A Hot Spot For Your Summer Break
There are many beautiful people to be seen on the London Underground, provided only that one avoids looking at the staff or the passengers. Every weekday when I travel home from work, as I wait on the platform, a beautiful young woman across the track stares right into my eyes. She is sun-tanned, bare-shouldered and wet; her beautiful eyes sparkle, and her beautiful face is perhaps fifty inches from cheekbone to beautiful cheekbone. She is immersed in water up to her beautiful shoulders, and somewhere behind her lurks a masculine silhouette for optimists to identify with and pessimists to envy.
The lady is, of course, a postertute: one who sells her body to a salesman so that he may use it to sell something else. The merchandise for which this beautiful lady is the sucker-bait is a beautiful tourist resort called Eilat, which has no natural features worth setting against those of the aforementioned beautiful female and which is in a country under existential threat.
Perhaps I am merely perverse, but I find this rather strange. I don't recall being enticed in this fashion to Lebanon, formerly the playground of the Middle East, when Israel, Syria and the PLO were playing there after 1978. East Timor had many pressing concerns during its quarter-century occupation by our ally and business partner, Suharto's Indonesia; but I doubt that the tourist trade was high on the list. When Hitler and Stalin carved Poland up between them in 1939, more civilians tried to leave than tried to get in, despite that country's immense cultural riches.
Indeed, I cannot help feeling that the British foreign office, or whoever is responsible for these matters, has neglected its duty in this case. Why have British tourists received no warning that travel to Israel is dangerous? Why is the Israeli tourist industry permitted to display its propaganda without even the hint of a warning that the whole country might at any moment be subsumed by stone-throwing fanatics or incinerated by nuclear weapons of near-existential ontological status? Why are no tanks or soldiers pictured on that poster; why is there not so much as a single reassuring fallout shelter to show Israel's beautiful humanitarian concern for the lives of its foreign guests?
The lady is, of course, a postertute: one who sells her body to a salesman so that he may use it to sell something else. The merchandise for which this beautiful lady is the sucker-bait is a beautiful tourist resort called Eilat, which has no natural features worth setting against those of the aforementioned beautiful female and which is in a country under existential threat.
Perhaps I am merely perverse, but I find this rather strange. I don't recall being enticed in this fashion to Lebanon, formerly the playground of the Middle East, when Israel, Syria and the PLO were playing there after 1978. East Timor had many pressing concerns during its quarter-century occupation by our ally and business partner, Suharto's Indonesia; but I doubt that the tourist trade was high on the list. When Hitler and Stalin carved Poland up between them in 1939, more civilians tried to leave than tried to get in, despite that country's immense cultural riches.
Indeed, I cannot help feeling that the British foreign office, or whoever is responsible for these matters, has neglected its duty in this case. Why have British tourists received no warning that travel to Israel is dangerous? Why is the Israeli tourist industry permitted to display its propaganda without even the hint of a warning that the whole country might at any moment be subsumed by stone-throwing fanatics or incinerated by nuclear weapons of near-existential ontological status? Why are no tanks or soldiers pictured on that poster; why is there not so much as a single reassuring fallout shelter to show Israel's beautiful humanitarian concern for the lives of its foreign guests?
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