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Originally Posted by jopperm2 I'm very interested in the religious aspects you mentioned.. It sounds like something similar to the voodoun traditions of the caribean.. Too bad they were afraid of whitey selling them out to the bishop!  |
Perhaps I didn't explain it well. It's not that they were afraid of the RCC's reaction. Quite the contrary. The RCC in that part of the world is seen (rightly) as a bulwark to the poor. Local priests are often very active in protest movements, and wield a degree of power. No, they were afraid their religious beliefs would reflect poorly on the RCC, be regarded as evidence of backsliding into "indigenous belief systems," and that the government would pay more attention to American Protestant missionaries who side invariably on the local level with the wealthy landowners. By putting their support behind the Protestant missionaries, the governments would be seen as backing powerful landed interests, and pacifying possible resistance among the poorer elements of the society who are (in those regions) sometimes dispossessed of their hereditary lands by hired mercenaries. Brazil is perhaps the best known, but by no means the only example of this. I can post some examples, if you'd like.
It didn't contradict it. It just wasn't very clear. Sorry. What I meant was that you having taken two trips doesn't qualify you as much more of an expert than him. He's a novice at terrible, commercial, faux-eco travel; and you are a novice at legitimate amazon tourism.
And that last sentence of yours makes no sense in context at all, which I'm sure you realize.
Whether O'Rourke or myself is a "novice" in the Amazon region doesn't matter. What matters is whether he ever went. All I get from O'Rourke is the usual sense of utter cynicism about anything resembling ideals he doesn't believe in: that's it. There's no sense of character to make me believe it isn't some parody he's created out of whole cloth. What's the name of the place he stayed at? Does he mention specific locales, and when he went there? How much he paid? Is there anything that isn't generic in the piece, available from a little search on the Web? Why did he go in the first place, since O'Rourke's the last person you'd expect to take an "eco-tourist" jaunt? The whole piece sounds about as real as Tony Blair's constant protestations that he cares about all the civilian deaths in Iraq. I can give you names, dates, pictures, even 20 pages out of my wife's travel diary, which she maintained at the time; does O'Rourke offer any of this? Art Buchwald used to write about fake experiences he never had all the time, to put a pithy moral in his humorous political column. Only Buchwald never made any pretense of hiding the fact that he created out of thin air all the situations he discussed.
In any case, do you understand now why I feel the experiences were very valuable, and certainly didn't mirror the jaded and superficial attempts at humor made by O'Rourke?