Hundreds of thousands of people with better cameras and better photography skills vacation at the same places as me.
Hundreds of thousands of people are better at travel writing than I am, better at writing in general, and are clearly better than me at speaking English.
Go read their damn blogs….
I love to travel. It helps me to relax; feel in charge when I am planning my next trip, buying tickets and making reservations; learn new things; change the scenery; feel better (or worse) about my hometown. Most importantly, it helps me not to raise a moron. This year we traveled to the Pacific Northwest, a place that until now remained a blank spot on my travel map. We visited Seattle, took an Amtrak train to San Francisco and drove 450 miles along the Pacific Coast on Highways 1 and 101, stopping for a night in Monterey. The trip turned out to be even better than I imagined.
The next several posts will be about these places illustrated with tons of photos (I brought back 1,214, which would probably weigh tons if I was using film).
Face:
If there was a god, the Pacific Northwest would have been his reward to the people who didn’t quit going West in the middle of Kansas, and, instead of making “Ad Astra Per Aspera” their motto and giving up, continued to endure and persevere for months and years, slowly consuming their mates on the way. When these people, exhausted and with little hope remaining, saw the water in front of them (after the rain stopped and the fog cleared 6 months later), they knew it was all worth it, and everyone they ate on the way would have wanted it that way. Over time they proceeded to cut and kill most of the things so abundant in the area, swindle the Indians, build depressing slums and fill the void with homeless people, Mexican radio stations, French-speaking tourists and a special breed of people who ride the Ducks.
Over time, people had an epiphany, and after multiple fires and earthquakes, the Pacific Northwest and Northern California (I have no idea if these are considered one geographical region) are an American jewel, a place where the nature, weather and landscape combined with the architecture, city planning, atmosphere and a number of Asian restaurants approaching infinity make one understand why people are willing to pay mind-blowing prices to live there.
If I had to summarize Seattle in one photo, it would probably be this shot of a redheaded, bearded guy in a cap, wearing sandals and smoking a pipe.
You can complain about the Missouri Legislature, but you cannot accuse them in the lack of the sense of humor. Rick Hellman, the heir to Hellman Mayonnaise fortune editor of the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle reports that the Missouri legislators passed a bill meant to tweak the Springfield chapter of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement.
In the beginning of the year local news reported that a neo-Nazi group has joined the state’s “Adopt-A-Highway” volunteer litter pickup program, taking advantage of a free speech court fight won four years ago by the Ku Klux Klan. Now they will be picking up litter along the “Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Memorial Highway.”
Today’s Stuff White People Like brought up a subject of political prisoners. Strangely, I probably know more about American political prisoners and dissidents than many of you. Soviet propaganda machine loved to get the people involved in a cause of standing up for a political prisoner. It served many purposes, not the least of which was to show the Soviet people that the grass wasn’t that much greener on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. Growing up in mid-seventies and early eighties I recall a few campaigns when millions of “outraged” Soviet people of all ages wrote letters and collected signatures to free some unjustly imprisoned victim of imperialism.
According to the Soviet press, Angela Davis was arrested for her progressive views and the government fabricated the charges of her being and accomplice in a murder case. Her arrest was supposed to “discredit and hurt the Black Panther movement and start a misinformation campaign against the Communist Party of the USA”. Thousands of people signed petitions to “Free Angela Davis” and Soviet school kids participated in a “Million Roses for Angela” drive where they were mailing postcards with hand-drawn roses and their pleas for Angela’s freedom to the American president. As a special touch they weren’t attaching any stamps so that evil bastard President would owe the missing postage. In reality Angela Davis was arrested when her gun was used in a hostage situation and a shootout and she was charged as an accomplice to conspiracy, kidnapping, and homicide. After 18 months in prison she was acquitted and released, clearly as a result of the White House being flooded with a million postcards; she went on to visit the USSR and meet L.I.Brezhnev and is presently working at UC, Santa Cruz.
Leonard Peltier was imprisoned by the military-industrial complex and imperialist murderers from the CIA for being an outspoken advocate for the rights of the Native Americans. The Soviet people stood up in his support with another letter-writing campaign, meetings and demonstrations but failed to get him released. One central newspaper was printing out pre-filled petitions which were supposed to be cut out, glued to a postcard and mailed to the (still an evil S.O.B) US President. In reality Peltier was arrested and convicted of killing two FBI agents and although the allegations had been disputed they were never overturned.
Charles Hyder is hardly known in this country but his name is familiar to anyone who grew up when his name was mentioned daily on the Soviet TV and in the press. Dr.Hyder was a progressive American astro-physicist who used to work for NASA. In 1986 he protested against the use of the nuclear weapons and the arms-race by staging a 218-day fast in front of the White House. All of the progressive humanity (except of course the heartless imperialists in this country) watched in awe as the aging professor was weakening by the minute for the cause of detente. Soviet TV broadcast daily updates on his health condition while that callous S.O.B President Reagan let this hero waste away. Gorbachev wrote a personal letter to Hyder and the Soviet people expressed their strong support for his cause and even offered to send him food and money. In reality, the consensus was that Hyder was cheating, either eating at night or sneaking food somehow because no one survives 218 days without food even to prove a point. In addition, it turned out that his doctor ordered him to lose weight due to a health condition. A Soviet correspondent faked the daily reports by changing his clothes and filming up to five updates on the same day. Dr. Hyder died in 2004.
There were some others that I don’t personally recall like Assata Shakur or the ones where the person was not a dissident but just a victim of capitalism like a fake homeless guy Joe Mauri.
The common thread was the forced enthusiasm with which the Soviet people stood up for anyone, anywhere, for any reason. Propaganda, constant barrage of falsified information and mandatory attendance of these “spontaneous” events created an impression, an impression is what we were after in the first place.
I’ll conclude with an anti-American poster from the olden days.
This post should be titled “I have a camera too, you know…”. There are people in this town who are really good at taking pictures, and then there is me. I don’t set an aperture and exposure on my camera, I just push the button. That doesn’t make me any less eager to share my photos. Plus I have better captions.
Leonard Peltier was imprisoned by the military-industrial complex and imperialist murderers from the CIA for being an outspoken advocate for the rights of the Native Americans. The Soviet people stood up in his support with another letter-writing campaign, meetings and demonstrations but failed to get him released. One central newspaper was printing out pre-filled petitions which were supposed to be cut out, glued to a postcard and mailed to the (still an evil S.O.B) US President. In reality Peltier was arrested and convicted of killing two FBI agents and although the allegations had been disputed they were never overturned.
Charles Hyder is hardly known in this country but his name is familiar to anyone who grew up when his name was mentioned daily on the Soviet TV and in the press. Dr.Hyder was a progressive American astro-physicist who used to work for NASA. In 1986 he protested against the use of the nuclear weapons and the arms-race by staging a 218-day fast in front of the White House. All of the progressive humanity (except of course the heartless imperialists in this country) watched in awe as the aging professor was weakening by the minute for the cause of detente. Soviet TV broadcast daily updates on his health condition while that callous S.O.B President Reagan let this hero waste away. Gorbachev wrote a personal letter to Hyder and the Soviet people expressed their strong support for his cause and even offered to send him food and money. In reality, the consensus was that Hyder was cheating, either eating at night or sneaking food somehow because no one survives 218 days without food even to prove a point. In addition, it turned out that his doctor ordered him to lose weight due to a health condition. A Soviet correspondent faked the daily reports by changing his clothes and filming up to five updates on the same day. Dr. Hyder died in 2004.
