Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Oh, Hear Us When We Cry to Thee, for Those in Peril on the Sea

Can you think of a worse fate than being trapped aboard an Alaskan Cruise ship with 460 readers of the Nation? Nope, neither can your Bloviator. The New York Times, of course, felt differently and sent a reporter to cover the event. Herewith excerpts from a dispatch filed from floating hell:
During a weeklong cruise from Seattle up the Alaskan coast last August, Ms. Mapes and 11 other speakers — mostly Nation contributors and journalists, but also Ralph Nader, Richard Dreyfuss and Rocky Anderson, then the mayor of Salt Lake City — tackled the Big Topics, all within the confines of the Holland America Line’s amenities-drenched Oosterdam. Cultural dissonance was much in evidence — picture a self-described “atheist Socialist Quaker” marveling at an ice-carving demonstration; picture Birkenstocks in the piano lounge. (“Do you think we’ll ever see Ralph Nader in the hot tub?” I asked a fellow cruiser at one point. “I don’t think so,” he told me. “Every time I’ve seen him he’s disinfecting himself at the Purell hand-sanitizer station.”)

Pretty grim, huh? By the way, "Ms. Mapes" would be Ms. Mary Mapes (remember her?) who no doubt leaped at free passage on a cruise ship in exchange for being stood drinks and chatting up people who actually believed her, seeing it as quite a deal for someone in reduced circumstances like her. It gets worse.

I was made aware of this hobnobbing for the first time over lunch on Day 2, when my seatmate, Marlena, a five-time Nation cruiser, told me that on one Nation cruise she had brought sheet music. She told me: “David Corn, the writer, played piano and Bud Trillin — all of us who know Calvin Trillin call him Bud — started singing ‘Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat.’ We had 400 people singing until 2 in the morning.”

And worse.

Later, the Nation columnist Patricia Williams told me that Daniel Ellsberg, a guest speaker, did magic on one cruise — “He was pulling coins out of people’s ears. I wondered, did he learn this in prison?” (I didn’t point out that Mr. Ellsberg, did not in fact serve time for releasing the Pentagon Papers to the news media. Why ruin a good story?)

Why indeed, sir, and spoken like a true liberal. There was more mirth and merriment to be had. Who could resist pounding down a few with the party animals below?

The fireworks of the [Robert] Scheer-Nader discussion seemed to carry over into the Crow’s Nest that night — the partying and the dancing took on a slightly harder edge. At 2:30 a.m. I found that two Nation cruisers — one in his 30s and one in his 50s — had grown anxious that the bar was about to close, and had started to stockpile drinks. One had three screwdrivers lined up in front of him, and the other, two Heinekens, causing a third drinking companion to comment, “You’re like the Costco of alcohol: three drinks, two beers, eight rolls of toilet paper. ...”

Ah, but scratch a liberal and you'll find a didact: our intrepid reporter was able to make this fabulous cruise a learning experience after all; squeeze in a little re-education and share his gleanings with the reader.

The museum was dimly lighted and wonderfully quiet, a perfect antidote to the pressure cooker of the Nation seminars. Nevertheless, on looking at a diorama called “The Buffalo Jump,” whose placard read, “The Indians stampede the herd over the cliff to their death,” I couldn’t help but get all over-analytic and Nation-y by thinking, “Even out on the prairie and operating under his own terms, man oppresses whatever he sees fit to oppress.” My days aboard the cruise ship were starting to pay off.

(h/t the Bloviator's brother.)

No comments: