I went to the TBEX travel writers’ cocktail soiree last night at the Hotel Giraffe in Manhattan. When we entered, we filled out our name tags (I led with “@bastable,” since there are lots of people who know me by my Twitter handle and not the name I was born with), and put our business cards in a metal urn.
Andrew Zimmern, the host of the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods, was one of the special guests. You won’t be surprised to learn he has a firm handshake and was friendly to everyone. But I don’t think I would have liked to have been the caterer at this event — if a man who eats foreskin and rancid blood on TV tells you that your canapés are delicious, is it a compliment?
He said he loves the newly emerging digital travel press, so he brought a giant gift basket of hand-selected items for one of us. And lo, I won it.
I don’t usually win much. I certainly never win the trips to China for eight that they usually give out at these travel press confabs. But I did win Andrew Zimmern’s sour-cream-and-onion flavored crickets. Among my haul: his latest book, a DVD of his show, and some Travel Channel goodies such a cap and a tee-shirt.
Even Andrew Zimmern thinks these are terrible
There was some other good stuff in there, too, including snacks he personally swears by: Blenheim Ginger Ale (two bottles, one of which had amputated the arm of the Andrew Zimmern Bobblehead), a Hotlix “Watermelon Flavor with Worm” sucker, Blair’s Death Rain Habanero Chips, and a lolly made from cinnamon oil by Leslie’s of Clovis, New Mexico. You can only buy those in bulk, he said, so these were from his private office stash.
It was like Oprah’s Favorite Things, except they were the favorites of a famous testicle eater.
My favorite presents were the two boxes of “Crick-ettes” and the small white box, ominously labelled “Chocolate Covered Insects.” I asked him which ones they might be, and had no problem identifying them by the shape of the chocolate coating. “Mealworms,” he told me. “More crickets.”
I told Andrew that I wanted to have him over to Aol so I could eat these bugs in front of him. He said he’d love to come, but he pointed at the crickets. “Those are awful,” he confided. “I’ll bring you the good ones.”
A lovely fellow, really. Bringing a gift basket was so — dare I say it? — tasteful.
And YOU get a worm, and YOU get a worm, and YOU get a worm!
“Life was simpler in the ’50s, Jay. It really was,” she says.
I call baloney on that. Just think about what the ’50s offered Western culture: atomic bomb terrors, the HUAC, segregation, women who lived in fear of unwanted pregnancies and could only choose from a few professions, Cold War passive aggression, Europe and Asia in ruins, and people still suffering night sweats from the horrors of the Holocaust and World War Two. Feel free to join in with more of your own.
“No, mom,” I usually say. “They just seemed simpler because you were a kid.”
“No,” she usually says ruefully. “They really were.”
(Right, I think. While your mom slaved to cook dinner nightly for your father or face hell to pay. They were so much better.)
Nostalgia! I love you dearly, mom, but it’s killing us.
I look at this Dadaesque charade that Glenn Beck & Buddies are putting on right now. These are not people who thrive on specificity. Instead, they invoke fuzzy nostalgia. Just a few days after his rally in Washington, Beck was already showing images from it that were doused in soft focus, the way they shoot old ladies like Barbara Walters on television. The engine of his “change” platform runs on fuzziness, because it runs on nostalgia, and nostalgia is always fuzzy. Especially when it’s based on something that never was.
Our first Beck? George Whitefield, of the first Great Awakening, knew the power of bizarre theatrics
Their platform, as expressed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, is fuzzy, too. They didn’t really propose anything specific. Instead, they referred constantly to an America that they feel is being lost. One that needs to be “restored” with “honor,” which doesn’t mean anything in practical terms, so is fairly unassailable by anyone with facts in hand.
“They actually want you to believe that this nation was not built on faith by men of good character. They want you to believe a nation can survive without faith, character and integrity.”
To him, then, there’s something we’re departing from and something more odious we’re approaching. To accept his imagining of our pluralistic society, you have to accept that what we’re departing was good. That’s where nostalgia is necessary. A nostalgia free of slavery, monopolies, inequalities, greed, and other assailable truths.
We Americans are good at nurturing delusions of nostalgia. We treasure Main Street, USA, at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, which presents a version of America that never really was. We build planned communities of curtain-shuffling inhabitants in an attempt to re-animate the Leave It to Beaver world that our Hollywoodized upbringings convinced us we left behind. We keep the shape and look of our currency just so. We invoke the Founding Fathers as if we could divine their will from beneath their graves, though of course the average American couldn’t tell you the first thing about Jefferson or Washington or Dickinson. Not that many of them depended on slavery, defended secularism with an almost animal passion, or even that Adams himself defended the British in the Boston Masscare — the 9/11 of its day.
Nostalgia is mythology. Times were not that great back then — especially if you weren’t white and holding some money, but even if you were. And times are not particularly awful now. May I direct you to the Black Plague?
Why is fact-checking of nostalgia so important?
For one, if your eyes are open, you can dismantle a perception of an event. You realize that the way we choose to see things doesn’t always testify to what really happened. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle lives through the people who recorded history for us, because they were born with the biases of their day, and similarly, we are born not knowing the petty politics of another man’s day. But more importantly, nostalgia can be used to rally people around whatever notion you care to attach it to.
Several times in American history, we have responded to tough economic times by springing toward nostalgia. A return to normality, to prosperity, is possible! Depressions and recessions have often been accompanied by Great Awakenings, or spiritual revivals, in which Americans terrified for their futures could cling to the soothing fancies of their simpler and more secure pasts. Pasts painted rosier than they really were — Main Street fantasies.
Norman Rockwell, 1964: It wasn't all soda shops and baseball
Glenn Beck is, believe it or not, a secularized version of the weirder-than-life firebrands that America produced during various Great Awakenings. George Whitefield. Jemima Wilkinson. Lyman Beecher. Billy Sunday. As humans, it seems proven that we need to believe in our purer selves, especially when times get bad. Unfortunately, those with political aspirations can frame the nostalgia in terms of any group that has been perceived to have usurped our purer selves.
A recent piece by Michael Atkinson in In These Timesput it this way.
“As long as American politics remain a matter of simulacra—of rhetoric and persona—the storytellers will dominate the discussion, doing what myth has always done—supply order in place of chaos and uncertainty. This is our modern tragedy: Recent history offers a parade of evil fabulists, from Hitler to Karl Rove to Kim Jong-Il, all of them bewitching storytellers.”
Of course American politics will remain a matter of rhetoric. They always have. The question of states’ rights might well have been carved into our national seal from the moment of our inception, and since the embrace of that issue has enduringly fired all sorts of issues, from slavery to spot immigration checks to gay marriage, there are many of us who work to harness it, and it pays to convince the rabble that it was ever settled, when it never was.
If you can make people believe that it was they who made us veer from the path (in the last century, the alcohol drinkers were the they), then you’re halfway home to building political power.
Nostaglia, then, is also one of the most powerful weapons in American culture, and knowing the whole truth of history is your shield.
In almost all cases, there was never one path, never one truth. In our fuzzy, Barbara Walters-style soft focus, where our depth of understanding can be summed up in a tweet, we can be tricked into thinking there was. But the good old days were not as simple as we enjoy believing. And because we were never really fully there to experience them, we can’t know that, and we can only embrace nostalgia and mourn what we would like to believe has been lost.
In case you didn’t know, I also have a “fan” page on Facebook, where my videos, posts, and general blathering are published. If you’re looking for me by name there, you have to search in Pages (not People).
I love Cristina Pellerano Jambon for many things, but one of the more recent ones is that she set this page up.
You can get there by clicking here, or by clicking the blue Facebook icon that can be found on the right side of this page.
I put the word fan in quotes because it makes me uncomfortable.
Hold me down! I’m big-time digging Jeff Schroeder’s Around the World for Free on CBS.com. Some of it has been slightly canned, like the plugs for American Airlines (a sponsor), but the majority of it is killer stuff. Anyone who backpacks will recognize what he’s going through right now as he tries to make it around the world without spending any money, instead relying on the generosity of the people who are following the trip online, like an open-palmed version of the Travel Channel’s dearly departed 5 Takes. Although the series’ conceit seems like a stunt, it takes a special traveler not to make an actual stunt out of it.
Jeff on 'Big Brother'
As a not-so-closet fan of Big Brother, I watched Schroeder last summer, and I grew to appreciate his demeanor, his almost childlike joy for seemingly trivial stuff, and the respect he has for other people. Reality television players can be unabashedly self-serving, but Jeff wasn’t. He was the frat boy who cared. I watched the Big Brother live feeds, which expose players every minute of the day, and his character held up — when he had momentary lapses, he instantly recognized his failings and made up for them.
This summer, as he does this trip, I have grown to appreciate him even more. He’s bushy-tailed and peppy, and what he lacks in eloquence (most stuff is either “amazing” or “awesome”) he makes up for in enthusiasm and empathy. He’s unfailingly polite, hungry to learn, and is good at anticipating his audience’s questions. Two weeks ago, Schroeder served for a day with a People for Care and Learning, a humanitarian group that delivers water purification devices to floating villages in one of the poorest provinces in Cambodia.
In this segment, from a week ago, he’s stranded in Pakse, Laos. He’s not allowed to spend money, but he needs $18 for a bus fare. Begging for cash in a poor place like Laos would be highly unsavory. I seem to remember another show from about 10 years ago that was built on just such a premise — strand the players, see how they get home — and it turned me off. But that’s not how Schroeder is handling things. He’d rather go thirsty than be a burden on the locals.
This clip brings me a flood of powerful travel memories: the heat of a Southeast Asian village’s streets, the benign language barrier, that unique feeling of wandering aimlessness paired with the traveler’s faith that everything will turn out just fine. And what backpacker hasn’t found himself struggling to find a Wi-Fi signal, peering in the windows of the fancy hotels?
“I don’t want to mooch off anybody. That’s not why I signed up,” Schroeder says.
He doesn’t have a production team to put words like that in his mouth.
He made it out. Today, he’s in Bangkok battling some tummy trouble, and he appears to have been reunited with the prodigiously talented videographer and editor named Zsolt Luka (I wouldn’t give Luka’s daily edit-and-recharge demands to a monkey on a rock) who accompanies him much of the time and whom I have to assume is equally responsible for the spirit of this endeavor.
Schroeder is making this odyssey not about himself, but about the people he meets, and that’s clearly by design and not by accident. So many other mass-media travel diary projects are about the ego of the traveler, but against the odds and the currents of the genre, Schroeder always puts the spotlight on the people he meets. He’s both amazing and awesome. You can follow Schroeder’s adventure (videos, photos, tweets), throw him tips, or offer him help on his next leg by going to CBSAroundtheWorld.com. There are also videos on YouTube.
Major praise to CBS for accomplishing this series with so much sensitivity. And since it’s the sponsor, I guess I should tip my hat to American Airlines, too.
I can’t be the only one who hates when sites only show me stuff based on what I like. “Personalization,” they call it. Choice. Customization. “Navel-gazing,” I do.
Far too many sites and apps are doing this. Based on the ads it shows me, Facebook has me boiled down to a neat consumerist stereotype of a single urban male. Amazon tries it too, although my wide-ranging purchasing habits have it confused about how to pigeonhole me. Even Google News wants to know what sort of news I always read. Do I like international stories? Am I interested in business news, or health coverage?
I don’t want to tell it a thing in case it decides to withhold facts from me just because its algorithms assume I won’t care. And if, for example, I tell it that I only like health stories a little bit, how will the site decide when a story is important enough to make sure I see it? Telling Google what I usually read would subject my “need to know” to the vagaries of either its news staff’s biases or of algorithms based on what’s “popular” (read: clicked on) on a given day. Either way, something is lost. In deciding what’s important to me, I may lose what’s truly important.
I made the mistake of telling the BBC I live in America, because it immediately started omitting Britain-based news, which was a big reason I used it to begin with. Social media, by design, shows you headlines about the things your friends care about, which may expand your exposure in many cases, but depending on your circle, may not expand your range at all.
My app from the AP only wants to spoon-feed me a few stories at a time in a few genres, as if learning what’s important in a news day is as simple as browsing shelves at the Blockbuster. (Which people also don’t do anymore — now, we pretty much have to know precisely what we’re looking for when we walk up to the Redbox machine.)
And this is how we get stupider. We Westerners love our technology, and when we embrace its ability to “personalize,” we can unwittingly also embrace a shallower intellectual narrative. “I know what I like, so don’t give anything else.” “Challenges confuse me.” “I don’t need to visit the real France because I’m quite comfortable with my Epcot version, thank you very much.”
I’m no Luddite. I love my technology, and I even create “content” for the Internet. But I do miss newspapers, where at least I ran across news that I didn’t know would interest me — or was boring but important. The more my exposure to information is customized to please my pleasure, the less I’ll be given the chance to click on a headline that might have surprised, motivated, or edified me.
Stumbling across stuff that is out of your field of comfort zone is one of the healthiest activities a brain can engage in. Otherwise, how do you find new fields of interest?
Reading the news can be like travel itself. With any journey, including an intellectual one, you are challenged, and with exposure to new people and places, your interior blank areas are colored in. It expands what you know and embellishes upon what you merely thought you knew.
And just because I don’t usually read certain kinds of news doesn’t mean they’re not important to know.
These are tough times for renaissance types, but they’re great for dilettantes.
Google's personalization quiz: the path to a shallower me
I just got back from Fox News, where I talked to my long-distance BFF, Kerri-Lee Halkett, who has slightly better hair than I do, about five steps you can take to get out of personal debt.
The basic truth is that getting out of debt is a lot like staying fit: You have to balance intake with output. If you spend more than you earn, you’ll go into debt. If you eat more than you burn, you’ll get fat. Here are five tips that, as Fox 29 Philly succinctly put it in its Twitter feed, “you don’t have to be a CPA to understand.”
(Oh, no… sometimes when I get off camera, I have the same feelings I get when I sober up after a raucous party. Sitting here typing, I just realized I winked at the camera after my first point was made. Is that the talking head equivalent of drunk texting? But when Kerri-Lee gives me an opening like she did, the nerd in me can’t resist seizing upon it. It’s what makes it fun to talk to her!)
I’d like to suggest one more magnificent tool for avoiding debt: My friend Zac Bissonnette’s new book, Debt-Free U, which was published yesterday. What I love about the book is that it’s essentially a radical manifesto that has the power to reshape the way you look at the role of borrowing in American culture. Anything that has the power to intelligently rock my world view is something I love.
The book’s already a sales hit (it’s #1 in several college categories), but the kid’s risking getting a real hit put out on him if he’s not careful, because he’s going on shows like Today to inform everyone, quite rightly, that they can chuck the vast American system of usury and pay for a high-quality university education by simply cash-flowing it, no debt required.
He should know: He’s a senior in college. He’s also slightly gonzo, so he probably would welcome the challenge of the financial industry trying to run him off the road, Silkwood-style. Sic ’em, Zac. (Wink, wink.)
I recently wrote about bloggers who seek to elevate themselves by launching unprovoked attacks on other writers in their field. As if on cue, someone has tried it with me.
A British writer, whom I have never met nor named in any of my published work, went after me for the warning I wrote for WalletPop about iPhone travel apps, which often require expensive data connections to function. The problem lies, essentially, in 1) exorbitantly pricey international access and 2) apps that suck data from the network without telling you how much you’re actually using. People get routinely slammed with massive bills, and they are taught by AT&T itself to thwart disaster by switching their iPhones into Airplane Mode the minute they board the flight to fly abroad.
The bigger the claws, the weaker the venom (Photo by H. Dragon)
This guy hated the example I supplied of a $3,000 bill because it happened in 2007 — even though I linked to the report of it so readers could fully investigate for themselves. He was fixated on the fact apps weren’t yet for sale then, but the truth is that astronomical charges unquestionably still exist. A friend went to Toronto for two days last week and was charged $300 for just 20MB of usage. (Can you imagine a full vacation’s worth of damage?) He hated the headline that said a person can spend “thousands” using data on vacation. (They can. You have to know the tricks.) He also didn’t say much about my publication, which is owned by Aol, or post constructive comments beneath the story in question, where true corrections would presumably most help the public, choosing instead go after me by name in a post published on his home platform.
Unfortunately, this man was disingenuous about his primary assault. For one, he neglected to disclose he has a dog in the fight: He makes and sells travel apps. He only admitted, near the bottom as a sort of footnote, to being “an app developer.”
Fortunately, his tirade has not gotten much traction, which is probably good for him, because the unpleasant truth hiding behind the attacks is that his own guide apps work best when they access Google Maps, otherwise, you don’t get to enjoy the entire functionality. (It must also be pointed out that Google Maps was one of the culprits in the $3,000 bill this guy didn’t like reading about.)
This is what my critic told his followers about his apps:
“All our travel apps store content when you first download them. All the images, all the information, it’s all inside the handset and you don’t need a data connection to access it.”
Notice the perhaps-tactical omission of the word maps (and what good is a travel guide without a map?). I can’t locate a clear truth on this one. This screenshot (below), taken from the App Store product page of one of the apps he is associated with, contradicts his presentation of the facts: As you can see, it declares that users “need a 3G or wi-fi connection to view Google maps [sic] or external website links.” Another sales page for another of his products words it as “you only need an internet connection…” for the same features. Still other sales pages for apps he sells make no mention at all of the warning, but I don’t know if that means the maps are stored offline for those. Now, data connection for external sites can be forgiven, but when it comes to protecting the traveler from shocking mobile phone bills, Google Maps is dangerous indeed.
This app needs the Web for full functionality: Its product page from the App Store
I can understand why this man might object to my call on consumers to be smart about their travel app purchases, because he stands to lose money if I drum up awareness about iPhone app design that allows data charges to creep in the back door. Most consumers are not as versed as app designers, and many people have no idea how much they stand to lose by using a travel app that accesses the Internet.
He also didn’t seek any comment from me for his first post despite the fact he repeatedly named me and invented assumptions about my professional practices.
Those omissions, together, raise significant questions about his motives and standards.
Considering the omissions so far (and there are other perceived misrepresentations that reach outside the scope of iPhone apps), it will surprise no one to learn that his three posts about me, plus updates, are selectively presented to make it appear as if it were me who picked the fight. He even published tweets I sent to his personal account to his wider platform, and then claimed it was “defamation.” It is not defamation, however, if 1) it’s true, and 2) you yourself are the one disseminating it.
Regardless, with his third attack post, he’s finally taking a more reader-conscious course by countering with solid information of actual service to the purchasing public. This morning, the guy put up a list of 11 data-use workarounds for using your iPhone while you travel. I must say there’s quite a bit of helpful information in there, particularly if you have bought one of his travel products (of which I have no opinion otherwise) and want to use Google Maps.
But if expensive data connection expense isn’t much of a problem, why did he feel the need to craft a long list of helpful tips, tricks, and hacks?
Having written this, I fully expect a fourth installment in his self-serving vendetta, and more fixation on minor points at the expense of the whole. I know I have played somewhat into his game. But this man’s hyperbolic campaign obscures the truth behind it — a truth that’s obviously more complicated than a rabble-rousing 140-character tweet. His vociferous objections to my consumer reporting remind us that you should never believe everything you read on the Web. Motives are shadowy things.
Update: I was invited to discuss this topic on Arthur Frommer and Pauline Frommer’s national radio show. You can get the .mp3 here; the chat starts about midway through. I encourage everyone who uses apps to make sure they understand the possible expense of data usage, and to be duly appraising of those with vested interests who try to deflect attention from, or blame consumers for, this very costly problem.
I tried, but I just can’t get behind the so-called “flashpacking” trend. I have real problems with it.
In the beginning, when flashpacking was first named as a trend, it sounded like something the trust funders were doing: Go abroad with your laptop, your HD video camera, your iPods and iPhones, and use them to stay connected and maybe to document your trip for the people back home. It’s said that flashpackering was born of cheap budget flights, as somewhat affluent workers could now choose to sojourn wherever they wanted, and bring their goodies with them for comfort, and wear nice clothes and eat really good food. In short, they want to take their consumerism with them.
My classist assumptions aside, at the very least, I insist on traveling with the bare minimum of possessions, and the mere thought of a laptop in my pack makes my lower back ache. I also couldn’t stand having to block “recharge time” into days that I’d rather keep spontaneous.
Now things have changed, and I recognize that being a flashpacker no longer says much about your income level back home. People of all classes — except the extremely low ones, who are unlikely to be backpacking anyway — can now afford some kind of device, and many hostels offer the free Wi-Fi necessary to connect them. Four years ago, too, having a laptop in your satchel might mark you as a crime target at a hostel, but now, a significant proportion of travelers have one. So flashpacking may not say as much to your fellow travelers about your status as it did just a short while ago.
But if you flashpack, it probably says a lot about what kind of countries you prefer to visit.
That’s because it’s very difficult for a sensitive traveler to take expensive electronics out of their packs in a countries where extreme poverty is the norm. Some of my favorite sights from my travels went undocumented by me because I wasn’t willing to take out my camera when I saw them. That fascinating procession of holy men in India, that animal sacrifice in Bangladesh, the flies crawling on the open eyes of laughing children in Luxor — the list is long, and lives mostly in my journals. I kept my few electronics hidden, and not because I was trying to avoid being robbed.
From www.how-to-travel-the-world.com
No, there are vast swaths of the planet where I don’t take out my expensive equipment because it feels like an insult to the people who are there. When five-year-olds go shoeless and beg for food in the streets, I do not want to flaunt my American wealth by using a frivolous luxury item such as a camera or an iPhone. Even the cheapest, flimsiest, D-grade models are worth more than many people make in a year. I refuse, and I refuse to snatch their image and turn it into a personal commodity that forever marks the value of my trip. Sometimes, journalism and imperialism are one and the same.
There’s also something liberating about not caring if your backpack is stolen when it’s strapped to the roof of an overnight bus in India or tossed onto a luggage canoe in the Okavango Delta. Carrying gadgets around is like toting a nest full of baby birds that demand daily feeding; it’s like that assignment in middle school when you had to take care of an egg as if it was an infant. Your journey is simply more liberating without them.
It seems to me that if you flashpack, you’re probably hitting the road well traveled: Europe, parts of urban Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and so forth. It would be pretty much unthinkable for me, as a person with an overabundance of empathy, to use my appliances in many other places on this Earth — meaning most of this planet. I’m glad they’re traveling at all, but this mode only works in a subset of the world’s destinations.
Of course there are ways to do it humbly, and there are ways to use your culture’s clutter without rubbing it in the faces of the people who are hosting you. But flashpacking, in my perspective, limits the number of places you can effectively see — at least if you want to use that stuff you brought. I’d bet a lot of flashpackers are markedly more discreet about their swag when they’re in the Third World, and that says something to me.
About eight years ago, I got in a passively aggressive verbal sparring match with a developer who told me, the travel writer, that I’d better get on board with the Palm and other devices, because hand-held travel guides were “the future” of travel writing. He himself was throwing himself wholeheartedly behind them.
I told him he was wrong. They might take off among business travelers, because they are generally wealthy and insulated from poverty. They might even do pretty well in American, Canadian and Western European cities. But there was no chance that a sensitive traveler was going to whip out a smartphone on a street corner in Mexico City or Mumbai or Nairobi or countless other major cities on this planet, and to think so hinted at a complete blindness to the realities of the enduring worldwide inequities of class.
The open use of devices, I told him, would always be something restricted to the wealthy Western world. There is a significant portion of this planet where people can’t find clean water every day, or wood to burn, or medicine to keep themselves alive. To assume we’re all going to digital is the grossest form of ethnocentrism. We aren’t, because we can’t.
That’s flashpacking. It’s a prerogative of the rich, and often marks an indulgence in naval-gazing, and anytime I tote the burdens of my culture and my class into a place where I intend to better understand the locals, I miss out on the richness of a full experience.
What she really wants is the iPhone 4 (Prince Albert, South Africa)
You know about my passion for connecting to American history, and for remembering how we’re all product of it, and how much I love dispelling the patronizing myth that the people who came before us were somehow simpler than we are. When it comes to a geek like me, there’s no bigger geek-out than meeting the man who personifies my beliefs about retelling the stories of American history.
It’s Ken Burns! The actual Ken Burns! You know: The Civil War, The War, Jazz, Baseball … I brought him to WalletPop today for an interview for his four-hour follow-up to Baseball, called The Tenth Inning, which airs in late September. I interviewed him last year, too, when he was promoting The National Parks. He won an Emmy for that last Saturday. I taped this interview the day after Letterman taped his.
Was it fascinating? Was it rangy? Was it heaven? Yes. A grand slam. We talked for a half hour — sadly, to be whittled down in editing — about baseball, doping, corruption, Barry Bonds’ asterisk (he doesn’t think he should have one) the Caribbean player as an analogue to Jewish and Irish immigrant labor, American culture and history, the common threads that tie all generations of Americans together, and Meryl Streep (who will voice Eleanor Roosevelt in one of his upcoming films).
Me, documentary idol Ken Burns, Aol producer Ken Shadford
I wonder if I could get Ken and David McCullough and Sarah Vowell in the same room at the time time. My head might explode.
I always say that “History is just something that didn’t happen to you.” Today, I feel like something happened to me.
A new souvenir tee-shirt soon to be on sale at Disneyland and Walt Disney World will sport a frisky turn of phrase. The shirt, themed to the water flume spectacular Splash Mountain, will proclaim “It was soaking awesome.”
The shirt, previewed on Disney Parks’ official blog today, is sure to be given a pass in the Shatner-induced national debate over acceptance of everyday vulgarity. To me, the thing is clearly a play on a common phrase involving the f-word. I’m definitely not a prude, and my language can be worse than this, but it does seem somewhat like a betrayal of a brand.
I guess it’s nowhere near as shocking as Song of the South, the movie upon which the Splash Mountain attraction itself is based. I will never understand why Disney green-lit a major ride based on a movie deemed so racist that the company still refuses to release it in the United States. When it was first made, Adam Clayton Powell called it “an insult to minorities.”
So I guess another baby step toward an idiocracy isn’t much of a concern in comparison to stereotypes of kindly old ex-slaves who live, like magic gnomes, in tumbledown shacks, waiting to teach young white boys it’s better to live back on the plantation. That central character of Uncle Remus was deleted from the flume version, but I guess minstrelsy is still acceptable if you apply it to rabbits and bears, and I guess a reference to the word fucking is fine for your 8-year-old’s chest if you make it plausibly deniable.
I guess 'I'm a mother soaker' was rejected
It’s still my favorite ride at the Magic Kingdom, though. And the lavish Japanese version could blow your mind. Then again, the Japanese can buy Song of the South, too.
