The Journey of Discovery

We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery guided by a private chart of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Traveler's Tales

For James

 

We were told that our flight would be delayed for another hour. As we sat there I watched my fellow travelers who gathered at the gate. Some were quite angry, others seemed to have given up completely. We were stranded and there was nothing much we could do.

First, it was the engine, then the weather. I wondered what the excuse would be an hour from now. But at this point it did not matter anymore. I would never be able to make my connection in DC. So why get mad? 

I opened my book and begun reading when a guy sitting next to me woke up. He must have been very tired. Or sick. To be true, he looked like crap and you couldn't even tell how old he was. He must have been in an accident or something. Bruises everywhere.

"Traveler's Tales" - he read the title aloud and asked me if the book was any good. I just started reading it and had not yet formed any opinion about it. It was an anthology of some obscure stories told by people who traveled to strange places. I love traveling, but I am not brave enough to hitch hike in Yemen or Cambodia. Besides, I was always curious to find out what motivated people to chose a thousands' stars "hotel" over a warm bath and a king size bed at the Ritz. 

He looked at me with his blood shot eyes and said that he used to love adventures, but his current experience changed him forever. It would be a while before he leaves the country again. I could empathize. I never forgot the nightmare of arriving in Turkey without my luggage...

I wanted to go back to my reading, but he asked me if I wanted to hear a real traveler's story. I hesitated. Oh, actually why not, I thought, and let him tell me his tale. 

He was a student from Berkley, CA. When the Arab Spring begun last year he decided to go to Somalia and help the protesters organize against those in power, just like his father did in California when they protested against the Vietnam war in the 60s. 

Oh my God! - I thought, but let him go on. He joined the Marxist outfit "United We Stand" and just like his father was ashamed of America and regarded himself as a proud citizen of the world. He despised the military, hated the rich, and wanted to abolish the Republican party. He hated the American way of life and hoped that the change would come as promised by the president. A new era of social justice and equality. A real new world order!

I was quite appalled at what I heard and wanted to confront him. I knew that not all was right in the country, but most Americans could really be proud of being American. But before I could say a word, he continued. 

Short after his arrival in Mogadishu he was snatched from the street by some masked men. He was beaten up and thrown into a dark cave-like cell. The stench was unbearable. 

There were two other Americans in the cell and they had the same story to tell. One of them was businessman from Ohio. He could speak some Arabic. His mother was a second generation Lebanese who married his Irish father. Somalia was supposed to be a paradise. But before he could even meet his business partners, he was snatched from the street. Just around the corner from his hotel! 

The other guy was a Boston doctor who joined the Doctors Without Borders organization. He made great money as a plastic surgeon in a private clinic, but decided that his life had no meaning. He was disgusted by the vanity of Boston socialites who were unhappy with their noses or droopy eyelids. He wanted to follow two friends who came here last year, but just like the other man, he was snatched from the street before he could even meet the others. 

What followed was a story of pain and fear. The cell was dark and dirty. There was no toilet and they had to sleep on a cold, dirty floor. They were hardly given any food. And all of them were tortured. 

Their captors would vanish for days and return only to abuse them even more. One day, however, each of them was taken upstairs, given a copy of a Herald Tribune to hold in front of the chest. They were told that they would be free if the ransom was paid. Each of them was put in front of a video camera and had to read a text. Name, nationality, and a plea for a quick payment. They also had to read out what would happen to them if money wasn't paid on time.

This was a story you usually read about in the papers. But here, next to me, was a man who actually went through an unimaginable hell. 

He took a sip of water and continued. Two days later his cell mates were released and he never saw them again. It must have been a week when he saw his captors again. He was beaten again and thrown back to another cell. In the darkness he made out a silhouette of a Chinese man sitting in the corner. That man spent almost a month in captivity and gave up any hope of returning to his family. He was expandable. Besides, no one knew where he was...

An announcement was made at the gate. Our airplane was in approach. Everyone was relieved! The boarding would begin within the next forty five minutes or so. 

There wasn't much time left and I wanted to call home, but the young man resumed his story. His captors told him that the American Consulate could not do anything for him because they claimed he wasn't an American citizen. But if ransom wasn't paid, he would have to pay with his life for this "insult". 

This was more than horrible. He was Robert C. Johnson of Berkley, California. His parents could confirm his identity at any time. The Consulate must have been able to access some record of his existence. His passport was issued only weeks before he came to Somalia. But instead, they claimed that no one, not even his parents ever heard of him. He should stop pretending that he was an American citizen.

Never before in his entire life he would insist on being an American, but there, in that hopeless black hole things looked much different. If only someone could confirm his citizenship, he would be free. He not only felt like a character copied from Kafka, he felt like Doctor Faustus! When he was a freshman, he seriously considered giving up his nationality, so insisting that he was indeed an American felt like selling his soul to the devil.

As days went on, he gave up his hope just like that Chinese man in the corner, although in his delirium he would sometimes imagine a US Marine squad raiding the compound and liberating him from the fangs of these savages. But to be true, on most days he thought of ending his own life. And yet, here he was. Free and grateful. On his way back to the United States. Proudly holding his American passport. Never happier to return home. To freedom.

"So, what happened? How did you get out?" I asked. "Oh. That's another long story," he said.

By Dominique Allmon

Traveler's Tales by Dominique Allmon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The Art of Political Rhetoric

The School of Athens by Raphael, 1505

By Robert F. Beaudine

The ancient Roman rhetoricians developed rules for their oratory. They began with “the exordium,” an emotional or ethical appeal to put the audience in a receptive mood. The “narratio” followed, a narrative of the events leading to the situation to be discussed and an explanation of their manner of treatment.

The main body of their speech delivered the proof of their argument, confirming their conclusions and refuting their opponent’s claims. They developed techniques called “the praemunitio” and “the amplificatio,” which cleared away obstacles and amplified their case with a rhetorical flourish. They concluded with another appeal to the sympathies of their audience.

These rules have been used throughout subsequent history. Today, the majority of our citizens no longer require proofs from our political class. They applaud any slogan that stirs their emotions, and they conveniently forget when a promise is not fulfilled. This has enabled our political leaders on either side of the spectrum to continue the policies and spending that undermine our liberties and our economy.

Public education has been instrumental in the dumbing down of political speech. Beginning in the late 19th Century, our industrialists used their wealth and power to methodically dismantle traditional education and replace it with a progressive system based on the Prussian model. Rather than enlighten, education was redesigned as job training, a system to raise compliant citizens who always looked to the experts for answers. This schooling would become the central feature of their planned society with its planned economy, both necessary for our industrialists to maintain and multiply their wealth and power.

Using the experiential discoveries of psychology, it’s taken a century to perfect today’s public indoctrination system. The unthinking emotionally-driven perpetually-dependent products of this schooling attest to the success of their method. Our politicians are the beneficiaries and no longer need sound arguments to justify their position.

Our political class also enjoys the advantages of a two-party system, which divides the people in two opposing camps, the “haves” and the “have-nots,” terms verbal engineered into the common vocabulary by the Left.

On its simplest level, the Left appeals to the have-nots with promises of increasing governmental assistance to ease their sufferings under Capitalistic inequalities, while the Right appeals to the haves with promises of less taxes, less government, and more liberty. Each side has a receptive core that readily applauds when their emotions are aroused through simple sound bites and slogans. And when the promised benefits are not delivered, each side points the blame at their conniving opponents, arousing anger, further dividing our country, while engendering sympathy for their tireless benefactors.

These techniques have been setting up the final solution. After we’re irrevocably divided, we’re ripe to be conquered.

This false left right paradigm has successfully served each side over the years, as our government’s bureaucracy and power have continued to grow unchecked, and the inequalities between the haves and the have-nots have increased unabated. That is, until a few small groups on the Right no longer applauded. Rather than accept the status quo of continual broken promises, these tea-partiers and libertarian groups like the Campaign For Liberty have demanded accountability. They demanded a return to sound government not in the fairy tales of their fraudulent speeches, but in a reality darkened by a fiscally irresponsible federal government that continues to reach into all aspects of daily life, as it gobbles more power and throttles liberty.

Yet, these small movements have been demonized from the start and are now blamed for bringing us to the brink of insolvency, something they alone seem concerned with preventing. In this respect, the rhetoric of the mass media is similar to that of our politicians – the truth is inconvenient to their agenda. Without the safeguards of an objective press, the status quo in Washington continues. Our debt gets deeper, our economy more mired, and our liberties more threatened. It matters little whether the Right or Left is in power. Our country continues along the path to insolvency and moral bankruptcy.

The recent Debt Crisis illustrates the false paradigm. It was engineered under a Republican President with a massive bailout of big business, and it continued under the current Democratic Administration. These opposing camps have become hired mouthpieces without the will or inertia to do anything but the bidding of those who keep them in office, the international banking elites. If left unchecked, the US Dollar will continually weaken until it’s replaced as the world’s reserve currency, which will ruin our economy and facilitate our merger into one-world-government.

And still, the underlying causes of our debt crisis have not been addressed. We have both a spending and an entitlement crisis, as an unsustainable debt piles up. Yet, we hear the same rhetoric echoing from the halls of Washington. Both sides claim the other side won’t compromise and allow an equitable solution. While the Right wants to punish the poor with spending cuts and reward the rich with no new taxes, the Left wants to soak the rich with massive taxes and aid the poor with more spending. The so-called solution was demonized as a tea-party victory. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, these patriots didn’t celebrate because it’s a mirage with the appearance of spending cuts in the face of massive spending increases.

Will we find a real solution in time? Is there a Presidential contender on either side, besides Congressman Ron Paul, who will not continue this false paradigm with its broken promises and destructive policies? History would say no, as the mainstream media continues to marginalize any voice against the status quo, including Dr. Paul.

In 1966, the historian Dr. Carroll Quigley thought the international bankers were too powerful to oppose when he published his smug exposé, "Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time." He wrote, “The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one perhaps of the Right, and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy … either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same policies.”

Future historians will wonder why we neglected to educate ourselves about a world dominated by an international elite, and why we never learned our lessons about our political class, who do their bidding with baseless rhetoric.

About the author:

Robert Beaudine is the author of the novel "Based Upon a Lie", which you can purchase as an e-book. To learn more, please, visit his website.