Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

Was the whole "underdeveloped" world queuing up to be put through the sausage machine, to come out uniform and plump and covered in the same shiny plastic skin. It was not the first time I had seen the human condition in such mean and aimless terms. The same depressing vision had overwhelmed me in the slums of Tunis, the tin huts of Ethiopia, the shanties around Nairobi and the black township of Soweto. Try as I would to imagine a rosier future, I could see only ever-increasing numbers of people determined to seize on the resources of the earth and pervert them into greater and greater heaps of indestructible concrete and plastic ugliness, only to look and learn and retreat in penitent dismay before the next wave of "developing" citizens. And there seemed to be nothing that I or any individual could do that would make a jot of difference to the outcome. I met many who shared my pessimism, and some who felt personally insulted by it, but I never heard anyone propose a convincing alternative.