Americans are a people possessed with and by wanderlust,
said the man who travelled a quarter of the way around the world to find the
person who completed him. But, if I may offer something to better explain, that
wasn’t what I started out on the journey to do.
You’ve seen/read the news on this: Jeffrey Fowle is back in Ohio after a Gulag
Intermezzo (of sorts) in North Korea. Terrific news for his friends and family
and perhaps reasons to be cheerful for the loved ones of Matthew Miller and
Kenneth Bae, both still guests of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
In much the same way as I don’t understand people who
base jump, pet sharks, climb mountains or do all three at the same time while
blindfolded, naked and on roller skates during a rain of locusts, I look more
than askance at anyone who would journey to such a country.
I don’t pretend to know why any of them chose to travel
there or to have understood, so far, what they did to earn themselves an extended stay, but however they’ve been making their travel arrangements, do
yourself a favor and stay away from whomever they’re using.
For me, both the guy who always needs a shave, and that snarky multi-colored
gnome give me more than enough cause for pause (and when did it
become too hard to say “cutting out the middleman” so much so that we now have
a term, disintermediation (that no one on earth
understands), to do this). And besides there’s a world full of places I would
love to see, and whose People’s Republic didn’t make the list?
In a world of unlimited possibilities, someone chooses to
head towards a place where they make men’s suits out of poured concrete, where Spy vs Spy isn’t a Mad magazine feature but rather
a meeting of the Neighborhood Watch, and
an optimist is someone who looks forward to when they can die.
“With your fussin’ and a fightin’ won’t you get me to the
rhyme?” Preferably without routing me through Chicago while my
baggage travels direct to Dallas.
-bill kenny
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