History’s High Note
Posted on November 6, 2008
“History sometimes hits a high note, sweet and soaring, clean and clear, as if from Satchmo’s horn.”
Dayan Jayatilleka - Diplomat to the UN from Sri Lanka
I was optimistic that the election of Barack Obama would be a world-changing event, but I didn’t realize that the celebrations in the US and many countries around the world would rival New Years Eve. We got an email this morning from a friend who had moved to Australia extolling her new pride in being an American. Most telling was across San Francisco Bay from us in Berkeley, otherwise known as The People’s Republic of Berkeley for its often dizzying lean to the left. They were flying American flags in a place where burning them was once de rigeur. And, ironically, a friend and staunch Bush supporter this morning forwarded me an essay by a Sri Lankan UN diplomat and political science professor that gave me goosebumps about a new world of possibilities.
From The Island Features- Barak Obama, History’s High Note
» Filed Under Culture | Leave a Comment
My Close Encounter With Obama in Hawaii By Pico Iyer
Posted on November 5, 2008
One of the worlds most insightful and sensitive travel writers comments on his encounter with Barack Obama.
» Filed Under Culture, Misc. | Leave a Comment
Rational Exuberance: The Optimistic Traveler
Posted on November 1, 2008
REVISION: The elections are over and for the first time America has a president that represents all of America and will do so to the rest of the world. I was at an election night party last night where we all toasted with pride that we could now go anywhere in the world and be proud again. Some even suggested wearing flag pins. I am now in a state of hyperoptimism. I think Barack Obama’s election will dramatically improve America’s standing in the world and set the stage for a new optimism and prosperity at home.
OK, I have been hoodwinked by optimism before. In college in the late 60s I wrote an airy-fairy political science essay proposing the notion that the communications satellite would link the world in a guitar-strumming harmonic convergence in which prejudice, war, aluminum siding salesmen and all manner of bad seed would be dug under by knowledge and truth. I found a C+ and the comment “naive” scrawled at the top of the paper.
I tried to make of a career of finding truth as a journalist, charging forward during the Watergate era with high ideals but leaving suffering from repetitive news injuries. I taught broadcast journalism at a university, finding that the glamor of being on TV was more important to my students than any duty to expose the truth. I, like others idealists of my generation, could not close the deal: the Summer of Love went up in a puff of hash and weed, Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew, who resigned after being indicted for bribery, introduced “Joe Sixpack” as the leader of a pitchfork wielding mob storming the castle to rout out liberals, media who asked tough questions and any other “nattering nabob of negativism” who doubted his party’s motives.
And it worked, brilliantly.
» Filed Under Culture, Misc. | Leave a Comment
Pimp My Vacation: Custom Cars Rumble into Las Vegas
Posted on September 8, 2008
Video and Story: Russ Johnson
I have never really been a car buff. My several midlife crises have not involved hot cars, hot babes and certainly had nothing to do with buffing up at a gym. But last fall I admit to having a ball at the SEMA show in Las Vegas. SEMA is the acronym for the accurate but unsexy moniker of the Specialty Equipment Marketing Association, representing the makers of everything from chrome wheels to fuzzy dice, the stuff auto buffs use to pimp out their cars. The show, at the Las Vegas Convention Center, is not open to the public: I got in as press, covering in-car gadgetry like global positioning systems and entertainment centers. But the public is free to wander about outside among the pencil thin, low slung racers, vintage Chevys with iridescent paint jobs and even a 1930s-style jalopy purposefully made up to look like an abandoned rust bucket.
Some of these cars are truly works of art. But as in art, there are the cliches, too, the Thomas Kincaids of the auto world. I have always rolled my eyes over the paint motif of flames spurting from doors and hood, usually two flames pouring over a dark core, like sides of a salmon steak. Reverse the image and it looks like swimming sperm cells. The fact that only one in ten million sperms cells ever gets anywhere sort of belies the flames. But then I read too much into this. Maybe I should get out a spray can and do something about my rusty old truck, perhaps the only one in the world without cup holders.
SEMA SHOW: Las Vegas, NV, November 4-7, 2008
» Filed Under Las Vegas, Video | Leave a Comment
Tales from the Waiting Room: San Francisco and Bangkok
Posted on August 15, 2008
Last month I visited doctors twice: in San Francisco to have a spot of sun damage checked, and in Bangkok for a physical. As Mrs. Kuchenbecker, my sixth grade teacher said, “Let us compare und contrast.”
SAN FRANCISCO
I make an appointment, the doctor will see me in about a month. I show up on time, fill out forms and, clutching my Ganesha (the Hindu elephant god associated with overcoming obstacles), am waterboarded by a nurse-enforcer who finally establishes my financial worthiness. I sit down. Another patient in the waiting room stands up, exclaims, “I don’t have time for this,” and leaves.
» Filed Under Health Travel, Audio, Thailand | Leave a Comment
