TRAVELING TO DISCOVER SOMETHING LOST

 

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth, "rip down all hate, " I screamed

Lies that life is black and white spoke from my skull, I dreamed

Romantic facts of musketeers foundationed deep, somehow

Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now

                                                                              DYLAN

Brownsville Observer editor acting like a fool

An old fossil like me, mineralized, crystalized and carbonized, can be rejuvenated.

That happened to me in Asia in 2018, listening to a Philippine cabbie sing American 80's hits while navigating a twisting, turning mountain road overlooking Cebu.

For the U.S. and Americans, the reception, the acceptance in foreign lands, is a mixed bag.

There are countries that hate us, some that begrudgingly tolerate us and, a few, like the Philippines, that love and respect us.

Two year's ago Ana and I toured the USS Lexington docked at Corpus Christi.

On a wall inside the vessel was the map above, depicting the "Battle of the Philippine Sea," one of the fiercest battles of WWII, fought June 19, 20, 1944.

"That happened even before my father was born," exclaimed Ana.

Filipinos, particularly the older generation, hold Americans in high regard.

One of the most sacred places in the Philippines is a hillside cemetary in the center of Manila where 10,000 American soldiers are buried.  

It's an honored place, a revered place and somewhere former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos selected as his eventual resting place, pending approval from the Philippine Senate.

That approval did not come as the Senate ruled that Marcos did not qualify to be buried there.

Respecting military might is one thing, but its American pop culture that is now copied by the world.

Young men on every continent wear their caps backwards in deference to hip hop while millions hum our tunes and repeat our movie lines.

This imitation of America I've observed everywhere I've been and it affected me.

Somehow, witnessing the impact of American pop culture on the other side of this rotating, revolving sphere, injected me with the "force of life," made me feel young, alive and proud to be an American.

A lifesize cardboard cutout of Golden State Warrior phenom Stephen Curry in the Mall of Asia reinforced those notions.

Everywhere I went I heard American music via the airwaves and saw American movies on the marquee.

Eva Airlines, headquartered in Taipei, features Tawainese movies with English subtitles and I tried watching them, through simple curiosity at first, then, more to mentally make fun of the horrific acting, scripting and filmmaking.

Not since the Tab Hunter movies of the 50's, with something resembling catchup used for blood, had I seen anything as awful as Taiwan's movies.

The conduit for America's culture dispersal worldwide is that infamous information superhighway, the internet that's sometimes attributed to Al Gore.

And, yet, I was so far behind.

Ana on the road 2023

9,000 miles away from Brownsville, Ana, the woman I eventually married, had already seen the available movies streamed on Netflix, Hulu and Vudu, while I had not.

But, the man Ana met that day in November 2018 is not the same guy writing this article.

Yes, back then, I was an old fossil, locked into the 60's, acting, talking and looking like a very old man and out of touch with the current American pop culture fawned over by the world. 

But that mindset was based on a number, a chronological age that predetermined how I would live and act.

But, my young wife Ana refused to settle for a man "acting his age." 

She wanted a partner not encumbered or defined by a number, but someone who would embrace life as she did and so, in that process, I learned to live life as I'd always lived it before deciding I was "old."

Who knows how much longer I'll live, but, at least, I've dodged temporarily a self-imposed rigor mortis or "stiffness of death" and embraced the idea of fully living every minute that's left.