The Reader Travels

My senior year in high school, we had a guest lecturer from the local community college, a poet who challenged us to write a poem about a journey we take every day. The idea was to find beauty in something that we take for granted, to notice things we hardly notice.

Well, lately, I’ve been driving to downtown Dallas almost every day, back and forth to Baylor Medical Center. It’s an emotional drive, putting on big smiles and Santa hats, bringing food and song and sunshine, then driving home tired and pensive.

If I were to write poetry about this repeated journey, I might write about:

1. The glowing ball of light that is Reunion Tower.

2. The Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church on Washington Street.

3. The look on my mother-in-law’s face when she welcomes us back again.

4. Football games and sports radio.

5. Hugs and back rubs.

6. That furry little snaggle-tooth dog that’s always so happy we made it home.

If anyone wanted to set up camp and stake out my house, the apartments across the street would prove a very useful vantage point. They can see me coming and going, without making themselves known. Of all my neighbors, I know these people the least, there are no faces I recall, as people come and go from one six-month lease to the next.

I don’t know who they are, but they’re here living among me. And whoever they are, they have set up this huge, two-storey inflatable snow man, that stares at me whenever I leave the house. I’m afraid to go out and check the mail.

I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m like that neighborhood association lady I went carolling with last year who turned her nose up when we passed the apartments, refusing to bring “those people” any holiday cheer. But that’s not it. I can see his eyes moving, and he is not happy to see me, despite the big “Happy Holidays” sign he holds like a masque in front of him.

Brrrrr. Frosty.

My sixth and final review for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge takes us to the jungles of Paraguay. Lily Tuck brings us The News from Paraguay, during the late 1800s in a time of war and turmoil for this land-locked country in South America.

I always find it nice to have a map when I’m journeying in a foreign land. The adventure takes us from Paris, across the Atlantic Ocean to enter the South American continent at Buenos Ayres. We can track our course along the map as we travel up the Paraguay River in Argentina to reach the river’s namesake country, enjoying the lush foliage, colorful birds and chirping monkeys, all the while fearing the crocodiles and swatting the mosquitoes.

This historical novel gives us a look at the tragic reign of Francisco “Franco” Lopez. Inspired by the French, Franco sees himself as an emperor trying to conquer the Brazilians and their allied forces from Argentina and Banda Orientale (now Uruguay). The story follows his paramour as she travels with him from Paris into the jungles and bears him many sons. Though she is rejected by his family, Franco builds her a beautiful mansion, showers her with gifts and adores their sons.

The story is written in short segments as though emulating news briefs, shifting quickly from one character to the next, a collection of narratives, diary entries, letters and excerpts from official documents. It was a little hard to follow at first as we jumped from one point of view to another, and Tuck writes a lot of sentences that interrupt themselves with parenthetical interjections.

Because of this news clip style, the story lacks any in-depth character development, but overall, it was well researched and masterfully written, a good read, entertaining and educational.

Because this concept of mind control is not isolated to Orwell’s future London, I will continue my side tour of this continent. Let me share with you now some of my favorite looks at Big Brother in the US.

1) Big Brother– In this 1970s song, Stevie Wonder sings about the politicians coming around to make empty promises around election time, keeping the poor, dejected souls in their squalor and only pretending to care.

2) Watching Me – This is a lovely little paranoid ditty from Jill Scott, which includes the line, “DirectTV, am I watching it, or is it watching me? I don’t know.” On my CD, this song has started skipping, and I think whoever manufactured it has planted some subliminal mind control devices into the song, and they’re malfunctioning right now. I can’t even listen to it anymore. “I feel like I’m being scoped, y’all.”

3) The Manchurian Candidate – The Denzel remake was pretty good, but I really liked Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury in the original. It’s all about top level conspiracies and the most foul and dangerous uses of mind control.

4) Enemy of the State – Here was a good action packed chase with some pretty interesting gadgetry to track a man down. A part of me just thinks this movie is thinly veiled anti-Patriot Act propaganda, not that I think the Patriot Act is a good thing, I’m just saying…

And my absolute favorite…

5) Undercover Brother– The Man is real, and he’s polluting the fried chicken with mind control drugs so he can take over the world. Be very afraid.

Perhaps it is part of the African American experience, part of the Jungian collective unconscious to relate to this concept of Big Brother, watching. Big Brother is known by another name – The Man. And throughout the African’s history on this continent, The Man was there, watching him, torturing him, controlling him with fear.

But at Christmas time in the USA, despite the images we see on the TV, Santa Claus does not look like The Man, nor is he, nor will he ever be The Man. And all that stuff about him watching us and judging us and deciding who’s naughty and who’s nice, that’s just another conspiracy theory designed to bring fear and control over the unsuspecting masses.

Santa’s motives are pure. He brings and he gives out of sheer altruism, something that does not exist in mere mortals. There’s no coal in your stockings, unless you need some extra warmth and fuel for your fire.

Last week I visited the US Post Office in a mostly black neighborhood in Dallas, Texas. Everything was decorated for Christmas, happy and festive. But then I spotted the white Santa pretending to fit in by playing the jazz saxophone. Despite who Santa really is, this fake little doll was there to remind us that we were in a government facility, in which there is no escaping The Man.

Believe!

I love to look up phrases we use in our everyday language to figure out where they started. A lot of our idioms come from literature and story-telling traditions. There’s the popular phrase, “Catch 22,” that came from the book of the same name. And I always thought, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” came from The Iliad, where the Trojans send in the big horse filled with soldiers, but Dictionary.com says otherwise. Oh well.

Anyway, the term, “Big Brother,” came from George Orwell’s 1984, and in today’s time of conspiracy theories, the US Patriot Act and whatnot, it’s a very popular sentiment to think that Big Brother is indeed watching. In Orwell’s future London, the government is all seeing and all knowing. There’s nowhere to hide from Big Brother.

There’s this scene in the book where an auditorium full of people are chanting, “BB, BB, BB.” And this is the image that floated through my brain as I watched B.B. King in concert, circa 1992. Near the end of the concert, B.B. jammed on his guitar for twenty minutes, while his friend on stage punctuated the guitar solo with chants of the master’s name, ” B-b-b-Bee – BB. B-b-b-Bee – BB.”

Totally surreal, man.