In ruins, in Iraq
On travel as soft diplomacy, and space time relativity on Earth
I don’t know. I have sworn up and down to be more optimistic, buoyant, enthusiastic. In print, in person. But today is a terrible day, standing on land so heavy with genocide, and watching our leaders gleefully aiding and bankrolling another.
For the past couple of weeks, I have been pitching around an essay about the notion that travel functions as a kind of soft diplomacy. This of course is the sing-songy rhetoric we get in any kind of travel show — that personal connections, friendships, and hand to hand commerce, on a micro scale, create little eddies in the greater streams of narrative as created by nation states and mass media. But it is hard to feel that any of that matters under the sheer force of raging colonialism and conquest.
I was citing as an example in my pitch a visit I made to Iraq a couple of years ago — in that almost unbelievably wild, sliver of a window when American tourists could go — as a way to de-program myself from the fairy tales in both literature and on CNN that I’d been presented in media, as a way to have a first hand encounter with place and people, the better to have a place to file away memories as well as the myths we tell and are told about ourselves and others.
Maybe what I came back with proves my point, whatever my point is… today it only seems like a strange small artifact in the face of our brutal century. But here is the piece I wrote upon my return.