Reading

Upon Reading Jose Saramago

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Upon receiving his Nobel prize for literature, Jose Saramago said:

“As I could not and did not aspire to venture beyond my little plot of cultivated land, all I had left was the possibility of digging down, underneath, towards the roots. My own but also the world’s, if I can be allowed such an immoderate ambition.”

For me, however, I travel to discover what it reveals about the human heart and what we have become in this world. To look beneath the surface of things (dig down) to the heart of each day. Is God alive? Does hope exist? Are people still falling in love? Is everyone buying death as if it were cheap socks at a smoke sale?” To look for clarity. To look for signs of courage…of strength of conviction rooted in heart…in an authentic identity, in myself as well as in others.

You don’t have to travel a lot to get fodder for this kind of introspection. I am still “peeling the onion” of that trip to Europe in 1965…only 20 years after the war where houses still had dirt floors in the French country-side. I couldn’t believe how much young people in the pubs knew about [lived and modern] history in Germany. I discovered I was ignorant. I went home disillusioned with the ostentatiousness and new material successes of Americans after the war and am still dealing with it today even as I benefit from it.

Europe was full of Amerian hitchhikers in those years…many of the guys avoiding the draft. Other young people went on through Iran to Nepal…the Hippie Trail. We all went home to help give birth to a new set of values…for all the good it did.

I think you have to go to a country where the culture and values are entirely different than your own…at least once. Tours will insulate you…protect you…from the very thing you need to experience. And go alone so you are forced to confront and adapt to that culture and discover there is another very valid way to live. That…to me…is exciting.

I needed to go to Viet Nam where we fought the American War and see the abandoned air fields and the acres and acres of headstones in the cemetaries. And to China that Nixon opened up to the world. And S Africa where I saw the 8×8 foot room where Mandela lived for 30 years and where I roamed the hostels where the Apartheid War was fought in the township of Soweto. And Egypt where I later saw the birth of the Arab Spring. Go to Burma and Cuba before they too change.

That is just me. Others may have other reasons for choosing where to travel…or not. Where does your heart tell you you need to go? If there is no strong desire maybe, like Saramago, you can just do all this in your corner of the world. Another valid way to live.

Trouble In Egypt

Posted on by Laughingnomad

An explosion has taken place in the ancient area of Al Hussein-Cairo, Egypt, the number of killed and wounded is still unsettled.  How the bomb was exploded is not exactly specified.   It’s the most glorified and valued area for Egyptian and every Muslim; for both Sunni Muslim and Shiite Muslim this place is highly sacred. It’s the place where prayer is practiced every day, and it’s the place where Al Hussein (Prophet grand son) is believed to be buried.  It is also the place of an important market and center of business where hundreds of Egyptians make a living on selling goods and offering services to visitors.   It is well known that the place is a preferred spot for Egyptians and foreigners to spend an evening, says one Egyptian.

The news agencies are saying it was a militant Islamic group.

“Muslims usually comes to this place seeking spiritual calmness and peace of soul, not it’s ridiculous to claim that a cowered act like this would be made by a Muslim or some one who understand and believe what Islam is,” says this Muslim. He believes it was Mossad, the intelligence arm of the Israeli government.

But consider this.  If it was done by an Islamic group why would an Islamic do such a thing?  Here is one answer.

I know next to nothing about Islam but it just so happens that I just finished reading Bernard Lewis’ 2002 book “What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity In the Middle East.”  He takes 105 pages to itemize, often from journals and diaries, the gradual contacts of Islamics with the West, from the beginning of Islam, and the resulting modernizing influences of the West over the centuries on the Middle East. (This book was written for the Western reader so my apologies for copying much of what may already be known.) Then he goes on to say: Read More

The Unseen During The Olympics

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Watching the Olympics in Beijing has got me to thinking about China again.  I’d like to make a point about the legacy of the damage done in the last 50 years.

You might like to read “The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up” by Liao Yiwu.

Master Deng Kuan, abbot of the Gu Temple, established in the Sui Dynasty sometime around the turn of the sixth century, was 103 when the writer Liao Yiwu met him while mountain climbing in Sichuan Province, in 2003, and Yiwu’s oral histories begin with him.

This is from a review of the book by Howard W. French, a former career foreign correspondent for the New York Times, who covered China from 2003 to 2008 and who teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism:

We know the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s, the party went on a nationwide witch hunt for supposed liberals, reactionaries and capitalist roaders. Relating the Chinese experience amounts to a way of averting one’s eyes from something that may seem too hard to comprehend. It also encourages a kind of blurry forgetting, a storing away of things on a high, musty shelf that has been officially encouraged by China’s leaders, who are most keen to manage this story because they have the most to lose from a more vigorous and thorough telling. Thus the famous posthumous verdict by Deng Xiaoping, who judged that Mao had been 70 percent “correct” and 30 percent wrong. Yes, Mao’s errors, like the 30 million or more deaths from starvation caused by the crash industrialization of the Great Leap Forward, were doozies, but by and large he kept the country on the right path, avers Deng Xiaoping. Deng’s past has also benefited from studious airbrushing to avoid mussing up the standard portrait of him as a kindly, strong and nearly infallible second father to the nation. His enthusiastic role in violently suppressing “rightists” in the late 1950s has been placed out of bounds by the gatekeepers who determine which subjects can be researched and which cannot.

Master Deng’s life, and almost every other oral history in Liao Yiwu’s new book, appropriately subtitled Real-Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up , gives the lie to this entire vision, making this a deeply subversive book. I do not mean the reader should expect a tract or treatise on Chinese politics. Instead, Liao casts aside the official “facts” of events and replaces them with “memories”–with the resulting contrast between the censored record and interior consciousness revealing a post-1949 China that has never stopped being a traumatic place. At their root, all of Liao’s “real-life” stories share something fundamental: a fantastic, dreamy and nightmarish quality. Each story provokes a moment’s thought about its relationship to the truth.
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“The River of Lost Footsteps”

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The Bangkok Post review says that this timely book by Thant Myint-U, published by Faber and Faber London, rewrites 3,500 years of Burmese history “in order to enrich today’s debate on Burma and establish a strong base for future analysis and consideration.”

The author is critical of the “absence of nuance” and the “ahistorical” nature of current debate on the country. Therefore, Myint-U focuses on why Burma’s military machine developed into such a powerful force by General Ne Win, the country’s “supremo” from 1962 virtually until his death in 2002, and why the country became so isolated.
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Speaking Of Hope

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Mexican journalist and author, Gustavo Esteva, in writing recently about the wrenching repression and resistance in Mexico and the world, draws an analogy:

    The Pot and the Vapor

In the midst of the daily struggle, an image attempting to express what has happened in Oaxaca is now circulating.

Years of fierce corruption and overflowing authoritarianism converted Oaxaca into a pressure cooker above a slow flame. [Governor]Ulises Ruiz added fuel to the fire until the pressure hurled the lid off on June 14th 2006, with the repression of a teachers sit-in. APPO [Popular Assembly] articulated the discontent brewing inside the pot and converted it into transformative action. The ferocity of the federal forces put a new heavy lid on top of Oaxaca on November 25th, but the fire continues. Small holes, that opened in the lid through people’s initiatives, alleviate the pressure, but they remain insufficient. The pressure continues to accumulate and in any moment will hurl the lid off once more. The experiences accumulated in the last year might provide ways to let the pressure escape in a more organized way, but nobody can foresee what will happen. There are too many forces at odds with each other.

Another metaphor can contribute to an understanding of what is coming. More than 35 years ago, in the final pages of La revolución interrumpida, Adolfo Gilly quoted some phrases from Leon Trotsky: “Without leading organizations, the masses’ energy will dissipate, like vapor not contained by a boiler. But be that as it may, what propels the movement is not the boiler nor the piston, but the vapor.”

What is this “real material, invisible and indefinable” that Trotsky calls “the masses’ energy” and compares with “vapor?” In contrast to this, adds Gilly, that material has “sense, understanding, and reason and because of this does not dissipate, like vapor, but endures transmuted in experience, invisible for those that believe that the movement resides in the piston and the boiler (in other words, in the organizational apparatuses), but existing in unexpected subsequent aspects of daily life.”

Oaxaca is still “at full steam”. Part of what was generated in 2006 has condensed itself into an experience and transformed into a behavior: it is in the daily attitudes of many people, who will never return to the old “normalcy.” Another portion of the “vapor” generated yesterday, or that comes up every day, propels many initiatives. And there is “vapor” that continues to accumulate, that raises the pressure and that perhaps is trying to redefine its course once it succeeds in liberating itself from everything still retaining it—which is not a boiler with a piston, but the oppressive lid of the repression that continues: political and police mechanisms blocking off the popular initiative.

The obsession to ascertain who generates that “vapor” persists, according to the prejudice that people can not take initiative themselves. It’s taken for granted that somebody, a person or a group, would be throwing rocks and hiding the hand: it would have manipulated the docile masses and would want to continue doing so. The media constructed their leaders, presenting as leaders people better adapted to the image they were creating to better prepare public opinion to the violent liquidation of the movement. The authorities did the same to organize co-optation and repression; they seem now to believe that the APPO will be paralyzed or at least disabled while those that supposedly lead the movement remain in prison. Similar attitudes have been observed in the left, inside and outside the movement. Those who think that what has happened would be inconceivable without a leading organization, now see it dissolved or weakened and want to renovate it or reconstruct it. Or else, when the absence of real leaders of the APPO is recognized, everything is transferred to the past: that deficiency would have provoked the evaporation of the spontaneous popular outbreak. The popular energy would have dissipated, like vapor not contained in a boiler.

When the question is not about seizing the State apparatuses, but about changing the social reality, the vapor, which continually condenses in experience, operates in its dissipation, spilling itself onto reality. Occasionally adapting itself in boilers and the pistons generated by the vapor itself and used for certain tasks, the vapor can not be contained in “organized apparatuses” nor be driven by “leading organizations”. For those apparatuses and organizations to be relevant and play a role, they should renounce the pyramidal structure, when a web is needed, and they must learn to lead by obeying. Furthermore, they should operate on an appropriate scale, adapting themselves continually to conditions and styles of the real men and women that are always the vapor, the impulse, and those finally determining course and reach of the whole movement.

Mechanical metaphors always fall short of the richness of real social processes. But the pot and the vapor are useful images to observe the complex present situation, in Oaxaca and greater Mexico, when what is most important seems to be invisible.

Then he has this to say about hope:

More than 30 years ago, Ivan Illich observed that, “The Promethean ethos has now eclipsed hope. Survival of the human race depends on its rediscovery as a social force.” [Deschooling Society, London: Marion Boyars, 1996, 105. (First published in 1972).]

In my view, there is nothing about the Zapatistas more important than their contribution to hope. Given the current situation in Oaxaca, Mexico and the world, we are still hoping for the best but prepared for the worst. In our context, hope is not the conviction that something will happen, but the conviction that something makes sense, whatever happens.

San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca Mexico January 2008

(Italics are mine. If the above reads a bit rough in places it is likely due to the best job that the translator from Spanish could do.)

Hmmm…

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I must be getting old. Came across this shocking article in Newsweek describing teen sex taking place openly in public parks in Santiago Chile. Actually I remember being agape at the couples in public parks in Guadalajara Mexico when I visited a few years ago.

It reminded me of something my Thai friend who teaches at Kasetsart University in Bangkok told me a couple weeks ago. She said AT LEAST half of the boys at the university are openly gay. I asked if it was a reaction to so many girls chasing foreigners and she said definitely no. It’s more of a fashion thing she said. It has become “hip.”

Next wednesday night there is a talk at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club about expat authors and their writing about Thailand. Apparently, after all these years, expat writing is branching out from “older man looking for the hooker with a heart of gold only to arrive at a no good end” to more literary material. Ought to be interesting.

On a more mundane level, son Doug and his wife Luk left Bangkok today to return to Koh Samui. Another dentist appointment tomorrow and a doctor appointment Friday.

Update: The Bangkok Post had an article a couple days ago that the Thai military is trying to decide how to designate a third sex.

Writing From The Ground

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New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof (incidentally from my home state of Oregon) has written an excellent review of William T. Vollman’s book entitled “Poor People” that reflects a deep understanding of the issues underlying poverty.

From my 30 years of work with impoverished people in the US and from six years of travel in impoverished countries, what Kristof says rings true for me.

Vollman interviewed poor people in several countries and asked them questions like “do you consider yourself poor?” Or “why are poor people poor?” Or “are men and women equally poor?” Or “why are you poor?” Or “why are some people rich and some poor?”

Kristof considered Vollman’s book a kind of “tour guide of the slums.” The answers were not very illuminating without some larger context…just as I pointed out in my last blog entry on getting information and making connections between the pieces.

Referring to just one issue, health care, Kristof says that before seeing the effects of the hurricane on New Orleans, he “had thought that the obstacle for poor people—and the reason they die as a result of deficient health care —was that they couldn’t afford it. But that’s only one factor.

What we’ve seen over and over is that even if there is a free clinic, the poor family may depend on a single mother who doesn’t have a car or driver’s license and so can’t get there. Or she can’t afford the gas. Or her car doesn’t have insurance. Or she doesn’t understand how serious the symptoms are. Or she is working at a low-level job where she can’t just ask for time off to take a child to the clinic. Or she doesn’t speak English. Or she’s illegal and is worried that INS agents may look at the clinic’s records. Or she’s got three other small children and can’t leave two at home while she takes her sick child on a series of bus rides to the clinic. Or…the possibilities are endless. The point is that making medical care accessible to the poor requires much more than making it free.”

Economic-development experts promise that with the correct mix of promarket policies, poor countries will eventually prosper. But policy may not be the only problem. Geography may be a problem. Tropical, landlocked nations may never enjoy access to the markets and new technologies they need to flourish in the global economy. In Oaxaca, only government workers (who usually live in Oaxaca City) get free health care. For the poorest of the poor there are no accessible clinics at all without a 7 hour bus ride out of the mountains…even if they had the money. As a result the infant death rate in Oaxaca is twice what it is in Mexico City.

Comics…A New Way Of Thinking?

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Have been thinking that I need a new way of thinking. Like comics. Not Donald Duck or the Road Runner although those have their virtues. In Salon.com I came across an interview of Alan Moore, who the author, Scott Thrill, thinks reinvented the comic book as the cutting-edge literary medium of our (whose?) day.

Some thoughts of his: “Connection is very useful; intelligence does not depend on the amount of neurons we have in our brains, it depends on the amount of connections they can make between them. So this suggests that having a multitude of information stored somewhere in your memory is not necessarily a great deal of use; you need to be able to connect this information into some sort of usable palette…I think that complexity is one of the major issues of the 20th and 21st centuries..We have much more information, and therefore we are much more complex as individuals and as a society. And that complexity is mounting because our levels of information are mounting.”

He goes on: “Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I’ve found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as something that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they’ve referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information, from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature…If you can find a new synthesis…you can help people find new ways of seeing, thinking and dealing with the times in which they find themselves…”

Hmmm. This need to make sense of our world…to find meaning…I think, is part of what is giving rise to the popularity of radical religious fundamentalism in the world today. Simple. Just pick up the Bible or the Koran. The “connections” are all there…or at least the ones some of us are looking for. Or we could read the comics. Or…

But this all assumes we have the the money and the “luxury” of taking time out from putting food on the table. In other words, how do we access relevent information and when do we think about it? And what if we don’t have the language and education to understand the terms. And what if you are a Trique, or Mixtec indigenous living in the mountains of Oaxaca and all you know is that your land is being taken away?

Atenco Foreshadowed Oaxaca

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A brutal repression and massacre of resistors by federal and state police in the small city of Atenco, 15 miles south of Mexico City, in May of 2006, foreshadowed the repression that was to follow June through November 2006 in Oaxaca. Government forces were attempting to crack down on some flower vendors that they assumed were associated with activists demonstrating against government acquisition of communal land for an airport. A “>video on YouTube is the best (graphic) depiction and explanation by analysts and historians that I have seen so far…with English subtitles…of the machinations the government has historically used in Mexico:

A Mexican-American friend who was a student in 1968 in Guadalajara, told me that when students were demonstrating in the soccer stadium in Mexico City , police snipers killed some soldiers to make it look like the students had done the shooting. Immediately, police opened fire on the students…killing hundreds.

In July 1975 the army evicted squatters from a section of Oaxaca City, herded them into buses and imprisoned them overnight while what remained behind was burned. According to Murphy and Stepick in Social Inequality in Oaxaca…a History of Resistance and Change 1991 “the state director of the federal public works agency masterminded the invasion in order to increase his political power by recruiting support among the urban masses (against the demands of the poor). The director’s plan had been to convince the owner of a large tract of land to relinquish a portion of it in exchange for the introduction of streets and water on the remainder of his extensive holdings. The agency’s director used university students with ties to the Communist Youth Party as intermediaries to implement the plan.”

Sounds familiar. A plan sure of alienating the middle class from the dissenters.

Seeing Red Over Mao in Alhambra

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Values in China today are only carried forward by the culture largely as a result of the destruction of ethical and civic standards wrought by Mao during the Cultural Revolution. In other words, in my experience, there is generally no honor given in China today for verbal or written contracts and the visitor will find him or herself at the mercy of Chinese pragmatism.

In China today portraits of Mao are everywhere and due to the controlled press few Chinese know the truth of their own modern history. And I am horrified when I hear “Maoism” being bandied about…even here in Oaxaca Mexico!

To understand how this came about, to understand the ability of the Chinese to dupe Westerners and to understand the anger of the Chinese community in Alhambra over the hanging of Warhol-like images of Mao you can read the 1995 “Mao: The Unknown Story,” an 832-page biography of Mao written by the husband and wife team of historians, Jon Halliday and Jung Chang who herself was a Red Guard during the Revolution. It depicts Mao Zedong, the former paramount leader of China and Chairman of the Communist Party of China, as being responsible for mass murder (upwards of 30-70 million people) on a scale greater than that committed under the rule of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.
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