Cognitive Dissonance

I do not write blog posts at sea.  I get seasick if I am on a computer for very long.  In fact, I read on a boat lying down for the same reason.  Not seriously seasick, but it’s like the motion sickness I get if I try to read in a car.  This can be a liability on a circumnavigation, especially on long passages.

Jon and I just finished our longest passage a week ago.  Twenty-nine days from Saint Helena to Barbados.  And thirteen days from Cape Town to St. Helena meant that we spent forty-two of forty-nine days at sea.  The passage from Africa was so much more than just sea days, however.  It was leaving what was exotic for us, the Pacific islands, Indonesia, the Indian Ocean and Africa for what was familiar:  the Western Hemisphere and the Caribbean.  As we left the Southern Hemisphere for the Northern, we reentered the tropics and approached the hot and intense equatorial sun.  We crossed the infamous doldrums of light to no winds.  I often thought of the song by the seventies band America with the lyrics, “the ocean is a desert,” while I thought of myself as that familiar cartoon of a ragged man crawling in the dessert on his hands and knees, saying “water, water” only I would be saying “wind, wind.”

To top it off, I got a stomach bug our last two weeks at sea and am still recovering.  This final insult to body and soul perhaps best explains, if not excuses, my general sense of grumpiness since we have re-entered the same time zone as home.  But grumpy I am.

As we sit on our boat, anchored in gorgeous clear water in Carlisle Bay off Bridgetown with its two miles of beautiful white sandy beach and surrounded by sea turtles, loud thumping techno dance music penetrates the thin walls of our hulls.  Jet skis abound.  Catamarans covered with dozens of tourists come and go throughout the day, offering them a couple of hours of swimming and drinking rum off a boat in this beautiful bay to complete their island paradise experience.  Some carelessly leave their traces of plastic cups on the ocean floor.

And then there are the large cruise ships, making ever so brief stops to disembark a lot of tourists who have come to enjoy a bit of paradise as well, albeit a bit myopically.  Some tourists are actually pink people whose introduction to the tropical sun has come a bit too abruptly.  I witness two husbands standing in a shopping area passively dazed as their wives examine cheap unnecessary plastic objects (my general term for junk) that they don’t need and could just as easily purchase at home since it’s made in China. Taxi drivers seem to outnumber tourists three to one and they compete relentlessly for the opportunity to offer tours.  But harbor no doubt.  These tourist dollars drive the economy today, having long ago supplanted the sugar plantations.

(This scene occurs not only in the Caribbean.  Jon and I also experienced it in Bali.  Here was a beautiful island that was home to a unique form of Hinduism and was known for its peacefulness and spirituality.  Yet it is overrun with drunk marauding Australians (as well as some others) who feel they have a God-given right to behave badly.  And the Balinese and other Indonesian migrants frantically chase after the tourists’ dollars in hope of acquiring some of the same material things these westerners had, while also acquiring the western form of stress.)

The poverty in the Caribbean islands stands in plain sight for anyone to see.  Alcoholic men lying in a side street passing a bottle of rum and pissing in broad daylight.  The local market sells pig heels, pig tails, pig tongue and lamb necks, because the better cuts go to the hotels and restaurants, and are largely unaffordable anyway.  Crime, particularly thievery, is high.  Our dinghy engine has to be locked to the dinghy.  The dinghy has to be locked to the boat or when ashore, to the pier.  Our fuel jugs are locked.   The last time our boat security was such an issue we were in Panama.  And Barbados is one of the wealthier islands in the Caribbean.

And then there is the legacy of colonialism and slavery.  First of all, the indigenous peoples of these islands were killed off shortly after the Europeans (mainly the English, Dutch, French and Spanish) came in the early 1500s.  Arawaks and Caribes no longer exist.  Slaves from Africa were brought here to work in the sugar plantations.  Europeans not only got sugar for their tea and pastries, they got rum, the drug of choice to pacify restless sea crew and anyone unhappy and ungrateful enough about being held as a slave.

Slavery ended in the Caribbean about a generation or two before it did in the United States, so that was a long time ago.  In most of the Windward and Leeward Islands, colonialism officially ended more recently, in the 1960s and 70s.  But the legacy of both can still be felt today.  For me, I experienced it in an unfamiliar manner.

Prior to arriving in Port St. Charles to clear in, I contacted Customs to notify them of our arrival.  Our repeated efforts to contact port control (the usual first step of entering a country by boat throughout the world) had been unsuccessful.  When a man on the radio finally answered, I gave the usual information and asked how he wanted us to proceed.  He said nothing.  After about three minutes of waiting, I called back to confirm that he had heard me.  Nothing.  Not even a request to standby.  Finally, after about ten minutes, he said that a mega yacht was departing and to wait.  That was it for guidance.    Once in Customs, Immigration and Quarantine, clearing in was dealt with, not in a friendly manner, but not necessarily in an unfriendly manner.  No one said welcome to Barbados, although the Custom lady did give me a brochure on how to raise a Christian family.

Upon landing at one of the beach establishments once we were anchored off Bridgetown, I was promptly escorted to a street side booth to pay a $10 cover charge for the privilege of coming ashore and inquiring as to the nearest grocery store.  No one said welcome to Barbados.  They didn’t even try to be nice.

In search for place to purchase Internet minutes--something I thought I have become quite adept at after all the different countries we’ve been in—I went into about a dozen establishments that advertised Lime Wire top offs.  When I asked to purchase Internet minutes, the store clerk would turn silently and walk away…. to ask the manager.  It seemed so odd that they did not say, “one moment please I’ll go ask someone who might know.”  Inevitably, the manager would tell me that they only sold cell phone minutes and had no idea where I could purchase Internet minutes.  The next day, I succeeded in my quest.  Turns out that the same prepaid minutes voucher I would buy for cell phone minutes could be used for Internet minutes.  I doubt that I was being toyed with by all the vendors I had tried previously, they probably genuinely did not know, but their coldness was unsettling just the same.

At the grocery store, I handed the check out clerk my shopping bags, saying that I had brought my own and did not need plastic ones.  She proceeded to throw them aside and put my groceries in plastic bags.  A bit stunned, I began to repack my items in my own bags.  To which she barked back at me that she couldn’t read minds.

Seeking emotional solace after that unpleasantness, I went to a fast food chain for a milk shake.  The lady who took my order completed the transaction without the ugliness I had just experienced in the grocery store, but there was no response to my smile, to my hello, to my thank you.  No welcome to Barbados.

Feeling confused, I wondered if this was an urban thing.  Like what a Midwesterner feels upon first being in New York City.  Or had the heat or too many tourists just made everyone here grumpy.  I missed the gentleness and generosity of Polynesian culture.  I missed the welcoming kindness of everyone I encountered in South Africa. 

And then a fellow cruiser, who had lived here before, explained it to me.  He said that here, the people equate service with servitude, and servitude with slavery.  I wasn’t treated rudely because I was a foreigner or because I was white -- they treat every customer, visitor or local, that way.  It’s their way of distancing themselves from the posture of a slave.  That is their legacy.

Looking at the white tourists on the catamarans and the white tourists laying on the beach chaises, all slathered in tanning oil in skimpy bathing suits, I wondered if the locals ever smiled at the irony of how white people try to get darker skin.

Perhaps it is too easy for me to criticize as I sit on my boat and sail around the world— truly something few in this world can afford to do.  But I have looked from afar these last few years as Americans and Europeans have careened into a head on collision with economic reality, and suffered a psychological whiplash from which they have yet to recover.  Yet it is clear even from a distance that unrestrained greed and relentless consumerism has taken a toll on western civilization in recent years.  To me, these huge cruise ships represent such over-consumption on a massive scale.

John Lewis Gaddis, in his recent biography of George Kennan,  notes that Kennan wrote in the early 1930s that an absence of consumerism in the Soviet Union would lead to a bitter disappointment in an artificial ideology.  But having long bemoaned the excessive consumerism in America (decades before that message was co-opted by John LeCarre’s George Smiley), Kennan also noted that too many “automobiles and ice boxes” would also crash their ideology and society.   I don’t know where the happy balance lies, but as I watch the tourists gyrate and grind to the thumping sound of techno while they throw down their rum drinks and tan their bodies in paradise, I know that I am struggling with the cognitive dissonance of it all---a form of culture shock (or is it culture ambivalence?)--as I return to the western hemisphere, to America and to home.

Re-entry can be bumpy.  I am off in search of ice cream.