In the Garden of the Long Pig

At the risk of sounding pedantic, this world of ours is getting smaller and smaller. What concerns me is the rate at which information becomes accessible outweighs the ability of the recipients to do something with that information. Such as: The third world ogles Western niceties but for the most part finds them inaccessible. Youth sees power evinced in political judgements or big screen firepower and still has to rely on elders for money and hence freedom. We ALL get handed a stream of information about people who are richer, better looking, healthier, more popular and generally BETTER than us.
But I digress.
There is a song I wrote called "In the Garden of the Long Pig", which you can find on a CD called "Beautiful Accident" by my band, The Third International. It is a tongue-in-cheek look at New Yorker eco-tourists making their way into the depths of the Amazon only to find their tour guide more enamoured with the  manufactured trappings of middle class life than with the spectacular thousand year old trees that surround him. It's a joke, yes, but it illuminates a dangerous situation. When people are presented with things they come to desire without the ability to acquire them, they either cultivate new levels of restraint or react explosively to their impotence.
Now I am in no way Ned Ludd. Progress is the inexorable path of mankind. I do not have the answer to this dilemma. Maybe somebody does?

So that's the gist of "In the Garden of the Long  Pig". Shall we say, it's primary storyline. But it is contained in the "Beautiful Accident" CD which, as well as being a collection of songs, is an abstract walk through the 20th century...at least a series of snapshots that I think are important. Historically it correlates with World War 2, (and so sits around the middle of the album) or more precisely, it correlates with the innovations that the conflict brought us. Those which accelerated the shrinking of the planet. Long distance air transportation. Long range communications. These things, along with others, served to mark the beginning of the end for the unexplored/untouched distant mystery lands only recently discovered by Victorian explorers. They brought societies that only a generation ago threw spears at airplanes because they thought them evil spirits, to a point where they now thrive with the use of cell phones and the internet. A new class of information junkie was born.

"In The Garden of the Long Pig" can be heard on http://www.jango.com/,
http://www.reverbnation.com/ or
http://www.itunes.com/