Chicken Bus Fever Part VII Lost and Sick

San Juan Del Sur is sometimes called the Hawaii of Nicaragua and Rio Dulce felt like the Hawaii of Guatemala. I don't know where these families with cars come from but the area was very popular. Maybe they drive from Livingston. I sincerely don't know where so many upper class Guatemalans were hiding. Maybe Puerto Barrios. The bridge over the river from Fronteras to El Relleno had big signs prohibiting parking on the bridge and these signs were ignored by absolutely everyone until it became a congested, one lane bridge.

Park Anywhere you want!

Tourist buses stopped on the bridge, taxis, cars, motorcycles. Food carts stopped to sell refreshments to people taking selfies while traffic honked to clear the way. The bridge, I suspect, is one of Guatemala's engineering marvels. In all my travels I don't remember ever crossing another bridge and maybe this is because I mostly lived in the southern Earthquake-prone region where a bridge would not last even long enough to be completed. But Rio Dulce was not close to the Subduction zone in the Pacific to be threatened by shifting plate tectonics so it survived and was probably the tallest man-made structure outside of the capital city. To my eyes, it was nothing special and I have no photos of it, but Guatemalan tourists drove long distances to park next to a no parking sign and take a picture of themselves with the river in the background.

A Century of Spin

Battle of the Somme: 100 years ago.

Reading the news today is like a test to see how much frivolous bullshit one can tolerate. CNN has adopted a habit of posting random, anonymous Twitter comments instead of interviewing real people on the street. We all know how Twitter brings out the best in us. That allows CNN to cherry pick the most infantile or dramatic or clever or literary quote to fit their rotten article. It got me thinking, "How would these illiterate fuckwad journalists who graduated from some diploma-mill like Brown write about events from 100 years ago?" I really am curious how someone who scours Twitter for snarky remarks about totally irrelevant events in 2016 would write about almost identical international news a century ago. 

Now, the Battle of the Somme resulted in 1,000,000 casualties over 4 months (yes, one million) so it's pretty high on the list of insane human events, but are events of 2016 much different? I think not. The 1916 Summer Olympics were scheduled (by some idiot) to be held in Berlin so they were cancelled because of an active war zone. Today, Rio, Brazil was deemed safe enough to hold the Olympics but Russia is militarizing allies for a land grab, Syria is in a Civil War, refugees are fleeing Africa by inflatable raft to countries that immediately criminalize their religion, America has been occupying oil production territory in Iraq and Yemen while ignoring blatant civil rights problems in distant barbarian cities such as Chicago and obviously dire flooding in other foreign lands not protected by the Constitution, such as Louisiana, while paying some $2 Billion to Iran for an arms deal that was intended to keep the despotic Shah in power back in 1979, but never happened because he was overthrown, but Iran had already paid for the arms so even though the 'buyer' from 1979 died a year later the U.S., for some reason, feels obligated to pay this money back, with interest, to a completely different terror supporting band of lunatics who now claim it is owed to them, the same people who tried to kill the original buyer whose goal was to squash the rebellion led by the parents of the people now demanding the money back. Makes sense. In 1916 a campaign was building to end alcohol production because it was an obvious health scourge and in 2016 there are more Heroin overdoses than births* But Heroin is already illegal because that law empowers municipalities to attempt to profit from suicidal, broke, drug junkies. Pretty smart!

Here is a list of actual events from 1916 - combined with generic spin from a modern day fuckwad journalist a'la CNN or Breitbart.

• Battle of Verdun is fought - A Pop singer in N.Y. complains that her summer house in Belrupt-en-Verdunois has been destroyed. Demands restitution.

• Mexican Rebel Pancho Villa attacks town in New Mexico - Woodrow Wilson claims this is proof that we need to build a wall between America and Mexico.

• Easter Rebellion in Ireland put down by British troops. - 10 Irishwomen in Boston refuse to wash any clothes manufactured in Britain for a week. They are denounced as Atheists. User #RemembertheMaine@'98 comments on Twitter "A Chink can wash clothes as good as any potato famine Cat-lick whore."

• Emma Goldman is arrested for lecturing on birth control in the United States. - Goldman is uniformly considered a slut but a small group defend her. She later accepts lucrative offers to pose nude.

• Voyage of the James Caird: an open boat journey from Elephant Island in the South Shetland Islands to South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean (800 nautical miles (1,500 km; 920 mi)) undertaken by Sir Ernest Shackleton and five companions to obtain rescue for the main body of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition following the loss of its ship Endurance - Lurid rumors of homosexual orgies plague expedition. Financial sponsors flee.

• United States Marines invade the Dominican Republic - Florida rejoices as Banana prices plummet!

• U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs a bill incorporating the Boy Scouts of America - Conservative pundits say this demonstrates failure of American family to perform first duty of preparing sons for war.

• In San Francisco, a bomb explodes on Market Street during a Preparedness Day parade, killing 10 injuring 40. (Warren Billings and Tom Mooney are later wrongly convicted of it) - Billings and Mooney were identified by web sleuths who later delete their accounts.

• U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs legislation creating the National Park Service - Liberal Pundits announce this will lead to high price of admission at previously free parks. 

•  Mary, a circus elephant, is hanged in the town of Erwin, Tennessee for killing her handler, Walter "Red" Eldridge - "Pachyderm Lives Matter" activists boycott Tennessee. #JusticeforMary

• Margaret Sanger opens the first U.S. birth control clinic - Men nationwide breath a sigh of relief in private but denounce whorish behavior in public.

• The first 40-hour work week officially begins in the Endicott-Johnson factories of Western New York - 11-year old Derek "Nine-finger" Sullivan says he prefers the new hours. "It's like working half-time," says a smiling Sullivan from behind his bench.

I couldn't resist an insulting modern day meme.

*none of this is fact-checked

Chicken Bus Fever Part VI.5 Sweet River

I can't leave this chapter of log describing my circumnavigation of Guatemala via local bus without some mention of Santa Elena, Flores, La Isla De Flores, Tikal, and my experience there. What kind of selfish travel writer would I be if I only analyzed bedroom curtains?

The main point I will make is that Tikal and Flores are not the same place. People I met seemed to use Flores and Tikal interchangeably, but they are not very close to one another. If one wishes to visit the Mayan ruins of Tikal then the city of Flores is the natural hub for travel, also a hub for travel to Belize and other historic destinations in Northern Guatemala as well as destinations to the south. There is an airport but I prefer bus. Within the Tikal zone there is a hotel as well as a campground. But the ruins are closed after 6pm except for guided night tours. So, even if a person hitchhiked to Tikal in the evening after the last bus departs for Flores it's possible to camp in the park or rent a room, but don't take my word for it if you know what's good for you. I'm irresponsible and barely care about my own well-being so do you really think I care if you must sleep in an active jaguar den because you followed my advice? I'm sure these hotel rooms are expensive, but probably nice too, if they do exist.

Chicken Bus Fever: Part VI Ruined

The owner of the Hospedaje in Sayache gave me advice that I should rent a room in Santa Elena or Flores because the hotels near Tikal, the Maya temple site, were expensive. This was good advice because I didn't really know where I was going. I knew I wanted to visit Tikal but was not sure if Tikal and Flores are the same town. I knew they were in the same general area but did that mean they were close enough to sleep in one and visit the other? Well, the advice to rent a room in Santa Elena was wise because Tikal and Santa Elena are about 1 hour apart and while buses go between them regularly I only saw one or two premium hotels closer to Tikal near the lake, and the budget hotels/hostels and hospedajes were all back in Santa Elena.

Eric Hoffer

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

I had an experience right out of Glass Bead Game when I was in Guatemala. I was discussing life and history with a retired man who had a colorful past and it was very similar to Knetch's discussion with the elderly historian in the monastery where he is sent for his first assignment after graduating from the academy. In his casual conversations with the historian leads them to the realization that they both had studied a little known philosopher named Johann Albrecht Bengel from hundreds of years earlier (Glass Bead Game takes place in the far future). Bengel exists, along with some of the other historical figures mentioned in the book, but some are invented to imply time has passed. Well, in my conversations with the retired man in Guatemala he mentioned making a pilgrimage to San Francisco not to smoke pot and listen to music, but to seek the counsel of a "longshoreman philosopher" who lived there in the '60s. This could only be Eric Hoffer, whom I had read about randomly in my attempts to justify labor as a means to self-enlightenment. I had not read much of what Hoffer wrote, preferring to romanticize a laboring philosopher, content with his day's work and content to write some witty aphorism on a park bench. The ideal was enough to sustain me and inspire me. Hoffer was not of the Stalinist camp of labor, represented by the horse Boxer in Orwell's Animal Farm with the quote "I will work harder." No, Hoffer reached the conclusion that work was hard enough, labor was required from someone, and he would give his fair share. He was not content with intellectualism as an end in itself, like Dr Zhivago who scoffed at the idea of earning his keep with poetry. Hoffer may have found that reflecting on the act of work was his idea of rest. One of his many quotes says, "It is not work that makes us tired, but work left undone." and even if you can contradict it, one must agree it is a witty statement. My favorite quote is, "Why are Jews expected to be the only Christians?" in reference to refugees evicted from Israel and critics asking Israel, but not countless other Christian nations, to do the Christian thing and make room for the refugees. It's witty, even if one can contradict or pick it apart because it not only questions religion, by also contradictory principles and history and the laughable idea that a Christian ideal would be imposed on the very religion that historically executed Christ. It's funny if you examine it, but the idea is quite clever and important and still relevant today decades after Hoffer wrote it.

Well, I said, "That's Eric Hoffer." and thus closed the circle set up in The Glass Bead Game. My conversation companion was never able to meet Hoffer at the time and way led on to way. Hoffer wrote, "People who bite the hand that feeds them usually kiss the boot the kicks them." He also wrote "Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves." And this quote makes me wonder if we are not also on the same page with the word "just" which is usually substituted for the word "merely" but doesn't mean the same thing. Readers will notice I use merely or simply instead of just, unless I am rushed or sloppy, and a study could be done of how Hoffer avoids that insidious word.

Hoffer was an observant and wise man. His work does fall into the realm of punditry or cultural analysis, and his aphorisms toe the line with a broad brush, but his experience earns him a position of respect. He had done the hard work of examining the world from all corners and his experience, not his political bias, served as the source of his opinion. Jack London wrote Martin Eden, which I am still trying to adapt into a screenplay, and that book also studies the dichotomy between labor and philosophy. This theme is also covered in a short story by Jack London that I can not track down right now but it involved a man who lived a dual life as a street fighting socialist and a genteel white collar professor. A literary buff has told me this story is called "South of the Slot". This story had a profound effect on me, more than even the London stories that led me to The Yukon Territory in search of gold. The romance of entering a socially antagonistic culture and learning to fit in and then returning to the bourgeois society and lording your superiority over the ignorant pale pundits appealed to me. I was unaware of the larger message London suggests about this transformation, that one's superiority would merely be used to ostracize and alienate one further, and one's bourgeois roots would always prevent inclusion in the working class society, so that one would be alienated completely from both the north and south of "The Slot", but that wisdom would come later, like Hoffer's, won the hard way.

Jack London and Eric Hoffer. Check them out in this time of idiot pundits and soft pale politicians with toothy lies and bloated egos. 

Hoffer was not a scientist and did not want to be. He wanted to reason out social puzzles while hauling rope and moving cargo and that left no time for science. He is a rhetorician and begins his book True Believer with a humble quote from Montaigne, "All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed."

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/eric_hoffer.htm