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Dear Molly Brown,
While I do find you indomitable, I take issue regarding creating images and then having to live up to them. I think you are revealing your personal paradise bias. You have conjured up a 21-century utopia, and in reconciling the myth with reality you find it lacking. Images are dangerous creatures because they have no faults.
If you are of my generation, then you know Bob Dylan well. Or do you? Yes, you think you do from his freewheeling tambourine in time and lyrics and rhymes, but you don’t really know him at all. And why should you? He is a businessman who created an image for his product (music). He was one of the first to admit that his image was a business asset: a marketing tool. As a result of the marketing, what people conjured up was a an altruistic 60’s revolutionary leader.It sold well, “Give the peole what they want” an old Chinese saying.
In reality, not so. Dylan was a family man, entertainer/business man.
Same goes with CR.
I don’t think its realistic for you or anyone else to try and hold CR to peoples fantasies about CR, because of marketing ploys and personal preferences (people need images of paradise). If you saw the move Collateral with Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise than you might recall the photo the Taxi driver had on his visor. It was a tropical island and when he had a moment, he would pull down the visor to look at it and “go there.”
Judges in CR are not sympathetic to people who claim they were fooled by salesmen. Here, we all expect salesmen to spin there words to sell a product, and that means withholding and lying.
It’s foreigners interpretations of marketing and their naiveté about the land, the law and its people that create the myth of paradise. Holding the nation and its people to other people images and marketing hype is a US kind of thing.
Here we see the hypocrisy and realize that people use it to sell. In the US, the hypocrisy is disguised.
It takes time to learn to deal with the hypocrisy and little lies told daily in CR. However, it is actually a more realistic view of life. That is – that we must accept lies and hypocrisy as part of daily living. In CR you confront it. In the US it is well hidden.
So, expecting CR to live up to marketing images and images conjured up from others lack of investigation is unrealistic. Like many other aspects of life, CR is a business deal.
It’s like expecting Bob Dylan songs to be true, and believing that Dylan was an altruistic voice of the times. Dylan was in it for the money and so is CR.
People do not like to have their fantasy squashed. Perhaps this is why they do not want to investigate Costa Rica. I know that after I read a biography about Dylan, I thought he was a hypocrite because he did not live up to my image of him. For me, after reading about Dylan, the music was never the same. Kowing about the artist tarnished the art.
Maybe it’s the same about CR. People don’t want to know because they want to maintain their unrealistic image of the country. This image serves them well when they are in the doldrums of daily life. That’s why they prefer to maintain them.
There, I wrote you article for you. Consider it a gift Ms Unsinkable. At least you have the theme for your article: Paradise Reconciled / Do you really want to Know?
i certainly didn’t come here with any illusions about a paradise. i’ve lived in many places that were called that, and there is a different reality that one never sees while on vacation. and as the Eagles said, call a place paradise and kiss it good bye.
unfortunately i’ve met many people whose vision of CR didn’t match the reality. they are the ones who leave in two years when they discover that beneath the patina of paradise lies all the pitfalls of the life they left behind. maybe the weather is better here, maybe there is a great variety of fresh food, etc. but that doesn’t negate the daily hassles of keeping one’s life together. thank you for your comments. they mirror many of my own thoughts, so they may appear in some form in my articles.
as for little bobby zimmerman, i know him. . . personally. my ex-father-in-law produced one of his grammy-winning albums. he was the best at revealing the dichotomy of how things appear and what they really are. some of it may have been contrived, but the bottom line is that there is still a message. the stupid ladrones stole all my dylan albums. have replaced many of them, but not all.
I think you need to read deeper.
Dylan gave a message, but that’s not my point, just as the CR branding is not the point> The point is how we react to the message/branding.
If we like our images of paradise we eat up the brading/marketing also if we like the messenger we acept the pill.
Life is how you react to the message rather than the message. To fault the message no matter the messenger means that you are not taking responsibilty for yourself.
People tell themselves stories all the time to justify behavior. The pardise story is one more in a long line of stories we tell ourselves and willingly believe to use as impetus to act. That should be the crux of your article. Another gift and you are welcome for the comments.
BTW love Dylan for the music, not the man. Personally I belive him a genius but also an ass. That’s hard for me because of my love for his art. Its the same for Costa Rica, when you visit you see the art. When you live here you see the artist. Big difference.
i got the deeper meaning of what you wrote, and your thoughts mimic many of the points i have already outlined for my article. thanks for validating my thesis. i had composed a lengthy response but it somehow disappeared into the ether and i couldn’t rewrite it.
bob can be an ass, i agree. like the concert i went to where he played with his back to the audience for 90% of it. or the time i saw him backstage and he decided he wasn’t talking to anyone! other artists have similar reputations — picasso was alleged to have been a jerk, as was stravinsky, tolstoy, etc. i love your analogy about the art vs the artist vis-a-vis costa rica.
Thank you – feel free to use it.
I remeber when a roadie buddy of mine said he was going out with the Santana Dylan Wail Souls Tour. I said great! I would love to thank Dylan for all the great music. He looked at me and said “Don’t you know, Bob don’t talk to anyone.” I thought to myself – “figures. What an ass.”
I always compose on word as not to lose compositions on the site.
Take care. BTW do you remember the poster that came with the Blonde on Blonde album? The profile of Dylan?
I still have mine!
despite the warnings of not composing long messages while logged on, i did it anyway and lost it. oh well. i’d made some good comments, too.
i never collected any posters of anyone because i was in the biz and took it all for granted. usually, gave all the posters to friends and family, along with the free records i got. did you like slow train runnin’? that’s the album my FIL produced, when dylan was in his born-again christian phase. jejeje
[quote=”sueandchris”]Maravilla: I too have noticed that you have a very negative view of the country.[/quote]
I think rather that Maravilla is more open about voicing her opinion of the “warts” she sees. The Rio Tarcoles is said to be the most polluted in Central America.
Just for discussion of the topic of pollution with all the hoopla regarding what a paradise Costa Rica is there is a negative side as with all areas of human habitation.
The real downside is that [b]there are no meaningful penalties[/b] for polluting either the rivers and beaches or the highways or the cities. If a penalty of 100,00 colones was enforced on an individual throwing trash from a car or forcing a business to clean up their polution and then doubling the cost as a penalty or close them down, confiscate the property and sell it to an investor who will install the improvements needed to bring it into compliance. Finding and eliminating raw sewage sources through forced remediation or monetary penalties for non-compliance. All of these would be helpful but they dont exist in law.
California enacted a law that requires a deposit on beverage containers which resulted in an almost immediate reduction of these items in the environment. Costa Rica could do the same for all containers.
Someone needs to say something about the down side of Costa Rica even in a small way and Maravilla is doing that. It’s just being realistic.
ah, waggoner, you get it! to point out the realities of a place doesn’t mean one has a negative view of that place. one only needs to gaze around them to see that there are things that should be fixed — the trash issue is one of them, as is the polluting of the rivers, as you pointed out. for a while, we were going to a lovely beach called playa dona ana. it’s a nice little cove, coconut palms on the shore, monos in the trees. it seemed to be the picture postcard of perfection. . . until someone told me that the river just to the north by only a few hundred meters of this beach empties raw sewage and other contaminants right into the ocean. i’ve never gone to that beach again. that saddens me but it’s no different than the beaches in california where one often cannot swim. does pointing out that it might be potentially hazardous to swim in those waters convey negativity about where i live? i don’t believe it does; i simply don’t want the health problems that can occur from swimming in contaminated water. and pollution is a reality everywhere not just in costa rica! paradise is no different than any other place — yes, we have nice weather here, but we also have really nasty weather at times that causes mudslides and destroys things; and then there are the terramotos such as the one we had 18 months ago that made a right royal mess of things for many months. and while we have an abundance of fabulous fruits and vegetables that are affordable compared to the prices in the States or elsewhere, they use some of the most toxic pesticides on them. there are places of beauty that cannot be compared to anything else, yet getting to those places may cost you your life because of the crazy drivers, bad roads, or even a new highway, years in construction, that is a death trap. paradise is a state of mind and an attitude. to believe that costa rica doesn’t have any down sides is to be completely delusional.
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