Travels Of An Iconoclast

Travel is eye-opening, educational, and sometimes mind blowing!  At best, travel experiences question everything you thought was sacred; challenges many "facts" you thought represented truth; makes you self-examine many of your personal values, and confronts head on the bullshit you've been fed by our politicians, the media, and American corporate interests.
 
Vanuatu is NOT like it was shown on the American TV show, the Survivors: Vanuatu. The Philippines is NOT the happy little democracy we organized for them in 50 years of exploitative colonial rule.  Sri Lanka is NOT contented tea pickers in brightly colored sarongs. Nor is Malaysia a sleepy little third world country of a few rubber plantations left by the British.
 
Instead, we find Panamanians never signed any agreement to let us build a canal through their country; that the world's biggest democracy, India, is residing in rotting buildings left by the British 'raj'; that the two Middle Eastern countries with the least trouble and the greatest progress are ruled by total autocrats; that Tongans view American sports as "selfish" and laugh at our "motivational courses"; that many Alaskan natives owned slaves four decades after the Emancipation Proclamation;  and that Santa Claus prefers a pint of gin rather than a glass of milk in New Zealand.
 
The author, an award-winning college professor of psychology who loves to travel, is witty, insightful, and optimistic - yet, as he says, an iconoclast!