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Breaking bread in Iraq - today! 

Stirring the dinner pot in northern Thailand. 

Being America

I'm reading Being America by Jedediah Purdy and the following excerpt rang true after traveling to Thailand and then returning to Iraq. It's difficult at times to retain that fleeting perspective you gain after travel....

"This is the fact of global life. We Americans live in an American world, more than the citizens of imperial Rome inhabited a Roman world or nineteenth-century Englishmen a British one. The sun never sets on us. Where two or more are gathered, we are with them. Wherever one is trying to make sense of her life, we are there.

Beyond our power and wealth, America provides the global language of dreams and the imagery of ambition. We are what everyone, everywhere, might yet be. Ours is the face that has launched millions of planes and billions of migrant journeys, whether from Bombay to New York or from a Tamil Nadu village to Bagalore.

People everywhere want to spend their days not eeking out survival, but enjoying the bounty of a rich country. The fantasy of a land of plenty is very old; it figures in Muslim views of paradise, Hindu descriptions of the Golden Age, and the legendary Cockaigne of medieval Christianity, an imagined place of of perpetual feasting, Americans live in that place, the everyday tenants of one of the enduring human myths.

Apart from wealth, people are moved by the wish for freedom - which today means American freedom. The ordinary liberty to go through a day or a week without harassment from the police; to choose your own friends and lovers; to speak your mind and come to your own opinions; to have ways of making the powerful answer to you; these are human aspirations, charged with new force in our age of democracy and human rights. For all its failings America stands for them. We live in the flesh and trip off the tongue of anyone, anywhere, who desires what it is human to want.

The worlds hunger is not exactly a compliment, and we should not take it complacently. We are loved, desired, and resented, often in one breath. Life is full of injury, confusion, and humiliation in a world upset by vast migrations, the rise of huge cities only fifty years old, and the collapse fo social orders to which people belonged for centuries and millenia. Resentment and hurt, like aspirations, run to America: the country that offers to the mind and heart everything that real life denies the hand and mouth. This is not a question of what attitude we deserve. Admiration and resentment have always atatached themselves to the powerful, the successful, the visible.

There is no guarantee of an American future. It is naive to believe that the migratory icons of American modernity- constititions, regular elections, free markets, shopping malls, MTV- will turn every place to a version of what we already are. What awaits us is not restricted to what we wish for, or even what we can imagine."

Just looking through pictures from the Olympic National Park in Washington. Such a good hike. Thanks Ben! 

Comin to get ya. 

Farang!!!! 

Spring is here!