Oh, we Americans are a wild and crazy bunch: toiling hard and productively, spreading democracy by day...partying hard by night. Or is it partying day and night? According to a new report on travel trends, we Yanks are binge drinking, G-string snapping "debaucherists," longing for the eternal spring break.
This report, put out by the UK research firm Euromonitor International, says the hot trend among the British is traveling with pets. Western Europe likes Slow Travel (an analogy to Slow Food) and South America "End of the World Tourism" inspired by "March of the Penguins." For the Middle East it is Halal or Islam-safe travel. But we North Americans are cut from a different cloth. We pine for the lifestyles of the rich and vacuous, of Britney and Kevin and the rest for whom life is one endless DUI. I'll admit that I share the helpless anguish of millions of Americans about the state of our Union and have entertained the notion that finding a pal in Yukon Jack until Bush lets go of the football might be less toxic than watching cable news, but is this a for-real trend or a fashionable whack at US culture drawn from the backside of The Queen?
Taking a taxi ride is an instant way to form some conclusions about a place. In Beijing, for example, I was assaulted by a silent driver and Chinese rap song that kept going on and on and on.for about 100 minutes. China, it seems, is embracing the rhythms of western economics and culture faster than China's leaders would like to admit. In a similar musical assault in Brazil a few years ago, Brazilian pop blasted through a torn speaker in back of me as the cabbie blew kisses at young women we passed.who completely ignored this Latin Lothario.
What would you hear if you were to thump the world as if you were testing the ripeness of a watermelon? Politicians would like to scare us into believing that it sounds hollow and rotten and that it can be fixed by sending troops. The Gaia folks might say that it hums in harmony. We prefer to think that the sound of the world is more like a symphony minus conductor or score, occasionally playing together but most often not...resulting in delightful, unpredictable rhythms. But, what once happened around campfires and along trade routes now happens in a worldwide cloud of bits and bytes. Our primal grunts and melodies, passed from generation to generation, must fight for bandwidth with the highly-paid conductors of mass culture.
