#200 World Travel

Now I’m not what you call a travelin’ man. Oh sure, in my youth I hitchhiked throughout the Southwest, up and down the West coast and even to Canada, but my visits to foreign countries number exactly two; the aforementioned Canada and Mexico. Not what you’d call your world traveler. I suppose nowadays you could also add another four if you count the various independent nations represented by Indian casinos, but that’s a bit of a stretch, learning the finer points of Keno hasn’t gone far in the direction of broadening my cross-cultural horizons. Still, whenever I want to see a variety of American subcultures, casinos have em galore.
So anyhow, I was watching a movie the other night that dealt with that whole traveling thing. It was the most recent remake of The War of the Worlds; this one with Tom Cruise as a not very convincing dock worker who becomes an alien avoiding aficionado. The reworked premise of the movie is that aliens planted big vehicles in the ground before humanity came down from the trees and, arriving now on a bolt of electro-magnetic disturbance, they charge up these tripod tanks and proceed to lay waste to all the cities and then begin harvesting humans so they can suck out all their blood or something. Of course, they still keep the old final plot twist of H.G. Wells, that the secret savior of humanity is the microbes that have evolved with us and that therefore infect and kill the unsuspecting and invading aliens.
Now back in 1898, when old H.G. penned this thrilling cautionary tale, the idea of viral and bacterial disease was relatively new and made for a thrilling and surprising plot device. Now, with every other news story about invasive species and evolving bird flu and HIV, you’d just kind of figure that your basic aliens, capable of traveling between planets or possibly star systems, would have heard of the whole thing. I’d assume that before they come down to destroy us they might monitor our radio transmissions or something. Maybe even pick up a broadcast of the history channel and catch the story of the current theory that 80 percent of the native population of North America was wiped out by European diseases when unsuspecting white folk came to these shores. A number the Indians are only beginning to pay back as the consequences of smoking that little native tobacco weed they introduced to us in return wreaks its cancerous karma. Hell, I just had an acquaintance head to South Africa for the first time and the preventative shots he had to take left him pricked full of more holes than heroin addict in a tattoo parlor. You’d think a visit to another planet would engender a similar caution. But what do I know, I don’t travel much myself.
America, ya gotta love it.