Part 2
Hawks fly high as one approaches the Guadalupe Mountains National Park northwest of Big Bend in Texas and the bush stands green over the brownish shrubs. The image has recently been flaunted in a parody about George Bush being really a George Shrub, which may be funny to some, not unlike the racial jokes of the '60s and '70s, but may not resonate to many in today's politically correct moralism and emerging glocal sensibilities.
When we are no longer capable of respecting the integrity of someone's ideas, either in agreement or disagreement, we resort to the tactic of personality assassination or adulation, both of which negates the authenticity of valid discourse.
The diner car of the Sunset Limited in this trip became a point of contention between the maître 'd and some passengers who found him to be a bit snotty. Following the tradition of European trains, particularly the old Paris-to-Istanbul run of the Orient Express, our dining room director might have read one too many Agatha Christie mystery novels, for he runs the food pantry like it had chandeliers, blue willow China, and silver cutleries, with passengers coming to dinner in their fineries.
Of the three passenger coach cabins, there is a high percentage of man'amko and physically obese people. Man'amko who are 62 years old and above get a 10 percent discount so that explains their number. The obese people would not fit in regular airline seats. The train coach seats are not all taken so there's a lot of space to hold and spread the midribs. There are quite a few insulin-shooting brothers and sisters on this trip. An inordinate number of disestablishment Latinos and blacks of the lower income class are on board. Infirmed elderly have their numbers with their universal demands for luggage carts as well as priority rights to chairs and the front of the line. Then there are young families with children.
One might get an idea why the maitre 'd was hot under the collar since his clientele are the counting-every-penny kind. He had organized the dining schedule by reservation like the old Waldorf-Astoria. The breakfast, lunch and dinner times are announced, and he comes around to take reservation requests, first to the sleeper section, and then to the coach section. One young man busy on his computer asked what was the special meal for the day, and the maître 'd replied with a curt response: “The menu is printed outside the diner's door.” The young man was wearing cutoffs and an undershirt, and I suspected that the retort was more to discourage the young man from proceeding to the diner.
The maître 'd, decked in his three-piece suit and bright tie, looking by hairdo and smile like Amtrak's head Joe Broadman, clearly wants to make it known that control of the kitchen and the dining room was his prerogative, and he was not about to surrender his domain to ill-attired and above the poverty line customers. This analysis came from four people who happened to consistently come into the dining room on the last call-a former teacher Afro-Am woman, a dyslexic self-made young man, a female Vegan college student and I. We did do a random sampling of the people around our seats, and our judgment on the maître 'd's stance and behavior as less than to be desired was right on the consensus. But I had a hard time convincing my “last call to the diner” group not to be too harsh on our uppity butler-acting maître 'd as a person and to zero on the quality of our dining as a choice rather than dependent on the actuations of the hired help!
There is a Grand Central station type in El Paso. The crawl in revealed a tall and huge Mexican flag flying in the near South, presumably the border station to Ciudad Juarez. The downtown area was fully Iberian, though the signs remain exclusively English. Unlike Chicago where public signage has become bilingual, the movement to require English as the sole language of official and public use is very strong in the South.
The AMTRAK Superliner bodies are tall and bulky. They are two-story high and at 70 miles per hour, have a propensity to sway. The bulkiness make it look like an elongated Humvee and the rails primarily built for freight on the long haul does not lend itself to solid and steady footing, in the same manner as the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system, which favors the trucking business as sorely in disrepair. The amenities inside the train, however, are nice, with the observation deck a favored feature. Bathrooms are clean, though I must confess irritation when two stewards separately inquired if I flushed. I must look like one of the “wetbacks” newly arrived!
Getting into the flat desert of New Mexico, with Albuquerque up north and the Mexican cordilleras down south, gave the scenery a veneer of Hollywood cowboy-and-Indians movie set. The clear wide span was poster perfect. Nut orchards finally emerged, along with a winery that processed the fruit of the vine.
Soon, the dark night in the plain and the train, easily gave way to reflections on the dark night of the soul. The experienced fear/rage incident in the roundabout at Sugarland elicited a comment from my Alaskan Afro-Am colleague who said, “I have learned long time ago that, just because we have a lot of assholes, I did not need to be one, too.” Yet, the display of anger is deemed to be psychologically healthy by many therapist, and strategically encouraged by no less than Pope Gregory the Great who said: “Reason opposes evil the more effectively when anger ministers at her side.” Our fear, anger, and humiliation-based personalities await to be overcome.
How often in the last decade have I listened to otherwise level-headed neighbors mistake war as a showing of strength, and coercion as the symbol of courage. Dick Cheney in the news is still arguing for the rightness of splitting hairs in the torture methods applied post-9/11 interrogations.
A Marine aboard the train did his stint between Beirut, Lebanon and the Gulf War. He never gave up the haircut, and still called me “sir” in conversation, but he is clear in his mind that war-mongering, or even the notion that the United States must always be in a permanent state of alert, and not just preparedness, to go to war, is a big mistake. He chuckled when he read a line from a letter-to-the-editor writer who responded to one of my articles about how I might not be in being, had the Homeland Security people and the Department of Defense not foisted the alarm against terrorist post-9/11.
Traversing New Mexico and Arizona with a stop in Tucson long enough for nicotine breaks for passengers pretty much made the night. Morning met us with orchards of the flowers of the desert (wind turbines) in Palm Springs, and their controversial but now famous casino. Not a few beautiful tax shelter horse farms and ranchos in the foothills are up for sale, casualties of the new economic dispensation. The once fragrant orange orchards from Redlands, Ontario, Pomona to Pasadena are now punctuated or replaced by various storage lots, warehouses and truck/freight depots, marring the agrarian view of rustic fruit farms of my acquaintance in the early '60s when the smog-laden valley south of the San Bernardino range still displayed clear blue skies.
It being L.A., graffiti is writ eternal, and the ubiquitous flea markets are in full swing-yen, rmb, pesos, euros and won accepted. Welcome to the city of fallen Angels.
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