educational paradise

Inside a Myanmar prison block of teachers' apartments

reminding him of Chinese reform through re-education schools

in Sichuan and Fujian

where he lived, taught and breathed years ago

hearing underpaid, undersexed and overworked teachers smash sticks on podiums

using fear as a motivator screaming

wake up idiots

near five-story class tombs

surrounded by walls, dirt, silver strands of barb wire

removed from glowing rice paddies, soaring white herons

Burmese pythons constricting choices and consequences

freedom of speech with Big Brother in deep shadows

near goats foraging in trash as village women lugged buckets of water on thin shoulders

or balanced stacks of bricks and rocks on heads to build a new wall

a new tomorrow, forging new futures for the monied class

a man read a newspaper after 50 years of censorship in Myanmar

as sunlight streaked morning clouds above Shan mountains

inhaling a glorious day in educational paradise.

Repair time.

Salute the sun.

 

Khmer new year april 14-16

On Khmer New Year’s day, a bitter mother at a guesthouse wearing blue cotton floral teddy bear pajamas decorates the family altar with cans and bottles of soft drinks, coconuts, durian, perfume, two crystal glasses of milk, yellow candles, red candy, bread, rice, oranges, apples, water, incense, photos of dead relatives, cockroaches, howling vicious fucking canines, balloons, clouds, condoms, clones and clowns. She has a terrible temper.       

“Wake up idiot!” she yells at her infantile hubby.

She is one among millions of sad angry neglected women.

She turns on the Idiot Box. LOUD. Her daughters, 4, and 6, are entranced by the visual Apsara circus. They never read books. This is weird because their father was a bookseller in the capital for six years. What happened to literature, what happened to paper, books, education, and critical thinking wonders Ice Girl.

Now he sleeps alone with Boring, having performed his sexual duty, rents out rooms and roars around the forgotten river town on a souped up 125cc noise machine alleviating suffering, spinning his loss, his intellectual wheels, pretending to be important, stirring up dust.

It’s rare to see anyone in Cambodia reading anything on paper, unless it’s a directive from unaccountable government command and control centers sustaining their economic dominance perpetuating 20 years of passive hopelessness. Or forged land paper deals screwing illiterate peasants. So it goes.

Survivors read empty streets on swivel necks. Survivors read rice. Survivors read (empty) bowls. Survivors read money. Survivors read blank faces in rear view bike mirrors. Survivors fall in love with their reflection pretending it is real. Hello Beauty.

Beauty is the mother of Death.

Leo and Ice Girl turned a page away from morning, away from scattered grains of rice in a broken bamboo basket feeding wild crows.

They are blacker than shadowed faces hiding inside deep dark structures watching the road. Always watching. They stare with hard eyes, said Ice Girl. Their eyes live in the present dancing over flat countryside covering lost forgotten patient rice paddies waiting for a drop of water nourishing green rice, or watching palm groves, coconut, banana trees surrounding thatched bamboo stilt homes as naked children harvest dream kites.

They watch. They never close blind eyes. They watch for invaders from Thailand, America, Vietnam. They wait watching for wives, husbands, children, strangers, soldiers, amputees, and Apsara dancers. Their blind eyes are always switched ON always ready to observe minute cosmic details and subtle movement across miles of land mined flat horizon country penetrating thick green sweet foliage.

Their eyes dance with waiting. Waiting caresses eyes as lovers do: close, feeling fluttering lids, retinas trembling with visual sensory information, data, sensing rational coherent mysteries. Eyes cultivate patience, an essential visual nutrient.

Watching without seeing is their Zen. Living in perpetual darkness they have a small immense critical survival responsibility. They stare far away with telescopic floodlight acuity. This consistent hard eyed vision burns up 85% of their daily energy. The remaining 15% is used for procreation, eating, and speaking.

Eyes practice the eternal art of being silent. They watch past another person during a conversation. They watch each other’s back. They face watching beyond wild where everything unknown matters infinitely. Everything here happens simultaneously.

One anxious dreaded moment in their short sweet life recognizes fear.

Fear is disguised as indecision and loss and ignorance. 

Ice Girl in Banlung

Big Game, Little People

Centuries earlier or later depending on reference points along Time’s thin line on an event horizon as infinity and eternity played post 9/11 dirges, fugues, and blues with a full orchestra in the pits Ahmed resumed his story in the Sahara.

“Fate bites you when you least expect it,” he said waving his hands like wild kites. “Her appetite is insatiable.”

Leonardo was so far removed from 9/11 reality he took no possession of the event. He read Ahmed’s open palms and eyes. Leonardo’s facility for unspoken tongues was legendary. It was all body language and he was fluent in every language. Gestures were a work in progress. Gestures used people.

Ahmed described airplanes and two tall towers. “I’ve read Superman by Nietzsche in Arabic. He said 'God is dead' and God said, 'Nietzsche is dead.'"

Ahmed waved his arms like a Moroccan eagle condemned to freedom yet a prisoner of the sheltering sky. He raised a hand indicating height and smacked his flying hand into his stationary hand. The impact echoed across caramel dunes. He smiled through black teeth. His dark eyes held all the world’s secrets.

Leonardo had no idea where, who, how, why, or when Ahmed received his information. Perhaps from slave and gold trade caravans, perhaps through osmosis.

“Yes,” Ahmed said, “2,974 people from 80 countries died.”

“I see.” They were just two nomads in the desert. They did not talk about Being and Nothingness. They tweaked reality by breathing.

He handed Omar’s book to Ahmed. “Have a look-see.” Ahmed read Tifignagh words.

“He was not as surprised, stunned and scared as all the well meaning myopic tax paying, allegiance singing populace would have the world’s citizens believe in their us or them attitude. He knew they’d be catapulted into a new heavy deep reality, grounded fast, sifting soil, searching for answers, breathing through death masks, deconstructing and revising history while pleading for meaning to their existence. Postmodern dialectics.

“Now they had to figure out the big answer to the big question. Why? It’d keep them busy for life. Their children taught them to ask why? Being extremely impatient and under extreme pressure to be successful in their all-consuming reality, they became extremely frustrated with the “why” question from their children. Parents wanted to be the boss, the grown-ups in complete control. They figured they had all the answers.”

Whoops!

“In the BIG game people with a long history rolled their dice when it was their turn to play and everyone had to go back to the start. They had to read the rules. They had to read the small fine print. The details they casually accepted carte blanche, data they skipped because they didn’t think it was important, the stuff made in Hollywood, the fictional entertainment stuff with happy endings. They were well conditioned to violence, sex and reality television. Now they digested so-called reality television in real time." 

ACIN

Curveball

Media's running stories about falsified intelligence after 9/11 leading British and American politicians to believe Sad Man had WMD. We know he didn't.

The pretense of believing faulty intelligence led to the invasion of Iraq. Politicians and media pushed it down gullible throats ten years ago. Choke choke.

Cost? $1.7 trillion so far. Estimates of $6 trillion over 40 years. 

190,000 dead Iraqis, aid workers, security forces, journalists and insurgents. Millions displaced.

4,500 dead US soldiers.

Curveball, Wikipedia

An excerpt from A Century is Nothing, Subject to Change (2007, 2012).

Curveball came in for short relief. “I know where it is.”

“Where what is?” asked Bumsfeld.

“All the Iraqi mobile labs full of toxins and nerve agents.”

“For an alcoholic spy and fabricator you have a lot of nerve,” screamed the Tenant (CIA). He used to be Lew but now he was just a plain Jane Tenant from a housing project. He was on a speaking tour making big bucks when it happened after his slam dunk fell well short of the net.

“Look,” said Curveball. “I gave German intelligence the high hard stuff. But they don’t understand the American pastime. They said I was past my prime. They co-opted me with women and booze. A hell of a lethal combination, let me tell you. They grilled me over a hot flame. I became a double agent. I was beside myself.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Bumsfeld, “a classic case of split personality, bi-polar disorder and your mother wears combat boots. Anyway, then we distort flimsy evidence from a worthless intel source saying the dictator is an immediate and direct threat to our national security. He’ll attack us in forty-five minutes.”

“But,” said Resident President, waving his one-way tickets to Argentina, “that won’t give me time to finish reading the story about goats to the elementary kids.”

“No butts sir,” said his spokesperson. “You’ll just have to skip a few pages.”

“Isn’t this strategy too vague and deceptive?” asked a garbage collector.

“Vague and deceptive shit happens all the time,” said the man cracking his cool whip. “What planet are you from, amigo? We have the national media eating out of our filthy hands with all this flag waving patriotic bullshit. So, we con the world with these fictitious stories about the dictator being a threat to us with his weapons of mass distraction and start a war to remove him from power.”

“Brilliant,” said a very rich civilian military contractor from Texas. “What then?”

“It’s easy. We know the dictator’s been bluffing all along to maintain his power base. Just ask Curveball here when he sobers up. He’s never had weapons of mass destruction except for the munitions and sarin gas we gave him to support his eight-year war with Iran and commit genocide against the Kurds, but the world doesn’t know that unpleasant fact. His military will collapse like a house of cards. We send in, what, maybe 150,000 military forces, - mostly young, poorly trained national guard units from America’s middle and lower class mind you - take some losses sure, but that’s the price of doing business right, while we establish a quasi-official coalition government with us in total control of everything.”

“What about the local people?” asked a relief worker.

“Screw them I say. We’ve liberated them from a dictator for God’s sake. They should be eternally grateful to us and get down on their knees in desert sand thanking us.”

A public relations flack had an idea.

“For propaganda purposes we’ll let them form a provisional government so they’ll be distracted and think they have real input in how their country is going to be run. It’s like we’ve controlled Kuwait with our remote for years. They increase oil production when we tell them and they shut up when we hit the off button.”

“When do we get the contracts?” asked an oil man from Texas washing his bloody hands.

“All in good time. Rebuilding the oil industry will be tied into larger deals. We’ll start you off with easy contract stuff first: mail delivery, detention camps, prisons, roads, schools, building hospitals, and supplying food to the troops. That will keep your people busy for what, 5-20 years, easy.”

“Sounds great,” said the contractor. “This is going to make a lot of my friends very rich.”

“Hey,” said Hally Burden, “war is good business. Politics is business and business is politics.”

Ministry of tourism

Welcome to The Ministry of Tourism in Kampot.

It's near The Ministry of Fear and The Ministry of Truth.

You can't miss it.

It's next to The Genocide Museum. S-21. 

2,000,000 skulls are waiting for you.

They are delighted to have company in their silent vigil. 

Colonial French buildings will delight your memory of commercial conquest.

It's all a facade. 

Kampot is a sleepy little southern river town.

It is famous for pepper. Pass the sneeze please.

Quack-quack.

Hold hands. Relationships are precious. Life is short.

Let's have a look-see.