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Earlier in the month, we embarked on what was to be this summer's epic family vacation: A trip to Treasure Island, Florida…by car. While Thomai had made the trip by car before, such a long car ride was a first for the kids and me. I had been suffering from bronchitis in the days leading up to the trip and the ride down was a bit unpleasant for me. It would actually be a few days into the trip before I really started feeling better. The girls did well on the two 11+ hour shifts down to Florida and I am happy to say that we went against the advice of many of our fellow young parents who had urged us to buy a DVD player to make the time in the car easier. In lieu of the DVD, we stocked the car with plenty of paper & markers, stuffed animals and the like. We also burned a 3 CD set of "road trip music" for the trip. The "road trip" CDs are becoming something of a family tradition for us and on this trip we had a huge mix that spanned the genres, including cuts by Tom Morello, Bruce Springsteen, Sly and the Family Stone, Kiss, T. Rex, etc. The "kickoff" track for the trip was the title theme to the legendary East German musical "Heisser Sommer (Hot Summer)" and we also had obligatory American vacation songs like "Vacation" by the Go-Go's and "Holiday Road" by Lindsey Buckingham as part of our road trip repertoire. Music definitely made the trip a little easier.
We spent the night at an awful Holiday Inn Express in Smyrna, Georgia. A couple of times during our brief stay there, we encountered a sickly, scantily-clad fellow who spent a fair amount of his time telling the hotel staff about the raccoons that he raised in his apartment. We ultimately concluded that he actually lived behind the hotel and he was just coming in to get food from the hotel's breakfast bar, but we never really figured out if the food was for him or for the raccoons.
While we were driving through Georgia, I caught a news story on the Macon, Georgia NPR affiliate about Macon's outgoing mayor, C. Jack Ellis. Apparently, Ellis has recently angered his constituents by sending an open letter of support to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Hilarious!
The second leg of our drive down to Florida was not so bad, with the exception of a huge tractor-trailer accident (and the ensuing traffic jam) just south of the Florida border. We ended up reaching St. Petersburg/Treasure Island very late in the evening and we stayed at a nice hotel/condo suite on the beach. The furnishings were pretty good – generally better than a hotel's furnishings would be – plus we had the benefit of staying right on the beach, which was a huge plus.
The next morning, we went out to the beach. It was the first time we had been to a beach since Gerakina in 2004. Prior to that, we had visited the St. Petersburg area back in 2001. The girls all had a really nice time playing in the water and on the sand. As for me, I actually spent a fair amount of time thinking about quantum mechanics and the probabilistic/deterministic controversy (so hotly debated by Einstein and Bohr, among others) while I watched the tide move about scores and scores of tiny grains of sand each time water rolled in and out. I'm sure this sounds strange to people, but this is the kind of think I think about when I am at the beach.
One of the things I like to do when visiting a new city is to visit a bookstore or two while I'm in town. On this trip, we went to Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg. It was a pretty cool place and it was just packed to the ceiling with books. In places where the shelves were overcrowded, the overflow was stacked in piles in front of the shelves. This is the kind of place where I could spend hours browsing. I scored a couple of interesting items there, including some volumes of the journal "Chinese Literature" for my collection (someday, I might be fortunate enough have the full run in my home library). I also came upon a 1937 copy of the booklet "China: The March Toward Unity" that seems to have something of an interesting history behind it. I'll write some more on that in another article. Wednesday, we made it to Disney World to visit The Magic Kingdom. It made for a long day as Orlando is about a 2-hour drive from St. Petersburg. It was also an expensive day, especially when you consider we spent about $300 just to get into the park itself. And it was pretty hot too...I think the heat index for each day we were in Florida was over 100 degrees. But, I have to admit, Disney World was a good time, especially for the kids who were thrilled to meet characters and to go on the rides there. It was really something to stand in front of the Cinderella Castle. You know, I hate to make the comparison, but I'm going to do it anyway…It felt a lot like visiting the Parthenon in Greece because I had seen pictures of both of these places all my life but I had never really considered that I might see them in person one day. So that aspect of it is really pretty cool, I must say. Most people we talked with in the days leading up to the trip insisted that we stay for the fireworks show that happens each night at closing and, although it made for a long day, we saw it through and we took in the show at 9 PM that night. I had one of those clichéd moments as a parent when I glanced over at the girls as the show started. The looks on their faces made the long day worth it.
On our last day, we visited the beach in the early evening, but the tide had washed in so much debris and dead sea creatures that the whole area smelled bad. The girls couldn't handle the stench, so the adjourned to the hotel pool, but I stayed behind to look at the stuff that had washed up. I saw a lot of interesting stuff and I picked up some especially nice shells, including a really interesting half of a large conch shell that had a lot of barnacles and odd cracks and crevices from what looked like a long, harsh existence. The drive back home was another two-day affair. We spent some time looking for peaches at several exits in southern Georgia. After striking out at a number of stops, we finally found a old fellow at a fruit and dairy stand a ways off from one of the exits. He seemed like an interesting character and I noticed some pictures on his wall of some professional wrestlers. When I asked him who was in the pictures, he told me in a very matter of fact manner that the pictures were of him with his brother back when they were a tag team called "Alaskan Hunters." I asked if they had wrestled for Georgia Championship Wrestling and he said that not only had they been in GCW, but in WCW and WWF as well. When I mentioned that I was a fan of Jerry Lawler's old Memphis Championship Wrestling show, he shared that the Alaskan Hunters had worked for Lawler back in the mid 1980's. I think that Alaskan Hunters actually held some championship gold for a while back in their heyday. So that was something of a brush with greatness, I guess. I got a batch of boiled peanuts from the guy in addition to the peaches, but I had never had boiled peanuts and I wasn't too crazy about them. Yuck.
The rest of the drive to Atlanta was considerably unpleasant. Around Macon, we hit a decent thunderstorm, and we could see lightning flash all over the sky for miles in several directions. By the time we made it through downtown Atlanta to Marietta, we found that the storm had knocked out the power at the hotel where we had made reservations for the night. They had auxiliary power, so the air and lights were running at about half power for the whole night. Those shortcomings, along with a less than stellar late-night dinner at Chick-fil- a made for an uncomfortable night. Luckily, I had the foresight to buy some wrestling action figures at a Georgia toy store earlier that day, so the girls and I played out a number of grudge matches between Super Crazy and Psicosis before turning in for the night.
The drive home through Tennessee and Kentucky went smoothly, but it was long and we were happy to get home. It all went well enough and the kids were really good to us on the long car rides throughout the course of the trip. We had some good times together and I'm sure we'd all gladly do it over again.
But the next time we go to Florida, I am pretty sure we'll fly there. A two-hour flight really beats the heck out of a 2-day trip by car.
You can view pictures of our trip here. (username & password required)
Last week, I was doing a bit of tidying in my home library and I came across a big stack of copies of The Economist from late 2001 and 2002. I had a subscription to the magazine back then and read the issues with some interest, holding on to them as I thought they might be useful at some point in the future. However, since they had done little more but gathered dust for the past 5 years, it seemed like a good time to get rid of them. But before I pitched them all, I did recall that there was one article in the batch of 50+ issues that was worth keeping. The article was an October 27, 2001 obituary for Chang Hsueh-liang (Pinyin spelling: Zhang Xueliang), who was – in my opinion – one of the most intriguing figures in China's modern history. I clipped the obituary before walking the pile of old magazines to the recycling bin.
It was Chang Hsueh-liang, known to many as "Young Marshal," who temporarily quelled the Chinese Civil War of the 1930's by unifying the reactionary Kuomintang (KMT) with China's communist forces against the invaders from Imperial Japan. His intervention occurred at a point in time in which such a united front seemed impossible. As the story goes, following some discussion with Chou En lai (Zhou Enlai), Chang engineered the arrest of KMT Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and compelled him (ostensibly under a bit of duress) to join forces with the Red Army in an effort to smash the invaders from Imperial Japan. This incident is known as the Xi'an incident (or Sian incident) to many. According to the piece in The Economist, Chang opened his meeting with Chiang Kai-shek with the simple words "Please don't be angry...I wish to lay my views before your excellency." Upon agreeing to Chang's terms, Chiang Kai-shek was released, returning to the helm of the KMT. Chiang Kai-shek was surprisingly true to his word upon regaining his freedom and the united front of the Nationalist KMT and Red Army did indeed win the day in the struggle against the Japanese invaders. It is widely believed that the Chinese forces could not have repelled the Japanese on their own without the intervention of Chang Hsueh-liang.
Toasting victory against Japan; Mao and Chiang Kai-shek, 1945
Interestingly enough, it is Chang's upbringing as the son of a prominent Manchurian warlord that made something of a unique ally for the communist forces. Chang received a private education and military training from the KMT in his early life. He had something of an appreciation for westerners and a penchant for western luxuries and it was these qualities which made him an unlikely "communist." Nevertheless, Chang effectively saw past differences of philosophy and theory in his efforts to combat one the greatest threat the devloping nation had ever faced.
Unfortunately, Chang ultimately spent most of his life in prison for his role in the arrest of Chiang Kai-shek. He voluntarily appeared before a KMT court following Chiang's release and was placed on house arrest. When the KMT fell to the communists in 1949, Chang Hsueh-liang was taken to Taiwan by the KMT and he remained imprisoned there through Chiang Kai-shek's death in 1975 and through Taiwan's "democratic" reforms in the late 1980's. It was not until 1990 that he was finally freed. In 1995, he moved to Hawaii where he spent the remainder of his life.
Chang Hsueh-liang, the "Young Marshal," is remembered to this day as a hero of the Chinese people. His bold pragmatism is an enduring example to those who oppose fascism and imperialism around the globe. Further reading A Statement on Chiang Kai-shek's Statementby Mao Zedong (December 28, 1936) Long Live the Victory of People's War!by Lin Biao (September 1965)
My good friend Zdravko Saveski recently penned an article for the July/August 2007 issue of the Canadian journal Relay (download the complete PDF here). The article, entitled "Socialist Organizing in Post-Communist Macedonia,"provides analysis of the main problems facing the Macedonian left through discussion of specific and unique domestic and regional issues.
Included in the article is a short piece on the so-called "naming dispute," in which Zdravko accurately describes the dispute as a "preoccupation with ethnic issues, so easily aroused by the nationalist political parties and other organizations." This is, in fact. a profound statement, succinctly characterizing the nature of this significant distraction for the working classes of Macedonia, Greece and Bulgaria.
Additionally, Zdravko discusses the problem of "nostalgia for the communist past" in the former Yugoslavia, noting:
The social standards were high in the former Yugoslavia, the repression – low, and the communist leader, Josip Broz Tito, very popular. Comparing the present with the former system, the common people are ignoring the issue of democracy-dictatorship and tend to concentrate on the social issues.
Zdravko's intriguing perspective and his level of insight are characteristics which are difficult enough to come by in many publications by the international left, to say nothing of the shortcomings of the mainstream (bourgeois) press. The issues facing the left in the Republic of Macedonia are a series of complexities which include dynamics and conditions that are unique to the region itself. These problems are an addition to the myriad of more general problems faced by progressives and the radical left throughout the world. Should the Macedonian working class rise to these challenges and ultimately present a strong, unified, and sustainable movement, perhaps the working people of the world will share in the optimism of Koco Racin and proclaim, "As you have prevailed, we'll prevail as well!"
Disclaimer: At least 27% of the following article
includes statements which may be characterized as "wild
exaggerations." Several statements have been flagged as
"gross distortions." A number of untrue facts are contained
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