Worst news ever. Flight has been cancelled. Huge snow storm. Horrendously long lines— in one of them now, hoping to get on the 2:30 flight to Copenhagen and catch connecting flight home tonight.
December 21, 9:33 am:
Still in line, moving painfully slow. Someone in the family in front of me has a case of the farts. Annoying. I bet it’s the chubby kid. It’s always the chubby kid.
December21, 10 am:
Not going to Copenhagen. But guess who is? That’s right, little mister fartface and his whole slob family. Blood pressure rising. Need a Cinnabon.
December 21, 10:13am:
Line at Cinnabon of unspeakable length. Don’t care—right now this glutinous mound of fat is more important to me than seeing my family.
December 21, 11:30am:
Got 10 Cinnabons, just in case. Ate three, stowed six in my carry-on, used one to bribe the lady monitoring the line at the United ticket counter. Got a spot near the front. Feeling pleasantly engorged. Staying optimistic.
December 21, 12:02am:
Unfuckingbelievable. I think my spleen is ruptured. A group of Australians behind me saw my greased transaction with the line lady and went mad max on me. They must have burst an insulin clot when they were shoving me to the back of the line. I don’t mean to sound bigoted, but Australians are the most brutish people in the world. And the ugliest.
December 21, 3:45pm:
Really wish I brought something more to read than the December issue of Details. Don’t get me wrong. Great magazine. I owe everything I know about performing world-class cunnilingus as well as my prized pair of eyebrow tweezers to their staff of writers. But reading it in public makes me feel kind of like a—how-do-you-say—oh yes— moron.
December 21, 5:30pm
So bored. So tired of hearing CNN on the monitor above me. So death squads are terrorizing Ivory Coast, but do you have any idea how long I’ve been in line? I’m trying to get home for Christmas, so don’t burden me, Anderson Cooper, with your lament about death squads.
December 21, 7pm:
Great. No flights today. Ticketing agent said my best option is to sleep overnight and see if I can get placed on something tomorrow. Said the wait might last a few days, possibly until after Christmas. Does anyone know the best place to sleep in Heathrow?
December 21, 9pm:
Thanks for the tip on the ventilation shaft by baggage claim 4. Have made a cozy bed in here with clothes from my suitcase. Just feasted on a couple more Cinnabons and am quite engrossed in Details’ investigative piece on male cheerleading. Have a feeling tomorrow will be better.
December 22, 1:52am:
Hey, how many people did you tell about the ventilation shaft?! Seven more have shown up and we’re at capacity. A German accountant is leering at my carry-on. He must smell the Cinnabons. If he touches them, I will destroy him.
December 22, 9:33am
Spirit broken. Fell into stink- and heat-induced sleep coma, overslept, and awoke in the arms of the German accountant. Pretty sure there’s frosting on his lips. Kicked him in the neck out of suspicion. Ran to the ticket counter, where the line was already out the door and snaked into the short-term parking garage.
December 23, 10:12am
Realized I forgot my luggage, with wallet in it, in the ventilation shaft. Sprinted back in cold sweat. Nothing. Frantically searched for airport security and related my story. Airport security guy asks what I was doing in a ventilation shaft in the first place. He wants me to go with him to answer a few questions.
December23, 7:00pm
Now I know—in airport security jargon, “answer a few questions” means “answer a few questions while a gloved finger wiggles around in your anus.” I will never complain about the TSA body scan again. Thank god, have been released.
December 23, 11:08pm
Spent the last four hours ravenous— loitering in duty free in vain attempt to pocket candy. Every fucking thing is oversized! Store clerk picked up the phone when she saw me trying to stuff a jumbo Toblerone and a handle of Chivas down my collar. Left empty-handed in a panic. But, by stroke of luck, found a bonanza of Auntie Anne’s pretzel cheese in an overflowing trash bin near Delta counter. No Cinnabon, but it’ll do.
December 24, 3:19am
So cold. So scared. Will I ever get out of here?
December 24, 4:06am
Tormented by a single unrelenting thought: what if that wasn’t pretzel cheese? Of course it was, I tell myself. But then my devil voice whispers: well, then what was it doing in a pile of diapers?
December 24, 7:30am
Sleepless night, but I conquered my demons. Queued up at United ticket line before dawn, resolved to make it home, even if it’s the day after Christmas. Realized I still had a photocopy of my passport in my pants pocket. There’s still hope!
December 24, 1:23pm
Hallelujah! Finally spoke to the ticket agent who accepted my passport copy and booked me on a flight to Madrid tonight, arriving home Christmas morning! Save some eggnog for me!
December 24, 5:40pm
Made it through security, plane has arrived, about to board. Hey that’s funny— that sounds like my name being called on the intercom.
December 24, 6:02pm
Name definitely being called on the intercom.
December 24, 6:09pm
They found my bags! Lady at the gate told me sweetly just to wait at the counter and someone would come for me. Guess everything always works out in the end.
December 25, 12:03am
Tried to tell them it was just icing, you know, from a cinnamon roll. But they couldn’t understand why I would line the inside of my carry-on with icing, nor why a normal cinnamon roll would have so much icing, especially one with such high levels of silicate residue. It’s no normal cinnamon roll, I told them, it’s a Cinnabon, and I had six of them in there. That’s absurd, they said. No one eats six Cinnabons, besides, we didn’t find any cinnamon rolls in there. Damn that German, I screamed, tears welling up.
It’s ok, they told me. Why don’t you come with us and answer a few questions.
“Sancho followed on foot, leading is donkey — his perpetual companion in prosperous and adverse fortune….” — Don Quixote
In these threadbare days, what kind of future do we foresee for that homeliest and homiest of institutional beasts, the public library? It is surely the donkey of the American cultural menagerie-toothy, overworked, belittled, yet stubborn to the point of endearment. How else, other than out of sheer stubbornness, can we account for the fact that libraries continue to supply communities all over the country with books… made of paper…to the public… for free?
But for residents of Santa Clarita, California, this persistent belief in community education in the age of the bottom line may at last be coming to an end. Thanks to the city’s controversial vote to outsource its libraries to a private for-profit company, the donkey may be going the way of the dodo.
Santa Clarita is only the latest town to consider privatization. Currently, fourteen library systems comprising 63 branches are already operated by a company with a villainously generic name, Library Systems and Services (LSSI). Of course, this great whoring out of one of the cornerstones of democratic civil society ought not come as a surprise. Libraries reek of government and if there is one thing so many of our governing American politicians hate, it’s governance.
The most decried issue by those fighting the specter of LSSI in Santa Clarita concerns the likely replacement of salaried and pensioned municipal employees with cheap non-union labor. The head of LSSI made remarks in The New York Times this fall accusing public librarians of being rich and lazy. Apparently, whenever you see a librarian scanning his computer screen, they are not helping people access information but checking the soaring dividends on their pensions.
Beyond the inevitable union busting, privatization of libraries could bring a subtler yet even more insidious anti-democratic change: the removal of the public from the public library.
The central branch of San Francisco Public Library is a carnival of humanity. I used to work next door to the central branch at Civic Center and, I can assure you, the library is not only home to the unwashed masses; it’s where some of those masses go to wash. In one of my many memorable trips to the lobby bathroom, I saw a man washing his shoes in the sink, the fellow next to him brushing his teeth, and, in the corner, a less hygienic soul conversing with the air dryer. On a subsequent visit, I witnessed a showdown between two men in the doorway of a stall. One was accusing the other, in no uncertain terms, of defecating on the toilet seat.
I’ve studied next to a man who took frequent breaks to stretch his quads and make high-pitch screams, as well as a wretch who incessantly cleared the phlegm in his throat to such revolting effect that I nearly gave up on life. And often when walking by the hallway bank of derelict payphones, I’ve come across a cane-wielding retired geisha giving the stink-eye to passersby as her brothel rouge slides down her jowls.
While, in an ideal world, I could do without the scream breaks and the soul-shrinking phlegm rattles, I embrace the library as a radically inclusive community space. That a substantial part of downtown San Francisco’s community is indigent and mentally ill is perhaps another matter. The public library should be available to everyone in the spirit of a civic refuge and forum. Like a donkey that dutifully bears the burden of humble peasants and mad hidalgos alike.
A private for-profit public library is a contradiction in both name and ethos. With that murky designation, a host of equally murky and unsettling questions arise. Would a private library, like other private businesses, have the right to refuse service to anyone? Would a private library, to cut costs, reduce the diverse and community-specific nature of their collection? Would a private library, in the spirit of corporate synergy, pedal certain types of publishers over others? How would a private company handle access and protection of patrons’ library records?
One thing is clear: once a profit motive enters the picture, serving the public becomes a means not an end.
The good news is there are currently 16,549 public libraries (including branches) in America. According to Leonard Kniffel, editor and publisher of American Libraries, this country has, astonishingly, more libraries than McDonald’s restaurants. Let’s keep those libraries public, in name and deed.
We certainly have a better shot at that than my other idea: nationalizing McDonald’s.
This coming election day, with the proposition on the ballot to legalize the small-scale growth, distribution, and possession of marijuana, we in the golden state have the chance to repeal an outdated law that has done too much harm for too long. Unfortunately, the current debate surrounding the prospect of legalization obscures the simple heart of the issue at stake.
I said the law was “outdated,” but the prohibition of pot was never the right answer for its time. Only its motives were clearer. The first states passed anti-marijuana laws in the twenties during Prohibition (strange how alcohol is such a vital part of our culture that we can characterize an era by its absence). The criminalization of pot emerged in an age in which legislators and courts thought the consumption of alcohol posed too great a burden on society to be considered an inalienable right of liberty or property, as protected under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. Marijuana, its detractors worried, would become the substitute narcotic in that period of unquenchable thirst. But we have since come to feel differently about the freedom to consume alcohol, despite recognition of its potential dangers.
When the first federal law against the drug, the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, was passed, most Americans had still never heard of the drug. Why? Because the law targeted the practice of a specific demographic, itinerant Mexican workers, who were immigrating in greater numbers to the south and west of the country. In other words, the prohibition of marijuana proceeded under the radar of public opinion because, unlike the prohibition of alcohol, it targeted a demographic that no one who was then considered part of ‘public opinion’ cared about. Meanwhile, the blatant unconstitutionality of the law could be ignored in the face of fear-mongering claims about the drug’s effects, which produced criminal depravity, insanity, and other gangrenous blights on the social body.
In the fifties marijuana became a household name, known mostly as a drug of questionable urban types — blacks, Latinos, poets, and jazz musicians — that, without strict prohibition and stiff prison terms, would infect white youth. Despite the draconian measures, in the sixties and seventies, those fears came true.
Fortunately, as a result, the discourse has moved beyond the myths of reefer madness. This is due less to the recent scientific and medical studies that have been marshaled in support of the benefits of marijuana and more to the simple fact that many Americans under sixty-five now have first-hand empirical understanding of the positive and negative effects of the drug — not something you’d want to smoke right before you operate a submarine, but unlikely to turn you into a frothing rapist.
Instead, the opposition today, no longer able to embellish with quite the same high moralist rhetoric of yore, voices supposedly practical objections. They complain about the great tax burden that would come from legalization and its incurred medical costs. Guess what? We already incur those costs, whether or not pot is legal. They complain about youth having easy access to the drug. Again, this is already the status quo. According to one study, teenagers have an easier time getting black market marijuana than they do liquor on the shelves.
At a recent conference in Cartagena, Colombia, Latin American leaders condemned California’s Proposition 19, claiming the legalization of marijuana in the United States undermines their war against drugs and mocks the tragic nature of the narcotics industry in Latin America. But legalization will only further emphasize, perhaps painfully, the senselessness of the violence associated with the cultivation and distribution of this plant and the futility of the war on drugs.
Yet the supporters of legalization are also guilty of obscurantism in this debate. They tout the supposed social benefits legalization will bring by striking a blow against the prison industry, ending the cycle of poverty and jail, helping defuse the violence of the Mexican drug cartels, and creating state revenue for education. Certainly the laws against marijuana and the way they have been enforced by police and prosecutors have helped to destroy black and Latino communities and fund an industry of incarceration. But legalizing marijuana is not going to fix those problems. And legalizing marijuana in California is not going to quell the bloodlust of the Mexican drug cartels. I’m also skeptical legalization is the key to solving the problem of California’s education system.
The truth is we don’t know what the effects of legalization will be. We have to wait for the law of unintended consequences to show us. But we do know that it is both high time and just to do away with a law that infringes upon a basic civil liberty — the freedom to exercise sovereignty over one’s mind and body. John Stuart Mill, in his stunning and still relevant 1859 treatise On Liberty, put in pithy terms what has come to be known as the principle of negative liberty:
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise.
The legalization of marijuana aims to recover this principle of negative liberty from nearly a century of violation. Proponents of legalization should keep their utopian visions in check, for they risk making a simple issue of negative liberty, concerning a trivial act of personal pleasure, into a vehicle of social reform. The repeal of an irrational and unjust law, insofar as it constitutes a critical revaluation of our own past and a respect for the civil liberties that this country prides itself on, is a social reform in itself.
Another year is fast becoming history — pun intended! — and we have been busier than ever. Before it slips away, let us take a moment to congratulate ourselves on recent successes and sneak a peek at the exciting new historical events just around the corner.
This past March, we kicked off our season with the fifth annual shelling of Sarajevo. Living historians took to the hills outside Youngstown to bring to life those early days of the Bosnian War. A harrowing ordeal, of course, but from a military re-enactment perspective a veritable hoot. Clad in the full regalia of the Republika Srpksa and the JNA, historians swigged non-alcoholic slivovitz and rained down empty mortar shells on unsuspecting Youngstowners, teaching them a history lesson they won’t soon forget! The legendary Ron “Swifty” Gibbs of Swifty’s Auto Repair in Akron deserves special kudos for his performance in the role of Serb nationalist leader Radovan Karadsic. He masterfully expressed Karadsic’s proud patriotism and fierce determination in the face of battle(without any ethnic hostility, of course). Way to go, Swifty!!
After a long winter, April’s bombing of Guernica helped bring spring to Ohio. This event, which coincided with the Greater Cincinnati Air Show, turned out to be a real crowd pleaser — a notable contrast to last year’s bombing of Pearl Harbor. And who could be surprised, with the prowess shown by the living historians of the Cincinnati Condor Legion. As predicted, they utterly demolished the boys of the Louisville Basque Civilian Brigade. Just like we demolished all those tasty paella wraps Beverly Delmonico served after the bombing. Thanks Bev!!
Summer had us running around with our heads cut off, as usual. Our Days of Summer Armenian Genocide was the educational bloodbath Ohio citizens have come to love, but, as always, a heck of a lot of work. Cease and desist letters from both Armenian advocacy groups and the Turkish government continue to create a lot of red tape, making it difficult for our historians to channel the hearts and minds of our historical subjects. On an even more tragic note, we lost two beloved historians to heatstroke during the massacre. Reginald DeWitt of Canton, aka Turkish bludgeoner #47, and Huey Liddersworth of Dayton, aka Armenian shopkeeper #18, were honorable men and accomplished historians who died fighting for what they believed in. Fallen heroes, we salute you.
As winter approaches, we turn our attention to the frozen tundra of the Eastern Front, 1941. We are still looking for new recruits to join our Einsatzgruppen SS for our December staging of Operation Barbarossa at Uncle Boone’s Turkey Farm, just outside Toledo. If you know any living historians or aspiring living historians who would like to join our well-trained corps of loyal commandoes as they cruise through Belarus on special missions to fight cultural bolshevism, please email Randy Nesbit (randytnesbit@cheapsuntansrus.com). Attention: The Ohio Historical Re-enactment Society in no way endorses, for better or worse, the ethos of National Socialism. We are historians who enjoy studying the past by dressing up and pretending to be soldiers from history. We emulate courageous warriors who fought for ideals, however unsavory those ideals may have been, or however they may have been distorted by the liberal media. If you are a looking to join the Einsatzgruppen SS out of belief in the tenets of National Socialism, you are looking in the wrong place. If, however, out of sheer love of history, you would like to dress up and pretend you are a soldier in a mobile killing unit targeting Jews, Gypsies, and members of the Soviet intelligentsia - then welcome aboard, historian!
Speaking of Nazis, which we are not, we just launched a new program. Our community youth outreach program in the living history of the Third Reich educates youngsters about the fascinating (though, admittedly, delicate) institution of the Hitler Jugend — the boy scouts of 1930s Germany! Through our innovative pedagogical commitment to experiencing history first hand, we show students what a care-free Aryan childhood was really like. First, we demonstrate how they would have been selected for HJ membership through rigorous genealogical blood purity analysis. Not only do the kids learn history-they practice adding fractions! Then, as a learning simulation, we put them through an intensive ideological indoctrination process (minus the anti-Semitism of course!), teaching them the relevant values of self-sacrifice, love of country, and the importance of monitoring family members for signs of cultural bolshevism. This year’s program will culminate in a gymnastics exhibition and flag ceremony (minus the swastikas of course!) during halftime at the Fremont Cougars homecoming game, November 18th. We encourage all you historians to don your costumes and come fill the rostrum!
Two last announcements: Susie Orstmeyer is organizing a bake sale and car wash to raise funds to build a full-scale compound in Columbus for next summer’s staging of the Branch Davidian showdown at Waco. Auditions for the role of David Koresh will be announced in February. And, finally, just a reiteration of last newsletter’s call for living historians: if anyone knows anybody of brownish hue — Hispanics, blacks, Arabs, or even the right kind of Asian or Jew- Herb Jennings is hoping to reenact the Battle of Algiers in the spring, but is having a heck of a time fielding the Algerian side.
Well, historians, that’s all the news I got. The rest, as they say, is history — pun intended!
Yours sincerely,
Rich Iott,
Living Historian Candidate for Congress, 9th District Ohio
In the last embarrassing installment of the “The Conversation,” the New York Times’ pandering online ‘dialogue’ between columnists David Brooks and Gail Collins, readers overheard David and Gail chatting philosophical on the progress of humanity.Regardless of the deplorable state of American, well, everything, they assured each other in alternating heaves of optimism, at least the present is better than the past.
Not that we should be surprised. David Brooks could find the silver lining of industrial capitalism in a radiation cloud.Nuclear technology, after all, is clear evidence of economic growth and human creativity. No, we shouldn’t be surprised that this country’s supposed intellectuals are finding new ways to dumb down discourse with rancid chestnuts about progress. But we should be disappointed.
The old progress versus decline debate is usually an impoverished one, especially when the parties end up cheering for the upward march of history based on the greater availability of nifty telephones. Case in point, Brooks:
Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure living standards will continue to surge, as they have for everybody for a century or more. Gizmos will get cheaper. New technologies will sprout. Luxuries will be considered necessities.
I cannot understand what qualitative measure of progress is gained when luxuries become necessities. The equation of human progress with technological development rests on the assumption that more sophisticated ways of manipulating our environment and organizing knowledge amount to an increased ability to satisfy human need. But doesn’t the transformation of what was previously a luxury into a necessity increase human need only further?
Contrary to what advertisers want us to think, sprouting technologies will not make our lives better. They will simply change the circumstances in which we lead our lives.And that transformation can be felt as a loss or a gain, depending on what one values. I see no hope for a resolution to the problems facing America and the world in the fact that “gizmos will get cheaper.” If anything, our tendency to convert luxury into necessity will make those problems more acute. But David Brooks, like so many Americans, is too enthralled with the warm glow and supple buttons of his BlackBerry to notice. I expect this kind of delusional pap from the people who line up three days early to buy the first batch of iPads. But should I really expect to read the same idiotic sentiments in the pages of a respected newspaper?
In an earlier “Conversation” column this year, Brooks attempted to refute the idea of America in decline, claiming that theorists of the disintegration of Western civilization have always been mistaken because, voila, look what’s still here, Western civilization.In his muddleheaded conflation, America’s status as supreme global economic power and the continuing existence of that unwieldy cultural-historical entity we call Western civilization were one in the same.
Forget for the moment the hot topic of America’s decline in the world order and consider instead Brooks’ underlying denial of the idea of decline per se. “Every previous bout of declinism has been disproved,” said Brooks. He failed to elaborate, but even if we accept that talking about decline in any objective sense is unreasonable, then shouldn’t we say the same about progress? Isn’t the very idea of a single all-encompassing directionality to history absurd? History is human activity and the interpretation of said activity. How could the movement of such a phenomenon--either the activity or the interpretation—be anything other than flux in all directions?
Just because we still consider ourselves nominal heirs to a cultural tradition called the West- - a myth of identity whose origins we often place in the eighteenth-century nexus of Enlightenment, French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, with Renaissance and Greco-Roman antecedents—doesn’t mean the values of that tradition actually persist.Increasingly, our sense of historical identity is a facade, a rhetorical gesture intended to disguise the fact that an abyss separates our present from the past that we call our own.
This feeble rhetorical spackling is on display in “The Conversation” where columnists masquerade as men of letters. Gail Collins refers to Voltaire’s novel Candide as “that play.” David Brooks and Dick Cavett, in an abortive attempt at comparing America to Rome, can only guess at what Edward Gibbon must have said in that big old dusty book of his. The best Cavett can muster is that he knew one person, Gore Vidal, who had actually read it. It becomes painfully clear that if we want to read anything incisive about American politics and culture in relation to Rome, we’d better get the hell out of this ‘conversation’ and go find Vidal.
In the meantime, until they have a better grasp on the past and are capable of measuring human well being in something other than gigabytes, pundits ought to refrain from reckoning either the progress or the decline of civilization.
These days, the only basic training you’ll need for a tour in Vietnam is idle curiosity and the simple art of lifting beer glass to face. The only gear: an internet-procured tourist visa, a pair of flip-flops, and a fanny pack stuffed with dong—and with the Vietnamese rate of exchange at approximately 19,500 dong to the dollar, your wallet will be filled with more dong than a Shanghai public urinal.
Here, in disjointed narrative, unverified notes, and hazy recollection is my dispatch from Hanoi:
“Hello, welcome to my hotel!”said a smiling pimply boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen.Factor in Asian youthful countenance and twenty-one, max. He was waiting for us on a busy street in the old quarter of Hanoi, in front of the AsiaPalace, our home for the next four days.
Groggy from the airport and fresh to the country, I took the young man for some sort of Vietnamese hotelier wunderkind.Then the porter came for the bags. “Hello sir, welcome to my hotel!” Only once we got past the doorman and the concierge did we realize that every employee of the AsiaPalace—from piss boy to omelette man— thought of it as ‘his’ hotel.So this was what happened, I thought, when the workers took control of the modes of production, put an end to the wage slavery of surplus capitalism, and reclaimed their own labor from its alienated state.
Little else in Hanoi, however, reminded me I was in a communist state. Granted, the light posts on the main highway around town fly the hammer and sickle and Ho Chi Minh keeps benevolent watch over you from atop billboards, in restaurants, and in your wallet.But rapacious capitalism in its myriad brand-names runs rampant on the streets. In fact, everything runs rampant on the Hanoi streets, a tourist site in their own right.
In the center, at least, Hanoi feels like a small city, or more like a frantic town that has been overrun by a two million member motorcycle gang. Perhaps you’ve seen pictures of old Hanoi with women in woven conical hats, wearing long traditional gowns, daintily pedaling bicycles.Well, that image has been swallowed up by the scooter exhaust of modernity. The conical hats can still be seen on laborers and fruit vendors. But the new image of the Hanoi commuter sits astride a shiny red motorbike with the hand permanently engaging the horn, the face obscured by a burberry-patterned cotton surgical mask (for protection from sun, pollution?), and upon the head, instead of a motorcycle helmet, a rakishly donned equestrian helmet, also burberry-patterned.
This image flits before your eyes millions of times a day in Hanoi, always to the sound of blaring horn, and often while you are attempting that most daring and death-defying of feats—crossing the street.But, miraculously, in only four days, parting the sea of motorcycles went from seemingly impossible to second nature. No less miraculous was how the traffic in a city that appeared to be utterly devoid of stop signs, and with only the occasional traffic light, managed not to pile up accident after accident.Americans drive according to abstract principles, while much of the world drives according to the empirical reality of the road. But the empirical reality of Hanoi roads almost defies belief. Fortunately, the sound of a horn arises every fraction of a second to rouse you from your skeptical stupor.
On the taxi ride from the airport, our driver pointed to a policeman on the highway shoulder and said “wrong way,” and then tried to tell us about the problem of wrong-way drivers on the highway. Why do they drive the wrong way, I asked, thinking I was misunderstanding him. “They bad man, sir, I think.” I was left puzzled, until a few minutes later, sure enough, along came a motorcycle on the four lane highway—on the wrong side—going the wrong way—weaving his way through the congested traffic.Bad man, indeed.
Traveling on foot on the sidewalks of the old quarter was no less of an adventure. The narrow sidewalks, when not buried under parked motorcycles, played host to every activity of daily life imaginable, with eating and loitering chief among them.Unlike the old quarters of European cities, Asian ones don’t seem all that old (on account of the high turnover rate of wooden architecture). But, in contrast to the Euro tourist playgrounds of cobblestoned shopping malls and wax museums, they house real people doing real things.In Hanoi, these real people and their doings all occur on the sidewalk at six inches remove from the ground—cooking, laundry, gossip, watching T.V, you name it.Instead of chairs, people sit on what appear to be tiny plastic foot stools.These are expertly designed so that your chin can rest on your knees while your splayed crotch catches the gaze of all passersby. Vietnamese people naturally display more grace in these chairs than your average Westerner with legs and have designed their outdoor kitchens and desks at correspondingly diminutive scale.Despite the danger of catching blowing refuse in the gaping leg holes of your shorts, it’s good fun sitting on the tiny street corner on a tiny foot stool with a small glass of beer on a small table watching the maniac traffic go by.
Which is exactly what we did when we first arrived. Bia Hoi (fresh beer) was apparently introduced by the Czechs in the spirit of cold war camaraderie. It consists of small kegs of unpasteurized beer served cold and watered down in little outdoor stalls all over the city and costs about 8,000 dong(40 odd cents) a glass. It brings much needed relief to the sweltering exhaust-filled streets, which sizzled at over 42 Celsius when we were there.
The next morning, with dill and turmeric oozing from our pores, we paid our respects to Ho Chi Minh. Inside his marble sanctum, sleeping the dreamless sleep of the embalmed, protected by crimson-backed gold star, hammer and sickle, and a cadre of white-uniformed soldiers resembling the humorless stewards of a Caribbean cruise ship, Uncle Ho’s rubbery glowing body rested in an elegant carved wood casket of floating flowers.
The adjacent Ho Chi Minh Museum had some interesting documents and photographsfrom the leader’s long and dedicated life— from his down-and-out days in Paris and London as a dishwasher to his final years as a national hero against the American imperialists. The exhibit did a good job of convincing me Uncle Ho was a great, perhaps admirable, person. Of course, I had little evidence to consider other than the authoritarian government-sponsored portrait of their patriarch. “If you want to reap the fruits of your labor in ten years,” Ho said, “then plant trees. “If you want to do it in 100 years, cultivate human beings.” Kind of inspiring, kind of scary, depending on your mood. But one thing is indisputable: he had a refined yet austere taste when it came to architecture. Next to the museum was the stilted wooden house Ho lived in during the 50s after getting rid of the French. The house looked like Southeast Asian traditional with a touch of Mies van der Rohe. Certainly, there was a lingering hint of an elegant Parisian aesthete in the Spartan communist.
We ate lunch at a place called Koto—a nonprofit restaurant that provides vocational training in hospitality to Hanoi street kids. It’s a great idea and makes a pleasant lunch feel like a charitable deed.You can tell which of the kids have completed most of their two-year training, as they seem fluid and self-possessed, while the others are still wrestling with the script, battling disorientation and low self-esteem. To see the difference between the two at your table makes you realize what a valuable impact this organization has in these kids’ lives.M. and I felt that their banana, passion fruit, and mint smoothies had an equally valuable impact on our lives.
After lunch, we visited the Temple of Literature, an 11th century Confucian school for the sons of Chinese Mandarins in then Chinese-controlled northern Vietnam. The grounds were beautiful and shady, with a long pool, flanked by stone turtle seats and bronze cranes leading up to the red lacquered wood temple.
On the way back from the temple, a man stopped me on the street and began pointing and yelling at my shoes. Before I had even broken stride, he grabbed for my shoes and started dabbing glue on them. He was an itinerant shoe cobbler who saw in my tattered shoes a day’s wages. I figured I’d make it easier on both of us by removing my shoes, at which point his partner showed up, gave me a foot stool to sit on and a pair of slippers to wear, and both of them went to town on my shoes. Ten minutes later, I was wearing renovated footwear. He assured me the new soles he glued on would last me at least five years and then demanded I pay him 500,000 dong (about 27 bucks). I told him my shoes hadn’t cost me that much to begin with and told him I would give him 100,000 at most. They looked at me like I was spooning shit into their mouths, so I threw in an extra dollar for their wretchedness. Three days later, my new soles fell off.
The soles of my running shoes almost melted off, too, trying to run in the Hanoian miasma. The city is marked by lakes, which I imagine make for fine oases in more temperate weather. We got up at 5:30 one morning and were at the lake by six for a jog. Already in the weak dawn light, it was like trying to run through gravy. But it was worth the sweat to witness the geriatric carnival around the lake—droves of oldsters engaged in group exercise from tai chi to go-go dancing to vigorous crotch-stretching. They must have been getting ready for a long day of sitting on tiny chairs.
Our eating exploits over the next few days continued to deplete the city. We devoured grilled ostrich and bitter herb, squid with dill, garlic, and Vietnamese celery, deep fried squash, bun cha (a meal of pork meat balls, rice noodles, fried spring rolls, and a colossal mound of raw herbs and greens), snail soup, pho, steamed crab, whole sweet and sour fish, and in a buffet finale, an arsenal of coconut- and taro- based desserts.
Only twice did we turn away from the food in front of us. The first was when we asked our bicycle taxi driver to recommend a restaurant, after the one we tried to go to was closed. Thinking he would take us to a true grit locale where he went to nourish his calf muscles, we were disappointed to arrive at a restaurant with linen table cloths and no people. Not wanting to be rude, we went in and politely pushed around dessicated octopus, raw pork spare ribs, and sliced bitter gourd on a bed of ice—so bitter that you had to immediately stuff the accompanying dried shredded beef into your mouth in order to neutralize your gag reflex. The second time we declined was in an outdoor market, where a woman tried to sell me roast dog head.There, sitting upright on the hot grill staring at me was a small miniature Pinscher-like decapitated dog head.
After a couple days, the streets of Hanoi lost their novelty and began to turn sinister. The heat would not abate. The French quarter, despite an imposing opera house, a haunting cathedral, and sundry other handsome colonial relics, was hot and boring. Unlike in the snaky Old quarter, life withered on its wide Gallic boulevards.Amped on ultra-strong Vietnamese coffee and sweetened condensed milk with sweat gushing down my buttcrack, I seemed to be about three inconveniences and two horn honks away from beating someone senseless. It almost happened when a bicycle taxi driver suddenly doubled his fee after I paid him and refused to make change. Instead, I spent my visit to the Hanoi art museum fantasizing about boxing his ears.
We escaped Hanoi just in time, leaving all the taxi drivers with their hearing intact, for the tranquil waters of HalongBay. A few hours outside of the city, we boarded a wooden junk for a three day cruise along the bay, one of the most gorgeous places I’ve seen, with turquoise waters, green-topped karsts, and sea caves. We spent our days kayaking, swimming, squid-fishing, and enjoying the company of our fellow cruisers—an improbably wonderful assortment of American teachers and writers, Australian doctors and dancers, and Catalan economists.At last, in the vacation we had taken from our vacation, which itself was a vacation from our original vacation, we felt like we were truly on vacation. The days dissolved into the warm waters of the bay.
Epilogue: a week after we left Vietnam, a monster typhoon wracked the northern Vietnamese coast right at HalongBay, killing many people.
That was our tentative conclusion in what was shaping up to be a game of Clue with a careless Thai food vendor as Colonel Mustard and a languishing octopus as the candlestick—the principals of the violent drama unfolding in the darkened corridor of my bowels.
The investigation had begun as I was writhing on the bed in my in-laws’ house in Buriram, a small town in northeastern Thailand near the Cambodian border, with an ice-filled sock pressed against my head and an empty shopping bag-cum-vomitorium dangling from my wrists.
Convinced that I was just suffering from a stomach bug, I resigned myself to spend the rest of the day and night moaning in perpetual motion between bed and toilet.
But my father-in-law Karl still had doubts about the case. “How many times have you gone today?”
Seven.
“When you go, does your sphincter feel tight? Like it wants to stay closed but it leaks out with a hissing sound?
Um, well, yeah, kind of.
“So,” he said, nodding his head slowly, synthesizing the data. “I think we should go to the hospital.”
With that word, a fresh sweat of desperation rippled through my bedsheets. I tried to recant my former admissions, saying my sphincter always felt tight, and maybe I had only gone six times. In fact, I was starting to feel much better. Anything not to have to go to the hospital.
But Karl was not easily persuaded. My symptoms sounded to him like something he called “para-typhoid,” an illness he had once had and whose peculiar sphincter-ratcheting qualities he could vouch for.
“You don’t want to mess around with that stuff here. It could be something serious. You know, they still have cholera outbreaks here.”
This news came as something of a shock. In the six years since I had met my wife, I had traveled with her to Thailand five times for visits lasting between two weeks and two months. Before my first trip, I had dutifully consulted all the CDC travel advice, gotten all possible vaccines, fed myself a steady diet of anti-malarial pills, applied bug spray religiously, abstained from street food, and tried to avoid drinks with ice possibly made from unsafe tap water. But by the time I came to Thailand for the second time, a year later, I had abandoned all these precautions.Street food was delicious. Ice made drinks cold. And, outside of the jungle, mosquitoes were a minor nuisance at worst.
But what really made me throw caution to the wind was the fact that Thailand-- even backwater Buriram, with its potted sidewalks, mangy dogs, faintly rotten sweet smell, and overwhelmingly genial villagers—now seemed normal. It was where my wife was from, where my in-laws lived. Absorbed into my existential horizon, exotic Siam had become pedestrian. So the mention of cholera, in tandem with a typhoid auxiliary, made me reconsider not only my hospital phobia of moments ago but my entire image of the country. Thailand again seemed as strange as ever. You could still get cholera and typhoid here!
Suddenly life felt as real as fiction. Images of Gustave von Aschenbach eating strawberries on the Lido, a Colombian Casanova telegraph operator tapping out love poems, and the computer game death notice of a pioneer child on an Oregon-bound covered wagon flitted behind the sock full of ice on my forehead.
Over the years my klutziness had made me no stranger to minor ER visits. A finger half-sheared in a meat-slicer. A wounded knee from falling off the ski lift. And, perhaps the all-time most degrading episode, dating back to my miserable high school marching band days— a throat swelled shut from an angry bee swallowed through the mouthpiece of my trombone. Based on these experiences, I fully expected to be keeled over for hours in a sweltering waiting room, the only unknown being the gallery of provincial ailments that would be sweating next to me.
When we walked through the doors, the waiting room was virtually empty. Only a kindly grandma propped up by her daughters and a mother bouncing two giggling toddlers on her knee. Where were the open abscesses? The mangled limbs? The consumptive hacks? The pus-filled scrotums? I barely had time to sink into the cool cushions of a couch before my wife had me checked in and we were called to the triage nurse. From there we were sent immediately to the doctor.
The doctor was an unprepossessing man resembling an Asian Doogie Hauser. He wore a striped polo shirt and leather slippers and could barely speak loud enough to push his voice beyond his surgical mask. My father-in-law Karl, an American expat who speaks perfect Thai, explained my symptoms in as clear terms as possible--
“runny shit”— violating the usual Thai tendency toward circumlocution in medical matters. The doctor seemed unconcerned. Sure, there had been a few cases of cholera in the area, but, without a fever, I was probably just suffering from good old-fashioned diarrhea. He was preparing to usher us out, when Karl reminded him that no one had taken my temperature. The inside of the surgical mask mumbled as an embarrassed nurse thrust a thermometer into my armpit. I had a fever of 102. In that case, the doctor said, it could be cholera.
Aside from the less-than-inspiring performance of the doctor, the whole admittance process was by far the swiftest visit to any doctor’s office, let alone the ER, I had ever experienced. I had been registered, triaged, seen by a doctor, and assigned a bed all within twenty minutes of walking through the front door. Not only that. My room and board, without insurance, would cost 1,070 baht per day—approximately 33 dollars.
In my wretched state I calculated what an indictment of American healthcare this bill was. For nearly all hospital visits, even a simple suture job, it would actually be cheaper for an American citizen to buy a thousand dollar plane ticket to Thailand and go to any old Thai hospital. Even with the sixteen hour flight, they would stand a good chance of getting faster medical care.
And I haven’t even told you about my room yet. My 33 dollars entitled me to a “VIP” room, the corner penthouse with private bathroom and wrap-around balcony, which was thoughtfully chicken-netted to guard against the self-destructive thoughts of the sick. The interior— replete with brown wainscoting and trim, green fake leather parlor chairs and matching sofa, pale green floral curtains, and a long wooden desk flanked by four high-backed chairs—looked like a 1950s conference room into which a hospital bed had intruded.
A retinue of nurses, smiling beneath their surgical masks, brought me some green XXXL pajamas to wear, a medley of cups for which to collect various bodily excretions, and an IV bag of medicine and electrolytes. Karl went back home and my wife Marissa, thankfully, stayed and slept on the green sofa.
---
It was, as expected, a long night.Liquid evil surged from my gut every couple hours, accompanied by twisting pangs of nausea. I distinctly remember sitting on the toilet at 2 AM shitting myself into green oblivion, entangled in tubes and my sweat-soaked oversized pajamas, filling bed pan after bed pan with steaming upchucks of corn and bile. I had what at the time seemed like an epiphany: that the finely woven structure of my consciousness—the desires, perceptions, and designs that I called a self—could literally go down the toilet if the simple arithmetical balance of things called electrolytes were upset.
This ruthless logic struck me as at once preposterous and profound, though my realization of it was hardly profound, since there are countless similarly miniscule contingencies that underlie the conditions of our existence. But I had never really reflected, and with such foreboding, on how rooted our being is to water. This truism is laced with a particularly monstrous irony when the problem is not access to water but the ability to keep it from gushing out one’s ass too fast.
My wife experienced this same episode in the middle of the night as a revelation of a different sort. She was awoken by the sound of my hacking, momentarily disoriented by her strange sleeping quarters. While trying to get her bearings, she saw emerge from the dark a shaking pale hand clutching a mobile IV stand. Was this a vision of her future, of conjugal nights in the elderly years to come?
---
With dawn came respite from my torment and the beginning of a steady stream of activity in the hospital room. Over the course of the day, a dozen different employees wearing a dozen different uniforms filed in each to carry out their own special task. Beyond my team of pill-bearing, blood pressure-pumping nurses, there were the yellow- clad sweepers, the orange moppers, the green bed changers, the red trash collectors, the blue food servers and water replenishers, the pitiable bathroom cleaner wisely wearing knee-high galoshes, and the newspaper deliverer donning a sequin fuchsia cocktail dress at 9 in the morning.
At ten the doctor—this time an older more convincing one—came in smiling to give the verdict. The lab had rooted through my feces and found no evidence of cholera. I was dejected. Earlier that morning Karl had brought me a printout of the Wikipedia entry on cholera, sure that I had hit the jackpot, joining a pedigree list of stricken personages, not counting the other anonymous millions. Nor did I have typhoid or any of its militant wings. They did, however, find a type of bacteria that wasn’t supposed to be there, the likely source of my infection. His diagnosis: I wasn’t used to Thai food. How this caused a bacterial infection was unclear. He spoke, while rubbing my stomach, in faster Thai than any of the native Thai speakers in the room could comprehend. By the time we asked what kind of bacteria it was and how long I would have to stay in the hospital, he was gone.
Americans coming to Thailand will thus feel right at home with brusque manner of doctors who seem to be on their way out the door the moment they step in to see you, as though you, the patient, were keeping them from seeing their patient. My Thai doctor managed to be evasive as well as brusque, racing in to not really tell me what I have.
---
We spent the rest of the day in a thick haze, reading, sleeping, and wondering when and if the doctor would return.Knowing that I was no longer battling cholera or sweating out typhoid, my spirits flagged. Tethered to my bedside IV bag, I escaped into Bruce Chatwin’s travel account of the aborigines of the Australian outback and his meditations on the nomadic life. With the clock on the wall broken, my sick room had the suspended feel of Dreamtime, punctuated only by the cyclical rhythm of my bowels.
When moments of ennui struck, we flipped through Thai television for the channel showing the World Cup just in case we had missed it the last thirty times we checked. The closest we could get was two infuriating fat men in front of a massive deodorant advertisement yelling about the World Cup match currently being played. Thai television, even for a native speaker like my wife, has the advantage and disadvantage of being unwatchable for more than five minutes. In the hospital, we probably watched three hours. At all times of day and night you come upon what looks like public access soap opera, always with the same radio theater sound effects and same character types: prissy female lead, humorless male, envious female, and grotesque comic relief. The default shot is profile close-up, so as best to capture all the emotion being expressed in the character’s eyebrows and lips. One historical drama, meant to evoke traditional Thai village life in days of yore, looked like a women’s locker room epic, with all the women in modern make-up wearing purple towels around their chests.
I was in the danger of becoming wrapped up in the plot of the women’s shower saga when my mother-in-law Noi (whose name means "Tiny") showed up at the end of the day in hopes of springing me out of the hospital. She managed to track down the doctor, who said I needed to stay another night, without further explanation.
---
The second night passed with the calm of a broken fever while a thunderstorm raged outside. The nurses freed me from my IV drip before bed and Marissa read aloud a few chapters from Don Quixote until I fell asleep. The next morning I woke up feeling human and ready for breakfast. I swilled ovaltine and ate rice porridge along with a salty Thai version of a beignet.
When the doctor popped in to inspect me, I tried to beam health.
“How are your bowels?” he asked.He stood contra posto with the back of his hand against his hip, like an aristocrat posing for his portrait.
“Better,” I assured him. “But very green. That’s not a problem, is it?”
“No, not at all,” he laughed. “We’ll give you some medicine to take home when we give you the bill.” And then he galloped away. Exactly what disease I had, I’ll never know.
The bill would not gallop in until three hours later, but when it finally did, we had little cause for complaint. The grand total for my two days and two nights in hospital, including meals, medicine, doctor consultation, and lab work was 6,000 baht—just under 190 bucks, no insurance.* And if I had really been looking to tighten my belt and willing to stare into some open abscesses, I could have stayed in a four-bed room for much less—though I can’t imagine the horrors of sharing a bathroom with a stranger suffering the same ailment as mine.
In the end, in the absence of cholera and typhoid, suspicion fell back onto the seafood noodle yum and the octopus handler of questionable hygiene. But I bore her no grudge. My confidence in Thailand had only been bolstered by the experience. It was still a wild place where I could, at least in theory, catch something horrendously romantic. And even if I only got the occasional middle-brow, food-borne, nondescript bacterial infection that sent me spiraling down the toilet into nothingness, I now knew I had a reliable local hospital to count on—one that even left me enough money to buy my next lukewarm seafood dish from the street vendor.
This is the last column I wrote for the Stanford Daily:
“When the earth gapes my body to entomb,
I justly may complain of such a doom.”—Voltaire, “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”
“And I can’t fight this feeling anymore. I’ve forgotten what I started fighting for. It’s time to bring this ship into shore. And throw away the oars, forever.” –REO Speedwagon, “Can’t Fight this Feeling Anymore”
My Sunday sing-along with the village delinquents had just reached the coda when I heard a pounding at the door.
The sound startled the young ne’er-do-wells and sent our five-part harmony into a pitchy mess. Everyone stayed on key, but they lost their balance and fell from the risers into the inflatable pool of hot pitch below. I have found, in working with degenerate youth, that sometimes all it takes to bring out the golden voices slumbering inside their criminal bodies is a little tough love.
Take the Three Tenors, for example: all products of the musical pedagogy of European fascism. “Lucky” Luciano Pavarotti was a cracker thief in Mussolini’s Italy until the authoritarian youth outreach program fed him the castor oil that brought his sweet tenor gurgling up to the surface. Placido “Sleepy Sunday” Domingo was bastinadoed sixteen times by the Spanish Falange before he could sing a melody instead of jimmy a lock. And Jose “Career Loiterer” Carreras would still be standing on a street corner in the Barceloneta if Franco’s Guardia Civil had not tended to his musical ‘reeducation’.
But back to my story: peeved that I would now have to refill the tub with freshly heated tar, I marched to the door to rage at the intruder whose knocking had interrupted my stern commitment to community service.
“Don’t you realize that I am trying to rehabilitate the malformed souls of our nation’s youth through the formidable spirit of music?” I shouted. “Account for yourself, villain!”
I concluded my greeting with a swift flick between the man’s eyes delivered by my callused bludgeon of a fingernail.
Only when his eyes failed to come uncrossed did I realize this villain was my twin brother, G.P. (Gross Product).
“G.P., you rogue! My apologies, but I didn’t recognize you dressed in your clown suit. What gives?”
G.P. was a real biz-casual kind of guy. He talked a lot about synergy, diversifying stuff, stimulating investment incentives in things, and all the legendary nights out he had with his boys in Palo Alto. He was the kind of guy who praised the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporate donations to political campaigns as a victory for free speech. So you can imagine my shock when I saw him swaddled in pink robes, his hair tied in a knot, and a skull tattooed across his face.
“The end is nigh, P.G.! Death has come to swallow our world, to gnash our guts betwixt his jaws.”
“That doesn’t sound like you, G.P. You’re usually so upbeat and of limited diction. What happened?”
“My real estate investments fell through, so I’ve joined an apocalyptic cult.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll get another investment opportunity,” I told him.
“You don’t understand. My penthouse vacation condos in Port-au-Prince fell through all fifteen floors below them.”
“Oh,” I said. But as soon as tried to say something comforting, something remotely optimistic, a little serving of a vomit would surge into my mouth. My mind desperately searched beyond the earthquake in Haiti for a current realm of human activity that didn’t make me gag in despair. Politics, War, Healthcare, Education, Economy, Jobs, Media, Hollywood, Environment—these banal terms, fired into my brain hundreds of times a day, took on a ghoulish appearance that sent me cowering in the warm vat of hot pitch.Not even art—the cherubic voices of my village hoodlum choir singing “Waltzing Matilda” in the round—could draw me from the bilious depths of my black liquid sanctuary.
My brother’s return had sapped my resolve to live among men. In the days following his visit, I tried to carry on with my volunteer work as choirmaster for incorrigible derelicts. But I didn’t possess the strength of will to cane the sole of even a single foot. As a result, the group’s singing failed to improve and recidivism quickly replaced rehabilitation. Petty larceny and gambling returned to the choir room. By month’s end, my Sunday sing-alongs had become wanton orgies of disorder. There would be no great Pavarottis or Domingos made by me—only tone-deaf cracker thieves and donkey-voiced loiterers.
In a final attempt to fight that apocalyptic feeling, I decided to volunteer my living body for scientific testing. Surely, in a world mired in disaster, science is still our one stalwart hope. So I stumbled into my neighborhood medical testing office and shouted at the receptionist, “In the name of progress, hit me with the radiation!” But the supervising physician rejected me, citing some jargony bureaucratic term called “raving lunacy.”
But, really, I’m happier here. I’m with my twin brother Gross Product, who now goes by Death Knell, and all his apocalyptic cult friends. We have a lovely little stretch of hovel in the trans-Bay tube midway between SF and Oakland. I hear the view three hundred feet above us is simply stunning. We have an ample supply of nettles and pass the time telling each other stories of the pending apocalypse and watching the BART passengers zoom by merrily on their crash course to inevitable disaster.
One thing, though. I can’t write these columns for the Stanford Daily anymore. Internet connection is too spotty down here. Besides, ever since I’ve stopped fighting this apocalyptic feeling, I’ve forgotten what I started writing for.
