Time Travel For Dummies

So....some of what you get from traveling comes as a surprise. Actually, most of our best experiences come unlooked-for. During our time in the American Southwest, we visited and explored several native American ruins. I was impressed by how extensive and developed they were. A lot of people lived out there before Europeans came to North America and the remains of their architecture are so extensive and intact that I couldn't help but imagine what it was like to live as they did. In some ways, I didn't have to be too creative as we were camping in the dead of winter ourselves.

As I mentioned below, we have been in a pretty remote and arid part of the Himalayas. For much of the past three weeks we've been staying in and visiting buildings that have been built in the same tradition for at least a millenium, probably much longer. As I've looked at these buildings, the memories of those of the Southwest gave me the ole sense of deja vu. I went back and looked at our photos from that time (see links below) and was surprised to see how similar those buildings are to those they still build here.

Chaco Structure Photo Link 1

Mesa Verde Photo Link 2

Navajo National Monument Photo Link 3

Chaco Structure Photo Link 4

Chaco Structure Photo Link 5


New monastery being built in Nako, Himachal Pradesh.



















































Old Monastery in Tabo, H.P.
















Without looking for any connections, I was suddenly surrounded by them. The buildings are very much the same. The people themselves look like American Indians. These people have been living in much the same way they have for, again, centuries. Just by coming here, I can very effectively travel back and have some of my questions answered including some that I never asked. For example, the buildings have stone and/or adobe walls and timber rooves and supports. Well, those big timbers give off a cedar-y/piney incense aroma for generations. It's one of the most homey smells I've ever enjoyed. And you know what? These people seem to do pretty well in stone buildings. Modern conveniences like electricity (which is sporadic) or running water are easily used without being viewed as absolute necessities. When you don't rely on electric lights, the movement of the sun becomes a day-long pleasure.

I think about how someone might travel to Disneyland or Vegas for some kind of pre-fabricated versions of culture. Here, we are, quite tangibly, traveling in time on no more than the periodic bus and our legs. How lucky is that?

Life on the Edge

For the past few weeks, we've been traveling in an area of the Indian Himalaya just west of the Chinese (occupied Tibet, actually) border. The area bears little resemblance to the India of the plains to the south. The population, except for the few intra-border 'colonialist' (i.e. Hindu flatlander) business owners encamping to make money, is mostly Buddhist. In places closer to the Hindu areas, the temples' decorations have adopted a hybrid of the two religions. To my eyes, it doesn't seem to matter so much what religion one practices in mountains like this. The monumental and austere beauty draw out your humility and reverence.

Water is a valuable and scarce resource. Until the past decade or so, when the area was opened up to travelers, farming has been the only way of life in these parts for all of its history. We aren't talking the kind of farming you might be familiar with in the States. This is subsistence level farming on limited, mountainside terraces, irrigated by small streams, growing only the few crops that will survive at this altitude (peas, barley, potatoes, lentils and a few other beans). Life on such a precarious edge leaves scant room for climatetological variation. If the snows don't fall in sufficient amount to provide water, these people are, in the fullest sense of the phrase, high and dry.



In many villages, they have water shortages and ration to certain times of day. To the humble and reverent, you can add that these mountains definitly make you feel vulnerable.

Access of Evil

If you question the damaging effects of media consolidation and and unquestioning press, see the below article in the current, on-line issue of the Nation magazine.

Link

Access of Evil
by AMY GOODMAN

[from the July 3, 2006 issue]

If President Bush had stood on the steps of the White House with a megaphone when he set out to sell the Iraq War, he might have convinced a few people about the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein. But he had something far more powerful that convinced far more people: He had a compliant press corps ready to amplify his lies. This was the same press corps that investigated and reported for years on President Clinton's lying about an extramarital affair. The difference here was that President Bush's lies take lives.

In order to be able to get that all-important leak from a named or, better yet, unnamed "senior official," reporters trade truth for access. This is the "access of evil," when reporters forgo the tough questions out of fear of being passed over.

And then there is the embedding process. Journalists embedded with US troops in Iraq bring us only one perspective. How about balancing the troops' perspective with reporters embedded in Iraqi hospitals, or in the peace movement around the world? Former Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke proclaimed the embedding process a spectacular success. For the Pentagon, it was. More powerful than any bomb or missile, the Pentagon deployed the media.

During the Persian Gulf War, General Electric owned NBC (it still does). A major nuclear weapons manufacturer--which made parts for many of the weapons in the Gulf War--owned a major television network. Is it any surprise that what we saw on television looked like a military hardware show? According to the New York Times, CBS executives "offered advertisers assurances that the war specials could be tailored to provide better lead-ins to commercials. One way would be to insert the commercials after segments that were specially produced with upbeat images or messages about the war."

After the Gulf War, Pentagon spokesperson Pete Williams jumped ship, but he was hardly crossing enemy lines. He became a correspondent for NBC. Just over a decade later, another Pentagon spokesperson, Victoria Clarke, gave up her position to work as a CNN commentator.

During the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, MSNBC, NBC and CNN--not only Fox--called their coverage Operation Iraqi Freedom. We expect the Pentagon to research the most effective propagandistic name to call its operation. But the media's adoption of Pentagon nomenclature raises the question: If this were state media, how would it be any different?

While the big players in the National Entertainment State deserve much of the blame, other major news outlets have truly outdone themselves in their total affront to the role that an independent media should play in a democracy. The New York Times and its former national security reporter Judith Miller were critical to the successful promulgation of the WMD lie, with repeated front-page, above-the-fold articles pumping the false stories about aluminum tubes and buried weapons caches, to name a few, all reliant on unnamed sources.

Sinclair Broadcast Group, which controls close to sixty TV stations, acts like a junior version of Fox News, with right-wing biases in its lackluster coverage. Sinclair refused to broadcast an ABC Nightline segment on which the names of killed US servicemen and -women were read, continuing the Bush Administration campaign to deny to the American public bad news about the War on Terror. Sinclair also broadcast with much fanfare a Swift Boat Veterans-inspired smear piece against John Kerry at a critical moment in the 2004 presidential race.

And then there's the Clear Channeling of America. Enabled by the Clinton/Gore-backed 1996 Telecommunications Act, the Bush-connected Clear Channel Communications, which began with a dozen radio stations, ballooned into a 1,200-plus-station radio network. According to South Carolina's 2002 Radio Personality of the Year, who believes she was fired for her antiwar beliefs, Clear Channel led prowar rallies, forbade certain songs from being played and silenced critics.

In 1997 the late George Gerbner, former dean of the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School of Communication, described the media as being "driven not by the creative people who have something to tell, but by global conglomerates that have something to sell." And almost ten years later, it still rings true. We need an independent media. Democracy Now!

For Sale: One, not very recently used First Amendment

We have come down from the higher parts of the Himalayas to re-group. We're in a touristy town called Manali to get some supplies, eat some more varied food than noodle soup and Tibetan bread (like pita bread) and to catch up on communications via the Internet. That last task has become something of an indespensible activity since we've been on the road. It used to be that a backpacker's only access to news about the world came in the form of a few abbreviated, international publications such as the International Herald Tribune (published by the New York Times), Time magazine or its British equivalent, The Economist. These were expensive, limited in scope and tough to find.

Now, via the World Wide Web, I can and do get all same the news I read when I was in the U.S. I can't tell you how much more connected I feel out here because I can track news and issues I care about. Even when I was at home, most of the news I read came from the Internet. In the last ten years, I have grown so suspect of the agenda of "corporate owned" media that I sought out more balanced coverage from other sources. The web-link to one of those sources, Democracy Now!, is to the right of this text. I get a daily news summary from them every weekday.

In two recent articles, I was sickened to read about the introduction of a bill (the COPE - Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act) into the US Congress aimed at controlling content on the Internet. The bill has already passed the House of Representatives. They debated and passed it late at night to minimize media exposure. You can read the full articles here: (first article, second article). In a nutshell, the major telecommunications companies, those who supply all of us with Internet access, have lobbied Congress to allow them to have more control over the quality and cost of access. If their effort at re-writing the regulations succeeds, these companies will have the ability to limit the expression of anyone who wants to read, write, advertise, sell or otherwise communicate without censorship to anyone else via the Web.

The Internet was originally set up to be "neutral". In other words, anyone who set up a web site would be allowed the same speed and accessibility as any other web site at the same cost. Your corner video shop could offer access to their web site as easily and quickly as Microsoft could offer you access to theirs. Under the proposed bill, AT&T or Comcast or Cox cable companies or any Internet "provider" would be able to go to a company with a "rate card" offering differing levels of service at different costs. This is the same setup as those currently employed by television and radio stations (you pay more for prime time, less for middle of the night) or newspapers (you pay more for more space and better page placement, less if your ad is tiny or buried.) If you can't afford what a big company can, the "provider" could relegate you to a super-slow connection rendering your site too frustrating for people to use.

What's worse, if you have a message that the "provider" disagrees with, they can block your site or slow it down. Heaven help the Democrats or any other political party who wants to raise money or disseminate information for elections. If the company doesn't agree with your point of view, they will have authority to block your site or slow down access. This is not far-fetched. Companies have already limited access in such underhanded ways as (see link):

- In 2004, North Carolina ISP Madison River blocked their DSL customers from using any rival Web-based phone service.

- In 2005, Canada's telephone giant Telus blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a contentious labor dispute.

- Shaw, a major Canadian cable, internet, and telephone service company, intentionally downgrades the "quality and reliability" of competing Internet-phone services that their customers might choose -- driving customers to their own phone services not through better services, but by rigging the marketplace.

- In April, Time Warner's AOL blocked all emails that mentioned www.dearaol.com -- an advocacy campaign opposing the company's pay-to-send e-mail scheme.

The telecom companies are trying to plunder something they had no hand or interest in creating. Here is a quote from one Congressmember (Ed Markeky - Democrat of MA - speaking on the House floor, June 8th, 2006.):

CONGRESSMAN MARKEY: Let me just make this point once again. The Bell companies had nothing to do with the creation of the Internet. The Bell companies had nothing to do with the development of the World Wide Web. The Bell companies had nothing to do with the browser and its development. In fact, AT&T was asked if they wanted to build the Internet, the packet-switched network in 1966. They turned the contract down when the government went to them. And so a company named BB&N, Bolt, Beranek, & Newman got the contract, a very small company -- not AT&T. They had nothing to do with the development of the Internet, but now, at this late date, they want to come in and to create these bottleneck control points that allow them to extract Internet taxes, Internet fees from companies and individuals who have been using the Internet for a generation. It is this absence of non-discriminatory language in the Manager’s Amendment and in the bill to which I object.



In the US we have four major TV networks all owned and controlled by very large, multinational corporations. Radio and newspaper ownership is similarly consolidated. You can go to this site to see who owns what: link. In my lifetime I have seen the corporate media become a unquestioning lap dog for the Government and big business. The Internet finally allowed some diversity. It will be a huge step backword if this bill is allowed to pass as-is. See this website: http://www.savetheinternet.com. Contact your Congressperson and Senators and tell them to keep the telecom companies' hands off the Internet.

e-mail: For Senators go to www.senate.gov/contacting/index_by_state_cfm.cfm for Representatives, go to www.house.gov/writerep/

Here is a link with other steps you can take:

http://www.savetheinternet.com/=act