The Wasteland of TV

When I was a child of the 50s in Maine, Timbukto symbolized the most remote destination on this Earth, although Bob Hope and Bing Crosby never made a 'road movie' to there. One day during geography class my teacher at Pine Grove Primary School in Falmouth Foresides traced her finger across the world map to Africa.

"That's where Timbuktoo is." She pointed to the center of the Dark Continent. "It's on the edge of the Sahara, which is the world's largest desert.

Few of us would ever learn that the name meant 'place covered by small dunes" in Berber.

We were from Maine and the only reasons to leave the Pine Tree State were to sail the seas, war or attend a Red Sox game in Boston.

Until the 20th Century the only method of reaching the remote city was by foot or camel.

Europeans traveled across the wastelands to be the first white man to visit the gold and slave trading post. The British explorer Mungo Park died on his 1805 attempt. A shipwrecked American sailor had been taken there as a slave in 1811. The Paris-based Societe de Geographie offered a 10,000 franc prize to the first non-Muslim to reach the town. Rene Caillie won the prize in 1828, but few adventurers sought to repeat the journey.

For many westerners Timbuktoo existed as a myth, but in 2012 the legendary city has been seized by the Islamist rebel group Ansar Dine, who have introduced 'sharia' into the World Heritage site famed for its ancient mud mosques and last week these fanatics destroyed several structures with picks and axes on the grounds of idolatry and their connections to Sufism, whose sect is an anathema to the fundamentalists.

Within the week the sixteen mausoleums will be dust in the wind and they will only exist as a memory. The West had no response. Mali doesn't exist in the minds of Wall Street, although some of them would love to own one of the mosques. They are priceless.

I've never been to Timbuktoo, but the shrines will survive in my heads as they will in the dust.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

At sixty-nine I know that all glory is fleeting.

At seventy it will have fled for good.