Those who say that one never looks upon one’s fellow as an interruption are wrong. I always do. Do you not see I am at play, I was rather enjoying myself! But he insists. One would like to turn away and sigh. There is always the possibility of a humorous response, but only on the condition that no one speak. He insists. During the dance, he comes speaking without thinking, un-one’d, to the point, bumping in he says ‘I was listening to the rain; I was hearing something else,’ and then it is quiet. Your missus gives a hiccup.

This is the act for which one does not account. The approach on which one imposes no law. It is enough, you say, to follow rules on the road and have taxes on my enjoyment. I will not have this last portion of my existence parliament’d upon. But it is all a matter of re-convention. Move the laws from one territory to the other. Rotate the communal crops. But this fellow comes up in a bump, gives a jolt, and takes what’s his. Sets himself a stallion among mares and sheepdogs. It’s goddam insensitivity.

Have it refracted upon. When the approach and your missus. But it is not just my affair. It sets in, the voice of this and now that device, it reaches into small parts of the day and then swells in a deliberate gust, brings all the sedentary sands into spell and upholds them, binds the desires into one, the sense of responsibility, the pharaoh that builds a pyramid between your ears. This is what it feels like when you are a child: ginger-ale can. But then everyone has one, it’s the whole goddam soda machine, adulterated, tranquil. You either put your coins in or go thirsty.

Ah, but I am too tired for this right now. Too tired of such speaking. The ale is glistening to-night, is it not; one would be far gone to denounce it. It is enough that the gulls cry outside. I met a man once who said I would write about these things. The wind, and the air, the birds - not he and his kind, he said. He had come from the side of the river, where he sat with the other saps. We smolder there, he said, drinking orchards. Write of our plight. Ah, but it is not me, I said. And he nodded. I supposed he understood. But he, spitting like cursing as he said it, You will write of Ireland, you will write of the wind, the birds, like all the rest. Then he stumbled back along the path towards the bridge, and I returned to my book.

Hey guys,

I’m sorry if I’m bogarting the blog. Please offer any feedback about this piece that is completely consuming me.  Hope you’re all well,

JP

            The American, Michael Edward Freedham, is sitting down in a comfortable chair at Café Las Quilles. There is the pretty waitress, his fifth cup of coffee now blood-warm before him, the bar and the little percolator working and the fat bartender with the pencil moustache bored and staring out at the organ man. There’s a feeling of summery drowsiness but it’s December. He’s come to the city of Abaixado at the rainy part of the year, right before the disbanding of the police.

In Chicago the winter is too much, all of the snow is businesslike and in stony piles. When it melts the soil underneath is raw like a wound.  In Abaixado, warm rain has been falling. There are rainbows.

Two months ago, just after Michael arrived, the police were disbanded. The air felt too close that day and Gilson Cabral had been shot. Michael couldn’t always understand the television news and he still isn’t sure what happened. He thinks the thing about Cabral is that he was what in English you would call a “ring leader.” He was the head of one of the striking trade unions. Dead on television, his plaid shirt was pulled away from his neck and there were the scarlet, neat little holes on his chest and shoulders. He was handsome, even so.

For obscure reasons, the police were disbanded shortly after the death of Cabral.

The mayor of the city is Ulíses Días, a muchacho muy alto with plasticine good looks, and he has denied involvement. Michael the American, who didn’t catch every word, could tell the mayor was lying on TV.

For some reason, the striking trade unions were joined about a month ago by the teachers and the farmers, who came down from the mountains. And then by the student groups in their multifarious ideological permutations. The revolutionaries occupied the square by the Eglisa Santo Domingo and demanded the resignation of the all members of the ORP party from governing posts around the state, including and especially the post of mayor of Ciudad Abaixado.

Every few days an assembly is held and one of the revolutionaries gives the balled fist salute to his companeros and shouts things angrily into a microphone. Michael listens to them but can’t always follow — the revolutionaries scream about the superhighway being constructed across the isthmus, about the oil in the mountains, about the sudden and strange exodus of all of the corn farmers from the state of Abaixado. Michael the American only understands what he sees: there are 10,000 of them in the streets and they seem very upset.

Every few days they do this and now Michael Freedham has been in Ciudad Abaixado a while and he has settled down some: his days have taken on structure and shape. The mornings come and he yawns in the little hotel room, he fingers the curlicued hair below his navel. He goes to his balcony and the heat of the day is on him and it is good.

            After a shave, he goes to the little café by the ministerial plaza — Café “Las Quilles” — and he orders a plate of juevos flacos. They also have granola even though this is Mexico, and sometimes he eats granola. He stays at the cafe for the better part of the day. Out on the patio every day, the same man — he could pass for 17 or 30 — is under the awning, reading as though possessed by words. Rain or no rain. The man’s lips twitch as he reads, and sweat forms beads on his forehead and he flips the pages so fast that sometimes they tear under his fingers.

For Michael, there’s the night, which also has a kind of structure. There are Emily from Kansas City and Henry, from somewhere out east. There’s Aurelien the Quebecois, and there are Mr. House (a novelist) and Marcel, the poet who lives in a brothel in El Jicaro, and who only comes down every so often. They have a nickname for Michael; it’s “Chicago Mike.” All of them run reckless at the nighttime together. The revolutionaries have occupied the central square and light bonfires at the intersections and obstruct traffic. Sometimes late at night the revolutionaries will grab someone by the scruff of his neck and ask him what the hell is he doing around here? They never even look at Michael Edward Freedham.

            When the bar closes Chicago Mike goes to bed and sleeps the sleep of the dead. He wakes up and begins anew. It is a cycle.

            At this instant he’s at the point in the cycle where he’s sitting at his table at Las Quilles, as he has every day for the past two months. It’s juevos flacos today and not granola. He is trying to read Carson McCullers or something when he feels the unnameable sense of a body too near to him and a pair of eyes on the base of his skull. He looks up: it’s the man who is somewhere between the ages of 17 and 30, who reads rabidly under the awning facing the ministerial plaza everyday at Cafe Las Quilles.

“American?” he asks.

“Yes, I am.”

“Here for spring break?” he says with very good English. “You’re a long way from the beach.”

“It’s winter,” says Michael. “Besides, I don’t like beaches.”

“No?” He is looking at Michael with an entertained, not-quite-friendly look.

“I prefer mountains.”

The man considers this: “There are some in America, I think.”

“I prefer mountains, but I hate cold,” says Michael.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” says the man finally. The man has air like an oil slick over dark, soft eyes, and there are firm bones under the flesh that angle gently toward a certain kind of mouth. For no reason at all Michael thinks of a thing he’s seen the night before in his little hotel room: a cockroach dangling like an autumn leaf in a spider web.

Sometimes, people confer on one another really unnecessary amounts of intimacy—liquor is involved a lot of times. But Mike isn’t drunk. There is something about the dark eyes or the voice.  So as he stands there at Michael’s table at Café Las Quilles, Michael tells the man like it is: how he has left the University in Chicago and that he isn’t any better off and no weight is lifted from him, here, now, in Mexico, just the same bits of the same old stories coming and going, creating something entirely new and yet completely old. He says that it is interesting to travel so many miles and discover that he hasn’t really gone anywhere. He is talking like thirsty men drink.

It has sort of surprised him, but he has been very unhappy all this time.

The trick, he explains, is to find yourself in bars with nothing to say, wondering if you should say something. To decide instead that you have nothing worth offering. You go to the bars with the other expatriates, who will try to engage you in speak about surfing or fútbol or, of course, The War. Eventually they start talking about Appalachian National Park—but you’ve never been. And you watch the conversation pull away much as you might watch ruefully the bus you just missed.

He continues: You must have a sad and alone look because the others start throwing you sidelong glances. You order another drink, quietly, with your tongue feeling too thick. Eventually Emily from Kansas City asks you if you’re feeling okay. You try to speak but now you’re too drunk even to talk. Henry from out east intones you’ve had too much to drink and you can only glare helplessly. You’ve heard and seen and felt all this before, only in Chicago. It’s warmer now, is all. Later on, you and Emily and Henry are walking to the hotel together when those two slip away wordlessly down Avenida Duruti, folding into one another. When you come to your small room in the hotel you collapse onto your bed realizing a mule can’t come back a horse, no matter how far he walks.

Michael finishes, suddenly breathless.

“So you’re unhappy?” There’s no judgment in the man’s words — they’re just a sort of clarification.

He wonders: “I am.”

“I’m making the same choice,” says the man. So they begin to talk.  

And what is it that people find to talk about?

There is religion, for example. There is in this man almost a palpable sense of disdain for faith, and it runs deep like some chasm. For him, faith is a kind of pinnacle of unreason. Michael, though he’s always hoped against hope that Some Thing is watching out for all of us, can’t quite articulate why the lack of visible evidence of a God may not be reason to doubt His existence. But it is revealed later on that this stranger has never missed mass. Not once.

And politics, too. They talk about politics on this day. The man sees government as only the meddling of men in things that aren’t their business. Sometimes he spits on the sidewalk, he says, just because. As for the revolutionaries — well, it’s not that he disagrees with them, exactly. The man has a hard feeling in his heart when it comes to those people at the square by the Eglisa Santo Domingo: the problem is that they are all in so much agreement. All agreement, he contends, is false. And Michael agrees.

Books. Oh, God, there are so many books to discuss. Conrad and Carson McCullers and James Joyce and all the wonderful, delicious books to be read.

They talk for a long time. The pretty waitress leaves and is replaced by a fat, balding, middle-aged man with curly hair. They don’t order any food or coffee or anything. The thing is that they are two men and they are lonely and reasonably intelligent. So they are friends.

After a few hours, the man introduces himself: “I’m Bocanegra.”

“My name is Michael,” says the other one. There’s a pregnant quietude for a second or two. “Well, I guess I should clear out.” Bocanegra nods. Michael picks up the book he has been reading; it feels strange and light. He shakes Bocanegra’s hand, leaves whistling. He becomes happily drunk and talkative at the bar and sleeps with Emily from Kansas City.

The next day Bocanegra is there again, at his table with the coagulant dishes and his burnt, cold coffee. He looks up when Michael approaches and puts away the book he’s reading and his notebook. It occurs to Michael that Bocanegra has set time aside for his arrival. This day and the day after that and the days and days after that they speak for hours that slip by like rolling, green hills.

Only one day, Bocanegra isn’t at Café Las Quilles.

8.8.08

In this summer’s Batman movie, we glimpsed a bit of Alfred’s back-story.  He tells Batman the story of when he was in the imperial service during the British colonization of Burma.  His government had been bribing local leaders with absurdly-sized gems, which kept getting stolen by a rogue thief in the forest, who had been simply throwing them away.  Because Alfred could think of no conceivable reason why any Burmese would want to resist the British regime, he must have been thieving simply to “watch the world burn.”  Later, the crime fighting duo return to the topic:

Batman: That thief in the forest in Burma, did you ever catch him?
Alfred: Yes
Batman: How?
Alfred: By burning down the forest.

And Burma (now officially Myanmar) is still burning.

I am sending you this email to remind you that twenty years ago today was Burma’s best chance at freedom.   On August 8th 1988, students, monks, and Burmese citizens took to the streets to rally around Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of Aung San, who won Burma’s independence from the British.

I am sending this email because I am largely ignorant of the political realities at issue here, and I think most of us are.   I really don’t know what I’m talking about, I just feel that we ought to be talking about it today. Seriously, Batman’s pretty much the extent of what I’ve got, here.

The protests of 8-8-88 were brutally suppressed by the junta.  Soldiers indiscriminately killed citizens on the streets of Rangoon and other cities around the country. According to the SLORC (the junta of Myanmar, renamed the SPDC in 1997), five people were killed.  Words fail me here, so click: 1  | 2 .  Independent estimates put the number of killed at 3,000.

The massacres of 8-8-88 have been repeated and amplified since.  Hopefully we have not forgotten the Saffron Revolution last September—reports of casualties have been effectively repressed, but the number is certainly radically more than we heard about in America; The Daily Mail reported that thousands of bodies were dumped in the jungle.  That was one of the most inspiring events I can remember–the sight (both in pictures and in my imagination) of a sea of saffron clad monks walking barefoot out of their monestaries into certain violence in order to go visit Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest and demand change for their country will stay with me forever.

And Cyclone Nargis.  The SPDC’s insistance that the Burmese people not receive aid must be considered an attempt at massacre.  But the Burmese people proved to be stronger than the SPDC thought they were; through community support and neighborly assistance, and the bravery and concern of the monks, a humanitarian disaster was averted.  It has been bad for the people of the Irrawaddy delta, but not nearly as bad as international aid organizations had feared.

Today, on the twentieth anniversary of 8-8-88, the Chinese light the Olympic torch, the fruit of a tremendous feat of international propaganda.  History may well look back on today as the beginning of China’s worldwide reign.  This Olympics may be for China what Hitler hoped the Berlin Olympics would be for The Third Reich.

Burma is not China; in fact, the two claim to have no relations.  But just as the red dragon is at the root of tragedies worldwide (Darfur, Tibet, Somalia, Xinjiang), so is it the root of the oppression in Burma.  Ever since the uprising of 88, the SLORC has received almost all of its weapons and funding from China.  China is Burma’s only significant trade partner.

I don’t really feel the need to rattle off the reasons for China’s growing power.  At base, China controls the largest single flow of the world’s capital.  They beat America at its own game.  Capitalism worldwide (and especially in America) is absolutely reliant upon China, much more than any other single power.

But the reason for this email is that I feel that not enough attention is paid in this country to China’s moral and ideological stance, perhaps because their cynical amorality makes it difficult to pin down what it actually is.

Of course, China is still nominally a communist nation. My parents’ generation celebrated the fall of communism as it celebrated the fall of the Soviet Union.  Yet here we are.

Much has been made of China’s move towards capitalism.  But China’s government remains in absolute control of the economy. Their economic might does not come from individual entrepreneurs, but rather their ability to organize huge masses of people into astoundingly productive units.  The potent marriage of authority and capital. Everywhere in capitalism the government and the largest businesses are in league, but in China they are almost indistinguishable. The ruling class has profited immensely from subverting Maoist philosophy into a slave ideology of the amassed workers.

China’s actions on the international stage are reminiscent of the early days of the American empire.  I am reminded of the Monroe Doctrine and the “sphere of influence” we fought for in South and Central America. Just as the CIA trains and arms dictatorships across the Americas, so has China learned to arm Sudan and Burma.  I cynically believe that this is just as much the reason America finds it impossible to stand up to China in any capacity.  Our leaders see too much of themselves in China.  Of course there is a deep economic dependency between our countries, but it is buttressed by a twisted ideological affinity that reveals the Cold War for the farce that it was.  Capitalism and Communism might be antithetical in their pure forms, but what we have is not capitalism and what they have is not communism.  We have a command economy that is designed for and by corporations powerful enough to replace state actors—America uses the idea of capitalism as a slave morality to keep the workers working for that entrepreneurial dream.  China has turned its state into a corporation, and uses communism as a unique brand of slave morality that keeps the masses working for the Motherland.  America warehouses its undesirable populations in an endless prison state.  China cuts out the pretense and harvests their organs.  It was only natural that Nixon should be the president to open relations between the two countries.

I’m not nearly well enough informed to be able to predict what will happen as China grows.  It just seems to me that as the American Empire is falling, the Chinese Empire is rising, and it will be a brutal reign.

I would love to be writing some sort of call to action at this point.  But we’re talking about massive flows of capital and power way beyond the reach of any one or group of humans.  We need China, not only for our cheap plastic crap, but also to bankroll our economy of debt.  Obama will need China just as much as Bush does.  And thank god of it, because a mutual dependency of avarice is much better than a world war—I genuinely mean that—even if some Black and Brown people have to die or live under tyranny for it.  As Americans, on this historic day, all we can do is be aware of what we are watching when we watch that torch erupt into flame in Beijing.  I could ask you not to watch it, to boycott the Olympics (I have pledged to do so), but I’ll leave that up to you.  The Olympics are some good entertainment, and no-one in Beijing or Washington or in the headquarters of Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and the other sponsors, will care what you decide.

One side note that I feel like adding: the phrase “The Rise of China and India” has become almost a cliché in America.  When we are discussing the world economy, we seem quick to associate China with India.  They are enemies: it was not long ago (in the mid eighties) that China last tried to invade India.  India is painfully aware that the annexation of Tibet puts China right next door to them. India is the world’s largest functioning democracy—although its government is far from perfect, India is generally a free and diverse society.  Entrepreneurs fuel India’s economic growth.  China’s growth is driven by the government’s firm control.  As we seek awareness about our world, we ought to remember these differences.

Anyway, I don’t want this to be a one-way diatribe.  I’m no authority on this.  In fact, this email was partly just a way of educating myself, and I’m asking you to be part of that education.  If you’re reading this, it’s because I know and respect you.  So I want to hear back from you, hear your opinion on this whole situation.