The Sex Pistols, you know. He was singing about vacationing (cheaply) in communist east Germany in the 70s, but I think about that line whenever I go to Southeast Asia and find myself in a late 90s fantasy where the dollar remains powerful. It generates a bit more unease when one considers that region’s nasty, nasty history of colonialism; the Dutch, the British, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese all took turns exploiting the locals and their rubber trees and coffee plants and sweet sweet mahogany and teak and palm oil. Do you know how much palm oil you can get out of an orang-utang? Those guys have huge palms. Ha, ha! But, seriously, a lot of people suffered and died during the few hundred years that western Europe jockeyed for supremacy in that part of the world, depriving those people of sovereignty and the sacred right of self-determination.

But, of course, one is never guilty for the acts of another, and one may decline to participate in first-world white guilt by living correctly one’s self; ergo, I will not be patronizing the indigenous prostitutes, I will not be buying drugs, I will not, though it breaks my heart, spectate at the Elephant Gladiator Championships. Just give me cheap beer and a $15/night bungalow on a beautiful white sand beach - and keep those goddamn fishing boats out of the view, would ya?

The fact is, tourists bring prosperity. I’ve been in Saigon and Hanoi, in the parts where you’re supposed to be, where the kids have cell phones and literacy and exposure to ideas of the rights of the individual and air-conditioning and fancy little motorcycles, and I’ve gotten lost and ended up in the sections of town that do not participate in tourism, and they are for-real authentic squalor. Are they selling their culture, climate, cuisine, dignity? Maybe - arguably - but they’re getting a good price, and their collective quality of life is better for it.

The best anyone can hope for is to sell themselves for a good price!

Any of you, I mean. Not Jens. Jens is bulletproof.

Buy my books.

Let’s boil this down to a maxim: travel. It broadens minds and weakens prejudices. But don’t be a dick. That law is no more flexible than at any other times: travel, weddings, bar mitzvahs, commencements, twenty-one-gun salutes. And in SE Asia, it means don’t perpetuate whoredom, avoid littering, minimize plastic water bottle use, don’t go to those sketchy little “circuses” where the elephants are covered with feces and scars. Don’t be one of those geniuses who gets high, then arrested, at a Full Moon Party, don’t urinate on the local gods, even if they are false. Etc. But you don’t come here for me to tell you what to do. You come here for me to tell you what to think. You could do worse. Probably have. That’s why I am your only hope, and if I leave, you are screwed.

What I’ve been trying to say for five hundred words is, I’m going on vacation. I’ll be gone from January 3rd until February 25th. It’s going to be an excellent vacation, probably the longest and best I’ll ever have. We’re flying into Kuala Lumpur, spending a week on Langkawi, then down to Singapore, then up to Thailand, with a probable stop at Georgetown. In Thailand, we’ll spend a week or two on Ko Samui and Ko Pha Ngan, then up to Bangkok, then Ayutthaya, Vientiane, maybe Luang Prabang, then Angkor Wat, and then back down to Kuala Lumpur. Wow!

Obviously, I cannot let my webpage lie fallow, or discontented “webizens” would flood the streets, jump up and down on cars, throw explosives through storefronts, tear babies apart like wishbones, tie folks’ shoelaces together, link all your paper clips so that they all come out when you take out one, rape like it’s going out of style, and other such monkeyshines. So I’ll come up with some sort of time-released content and let the auto-bots release it for me, a dollop at a time, like charcoal released into your strychnine-rich blood. You took the strychnine when you realized I’d be gone.

Expect it! Probably twice a week, beginning next week.

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I read a massive interview with David Simon this weekend. It took me an hour to get through and left me speechless. (Do yourself the favor of reading it. If you haven’t seen The Wire, there are spoilers; but if you haven’t seen The Wire, you’ve wasted your life. Go see it, now. It’ll make you a better human being.) Simon has an uncanny gift for cutting to the heart of incredibly complex social issues in a few sentences; in the course of the interview, he explains why Americans are addicted to drugs, why the drug war can’t be won, why reform is desperately needed but virtually impossible, why our popular representatives in government have no idea what the populace wants, and why this is unlikely to change. It’s deeply distressing.

He also calls out journalists; they are the watchdogs of society, and they are now toothless. He says that good journalism is what keeps us free. I always found this far-fetched, but one recalls that journalism brought down Nixon, journalism damaged Clinton’s political power, and it was the lack of good journalism that enabled us to tolerate Bush for eight years. (That’s not 100% true, is it? I remember reading Seymour Hersh’s scathing article on Bush and the Iraq War in a 2004 New Yorker; was it the irrelevance of the medium that let these truths go without a ripple? The stories that people need to hear about are out there, but the populace is too jaded/drugged on disposable pop culture/preoccupied with toys/uneducated to care. So, journalists and teachers are the watchdogs of society - but Simon has his say about teachers in season 4 of The Wire. Turns out they’re compromised by the very system they work for! Just like journalists.)

Anyway, it made me want to be a journalist. Not a for-real, works-at-a-newspaper journalist, because my personality is too retiring and subtle for the dog-eat-dog hustle and bustle of a newsroom, where the assertive thrive, but also because newspapers are, of course, dying. It reminded me of a project me and Joel have been kicking around for years; we want to travel through east Texas, talk to people, photograph them. We expect to have an excess of material, so some will be released via blog, with the best stuff saved for a book, wherein we will try to knit it into a narrative. We have no idea what thesis we are after; the region is not afflicted by any particular economic or cultural misery or stagnation; perhaps we will come up with nothing more specific than a portrait of life in this part of the country. I can say that we will be speaking mainly to working class citizens. Everyone loves to hear about the plight of the working man.

I’m excited because the work will be quite different from my usual output, and because it’ll give me a chance to work with a guy whose creative sensibilities are more in tune with mine than anyone I’ve ever met, even if our talents lie in different areas. I expect the project will yield artistic and personal satisfaction. If it’s fruitful, we’ll probably pursue similar projects. We’ll become a powerful, unique voice for change and hope in America, which no one will ever pay any attention to because what we have to say can’t be rendered into ten-second sound bytes or tweets or Call of Duty multiplayer maps.

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538 has a post comparing him to Br’er Fox. Man, I loved those stories when I was a kid. So what if they were racist? They in no way influenced how I think of colored folk. Haha! Gotcha.

I’m reading Black Ajax, by George MacDonald Fraser, one of the greatest writers of the past century that will probably never achieve much critical recognition, because he wrote historical fiction, which is despised by audiences and critics alike. Never mind that his books are thrilling, profound, populated with excellent characters. His bread and butter, of course, was the Flashman series, but he wrote a number of deeply affecting books outside of those. His Mr. American, while flawed, was a moving examination of the relationship between America and Britain, and concluded with a tidy, yet shaking statement on mankind’s zeal for mankind’s own destruction, here on the eve of World War I: the aged war hero Flashman rides on a motorcar into Buckingham Palace to the jubilant cheers of the battle-eager masses, thinking he’s attending some council of war, when he’s just going in to use the royal bathroom. It’s an excellent illustration of the character’s eye for bathos (comedy derived from juxtaposition of high drama and the ridiculous), as well as the farcical, yet tragic rush to a war more devastating than anyone could have imagined. There’s a similar scene in Zola’s Nana; as the lead character lies dying of her sins on the eve of the very ill-fated (for France) Franco-Prussian war, the mob rushes down the street shouting, “À Berlin! À Berlin!”

Fooooools.

Yes, Black Ajax. It’s about a boxer, a former slave fighting in England around the time of Napoleon - and as famous as Napoleon, too. The book opens with Ajax (Tom Molineaux, rather), perpetually punch-drunk, brain-damaged, and dying now, and his manager trying to get him fired up to go beat down some local ruffian. The village’s squire might give them at least a leg of mutton, if it’s a good and bloody show. The scene is written with a strikingly chilly and ineffable sadness. It almost paralyzed me. Seriously. I was standing while I read it and had to sit down lest I fall over.
After that, the book gives way to a series of about twenty “witnesses”, short essays written by historical personages whose lives intersected somehow with the boxer’s. The first is Paddington Jones, and it reveals not only Fraser’s incredible ear for period dialect, but also the character’s deeply seated, yet weirdly complex racial prejudices.

I’m going to go read it now. And you thought this post would be about Joe Lieberman! So did I.

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I wish there were a plural word for that.

Reading:

• The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers. I enthusiastically supported Tim Powers before ever reading him; he writes historical fantasy, what more do you need to know? Then I read The Drawing of the Dark, which was… merely okay (even though a magical beer is the central plot device), and I wondered if perhaps he wasn’t all I’d hoped. Ah, but Dark was one of his first novels, and The Anubis Gates came after some years of refinement. It’s witty, it’s inventive, it’s entertaining. It has a gripping plot and is cover-to-cover full of weird and wild characters. It’s Dickens from hell.
• Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s futurism, or future history, that branch of hard scifi that tries to realistically imagine some part of the future - in this case the colonizing and terraforming of Mars. This book proves like none other (since Riverworld) that the exceptional scifi author must be a polymath; Robinson shows an impressive command of astronomy, geography, geology, engineering, history, sociology, psychology, languages, comparative religion, literature, space travel, genetics, biology, and many other fields. Robinson executes his usual trick of having exquisitely crafted characters in a plot that redefines “epic”.  No, not plot, quite; his books don’t have plots in the same way that history doesn’t have plots. It has stories. I was humbled by the power and majesty of this book - and it’s just the first in the trilogy.
• Road Dogs, by Elmore Leonard. First time reading Leonard. I looked forward to it. He’s known for his pacing; as he says, “I skip the boring parts.” I was surprised to find such a talky novel. Most of the novel is dialogue - great dialogue, with real rhythms and poetry to it, but little happening none the less. A fun novel, but not quite what I expected. It breezes through and is done with. An entertaining diversion - nothing humbling or majestic, but I wouldn’t be unhappy if I’d written it.
• The Bootleg Inn, by Jason Sauchuk. My buddy’s debut novel, about a haunted hotel in Nova Scotia. Not bad!

Watching:

• Planet Earth, BBC. As good as everyone says. I got goosebumps at the glorious thirty-second shot of the great white catching a seal.
• Inside the Medieval Mind, BBC4. It’s okay. I’ve learned a few new things, but it’s pretty clear that the cinematographer and director were bored as hell. Every shot is so edgy it makes my eyes bleed, and the soundtrack is rattling, disturbing, grating - that’d be fine if it were a slasher flick, but the guy’s just reading some monk’s letter from seven hundred years ago.

Playing:

• Dragon Age, Bioware. Great stuff. Game o’ the year.
• Final Fantasy XII, Square Enix. I made it to the endgame! … now I have to grind for ten more hours to beat the final boss.
• Wolverine: The Origin: The Movie: The Game about the Movie, Raven. Surprisingly great for a tie-in game. Crazy, silly violence. But it’s a good God of War-style combo-based brawler at heart. With RPG elements! Which everything should have. Breakfast cereals! Why shouldn’t I get better at eating them as I eat more? Shaving! I should be better at it, with all this experience.
• Tales of Monkey Island: Rise of the Pirate God, Telltale. My love for this company is so boundless that I actually pay for their games. It’s been a good year for Monkey Island fans. The final chapter is as good as the rest.

Listening:

• Stuff. Things. None of your business. Though the new Christmas song from Jens Rushing is pretty good.

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Click here.

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6. The Beijing-Brazil Naval Axis

China wants to build an aircraft carrier. Who doesn’t? Anyone can build an aircraft carrier. Not everyone can build a relationship. But they have. With Brazil, one of the four countries that maintains an aircraft carrier. Theirs is fifty-two years old. They bought it from the French. And they’re using it to train the Chinese. The Russians, French, and US weren’t interested in helping out, so they went to the sunny southern land renowned for its beef, rainforest fires, high rate of AIDS patients, and likely position as one of the most powerful countries in the world over the next few decades, what with its booming agribusiness and burgeoning population. What could this alliance between a current US-antagonistic superpower and a possible superpower in our hemisphere mean? Probably nothing. Don’t think about it.

Why are aircraft carriers important? Because they’re freaking awesome. And they allow a nation to project far beyond the reach of a navy (viz., the sea). A fighter/bomber launched from a carrier can strike a thousand miles or more inland, and a handful of US carriers (and support ships) have allowed the US to remain the dominant power in the Pacific for decades. China’s been growing its navy for the past decade and become gutsier in approaching US ships, but they can’t really hope to take the US on until they have carriers. Thus.

But I’m not worried about China. Sure, they’ve got a massive population and (historically) a sense of racial superiority (the Chinese word for Vietnam, for example, means “The Pacified South”, and in their negotiations with Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, they repeatedly referred to European kings and queens as vassals to the Emperor), and they’ve steadily subdued and supplanted their Muslim and Tibetan populations, and they’re economically powerful enough that they can score the Olympics despite their constant and famous human rights violations, and they can skew US blockbusters to portray Chinese positively in hopes of winning their box office dollars (see 2012), but you know what China doesn’t have? Oil. Gas. They have some coal. But as Germany proved in WWII, when you’re powering a huge military-industrial complex, there’s no substitute for sweet black gold. Global empire runs on dead dinosaurs, and China has precious little of those. Unless they invade Iran! Fingers crossed.

7. Dead man gets passport.

Eh, who cares. Fraud, forgery, and incompetence are nothing new.

8. Chechen murders go global.

The Kremlin’s Chechen murderer of choice, Ramzan Kadyrov, is killing his enemies all over Europe - a human rights activist investigating him, a former bodyguard accusing him of torture, a defected freedom fighter, a competing insurgent leader. But, with Moscow’s help, he has brought peace and stability to the region, and what’s a few thousand Chechens more or less? They are grist in the mill of history! I don’t even know where Chechnya is! Haha! It’s a fine example of Vladimir Putin’s new Russia. That man gets things done!

9. America joins Uganda’s civil war.

Here’s a doozy. You knew, of course, that Uganda has suffered from one of the world’s longest ongoing civil wars, between the government and the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Genuine Satan Joseph Kony, who claims to be a spirit medium and chosen of God. The man is openly diabolical and probably insane, and has fueled his army with kidnapped child soldiers, and paid them with the proceeds of sex slaves sold to his Sudanese paymasters. In Christmas 2008, his men hacked to death about 400 civilians, earning this stinging rebuke from the Secretary-General of the UN: “[he] condemns in the strongest possible terms the appalling atrocities reportedly committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in recent days.” Ouch! Joseph Kony instantly burst into flame and plunged to the depths of hell. Oh, no, wait. He went on kidnapping, mutilating, and raping. In fact, he’s kidnapped about 70,000 people so far, half of them children. Wow! Well, you know what the US does when it sees a brutal warlord abusing human rights! We wreck their shit, unless they’re Russia, North Korea, Cuba, China, Turkmenistan, Cambodia, East Timor, Chile, Venezuela, Iran, Sudan, Congo, Haiti, etc.

So we helped the Ugandan government plan and fund a mission to wipe out the LRA, and with the famous competence that captured Osama Bin Laden and recovered Saddam’s WMDs, Joseph Kony and his band of merry murderers were brought to justice. Oh, no, wait. They escaped and killed 900 civilians in retaliation.

The US’s role in Africa could certainly be expanded. There’s a question of how much responsibility we - AND EUROPE, COME ON YOU SLACKERS - have in rebuilding the continent after so thoroughly fucking it with a decade of colonialism. A good deal, no doubt, humanitarian issues aside. However, as in Iraq, there’s a sticky question of where military aid overlaps with neo-colonialism; the capital crime of colonialism is that it deprives populations of the chance to create their own history, and foreign management, beneficent and well intentioned though it may be, is a heavy hand.

(Happily, though, I can say definitively that most of Africa’s problems are Europe’s fault, not ours; American interference in the continent is nothing compared to that of Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Belgium.)

Moral issues aside, there’s the concern that Africa is a pit into which we may throw money and lives forever without seeing improvement. Disease, famine, and lack of resources make many of the governments untenable without war and political unrest. How many quagmires can we handle?

10. An ROTC for spies.

A secret program in universities to train spies? Freaking awesome. It’s like Alias! I used to think Jennifer Garner was so hot. Now I can’t see past her giant square jaw. She looks like the Tick with breasts.

And that’s the lesser known stories of 2009! As you can see, hell in a handbasket.

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My friend Chris Coffman linked to the “Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009” on foreignpolicy.com. You missed them for a reason - most are relatively obscure matters of economics or ethninomics (neologism, copyright Jens Rushing), things which, let’s face it, no one cares about. But a few warrant discussion.

1. The Northeast Passage is open.

Two German ships traveled from Pacific Russia to Western Europe via the northern route, “over the top,” if you will, a route previously impassable due to polar ice. “There was virtually no ice most of the route,” said one of the captains. Hurrah! Now we can see a whole new era of exciting geopolitics as new shipping routes open up. Canada will continue to subsidize its impoverished and alcoholic Inuit population in order to maintain its claim over the northern reaches; despite, the claws of the Red Menace will stretch over the dwindling polar cap, seeking, seeking for capitalists ripe for the claw-raping. Exciting! And, as my Canuck friends never tire of telling me, they’re cheerfully dismantling what little navy they have, while paying way too much for obsolete British subs that they can’t maintain. And the Russians, who have traded Soviet imperialism for good old-fashioned Peter-the-Great capital-I Imperialism, couldn’t be richer or more powerful. They have a charismatic and beloved leader, and they have Western Europe by the teats - remember last winter when they “accidentally” shut off natural gas because of a “disagreement” with the Ukraine and the pipeline? And Western Europe went into convulsions? Yes, it looks like they’ll finally get to conquer the world. Bully for them!

Haha! I jest. In this age of contraction and dwindling resources, anything on a large scale - big box retail or global empire - is doomed to fail! So our affable neighbors to the north may be spared Russian hegemony, but they’ll be too busy scrounging for firewood and meat - whatever kind - to care.

2. A new flashpoint in Iraq.

So the leaders are corrupt or insane, and internecine war continues to tear the country apart, and civilians are still being blasted into oblivion in what was once the greatest city in the civilized world. Haha! What times we live in! No, that’s not enough. The Kurds, that Ethno-Iranian ethnolinguistic group that live in the north, have been feeling frisky and would like a slice of the oil-rich Nineveh region. You probably know the Kurds as the group that produced Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb, or Saladin, that most famous sultan who fought Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood, personally. “The Flower of Islamic Chivalry,” whose death represented a turning point in the fortunes of the Muslim world, whom Sir Walter Scott invented as a charming, liberal gentleman, and whom William Monahan and Ridley Scott made a ridiculous saint. I vomited in disdain at the end of Kingdom of Heaven when Saladin releases the defeated Christian army for free; in real life, his mercy, while certainly exceptional for the time, was not so unalloyed by human characteristics. No, he set them free for a hefty price, and those who couldn’t pay the ransom were sold into slavery. Hey ho! History is a series of disasters and enormities, and those figures that approach nobility are ballooned into saints. Anyway, Iraq? Totally fucked. It was always a hornet’s nest; we just gave it a good stirring. Next!

3. A hotline for China and India.

The heads of state can call each other whenever they want now, just to talk. I wonder if the US feels left out when nuclear powers confabulate without them. Nah, they’ve got a lot to talk about. A border Himalayan region really belongs to China, because it’s really a part of Tibet, which really belongs to China, because China isn’t big enough yet. They fought a war on this in 1962, which I bet you didn’t know about. I didn’t. You know who did? The families of the 2000 soldiers who died! Ha! Man, what a crazy world. Anyway, they’re both nuclear, both big and hungry countries, still growing; throw Pakistan into the mix, and we’ve got what one might call a plumb innerestin’ sitchiation. Yes, probably all of Asia will be a nuclear cauldron in the near future!

4. A New Housing Bubble?

I think it’s just wonderful that we live in a country where people not only can have a small mansion surrounded by a tiny strip of grass, then a hundred other duplicate mansions, but expect such a thing. It’s awesome to visit other countries such as Korea, where everyone lives in giant filing cabinet apartment towers, or Southeast Asia, where you have your choice between a filing cabinet and a shanty, or even Europe, where the wealthy have really nice apartments, but apartments still, and then to go home to the US where people complain that their house is only 1500 square feet and really they should be in the house they deserve. Who knows why they deserve it? Dammit, don’t knock this sense of entitlement. It built this country. Manifest Destiny is self-entitlement writ continental. It’s freaking amazing what we can do when we think we deserve something. We wouldn’t have Texas, or California, or everything in between. God gave us that half of the continent; God wants us to have a 3000 square foot McMansion, and the government is helping out. The new housing bubble, says the New York Times, is probably caused by the government backing loans to unqualified borrowers via the Federal Housing Administration. Remember how spectacularly the last housing bubble burst? Imagine that, but instead of leveling the banks, it levels the government. Wow!

Why does no one want to make realistic disaster movies? Disaster porn like 2012 is all well and good, apparently, but no one wants to chronicle the orgasmically destructive collapse of America’s banks and the economy thus powered. I guess it’s more uplifting to watch someone crushed by volcanic ejecta than, say, a retired couple staring down the bleak barrel of impoverished life after Wall Street vaporizes their retirement funds. Real disaster is even more poignant, Hollywood, and thus riper for exploitation! Get on it!

5. The Civilian Surge Fizzles.

Robert Gates and Obama would like to send you to Afghanistan. USAID is the government’s international development branch, and they send civilians to help development infrastructure in countries where the infrastructure has been bombed to shit.

Hard to be cynical about this! It’s not only humane, but necessary - as “Charlie Wilson’s War” pointed out, if we don’t do this, it’ll come back to bite us in the ass later. It’s a fine thing to kick the Russians out of Afghanistan (back in the 80s), but if we don’t build schools, teach them how to farm, try to move them out of preindustrial life, then they’ll be ripe and ready for, say, a scary unthinking fundamentalist hate group to take over the government.

Here’s the cynicism! No one signed up. The military has had to fill most of the roles that State Department or USAID might, and the military, as Tom Clancy pithily pointed out, is not good at these things; they are good at breaking things and killing people. We are failing the Afghanis on this front, and it’s unlikely to turn around. Would you like to be paid 40k a year to go to Afghanistan if you don’t even get to shoot people? Of course not. I guess we’ll leave national reconstruction in the hands of the increasingly thuggish Karzai government.

Fun fact: Afghanistan is often classified as a Fourth World country, meaning that it not only has no development, but no prospects for development. Also, I can’t wait until I move back to the states and buy a 2500 square foot house. I want to get one with a big garage so my band can practice there. (I need to buy a new guitar amp, too!) It’d be nice to have an office and a library, but I’m not greedy.

This is getting long. Let’s split it in two.

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Because I wrote a story today. It’s a Blankenship & Dawes story, it’s fast, funny, and absurd, and I feel satisfied with it. I’m happy to return to these characters after a too-long hiatus, and happy to produce something after a few weeks of video games rotting my brain. Huzzah!

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