"Paul Park - The Tourist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Paul)

organized the whole event as a kind of theme park. Casualties (my
friend
wrote) after seven hours of fighting were still zero, except for an
Italian who had cut his finger changing lenses--an improvement, I
suppose,
over the original battle, when the waters had flowed red with Danish
blood.
And that period is less travelled than most. The whole classical era
barely exists anymore. First-century Palestine is like a cultural
ground
 zero: nothing but taxi cabs and soft-drink stands, and confused and
frightened people. Thousands attend the Crucifixion every day, and the
garden at Gethsemane is a madhouse at all hours. My ex-inlaws were
there
and they sent me a photograph, taken with a flash. It shows a panicked,
harried, sad young man. (Yes, he's blond and blue-eyed, as it turns
out,
raising questions as to whether the past can actually be altered in
retrospect by the force of popular misconception.) But at least he's
out
in the open. Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, and the entire family of Herod
the
Great are in hiding, yet still hardly a week goes by that Interpol
doesn't
manage to deport some new revisionist. It's amazing how difficult
people
find it to accept the scientific fact--that nothing they do will ever
make
a difference, that cause and effect, as explicative principles, are as
dead as Malcolm X.
Naturally they are confused by their ability to cause short-term
mayhem,
and just as naturally they are seeking an outlet for their own
frustrations: Adolf Hitler, for example, has survived attempts on his
life
every 15 minutes between 1933 and 1945, and people are still lining up
to
take potshots even since the Nazis closed the border to everyone but a
small group of Libyan consultants--now stormtroopers are racing back in
time, hoping to provide 24-hour security to all the Fuehrer's distant
ancestors. Who wants to explain to that crowd how history works? Joseph
Stalin--it's the same. Recently some Lithuanian fanatic managed to
break
through UN security to confront him at his desk. "Please," he says,
"don't
kill me." (They all speak a little English now.) "I am a democrat," he
says--"I change my mind." These days it requires diplomatic pressure
just
to get people to do what they're supposed to. It is only by promising
the