rush for a better life. Somewhere along the road we forgot the
point.
Sea, air, rain, consciousness: these things are real. Love, hate, fear,
pain: these things individuals experience. Money, rights, virtue, evil:
these things are constructed. We've got to get that list of truths straight.
The existence of the first set preceded observation, the existence of
the second set coincides with it and the existence of the third set requires
it. By observation I mean the faculty to perceive and categorize. That
is what we do. We are gifted with the faculties to study the first set
but not change them.
We directly experience the second set but can only empathize others'
experience and even the individual can manipulate their deepest emotions
only by degree. But the third set is wholly social construction and as
such it is entirely malleable. Finally, we are each and all responsible
for the grand design.
8:21 Blackheath, Australia :: 3 JUL 94
SUN!!!!!!
17:13 Singleton, Australia :: 3 JUL 94
AND A PHONE!!!
Finally, a motel room with a phone. Even better than that, there are
RJ11 and Australia Telecom sockets and jacks with which the computer can
be connected. And I can charge the computer, video batteries, boil water
and watch telie all at the same time.
I think I'll connect up right now and transmit mail, just 'cause I can.
18:10 Singleton, Australia :: 3 JUL 94
No, I can't.
Once again, just 'cause you can plug the jack into the wall doesn't mean
you can actually communicate. Seems the motel's phone system doesn't talk
standard dialing tones. <sigh> This is more often a problem than
one might think. I've so far encountered two telephone systems that utilized
proprietary equipment and protocols. Very bad for ubiquity-remember that
term you Microsoft people??? Kind of hard to have an infobahn if the street
signs are in the wrong language, eh? Where do I get off?
Well, at least the sunshine held out. Spent the day making the grand
circle tour around the Blue Mountain National Park. We're nearly as close
to Sydney tonight in Singleton as last night in Blackheath.
Many scenic vistas and a couple short hikes, one exceeding an hour walking
along the edge a 500 meter precipice. Just wait til you see the video
next winter.
Later, the road climbed up into the hills, gaining a hgh plateau reminiscent
of BC's interior plateau between Merrit and Kamloops.
Both support much ranch land and lush forests. One would expect differences
though, and many can be found. The main difference lies mainly in the
trees which are gum here but conifer in BC. Also, a "kangaroo crossing"
sign would be amiss along the Coquihalla. Oh, and very few, very short
stretches of Australian Highway can match the Coquihalla for engineering,
capacity and safety. It's kind of neat seeing signs warning you to slow
to 95km/h for an upcoming curve on a roadway about as safe as highway
99.
22:40 Armidale, Australia :: 4 JUL 94
OK all you Americans and expatriot Canadians, today's your day. I think
the expatriots among you might be surprised at just how big a deal Americans
make of Independence Day. Quite the party, and such a lot of stars and
bars. To commemorate the occassion, here're a few excerpts taken from
a couple articles appearing in The Weekend Australian newspaper
printed for July 2 & 3, 1994. The first article was printed as a preamble
for the second.
AMERICA IN PROFILE: A Special Survey
by Luke Slattery, Editor
"America," said Freud, "is a mistake. A gigantic mistake."
This might seem churlish for a man whose enormous impact on the American
psyche has only now begun to fade, alongside Woody Allen's brand of
self-obsessed Manhattan irony. But what if Freud were right? What would
it mean for Australia-hooked on pop, rock, and now rap, fast food and
freeways, the suburban block, and that endless chain of sitcoms from
Mary Tyler Moore to Roseanne?
How American have we become in an age when every second 16-year-old
sports a Chicago Bulls cap with its bill turned backwards, Nike pumps,
a US college sweatshirt and a street cred home boy haircut?
When we look at American society today, to what extent are we looking
at ourselves in a decade's time?
Having cast adrift from Europe, our most alluing social model is in
many ways North America. In time, with the move towards a republic,
we may find a model in the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
...As a university student in the early 1980s I as emphatically anti-American,
a legacy of the Vietnam war glimpsed dimly on TV screens as a child.
Then there was El Salvador, Guatemala and the ignoble trail of US foreign
policy in the Third World. I had to actually cross the Pacific to see
something of the other America, an America that included sunny afternoons
in Central Park, great newspapers and journals, powerful writers, a
strong tradition of oppositional politics. And American food: bagels
and lox, Tex Mex, Cajun, Cuban and Californian.
Ironically, for a nation saturated in American popular culture, we
receive little of America's high culture. Our academics, their eyes
turned towards the distant spires of Oxbridge [sic], tend to neglect
the American tradition of the public intellectual. Our book culture,
too, is largely British. How many Australians realise that in America
they do books better than the Brits?
But then, as I am reminded by the editions cver story, this represents
only a slice of America. There is also the America of racial violence,
urban decay, stunning ignorance, intolerance and plain old bad taste.
America, as any travelogue will tell you, is a land of extremes.
America is the oratory of Martin Luther King, but America is the madness
of Charles Manson. America is the Chrysler building, a shining example
of an industrial object that is both beautiful and purposeful. But America
is aso the Bronx, a suburb that once housed Manhattan's middle class
Jewry in a mood of joyous optimism, and is now a no-go zone. America
is the best, but also the worst, of this century.
As the century draws to a close, and as Australia looks to recast its
identity as a vigorous multicultural society, more energetic than the
British, more relaxed than much Asia, we would do well to look at what
has gone right, and what has gone wrong in America.
STARS & STRIFE:
The lessons for Australia in the crumbling of America
...Despite having a quarter of a billion peple, [America] is commited
to allowing such a defenceless group [as the Amish] to continue their
traditions with full protction, at law and in fact, enabling them to
withdraw their children from the schooling system at 11 years of age
in accordance with their beliefs.
If that was [is the] soul of America, a few months later I looked at
one of its demons-as Hollywood Boulevard burned in Los Angeles, black
youths set upon Koreans while Koreans shot defenceless blacks.
The nation's second largest city brned because of bigotry-and will
surely burn again.
America is a daily contradiction. One can be seduced by its uniqueness
and diversity one day and be appalled by the ugliness simmering below
the surface the next.
The United States will enter the next century fraying badly, with race
relations the worst they have been since the civil rights riots of the
1960s. It has an economy encouraging two Americas, where the gap between
rich and poor-or more commonly white and black-is widening.
After living in this country for three years, I continue to be staggered
at its racism and violence. The threat of violence is everywhere-the
streets, the schools, the office buildings.
Clinton's America is confronting three long-term ailments which, if
not resolved, will inflict great harm upon it by unleashing more racial
violence. There is an economy not sufficiently designed to compete with
the tigers of Asia and South America; endemic racism which is being
given more vent as the economic security of middle-class whites becomes
more precarious; and increasing segregation through "white flight"
to the suburbs, leaving the cities to minorities who are starved of
resources. Washington is as segregated s Johannesburg; the only difference
is this is economic rather than legal apartheid.
...The superintendant in my building seems a gntle man in his 70s,
but recently explained that he and his wife leave Washington freqeuntly
"to get away from the blacks". Lyndon Johnson could change
laws but could not change hearts.
Henry Louis Gates daily suffers he black man's burden. Although one
of America's leading intellectuals, he finds it difficult to convince
a taxi in Manhattan to stop for him; when he stands at the door of a
jewellery store on New ork's Upper East side, he cannot convince the
store owner to buzz him through the door...
Black males between 18 and 25 in the US are twice as likely to be in
a prison as a university.... As whites flee to the suburbs and take
their money with them, cities are left without tax bases. One such blighted
zone is south-east Washington, which has the highest murder rate in
the world. Only 4km from the White House, Anacostia has only one supermarket
for the 70,000 people. But it has dozens of liquor shops.
In Washington there are now 100 police whose entire job is to patrol
schools seching for guns. Schools in many cities now spend 10 percent
of their budgets on metal detectors and guards. An estimated 100,000
guns enter public schools each day.
If you place a dot on housing projects in large cities, most crime
is within 2km. Central to the decline of America is the crushing weight
of crime. Crime is now the dominant issue in America...
Every major American city is torn by violence, a spiral fed by America's
failed war on drugs and its insistence, as a legacy of a Constitution
drawn up when Uzis and AK-47s were unknown, that all citizens should
have the right to bear guns. There are an estimated 200 million hand
guns in the US [nearly one per inhabitant-pmj].
...In New York, the new gun of choice is the Israeli-made Desert Eagle,
popular because if it hits somebody in the arm it will also blow of
their shoulder.
A restaurant in Brooklyn urgesits customers not to flash car headlights
when driving home if they see another car with its lights off-one gang
has as its initiation the requirement that they drive around with their
headlights off then shoot at the first car that flashes....
Crime grows from poverty. In Virginia, every 74 minuts an infant is
born too small to be healthy. Every four days a child is murdered. Every
two hours a child is born to a mother who received late or no prenatal
care. Every 36 minutes a child is abused or neglected. If these children
reach adulthood, they are unlikely to respect the system. Many of them
have grown up in a violent household-a violent society seems natural.
Me again. It's getting late and I'm sharing this hotel room with my sister,
who's decided to go to bed. Perhaps I'll excerpt some more later but for
now this should provide enough incentive to those in America to consider
on this day not only what the country promised to be, but also to take
a good long introspective appraisal of what it has become. I have several
times been told the USA is "the greatest and happiest nation on Earth."
That same great happy place generated the highest infant mortality rate
in the G7 nations and has spent years and billions of dollars propping
up military dictators who it would later denounce as drug lords or mad
men before taking military action against them and the people of their
country. These do not seem to me traits of a great and happy people.
America is at the center of the world's attention now more than ever.
Increasingly, the observers like less and less what they see: a country
poised for self-destruction. Already these other countries are moving
to make sure they're not on the ship when it sinks. Those who believe
the myth of the great and happy nation would be wise to get a second opinion.
July 4th, 1994 is as good a day as any.
I'll end this edition with some quotes I found in the newspaper section
containing the two articles above.
Patrick.
-- Responses Sought --
There, I guess King George will be able to read
that.
| |
 |
John Hancock,
first signatory of the American Declaration of Independence, 1776
|
Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well,
that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic
nation in the world.
| |
|
Woodrow Wilson,
US President, 1920 |
There is nothing the matter with Americans except their
ideals.
| |
|
G.K. Chesterton, 1874-1936 |
McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.
| |
|
Joseph McCarthy,
US senator, 1952 |
America is a political reading of the bible.
| |
|
Richard Nixon,
when vice-president |
America is a large friendly dog in a very small room.
Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.
| |
|
Arnold Toynbee,
English historian, 1954 |
To see freedom sent round the world, this is our mission.
It was God's charge to us.
| |
|
Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964 |
That's a part of American greatness, is discrimination.
Yes sir. Inequality, I think, breeds freedom and gives a man opportunity.
| |
|
Lester Maddox,
governor of Georgia, 1966 |
If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No
more appeasement.
| |
|
Ronald Reagan,
governor of California,
calling for a final solution to dealing with student activists,
1970 |
The happy ending is our national belief.
| |
|
Mary McCarthy,
"On the Contrary", 1961 |
