Monday, August 20, 2007

Think Globally?

Greetings from the other side of the planet. The posts have been rare lately because I’ve been traveling. A buddy of mine from law school and I decided to take a break after the bar exam and do something adventurous. Ergo, I’m in a rented van in New Zealand. There has been so much going on that even though plenty of things deserved some observational humor I’ve either been sans writing materials or didn’t have the time to write anything. Anyway, thoughts on the world from the other side of it. Broad strokes.
Globalization is a Middle Eastern guy standing in an Irish pub in New Zealand drinking a Corona in the middle of winter and bobbing his head to Ja Rule. (Note… this dude is not a creature of my imagination. I drank a beer next to him yesterday.) There is nothing like traveling to make you realize how big/small the world is. You can be driving into a glacier-carved fiord that is literally as far away from home as it is feasible to get without a team from NASA, turn on the radio and listen to Pink. (here of course I am referring to the white trash turned rapper turned pop starlet turned my stomach) It gives you the feeling that as a species we are becoming really homogenous. Honestly, if you are going to adopt a piece of another culture, the least you could do is try not to adopt the worst shit that we produce. The fact that I have to listen to Daughtry in New Zealand is a monument to the suggestibility of the human animal. Basically, if somebody tells us something is good then we bite. This does not bode well for the tourism industry. Once everything is the same all they will be able to market is the weather.
More to come…

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