Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island and a great traveler himself, once remarked that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. As a philosophy of life, you can scarcely argue with that, since we all know what happens when we arrive; and as a prophetic description of the tourist experience in the 1990s, Stevenson’s words hit the mark exactly.

If you travel a lot, you must have noticed that the world is becoming a very crowded place. Or at least parts of it are. About four hundred million people now travel abroad every year, in search of new worlds and new civilizations, boldly going where almost everybody has gone before. Like all travelers, they are in pursuit of a romance, that elusive moment of solitude and discovery that justifies the pains and costs of leaving home.

Well, they won’t find it in the Sistine Chapel or Canterbury Cathedral, or Notre Dame, or Venice, or at Stonehenge, or even at the Taj Mahal or the Great Wall of China, or at any of the culturally-approved tourist destinations. These places are swamped and almost obliterated by the tidal waves of tourism. Tourism is an old phenomenon, but mass tourism is quite new. Only one million people went abroad in 1939. About six hundred and fifty million are expected to be on the move by the year 2015, plus another two billion people travelling in their own countries, almost all of them heading towards the same few tourist magnets like ants to sugar water.

Travel is good. There’s nothing worse than the parochialism and suspicion of people who never leave home. The problem with modern mass tourism is precisely that tourists never do leave home. They are herded in groups from identical hotels to a few preselected destinations or “sights.” The “sight” is something that must be seen, that certifies in a mystical way that the tourist has participated in a travel experience. The certificate of authenticity comes in the form of a photograph or video that says “I was there” – although I can forsee a booming new industry in faking such pictures through computer-imaging technology. Just think of it, you could sit on your own deck for a couple of weeks, and then produce a whole sheaf of photographs proving that you had visited dozens of culturally approved sights all over Europe and Asia. No plane flights, no stomach upsets, no hideous souvenirs – just pure relaxation.

The problem with the “sights” is that very few people really want or need to see them, or have any idea what they are looking at when they get there.

You can’t blame the tourists. You only have to look at them to see that they’re not enjoying it. So maybe there’s a way of saving the most popular tourist destinations from gross overcrowding, and saving the tourists from themselves at the same time.

Various things have been suggested: advance booking at the most popular places; setting up replicas and imitations to draw iff some of the crowds (a fake Eiffel Tower, a fake Parthenon, and so on); diverting attention to different kinds of sights (say a disused iron factory instead of the leaning tower of Pisa). But none of these seems very likely to work.

The idea I like best came recently from a curator of the Uffizi gallery in Florence, which was that tourists should take a simple test before being allowed to enter the gallery – a very simple test – just to see if they have any clue about the treasures inside. For example:

Who was Michelangelo: A minor operator in the Gambino crime family; a pitcher for the Chicago cubs in the 1950s; a famous Renaissance artist; finance minister in the first two years of Mussolini’s government; none of the above?

This idea is quite brilliant. Those who failed the test would be bussed happily off to the nearest beach or bar or bowling alley, while the As and Bs would get a much less crowded and more satisfying cultural experience.

With the universal application of the tourist test, every part of the world would receive only those tourists who really had some reason to be there, and maybe Florence and Paris and London and Stratford on Avon could breathe easier.

Mass tourism is not a problem on Long Island yet, unless you count the ritual weekend traffic jams around the Hamptons. But when all the other places in the world have filled up, our turn will come. We should be ready, start formulating our test now. Let’s see, how about this as you come out of the Midtown Tunnel.

One of the earliest Dutch families to settle on Long Island was: the de Floot family; the de Groot family; the Edam family; the Van der Valk family; the Manson family; none of the above.

Don’t worry. If you live here, you won’t have to take the test.

Copyright: David Bouchier

One of the several things that makes April the cruelest month is that suburban homeowners take it as their cue to bring out their wretched machines.

I say “home owners,” but what I really mean is “men.” Do you see many women wielding these machines? No, and here’s why. Men have problems. Tom and Ray, the car guys you hear on public radio, have identified a condition that they call “Male Answer Syndrome.” This is a hormonal imbalance that prevents men from ever saying “I don’t know,” and forces them to give an answer, even a wrong answer, to any question whatsoever. I believe that there is a similar and related disease, which I’ll call “Male Engine Syndrome” – the male’s inability to tackle even the simplest job without starting up some kind of very noisy engine. The small, air cooled two-cycle gas engine is extraordinarily efficient. It produces more racket and pollution for the buck than any other device – although for a really excruciating pitch, the high-speed electric motor runs it a close second.

If it is true, as H.G.Wells speculated, that our machines have made us into Gods, we are unnecessarily noisy gods, like some of the more rambuctious Roman deities. Any man, however modest his condition, can make his mark on the neighborhood with a chainsaw: like Jupiter or Vulcan, he can be heard.

As spring turns into summer, the suburban power tool symphony inexorably increases in volume. Mowers are joined by leaf blowers and weed whackers, tillers and shredders. Reluctant husbands start on all the home repairs that they had avoided all winter. Out come the electric saws, the chain saws, the drills, the sanders, the paint sprayers, and the power washers. They may hate the work, but they love the noise it makes.

In part, of course, this is pure laziness; or to put it in a more positive light, it’s a man’s natural desire to avoid bodily wear and tear and premature aging. I have seen men bring out an electric circular saw to cut a piece of wood 2″ by 1″, that could be cut with a handsaw in ten seconds. Clearly, such men are serious about conserving their physical energy. They have power windows on their cars, automatic garage door openers, and electric toothbrushes. No exertion is too trivial to be avoided.

Husbands who have to go out to work, and so leave their patch of suburbia unnaturally silent, can call in a lawn service. They have even noisier machines, mowers big enough to harvest the prairies, and super hurricane-power three-hundred decibel weed whackers. On a fine day, several lawn services will converge on our neighborhood and run all their machines together, like a chorus from some mechanical hell. When the kids get home from a hard day at school, at about noon, they drag their industrial-strength amplifiers outdoors and play vile music at full volume until their parents, conscious of their social obligations, arrive home and yell at them full volume for ten minutes, before pulling the plug and putting on their own vile music at full volume.

If there are any moments of near-silence, we can listen to the bulldozers tearing into the nearby woods to create yet another development of “Woodland Estates.” Somebody within a couple of blocks is invariably having oil delivered, a cesspool pumped, trees trimmed, a driveway resurfaced, or a roof replaced. The concert never stops. If we walk down to the beach for a bit of peace and quiet, we see not footprints in the sand but tire tracks. This is a visible warning that teenagers with All-Terrain-Vehicles are enjoying the beauties of nature in their own way, although we can usually hear them coming for half a mile. Looking out to sea, we can enjoy a roaring vista of powerboats and jet skis.

The National Institute of Health reports that ten million Americans now have hearing loss caused by too much noise. The Environmental Protection Agency has introduced progressive regulations for quieter and less polluting engines on garden machinery. But we won’t notice the improvement until the regulations come into full force later this century, by which time we will scarcely be able to hear the difference. Laws won’t help. Making noise is one of those inalienable American rights, like the pursuit of happiness. If the issue gets to the Supreme Court, they will certainly rule in favor of the noise makers, even if they have to yell the judgment at the tops of their voices.

But there may be a technological rather than a legislative solution. The portable CD player makes the most appalling noises available in a private, portable form, injected right into the victim’s eardrums, without disturbing anybody else. What we need are some really nasty CDs that would satisfy mens’ craving for high-decibel meaningless noise. There’s a big potential market here. “Chainsaw Symphony”; “Leaf blower Sonata”; “Dan Drives Twenty Thousand Roofing Nails while Playing his Boom Box full volume”, and so on.

If the boys must have their noise, let them have it on headphones, and leave the rest of us to enjoy the natural music of a suburban summer: the birds, the dogs, the insects, the swish of sprinklers and the gentle sounds of a million gardeners, working the old fashioned way, with their hands.

Copyright: David Bouchier

Dieting is the curse of the modern age. Having freed ourselves from religious Puritanism, we’ve fallen prey to the far worse medical kind. No fifteenth century preacher could come up with as many “thou shalt nots” as my doctor can in a half hour visit. Just ten dietary commandments would be a relief. He has dozens of them.

Those of us who were born before the 1960s health craze have heard them all. We’ve trodden the downward path from our mothers’ version of health food lots of butter and eggs, milk and steaks and bacon to the neo Puritan platters of today: three ounces of white fish, a few steamed vegetables, a bowl of sprouts and a glass of purified water.

Back in the golden years before health was invented, illness was an occasional nuisance. Health is a nuisance all the time. Healthy people furtively consult cholesterol and sodium charts in restaurants, reel away from a little tobacco smoke as though it was CS gas, and frown over the lists of additives on supermarket food packaging. Don’t they know it’s only the chemicals that make modern food edible? It took millions of years of evolution to get us from grains and raw green stuff to the double maxi burger with large fries. If we’re going to eat natural food like our Neanderthal ancestors, we may as well go live in caves and save a bundle on mortgage payments.

Every spring, the pressure to diet rises to a pitch of hysteria. “Ten weeks to summer,” scream the magazines at the supermarket checkout. Researching this piece at my local supermarket I counted seventeen magazines on display; three of them were about nothing but diets, and eight more had front page miracle diet stories. In the library, I gave up counting diet books when I came to one called Power Dieting, and had to go outside for a donut to steady my nerves.

Dieting is always a Faustian bargain. If the diet works you will become skinny and annoyingly healthy, your dog will cringe away from you and your spouse will probably abandon you for someone more cuddly. Also, you will be at risk of living to a great age (which everyone agrees is no fun at all) and end up being wiped out by some dread disease that nature has evolved to compensate for culture. As Mark Twain remarked of diet puritans, “They give up every pleasure for the sake of their health, and health is all they get for it.” If the diet doesn’t work, you’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for nothing and will probably expire with the words “chocolate sauce” on your lips.

Mark Twain understood that once you let your body get the upper hand over your mind, you’re lost. You become a slave of your own biology, and go around fretting about dietary fiber, protein imbalance, complex carbohydrates and all the other voodoo promoted by the diet industry. The very fact of knowing and worrying that a slice of bacon contains fifty calories, four grams of fat and another four grams of assorted fatty acids is enough to bring on hypertension at the breakfast table. The human brain and the human digestive system have been at odds ever since the invention of French fries.

The diet industry’s major product is not health but anxiety. They keep their public constantly off balance by promoting anew miracle diet about once a week. If a diet can be created by human imagination, it has been: all protein diets, carbohydrate diets, liquid diets, rice diets, grapefruit or kiwi fruit or banana or boiled cabbage diets. The slogan “you are what you eat” takes on a new and sinister meaning when we contemplate these menus of tasteless pap. This week’s miracle diet always turns out to be next week’s health hazard, so here we go again.

The truth is that dieting has less to do with health than with self punishment. It is the last remnant of the religious disciplines of the past. Abstinence from food has always been counted a sign of spirituality. Saints like Catherine of Sienna were accustomed to feast on a couple of sprigs of herbs, modern spiritual leaders like Gandhi were admired for their bizarre dieting habits, and even Mother Theresa wouldn’t be such an inspiring figure if she weighed three hundred pounds. This is why the high priests and priestesses of diet and health can offer their brutal regimes with such an insufferable air of virtue, and make us feel so guilty when we ignore them. We’re not just overweight and loaded with cholesterol. They’re telling us that we’re spiritual failures too.

If there’s one diet book worth reading, it must be Richard Watson’s modest little volume The Philosophers Diet. Dr. Watson, like his famous namesake in the Sherlock Holmes tales, at least knows how to separate facts from fantasies. He inclines towards a Zen Buddhist view of life, summed up in the phrase “Just get on with it.” The Philosopher’s Diet has a simple, non punitive message; choose how you want to live, healthy or unhealthy, and then go ahead and do it. If it’s health you’re after, he offers all the usual boring prescriptions: eat less, don’t eat junk food, exercise more. But what joy to get them without the standard dose of condescending superiority! And how comforting to be reminded that at least one great spiritual leader, Buddha himself, was splendidly and complacently fat!

Those of you who find it hard to maintain a Buddha like indifference to the great diet conspiracy may be tempted to fight back. Food is freedom’s last frontier, and I would like to see a great, nationwide anti-diet movement – let’s call it Plate Watchers – to restore the menus of an earlier, freer, and unhealthier age. Eaters of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your grains: may the sauce be with you. I’m still working on the slogan.

Copyright: David Bouchier

This is the season for all kinds of rotten winter viruses. Nobody is safe, and I began to wonder why. If you live in the city, it’s easy to see how these diseases get passed along, in crowded subways and elevators. But in the suburbs, where we have so much space, so little human contact, how on earth do the viruses get from one person to another? Do they develop legs like fleas, and jump?

I think I have the answer, but you won’t like it. It came to me in the supermarket, as I watched change being made by an unfortunate young woman who was all-too-obviously in the terminal stages of some highly infectious disease. She counted the money, counted it twice, and put it in my hand – an innocent Typhoid Mary at the checkout.

Imagine this scene repeated millions of times every day all over the country. Medical researchers have spent more than a hundred years tracing the vectors of disease. Rats have been blamed – although personally I never met a rat I didn’t like – ticks and fleas, food and water, kissing, sneezing, sex, air conditioning. But here’s my theory: diseases are transmitted by money, dirty money, passed endlessly from hand to hand with no thought of hygiene whatsoever. This theory may not explain every single human disease and ailment, perhaps not lower back pain or insomnia. But I bet it explains how cold and flu viruses pass between strangers so easily.

The good news is that we are slowly moving away from the archaic, hazardous habit of handling coins and currency notes, and moving into an era of clean money, abstract money – in other words, credit. Already, we can buy almost anything, anywhere, with our own hygenic little plastic card, that has not been contaminated by hundreds of unknown hands. Credit is obviously the way of the future. In the twenty first century we can expect to be freed from old-fashioned, physical money, and therefore freed from the ravages of these miserable winter diseases.

“Who steals my purse steals trash” says Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, “But he who filches from me my good name, robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.” ‘Good name’ is hardly worth worrying about these days, but substitute “Credit Rating” and Iago has it exactly.

Credit is much safer than money in every way. I was greatly struck by an article in the paper last week about a woman in Oregon whose bank card was stolen. In due course, she received a bill for $346,770. The people who stole her card had spent two days running from one ATM machine to another, withdrawing all that cash.

But the victim was not poorer by $346,700 dollars. It wasn’t real money, so it didn’t count. On the other hand, the criminals might get up to sixty years in prison, because they made the fatal mistake of converting abstract money into real money. And I bet they also got a few upper respiratory diseases from all those filthy banknotes.

Abstract money weighs nothing, takes up no space, and can be stolen in enormous amounts with very little difficulty. The days of gas station holdups and armored truck robberies are almost past. In the 1990 Saving and Loan Fiasco, almost $500 billion dollars of this abstract money in bank computers vanished into cyberspace – the equivalent twenty five billion $20 muggings. Who knows where the money went? Nobody has been convicted of stealing it, nobody ever will. The taxpayers will make it up with more non-existent money, over the next hundred years or so: so there’s no real loss.

Looking into the future, we can see a utopian cashless economy, already halfway here, with no real money, no common colds, and no rough criminals out there committing $20 robberies. The criminals will all be safely at the keyboard, shifting millions in germ-free invisible assets from one invisible place to another.

Sigmund Freud said that money does not bring happiness, because happiness is the fulfillment of infantile wishes, and money is not the object of infantile wishes. Unfortunately, Freud failed to specify what exactly is the object of infantile wishes. But I think the banks have guessed it right. What every infant wants, and therefore what must be the true source of human happiness, is an an unlimited, non-repayable lease on the future: not money, but credit.

Copyright: David Bouchier

Only the most boring questions have answers. For example, here are three of the world’s most interesting and least answerable questions, which are posed at the beginning of Douglas Adams’ space odyssey, The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy: “Why are we born? Why do we die? And why do we spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?”

These are good questions, and not many of us can rise to these standards of perplexity. When I was young, before the days of IQ tests, my parents used to quiz me with such teasers as “How long is a piece of string?” and “If oranges are called oranges, why aren’t bananas called yellows?” Of course I failed these tests every time, which is the mark of a good test. But they did give me a lifelong taste for unanswerable questions. Here are some of my favorites.

How do the airlines manage to arrange that your incoming flight is invariably late, while your connecting flight is always on time? Why do they call the Long Island Expressway an Expressway? Are we having fun yet? How are you? Does anybody know what time it really is?

Mr. Robert Dylan provided many of the most unanswerable questions of the past century, such as: “How many roads must a man walk down, before you can call him a man?” and, even more difficult, “How many years must a mountain exist, before it is washed to the sea?” Mr. Dylan suggested that the answers were blowing in the wind, which is more or less what one would expect.

French intellectuals are also particularly good at baffling us with unanswerable questions. Roland Barthes asked: “Is the essence of a myth to be found in its form or in its content?” It’s anybody’s guess, really. One of the greatest obfuscators of all time, Michel Foucault, offered this brain-teaser: “How can we deny the autonomy of discourse?” It beats me. I will think twice in future, before I deny the autonomy of discourse.

Here is a truly profound question from a more mundane source. A magazine subscription reminder arrived in the mail the other day. Across the front of the envelope was printed, in large red letters, a message right out of a play by Samuel Beckett: the entirely unanswerable question, “What Are You Waiting For?”

Copyright: David Bouchier

Twelfth Night is supposed to mark the end of the Christmas season. Before midnight, unless we want to risk bad luck all year, the decorations must be taken down, and the last traces of the holiday removed. Our neighbors don’t know this. The morning after Twelfth Night, January 6, we’re still surrounded by houses draped in colored lights and ribbons, the owners entirely oblivious to the fact that they are tempting providence. In early January, some homes in our subdivision still have rotting pumpkins outside, suggesting a lamentable failure to turn over the pages of the calendar at all. Retailers continue to bang the holiday drum, doing their best to persuade us that the season of excess goes on forever.

Traditionally, Twelfth Night was the last big splurge of the season, a night of feasting and merrymaking presided over by the Bean King. The Bean King was chosen for the evening in the following way: traditional twelfth night cakes were handed out, in one of which a bean was concealed. I don’t know what kind of bean – let’s assume a baked bean. Anyway, whoever found the bean was declared Bean King. I wondered whether this method might be worth considering as an alternative, cheaper, and probably more effective way of choosing presidents. But no doubt the election committees would soon be spending billions of dollars on electronically traceable beans.

The point is that Twelfth Night drew a line under the winter Saturnalia. After that it was back to reality, back to work. Boundaries are good, beginnings and endings are good, even limits are good. They give life some sort of structure. But boundaries and limits are not popular these days. They interfere with commerce. If twelve days of Christmas are profitable, three dozen days of Christmas must be even more so. And if the season must end, let it lead straight into another equally joyful and equally expensive celebration.

And so one selling season flows indistinguishably into the next. I have it on good authority that the first Valentine’s cards and heart-shaped chocolate boxes were spotted in a store in Dix Hills, Long Island, on December 26. The florists shovel out heaps of unsold poinsettias with backhoes, to make space for roses. Right behind the chocolates and roses, the Easter bunnies are already getting in line. And so it goes through the year until, some time in August, the next wave of Christmas catalogs begins to arrive, and there we go again. Indeed, in my travels in New England, I have been amazed to see establishments called Christmas Shops, that actually do trade in tinsel and plush Santa Clauses and plastic trees all year long.

Oscar Wilde once said: “Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it once too often.” It was intended as irony, no doubt. But the real irony is that Wilde’s quip has become the ruling philosophy of the modern world. Only too much is enough.

Perhaps we need to recover that simple word “enough” for regular daily use. That’s enough on my plate; that’s enough space for a family to live in; that music is loud enough; that’s enough time to spend on Christmas Of course, we all need something to look forward to. That’s where history, as always, is instructive. The medieval calendar was packed with saint’s days and feast days, Holy days, tumbling one upon another. But these events came and went quickly. Today is Saint Crispin’s Day, but tomorrow is just Tuesday. We don’t want Saint Crispin’s Day sales, songs, souvenirs, TV specials and unrepeatable holiday offers rolling on through March. Even the best holiday loses its savor when it never stops.

Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night was written to be performed on January 5th, in the year 1601. It opens with these lines, spoken by Orsino, Duke of the imaginary kingdom of Illyria.

“If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it, that surfeiting the appetite may sicken, and so die.” Four centuries later, we can understand just how Orsino felt, on the twelfth day of Christmas. At the end of the play, the clown Feste reminds the audience that the holiday, by its nature, is brief, that the future is uncertain, that youth will not endure, and (just by way of a punchline) that the rain it raineth every day.

Twelfth Night has come and gone: the party’s over.

Copyright: David Bouchier

We are sliding into the thirteenth year of the twenty-first century. It’s no longer a novelty. Most people write the date on their checks correctly, and we’ve learned to say “two thousand twelve” with great panache. The twentieth century already seems almost as remote and historic as the nineteenth.

As history moves along, the frontier of real memory moves with it. As long as there are people around who remember particular years or events, those things still seem “real” to those of us who came along later. When nobody remembers, those events disappear into the history books. So the first decade of the twentieth century has almost vanished from human memory. It’s a sepia photograph, a flickering silent movie, a scratchy recording of a forgotten tune.

That still leaves a large chunk of the last century that is very much alive in the memories of our more senior citizens, and it’s worth remembering what we remember. Those of us who were born before World War Two have memories of life before television, before penicillin, polio shots, frozen foods, Xerox, contact lenses, videos, and the pill. We were here before radar, credit cards, split atoms, laser beams and ballpoint pens, before dishwashers, tumble dryers, electric blankets, domestic air conditioning, drip-dry clothes, or global positioning systems.

When we arranged a date, computers were not involved. We got married first and then lived together. It’s very difficult to get young people to believe this. We thought Fast Food was what you ate in Lent, and that a Big Mac was an oversized raincoat. We managed our family lives without househusbands or day care. We never heard of FM radios, CDs, disposable cameras, artificial hearts, word processors, or young men wearing earrings. For us a “chip” was a piece of wood, or a fried potato, “hardware” meant nuts and bolts, and “software” wasn’t even a word.

Who would have thought, even twenty years ago, that television would come down the wire and the telephone would be wireless? Who could have predicted students who don’t study, accountants who don’t account, or scientists who cheat on their experiments? Who could ever have predicted that young people would not always be clean, respectful, moral and hard working – the way we were?

We’ve had to absorb a lot of changes, and some of us may agree with James Thurber, who said: “Progress was all right; it just went on too long.” I would add: not just too long but too fast.
What so annoying about the headlong rush to change everything is that we never get to achieve the one and only benefit of age: superior knowledge. Age may bring wisdom to some of us, if we’re paying attention. But who needs wisdom? When your computer screen goes blank you can be as wise as Solomon, and it will stay blank. Knowledge is what we need, and we have less and less of it as we grow older. The instant we learn something it’s already out of date, and any ten-year-old kid knows more. Seniors are eternal freshmen in the fast-moving world of high technology.

The only consolation is that exactly the same thing will happen to today’s smug kids, and even faster. In a very few years they will have to ask their kids how to switch on the three-dimensional holographic home entertainment system – and those of us who remember the crystal set or the 78 record will be history.

Copyright: David Bouchier

I can’t seem to stop sending Christmas cards. I had planned to give it up this year but, when the cards started coming in, I felt guilty, wrote two or three, then twenty, then fifty, just like last year. It seems to be one of those habits learned in childhood that are almost impossible to break. If anybody knows about a twelve-step recovery program for Christmas card addicts, please call me.

Looking back, what I remember best from my childhood was the business of choosing the cards. They didn’t come in boxes then, and each one was selected with an individual in mind. We had dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins, so selection was a complicated business. It was a major social embarrassment if two relatives received the same card, although I never understood why.

My mother had an uncanny knack for picking out cards, some mysterious understanding of images that allowed her to say: “This will be just right for aunt Edith.” And it would be just right – a revolting pastiche of fat little angels that somehow fit aunt Edith’s personality exactly. These days, my mother would be a big executive in advertising, choosing precisely the right picture to sell us soap, or sun tan lotion. In our family, everybody got the card they deserved, and sometimes they didn’t speak to us for months afterwards.

It’s good to keep up a family tradition. But a lot of the fun has gone out of the choice, because it’s become so complicated. When I was a kid, most of the cards were at least vaguely religious. Today, a big card store literally has a card for every taste, from Unitarianism to militant atheism, and a great many cards for people with no taste at all.

It is an incredible, overwhelming blizzard of images. Ancient pagan symbols of the winter solstice, like logs and fir trees and candles, clash with Victorian snow scenes and Christmas puddings. Charles Dickens must take the blame for those, I fear. Then there are thousands of low-grade imitations of Currier and Ives prints, hundreds of innocent child angels – a nice change from the child devils so popular in movies the rest of the year – red-nosed reindeer courtesy of Walt Disney, funny animal cartoons courtesy of Gary Larson, wreaths and penguins and bears, and Santa Clauses and robins and doves and partridges in pear trees. There are even a few Christmas cards done in Islamic style this year, which takes some explaining even in a multicultural society.

Searching through this barrage of icons produces a severe case of visual vertigo and psychological overload. How can the brain process all these images, and make sense of them? What does it all mean? How do the angels relate to the penguins, for example? What’s the connection between snowmen and poinsettias? I would recommend everyone visiting a card shop to take along a French post-structuralist intellectual, just to unravel these little problems.

Here and there among the ranks of cards one finds a nativity scene, almost shocking in that crude company. Oh yes, we’d forgotten about that.

But still, I enjoy choosing Christmas cards, and sending them. It’s a fairly painless way to keep in touch with people, and remind them that you’re not dead yet, and that they owe you a letter, and possibly money. It’s fun to get cards too, and hang them on strings around the living room. We have a little competition in our house, as I suppose most people do: the most insipid card, the most ghastly sentimental verse, the most inappropriate image, and so on. The oldest aunts win every category, every year.

Advertising people talk about the need to “Break through the clutter” to get your message across. Christmas cards are a classic case of this difficulty. I just don’t think the Christmas message is getting across. It’s lost out there in the clutter, somewhere between the sleigh bells and the dancing elves. If a bright star rose in the east now, it would be lost too, in the sodium glare from the car parks around the shopping malls.

The Three Wise Men didn’t send a card, or even three cards. They visited in person, they made the journey. Because this was the only way they knew to break through the clutter, and to see for themselves.

Copyright: David Bouchier

During the month of December, driving around the suburbs at night can be a profoundly surrealistic experience. Most of the residential streets are dull and dark, as usual. But sometimes you turn a corner and see a multi-colored glow in the sky, as if aliens had landed on the next block. It’s another Christmas light extravaganza.

On the whole, I enjoy the tradition of celebrating Christmas with a display of lights. It’s a dark time of year. There’s nothing much to look forward to except the dark days of January, then more of the same chilly darkness through February and March. We may as well cheer ourselves up with a few colored lights, just as our ancestors pushed away the winter blues with extravagant displays of candles.

Candles are beautiful, especially in the windows of old houses. However, most people use electric candles, which are a bit of a cheat. They don’t create that lovely wavering effect, as the flame flickers in the draft, and they don’t provide the same employment for the local fire department. When I was a very young child, people still used candles on Christmas trees, and the fire services were busy all night. You don’t get that kind of entertainment with electric candles.

A modest display of Christmas lights is charming. Our little town is a good example. The “downtown” area, which is extremely modest, has one decorated tree outside the church, and a frosting of tiny white lights on the trees around the duck pond. It’s not Rockefeller Center, but it looks festive and sincere.

But, when it comes to Christmas lighting, some people don’t know when to stop. Their homes and front yards blaze out with whole galaxies of lights: reindeers with flashing red noses, blinking Santa Clauses, glittering sleighs, and cute little elves, glowing like survivors of a nuclear accident. Some of these displays even have sound effects, which must drive the neighbors very close to homicide. It has become a competitive thing. There are homes, and whole blocks of homes on Long Island that are famous for their annual illuminations. They start working on these projects in August, and some have more than thirteen thousand lights. The impact is stunning, especially when you come on them unexpectedly.

There is a whole Christmas lights sub-culture out here in the subdivisions. There are catalogs full of new and more impressive displays: lighted mobile reindeer sculptures, giant back-lit revolving wreaths, illuminated nativity villages, angels in neon, snowflakes with mini-lights, icicles, falling stars, and rotating trees. The only gesture towards economy I could find was a half-Christmas tree, conveniently flat on one side so that it will fit right up against the wall. I suppose that saves something on the utility bill.

Do these elaborate displays outside people’s homes indicate that a particularly strong Christmas spirit prevails within? Henry David Thoreau would say that we have to live up to our decorations. But how hard it would be to rise so high.

But my real problem with these over-decorated suburban homes is that they remind me of something else entirely. They remind me of Las Vegas. They remind me of the seaside resorts in England we used to visit as a child, to “see the lights” – hundreds of thousands of colored bulbs strung along the seafront and the pier. They remind me of the circus, the fairground, the carnival. They don’t remind me of Christmas at all. When I pass these glittering houses, I just think about the electricity bills. Such waste would embarrass a Renaissance prince.

But when these gaudy displays are switched off (as they should be) on Twelfth Night, when these insubstantial pageants have faded, I will actually miss them. They may have nothing to do with Christmas, but they certainly brighten up our suburban lives for a few weeks. Perhaps, at this time of year, it is better to light a candle, even thirteen thousand electric candles, than to curse the darkness.

Copyright: David Bouchier

When I came to live in suburban Long Island, New York, people would say “You must go to The Mall,” as if it was the local equivalent of the Sistine Chapel. I noticed that The Mall was always capitalized in speech, like The Catholic Church.

Eventually, reluctantly, I made my way to The Mall. It was a shock: a huge ugly building, with no windows, apparently designed by someone who used to build chemical factories in Siberia, and surrounded by a car park the size of an airport. When finally I found an entrance, it was like fairyland inside, or maybe I mean Disneyland – all cozy and clean and bright colored, with schmaltzy music dribbling down from the ceilings like warm chewing gum. This was not like the shopping experience I grew up with. No rain, no traffic, no litter or street characters to make it interesting, just shops.

In the middle of the day The Mall was full of people, many of them mother-and-daughter pairs strolling the polished aisles that mimic small-town high streets, and looking at the shops. It struck me at once that I had stumbled into a great mystery – shopping in its purest form divorced from need, and even from desire. In spite of the carefully-managed atmosphere of tranquility, everyone looked very serious, even anxious, because shopping is a serious ritual. And here I was, like an atheist at a church service, blundering about with no real idea how to shop at all.

The Mall, as I now understand, is a kind of Cathedral. The structure is shaped like a rough crucifix, with special holy temples at three points labeled Sears, Macys, A & S. This is where people come to pay homage to the great enigma of consumer society: where does all this stuff come from? And, more to the point, why?

I’ve been working on this problem in my spare time and, although I don’t have the final answer, I do have an idea.

Come with me back to the lovely islands of Melanesia in the South Pacific in the early decades of this century. When westerners began to settle in the islands, the innocent natives saw for the first time the full cornucopia of consumer society. Where there had been only palms and sea and sunshine, suddenly they saw ice machines and artificial lights and airplanes and toaster ovens and designer clothes and fashionable shoes. The natives lost their innocence, abandoned their traditional gods and built new religions around these new holy objects.

Anthropologists called the religions “Cargo Cults” because the consumer goods arrived as cargo, on planes or boats. The benighted Melanesians had no idea where all this stuff came from, but they assumed it must come from a very powerful God. So they started praying to the Cargo God to send them some of the same good things, so their lives would be fulfilled and they would become happy again.

Is this beginning to sound familiar? The stuff in The Mall arrives like cargo, out of nowhere, with fanciful labels saying “Made in Singapore” or “Made in Taiwan.” Is it really credible that all this gaudy junk is shipped thousands of miles across the globe, just to occupy space in a suburban American Mall?

No, the cargo cultists were right. There’s something very strange going on here. One clue is in the shoe shops. There were twenty of them in the Mall I visited, bursting with shoes, sandals, boots and sneakers, more than the whole population of the state could wear out in a hundred years. Then the clothing shops, forty nine of them, mostly feminine, with enough frocks to equip an Amazon army well into the next century. The Mall itself looks weird, bit like something dropped from another planet.

Yes, I hate to be the one to tell you, but the aliens are at it again. Somewhere out there on the Pacific Rim of the Galaxy, someone, or something, is dumping their surplus rubbish on us. We don’t know much about them yet, but I can guess what they must be like: a bunch of highly industrious transvestites with eight legs and no taste.

As for us humans, what we have going here is the biggest, most successful cargo cult in the history of the universe.

Copyright: David Bouchier