A Guide to the Hitchhiker's Galaxy

There are some people who are so interesting that I wish they could be my friend, but they are also so interesting that I’m afraid I would go nuts if they were my roommate. John Waters is one of these.

Most people know John Waters from the movies he’s directed like Hairspray and Polyester. For those who don’t know him, the IMDB plot summary of Polyester (1981) will suffice as an introduction:

“A suburban housewife's world falls apart when her pornographer husband admits he's serially unfaithful to her, her daughter gets pregnant, and her son is suspected of being the foot-fetishist who's been breaking local women's feet.”

Yeah.

John Waters has just written Carsick, a book based on his hitchhiking trip cross-country from Baltimore to San Francisco. Carsick includes three parts, the first two are fictional accounts of the best and the worst possible experiences he imagines he could have on his intended trip, and the third is an account of the trip itself. I know this from reviews of the book and from his appearance on “The Colbert Report,” not from having actually read Carsick.

Norman Power’s review in the New York Journal of Books includes this description:

“In ‘The Best That Could Happen’ Waters imagines a cross-country trip full of his favorite kinds of eccentrics, freaks, and amiable perverts, many of whom joyfully recognize him as their hero. There’s an escaped convict named Ready Whip and his girlfriend Polk-A-Dotty;…”

And so on.

I guess I’m kind of cheating by writing about book reviews instead of the book itself, but, truth to tell, I don’t expect to read Carsick. It interests me because it calls to mind my own hitchhiking past. My highway habit was born when I was a high school student in Lakeland, Florida, and I had a crush on a girl in Eustis, but no vehicle to take me there. Not much to tell about that except to observe that so much of what we do in life is driven by just this kind of passion. I recall Daniel Ellsberg saying, only half-jokingly, that he got involved in the anti-war movement because “there was this girl.”

My heavy-duty hitchhiking career really got underway in 1966 when I was in college in New Orleans. As soon as I got a break between classes, I took off on a hitchhiking trip to Mexico. I had never been outside the U.S., and going to Mexico seemed like the most exciting thing I could do with my break, so off I went. It was all very cool since, when I finally made it, I got to try out my Spanish and discovered that the Mexicans I spoke to could actually understand what I was saying sometimes. (Gracias to Mrs. Workizer, my high school Spanish teacher.) I also met two nice Mexican students from wealthy families who spent half the night driving me around to Monterey’s various brothels where we downed drink after drink. And, in anticipation of any questions you may have about further experiences in said brothels, the answers are all “no.”

On my way home, stopping off at the border town of Nuevo Laredo, I sat for a while in a bus station with some Mexican farmers. They were super-friendly (as almost everyone I’ve ever met in Mexico is) and, they were at pains to assure me that the U.S. didn’t have to be so afraid of Castro because, “Don’t worry, we Mexicans can protect you.”

I also met a thirtyish American dude who was, I think, hung over, but he may have actually been not yet hung over, but still drunk from the night before. He looked intently at me with watery eyes and said, “Don’t let ‘em get you, man. Whatever you do, don’t let ‘em get you.”

Who the hell he was talking about, I don’t know, but I just made my way to the American border as quickly as possible, not nervous about “them,” but not wanting to spend any more time being lectured to by a disheveled drunkard whose nose blew bubbles of mucous every time he breathed.

Back on the U.S. side, I picked up my hitchhiking sign, which I had stowed behind a gas station in preparation for the return trip. It turns out that more useful than a sign saying “Mexico” or “New Orleans” was my Tulane University laundry bag. Yes, I didn’t have a backpack, so, for my trip I had just thrown some changes of clothing and a couple of books into my laundry bag. When I placed it on the roadside where the university emblem was visible, I seemed to get picked up quickly, often by students from other schools.

Speaking of hitchhiking signs, John Waters had some innovative ones, including “Writing Hitchhiking Book,” ”Midlife Crisis,” and “I’m Not Psycho.” I have to wonder how reassuring this last one was to potential rides.

On my various hitchhiking journeys in the U.S., I often held up signs proclaiming my hoped-for destination, but once I recall using a sign that said “Scintillating Conversation,” and that seemed to work pretty well too.

The hitchhiker’s worst enemies are boredom and despair. My most disheartening experience occurred just south of Atlanta, near the airport, where I once held my thumb out for two or three hours to no avail. Still bitter about that.

I suppose that nowadays people would say that being picked up by a psychotic killer is the worst that can happen, never mind the boredom and despair. Somehow I didn’t worry about those things back in my student days and I never did have to face the heartbreak of being murdered on a lonely highway.

I did garner some informal education in my travels. Once I got a ride from Mobile to Pensacola with a couple of Florida country boys. When they fiddled with the radio dial looking for good, down-home music, they passed over some of my favorite stations. I recommended that they might try listening to them, but they were adamant. “We don’t listen to that switchblade music,” one of them said. This surprised me. They saw my favorite music as dangerously urban, while for a city boy like me, country music had the potential to conjure up images of belligerent rednecks with shotguns and clubs.

Near Tallahassee, heading west, I was once picked up by an African-American college student. Everything was cool and relaxed until, at one point, he noticed a police car and said something nervously about what the cops might think about a white kid and a black kid riding together in the same car. That was a news flash for me. I had never imagined that just seeing a cop car when you were doing nothing wrong could be a source of anxiety.

An awful lot of my rides were with gay guys. Again cool, except for one very hefty dude who gave me a ride on highway 90 on the Florida panhandle. I had been politely propositioned a number of times, and it had never bothered me. In fact, one very likable guy in New Orleans actually engaged me in an interesting philosophical conversation based on the wisdom of Plato, etc.

But Mr. Meatball on Highway 90 was different - uncomfortably forward about his interests. Hmm. So that's what women must feel like when clumsy guys press them with crude advances.

It has been many years since I have hitchhiked, but for a while I made it a habit to pick up harmless looking hitchers during my cross-country travels. Most of these resulted in pleasant or uneventful encounters, though there was one particularly interesting hippie chick I picked up just outside Boulder, Colorado, who led me to what seemed like a permanent campsite in one of the local canyons. Living there was a small colony of some of the grooviest people you might want to know. One guy made decorative hashish pipes out of some kind of grayish material that he said was soft enough that he could carve it with his thumbnail.

I don’t quite know what has happened that hitchhiking seems so much more risky today than it did in the 1960s and 70s. We have changed, and the result of the change is either that we are more dangerous to each other than we used to be, or we simply have lost our ability to trust each other. Anyway, good on you, John Waters, for showing us that it is still possible to bum rides across America without being hacked to bits by some roving psycho killer.

(The reviews I read were in The New York Journal of Books by NormanPowers and in the New York Times Sunday Book Review by Dwight Garner.)

Mass Amnesia

A colleague recently suggested that China’s Communist Party reminded him of traditional Chinese dynasties like the Ming and the Qing. In light of this, maybe we should call China’s current regime the Hong dynasty, Hong being the Mandarin word for red.

But no, this isn’t quite right, because red symbolizes communism, and the Chinese Communist Party, whatever it is, is most definitely not communist. In fact, capitalists are playing such prominent roles in the leadership today that a name change is called for. Maybe “ the Chinese Capitalist Party?”

               What do we workers want? More money!

               When do we want it? Now! *

Since Deng Xiaoping pushed China so decisively down the capitalist road, it might make sense to say that the Mao era (1949-1976) represented the Hong dynasty and what we are seeing now is the “Qian” or “Money” dynasty. The pattern whereby a ruthless warrior spills rivers of blood to unite the nation, rules tyrannically, and then sees his dynasty fade shortly after his death is a familiar one in Chinese history. It happened with the first emperor’s Qin dynasty (221 BCE) and again with the Sui (581-618 CE). So is this pattern being repeated, with Mao’s brief but bloody regime being replaced by the more enduring dynasty founded by Deng Xiaoping?

Another colleague suggested that the Chinese Communist Party is not like a traditional dynasty so much as it is like many other right-wing dictatorships of modern times. Such dictatorships concentrate political power in the hands of a small elite which hide their decision-making behind closed doors, control the media, intimidate the populace, and enrich themselves while pretending to “serve the people.”

Imperial Japan of the 1930s and 1940s was a typical right-wing dictatorship. The government of Imperial Japan controlled all the nation’s media and used it to spew out self-serving propaganda. In addition to this, it used military force to intimidate or gun down any civilians who dared to protest its rule. And this is exactly what the Chinese Communist Party did 25 years ago on June 4, 1989, in the incident known internationally as the Tiananmen Massacre.
 

Louisa Lim has just written The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited about the slaughter of civilians in China on June Fourth and about the systematically brutal and pervasive efforts by the Communist Party to cover up the slaughter. Covering up its sins with misinformation, violence and threats is also what the Imperial Japanese authorities would have done in their day, hence my argument that the CCP is acting like the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).
 

An ongoing source of trouble for the party’s cover-up is the Tiananmen Mothers, a group of women whose sons and daughters were gunned down by the “People’s Liberation Army” in 1989. One woman, Zhang Xianling, spent months trying to dig up the story of her 19-year-old son’s murder. What she found out, after struggling to locate witnesses of the killing, was that her boy was out in the streets taking pictures on the night of June 3 and that a soldier saw him and shot him in the head. The wound did not kill him immediately, so he lay for hours on the pavement as the life slowly ebbed out of him. Whenever any citizens asked permission to take him to the hospital, the soldiers threatened to kill them if they approached the dying boy.

Finally his body was removed and buried by the soldiers in a shallow grave on the grounds of the high school where he was a student. This proved problematic when the boy's corpse, and a couple others buried nearby, began to produce a stench that made it impossible to hold classes in the school. At the same time, bits of their clothing began to poke through the surface of the earth. So the bodies were disinterred and moved to another grave site.

Eventually Ms. Zhang located the site of her son’s ultimate burial and had his remains cremated. To this day, in memory of her son and as a gesture of protest against the Communist Party, she regularly visits the place where he was killed. The authorities are so hostile to this behavior that they have installed a security camera trained on the spot of the boy’s murder just for the purpose of deterring her.

And that’s not all they do. They periodically prevent her from participating in activities that they fear will remind people of the killings, and have guards watching her round the clock. According to Lim, “this five-foot-tall, 76-year-old grandmother poses enough of a threat that an escort of state security agents, at times as many as 40 strong,” follows her as she goes to the dentist or the vegetable market.

Since the government has worked so hard to keep the younger generations of Chinese ignorant of the June Four killings, Ms. Zhang’s guards often have no idea why they are watching her. Once, after she explained to a young female guard why she was being watched, the woman walked off her post in disgust.

It is the ignorance of China’s younger generation about the June Four Massacre that justifies the word “amnesia” in Louisa Lim’s book. Whole generations of Chinese are growing up with no knowledge of the slaughter that was brought down on Miss Zhang’s son and hundreds of others 25 years ago this week when they protested against the corruption and lack of democracy in the Chinese Communist Party. The party, it seems, has succeeded in hiding the reality of this massacre from an entire generation. Even the Imperial Japanese authorities would no doubt be impressed with the effectiveness of the CCP policies that have accomplished such a massive forgetting of history.

In conclusion I have to express my sympathy for the Tiananmen Mothers and my admiration for their courage. May their struggles be rewarded someday soon.

Hu Yaobang, a liberal reformer whose death triggered the Tiananmen protests. Does he not deserve the honor of the Chinese people?

*Picture by Jon Berkeley 

Your Brain on Testosterone

Michael Lewis’s 1989 book, Liar’s Poker, offers a brilliant inside view of the criminal and virtual criminal behavior of Wall Street investment banks. “Virtual criminal behavior” (my expression, not Lewis’s) is behavior that should be against the law but isn’t because Wall Street money - due to its political influence - spawns laws that facilitate stealing from the public.

Lewis is clearly not very proud of some of his actions at Salomon Brothers where he worked as a bond trader. One that I remember in particular was his selling of crappy AT&T bonds to a German sucker named Herman, promising they were a good deal. What Lewis only discovered later was that the bonds were guaranteed losers. He had been encouraged by higher ups to sell them because Salomon owned them and wanted to unload them on a customer so they, Salomon, wouldn’t have to eat the loss. That’s how investment banks, and Wall Street generally, work: they find ordinary citizens, cultivate their trust, then steal from them. Meanwhile they spend a fortune on key political campaigns in order to make sure their stealing can continue uninterrupted by federal agents.

In addition to insight into the specifics of Wall Street criminality, Lewis reveals the testosterone-heavy language of the Wall Street trader. Before he suckered Herman into buying the crappy bonds, Lewis was known as a geek, a pathetically wimpy and unmasculine figure. Once he made the sleazy sale, he was on his way to becoming what Wall Street calls “a big swinging dick,” that is, a success. It was possible for women to become big swinging dicks, but they rarely did. I wonder how those who did felt about the language.

This imagery, where success and domination suggest a penis of unnatural dimensions, reminded me of what Lyndon Johnson said after bombing parts of North Vietnam to smithereens. “I didn’t just screw Ho Chi Minh,” he bragged, “I cut his pecker off.”

I’m not sure how Johnson felt about himself and his own pecker after he had to slink out of the White House in 1969. He may have felt like a dick, but surely not a big swinging one.

I am by no means the only one to be struck by the connection between success in competition on one hand and masculinity with all its appendages thereunto appertaining on the other. Joshua Goldstein, for example, has written an entire book on this topic: War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa.

I think of war as a kabuki of destructive stupidity and a fertile breeder of personal tragedy. But, since I am also in possession of a penis, I wish I could find a valid way to take exception to the presumed connection between these two entities.

There is, unfortunately, a connection between masculinity and aggressiveness. But it isn’t rooted in the penis; it’s testosterone, an anabolic steroid generated mainly in the testes. It makes men horny and contentious. (Women less so, since their bodies only generate about 12% as much testosterone as do men’s.)

There was an ad back in the 1970s designed to discourage drug use that focused on egg imagery. It opened with a man holding an ordinary egg while he intoned, “This is your brain.” Then, he cracked the egg and dropped it into a frying pan where it immediately began to sizzle. He then continued, “This is your brain on drugs.”

I never found that ad particularly convincing since I like fried eggs much better than raw ones, but nevertheless I did not become a drug addict.

Anyway, I would like to propose a new ad, one aimed strictly at men, with images something like this:

This is your brain.

This is your brain on testosterone.

Of course, women are capable of leading nations in war as did Golda Meir for Israel and Margaret Thatcher for the Britons. And, speaking of Britons, there was the famous warrior queen Boudicca who threw her bad, fighting self into fierce battle against the Romans.

                    Warrior Queen Boudicca on the Rampage

But these are exceptional cases. Most war promoters, like most Wall Street traitors [sic], are men. Of course the way we construct masculinity in our society, how we perceive and think about it, is at least as significant as the effects of any anabolic steroids that course through men’s veins. But still, this biochemical gender difference is a cross-cultural constant and it closely correlates with some pretty nasty behaviors.

Both capitalism and war are largely testosterone-driven systems. The hyper-competitive mentality of testosterone-afflicted Wall Streeters encourages them to act in ways that normal people consider pathologically anti-social. The same also happens all too often on the battlefield. Who can help us overcome this madness? Well, I guess today is as appropriate as any day for me to express my wish that more female voices be heard amidst the current cacophony of self-aggrandizing baritones. Happy Mother’s Day.