Arctic Escapes and American Extremes

Hi subscribers!

This past week the DT Blog had two new posts, both on the theme of using this form of ‘virtual travel’ for providing a bit of an imagined escape from the high temperatures … for those of us in the northern hemisphere who are sweltering in the summer heat …

The first one from Wednesday took us to Svalbard, that archipelago in the High Arctic that belongs to Norway and is located halfway between the northern end of that country and the North Pole, at ca. 79 degrees north, i.e. far beyond the Arctic Circle. Summer there means 24/7 daylight and temperatures above freezing, if only just. When I went there in July/August 2012 we had a balmy 4–5 degrees centigrade ;-)

For the dark tourist, Svalbard is of particular interest primarily for the Soviet-era ghost town of Pyramiden, a time capsule of splendid proportions, featuring several Guinness-Book-worthy records like the world’s northernmost Lenin bust and the northernmost grand piano, both found at the abandoned former cultural centre of the ex-coal-mining settlement.

The second post was also Arctic but not quite so far north, just below the Arctic Circle, but also about a glacial wonderland: Tasiilaq in East Greenland. The island of Greenland (the world's larghest) doesn’t even feature (yet) on my main website, but some aspects of it could perhaps also count as dark-tourism-worthy. To begin with, cemeteries like the one featured in the photo above, located at Kulusuk, also in East Greenland. That is one of the most sparsely populated regions on Earth. And this extreme middle-of-nowhere-ness is another darkish factor ... as are the unpredictability and potential dangerousness of icebergs, sled dogs and parts of the local population, especially on pay days – when some Greenlanders apparently get drunk and start firing their rifles at random targets …(fortunately I did not witness this myself).

Speaking of unpredictability and dangerousness, the current coronavirus pandemic crisis is escalating in several places, especially in “the land of the free”. Regardless of any amount of propaganda and disinformation, though, the country is not really free, certainly not free of the virus. In fact it’s spiralling scarily out of control in some states.

Yesterday was 4th of July, celebrated as Independence Day in the US of A, this year with much pomp and posturing by current POTUS Trump and his camp, without social distancing and largely without masks, and also without any mention of the reality of the crisis. This 4th of July rally took place at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, just beneath that monument with those big four stone heads of earlier POTUSes. I can imagine Trump fancies his image joining them one day.

On my purged Facebook page two years ago, i.e. in 2018, I posted a special on the 4th of July featuring a photo of a replica of New York’s Statue of Liberty in a cage (taken at the BallinStadt emigration museum in Hamburg, Germany), in which I lamented a bit about issues like “white supremacy”, the proposed border wall with Mexico, children separated from their families and put in detention camps, mass shootings, excessive military spending, and various other dark aspects of the USA today.

I remember that in response to that post I had a scary intrusion: it attracted a (troll?) comment by “Team Trump” … doing the usual Trumpeters' denial of reality, insisting on “alternative facts”, insults instead of arguments, attacks on “fake news”, etc. – and all the other stuff we'd by then already become way too accustomed to. For example: calling the Paris Climate Agreement a “scam”, blaming immigrants themselves for the child separations at the US border, praising economic growth (an aspect I hadn't even brought up) and simply ignoring my points about gun laws, military spending and racism, etc. and instead calling me “ignorant” and “probably not from the US” … the latter I could have gleefully reacted to with a happy affirmative, but I didn't want to be drawn into such a non-reason-based argument.

Anyway, having that sort of Trumpism hit you personally was quite a shock, I have to admit. How did they even find me? And why did they even care? I mean Trump has millions of followers, whereas my DT page at that point had just 1,200 or so (and it ended at just over 3,000 this April), but still they sniffed me out as having been a little critical of US developments in recent times, and I too get the full propaganda onslaught. Anyway I took great pleasure in a) instantly taking the comment down, and b) using the “ban Team Trump” option that FB offered me. Still, a bitter taste remained ... Looks like none of us are safe from this departure from the previously more generally agreed norms of civilized debate and decency … (or was that always just an illusion?). But then again, Facebook at large is evidently of the same degenerate nature, as I had to find out the hard way. Yet at least I now get much less exposure to all that social-media anti-socialness …