The last bottle, the last moment, the last dollar;
The last conch eaten at Billy Joe's.
Ankle deep in the warm sea,
Six black rays flee like silent birds.
________________________
Things I've learned:
America is indeed a classless society, but not in the good sense.
Every American, male or female, under the age of 40 is covered with tattoos.
If a restaurant requires a shirt, shoes and long pants, the only Americans in it will be over 60.
You may not be able to tell a prostitute from a debutante any more, but you can spot an American from a mile away: Mohawk, Mullet, basketball shorts down to the ankles, tank tops covered with advertising, towing black bags behind them large and small and trailing more cloth through the lobbies of five star hotels and grill-hot tropical streets than a dismasted Portuguese man-O-war in a gale.
What else:
America isn't worth it. Arteries clogged with malls, covered in ads and logos and paved over and everywhere the same plastic, the same prejudices, the same ignorance, the same proud stupidity, the same pretense, the same anger eating at our hearts.
Life is still sweet and lots of people know how to live it.
Black really is beautiful.
Raw conch and red snapper; jerk pork grilled on a wood fire on the beach at sunset, served up with sweet potato bread and plantain and peas and rice: rake and scrape making your feet dance and island patois and trade winds and seas as green as absinthe -- Life -- it's still there.
Nice. Makes me want to get out of my house. (Well... maybe.)
ReplyDelete"Proud stupidity" does indeed seem to be the American way. What to do, what to do?
ReplyDeleteYou describe an idyllic setting for enjoying and forgetting. Here in the Northeast it's lobster on the wharf or pizza and beer for us regular folks.
DB
Reminds me of a song...
ReplyDeleteAll together now.....you have to have friends,friends..
That's all I can't sing..
"You may not be able to tell a prostitute from a debutante any more, but you can spot an American from a mile away"
ReplyDeleteThat paragraph is devastating and hilarious. In fact, this whole post is darkest humor.
If I had no family here or if I could afford to live elsewhere and fly to see them often, I'd be gone.
You still don't sound much like a fellow who wants to stay.
The US looks very different from outside, or from inside when you've been gone for even a short while and the ridiculous ranting idiocy begins again as you step off the boat from paradise.
ReplyDeleteThere are places where people go around remarking "my God this is beautiful" and so it is. Poor people, people with limited opportunity. We walk around in a rage making everything ugly.
Nothing like a little Bahamatherapy to make things clear and it's just over the horizon.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteThis is one of your best posts ever -- wonderfully epigrammatical and insightful. Welcome back.
Don't get me started on Americans abroad. I've had a great day.
ReplyDeleteBut one point.
Why is the worlds wealthiest population by far the worst dressed?
Sloppy minds...
That's the big question Arthur. Clothing is very cheap here, by world standards and it certainly is less expensive to dress decently than it was when we were a less wealthy nation.
ReplyDeleteThe best I can tell, people are seeking to use clothing as a way to identify with rebellion from a mainstream that doesn't exist and are passionately conformist in doing it. Conformity seems to be at the root of everything Americans do, but we do pick some strange shit to conform to, don't we?
And thank you Dino - really. I have these Mr. Kurtz moments too often and "the horror" doesn't quite describe it.
ReplyDeletewe do pick some strange shit to conform to, don't we?
ReplyDeleteWe certainly do.
Sometimes, you just need to take a break.
ReplyDeleteThe 'tribal' regions of Pakistan have nothing on the 'tribal' regions of America.
ReplyDeletePick a pathology or an aberration and presto! A 'culture' with a tribe attached.
This nation of rugged individualists is, in the final analysis, much more a nation of the 'me too'. And far too much of our identity is tied up in what we buy.
But then it takes a bit of work to actually create engagement with society and build a world view.
It only takes a credit card to get a tattoo, buy a corset, get a piercing, lease a Mercedes or spring for 7 For All Mankind Jeans.
Those are excellent points, Arthurstone and Captain.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, it's fascinating to see how this nation, which so obsessively champions individuality, is made up of conformists, by and large, who strive for nothing more than to keep up with the Joneses.
I've not heard it put this way yet, even though the American conformity and dreadful uniformity in landscape, people, and mores was one of my first (astounded) impressions after immigrating to the US decades ago.
And I came from a nation that stressed the primacy of a group and society over an individual, the role of cooperation (largely pretend) and, to some degree, sacrifice as well. That society, in spite of its official insistence on conformity, produced a population of fiercely independent and individualistic troublemakers.
Hm. Something to mull over.
I've read and re-read your final paragraph. It makes me smile, close my eyes, and remember. I had much the same feelings on a trip that I took to Mazatlan in Mexico, five years ago. I need to go bak there or perhaps I'll try the Bahamas.
ReplyDeleteMy pet peeve are all of the young American males running around with their pants at half mast, revealing their underwear. I have to grit my teeth to avoid shouting, "Pull up your damn pants!"
The Ministry of Tourism advertises that it's better in the Bahamas.
ReplyDeleteIt is.
I've been in a lot of countries and the US seems further from realizing how wonderful life is than any other. We're backward, backward looking, defeatist complainers yearning to be as much like the other defeatist complainers as possible.
I'm old enough to well remember Beatniks and particularly the right age to remember the bourgeois bohemians who rapidly replaced them until every suburb had identical beat coffee houses filled with identical bearded, beret wearing men and women in black leotards, smoking Gaulloises and sipping espresso and reading Sartre.
Same damned thing with the Hippies, the young conservatives of the 80's and the damned accursed Tea Bastards of today. It's all about our herd instincts and group-think.
I just hope to live long enough to see the backwards hat, baggy shorts thing join the leisure suits on the dung heap of infamous idiocy.