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Entries in human rights (61)

Monday
Dec112017

The Yellers - Ice Girl

Chapter 15.

I sat on the garden balcony in Hanoi one morning.  

I cleaned The Dream Machine.

There’s an invisible guy next door and they have an infant. He raises his voice. People yell here. It’s normal like breathing. They get yelled at when they are kids, like the man yelling at his infant until the kid balls. Tears stream until mother rescues her darling from the emotional abuse. Yelling affects their self-esteem and their wellbeing. Children will learn how to reject this yeller.

They, in turn will grow & learn to raise their voice in a whining, demanding yelling overture. They will be passive and then turn on the yell.

As they age they turn off. They turn off their ears. Their ears are assaulted nonstop 24/7. The volume control is broken. They grow up to be non-listeners. Never engaged unless marriage and procreation reaction recreation speaks.

The adult savors this POWER. It’s a throwback to his parents, a generation raised with fear and intimidation and suspicion and insecurity and poverty and informers and empty promises and empty hope and loud authority voices. Some voices are real. Others are nightmares.

Hope is the last evil thing that dies, yells his wife.

Take out the garbage fat man. Lose face idiot. Hide your shame. Raise your voice like a flag of authority. Signal your displeasure with the infants. Get them in line. Shape them up because you can’t ship them out. You raise them to yell with the best of them.

They yell and bellow like stuck pigs bleating sheep cackling crows breaking palm branches sending shivers down your spineless self pity wearing regret and anger and manifesting fear inside narrow tight lives under long florescent lights shattering glare.

They will grow up to be passive-aggressive yellers.

They will cremate you and take your photo to the artist who will memorize your face with graphite.

Generations stare at your sad stoic frozen face offering fruit and water. Survivors burn incense so your spirit has something to eat. It will not be angry, yelling, demanding and pleading. Feed me. Ancestors live in fear of the dead.

One day in the not-too-distant future of this long now your dead ancestors will learn to make sounds, then words, phrases, and sentences called talk. They grow louder until achieving decibels required by the living. They will compete in yelling contests with talking monkeys.

Someone - a parent, boss, lover, or stranger - will yell at kids and they will ignore old yeller. Doesn’t matter who it is, family or friend. Ignore the humans, beasts and gods. Old yeller will yell again, a little louder. No answer. 

I wait for them to get their yell going. Louder says listener cowering inside silence.

After I’ve made them yell three times I will answer with a whisper. They can barely hear me so they yell again and again. I have conditioned them to my living catatonic neurotic auditory nightmare. 

Finally, to teach them a lesson I will answer. Softly. They can’t hear me. They have to raise their voice to compete with the other yellers around them. I reject them for yelling at me. I am easily distracted. I nurture chaos and entropy. Ah, the glare of bright artificial ancestor passion for pain and tongue-lashings. 

Two ghosts whisper, ‘Give them 1,000 lashes with your tongue.

I have 1,000 arms and 1,000eyes.

I am an infinite ocean of wisdom.    

Ha Noise people grow up in small tight spaces where people yell and make racket and talk over each other and don’t listen and yell louder to be heard and others block them out or ignore them completely and the yelling gets vicious like the starving dog downstairs, howling, Feed Me!

Dave pisses in his underwear and his wife lives in her pajamas. They are a cheap red pastel flowering cotton brand decorated with brown pandas.

He yells at her and the kid because he had little choice in the matter when his father and mother told him he was going to marry the slob who learned to yell and ignore her parents which is how they evolved into this higher intelligent life form. To breed or not to breed, that is the quest-ion.

The other day Leo passed one of those narrow minded little hovels guarded by doors and rusting sliding gates. Narrow alleys are filled with sardine dwellings. Discarded sofas, people cooking in the alley using round perforated compressed coal, workers hauling cement, bricks, wires, stones, creating a

brave new world

with Marxist methods of production: knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer, control stick elephant, and stick.

In the street packed with screaming, beeping careening cycles, garbage carts, and kids playing fast and loose near women selling bananas from broken bamboo baskets was a dead dog. A chilled out sausage dog. Splayed legs. Glassy brown eyes. Inert.

This spectacular spectacle attracted people pouring from their shops. Sewing ladies held a needle and thread in air, a woman chopping greens held a leaf, a man oiling a bike a can, a woman working meat caressed a knife dripping blood, a girl held her red cartoon balloon, a retired man gripped his glass of urine beer, a grandmother held her future yeller offspring - all staring at the dead dog as rush hour motorcycles beeped impatiently trying to negotiate through the crowd to get home to families, food, television and their beloved pet.

An old thin man emerged from his small dark utilitarian space where millions live in the dark can’t see the dirt and hide from strangers. He grabbed the dog’s two rear legs, lifting it into air. It draped. He resembled a hunter holding a wild hare after canines flushed it running fast filled with fear, afraid and free.

He was in shock standing there, holding the dripping dead dog as blood formed a small pool on the street surrounded by angry confused surprised voices of friends, neighbors, and strangers pealing like bells in his brain saying something, offering suggestions, advice, warnings, predictions, songs, rituals, chants, musical operas, significant silences, stares, or no appropriate words inside or outside the mystery so he stood there holding the legs and gently laid the dog closer to the gutter as the dog’s body eased itself into itself and he turned away from people, noise, confusion returning to his dark interior space.

Inside every family’s deep dark space is a main room and altar for dead relatives, candles, fruit, and burning incense.

The black and white and color images reminded Leo of the Chinese artist in Maija, the poor pig village near the Fujian, university in China where he lived for two years riding his bike across forested hills, up and down narrow dirt back roads, watching butterflies mate in dust, old people planting, harvesting, threshing rice, women lugging piles of white cauliflower to market in bamboo baskets suspended on poles and zooming down long small tight dusty paths past athletic sweat shop shoe factories filled with morose girls and hunched over women threading clacking Butterfly machines making uppers, lowers, tongues and seamless survival wages until he reached a narrow street to sit drinking Fujian green tea with a man in his shop. 

Further up the hill were red wooden shops with appliances, market stalls, street food, electrical stores and hacking butchers. In a small mud and brick place was an artist. His job was drawing pictures of dead people. 

After someone died a relative gave him a common small black and white image, the kind from 1949 when the country declared itself free, independent and democratic. Benevolent Chairman Mao (our grandfather leader bless his heart) smiled at the masses before ordering peasants, “Eat Grass.”

38 million died of starvation.

Their tired B&W image is used throughout life in documents for residence, work, school and party politics.

The people had the Three Iron Rice Bowls. A guaranteed living space, guaranteed work unit, and guaranteed rice rations. It was a great deal.

Everyone was treated the same, wore the same clothing, said the same thing and followed the leader like kids playing a game. No one got out of line. Comrade. 

The bent nail gets hammered down! yelled a Chinese teacher next door to Leo’s classroom. 80 students applauded.

The Maija artist accepted the photo from a grieving relative and set up his easel. Using a magnifying glass he memorized her face. A pencil captured an 8x10 likeness.

On the chipped plaster walls were examples of his work: peasants, farmers, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives and young and old Pioneer communist members with tight red scarves knotting their necks, suffocating their passion. 

Today he sketched an old unsmiling stoic woman, a sad resigned peasant. She suffered. She’d suffered at the hands of the nationalists then the communists then the new economic corrupt greedy revolutionaries.

She suffered the indignities of old age.

A battered three-string wooden musical instrument hung on the wall near red streaks of paint inside his fine art museum. A black fly on the artist’s left shoulder rubbed its feelers together. 

An old man with an emaciated skeleton face and paper-thin arms carefully opened a bag of Fujian tea. He poured tight compressed leaves into his bony right hand. He dispersed this into an old chipped blue pot. He added water from a battered red thermos. Leo shared tea watching the artist work. The likeness was perfect. The tea was delicious with an acidic after burn.

     These images decorate family altars. Dusty images rest in city temples. Death is a big deal. Ancestor worship = fear of ghosts.

     Do all the ancestors hear, understand and acknowledge all the yelling from the talking monkeys? Yes. Do they open their mouths requesting a little peace and quiet? Yes. On anniversary death days they meet all the other ancestors inside narrow alleys where piss, drain water, used cooking oil, daily slop and vicious liquids drain into punctured cement holes flowing along narrow passageways slanted toward the middle.      

The dead formed a rubber stamp committee to address family noise. ‘It’s come to our attention dear comrades, dear people, dearly beloved family and friends...that we have a communication issue here in the neighborhood.’

     ‘Silence! We are trying to sleep a long peaceful sleep. Leave us be. Shut the fuck up.’

  Years later in Hanoi a woman commented to five million friends, here I am in Sapa. Look. A church. I am in front of it.

  A blond European tourist wearing rubber flip-flops walked past posers. Her t-shirt read, Love My Bones. She is a marrow transplant specialist.

Ice Girl in Banlung
  

Tuesday
Nov282017

Life in Cambodia - Ice Girl

Chapter 10.

Ice Girl told Leo about Cambodia life. People here are cunning, devious and scheming.

They smile but behind the smile is repressed anger. Darkness.

It’s pure survivor behavior. They have little or no formal education. Impoverished adults think educating their children wastes time and m-o-n-e-y. Food and survival is their daily priority.

  Let’s Eat is their mantra.

Millions here mill around, stare, interrupt others, are rude, and do not LISTEN, preferring to talk over others.

  They think the louder one is the smarter one. They are easily intimidated by a speaker’s volume.

  Signal-noise.

  They demonstrate behavior and attitudes similar to chimps. Yeah, yeah.

  Their #1 priority involves searching, finding, preparing and eating food. Priority #2 is searching, finding, preparing and fucking females. Sleeping, #3 is popular before, during and after food or suffering a small sexual pleasure death in eight minutes. Sleeping is the best meditation in the tropics.

  Fucking is popular whenever the male, the ALPHA animal in the tribe demands it. This is natural selection. People live on Earth for two reasons: work and breed.

  Read and write, asked Leo.

  No. Work and breed. Female members are passive. They are conditioned by DNA genetics, environment and family expectations to be passive. Produce more workers, more tools.

Children are tools.

  If they refuse to submit to the male they are beaten. If they talk about it they are beaten. If they enjoy it they are beaten. If they run away they are captured and beaten. If they suffer humiliation they are beaten. If they are beaten they are beaten. If they live to tell the tale they are beaten. If they die while being beaten their corpse is beaten. They are beat.

   The longer I work the longer I live. The longer I breed the longer I live. In theory. My main objective is work and breed. Then I am slaughtered. Life is a cheap bitch.

  I see, said Leo, same in China. Our one-child policy is genocide.

 Later, sitting across a rural red road in Battenbang, Leo is a witness. You have to cross the road to learn something. He extrapolates, illuminates, illustrates, and desiccates.

  A family moved into a shack near muddy waters. They set up a food joint selling steamed corn and fast fried foods.

  There’s a mother, two boys 17 & 20 and two girls, the youngest about 15. The girls either belong to the mother or they’ve come from poor areas looking for domestic work. They are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

  No papa. He’s history in the tragic family fairy tale, one of millions throughout the magic kingdom. Long gone in the long now.

  Mom is at the market. Incest Is Best, male, 17, wears a towel-sarong. A girl sets up a glass display case on a wooden counter with her back toward him. He slides up behind her and presses his crotch against her.

  She freezes. Imitating sexual movement, he whispers, little girl, this is what happens to you. I have a little red rooster. Do you like it? I have big power.

  She is powerless. She stands there taking it. Silent. She feels like crying. Her tears create a river. She floats away searching for compassion and meaning in a cruel world without freedom.

 Rule #1: Boys and men run the show. They pay lip service to girls and women. It’s the old work and breed paradigm. You are my property.

Sexual harassment by immature boys and older men (with money, power and control) and a high level of testosterone, IS a game. Simple sex. No education. Zero responsibility. No morals. No ethics. No education.

  This explains why millions of girls have babies and boys run away. Zero responsibility.

Girls and women tolerate it because:

a)    it’s an unpleasant hard, cold cruel fact of life

b)   they are told to submit to males

c)    they live in Fear & Ignorance

d)   they are considered stupid and second class citizens

e)    they have no human rights

f)    no quest-ions allowed

g)    it’s the LAW of the jungle

h)   it’s expected

i)  they have no voice, no way out

j)  they don’t have the power to say or do anything to stop it

k) mother is not sympathetic. it happened to her. that’s life so they say

Ice Girl in Banlung

Wednesday
Nov012017

Running Capitalist Dog - Ice Girl 

Chapter 6.

You can say that again, sang Leo, a broken-hearted brainwashed exhausted starving peasant practicing free speech with the fluency of intellectual rational objectivity at a Reform Through Re-education labor unit on the edge of the Gobi desert or Hell on Earth.

  He was short, fast and deadly.

  He was condemned to the labor unit for quest-ioning heavily armed moral authority at Beijing Abnormal University. It was the beginning of the Brand NEW Cultural Revolution lasting 10,000 brutal years.

 

Quanzhou, Fujian, China

  China was systemically dismantled and converted into a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. It was sold at global discount stores labeled Made In China By Poor Illiterate Sweatshop Slaves.

  Millions of educated people were purged from jobs. All social connections were severed. Informers prospered. Families turned each other in to save their skin. Dignity and self-respect devolved into humiliating samzen or self-criticism sessions.

  Yes, they cried. I am guilty, stupid and the cause of all my suffering.

  Yes, they wailed. I am a Running Capitalist Dog. Have mercy. Where do I sign my glorious true confession?

  Here, said Authority. On the dotted line.

  After accepting Leo’s coerced confession interrogation thugs dressed as acrobats rehearsing for a Beijing Opera beat Leo with tofu sandwiches and sand-filled rubber hoses.

A clandestine CIA torture manual instructed them how to adapt modern waterboarding tactics with ancient Chinese water torture techniques.

  Sink or swim sucker, said a diving instructor in a bell jar.

 

Unemployed and pregnant, Quanzhou, China.

  They hung Leo upside down in the asylum. They spun him around until he became a flashing strobe light jellyfish. A literate starving peasant applied electrodes to his genitals. An illiterate starving peasant cranked up the juice on an old car battery.

  Leo talked. Leo stuttered. Leo cried for mercy.

  Leo screamed, Why me? Not me!

  Denial will kill you, said interrogators. You are an enemy of The One State. You are a clear and present danger to social harmonious stability. Questioning authority is forbidden. Repent Running Dog!

  Leo screamed, I’m a mongrel cur. I will never ever ask another quest-ion, have mercy. They cranked up jungle juice shocking Leo back to a Brave New World.

  His memory was erased.

  This happened because corrupt Chinese party leaders choking on greed, concubines, estates, and gold plated chopsticks with their futures on the line were not pleased one lost day when, in a Correct Political Thought class, Leo had the temerity to ask, Why do we have to read Mao’s Little Red Book, it contains nothing of value, it is outdated, filled with mush for pigs, doublethink ideologies and peasant socialist agrarian social big brother control plans, mindless propaganda and is obsolete.

  Shock and awe filled airless silence.

  Leo was denounced before the entire population. Leaders took care of Leo. They executed all his relatives. That’ll teach the little SOB, said a bureaucrat.

  Authority has spoken, leaders said, standing with Leo wearing shackles of regret and loss and remorse code watching his ancestral Sichuan home erupt in a blazing inferno, hearing his ghost parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandmother, and grandfather scream for mercy in Dante’s fire.

  I will get revenge, Leo reflected in the Gobi. Someday I will stand in front of a tank on Main Street in Beijing screaming, “Run me over you bastards!”

 Until then, Leo’s task based re-education reform activity or Understanding by Design pedagogical reality meant hauling buckets of night soil shit out of labor unit shacks near his straw and mud hovel.

  All day. Every single fucking day.

  He fed it to pigs on Animal Farm. Some pigs are more equal than other pigs. Oink, oink.

 After days, weeks, months, years, decades and centuries hauling loose smelly shit Leo received a Certificate Of Merit and Achievement at an award ceremony.

 20.5 million political-social prisoners witnessed the event.

  Maija, Fujian, China

Fat party work unit leaders exclaimed to tumultuous applause, You Comrade Leo, carrier of the people’s glorious shit, have learned your humbling life lesson through re-education and reform. You learned the hard way. The hard way is the smart way.

You have reformed your thought and behavior in accordance with Confusion moral and ethical social principles. You are now a skeleton, an example of a good, wise and moral person. Congratulations. You may now return to society as a useful citizen.

Here’s a map of the Middle Kingdom, a pocketknife, a handful of rice and a free bottle of water.

  Survivors exhaled with joy. They celebrated his freedom with festive drinking, eating, dancing and tons of free shit. If it can happen to him, it can happen to us, said one of 20.5 million.

  Shouldering his bag Leo wandered out of the Gobi. It was hotter than hell and almost as expensive. It’s a long fucking walk and I lived to tell the tale. I am alive. Leo experienced freedom from anger and attachment with mindfulness.

 Walking, whispered Antonio Machado a Spanish poet, makes the road.

 Timeless metaphorical themes of love, hope, despair, treachery, revenge, betrayal, alienation, loneliness, boredom, loss, choices, consequences, morals, ethics, values, principles, free will vs. determinism, and abandonment coagulating with DNA in a cosmic soup struggled to find clean water, education and medicine expressing irony, symbolism, satire, comedy, weather and sex. 

 Ice Girl in Banlung

 

Maija, Fujian, China

Saturday
Aug052017

Give Blood

Experience, a wonderful little teacher nowadays said, giving blood helps someone who needs it more than you. Survival luck. Giving blood gifts life.

Living safely is dangerous.

Lucky had rare A-. He donated after receiving permission from Ankara medical authorities. Yes you may, blood is no argument.

The blood bus sat near a busy downtown intersection. He walked past pretzel sellers, cascading water fountains and shit covered statues of hero soldiers firing rusty guns into cobalt skies.

Paying attention he heard imprisoned Turkish journalists crying, begging, and pleading for free speech in a totalitarian Deep State of Fear.

A voice in the wilderness cried out, “The application of Articles 6 and 7 of the Anti-Terror Law in combination with Articles 220 and 314 of the Turkish Criminal Code leads to abuses. In short, writing an article or making a speech can lead to a court case and a long prison sentence for membership or leadership in a terrorist organization. Together with possible pressure on the press by state officials and possible firing of critical journalists, this situation can lead to a widespread self-censorship.”

Dissent is terrorism, said the angry frightened Prime Minister, slapping a Soma miner for booing him in public. Oh the shame.

Lucky climbed on the bloodmobile express.

A smiling Bulgarian nurse asked health questions in broken English. Another nurse took blood pressure. She attached a tourniquet to his left arm. “You have excellent veins.”

She swabbed one and slid a needle in. “Open and close your left hand.” Blood river flowed.

Outside tinted windows in blinding sun Turkish, Armenian, Kurdish and Syrian parents gripped children’s wrists. Fingers never touched. Scraggly half-starved men unloaded boxes of tomatoes from a truck. Light reflected off cheerless sunglasses. Savage salivating salvage teams folded and loaded crushed cardboard boxes into metal carts.

Sad affective-disordered businessmen spilled black market Iranian nuclear fission material and Syrian VX chemical liquids into Ankara’s water supply. Sharing is caring.

Suchness, a heavy responsibility weighted lives.

Nurses waved goodbye, “You brought someone luck by donating life.”

“It’s a small powerful gift. One stranger helps another stranger.”

101 people lined up to donate platelets. “This should be fun,” said a girl to her mother, “I love needles.”

Tears flowed into The Dream Sweeper.

The Language Company

Sunday
Jul162017

Take Amazing Risks

“To do amazing things you have to take amazing risks and suffer greatly,” said Zeynep, his five-year old genius friend in Bursa, Turkey.

 “Here,” she said, “many a-dolts stay with their mothers forever and a day because they are afraid of freedom and accepting responsibility for their lives.

“They eat fear morning noon and night. They are afraid to speak their honest feelings, to express their innate desire for independence.

“Learned helplessness. They are willing victims of traditional conservative attitudes and values. Free will is a foreign language. They are scared of taking risks, letting go and growing. I may grow old but I’ll never grow up. If I grow up I die.”

“I feel the same way.”

One day while sharing lunch and drawing in notebooks, Lucky said, “When I was nine I was going on 50. Now I am 50 going on nine. I exist outside adult time.”

“We are passing through,” Zeynep said lighting a candle in darkness.

After Ankara he’d accepted a new adventure in Bursa. This shocked everyone in the capital lower case. They assumed he’d stay with them forever. Students and teachers celebrated his transition with a sparkling cake. Women cried sadness and joy.

“We are not here for a long time, we are here for a good time,” said Sappho the poetess.

One adult student who’d articulated her desire to move to Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire seeking an educational engineering job in a quality control factory school producing obedient robotic idiot children and live with her boyfriend cowered behind her futile quest for independence from over-protective parents. “My father won’t let me.”

Oh the shame.

“Take control of your life. Get a grip. Let go. Jump. Discover courage and your wings on the way down.”

The Language Company