The Ishmael Gradsdovic Papers, part eight


Ishmael Gradsdovic continues his european vacation in part eight...


2 September 1991 (5:45 p.m. Munich):

Major crisis as I lost the camera somehow in the train station. All of my pictures gone as well. Have managed to get past the mourning stage with good food and chocolate.

It was nice, sipping a coke at a Burger King in Munich's central station, to see San Luis Obispo mentioned in the International Herald Tribune. It made me feel somehow closer than nine time zones away.

So I found out about "fitness guru" Jack LaLanne's plea-bargain. Deputy District Attorney Karen Medeiros may be pleased to know that she made the back-page "People" section in boldface print for her role in bringing LaLanne to justice. Next stop: Attorney General?

I wasn't planning to buy newspapers over here -- they cost four times what they do at home -- but by the time Gorby decapitated the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the headlines had become too enticing to resist. Now one of my first stops each morning is at one of the newspaper stands that dot nearly every European city.

So far I'm favorably impressed. What the English-language newspapers here lack in length, they make up for in depth. The articles read more like something you might find in the New Republic than in the L.A. Times.

The exception to this rule is The European, a McNewspaper which is trying to do for the European Community what USA Today did for the states -- make newsprint as colorful and vacant as television. It will probably sell like falafels here on the continent, where falafel stands have spread the way Tacos Acapulco has through the Central Coast.

I'm going to keep all of the newspapers from over here with the exciting headlines and historical gossip. I'll put them in a drawer with my Telegram Tribunes from the Panama invasion, the San Francisco earthquake and the Supreme Court's Webster decision.

But it's not the headlines that people will be reminiscing about in future years -- today all memories are in video, direct from CNN. I haven't seen any TV since I got over here, so I've missed the images that will define this moment in history and mythologize it in the satellite-reachable culture.

My generation, the twentysomethings, has through international television the most potent and durable cultural icons that money can buy.

Folklore that has taken generations to become rooted in the group mind through fairy tales, legends and religion is being supplanted by a nearly universal mythology of muppets, cartoons, commercials and sit-coms.

My friend and I met up by chance with our old roommates from Amsterdam here at the train station in Munich. Over drinks at a Cuesta Park-sized beer garden we talked about the favorite TV shows of our childhood. Classics like "Land of the Lost" and "The Brady Bunch."

We speculated together about why "the Professor and Mary Ann" were demoted to "and the rest" in the alternate version of the Gilligan's Island theme song.

As I reached the end of my cavernous mug, I joined Yog, an Indian man born in Africa and raised in New Jersey, in singing the preamble to the Constitution to a tune beaten in to my generation's stoned-on-the-boobtube eardrums by civic responsibility advertising in cartoon form that probably seemed like a great idea at the time.

The specifics of "domestic tranquility" or "the blessings of liberty" were watered down, seeming to consist only of smiling multicultural faces sweeping past in a sea of animated Americana.

Maybe we could export some of those commercials to the Soviet Union to help them establish the essential mythology of democracy. They might be able to make some sense out of all of that high-powered language.

Myself, I don't pretend to understand what exactly our founding fathers were getting at.

But if you hum a few bars...




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