TOURIST PLANET

Something cracked in my tidy little world view some decades ago when I saw a TV show about a member of the British nobility having his family board at a tavern in town on weekends so he could open his castle and charge gawkers enough to support his royal lifestyle on weekdays of the year round. In a way it was like finding that I was on the Truman Show, and I was Truman.

Supposing the nobility to be noble, above the petty groveling of the peasants at the hooves of their passing, is the very myth that perpetuates any awe in the breeding of subordinates, so necessary in supplying the abundant obedient servitude that lives demanding expedient convenience with their leisure require. Being an allegiance pledging fledgling to the nobility of “… in God we trust” without doubting the high minded patriotism of others for most of my early life, seeing this pitiful display of effete inbreeding solely dependent on inheritance of the noble acquisition of such high position turned out to be a major turning point in my life about assuming authority, that of others and for myself.

I was yet to question the nobility of the acquisitions themselves; it takes a long time to awaken to the complete delusion of wishful thinking. No, this post is about the inherently effete artificiality at the root of any form of tourism, from my example of Lord Cantdoit’s pawning acquisitions from ancestors’ exploits abroad in the name of the noble empire, to international corporations’ embodying the essence of pimps by marketing the value created by a home grown community business for the profit of slave wages by moving it to an area where labor is still recruited by beating the bushes in the wilderness.

It seems like in every instance when I see someone cede the noble integrity of a vital, independent self-reliance to borrow the money to afford others to promise them a guaranteed future, I see a reenactment of the noble savage tempted from his/her relatively symbiotic, hunter-gatherer coexistence with the environment to join culture’s exploitation of it and each other to advance status in a culture based on eminent domain granted by faith in an artificial authority. Newborns today don’t have to make the two hundred thousand year acculturation from emerging homo sapiens sapiens to the pop stars of today. Culture has devised a way to capture the emerging mind before it can figure anything out for itself and snap it up to date on the latest craze without it even suspecting there might be choices or that something might be missing among the plethora of transient facts they must engorge for regurgitation upon demand. Evolution is such that infants have always been equipped to deal with daily life in nature at any stage along the way; the cultural myth being so artificially, arbitrarily imposed on nature as it is, is never consistent enough to influence genetic memory.

The reason we never attack the source of our myriad problems is because it lies within the pointing finger. Governments and gods were invented as proxy straw men on whom to project the justification for our abdication of personal responsibility for our relationship to the nature of the world around us, preferring to amuse ourselves with the tricks we can make it do for us with this cattle prod, this dollar, this gun.

Vanishing Game was the best flint knapper still living. His work decorated display cases in museums and dens of eminent historians and amateur nativists around the world. He did it all, from finding the flint out in the lifeless wasteland reserved for his people, carefully pushing delicate slivers of geology away from the rest of the stone-cum-spearhead along its fault line as thousands of generations of accumulated hunter's skills became perfected in his strong hands, donning the war dress he inherited from his great grandfather and sitting by the Res Road on a blanket all day – not a deer in sight – just customers.

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Taking where one is to be home

More dear than junkets to Rome

That leads one thinking what one sees

Are facts learned

Not faux culture one's fees

Paid acts earned.