From America
Big Money vs Big Ideas
Republicans have to make a choice between Romney’s moderate politics and Gingrich’s extravagant idea
The Republicans: Veer Right and Right Again
The electoral process and the Tea Party risk jeopardising the Republican bid for the White House
The Silly Season
This must be a confusing time for those in Europe and around the world to try to figure out what America is up to.
Meat or Veg?
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From America: How the Lonesome Travel
They’ve done their time. They have acquired educations, married, and raised families. They have navigated the often choppy waters of adolescence, adulthood, survived their tenure in corporate America, or grew and sold businesses of their own.
And now, rid of the jobs, homes, possessions and responsibilities that once bound them, they have taken to the open road piloting recreational vehicles (RV’s) that often pull along an automobile - and which provide enough comfort to see this country and others that border it in a relaxed and without-deadline manner.
It must be wonderful to vacation endlessly. To avoid that sinking feeling that creeps into us before our imminent departure back to the world from where we had just escaped. To go to bed on a Sunday night realizing that the vacation continues tomorrow. Many working Americans are lousy at vacations. Long before the current economic downturn we were lousy at it. Americans - unlike Europeans - seem to feel that taking all the vacation they have accrued is akin to a sign of corporate weakness. This Calvinistic streak seems to be contagious. In August of 2007, French President Sarkozy vacationed in America and had lunch with then President Bush in Maine. The next month he addressed the French Senate where he attacked the 35-hour workweek.
The RV pilots are through with such thinking. They are now professional vacationers, equipped with enough electronic and digital gadgetry to remain in touch - at a distance - with the world they are vacating. Take Ron (not his real name), for instance. In his early seventies, Ron favors the gulf coast of Mexico, and describes with enthusiasm its little towns and beaches, favorite food haunts, where the beer is coldest, and where there are miles and miles of uncrowded beach. “I’ve never felt in danger there, despite everything you might hear.” He keeps a boat on a river in Oregon where he stays when not piloting his RV. He had it in the ocean at one point but says salt water is malicious to boats; that fresh water boat maintenance is much less expensive.
His children are grown, living the kind of life he once did. He sees them several times a year, mostly around the holidays. A discussion with Ron is invigorating; well traveled and bright, his ideas and opinions are nuanced and informed. He can discuss the hazards and benefits of nuclear power, or the cultural idiosyncrasies of Guatemalans. “I don’t regret the things I’ve done,” he says. “I regret the things I haven’t.” And, just when Ron has you convinced that his itinerant lifestyle is the envy of the deskbound, he volunteers that his wife died of a heart attack when she was 64, just when all the arrangements had been put in place to begin their endless vacation together. “It was a shock,” he says.
We shook hands when Ron headed for his car to get back to the RV Park where he was staying. “Call me,” he said with an injured smile, “whenever you want to go to Mexico.”