This will be my fifth cruise, and so I’m used to the fact that you spend the first couple days getting lost. I counted it as a victory today when I found the gym. I had followed the signs but always ended up in the wrong place. Today when I finally broke down and asked, I was directed through the salon and into a hallway covered with drawings of Greek art — gods and goddesses in that orange line drawing, black background style taken from ancient pottery.

Oh, of course. We’re doing the ancient world, because we haven’t covered that yet.

I started noticing yesterday that the decor on the ship is … well, eclectic would be the kind way to say it. “Busy”, “messy” or “chronologically insane” would be the unkind way.

The main look is Art Nouveau (think Paris poster art like THIS ) — lots of swirly lines, twining vines and leaves carved everywhere, stained glass windows, elastic-looking patterns worked busily into the carpets and wallpaper.

But then, the big theater is the Pharaoh lounge, with gigantic King Tut sarcophagi staring blandly out at you from the walls. I was still trying to give the ship’s decorators credit. Though Tut’s tomb wasn’t discovered until after Art Nouveau was over, they do sort of go together.
But then, how to explain the Napoleon room, or the medieval castle theme in the bingo parlor, or the Shanghai bar? How to explain the soundtrack that goes from the Moonlight Sonata to the theme from the X-files to the Beatles singing “Please Please Me”?

The whole ship is like a post-modernist’s doctorate theory. The pomo crowd love to mix and match entire cultures. But shouldn’t there be a limit?

As I walk past the Impressionist landscapes, totem poles and Renaissance love scenes all jumbled together, I suddenly realize what it reminds me of.

This is like “Night at the Museum”.

Greg and I watched this movie recently. It’s a doofy Ben Stiller vehicle in which he plays a lovable loser (is there any other kind?) who takes a job as a night watchman at a natural history museum only to find that after dark, all the exhibits start coming to life. From dinosaur skeletons to Old West dioramas to cavedwellers to Lewis and Clark, once the sun goes down, they all start moving around, wanting to finish out the life that’s been frozen on display all day. And of course, because it’s a Ben Stiller movie, that usually means attacking him either physically or verbally. He gets chased by the Tyrannosaurus, teased by an Easter Island head and shot at by Romans and cowboys. He also forges a friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, whose good advice and upbeat attitude help him to make progress mending his relationship with his son at the same time as Stiller is helping Teddy light a romantic flame with Sacagawea.

Yep, the movie is that dumb.

But the scenes where all hell breaks loose in the museum kept coming back to me. It’s not just that they’re the best funny parts (maybe the only funny parts). It’s also that you suddenly feel like they’re talking about a dilemma that comes from our shared experience.

Right now, all of us are sitting here with however-many centuries of recorded history behind us. We’ve picked and chosen our favorite bits and examined them to death. We’ve rehashed empires and battles and catastrophes until they’ve become clichees to us. And they all get mixed up. After a while the centuries that separated the Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar melt away, just another casualty of an overload of information and deficit of education.

And maybe that’s a good thing(?) We used to be taught things in chronological order, which is good, but it had a way of making the events of the past seem like they happened to androids. Maybe we’re better off now that knights in armor, cavemen and pioneers all play together in our head.

Except they don’t play. They compete.

It’s a bit of a crisis we’re working out as a society. Our culture — both high (art, sculpture) and low (TV, advertising) — are out of ideas. We’d keep plundering the past as we have been doing for some time, but even that is getting old. (How many comic books and old sitcoms can they possibly find to make movies about?)

And anyway, those looks and tastes from the past had ideas behind them. You can certainly try to keep Napoleon out of the Napoleon room and just go for French pastries and empire waistlines, but eventually he’ll start to show up (perhaps even as a gaudy and bizarre sculpture where he’s being crowned by a goddess. That’s what the clever Carnival people decided to put dead center in this dining room). And when he does, you’ll start to have to answer an inescapable question: “Who’s right and who’s wrong?” Was Napoleon right to try to recapture territory and make France into a great country? Was he wrong to do battle with England, Spain and Russia and be a conqueror? Was his idea a good idea?

If it was, then were England, Spain and Russia wrong to defend themselves? Just like at Stiller’s museum, the ideas will start to fight each other. It might be amusing for us to see the inhabitants of these different worlds just cannoning around goofily, but in truth they’d all fight each other.

Who was right? Which one deserves a prime spot in our consciosness? Do you want dinosaurs to roam the earth or Romans? Everyone? No one?

Which way do we go from here? I don’t think anyone really knows. And like the decor on this cruise ship, trying to stall by just including everyone ends up looking disorganized, noisy and downright weird.

It’s a bad time to be an interior decorator for a cruise line. It’s a worse time for those of us who want simple answers.