Jimmy Carter spent two nights here in 1994. Steinhatchee, Florida.
May 112012
May 112012
Rosewood Baptist Church, Florida
A year ago, I first visited Rosewood, Florida, the site of a horrific racist massacre in 1923. Someone imagined a black man raped a white girl, and it exploded from there. I found the paltry memorialization of this American tragedy to be disquieting. I wrote about my first visit to Rosewood on this blog (click here to read that post, see the pictures, and read the depressingly politicized plaque).
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to return. Rosewood is in Levy County, where Florida State Road 24 meets County Road 324, a few miles east of Cedar Key on the Gulf of Mexico. This place once buzzed as a miller of cedar for Faber pencils. Now it’s quiet.
My first trip there was too unsatisfying, bereft of the vibration that turmoil usually leaves. I left without a sense of the gravity of what had happened there. If I hadn’t known beforehand, I never would have realized that this dusty, overgrown, fire-prone patch of coastal Florida land had hosted any event of note, let alone one charged with such fury, terror, and bloodlust.
This time, I battled the seasonal swarm of lovebugs to shoot a little video of Rosewood so people can see it for themselves. It appears, on the face of it, to be a dreary, sun-baked little outpost of pickup trucks and scrubby trees. It seems like nothing special as long as you remain ignorant.
But of course, the woods most people zoom past once were once the setting for unimaginable savagery.
The location of Rosewood, Florida on a map
There is no way to stop in Rosewood inconspicuously. There is no street life. The sole business, the Clam Shack restaurant, is shuttered. The sole church comes out of hibernation, one presumes, once a week. The Florida Forest Service’s Waccasassa Forestry Center keeps a sleepy eye out for flare-ups. If you get out of your car to shoot video, as I did, it’s impossible to go unnoticed. It’s the kind of place where I expect the sheriff to drive over and ask you where you’re from, and to call me “boy” when he does it.
The brutality that started on New Year’s Day, 1923, persisted for a long time — there had just been a KKK rally in nearby Gainesville — and Rosewood was burned down by a mob a full week after the mayhem began. Gone are the Florida Railroad train station, Masonic hall, and school. The few remaining ashes and bricks are overgrown with vines and trees, and modern-day residents live on land long ago commandeered or repurposed from the black community. The lumber mill where its residents worked was in the white town of Sumner, next door just west — you could walk between them, and everyone did — and that mill burned down four years after the massacre, sending the joint settlement into the anonymous oblivion they occupy today.
Some white locals bragged that as many as 17 people were killed and buried like animals in plow trenches, but only eight deaths can be documented (two of them white men), so that’s the number officials usually go with, which minimizes the scope and viciousness of that week. The historical plaque is also quick to praise the brave whites who tried to quell the massacre and praise the politicians who ordered the plaque — facts that may be true but still make me uncomfortable given how much detail about the victims and the climate of insanity that was left off.
As many commenters on my previous Rosewood post have pointed out, there are many Rosewoods hiding in the trees of America, unremarked and unremembered. We pass desultory intersections like Rosewood’s every day. And we will never know how many of them were once the settings for brutal events, in which Americans, believing they were right and on the side of God, were in fact the instruments of something sinister and evil.
When unspeakable things happen, it’s human nature to simply want to get past them. We move on. In this way, they get forgotten.
No sheriff appeared to call me “boy.” That lived only in my imagination, just like the rest of Rosewood. Imagination is what fanned the furnace of mob action in Rosewood in 1923, too. Things like Rosewood depend on the imagination to exist at all.
Read about the historical plaque and my first visit to the site of Rosewood, Florida.
May 082012
Hosting 'The Savings Experiment'
You already read my blog, and thank you for that. I put a lot of thought and effort into my topics and writing here.
I always post some of my other goings-on through my Twitter feed. Not everyone follows my tweets (and even those I do can’t keep an eye on my feed 24/7), so I’ll round up a few links to a selection of the coolest things I’ve been up to in the past few months.
The New York Post: Update of this year’s development in Orlando
DealNews.com: Booking Got Bumped? Your Vacation Cancellation Recource
The New York Post: Preview of the big new rides at amusement parks across America
Scanorama (Sweden): Cover story on how to do Broadway like a local (link to PDF)
The New York Post: Feature on Anna Maria Island, Florida
I have two features in the editing pipeline at Travel + Leisure. They will be sequels to my recent feature for them about America’s Most Beautiful Neighborhoods.
BBC World: Expert appearance on Fast Track, discussing the South Korean theme park boom. I’m at 4:04 and 9:33. And they spelled my name wrong. I’ll know I’ve made it when they don’t spell my name wrong. Then again, that’s what Condoleezza Rice has been saying for years.
CBS This Morning: Segment about the ramifications of the proposed merger of U.S. Airways and American Airlines
I have also hosted four “The Savings Experiment” segments for Bank of America: on filing your taxes, buying drugstore items, and cable TV service (which is in post-production). I’ll embed those in a future post.
Apr 302012
Pardon her, but she's about to sing
The re-mainstreaming of the musical could be said to be a decade old this year. It was in 2002 that the movie version of Chicago was released and subsequently snatched up the Oscar for Best Picture.
Ever since, pop culture has been chasing the genre again. Sometimes it’s a wild cross-cultural and financial success (Glee, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog), and sometimes a miserable flop of torturously inept proportions (the 2005 adaptation of The Producers).
Although the musical departed the pop culture mainstream along with jukeboxes and crooners, there’s still enough money in them — if they’re done correctly — to have been a constant lure for the past decade. What was once a pet genre, invoked only in private or in some kind of pastiche such as Pennies from Heaven, is now being taken seriously again on its own terms, for its own unique language.
Much of the thanks go to Howard Ashman, the genius wordsmith who returned Disney to its groove, and to its black bottom line, with The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. He died at the peak of the AIDS holocaust before he could rightfully claim the credit that Michael Eisner greedily usurped as his own. But where Ashman laid the groundwork for pop culture re-acceptance of the musical with modern idioms, his work, whether it was for Disney Animation or for Little Shop of Horrors, seemed to always spring from an awareness that musicals work best in a candy-colored, backlot-imagined, hyper reality.
After all, modern audiences’ brittle, Vietnam-fired sensibilities are troubled by the musical’s annoying tendency to feature characters who unnervingly break into song. Problematic, that, and the clearest way around that intellectual short circuit, as the syrupy-sweet set designers at MGM’s Freed Unit knew, is to bathe productions in a surreality that excuses the transgression of song. Ashman’s greatest triumph was knowing that, and knowing the one medium — animation — could support song best.
'An American in Paris', 1951: It works because it's fake
Many of our most beloved musicals, from The Wizard of Oz to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, enter our brains and set our feet tapping by riding in on a Trojan Horse of surreality — and true to that, the musical’s death, or at least its hibernation, was hastened in the late ’60 and early ’70s, when directors insisted on succumbing to the Sondheimian temptation toward reality and started shooting movies such as Paint Your Wagon and Fiddler on the Roof in gritty, real-world locations and not in paint-washed back lots that invoked the alternative universe that musicals inhabit. The topics of a Sondheim musical are realistic, but they are nonetheless presented in the artificial world of a theatre, but translated to the screen realistically, they’re lethal.
So when the live action musical came back to us with Chicago, America’s play state, at least, was prepared in part for song thanks to Howard Ashman’s sassy Disney triumphs.
But something happened at the very start of Chicago that marked a pivot in musical theatre. In fact, what happened in the first five minutes of Chicago could be said to have set the filmed musical on a new course forever, and few people even noticed it had happened.
It was simply this: Roxie Hart watched Velma Kelly sing at a nightclub, began to fantasize about singing too, and began to sing inside her mind. We followed her there.
And like that, songs, if they were going to be sung at all, needed an excuse to happen. Film scholars might call that diegetic, meaning sounds that come from something you see happening in the film’s world, and not out of left field.
It made perfect sense for Velma to be singing. She worked at a club. Her song was diegetic. And once Roxie, played by Renée Zellweger, invited us into her moment of fantasy, or maybe her insanity, for the rest of the movie there would be a reasonable cause for any character to burst into song without it feeling weird to the audience as long as no one disturbed reality with a tune. Sets were never realistic. Instead, to maintain that out-of-reality reality, songs were sung in the limbo of a black void or in a tea-smoked, Hollywoodized, obviously fake set. If a set is clearly the figment of some designer’s imagination, modern audiences accept that singing is, too. That was the way MGM did it: by making things so plainly unreal that accepting the ludicrous rules of musicals became easier to do.
Once Roxie went into her own head, that uncomfortable rift that occurs between a singing character and the audience didn’t happen. No “moon in June” for us. The modern moment, unknown to our musical-loving forebears, in which the suspension of disbelief smashes into the brick wall of cynicism, the one that makes husbands shift in their seats at 8:02 and wish their wives hadn’t insisted on dragging them to another goddamn musical with jazz hands and show boys — it was squashed by director Rob Marshall the moment Roxie Hart went a little nuts during “All That Jazz.”
Even Fred Astaire looks ridiculous when he's not on a set ('Finian's Rainbow', 1968)
And non-diegetic singing has been squashed ever since. In Fox’s Glee, characters only indulge in song when it makes some sense for them to, which boils down to either practice in the chorus rehearsal room or, more sparingly, in their fantasies. Ideally, numbers veer between the two with a cue of blue lighting after the first verse. In NBC’s Smash, someone has to be in rehearsal or at karaoke or singing along to Guitar Hero should a melody dare surface. No one just up and sings. Not even in Once, the most-Tony nominated Broadway musical this year, whose songs all happen to be the songs written by its songwriter characters. Earnestness must be deflected at all costs.
The way to get someone who hates musicals to like one, at least a little, is by coming up with an apology for the songs so it doesn’t seem like characters have gone insane. Either there’s an organic reason for the song that arises from the action, or the character’s whole world is insane. Roxie Hart killed everything in between.
Never again will you hear Sir Lancelot sing Guinevere a song as sincere and unironic as “If Ever I Would Leave” you unless he happens to be rehearsing it for the local talent show. Musicals can no longer support an expressive statement without a scientific explanation for the lapse.
To the modern musical’s irony-fed audience, falseness sells earnestness. The target audience of High School Musical knew all too well that it was witnessing an idealized fabrication of perfect prettiness, Polyanna concerns, and Hallmark card team spirit that bore no resemblance to their own daily lives of metal detectors, bullying, and overcrowded classrooms. The fantasy was the vehicle.
Besides a diegetic cue for a song, there is only one other way you’re allowed to sing in a modern musical, and it, too, is a rule that satisfies modern audience’s tastes for realism and irony. That second way: If the rules of your particular movie involve a hopped-up, exaggerated setting or style, as with the clownish Hairspray or Tim Burton’s CGI Gothic Sweeney Todd, we will let you sing. We’re not too far off from MGM’s candy land in this regard. In the modern musical’s world, falseness sells earnestness, and the target audience of High School Musical wistfully knew it was witnessing an idealized fabrication of perfect prettiness, Polyanna concerns, and Hallmark card team spirit that bore no resemblance to their own daily lives of metal detectors, bullying, and overcrowded classrooms. The fantasy was the vehicle.
Tunes are either commentary or straight out of the action; after Chicago, we cannot look raw emotion in the face.
In a way, the modern era of film musical has taken place inside Renée Zellweger’s head. For that, the musical apologizes.
NBC's 'Smash': relentlessly searching for a reason to sing
Apr 192012
Once you hear it, you can never stop hearing it.
It’s everywhere, burrowing into my ears. I can’t concentrate on what people are saying anymore. I hear only it, pervasive as an undertone hum. I count the number of times it appears. It drills my senses with its numbing, senseless repetition. I’m being driven mad!
It is the word amazing.
The word amazing was once scrupulously applied to things that it actually meant, such as twenty-foot wedding dress trains and Sputnik. Things that truly amazed.
But today, this word is conversational herpes, an incurable earsore whose reoccurance is used to describe anything for which we’re too lazy find a more specific descriptor.
Just turn on the TV right now and count how many times people say it on the news, reality shows, and interviews. Whenever someone runs out of an ability to properly explain something with specificity, they run to the adjectival filler amazing. It’s cheap, industrial-grade description — the corn syrup of self-expression.
Even the most cursory of explorations will turn up descriptions spackled with wildly louche exploitations of amazing to describe things that aren’t really. In a few seconds of searching, I found amazing being used to describe, variously, a game-winning golf stroke, colored socks, Kirsten Stewart’s acting, and a Subway sandwich containing bacon. These things were not, variously, skilled, dorky, laconic, and savory. Or anything, really, that actually described them beyond an enthusiastically positive impression. They were all amazing.
Keep your ears open. You will suddenly hear many, many more appearances of this placebo word. More than you ever realized. Several instances in every discussion. And you’ll be driven crazy very quickly.
On a recent work trip aboard a cruise, the social director used it 11 times (I’m telling you I’m counting) in a two-minute speech designed to draw our attention to the skill of the service staff and the availability of the swimming pool on Deck 11. Just today, a friend used it to describe a brand of cracker and the aurora borealis just two sentences apart. Surely a snack food and the Northern Lights cannot both be accurately portrayed by the same adjective.
No, but the expediency of our conversation can be. It’s strictly a word we say but rarely write (except for on the most purple Internet post mills), such as gonna or lookit. No writer worth their ink would stretch the word much beyond the literal sense — to be jaw-droppingly dazzled, to be astonished to the point of being stunned — but even from the mouths of normally well-spoken geniuses, amazing overflows as a shorthand for anything positive.
Our tendency to use the word so sparingly in written English while it’s so egregiously stuffed into every other spoken sentence, almost makes it seem as if we’re nearly unaware that we use it as much as we do.
Looking on Twitter, where our communication is more conversational in vocabulary and tone, confirms the divide between using it in formal writing and when we’re palling around with colloquial symbolism. In tweets, the use of amazing pours forth, dozens by the minute, to describe everything from friends to concerts to dishes to songs. It does double duty as an adverb, too, as in “you did amazing,” but one battle at a time.
Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks usage of words and phrases in books, puts the written zenith of amazing around World War II, when the world was in cataclysm and certainly fit the adjective, but it’s been on a rising comeback for the last 20 years. But Google can’t track frequency in what we say. So I do it. Believe me, few of us can get through an anecdote without the word.
I wish I could say that the proliferation of amazing was just down to our expanding American idiocy, and proof that we are being turned into vanilla-vocabularied mouth-breathers through an educational system that’s being starved by our Hedge Fund Manager Overlords. But no, even the British Royal Family is doing it.
After a recent Diamond Jubilee tour, Prince Harry’s official statement went all amazed and shit. “The warmth of the reception that we’ve received from every single country that we’ve been to — including Brazil — has been utterly amazing,” the BBC said he said.
So much for The Grandmother’s English. Not that it’s without precedent: William Shakespeare’s characters, including Othello‘s Iago and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Hermia, sometimes professed to be amazed, but almost always in the sense of being profoundly dumbstruck. Only one character, John of Gaunt in Richard II, ever uttered the word amazing, and even then he was using it to describe the ghastly noise of God crushing the skulls of his enemies. An argument could be reasonably made that all of them were more strategic about their deployment of the word than simply praising a D.J. or a discount.
Often, the stultifying heights of amazing are apparently still not enough, as was apparently the reason with this junior high swim meet; in that case, and in many more besides, it was described as really amazing, which is the equivalent of totally awesome from the 1980s — as if anything is ever deceptively amazing or fractionally awesome. (In that instance, the speaker is an Australian, who know from their experiences with the cane toad and the Norway rat that they are historically defenseless against undermining invasions from the rest of the world, and this word is no exception.)
Using this word too much makes a even a well-spoken person seem banally agog, trapped in a bubble of over-stimulation, or worst of all, witless.
Pardon me for editing imprecise language skills like Inigo Montoya did over inconceivable, but bitch, please! I do not think that word means what you think it means. Don’t alienate your friends by confronting them over their amazing abuse. Also don’t turn it into a drinking game, or you’ll never recover. Just silently judge them, and vow to do better yourself.
Count ‘em up, like I do, on Facebook posts, in chat show interviews, out of the mouths of reality show judges when they’re really phoning it in, and when your friends are talking about something they like but are thinking more about what they’re about to say next than being truly descriptive now.
Count ‘em up, like me, and you’ll find it… well, you know.
Annoying.
Mar 252012
So I shot this video early this morning in downtown Orlando from the VIP viewing area as the not-so-old Amway Arena (once the TD Waterhouse Centre, opened 1989) was demolished by explosion. Ka-boom! Instant 9/11 flashbacks for me, and lots of dust. The proof of fast-cycle urban planning:
Mar 222012
Taking "baby consciousness" with us (Photo by Julien Haler)
The longer the childhood, the smarter the creature. That’s one of science’s core findings about the development of the baby brain as reported by psychologist Alison Gopnik in her recent TED talk, “What Do Babies Think?“. Humans, who take years to mature, construct cities, which chickens, which take months, wind up in soup.
Gopnik calls it “baby consciousness,” a phrase so giddily Zen it makes me giggle. It’s a development-specific mindset we lose as we grow and our heads are no longer stuffed full of tapioca. People peg toddlers as daft and scatterbrained, and it’s hard not to agree with that assessment when you observe a two-year-old do things like throw dried dog poo at the wall or try to fit a sandwich in the DVD player drawer.
But Gopnik, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the co-author of The Scientist in the Crib, says the truth about baby brains is just the opposite: “Babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing, but they are very good at taking in lots of information at lots of different sources at once… When we say babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we’re really saying is they’re bad at not paying attention.”
They’re starstruck with all the things there are to see and process. They’re high on learning. They’re in that deliciously primordial state that travelers know well, when everything is fresh and even meaningless details are noticed and interpreted.
There’s something to be said for this. When we go to a new place, our frame of reference is reset to zero. We bring with us our animal instincts for survival, of course. Even toddlers are self-protective. But everything we experience becomes a teachable moment.
Wide open, soaking it in: Fort Sumter Ferry, Charleston, 2011
Our gullible states are never higher than when we’re traveling. I remember dining once with some fellow writers at The Cricketers, a country pub owned by Jamie Oliver’s family, and after the meal, the waitress had a quirky way of serving tea. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but for the story’s sake, let’s say it involved wiping every exposed surface of the teapot with a moist rag after every single pour. Well, one of my companions was a first-time visitor to England, and when the waitress left the room, she leaned over and piped up conspiratorially: “They sure do pour tea funny here in England,” she protested, and took a sip. It took some minutes for me to politely persuade her that, no, what she had just witnessed was the peculiarity of one near-freak server at one country inn and was not representative of an entire nationality. The realization of her broad-stroke misinterpretation slowly lit her face like the dawn.
When we travel, our mind state tricks us into thinking everything we see is somehow typical of the new place we’re exploring. The stereotype of tourists as gullible morons, as infants with credit cards, is by no means particular to Americans because it’s well-earned by the borderlessness of human behavior. It’s what potentially makes travelers so annoying — and easy to swindle.
Try it the next time a visitor comes to your town. Invent some myth about your home that would make a fabulist blush: that there’s an Italian Heritage parade down your Main Street every Sunday afternoon or there’s a law making it illegal to serve steak with A-1 sauce — whatever Mike Daisey-ism you dare. Because everything about the destination is new to a tourist, just as the entire world is fresh to a baby, they will most likely trust you, their host and surrogate parent.
Travel regresses us to childhood. Is it any wonder that so many of us travel in our 20s, when we’ve just left that larval childhood stage but have not yet grown into the ill-fitting uniform of full adulthood? Is it any wonder so many travelers put a high priority on intensely sensory experiences such as drinking, sex, panoramic views, and extreme sports — pursuits that please our primal natures?
Gopnik knocks her point home in a way that make me think of a backpack as the next logical accessory after diapers:
If we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think cases where we’re put into a new situation that we’ve never been in before. When we fall in love with someone new, or when we’re in a new city for the first time. What happens then is not that our consciousness contracts — it expands. So that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home…. So what’s it like to be a baby? It’s like being in love in Paris for the first time after you’ve had three double espressos.
Personally, I’m for it. Peace and wisdom flower in an open mind. We travel to grow.
Hold onto that wonder, travelers. Always see the world with your baby brains.
Vacation as never-ending childhood: I rest my case
Mar 212012
"At our company, you're Number One!"
By now you’ve probably heard about this week’s news gossip that some business are now demanding the Facebook passwords of new job applicants so they can snoop around their private lives and approve of their private lives before hiring them. The media is noticeably short on names of specific companies that are actually doing it, but the debate has been opened — if you consider radio-button Internet polls to be debate.
Still, about 10 percent of people who responded to this Detroit Free Press poll said that, sure, they’d be wiling to surrender private password information in order get that elusive job. Granted, this is in Detroit, one of the most arid wastelands of the American employment ecosystem, and where people have lost dignity in a thousand ways long before clicking “vote.”
We’re sacrificing dignity because if we don’t, we won’t eat. Welcome to the new Low Self-Esteem Economy, in which the feeling that we’re lucky to get crumbs is a commodity employers can cash in.
The Huffington Post is building a news empire partly on the back of free labor; it doesn’t pay many of its writers and aggregates stories from other places. (It’s by no means the only publication doing this.) When a strike was called by the Newspaper Guild of America against it last year, its in-house flack said, “nearly all of our bloggers are happy with the arrangement, and happy to access the platform and the huge audience it brings.” Arianna Huffington herself, a famous liberal, blurted out a decidedly un-liberal denigration of a labor dispute, telling the media, ““Go ahead! Go on strike! What does it matter?… [N]o one really notices!” Maybe she was right. Five months later, the boycott was called off.
The message, of course, is that reporters and writers are lucky to get published at all. To accept any of this, you have to first accept that you’re not worth better.
I’m not sticking a knife in these companies for trying to get something out of people. I suppose that testing the limits of exploitation is the American way. It’s the bottom line of the free market system: Try to bleed profit out the other guy to the point where he cries foul — and there you find your market price.
I’m saying, with great concern, that we are happy to go along with it now. We are afraid to cry foul lest we go jobless.
A few people are objecting. There’s the former intern at The Charlie Rose Show who’s suing over alleged wage law violations. Who knows how much traction that’ll get, because as a culture, we accept no-wage situations when we’re beginning our careers. (I myself had two internships in the media when I was starting out; one at The Village Voice was unpaid, which I left the minute I landed a paid one at Entertainment Weekly, which indeed turned into an actual job with benefits.)
The trouble is that more and more of us are being told by powerful businesses that because the economy remains in a muddle, we’re all the equivalent of rank beginners.
Can you imagine if, say, Ernest Hemingway’s publishers refused to pay him for his first book, The Sun Also Rises, because he was “lucky” to see his name on a book at all?
If you have a great job right now, congratulations. Don’t brag too much about it, because many businesses already have us making huge sacrifices to retain our paychecks. We’re doing the work of all those who were fired in recent years. The trouble is that that employers have learned how to squeeze more out of us. While many of us toil to take one for the team, quaking in fear of retrenchment, the reality is that right now, corporations are recording record profit margins.
Economists fear that skeleton crew staffing has become the “new normal,” and that employers have seen they can wring maximum profits from minimum resources by demanded sacrifices from all. The Sword of Damocles, that mythic motivator that feeds on groveling, convinces us to give a lot of things we didn’t have to give up 10 years ago. Since businesses are racking up profits, why sheath the sword and hire more people again? Just as businesses have learned to operate under these lean circumstances, our tolerance as workers may have stretched so far it can never snap back to normal again.
What we’re seeing is a transfer of blue-collar terrors to white-collar résumés. Factory workers lived with oppression for generations, and they struggled with ways to fight back for just as long because often, there were few alternatives in their towns. Now cubicle professionals are being stretched to their hourly limit, losing already dwindling benefits, or donating labor without pay because the employers have convinced them they’re blessed for the privilege. It’s the old story with new middle-class players.
But, just as American factory workers learned long ago, it’s hard not to notice where the fruit of our labors is going.
I can only hope we’re nearing the end of this period an American industry that is underwritten by the low self-esteem of its workers. As the economy firms up, it will be more difficult for employers to hold onto this “new normal” of under-staffing and perennial internships. There comes a point, as people age and see their professional dreams wither, that they refuse to believe the manipulative lie that they’re simply lucky to have a job at all.
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Food for thought: Most American businesses only give about 10 days of vacation a year, and they don't even have to do that. Also: When you're dead, you're dead forever. (Source: CNN)
Mar 062012
Out of character? The State Department sends this passport mascot to trade shows to encourage applications
Last weekend at the New York Times Travel Show, a well-dressed young woman spotted my press credentials and introduced herself. She was from the State Department, she said, and she’d like to bring me over to Deputy Assistant Secretary Brenda Sprague.
I admit I was taken aback. Usually, when someone from the government taps you for a little chat, it’s not a good thing. But it’s precisely that mistrust of bureaucracy that the State Department appears eager to correct as soon as possible. In a surprising turn, the Obama administration’s State Department is making a true effort to reach out to travelers.
On the road, I’m always jealous of the travelers from Australia and New Zealand. When they need something from their government, it’s often a breeze. Their taxes are repaid with international support. Someone answers their calls at their diplomatic outposts. It seems like wherever they venture, they can all but pop into the nearest embassy for a beer and a back rub whenever they’re bored. Here in New York, I’ve even attended boozy Friday afternoon wine mixers at the Australian consulate.
But U.S. consulates and embassies are never welcome a weary traveler, not even if they were born with the privilege of carrying a passport with a bald eagle stamped on the cover. Indeed, the diplomatic fortresses we build abroad, such as the bunker on London’s Grosvenor Square and the $750 million citadel in Baghdad, are resolutely intent on keeping us out. They are designed out of an imperialistic marriage between pessimism and industry, and they’re geared to making inroads for business but halting independent Americans at the machine gun-guarded door. People around the world are confronted by those impassive slabs and wonder what sort of dastardly machinations are being hatched within.
A degree of detachment makes often makes sense, of course, either for security reasons or simply because they’re routinely swarmed with visa-seekers. In Krakow, I remember having to pick my way through a mob of what appeared to be boisterous protesters, only to realize when I got to its head that they were actually jostling for a spot in the queue for a paperwork blessing by my country’s invisible bureaucrats.
At the Travel Show, the State Department representative proudly told me that they were attending the show to get the word out about STEP, or the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program. This long-overdue program is designed to supply citizens with a level of hospitable consular support that other nations take for granted. If a traveler can surmount their malaise at registering their whereabouts with the federal government, they can receive email updates about local security warnings, and if the worst happens, as during the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, American seekers will actually come knocking on doors to make sure you’re all right.
The public relations push hasn’t stopped there. Today, the State Department held a live chat about keeping safe over Spring Break. This is a topic that travel journalists are often asked to hit this time of year. (Here I am on CBS last year talking about the same subject, spending much energy to gently assure viewers that Mexico is hardly a nefarious underworld of malfeasance.) So it’s gratifying to see the government trying to anticipate our questions for a change.
Mind you, I still don’t take my government’s word as the only word that matters. I have found that Australia’s list of travel warnings is often less politicized (or at least, politicized in different ways) than our State Department’s travel warnings. But the outreach is important to me. It’s encouraging to have an administration that values international travel or at the very least acknowledges that some of us are doing it.
You might have noticed that the White House has also been much more attentive to communicating with citizens on the same level that we communicate with ourselves. It’s tweeting now, it’s pumping out annotated live streams of important speeches, and it’s beavering away on Facebook.
Uncle Sam may not be ready to invite the masses inside for free Big Macs and Cokes, and behind the scenes he’s still an imperialistic fellow who’s more interested in fostering business deals than helping backpackers, but at least he’s working harder to repaint his impenetrable bunkers in a cheerier shade.
Feb 292012
The logo for one of the original travel blogs
“One day, not very long ago, I noticed I’d never been to the Pyramids. So I quit my job, left my apartment, and made a list of places I’d always wanted to go. And here’s the proof.”
That was how I kicked off the webpage documenting the round-the-world trip I took years ago. It was 1998. People were still paying for Netscape. Few of us used the Web regularly, and all of us had dialup, but I was determined to try it: I documented my journey online as I went. I’m ashamed to admit I began by using Courier.
Everyone logs their trips online now, but no one was doing it then. I was a pioneer. It took real effort. Flashpacking didn’t exist. I had to seek out Internet cafés and without WordPress or Blogspot to rely upon, I had to hand-code everything in basic HTML, and I was forced to seek out crude FTP programs (Fetch!) to get my writing online.
I didn’t put my travels online for Web fame or to garner a following, the way so many backpackers do now. There were no affiliates or appeals for free lodging, and I was years away from collecting my first paycheck for travel writing. Then, it was simply so my family and friends could follow along and know I wasn’t lying dead in some South African ditch. It also saved money at the STD ISD in India if I could simply upload some writing and pictures for everyone to follow. (I also tacked on a first-person account of 9/11 two years later because I didn’t know where else to post it at the time. That’s republished here.)
Technology and I have progressed somewhat, to say the least, but for all these years I have left my online diary online, quietly stashed in a corner of the Internet as a sort of museum of myself and of travel blogging.
I invite you to peer into the past to see how I did my online Web journal. There is some stuff that could really get me in trouble here, but just remember how young I was. Read about hippo attacks, angry mobs in Jordan, and false positives for syphilis. Learn about the traumatic event that made me call my RTW journey Stap Vinnig Oor.
Here’s the link, for as long as it lasts. Go:
Stap Vinnig Oor: Jason Cochran’s World Tour
It’s as much a journey into the Web’s past as it is a trip around our planet.
Me at the Monsoon Palace in Udaipur, India