Between The Lines

Pulling Back the Veil
By Larry Burke, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

Few countries have done more in recent years to earn the title "pariah state" than Burma, aka Myanmar, the Southeast Asian nation wedged between Thailand and India. Since 1962, the people of Burma have been gripped by a totalitarian and strangely xenophobic regime that has done everything in its power to maroon the country. And yet last month, after hurriedly building new hotels and sprucing up its pagodas and shrines, Burma's military leaders were scheduled to throw open the doors to tourism in a big way with their Visit Myanmar Year. It's a bit of deceptively cheerful sloganeering on the part of the junta, which appears to be seeking international legitimacy--not to mention hard currency--even as it continues to rule with an iron fist. Recently we dispatched former Outside executive editor Michael Paterniti to explore this lush, ill-starred nation as it prepares to host what it hopes will be an influx of visitors the like of which it hasn't seen in more than three decades. Paterniti went undercover, crossing the Burmese jungle with Karen insurgents, interviewing refugees and monks, and meeting with popular pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. In "Come to Happyland" Paterniti and photographer James Whitlow Delano paint a portrait of a haunted land thoroughly at odds with its government's glowing tourist brochures, a place that has been afflicted by violence and terror for so long that it's become, as he puts it, "an utter stranger to itself ... an anesthetized state, war-torn and woozy."

There are certain rarefied pursuits that, like marooned nations, are truly worlds unto themselves. One of them is bullfighting, the ornate blood sport that has always seemed to epitomize machismo--until now. Over the past few years, a young female matador named Cristina Sžnchez has taken the Spanish bullfighting world by storm, achieving rock star status, her face plastered on T-shirts, her romantic liaisons the subject of tabloid gossip. Susan Orlean, a New Yorker staff writer and the author of Saturday Night, travels to Madrid to meet this unlikely doyenne of the ring. "It's significant that Sžnchez is a woman, and yet it isn't," says Orlean. "Male matadors have always tended to be slightly feminine--lithe, graceful, dressed in precious costumes with pink knee socks. In Spain, bullfighting involves a ritualized aesthetic and a romance that goes well beyond gender."

Elsewhere in this issue: For those of you who sometimes feel you can't keep up with all the latest dos and don'ts of environmentally correct living, turn to Jack Hitt's rumination on the new puritanism that has begun to crop up in outdoor thinking. In the eyes of the new pharisees, argues Hitt, every form of interaction with nature, from mountain biking to fishing to camping to simply being alive on Planet Earth, can involve unimaginable quagmires of sin. Taken to its logical conclusion, Hitt observes, this line of thinking implies that humans aren't part of nature--and shouldn't be. "There is always another micrometer of virtue to squeeze out of any behavior," Hitt writes. "But then isn't the lightest way to live off the land to jump off ... altogether?"

With the snowy season upon us once again, we call your attention to a few articles calculated to put you in a hyperborean frame of mind. Before taking off for the slopes, look at "No More Excuses," our salute to the new Golden Age of skiing and snowboarding. Correspondent Elizabeth Royte ventures to the Alaskan bush for the Iditarod sled-dog race, the classic marathon of mushing which is just now preparing for its 25th anniversary. In "He's Still the Coolest," writer and artist Bruce McCall catches up with that much maligned figure of the season, Old Man Winter himself, for a frank discussion of icebergs, Jack Frost, and the prospect of being furloughed by global warming. And lest you think we forgot ... "Better Get a Big Sleigh," gives a peek at some of the niftiest Yule goodies around, from Harley bicycles to miniature cameras to titanium stoves for the outback.

A final note on holiday gifts: Outside Online, our Seattle-based service on the World Wide Web, recently received one of its own, when the Information Industry Association named it the year's Best Magazine/Electronic Edition. Raise a virtual cup of nog and point your browser to http://outside.starwave.com.