D'you know where Chuck Thompson comes from? Juneau! I know, but d'you know Juneau? It's the capital city of Alaska [Not Anchorage? Ed.] and, according to Chuck, a good place to be from. Like Bill Bryson leaving Des Moines, Mr. Thompson left his hometown to see the rest of the world. And write about it.
Chuck Thompson is a travel writer -- the kind who writes magazine articles about places like Juneau, because doing so pays the bills and gets you a look at the rest of the world. But he has the self-awareness to know when he's writing bullshit, and the courage to write the truth, when he can.
In Smile When You're Lying (Holt, 2007) Mr. Thompson gives readers "a hilarious behind-the-brochures tour of picture-perfect locales, dangerous destinations, and overrated hellholes". (That's from the blurb on the cover.) A reviewer said "This Thompson will remind readers of Hunter S.". Walt disagrees. No-one writes like Dr. Gonzo at his best, besides which travelling was only a sidebar to HST's main topic. Nevertheless, this Thompson does remind me of the early P.J. O'Rourke. Holidays in Hell springs to mind. I give Smile When You're Lying a big thumb up.
But a book review isn't what I intended to write. And Smile When You're Lying is more than an anthology of bad trips. In the final chapter -- "Not-So-Ugly Americans and the Road of Good Intentions" -- Chuck Thompson gives his opinions on why Americans in general and American tourists in particular are more reviled in the rest of the world than ever before. His argument makes so much sense to me as to demand a lengthy quote. Here it is.
Around the planet, "America" has become a byword for the kind of pushy, greedy, arrogant, ignorant, scheming, intolerant, hypocritical, violent, militaristic, goose-stepping, blood-gulping, Limbaugh-worshipping bullies that civilized people since time eternal have despised and occasionally battled to death....
No matter how many beaches we [clean] up, no matter how many schools we build amid the rubble of villages we bomb, the world will judge Americans not as well-meaning individuals but as faceless supporters of a fascist regime drunk with military power and an unslakable thirst for oil. In the way Americans once held all citizens of the Soviet Union in contempt, in the way the world's 1 billion baptized Catholics are somehow held accountable for every impetuous decree from a geriatric pontiff whose native language the majority of them don't even speak, the world now judges Americans as an evil herd.
Unfair, maybe, but this makes a kind of sense. Universal scorn is what results from willingly paying taxes to a government that sends soldiers around the globe to secure oil fields and flatten ancient civilizations before trying to rebuilt them according to its own shabby blueprints.... If you pay the taxes that foot the bills, you're complicit in the big picture. And you're hated for it.
Since the entirety of American civilization is based upon European civilization...the progression of American history shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone in the Old World. In the Middle East today, the United States is only acting in the manner that virtually all of its European fathers did whenever they enjoyed military, technological, and economic superiority over a foreign country -- that is to say, using a dominant army to overthrow a foreign regime and shuttle in private enterprise beneath the security of a semi-permanent military presence to extract resources and amass wealth....
Let's all stop being so naïve about who runs the U.S. government and remember...that it was that great peacenik Jimmy Carter who in 1980 signed the Carter Doctrine, making it official U.S. policy to employ "any means necessary" to protect the flow of oil from the Middle East, a document used by both Bushes to justify military actions in the region.
Democrat or Republican, the U.S. government always operates in the interest of corporate profit. And when it yaps about protecting your freedom and the "American way of life", that expressly means the inalienable right to burn Middle Eastern oil so that we can be warm in winter, cool in summer, and travel anywhere we want, whether it's to a beach in Tahiti or the beer cooler at the Quickie Mart down the street.
And now a few words for Walt's Canadian readers. Chuck Thompson concludes Smile When You're Lying thus: Just when you think you've seen the best the world has to offer, there'll always be Canada. That's the very last sentence of the book. The suggestion is that, compared with the Land of the Free [sic] and the Home of the Brave [sic], Canada is, in the writer's opinion, a veritable free and righteous paradise.
Dear Canucks... please keep in mind that Mr. Thompson wrote those words in 2007, before your Dear Leader, Steve Harper, got his hands on the levers of power and began his campaign to remake the Great White North into a pale imitation of the USA. See "Ralph Nader asks: What's happening to Canada?!" I'm sure Chuck Thompson is asking the same question.
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