Day Forty Five and Forty Six, Salt Lake City, UT: The Parks

Day Forty Five refers to Monday, August 3rd, which I spent touring the Browning Firearms Museum, the Utah State Railroad Museum, the Classic Car Museum, and the Hill Air Force Base Aviation Museum. This was good, cheap fun, costing me a grand total of $5, (at this point, I have been running low on funds for some time now).

Day Forty Six, Tuesday, was spent at the Fort Douglas Military Museum and in two of Salt Lake City’s Parks.

I want to focus now on my experience within the parks on Sunday and Tuesday, both internally – through the books I read – and externally, through what I saw. Salt Lake City, while it is (to me, at least) a generally wealthy city, is not without its share of transient homeless men and women. And they are disproportionally represented within the city parks. It is not the mere existence of this demographic that interests me; certainly I was previously aware of it. I had not, however, spent entire days observing the culture and engaging in conversations with its members prior to this experience. I had originally included in this post a (still growing) discourse of sorts on the society and culture that I observed within the homeless community, but as it grew larger and larger I realized it was unfit for this forum. (If, for some reason, anyone is interested in my humble thoughts on the subject, I’d be glad to supply them.)

I’ve done a lot of reading on this trip, and I had intended to talk about the books I’d read here. But as with many of the experiences I have had, there has simply not been enough time for me to write what I wanted to on the subject, which, at least for me, has been unfortunate. I have been keeping a bare-bones, shorthand journal and am hoping to expand it into something one might refer to as a book in the coming year. I can’t make any promises as to its quality or interest to anyone, however, but I thought I would let the idea out into the open and see what comes of it.

Of the several books I’ve read, The Iron Heel, by Jack London – which I read on Sunday – was one of the more interesting. It is an astonishingly whimsical novel of a future in which an entirely utopian communist state has come into existence and discovered a manuscript written 800 years prior – back in the early 1900s's – in which the rise of  The Oligarchy forcefully and remorselessly eliminates socialists. Despite the painful socialist rhetoric unleashed by London’s hero – his not-so-cleverly-disguised alter ego – against an array of straw man arguments, The Iron Heel still stands on it its own as an example of the results realized when idealism clashes with power.

This theme continues in Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. Machiavelli, in his how-to guide for princes, had not undertaken an entirely unique endeavor. Others had attempted to codify the rules of power that must be present in an effectively-ruled kingdom. Machiavelli, however, explained that these ideals were impracticable and could not maintain power. For example, generosity, while considered the ideal, would eventually lead to the prince’s bankruptcy and subsequent unfair taxation of his subjects, ultimately leading to his downfall. “Machiavellianism” has come to represent a pattern of dishonest and anti-social dealings with others. In The Prince, however, Machiavelli does not advocate brutal and anti-social tactics, merely those which are effective, if very occasionally duplicitous. Of course, many of his observations on society and government still hold true, especially if one modernizes them a little bit.

So I’m catching up on posts right now. It is currently Sunday, Day Fifty One, and I’m outside Ogallah, Kansas, once more – the same site that I stopped at on my way out, back in Day Thirteen. I am tracing the same path home as I took out here, and expect to make it back on Saturday, the 15th.