http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/john-mccain-iraq-and-th_b_93721.html

There is actually another vehicle one can use to travel in. No, it’s not a 767-400 or an Airbus, but in some ways, it’s better.

You see, I have my Couch. It is a fantastic, wonderful vehicle to travel in, and what’s more, I can choose the pilot simply by picking up a book. The author fuels the engines, sets the destinations, and itinerizes the tours.

Once you have chosen your pilot, you can choose any level of tour quality you want, and you can stay as long as you want. No visas, worries over conflicts, terrorism warnings, or standing in long lines. You can leave at any time, and speaking of time, you can leave BEFORE you came, if that is your fancy.

My Couch can not only travel in space, it can travel in time. One of my pilots, Peter D. Ward, flew me to South Africa during two spans of time: Select periods of time between 1992 and 2000, and a period of time far earlier, from 260 million to 248 million years ago, when the worst mass extinction to have ever gripped life on earth occurred.

I not only could fly to Lootsburg Pass, to see the home of a family who suffered an unfortunate extinction in the late 1800s, and who built their house on the gravesite of a fauna extirpated 250 million years before, I was able to travel to that distant time, when Lootsburg Pass wasn’t a “Lootsburg Pass” at all. It was part of an inland basin, freed only 40 million years before from the grip of glaciers similar to those that grip Antarctica today.

My Couch is a wonderful vehicle. I’ve more recently been to the White Sea winter coast area of Northern Russia. Not only that, I got to see what it was like now, but how it was during the 1960s, a time when it would have been inaccessible to any vehicles other than my Couch, given the tensions of the Cold War. My Couch has true stealth technology, the Russian air force never had a chance of detecting my arrival in the area on my Couch. I even got to see the area as it was during an incomprehensibly distant time: 630 to 542 million years ago. Yes, this is during Ediacaran times, when our ancestors first stirred the sediments and filtered the oceans in search of organisms to eat. Eating others is what marks us uniquely as animals, crass as that may seem…

Of course, there really is a downside to flying around the world on this wonderful vehicle, my Couch. The fact is, just like the ghostly images in stone that make up the Ediacaran fauna, an enormous amount of information is lost.

It’s called experience. You see, experience, whether over a second or a lifetime, is the ruler by which all information is measured against. After all, I must admit that my knowledge of Graaf-Reinett is much closer in quality to those ghostly Ediacaran images than it is to the memories of a real traveler, like AA and many of you. Even the actual experience of standing there for one second only would GREATLY enhance what I know, so great is the true measure of my ignorance. After all, even though I might know that there is a language called Afrikaans, I’ve never heard it. Ubuntu is as hazy a concept to me as those hazy Ediacaran fossils, regardless of my knowledge of them.

Furthermore, I don’t really get to hold those fossils in my hand, turn them over, heft them. No. As free as I am in space and time, I am absolutely NOT free to experience anything beyond the two dimensions available to me in the book, whose author pilots my Couch.

I’ve never seen the “national flower” of SA become entrapped in droves at Black township boundary fences – even given the fact that Peter Ward flew me there on my Couch. I’ve never seen the big whitewashed churches that dominate the white portions of these towns.

I’ve never seen the crematoriums that operated on Thursdays outside a town (I forgot what it was) in the Karoo that Peter Ward showed me. Nor have I smelled the smell of the smoke issuing from the smokestack. I have no connection to the reality of the AIDS victims whose number were so great that it required this method of disposal.

But then again, despite my Couches’ shortcomings as a travel vehicle, people like you and AA can always make my images of such places a little sharper. On the other hand, ignorance imposed by time and distance does have it’s advantages. I will never have to walk with crocodiles the likes of which many of you and AA have walked with – unless of course – we forfeit our own freedoms here through ignorance.

I will never have to risk the possibility that I might be as vulnerable there as that man from the Sudan was here, in Atlanta.

But I can say this:

There is a certain awe in being able to witness an asteroid, 14 kilometers in diameter, moving across the sky in a stately manner imposed by distance on what would otherwise be a speed so great it could transit a city in seconds. Such an uprooted Mount Everest would roll slowly as it passes overhead in a blue sky, gray, backlit to fiendish brightness in its sunlit crags, black in its shaded crevasses, dropping toward a horizon that will soon sport a second sun, 64.98 million years ago.

And the ground will respond with an equally stately version of what a blanket does when shaken of dust by a child.

I love my Couch…

Just this morning, a researcher (and an outsider) validated the data he gathered from the field and respondents re: land/crop conversion and issues of landgrabbing, land rights violation etc. All of us are really disappointed and thinks the research content is a crap because the value is not there. There are plenty of important infos that needed in order to see the real picture of the scenario, etc. So we really pressed him and made remarks of discontentment based on knowledge and experiences we have as frontlines and people living with the situation here (existence of landgrabbing, powerful clan vs small and poor farmers, etc). His defensive mechanism is “I have been there… I have heard them saying this… I have been there for 5 days…” But that doesn’t mean he got the information right. That doesn’t mean that he got the whole picture. That doesn’t mean there is no violation of rights, no landgrabbing. That doesn’t mean that in 5 days he was in the field, he already knows the real situation – women and men lives are threatened when resistance to convert their land from rice farm to biofuel source farm, fake land titles are distributed to landowners and the original land title goes to the private companies, and others.

Yes, I agree with you… It is not impressive just to hear words “I have been there…” Unless you live with it.

“They don’t know those places. They don’t live in those places. They fly in and they fly out. Just so they can say “I have been there”. Just so they can spin it in a way that you like it ”

I agree with this point. All of these politicians use Iraq as a political point. Many fly over there just so that they can use it to their advantage. They spin their experience over there to match their viewpoint. They aren’t using it to see anything other than what they want to see.
As a defender of the war on my blog, I do look for stories that represent my viewpoint and try to publicize them, so I suppose I am guilty of this on a much smaller scale.

Well AngryAfrican, since you’re African, I think you understand that line about as much as I do and should not get too angry when you hear it.

Didn’t you roll your eyes enough back on the continent after meeting so many people who ‘know’ Africa?

“I know all about Africa because I went for a two-week safari there… I know all about Africa because I was in the Peace Corps there… I know all about Africa because I had an African friend in college… I know about Africa because I listen to Fela Kuti…

Hehehehe. I had a good laugh after I read your post.

Thanks.