Holidays in Heck (4 page)

Back in the Zodiac (and rather pink ourselves) we were told by our guide, “You'll notice the puffer fish is particularly friendly—because it is poisonous.”

“Typical,” said a Houston hostess who has to endure a lot of political fund-raisers.

Young sea lions came out and dived with us. They did barrel rolls around our torsos, nibbled our swim fins, and played tug-of-war with the Zodiac's lifesaver ring. They are aqua-puppies. On the lava shore of Santiago Island we saw a little fellow who'd just been born. Like a well-bred American Kennel Club dam, his mother allowed us an up-close look. No one asked, “How do they taste?”

At that evening's fantail colloquium, fly-casters asked bird-hunters, “Is there a reason we couldn't train sea lions to flush bonefish in the Florida Keys?”

The adult male sea lions, the bulls, wouldn't be much use. They spend their lives guarding a particular stretch of beach from sea lion pool boys, sea lion UPS drivers, etc. Meanwhile their wives come and go as they please. “I tell my clients,” said the Dallas lawyer, “just
give
her the house.”

Not that our tour group meant to introduce collars and kennels or animal divorce courts into the Galápagos. There's
been enough disturbance of nature's balance. Feral goats, let loose by settlers from the mainland, ate the giant tortoise habitat. On the smaller islands the goats have now cashed in their 401(k)s, but Santiago still has tens of thousands. The Charles Darwin Foundation, the World Wide Fund for Nature, and other organizations are spending millions on goat eradication. We volunteered to do it for free. Well, not exactly for free. But give us the goat-hunting rights and we'd sell trips to the Galápagos to wealthy American sportsmen offering unlimited trophy goat opportunities. The Lindblad people looked dubious.

The Galápagos Islands do need assistance, however. The government of Ecuador does its best but is hampered by being, frankly, the government of Ecuador. Send lawyers, guns, and money. Actually, our group had the lawyers and guns. Send just the money to
[email protected]
. Think of those giant tortoises. They date back to the age of the dinosaurs. They have movie-star good looks. (
E.T.
was a huge hit.) And there's something about the giant tortoises that's just so . . . so . . . “Extinctable,” said Laura. “When life-forms that had more on the ball than dinosaurs arrived, they thought, ‘It comes in its own casserole dish!' ”

On Santa Cruz Island we saw a few tortoises in the wild. They're easy enough to find, being in exactly the same place they were when the last Lindblad tour came through. Top speed is approximately zero. And we saw a turtle herd at the Charles Darwin Biological Research Station, where a tortoise dating service is attempting to reestablish various subspecies and repopulate the Galápagos. According to research station literature, “When hormonal levels are running high, male tortoises have even been known to try mounting rocks . . .”

“Ugggh,
men
!” said the women in our group.

“Mating is very vigorous,” the research station biologist said. He pointed to the last male of the
pinta
subspecies. “We knew that this one was sexually dysfunctional when he copulated for only twenty minutes.”

“Ooooo,
turtles
!” said the women.

And then there is the pure beauty of nature in the Galápagos. One afternoon, steaming between islands, we encountered a pod of 1,000 dolphins, jumping in undulations, Baryshnikoving above the waves. Even the Buchanan Republicans among us held their breath in awe and thereby briefly honored the Kyoto Protocol on climate. Out beyond the dolphins was a basking sperm whale, such a magnificent creature that, we all concurred, harming it would be as bad as seeing a “
SAVE THE WALES
” bumper sticker on your congressman's car.

“This trip really
is
educational,” said the Dallas lawyer. “Suddenly I want to read
Moby Dick,
and not the CliffNotes, either.”

“And forty years after the fact, I finally understand my statistics class,” said George. He was referring to the penguins and flamingos we'd seen the previous day. This is the only place on earth that has both. The Galápagos are on the equator, so they're tropical, but the icy Humboldt Current cools the air, forming a dense foggy mist called a
garúa
that gets everything cold and soaking wet even though the Galápagos are desert islands. The climate is perfect—if you average it. Confusing “average” with “median,” as we all did in statistics class, penguins and flamingos both arrived.

I think we were also supposed to be learning something from the famous Darwin finches. But, to tell the truth, they're small, drab, and boring. It is a mark of Darwin's genius that
he noticed them at all. Then, by observing the various evolutionary modifications in their little beaks, Darwin somehow discovered that men are descended from monkeys, although he would have known this already if he'd asked the men's wives.

Which goes to show that not all lessons in ecology are edifying. The marine iguana, for example. Washing ashore from the mainland, it learned to go with the flow. It became the only seagoing lizard. It eats nothing but algae. Here is the lizard version of moving to Humboldt County, California, growing your own vegetables, and weaving your clothes from hemp. Marine iguanas are as dull as folk songs and as ugly as unglazed pottery. They spend all day lying on top of each other in big iguana group gropes.

Looking at the marine iguanas, the Dallas lawyer said to his wife, “Honey, do you think we should have left the teenagers home by themselves?”

The National World War II Memorial, Washington, D.C., June 2004

T
he World War II Memorial squats on the Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. From afar its purpose seems to be to mar the vista. From up close its purpose is less certain.

The Memorial was dedicated on May 29, 2004—something of a tardy homage to the combat veterans of the war, who were by then mostly near eighty or dead. On the other hand, no mere shrine to combat bravery seems to be intended. According to the Web site that all persons, places, and things nowadays must have, “The World War II Memorial honors the 16 million who served in the armed forces of the U.S., the more than 400,000 who died, and all who supported the war effort from home . . . a monument to the
spirit, sacrifice, and commitment of the American people.” In other words, a monument to showing up.

The Memorial was designed by Friedrich St. Florian, who, just going by his name, sounds like a fellow that America has fought a couple of wars against, such as the French and Indian and World War II. Mr. St. Florian did his designing in the neoclassic idiom—if the classic orders of architecture are Dorky, Ironic, and Corny-inthian. A seven-and-a-half-acre plaza is sunk below the ground, though not nearly far enough.

A pair of ill-proportioned four-story-high open-roofed structures, which could be construed as chapels if separation of church and state allowed chapels on the Mall, bookend a fountain-filled oval fringed with fifty-six bell-less belfries—one for each state, territory, and miscellaneous American domain including the Virgin Islands, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the District of Columbia, and Guam. (What, no Canal Zone?) Ask not for whom the imaginary bell tolls.

I might be wrong about these being bell towers. Maybe “Croquet Wickets de Triomphe” is the effect being sought. The two chapels—perhaps they're stone gazebos—have bronze sculptures where their domes would be if they had domes. The sculptures, I believe, depict bald eagles getting tangled in Christmas wreaths. The gazebos are labeled “Atlantic” and “Pacific,” causing anyone remotely close to the age of a World War II vet to automatically think “Tea Company.” The fountain pools, though lacking fish, are very fish pond–like, and these, combined with an artificial waterfall, produce a miniature golf course foreground for the Lincoln Memorial. A Vegas touch is also provided in a wall of gold stars equaling (by some mathematical ratio that isn't self-evident) the
number of U.S. war dead. Elsewhere are scattered incised quotations of a barely stirring nature:

Women who stepped up were measured as citizens of the nation, not as women. . . . This was a people's war, and everyone was in it.

—Col. Oveta Culp Hobby

The American Battle Monuments Commission must have looked hard for that one. As to its being a “people's war,” had previous wars been fought by furniture, toys, and pets?

The World War II Memorial is entered from the east, down steps to the sunken plaza. Flanking the steps are haut-relief bronze panels sculpted in a style that could be called “accused-of-being-socialist realism.” They depict scenes from the Atlantic theater, on the right, and the Pacific theater, on the left. The Pacific tableaux begin with alarmed people listening to the radio (news from Pearl Harbor, one supposes) and end with V-J Day celebrations in Times Square. The Atlantic tableaux begin with an attempt at a visualization of the Lend-Lease Program and end with our GIs shaking hands with Soviets, smiles all around.

This is not a fit monument to the American men who fought the war. But it isn't meant for them, what with their being near eighty and dead and all. The Memorial is, rather, a sentimental gesture toward the whole “Greatest Generation,” about whom we are getting so sentimental now that we've put them in nursing homes.

This
is
a fit monument to the American men, women, and politicians who endured a global depression only partly of their own making, struggled to free mankind from totalitarian oppression by fascists and communists (once they'd
gotten over admiring the efficiencies of the former and being allies with the latter), and rebuilt the postwar world—with seven-foot ceilings and cheap hollow doors. We call them the Greatest Generation, and we call them other things when we're stuck behind them in the ten-items-or-less grocery store checkout lane while they debate with the clerk about expiration dates on discount coupons for oleomargarine. Their World War II Memorial doesn't quite ruin the Mall.

I am reminded of the 1960s, when my own generation did a much more thoroughgoing job of ruining the Mall during various attempts to end war, expand cosmic consciousness, crush capitalist-pig imperialism, meet girls, and score pot. I can't help wondering when we will get our monument.

Technically, I suppose, the Vietnam Memorial counts. Vietnam veterans were for the most part born in the same years as my friends and I. But those were the kids who when somebody yelled “Get a haircut!” got a haircut—or, anyway, the Army gave them one free. What about
my
part of my generation? What about the Veterans of Domestic Disorders? I know Vietnam was a tough and terrifying experience. But you should have seen the fights around the dinner table at my house. Dad went ballistic when he discovered that I'd joined a commune that was living in the basement rec room. And when the cops broke out the tear gas at the anti-war demonstrations, my friends and I had to tap reserves of strength and will that we didn't know we possessed, to run away as fast as we did.

We cared. My generation of Americans was the first to really care about racism and sexism, not to mention the I Ching, plus, of course, the earth. “It's important to preserve
the earth's resources,” I remember saying to Windflower, a pert blonde. “You and I will have to double up in the shower to get this tear gas off.” Also, we were committed. I recall several people whose families had them committed.

We changed the world. Life has never been the same since that “youthquake” of forty-some years ago. Think of all the things we wouldn't have if not for the uninhibited freedom and creativity of the 1960s: Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream, Narcotics Anonymous twenty-four-hour help lines, Cher, the Volkswagon New Beatle, comedians who use the word “bullshit” on network TV (after ten PM), cats named Chairman Meow, retro 1960s clothing fashions, retro 1960s hairstyles, retro 1960s music fads, herpes.

As a generation, perhaps we weren't the “greatest,” but we certainly were the greatest surprise, when we returned from college drenched in patchouli oil, spouting Karl Marx, and wearing clown pants and braids in our beards. Members of the Greatest Generation pride themselves on all the tribulations they survived, but many of them never got over that one. Mercifully, most members of my generation did. It's been said that we never had to make sacrifices. Not true. Lots of us are awake by nine o'clock in the morning and have jobs.

We got married, had families, straightened out, got married again, had more families, straightened out (really). There can be no greater sacrifice than that a man lay down his lifestyle for others. And—“we are all one”—for himself, too, once he figures out that golf is more fun than hacky sack and decides he wants a Lexus. But that doesn't mean I won't pay fifty cents a cup extra to make sure that my coffee has been organically grown and ecologically harvested in a way that does not cause political or economic exploitation.