The Heart Of The Day

If there is anything a foreigner knows about China, it is that he or she knows that she knows nothing.

Today an American woman went to the Blind Massage School for accupuncture…but they don’t do accupuncture on foreigners. She doesn’t know why. Two different internet cafes refused me today even though I had been going to them before. I don’t know why. Meo! (No!) The price boards in the hotels show 680 Yuan but when they offer you a room it is lowered to 50 Yuan. Who gets to pay 680? No one knows. Some hotels won’t take foreigners at all. No one knows why.

Many Chinese are adamant about getting rid of that extra fluid in their throats. So they hack and spit…wherever they might be…trains…restaurants…on the floor next to their chairs in the internet cafes…

A Canadian wanted to go to Shanghai from Beijing a few weeks ago during the worst of the storm in China. A small boy with some English was willing to help him find the right window at the train station. But the vendor said she knew English and sent the boy away. The Canadian and his wife spent 30 hours on the train. When the train reached it’s destination they climbed off the train. But only when they looked at a menu in a restaurant they realized that they had gone to Xian instead of Shanghai. The ticket seller at the train station hadn’t understood them at all. So they looked at the unearthed soldiers or whatever they are called in Xian while they waited three days to get train tickets to Shanghai.

Whatever…

Already, one-third of China’s land mass is desert and it is losing 1500 square acres more a year to overgrazing, deforestation, urban sprawl and draught. Looking out the window of my plane from Beijing to Kunming, for the first half-hour I thought I was seeing snow. But then I realized the white was primarily in the valleys…and in what used to be terraced rice paddys. Didn’t make sense. I didn’t see a stick of wood or anything green. My god, I suddenly thought…this has all become desert! Don’t know how the few villages that could be seen below manage to grow anything to eat! Gave me the chills…like the ones you get when watching futuristic science fiction movies. As we approached Kunming for landing you could see thousands of acres of covered hothouses growing vegetables. So this is how much of China eats.

In Beijing the air seemed to be much improved this year from what I saw two years ago. But one night I woke up about 3am and looked out the window and you couldn’t see the buildings in the next block so I don’t know if China is manipulating the pollution.

Yet, President Hu goes on television to say that it is unfair for the developed countries to expect the developing “victim” countries to reduce their emissions at the same rate. China has four times more people, he says, and the developed countries have been contributing to the world’s pollution far far longer.

Don’t get the logic. My mother used to say “don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.”

Yesterday an older woman from Ireland and I tried to find the Night Market at the end of the bridge over the Mekong River where you used to be able to get great BBQ meat cooked over coal fires. Not found.

Of the many uninterested Chinese we stopped along the way to get information, a young strolling couple with a few words of English helped us. The man called his old English teacher from school on his cell phone so we could explain what we were looking for. But after my simplified request, she kept asking “what do you want” obviously not understanding me. And she was his English teacher, I thought!

Finally we gave up the idea of the Night Market when they said “follow us.” They took us to an open-air shack near the new beautifully lit bridge. In the “kitchen” we pointed to a few vegetables and some pork. In a matter of seconds we were feasting…on delicious food so full of flavor but probably loaded with MSG. Turns out the woman is a doctor at the local hospital but her husband said he “lost his job” at the same hospital. I was curious as to why he “lost” his job but didn’t want to pry. She was six months pregnant. “I want a boy,” her husband said. Knowing the Chinese can pay a fine for a second child I asked how many children they intended to have. “I only need one,” she said with finality!

Later, back at the Mei Mei Cafe where foreigners hang out, a 45 year old good-looking adventure-hooked guy from Belgium who has lived here several years regaled us with stories…many of them dealing with corruption. For example, a few years ago he, through his girlfriend, rented a building to remodel for a cafe. He signed a contract for the rental for five years. But after two years he was informed by the police they were tearing down the building for a big high-rise. So he lost his investment. A contract in China means nothing, he said.

The Night Market is no longer, he says. The Chinese are glad to be rid of it…having been full of prostitution and the drugs coming in from nearby Burma.

Then we discussed the latest biography simply entitled “Mao” that is banned in China. “Yes,” he said, I have it locked up in my room!” “My god,” he said, “if only 5% of it is true…!” We talked about “The Coming Collapse of China” written by a Chinese Professor at an American university which I had mischievously passed on to a Swiss girl studying Chinese economics in Shanghai on my last trip to China a couple years ago. Steven agreed with the tenuous situation in China where the dangerous rate of growth of the GDP can’t continue indefinitely. But the book was written when Deng (who said it was “glorious to be rich”) was President. President Hu, Steven says, is trying to help China avoid a crisis.

Steven, the Belgian, is planning on taking his Dai girlfriend of three years to Belgium for a 12 week visit. He said he could hardly wait to see her eyes! Getting her a tourist visa will be very tedious because so many Chinese try to get into Europe using falsely filled out papers. “They all lie because all Chinese want out of China,” he said. Besides the bureaucratic red tape, they will have to travel to Guangzhou for an interview at the Belgian Embassy. She will only be able to visit with a “Schengen” visa while there. (If you don’t know, the Schengen countries are the ones in Europe (I think there are four) who no longer recognize borders.

Then we talked about the attitude of the dominant Han Chinese toward the ethnic “minorities” as the ethnic groups are called. About one third of the 800,000 people of this region are Dai. Another third are Han Chinese and the rest includes the Hani, Lisu and Yao as well as lesser-known hill tribes such as the Aini, Jinuo, Bulang, Lahu and Wa. These beautiful friendly self-sufficient intelligent people, who live in the mountains with views that Californians would kill for, have historically been viciously discriminated against and the attitude of the Han is that they are dirty and stupid. Consequently the minorities are turning against their own cultures…so Steven has been teaching his Dai girlfriend, Orchid, about her Dai history and origins including that fact that many years ago the huge Dai army once defeated the encroaching Han dynasties. Ironic that it takes a western foreigner to counsel his culturally bifurcated girlfriend. The 37 year old Orchid, who owns and manages the Mei Mei Cafe, is certainly not stupid. Also ironic that since China has discovered that Western tourists are interested in seeing the minorities, it is starting to help promote their welfare as a source of tourism.

With my Irish friend off to Dali, I had breakfast this morning with a lovely woman from Holland who has traveled all over Indonesia. Hmmm. Think Sumatra may be next after Thailand. This is a good time to visit there, she said, as it is not the rainy season. Good! We had a long discussion about China. We agreed that one does not “like” China so much as one finds it incredibly interesting!

Other travelers can be just as enlightening as the country one is visiting…

I have not been able to access Wikipedia or the external links to Blogspot and Bootsnall blogs since I have been in China. My daughter-in-law who lives in Beijing says that she often can access Wikipedia by going to Answers.com first.

Interesting.

As small as Jinghong is there are internet cafes every few yards on the street where I am staying…each filled with 50 to a 100 spikey-haired bed-head boys all playing video games. Internet usage is very inexpensive and China is very concerned about young people becoming addicted to computer games. I use the internet and they are there. I walk by hours later and the same ones are there! The internet places sell instant noodles and drinks so they don’t even have to leave to eat! At the request of parents China has even introduced “recovery” programs.

Related: The beginning of March, China is cutting the cost of mobile phone usage by 50%. Every other person already has phones almost permanently attached to their ears!

Too cold to do anything in Kunming so am flying out today to Jinghong in the south of China where it is reportedly warm. Was in Jinghong in the tropical Xishuangbanna Region in December 2004 when it was much warmer than this year.  Lonely Planet says there are over 800,000 people  in Jinghong, the capitol, and the many surrounding minority villages. It will be fun to go there again. It is unusually cold in Kunming and nothing is heated…I mean nothing…not hotels…not restaurants…nothing… including my hotel room. During this unusually cold winter there is an energy crisis in China and President Hu has called on the people to conserve. But the heat pad under my bottom sheet is toasty and I can lie in bed and watch Channel TV Asia with information provided by Reuters out of Singapore…but am not sure.

Big deal on TV the last couple days is Spielberg’s resignation as artistic director of the Olympic games. President Hu (who?) says politics shouldn’t be mixed with the Olympics. But he doesn’t mention the fact that China is the biggest provider of arms to the Sudan, of course. Or that China is blocking a UN Security Council resolution against Sudan because China gets most of Sudan’s oil. Guess Spielberg et al figured it doesn’t do any good to talk nice to China and this was the only way to get it’s attention. A Chinese official says it is not China’s foreign policy to react to criticism.  BTW, China is very worried about the possibility that demonstrations will mar the games.

And then there is the case of the two spies for China that were arrested by the U.S. President Who says the accusations against China’s spying is a bunch of hooey. He didn’t say it that way of course. He says the U.S. is trying to start up the cold war again.

So it goes…

I plan on uploading pictures of Josh’s menu items when I get to a place where I can use my own computer.  He says that small groups of the Olympic committee have been meeting at the Hilton for the last four years, that during the Olympics the hotel will be 95% full with the entire Committee and that he is bracing for the walloping restaurant business.

Hard to believe I was in Beijing for two weeks. But you know what they say about stinking guests if they stay too long. So today I flew to Kunming in Yunnan Province in the south of China. Stewardess announced that the flight would take 3.5 hours to go 200 kilometers. I figured there was something wrong there…think she meant 2000 kilometers. Warmer than Beijing but still damn cold…39 degrees F. Had hoped for it to be warmer this far south. Might have to keep on going.

But before I could get to the plane, I had an adventure! Got out of the taxi at the airport and walked around to the back of the car to get my backpack out of the trunk. Then I’ll be damned if the driver took off like a shot with me flapping my arms, running and yelling after him in the middle of the road…to no avail. A nice taxi was coming up behind me…told me to get in…he ran the first taxi down to get him to stop. Boy…woke me up! The driver was just stupid! Didn’t even know why we were pulling him over until we got him stopped and pointed to the trunk! My rescuer kindly refused money. Travel tip: don’t get out of a taxi, if you have baggage in the trunk, until you see the driver getting out too!

I’m in the Camellia Hotel where I stayed both in 2003 and 2004. Great buffet breakfast comes with the room…$28 a night. Couple bars, internet cafe…mostly lauwai (same as gringo only it’s what the Chinese call anyone not from China). There’s a hostel here too…but mostly with twenty-somethings and I want my peace and quiet so I have my own room in the main building. Channel TV Asia is the only English language station but I get most of the world news….as if I needed it. Announcers have a British accent…think it’s operated by Reuters.

Same cafe down the street but with a different name…Chinese and western comfort food…but now with free WiFi. Around the corner is MaMa Fu’s Cafe…hot and sour noodle soups. And next door is a big noodle shop with Over The Bridge Noodle Soup…platter of meat and vegetables comes to the table and you drop the food in and it cooks in the still hot broth…indigenous Yunnan style soup.

No colorful minority peoples selling things in the street now. Guess it’s either too cold or the government has banished them.

I really like the neighborhood here…with a market nearby. A group of crazy Europeans are biking China in this cold…bicycles all parked in the street in the front of a sports clothing shop while they make repairs…older Chinese men stopping by to peer at the loony western barbarians.

This week Josh and I went to the Beijing Exhibition which is a miniature replica of the city in a huge building. Josh says they have one of these in every major city. Very well done! Then we walked through Tiananmen Square. It was full of tourists as we are still in the Chinese New Year season…one family asked to have our pictures taken with them. You know…we were a curiosity! I have had that happen before in rural China and other out-of-the-way places.

Then we were going to take the subway back to Lido…the neighborhood where Josh lives. The subway was packed of course. Josh says, “get on!” Which I did. Only there was no room for Josh! The doors closed and the train took off with Josh standing on the platform! As he receded from sight I hollered Josh! Josh! with my nose pressed against the door window! The Chinese on the train thought that was pretty funny! Stupid Laowi (foreigners)! I had just been following Josh around and had no idea where to get off. So I got off at the next stop and called Josh on the cell phone and told him where I was. What did we do before cell phones! So along comes the next train with Josh’s sweet face in the window!

The two most impressive Olympic venues are the National Aquatics Center or simply the “Water Cube” and the “Bird’s Nest.”

The “Water Cube,” a palatial structure with an area of 80,000 sq meters that is white in the daytime and blue at night, was completed January 28, 2008. Underneath a pure and simple facade, this translucent building embodies a complex and unrestricted framework as well as environmentally advanced technology that has become a landmark structure.

According to the Official Olympic web site, the shapes woven within the steel framework of the “Water Cube” symbolize a membrane of water molecules…a “pure and natural beauty.” Josh says the membrane structure ‘cloth’ is made of translucent teflon. But the welding of the irregular steel framework was the most difficult part of the design and construction.

The web site goes on to say that the “designers created the steel structure of the “Water Cube” based on the so-called “bubble theory,” a somewhat controversial theory because of its many unsolvable problems. When the designers of the National Aquatics Center decided to practice the bubble theory, it drew great attention in the international architecture field. Almost all of the architects that have studied the bubble theory have come to visit the venue construction site.”

“It took only 10 months for workers to build the large-scale, irregular steel structure of the Olympic venue, which is considered a miracle in the history of world architecture.”

“The design and construction of the ‘Water Cube’ steel structure stunned the whole world,” the web site goes on to say. “The Guardian, a British newspaper, published an article calling it a masterpiece of theoretical physics.”

Leave it to the Chinese to wax ecstatic. But it IS impressive! But nowhere do the Chinese say that the architects were all from out of the country.

The “Bird’s Nest” lies adjacent to the the “Water Cube” and creates a nice design foil. At night the inside of the shell is lit up of course and the structure of the actual venue inside is beautifully illuminated. A man made “lake” in the shape of a dragon frames the building as seen blow in the model at the Beijing Exposition.

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Chinese New Year’s Eve Wednesday February 6 2008. Words cannot do justice to the fireworks we viewed across the city from the rooftop of the Hilton Hotel at midnight. It was so cold Josh had trouble holding a camera. It will go on every night for a week,
Josh says!

Last Friday I went to the Yew Chung International School of Beijing with Amy, my daughter-in-law.

Seventy five years ago an optimistic young woman, Madame Tsang Chor-hang, barely graduated from a teacher’s school, emerged from a calamitous time in China and founded Yew Chung in 1932. It grew into the Yew Chung International School in Hong Kong and then expanded to Shanghai in 1993 and later to Beijing in 1995. Now, Yew Chung International School Silicon Valley in Mountain View California emphasizes E-Learning which means that there are now no longer any geographical constraints to learning.

The director says that “Yew Chung has pioneered an exciting new paradigm in international education that leads students to an inner transformation whereby they become both Eastern and Western. There are now massive opportunities for improving the human condition but we need to develop new concepts, new instincts and new politics of decision-making whereby we are first a global citizen, second a national citizen, and third a local citizen.”

The web site goes on to say that global education emphasizes global awareness. Teachers and administrators, who are informed and committed, empower students to realize they can make a difference…to go out into the world with a “common purpose and a deep commitment to resolving global issues confronting the planet.”

Wow…!

Students have to have a foreign passport. The school offers the International General Certificate of Secondary Education affiliated with Cambridge to students in years 10 and 11. It offers the International Baccalaureate to students in years 12 and 13.

Amy teaches modern history to 9th, 10th and 11th level students…mostly children of business people, embassy workers and workers in other organizations. The students come from all over the world…her 11th year history class that I sat in on had an Indian, Singaporean, Korean, an Italian-Chinese, a Malay, an American Chinese, a Caucasian American, a French and a Thai.

I was truly amazed. Both by the students and by Amy. Amy is an excellent teacher…giving energetic narrative to complicated historical events…and the motivations behind them. The students were even more amazing. So well-trained…so eager and ready to learn. All classes are small and taught in English…not the first language for most of these students. Mandarin is a mandatory subject and all students become bilingual in Mandarin/English.

The staff is truly global. Examples: Dr. Sandy Pike is the secondary coordinator and biology teacher. Her father was a British Medical Officer who lived in Hong Kong, England and New Zealand. She got her degree in biology in Hong Kong, then did 18 months of missionary work and teaching English in the bush in Zimbabwe. She left the mission a few days before it was overun by rebels when all her friends, teachers and students were murdered. She stayed in South Africa for awhile after she met her husband (the physics teacher) and they have taught all over the world…Africa, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and now Beijing. One science teacher is a white South African who has been on staff for 4 years. One teacher is a Black from Ireland (not black Irish), another is a Chinese-Canadian, several other Canadians, a few Caucasian Americans, some from Australia and New Zealand, Koreans…the list goes on.

A dream job in a dream school.

Amy, the historian, and I were watching election returns on CNN when we came upon this incredible video.

In the airport, while waiting for my luggage to show up, I scanned the crowd of people in the waiting area and had no trouble spotting Josh…three heads above all others. Eye candy for me! This is the first time I have seen him since we left our sublet in Brooklyn in January 2006!

So now I am ensconsed in Josh’s high-rise two bedroom apartment in “Lido” which is a relatively new neighborhood off the 4th ring road (there are 6 ring roads) in the neighborhood of the Lido (Holiday Inn) Hotel on the east side…not far from the airport. Beijing has 15.4 million of China’s 1.3 billion people! But traffic is relatively minimal here and not much honking…and as in most of China (and most of the rest of the world for that matter) there are no lanes and we get a real kick out of watching the intersection below from our 11th floor windows. Turning from no-lanes into absolutely the wrong “lanes”, they are so hesitant…so careful not to bung up their new new cars. (Josh says that 6,000 new cars appear on the roads in Beijing every day!) Every few minutes all cars stop…tied up in the middle of the intersection…until someone moves and it begins to unravel. No road rage. No one is upset that someone has turned in front of them. There could be a lesson here for the U.S. where everyone expects the rules to be followed and noses get bent out of shape if not.

This part of the city where many expats live is a striking contrast to the hutong near Tianamen Square in the center of the city where I stayed last time I was here in 2004. I found french pastry and great coffee in the Parisian Baguette up the street and the citibank ATM was very generous with me.

Waiting for Amy to get home from teaching in her school, Josh and I discuss Chinese commodities. I had lugged a duffel full of bath sheets and body cream to Beijing. The towels cost almost a $100 each here. I bought six at a Macy’s sale in Portland for $89. Travelers expect luxuries to be ridiculously cheap here. But, Josh says, goods made in China are shipped directly to foreign markets. The locals don’t get them…unless they are traded back into China which results in a very high price…like the towels. Nuts.

Josh took me to a great Korean restaurant my first night here while Amy finished preparing for her last day of school before the Chinese New Year holiday break. Then he turned on the little green and white froggy whose ears blow steam next to my bed. We are living on the edge of a desert, Josh says, so we keep the humidifiers on.

Arrived in Guangzhou (pronounced guan-jo) from Hong Kong yesterday on a sleek new train. I had no idea where the baggage area was. Had paid as much for the baggage as I did my ticket! Then, as I emerged from the immigration check area, from out of nowhere came a man with my two checked bags. Then luckily headed down the escalators with a duffel, a backpack, a carry on and my personal bag without turning head over heels.

Hundreds of people with bags, buckets and sacks full of I don’t know what were sitting and squating on the dirty floor…trying to get to their families during Chinese New Year. Remains of food, paper and boxes were strewn everywhere. Apparently they had been here awhile waiting for trains further inland that had been canceled by the snowstorms. I had forgotten how the Chinese throw their garbage on the ground to be swept up by the next little old lady or man with a broom and shovel. Had also forgotten how loud and aggresive the language sounds. I fleetingly wondered how long it took Josh and Amy to get used to China.

No taxis to be seen. Apparently you have to walk down the street from the station to find the taxis but before I could do that I was approached by a man who offered taxi service. This little man took off, practically running, with my bags as if they weighed nothing. He never looked back as he left me scrambling to keep up several yards behind. But his car was no taxi. I suspect I paid handsomely for the cross town trip to the Hotel Elan. But I didn’t care. No way could I carry all those bags all the way down the street. And he knew it. Travel Tip:  Walk out to the street and get a normal taxi with a meter. On the way he pointed out all the places I could buy different goods. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t here to buy anything.

Guangzhou, in this southern part of China called Canton, where most people speak Cantonese-not Mandarin, is a comparatively rich wholesale marketing area. Huge multi-level buildings harbor the latest trade fairs with goods made all over China. Nice hotels abound for buyers from all over the world. Down the street from me is a 6 story building with nothing but underwear! I thought to myself that the market niche for designers could be unending in China but they just copy.  To get to the underwear building you cross the street through a huge underground tunnel with more underwear. Turn a corner and you can continue down the street, underground, for as far as the eye can see…all underwear! And that is just my neighborhood!

My hotel was listed in the Lonely Planet guidebook as a medium-priced one. No more cheap Chinese guesthouses with no heat for me in the winter! This is a brand new one, cheaply made, tucked in between noodle and tea shops on a busy side-street. It is a smallish boutique hotel, art deco style…roomy with all the latest bathroom fixtures…but best of all free WiFi. It has all the amenities…hot water kettle, refrigerator, safe, queen sized bed with 4 down pillows and blinding white sheets and comforter. I am going into some detail because this would be a 4 star hotel in the states. I am paying $40 a night with an elaborate buffet breakfast for no extra charge.

It is raining and yukky outside. Last night the ATM at the Bank of China around the corner was out of cash. Travel Tip: Apparently you have to go early in the day so this morning I scored some yuan. So aside from eating at an open noodle shop next door where I am starkly reminded how the Chinese spit their bones and other detritus out on the table beside their plates and bowls in front of them, or on the floor, I am staying inside to nurse a brutal dripping head cold.

I am discovering how much China has changed in the two years since I was last here. Where before there were maybe 4-6 TV channels there are now 70. One is listed as English language but only part of the time and then it’s full of propaganda. But you can watch dubbed U.S. sports events!

With luck I fly out to Beijing tomorrow night…30 miles to get outside the city to the airport.

After a week here, I leave Hong Kong this morning on the 1.5 hour long train ride to Guangzhou China. Hong Kong is Hong Kong. The mainland is China according to the locals here who needless to say do not consider themselves part of China even though China does.

I will be in Guangzhou two nights and then hopefully fly out on an Air China 777 to Beijing 8:00 pm on flight 1302.on the 30th. The news this morning is not good. A cold front has brought snow across much of China and apparently the Guanzhou train station is a mess with people trying to get out to visit relatives for Chinese New Year. Glad I’m taking the plane but even then weather conditions may delay my flight. The chinese parliament met yesterday in an emergency session to assess the lack of coal and electricity needed to keep the country functioning. Oh great! So if I don’t show up in Beijing 11pm, where my son son Josh and his wife Amy will pick me up at the airport, hopefully interested parties will know where to start looking!

I will miss my little neighborhood in Kowloon…Cameron Street between Nathan and Chatham. There is everything I need here….interesting winding streets to explore. A coffee shop owned by a German…noodle shops galore. 7-11’s every block.. Starbucks up on Kimberly street where the taxi driver says I can find lively nightlife. Right! McDonald’s open 24 hours and next door to them a KFC…not that I go to either place. There are sales galore in anticipation of Chinese New Year but I have no room in my backpack for one more thing until I unload onto Josh in Beijing.

I will miss my Philippino housemaid who has taken good care of me at the Star Guesthouse. Her cubicle here in the guesthouse is no bigger than the smallest closet. Her daughter back in the Philippines, a nurse, is trying to get a job in California.

I listen to Bloomberg financial channel to find that markets are down in the U.S. and Europe but up everywhere in Asia except Japn. I listen to Al Jazeera, that I consider the best English language news channel in the world, while tending to my email on my laptop. And make left-over business calls to the U.S. on Skype. Yesterday, I hear about ex-president Suharto’s death. Good riddance to a man who was never conviced of bilking his country …siphoning off billions of dollars to his family and friends….his daughter’s plea to forgive her father for all his mistakes a little too late. But many people in his country are reportedly very forgiving…and still respect this former general for miraculously pulling his country into the modern age economically. Hard to believe he will be given a state funeral. This morning I listened to a Serbian tennis champ from Australia proclaim that his father always believed in him more than he did in himself. Inspiring.

Every morning I cross the street to an all night noodle shop and have delicious chicken congee (rice pooridge) and scrambled eggs with tiny bits of meat mixed in. Yesterday I dined on dim sum which was really no different than that found at the old Fong Chong Company in Portland, OR.

This morning some crazy traveler next door, probably some damn person from the Americas in jetlag, woke me up at 3 am with his TV blaring. So I fled across the street to coffee and early breakfast. “You are here a long time,” I said to the same waiter who was here yesterday afternoon. “Yes, I work 16 hours a day,” he said. “No money!” Then I remembered an article in the English language Hong Kong Magazine that said that, in this very expensive city, the average salary for a waiter is about U.S. $780.00 a month. On the other hand a retail sales rep with just one year of experience receives U.S $1500 a month. In an upscale restaurant there is a 10% service charge but is rarely distributed among the service workers. So waiters live on tips.

The streets here are very clean. People smoke while walking on the street since smoking is not allowed indoors (except for homes) Every few yards there is a large “ashtray” fixed atop a garbage bin. There is a lot of English spoken here, left over from the British occupation, and is a comfortable place for a westerner to transition to mainland China..if you live long enough to keep from being run over by a taxi or knocked off the sidewlk by the fast-walking locals who don’t seem to have the patience to deal with gawking tourists. New York all over again.

Enchanting lyrics sung by the Israeli singer…Yael Naim. It also happens to be the music behind the new Mac Air computer ad in the States.

I did it! It’s 9pm January 22 here now. Never going to take long 20 hour plane flight again! Will stop off somewhere…anywhere…Hawaii…Figi…anywhere! Fast efficient train to Kowloon and then taxi to the Star Guesthouse on Cameron Rd. 6th floor of a big building. I stayed just down the street at the Lee Garden before…same owner…friendly Charlie Chan. My room is just big enough for a single bed and TV…and small bathroom…and broadband internet access. U.S. $40 per night but it works just fine…friendly helpful staff. Access to refrigerator, microwave and hot water kettle. I will feel at home here for 8 days until I take the train to Guangzhou and then plane to Beijing where son Josh and his wife Amy will pick me up at the Beijing Airport.

Tomorrow I will find a computer store and buy hardware for Josh’s Mac computer. And apply for a China visa…double entry…30 days each. The visa is about 6 times more expensive for U.S. and UK tourists than for others. Sliding scale I guess. Similar in some post-colonial African countries.

Tonight, sushi across the street.

Spent last weekend with son #1 in Las Vegas. (He shines so bright I call him son. Sorry, my mother used to say that to the kids all the time.) Great time with sushi and a Lynard Skynard concert. It was my xmas since the kids are scattered from hell to breakfast….”kids” being 34 (Beijing), 38 (Thailand) and 40 years old (Las Vegas)!

Disneyland For Adults I call it. Many go there to let their freak flag fly. The brand message is “Whatever happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas.” This includes your money. No other city like it unless it’s Macau China. Unless you live there. Most locals ignore the strip. The morning after is referred to as the double hangover…one for money and the other for alcohol.

It so happened that my visit there overlapped with an Aussie friend that I met and traveled with in Laos and Thailand. Such excitement because we thought we would never see each other again! Greg took me to the hotel she was staying in. As I walked down a hall to the elevators I’ll never forget seeing her running toward me with her arms outstretched!

UN Denounces Racism in Mexico

Prensa Latina
Mexico, Dec 11

The Mexican chapter of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights revealed on Tuesday that indigenous women in the states of Guerrero, Chiapas and Oaxaca suffer sexual, work, educational and health discrimination.

A statement by UN representative Louis Arbour recommended the adoption of legislative, administrative, budgetary and judicial measures to overcome this situation.

Arbour explained that racism and sexism are great work loads for indigenous women, as well as is immigration of women to farm fields in northern Mexico and the United States and the abandonment of widows and minors.

Cases of sexual abuse or physical mistreatment by teachers, as well as discrimination in indigenous school shelters, have been reported among the child population, he noted.

The UN body added that regarding health, this population segment is also hit by malnutrition, mother and child mortality and an increasing presence of HIV AIDS.

I used to play Shane McGowan and The Pogues…turn it up…and do housework. The kids, when they were little, would groan, plug their ears and beg me to turn it off.

Shane’s growl is nearly unintelligible so these are some of the lyrics from this nationalist song from Ireland:

“If I should fall from grace with god
Where no doctor can relieve me
If Im buried neath the sod
But the angels wont receive me

Let me go, boys
Let me go, boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry

This land was always ours
Was the proud land of our fathers
It belongs to us and them
Not to any of the others”

The Mali band Tinariwen has often toured with the likes of Santana and Robert Plant.

Well, I had quite a day yesterday. My son Doug, visiting me for the last three weeks from Thailand where he lives, woke me at 1 am. We finished getting his banking set up on the internet. Wrote up the family info and took it to Kinkos to get it plastisized. Told him to give a copy to his wife in Thailand and that if anything happened to him that she was to show it to someone who reads English so we could be contacted. Got him set up with frequent flyers..and printed out his boarding pass.

I dropped him off at the curb for his flight back to Thailand, kissed him goodbye, and drove off elatedly. Free as a bird! Went to downtown Portland for a coffee. Then to shop for some clothes at Nordstroms. Everything made in China with crappy fabric and horrible prices. It was either that or high-end designer clothes with even more atrocious prices.

So I went to a movie…”The Darjeeling Limited.” Sneaky good…touching story about three brothers…set on a train in India…and their mother, played by Angelica Huston, who had become a nun in a Himalayan monastery. (This I totally understood!!!) The twenty something boys were whining about her taking off and leaving them and not even going to their father’s funeral. Ha! She finally told them to forget about it and get on with their lives. In other words, grow up. Very instructive for me, I tell you!!!

Then I bought some shoes and went to another store where I had a great conversation with an older woman who waited on me….me laughing at the prices…me telling her the cost of one piece was the price of a plane ticket to BKK…she telling me about living in Singapore when she was young and how she was so shocked by the ostentatiousness of America when she returned…we agreeing that Americans should travel to a third world country at least once in their lives. We ended up laughing about most of the women’s pants out now were low-cut… just the thing for women with poom pooey tummies!

Then I went to another movie ($8.00 tickets) called “I’m Not There,” the creatively constructed story about shape-shifter Bob Dylan amid the insanity of celebrity. Unconventional filmmaker, Todd Haynes, (who wrote the story while living in Portland BTW) cast 6 or 7 different actors (the best one a woman played by Cate Blanchette) who all played the changing personas of Dylan. The very young Dylan was played by a very young black kid (Dylan was supposed to be 11 years old) who claimed to be Woodie Guthrie. Dylan’s name was never mentioned and names were all changed but you knew who the characters were…Joan Baez played by Julianne Moore. If you are familiar with Dylan you will be intrigued by it…much of it ironic…tongue in cheek. Rolling Stone says that Dylan surprisingly gave his permission, through a third party, to use his songs both his own recordings and those performed by others. We are left with no better understanding of Dylan than we had before seeing the movie. That’s as Dylan would want it, I think…he hated being corralled…defined by others…especially by the niggard media. You’d have to see it 50 times to catch all the references of the times and then, unless you were a Dylan freak and were alive in the 60’s, you’d miss. If you are interested, musician/songwriter Peter Stone Brown chronicles the historical packaging of Dylan in a Counterpunch article.

Then I had sushi for dinner…including wonderful ice-cold Uni (sea urchin) from the California coast . Finally paid $16 to get my car out of the parking garage! I’m still in sticker shock after not living in the States for most of the last 6 years!

So that was my splurge. I am new again.

NAFTA and Biotech: Twin Horsemen of the Ag Apocalypse
The Last Days of Mexican Corn

By JOHN ROSS
Mexico City.

The single, spindly seven foot-tall cornstalk spiring up from the planter box outside a prominent downtown hotel here was filling out with new “elotes” (sweet corn) to the admiration of passer-bys, some of whom even paused to pat the swelling ears with affection. Down the centuries most of the population of this megalopolis migrated here from the countryside at one time or another over the course of the past 500 years and inside every “Chilango” (Mexico City resident) lurks an inner campesino.

But the solitary stalk, sewn by an urban coalition of farmers and ecologists under the banner of “No Hay Pais Sin Maiz” (“There Is No Country Without Corn”) in planter boxes outside the downtown hotels, museums, government palaces and other historical monuments can just as easily be seen as a signifier for the fragile state of survival of Mexican corn.

As the year ripens into deep autumn, the corn harvest is pouring in all over Mexico. Out in Santa Cruz Tanaco in the Purepecha Indian Sierra of Michoacan state, the men mow their way down the rows much as their fathers and their fathers before did, snapping off the ears and tossing them into the “tshundi” basket on their backs.

In the evenings, the families will gather around the fire and shuck the “granos” from the cobs into buckets and carry them down to the store to trade for other necessities of life. It is the way in Tanaco in this season of plenitude just as it is in the tens of thousands of tiny farming communities all over Mexico where 29 per cent of the population still lives. But it is a way of life that is fading precipitously. Some say that these indeed may be the last days of Mexican corn.
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Email from my son who is chef de cuisine in one of the restaurants in the Hilton Hotel in Beijing…to his friends and family:

On Nov 19, 2007, at 5:24 PM, Ryan Goetz wrote:

Happy Thanksgiving!

I write this now because in two days I am fully booked. I run a T.G menu for 4 days and will not have a chance to come up for air until next week. I ranked the #1 place to have thanksgiving in Beijing. It was not hard to beat out the American cafe called steak and eggs and then HOOTERS. Yes, they have thanksgiving at Hooters in Beijing! It is not a very long list of American restaurants in Beijing, but it is Distinguished!!! I never thought that my name and the boob and chicken wing restaurant would be named in the same article, but anything is possible in China!! So, if your jonesing for some Turkey then try hooters, because I am fully booked. I guess that is something to be thankful for.

On another note, Malcolm is at home and doing well!! He went for a walk with Phil, who flew to Hawaii to see his dad. He is a tough guy and even with a portion of his heart dead, he is still walking around. Phil says he is out of the woods and is being very “normal”. He is an amazing man! So that is another thing to be thankful for!

Amy and I have booked 10 days in Vietnam for xmas vacation, shopping, history and some warm weather. Beijing is really dry and cold!! There is snow on the Wall already. I am researching skiing in Japan. They are some great resorts there. Some in the North, near Sapporo and some right outside Tokyo. Lift tickets are around 4800 yen or $us 44 a day for 32 lifts !!! They say Japan has some of the driest powder in the world. I plan to check in out over a long weekend in Feb or March. They had the winter Olympics in Sapporo in 1972. They were supposed to have it in 1940, but the Indo-Japanese war took them off the list and then world war 2 which took Germany and Japan off for 1944. I wonder if we will lose the votes from the I.O.C. because of Iraq?? Probably not. These are the things you learn when you are married to a Historian! We are a great Trivial Pursuit team!

I know some of you have been planning vacations. I will have some time between now and April, but March to September are out of the question for me and anyone thinking of coming to Beijing this July- August is Out Of Their Minds!! The Olympics are going to turn this place into a Zoo. I am planning a wine trip (and Surfing) to Australia in the Fall, their Spring, in 2008 with a possible stop over in Bali. Anyone interested in Bali??

Cheers and Thanks,
Josh

One migrant advocate that has recently been deported from the U.S. has said that “Mexico could not economically or socially absorb an estimated six million Mexicans who face deportation from the US.” She is probably right. More than a million undocumented Mexicans will be deported from the US this year, according to the Institute for Mexicans in the Exterior (IME). There are 5 million children living in the US with at least one undocumented parent, and more than 500,000 will be separated from their parents this year, the result of roundups at worksites and deportations, according to the National Council of the Raza.

Oaxaca, one of the two poorest states in Mexico, sends a huge percentage of it’s people North to work. Villages in the mountains I visited last year were virtually emptied of it’s men…and many women. There are no jobs. Education sucks. Children who only speak their native dialect are taught by inexperienced Spanish-speaking teachers in “schools” with dirt floors and no equipment or materials. I could go on and on. Wages from 4-5 months work in the U.S. can support an entire pueblo for a year. NAFTA has helped only a few northern towns and has penalized others. The price of corn, the staple food of Oaxaca, has skyrocketed.

However, absorbing illegal immigrants in the U.S. isn’t going well either…either for the U.S. or for the migrants. While living in Oaxaca last year I and other expats found ourselves on more than one occasion trying to talk Oaxacans out of migrating illegally. 400 migrants have died already this year trying to cross the border, according to Coalition in Defense of Migrants, and the total is likely to exceed 500 for the year due to increased border security. Working with migrants in the U.S. for 20 years has shown me the problems that result when Mexicans, cut off from their families, their language and culture, try to live an illegal life in the shadows. It’s not pretty. I could go on and on about that too.

Pressure is building on both sides of the issue. American views of both sides of this issue has been amplified in the media. This article describes the prevalent current view in Mexico:

Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico
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My son Doug arrived in Salem from Thailand on Friday November 9th and hit the ground running…cleaning up the farm for the sale and tying up his loose ends in the area before he goes back to his wife on Koh Samui…all with the help of his personal assistant, of course…me! So I’ve been off the radar for awhile. I can tell. I am getting email from friends again asking me where I am now! Nice to have supporters trying to keep track of me!

For his part, Doug says he is mourning the sale of the farm. After all, his childhood was spent there…helping grampa feed the cows and eating grandmas fried chicken, fry bread and apple pies.

I’m getting a break this weekend. Doug flew down to Las Vegas yesterday to have brother time with Greg. We left Salem at 4:30pm and after nearly three hours in bumper to bumper traffic finally arrived at the airport at 7:25 for a 7:30 flight. Upside of flight delays. He surprisingly made it on the plane in time. But the packed freeways in the valley were a big surprise for me after being out of the country for the better part of the last six years!

Salon.com again by Gordy Slack: “New proof of “mirror neurons” explains why we experience the grief and joy of others, and maybe why humans are altruistic.

Nov. 5, 2007 | A young woman sat on the subway and sobbed. Her mascara-stained cheeks were wet and blotchy. Her eyes were red. Her shoulders shook. She was hopeless, completely forlorn. When I got off the train, I stood on the platform, paralyzed by emotions. Hers. I’d taken them with me. I stood there, tears streaming down my cheeks. But I had no death in the family. No breakup. No terminal diagnosis. And I didn’t even know her or why she cried. But the emotional pain, her pain, now my pain, was as real as day.

Recent research in neurobiology would explain my response as the automatic reaction of a kind of brain cells known as mirror neurons. On Nov. 4, neuroscientists announced that mirror neurons had for the first time been directly identified in humans. Previously their existence had only been inferred from primate research and the observation of human brains through fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging).

Enthusiasm among scientists has been spreading as growing evidence suggests that “mirrors” may explain the roots of human empathy and altruism as well as provide insight into such disorders as autism and even schizophrenia. But that’s not all. In the past few years, dozens of studies have linked mirror neurons to the emergence of language, abstract reasoning and even self-awareness or consciousness. “The self and the other are just two sides of the same coin. To understand myself, I must recognize myself in other people,” says Marco Iacoboni. [Maybe this is why gossip is so fascinating for us!]
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A 25 year old Brit, Alastair Humphreys, spent more than four years bicycling through Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, North America, and Asia. This is what he says he learned:

“That the world is a good place filled with nice, normal people. It’s not all filled with the terrible events we see on the news. I learned to trust more. I saw my strengths and weaknesses highlighted in the good and bad times: loneliness, self-pity, determination, an openness to get on and communicate with whatever kind of person I’m with, a stubbornness not to quit, a fear of failure. I came to really appreciate my friends, family, country, and good fortune.”

There is an excellent reprint of a review in Salon.com of a book published in 2005 by Martha Stout Ph.D. called “The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us.”

I have had at least one co-worker, and a few others, not many, but a few others in my life who have absolutely left me befuddled. Sometimes they made me question myself. Some made me very angry and defensive. Some have charmed my socks off leaving me to realize I’d been had. And maybe you have too. Maybe this is why.

The Devil Wore J. Crew
Salon.com
By Sara Eckel

“A new book says that sociopaths aren’t just Scott Peterson and BTK. They are your neighbors, bosses — even therapists.

Mar 22, 2005 | It sounds like a treatment for a creepy psychological thriller: a world in which one in every 25 people walks through life without a drop of human compassion. On the outside, these creatures appear perfectly normal. They get married, buy homes, hold down jobs. But on the inside, they’re morally bankrupt and completely unrestricted by conscience. They can do absolutely anything — lie, steal, sabotage — without feeling a shred of guilt or remorse.

Harvard psychologist Martha Stout, Ph.D., says this is not science fiction. In her controversial new book, “The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us,” Stout claims that 4 percent of the population are sociopaths who have no capacity to love or empathize. Using composites pooled from her research to illustrate her points, Stout details the havoc sociopaths wreak on unsuspecting individuals — marrying for money, backstabbing co-workers, or simply messing with people for the fun of it. The fact that most of us never suspect our friends and neighbors of sociopathy only makes the transgressions easier to pull off.

Stout, who is also the author of “The Myth of Sanity,” an analysis of forgotten childhood trauma and dissociated mental states, spoke to Salon from her home in Rockport, Mass., about serial killers, bad boyfriends and how to know if your boss is a sociopath or just a jerk.

This idea of ordinary people with no conscience is pretty radical and kind of terrifying. Why are so few of us aware of it?
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Here’s Jill Friedberg again with some insights on the teaching of indigenous children in Oaxaca:

“The demand for rezonification, one of the demands by the teachers during the strike in 2006, was not about where teachers are sent to teach. The rezonification was essentially a cost-of-living demand that would change the salary “zone” for Oaxaca, so that teachers salaries would catch up to the increasing cost of living. [Note: Teachers in Oaxaca City are also living in a city where foreigners have driven up the cost of living]

The assigning of teachers to teaching positions is very complicated in Oaxaca. The Section 22 of the teachers union has a say in who teaches where. And the section 22 has a certain amount of control over IEEPO (the state department of education). That said, not all decisions about who teaches where are decided by the Section 22.

It seems to me that it used to be that teachers were more likely to be assigned to communities where they spoke the same language as the community. But why that has changed may or may not have to do with a state attempt to reduce the ability of teachers and communities to build alliances, by sending teachers to communities where they don’t speak the language. I think it has more to do with the hardships of teaching in rural communities.
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An email from Jill Friedberg…filmmaker and frequent visitor to Oaxaca…on some of the inner workings of the 2006 teacher strike until now:

When there are plantons (encampments), marches, etc. each delegation and sector within the Seccion 22 of the teacher’s union does something that looks a lot like role call (all teachers within that delegation or sector are on a list…those present get their names checked off the list, those not present do not). Over time, the amount of time that individual teachers spend at marches, plantons, etc. adds up in what the teachers refer to as “puntos,” (points) and the more puntos you have accumulated, the better your chances of getting the teaching job in the city that you want, or of getting promoted. A lot of teachers within the Seccion 22 are very critical of this puntos system, for multiple reasons:

1) it’s not fair, because a lot of teachers (especially single mothers) have legitimate reasons for not being able to attend marches and plantons
2) it’s a “lefty” version of the corruption that existed before the seccion 22 “democratized” the union
3) if people are down with the struggle, they shouldn’t have to be coerced into participating.

On the other hand, some teachers argue that it’s not a lot different than the kind of mechanisms that some US unions use, when they go out on strike, to make sure that members aren’t scabbing. If you are assigned to a picket line, you need to be there with the rest of the union members. Going out on strike isn’t about getting the day (or week, or month) off, it’s about participating in the strike / struggle. In other words, if the Seccion 22 goes out on strike and holds a planton, it’s not fair that some teachers are sleeping in the streets, while others are relaxing at home, when the gains of that strike go to everyone. That’s the argument in favor of the puntos (point) system.
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You can read a discussion of the sad state of affairs in Oaxaca on the Yahoo Oaxaca Study Action Group discussion site:

An American expat in Oaxaca reports on the failure of the government to address the needs of indigenous peoples…a majority of the population:

“The Second National Congress on Indigenous and Intercultural Education was held in Oaxaca this week, with a colorful array of men clad in the short pants of Chiapas authorities moving among women in jeans or long skirts or crowned with beribboned braids. Lots of kids were present in the outdoor events like the sample classes held in Carmen Alto plazuela (never mind that the governor is once again renovating, the found space). I have photos which I will get around to archiving on the OSAG site.

Led by the Coalition of Indigenous Teachers and Promoters of Oaxaca (CMPIO, by its Spanish initials.) it’s been a long process of self-definition for preservation, and equal rights and justice. The front page of Noticias on Sunday /today, Oct 28) emphasizes their demand for equal rights.

Oaxaca is a state with 16 different language groups, many of them on the verge of disappearing when CMPIO stepped forward to promote bilingual education. Last July 30 I visited a workshop for teachers which focused on how grandmothers can renew their vanishing languages with their grandchildren: the in-between generation of parents were mono-lingualized by the state education system. Fernando Soberanes, present at that CMPIO event, said that the range of languages and experiences in all of Mexico is mind-boggling.
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Neuroscience researchers have concluded that “we can pretend we are free of bias, and avoid thinking about how to deal with our own deeply ingrained tendency to discriminate. Or we can take a lesson from neuroscience, and even from dumb computer agents, which can switch from noncooperation to cooperation if they learn that it is in their best interests.”

“Unconscious biased responses (amygdala activation),” they say, “can be significantly reduced by experience and familiarity.”

Oct. 31, 2007
Robert Burton
Salon.com

We’re Prejudiced, Now What?

Scientists now tell us bias toward others may be innate. But that doesn’t mean we have to behave like Bill O’Reilly.
|
All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They
— Rudyard Kipling

I am stuck in rush-hour traffic. Maybe I can find a decent radio program to distract myself from the blasting horns, angry looks and cussing behind rolled-up windows. But the radio is worse than the traffic. On NPR, a Washington think tank guru is arguing that “my 30-plus years of studying the Middle East has convinced me that democracy is more appropriate for some cultures than others.” A second NPR station is airing a debate on the medical rights of “illegal aliens.” On Fox, Bill O’Reilly is talking about a recent dinner in Harlem, N.Y., with Al Sharpton: “I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks.”

Everywhere I turn, someone is honking at the other guy. Once upon a time, when psychology was king of the behavioral hill, I thought that prejudice could be explained by upbringing, cultural influences, socioeconomic disparities and plain old wrong thinking. Despite any hard evidence from soft sciences, I nursed the vaguely optimistic belief that education and the teaching of tolerance might make a dent in the bigotry and racism of “others.” And yet sitting in stalled traffic, I cannot shake the irrational feeling that “those in the other cars” are different from “us in our car.” If my mind seems intent upon making such ludicrous and meaningless distinctions, is there more here than meets the purely psychological I?
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June 18, 2007
From the Folks Who Brought You Plan Colombia
The Annexation of Mexico
By JOHN ROSS
Mexico City.

Plan Colombia, the $5,000,000,000 drug war boondoggle cooked up in 1999 by Bill Clinton and then-Colombian president Andres Pastrana and subsequently transmographied into a War on Terror adjunct by George Bush and Alvaro Uribe brought U.S. troops, fleets of helicopter gun ships, spray planes spewing poisons, and a vast array of human rights abuses to that troubled Latin American country. It also made Colombia the third largest recipient of Washington’s foreign aid and the number one repository of U.S. military aid in the western hemisphere.

But Plan Colombia failed to stem the flood of cocaine pouring across U.S. borders nor has it even eradicated much Colombian coca acreage – 144,000 hectares continue to thrive under coca cultivation in Colombia concedes the U.S. State Department’s Office of International Narcotics Enforcement in its 2006 annual report, and while spraying massive doses of glysophate did force some farmers out of business, production simply moved south, spreading throughout the Andean region.

Indeed, the price of cocaine on U.S. streets dipped slightly last year and supply and quality remained constant, according to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. For the first time in five years, the DEA registered an increase in first time users. 90% of the cocaine confiscated in the U.S. last year continues to be Colombian-based.

Despite the abysmal results, the U.S. Congress has again budgeted $367,000,000 for Plan Colombia in 2008 although some congressional reps appear to be tiring of fighting this losing war and are beginning to call for an exit strategy. With the Democrats in titular control of both houses, doubts about Plan Colombia forced consideration of a bi-lateral free trade agreement to be shelved this spring. President Uribe, in Washington to lobby for the pact, complained to the press that he was being treated as “a pariah.”

Despite Plan Colombia’s fading allure, the Bush administration is about to debut a sequel: Plan Mexico, an interdiction strategy to confront the increasing “Colombian-ization” of Mexico by bi-national (Colombian and Mexican) drug cartels who have managed to spread their brand of mayhem into every nook and cranny of this distant neighbor nation.

The finishing touches for a Plan Colombia-like joint venture were worked out at the early June G-8 summit in Germany during a meeting between Bush and Mexico’s freshman president Felipe Calderon, a special guest at the conclave. According to insiders in both camps as reported in the U.S. and Mexican media, Calderon will make a formal application for increased anti-drug assistance from Washington come August. Mexico currently receives $40,000,000 in drug moneys from the White House.

If you liked Plan Colombia, you are going to love Plan Mexico.
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You live in the Pacific Northwest if

1. You know the state flower (Mildew).

2. You feel guilty throwing aluminum cans or paper in the trash.

3. Use the statement “sun break” and know what it means.

4. You know more than 10 ways to order coffee.

5 You know more people who own boats than air conditioners.

6. You feel overdressed wearing a suit or nice dress to a restaurant.

7. You stand on a deserted corner in the rain waiting for the “WALK” signal.

8. You consider that if it has no snow or has not recently erupted, it’s not a real mountain.

9. You can taste the difference between Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, Veneto’s, Pied Cow, Peets Coffee, Coffee People and Stumptown Coffee.

10 . You know the difference between Chinook, Coho, Sockeye, Farmed and Wild Salmon.

11. You know how to pronounce Sequim, Puyallup, Haceta, Yaquina, Yachats, Issaquah, Oregon, Yakima and Willamette.

12. You consider swimming an indoor sport.

13. You can tell the difference between Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese and Thai food.

14. In winter, you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark while only working eight-hour days.

15. You never go camping without waterproof matches and a poncho.

16. You go camping.

17. You are not fazed by “Today’s forecast: showers followed by rain,” and “Tomorrow’s forecast: rain followed by showers.”

18.You have no concept of humidity without precipitation.

19. You know that Boring is a town in Oregon and not just a state of mind.

20. You can point to at least two volcanoes, even if you cannot see through the cloud cover.

21. You notice, “The mountain is out” when it is a pretty day and you can actually see it.

22. You put on your shorts when the temperature gets above 50, but still wear your hiking boots and parka.

23. You switch to your sandals when it gets about 60, but keep the socks on.

24. You have actually used your mountain bike on a mountain.

25. You think people who use umbrellas are either wimps or tourists.

26. You buy new sunglasses every year, because you cannot find the old ones after such a long time.

27. You measure distance in hours.

28. You often switch from “heat” to “a/c” in the same day.

29. You design your kid’s Halloween costume to fit under a raincoat.

30. You know all the important seasons: Almost Winter, winter, Still raining (Spring), Road Construction (Summer), Skiing and Crabbing Season (Winter).

31. You can take hours agreeing on which restaurant to go to because Portland has more great restaurants per capita than any other city in the country. Seattle is not far behind.

32. You understand these jokes.

During the teacher strike and ensuing rebellion in Oaxaca in 2006, tear gas cannisters dropped out of helicopters and found all over the city were manufactured in Jamestown, PA. And it is rumored that Mexico’s PFP (Federal Riot Control Police) are trained at the School Of The Americas. During the take-over of Oaxaca City by the PFP on November 25, 2006, nearly two thousand people, including many who were never involved in the rebellion but simply at the wrong place at the wrong time, were arrested, beaten and incarcerated without being charged. Nearly 25 people were killed in night-time raids last year…a couple in plain daylight during the marches. The women have marched against the killings, arrests and rapes. Many are still missing. The “dirty war” continues.

So when President Bush announced Monday in Washington that he will ask Congress to approve a $500 million package to help Mexico fight drug cartels, the largest international anti-drug effort by the United States in nearly a decade, human rights groups were alarmed.

The Washington Post reports that the much-anticipated Mexico aid plan, which is included in the president’s $46 billion supplemental budget request for war funding, would pay for helicopters, canine units, communications gear and inspection equipment, the State Department said.

The program also would include training and technical advice on vetting new police officers, and case-management software to track investigations in a nation where drug kingpins have infiltrated many state and local governments and infighting among drug traffickers has cost more than 4,000 lives in the past 22 months.

The aid packages are part of what the Bush administration hopes will be a multiyear, $1.4 billion initiative.

Bush administration officials have praised Calderon for deploying more than 20,000 soldiers and federal police officers to fight drug gangs, but human rights groups have complained about use of the military after a series of rapes and rights violations in which security forces were allegedly involved.

Joy Olson, director of the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America, said Monday she is concerned that the Bush administration did not say which Mexican agencies would receive aid money.

“If they are allocated to civilian control structures, the funds are more likely to have a positive effect in strengthening the rule of law and civilian institutions,” Olson said. “If funds are sent directly to the receiving countries’ military forces, the plan could undermine civilian control of the armed forces and weaken efforts to strengthen civilian public security institutions.”

Many in Mexico and elsewhere suspect the aid will also be used to put down rebellions by Mexico’s poor who are fighting for better education and against the illegal confiscation of ejido land (owned by the people) by multinationals for mining and other activities.

Expect many more human rights abuses in Mexico in the future.

To widespread international condemnation, the military in Myanmar, also known as Burma, crushed mass anti-regime demonstrations recently and continues to hunt down and imprison those who took part.

So the International Herald Tribune has reported Friday that women in several countries have begun sending their panties to Myanmar embassies in a culturally insulting gesture of protest against the recent brutal crackdown there, a campaign supporter said Friday.

“It’s an extremely strong message in Burmese and in all Southeast Asian culture,” said Liz Hilton, who supports an activist group that launched the “Panties for Peace” drive earlier this week.

A comment on the Lanna Action For Burma web site goes like this:

The protest is innovative, but ironically it depends upon the willingness of women to reinforce a belief of the innate superiority of men over women that is held not only by Burma’s generals but also by most men in the country. Men are potent; women are weak. Thus women’s genitalia–especially if menstruating–are dangerous to men’s potency.

Day-to-day this means, among other things, that men in Burma actively avoid having contact with women’s lower garments, and that special restrictions are placed on the hanging of women’s washing that do not apply to men’s articles. Perhaps the organisers of the protest should have considered these features of the “culturally insulting gesture” before going ahead with it. Who is really being insulted?

The group, Lanna Action for Burma, says the country’s superstitious generals, especially junta leader Gen. Than Shwe, also believe that contact with women’s underwear saps them of power.

What do you think?

I refer to the “U.S.” instead of “America” in the title because if there is one thing I have learned in the last year it is that Mexico, Central and South America is also part of the Americas.

There is an interesting article in the LA Times this morning about where Mexicans come from by Gregory Rodriguez, a columnist for the opinion pages, director of the California Fellows Program at the New America Foundation and author of the just-published “Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America” that will be released on Tuesday October 23.

“Mexicans,” Rodriguez says, “mythologized a tale of the violent and tragic conquest of Mexico by Spain to explain their birth as a people: the story of the Spaniard Hernan Cortes and his indigenous translator and mistress, Doña Marina, a.k.a. La Malinche.

As Mexicans came north to the United States, that long history of mestizaje was also brought to bear on another cultural force, Anglo America. One scholar, Roberto Bacalski-Martinez, has described Mexican American culture in the Southwest as “incredibly ancient on the one hand, and surprisingly new on the other. Indian, Spanish, Mexican and Anglo elements have gone into its formation, and they continue to affect it. In each case, the introduction of new elements began as a clash between two peoples which eventually resulted in a newer, richer culture.”

I can hardly wait to read this book which has been said to offer an unprecedented account of the long-term cultural and political influences that Mexican Americans will have on the collective character of our nation.

Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico and former United States ambassador to the United Nations says “In the midst of a narrow, polemical debate on immigration, Gregory Rodriguez has written a generous, sweeping, prodigiously researched, and judicious history of Mexican Americans that helps us understand their long-term influence on American society. Smart, fun, and eminently readable, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds explores five centuries of cultural collisions and convergences, and dares us to imagine a new way of thinking about the future of America.”

In my perception, on the one hand, Mexicans purport to celebrate their indigenous history…but on the other hand the racism based on color in that country is systemic. The dilemma: how to love the conqueror’s blood in themselves. And then what happens when they migrate to this country?

Timely.

My friend Max waxed recently about living in Oaxaca City.

“For the life of me, I can’t figure out why most Oaxacans aren’t deaf. I mean, take Charlie the drummer over there:

Charlie got deaf playing rock and roll, in band after band, for decades. After all those years of having huge pounding speakers near his ears, he ended up with speakers in his ears: he has to wear a hearing aid when he wants to listen; a lot of the time, he’d just as soon tune out.

Us old folk, who have been hangin’ in Oaxaca for a while, but are still sensitive to loud noise, have for the most part figured out how to avoid much of it (if you think you’ll be able to dodge all of it, you just don’t know Mexico). Some of us own a bit of acreage out in the Etlas, with a good-size house on it. Others opt for separate bungalows in compounds – with or without gate – in residential suburbs. Still others are in townhouses, apartments or bungalows in the center of one of the downtown blocks, far back from the traffic.

The less fortunate among us, either because we made bad choices or just can’t afford the Gringo luxury of peace and quiet, have to live with the noise. There are only two advantages to this: after a while, you stop noticing it so much; and you can still grumble about it to anyone who hasn’t heard your story before (or the forgetful folk who have). Usually they lodge with families, or in a family compound, or small apartments in working class neighborhoods. These are the ones most likely to hear the ‘Courtyard Music.’

Courtyard Music is a blend of two or more loud radios tuned to different stations, shrieking kids, barking roof dogs, and people yelling back and forth at each other. This is a more or less constant accompaniment. The bass line; the left hand on the piano.

The melody constantly changes. Motorcycles are revved up. People wander in from the street and stand in the courtyard hawking 5 gallon bottles of water, tortillas by the handful, tanks of propane gas, and other more exotic items. There may be a carpenter’s shop in the courtyard: sawing and nailing provide the percussion. One poor unfortunate lives next door to a recycling center where they do cans and bottles.

From time to time there will be a wedding or a birthday party, accompanied by a three piece, amplified electric band adept at the three traditional Oaxacan party music modes: Marriachi, Tex-Mex and Oompah.

A musically inclined friend who lives in a noisy, two or three hundred year old courtyard with a big extended family, a dozen kids and four neurotically barking poodles, has become resigned to this aural environment after two years there. He has this to say:

“Sometimes the courtyard music is just annoying – if you’re trying to sleep or think deep thoughts. Sometimes, it all comes together, the children’s singing and laughing blends with the vendors cries and all the rest into a kind of counterpoint that is as complex and beautiful as anything Bach or Villa Lobos could do. Sometimes…”

Of course, this is someone who is clearly a little crazy. Not that he wasn’t a little weird when he got here. Probably, it was the courtyard music that drove him around the bend.”

Marches in Oaxacas continue to call attention to the occupation of 128 schools by section 59 and the PRIistas, the continuing incarceration of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, and to commemorate the assassination of APPO and teacher sympathizers by the local and federal police in October of 2006.

October 18: 16:00 leave Fuente de los Siete Regiones and march to zocalo
October 27: 7:00 Santa Maria Coyotepec
8:00 march leaves from office of Procuraduria Gral. de Justicia and Callicanto, Santa Lucia del Carmen and goes to zocalo
October 29: October regional marches
November 2: political cultural “jornada” and I don’t know exactly what that means
November 25: teacher-popular march

I have always chaffed at the idea of political correctness…that honest ideas and opinions must be subject to the language police…a practice that Doris Lessing, this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, has said was particularly evident in Marxist thought. She says “the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. ‘Raising consciousness,’ like ‘commitment,’ like ‘political correctness,’ is a continuation of that old bully, the party line.

In recent years, I understand the reasons for this. We are trying to snuff out bigotry and prejudice. But getting rid of repugnant language does not seem to be successful at getting rid of repugnant behavior. Indeed, when coded words do slip out they are brutally judged and pounced upon by well-meaning people…creating resentment and anger…until there is an opportunity to lash out.

Stifle language and you have stifled civic discourse and the opportunity to openly and honestly explore ideas…and with it the opportunity to, as Lessing says, discover “ideas capable of transforming our societies, full of insights about how the human animal actually behaves and thinks.”

Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer
New York Times
October 13, 2007

On Thursday, the novelist Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. Moments after the announcement, the literary world embarked on a time-honored post-Nobel tradition: assessing — and sometimes sniffing at — the work of the prizewinner. One of the most pointed criticisms of Ms. Lessing came from Harold Bloom, the Yale professor and literary critic, who told The Associated Press, “Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable.” He went on to add that the prize is “pure political correctness.” Interestingly, Ms. Lessing had some strong thoughts about political correctness, thoughts she expressed in this adapted article, which appeared on the Op-Ed page on June 26, 1992:

By DORIS LESSING
WHILE we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.

The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about “concrete steps,” “contradictions,” “the interpenetration of opposites,” and the rest.

The first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of London and saw them in use. “The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete situation…” Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see.
Read the rest of this entry »

Americans living and working outside U.S. borders are recognizing their growing importance in the electoral process. The outcome of the last several primary and national elections could have been very different had they been able to easily register and vote in a timely way…especially since living abroad gives Americans a keen understanding on the ground of the issues facing our foreign policy wonks.

Found on Salon.com this morning written by Tim Grieve:

True Confessions

In the interest of self-reflection or self-flagellation or something, I just took the new-and-improved naturalization test unveiled this week by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

I scored 96 out of 100, which had me feeling pretty good about my bona fides as a U.S. American until I realized how the test really works. While there are 100 questions on the overall exam, any individual citizenship applicant is asked a randomly selected 10, and you need to get six right to pass. What that means: If the four questions I couldn’t answer were among the 10 I happened to get, I would have received the absolute minimum passing grade.

How can that be?

Well, let’s see. Despite having sort of studied American history under a Pulitzer-winning professor and done reasonably well at one of the better law schools in the United States, I couldn’t say, right off the top of my head, how many amendments the Constitution has. It turns out — and you knew this, didn’t you? — that there are 27, the last one providing that “no law varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”

Whatever. Not knowing the number of amendments is hardly an indictment of my civic knowledge. Nor, I thought, should I feel so bad about thinking that the Statute of Liberty sits on Ellis Island. It turns out — and you knew this too, right? — that while Ellis Island is part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, the statue itself sits on Liberty Island.

Trivia, I said to myself.

But then there’s the small matter of Question No. 23: Name your representative. I know, I know: Of all people, I should know. And just a few months ago, I would have: I lived in Sacramento, Calif., and my representative was Doris Matsui, and her late husband, Bob, had been my representative for about a million years before that. But I moved to Bethesda, Md., in late July, and as I stared at Question No. 23, it occurred to me that I hadn’t yet taken a moment to figure out which representative represents the part of Montgomery County where we live.

Pleased to meet you, Rep. Chris Van Hollen. Having humiliated myself in public, I shall never forget you.

So that’s three wrong. How’d I miss four? I’ll put that law school education to use now and quibble. Question No. 68 asks for “one thing Benjamin Franklin is famous for.” My answer: He signed the Declaration of Independence. That’s correct, of course, but it’s not one of the officially sanctioned right answers: “U.S. diplomat”; “oldest member of the Constitutional Convention”; “first postmaster general of the United States”; “writer of ‘Poor Richard’s Almanac'”; or “started the first free public libraries.”

Yeah, well, he did that thing with the kite and the key and is said to have said that beer is “proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” too. Would a test administrator give me credit for one of those? Probably not. But I’d argue, if my citizenship depended on it, that my answer about Ben and the Declaration ought to be close enough to count.

After all, an officially acceptable answer to Question No. 8 — What did the Declaration of Independence do? — is “declared our independence.”

I just couldn’t resist this.

Maybe this is an explanation for why we seem to be able to tolerate the contradictions and disconsonate ambiguities in much of our public discourse. Maybe there is an inherent logic to it that is going over my head. Or maybe I’m still experiencing culture shock from listening to so much addled TV after five years without it. Why does Jon Stewart make more sense to me than the “news?”

scrambled, jumbled words and language recognition theory

Arinocdcg to rencet rseaerch, the hmuan brian is plrectfey albe to raed colmpex pasasges of txet caiinontng wdors in whcih the lrettes hvae been jmblued, pvioedrd the frsit and lsat leetrts rmeian in teihr crcerot piiotsons.

The fcat taht you are ridenag tihs now wtih reaitvle esae is poorf of the thoery.

Wehre did all of tihs strat?

It smees taht the trehoy orgteiinad form a 1976 ppaer at the Uvnitsriey of Nigaonthtm wtiertn by Graahm Rwsnailon of Asrhodelt, wichh gvae rsie to an acirlte wihch aaeprrped in the ‘Narute’ pbuolitaicn in 1999.

A fhrtuer alircte in the Tiems neppeawsr in Speemebtr 2003 pivroedd mroe eanxopiatln auobt the peohoemnnn.

In the Tmeis aitlcre, Dr Reoaesln MhActcry, a neruo-phylcoogsy lruecter form Knig’s Ceglloe, Cgmdbriae, ssegegtud taht hmuan bnegis are albe to usnatdnerd jeublmd up wdors buaecse the hmaun bairn parimliry raeds the mannieg rehatr tahn the piothenc cnontet of wdors (the sdnuos of the wrdos and leertts).

Dr McRtcahy was qoteud as saiyng, taht “…if you can acaitinpte waht the nxet wrod in a snnetece cloud be, you wlil not nslsciareey ntcoie if smoe of the leettrs in taht wrod are out of pclae…”, and she aslo taht she was sepsrruid at jsut how rosubt the barin’s rgceotnioin aeiibtils had been pverod to be. “The hamun biarn is a lot mroe toanelrt tahn we had pahrpes risaeled, and it has to cpoe wtih diisputrng in eevydray lfie.”

The torehy pdeoivrs a fiatsincang pprciesetve on mderon cutonacniimmos and the dmveelnoept of laguange.

The terohy aslo hples to eaipxln the doepmevnlet of merodn txet mseniagsg lagunage, and how the hamun biran so rlaidey utendrnsdas atboivbinears and cimtonobnais of lrettes and nbrmeus mainkg new ‘wdros’ whcih we’ve nveer seen beofre and yet stlil are albe to usterdannd alsomt iammeiltdey. For emxpale: ‘c u lte8r’, wihch you’ll nitcoe you can utransnded eevn thgouh it’s jmulebd.

One of the gerat lsneoss form tihs troehy dmsttnareoes the rmaaebrlke pweor of the huamn biarn.

Wehn we are yonug we not olny lraen how to raed, but aslo ibcerndily and uninaenionltlty lraen how to raed waht wuold by nmoral cooevntnin be decerbisd as uettr nnsosnee.

Tihs bges qtuseonis abuot the dicrieotn of laagngue eolotuvin.

Waht wlil lgganaue look lkie in geotrnaiens to cmoe?

Whtuoit dobut hmuan binegs are albe to asobrb pvrseiogerlsy mroe maening form pvolesesrrigy rucdnieg anotmus of wrdos and lrttees.

We now raed in shohtnrad – and iamegs – and sfcginltianiy we are beord by aiytnhng taht is too lhtngey.

Posorneiafl witerrs need to get tehir pniot asorcs in jsut a few seodcns, or the raeedr’s anitttoen is lsot.

The jmbleud wdros torhey datrmneeosts jsut how caalbpe the biarn is at arnboibsg mneaing far mroe qilcuky tahn msot wrietrs wuold eevr iaimnge.

And a fnail daioertomstnn of how celver yuor barin is – can you raed tihs?…

New York Times
September 26, 2007
With Bombings, Mexican Rebels Escalate Their Fight
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. and ANTONIO BETANCOURT

MEXICO CITY, Sept. 25 — The shadowy Marxist rebel group that has rattled Mexico three times in recent months by bombing natural gas pipelines has a long history of financing its operations with the kidnappings of businessmen, prosecutors say.

Prosecutors say the Ejército Popular Revolucionario, or Popular Revolutionary Army, a Marxist guerrilla group, has committed at least 88 kidnappings since 1999, collecting millions of dollars in ransom.

Just this year, the rebels have taken at least four people hostage, including two prominent businessmen and the relative of a reputed drug dealer, law enforcement officials and anticrime advocates say.

The bombings of gas pipelines are a drastic escalation in the group’s tactics. Seemingly overnight, the rebels have evolved from an organization devoted mostly to kidnappings into a much larger threat to the stability of Mexican industry and, by extension, to the state itself, officials say.

“The E.P.R. is a guerrilla organization with a political vision of taking power, and in this sense, has carried out violent acts,” Mexico’s attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, said last week. He added, “It’s a severe worry for the government of Mexico.”

On two days in early July and again on Sept. 10, several bombs went off simultaneously at junctures on the pipelines and disrupted gas supplies to factories and businesses. Together, the attacks shut hundreds of factories in 10 states, some for as long as a week, including Volkswagen, Nissan and Honda plants. Losses have been estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

In all three attacks, the bombers filled fire extinguishers with a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, then detonated them with plastic explosives wired to digital watches and batteries.

The power of the bombs and the logistical skill in setting them off at the same time took many top officials here by surprise. Before the blasts, the Popular Revolutionary Army was considered a moribund group that had peaked in 1996 and then splintered into several smaller groups.

After each bombing, the group issued communiqués demanding the return of two of its members. The group maintained that the men — Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sánchez and Edmundo Reyes Amaya — disappeared last May in Oaxaca, a state that has a long history of peasant insurgencies and brutal government repression. Mr. Medina Mora and Oaxacan officials insist that the men are not in government custody.

Mexican law enforcement officials say the guerrillas are using the men’s disappearance as a pretext to destabilize Mexico and set off a leftist revolution. The bombings, they theorize, probably stem from anger among radical leftists over the federal crackdown on violent political protests in Oaxaca last year and the outcome of the presidential election, in which the leftist candidate narrowly lost.

The Popular Revolutionary Army has deep roots in Oaxaca, having been founded there in 1994 when 14 small insurgent groups banded together. The core leadership came from an extremist Marxist organization known by the acronym Procup, the Spanish initials for the Clandestine Revolutionary Workers’ Party-Union of the People.

Founded in the 1970s, Procup waged a campaign of kidnappings and executions against other leftists in the 1980s.

The Popular Revolutionary Army made its presence known in June 1996. At an event in Guerrero State commemorating the first anniversary of a massacre by the state police, masked guerrillas in the group read a manifesto calling for a socialist revolution. Many leftist politicians believed at first that they were government provocateurs.

But two months later, the group mounted coordinated attacks on police and military posts in five states, killing 13 people. Small columns of rebels continued to ambush police convoys and skirmish with soldiers for the next two years.

By late 1998, the military, the federal police and the Oaxacan authorities had made strides in dismantling the group, arresting several leaders and scores of people suspected of being tied to it, mostly from Oaxaca.

The group splintered into several factions after a shootout with the army in 1998 in El Charco, Guerrero. While the splinter groups continued to carry out bombings, the Popular Revolutionary Army seemed to slip into the background.

“They have been really quiet for the past several years,” said Bill Weinberg, a New York author who has written a book on Mexican insurgencies, “Homage to Chiapas.” “A lot of us thought they were finished.”

Law enforcement officials here say the group has only been underground, not dead. Its fortunes revived in late 2000 after the governor of Oaxaca, José Murat, granted amnesty to about 135 people suspected of being members who were being held in state prisons, officials say.

Today, officials say the rebels’ main base of operations is not in the mountains of southern Mexico, but in the teeming slums of Xochimilco and Tláhuac in Mexico City. Active members are believed to number no more than 100, officials say.

Mexican law enforcement officials say the leadership of the group includes figures like Tiburcio Cruz Sánchez, a Oaxacan whose involvement goes back to the 1970s when he was a member of Procup. “Most of the leadership is Oaxacan,” said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about a continuing investigation.

Felipe Canseco, a former Procup member who is now a lawyer, said the Popular Revolutionary Army is organized in underground cells, so that the members do not know the names of the upper echelon of commanders. “These groups are very clandestine and compartmentalized,” he said. “The E.P.R. does not recognize a chief.”

Mr. Canseco said he worried that the government would use the bombings as an excuse to harass peaceful left-wing organizations, like his group, the Democratic Popular Left, a collection of former guerrillas trying to participate as a political party.

“These bombings make it clear that after 40 years the military insurgents continue to exist and that they have become strong,” he said. “More than anything else, this gives the government a motive to start up the dirty war again.”

I wondered what my Iranian friends were thinking as I sat squirming in my chair during the indelicate introduction to President Ahmadinejad’s remarks at Columbia University yesterday.

And I squirmed some more trying to follow Ahmadinejad’s obfuscated logic.

And I squirm some more wondering how all this is playing out on the streets of the middle east. If he is trying to “lead the charge” against the U.S. how will this event affect how the Arabic world sees him? And us?

I did laugh, though, when he said Iran didn’t have any gays. But perhaps this isn’t so funny if Iran is hanging them.

And yes, what does the holocaust directly have to do with Palestine? But then my history is fuzzy.

I would have liked to ask him why so many journalists were in jail. And what his ideas are about how to stabilize Iraq.

And I wonder how the women of Iran reacted if they heard his remarks about them.

In the midst of his outrageous denials no one seemed to hear his message to us about our troubling foreign policy. Today he will be at the UN.

The Washington Post this morning has a couple articles with details about the Columbia and National Press Club appearances here.

When I was living in Oaxaca during the teacher strike in 2006, people would often speculate about whether the EPR (Popular Revolutionary Army) in Guerrero was also operating in Oaxaca. At the height of the rebellion, when we were expecting the Federal Preventive Police to descend on the city, there would sometimes be rumors that the EPR was coming in. Most people doubted it. No one seemed to know. But then during the rebellion that lasted from June until the “hard hand” of the federal police came down on November 25, 2006, very few ever really knew exactly what was going on behind the scene.

Now that the APPO (Popular Assembly) consisting of thousands of teachers, activists, Unions etc have moved it’s activities from Oaxaca City to the pueblos around the state, it would seem that if the EPR is in Oaxaca, it is a significant development. It is also significant to the U.S. where the bombings of the pipelines pushed up the price of oil futures in New York.

Eduardo Verdugo / AP
The national oil and gas company’s pipelines were bombed this summer in attacks by leftist guerrillas that caused hundreds of millions of dollars in economic losses. The rebels are seeking the return of two missing militants. A rebel group responsible for costly attacks on pipelines accuses the government of having a role in disappearances.

By Héctor Tobar, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 20, 2007

MEXICO CITY — — Edmundo Reyes is a slight, unassuming man of 55 who loves baseball and children’s literature. Until recently, he sold candy and soft drinks from his family’s corner grocery store in this city’s Nezahualcoyotl district.

In May, he left to visit relatives in the state of Oaxaca and never returned. His disappearance might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that it has set off a small war that has twice shut down a sizable chunk of the Mexican economy.

Unbeknownst to family and friends, Reyes was conducting a double life: He was a leader of a group calling itself the Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR in Spanish. His comrades are convinced that he has been captured by “the enemy.”
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It is ironic that people who suffer from the worst oppression seem to be the most able to thrive and “find themselves and their calling,” a woman friend from Iran recently said to me as we were discussing the release of Haleh Esfandier, the Iranian American who was recently released after 7 months in jail in Iran. And there is Sharon Ebadi, the Iranian attorney who has been incarcerated for defending over 200 jailed journalists and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. Recalling the take-over of a television station by a group of women in Oaxaca last year, I am so proud of the women of the world who are courageously fighting for justice.

But of course, as in Oaxaca, it is usually the destitute that have the least to lose, except for their lives. You won’t see an uprising in the U.S. anytime soon. We have the most to lose…jobs that provide 401Ks destined for retirement and education of our children are more important to us in the short term than holding corrupt leaders accountable. Witness the University of Florida journalism student who was tasered after being handcuffed and removed from a venue where he was vociferously questioning Senator Kerry. See video here. Safer to hold leaders in other countries accountable.

Cambodia
Nuon Chea, the top surviving leader of Cambodia’s notorious Khmer Rouge, whose radical policies were responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people, was charged by an International Tribunal Wednesday with crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Nuon Chea, considered the right-hand man to Pol Pot, was arrested early Wednesday morning at his home in Pailin in northwestern Cambodia near the Thai border and flown to the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, where he was put in the custody of a U.N.-supported genocide tribunal. The late Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1998 and his former military chief, Ta Mok, died in 2006 in government custody.

The tribunal is investigating abuses committed when the communist Khmer Rouge held power in 1975-79. The Khmer Rouge have been blamed for the deaths of their countrymen from starvation, ill health, overwork and execution.

Officers later took the 82-year-old Nuon Chea – who denies any wrongdoing – into custody and put him into a car and then a helicopter for the capital, Phnom Penh, as his son and dozens of onlookers gathered to watch the historic scene in silence, witnesses said.

Burma
UPDATE Sunday September 23, 2007
The AP has reported that 20,000 March in Yangon (formerly Rangoon) Myanmar…double the number that marched yesterday in Mandalay.

The monks shouted support for Suu Kyi, while about 10,000 people protected them by forming a human chain along the route but riot police and barbed wire barricades blocked hundreds of monks and anti-government demonstrators from approaching the home of the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi

Plainclothes police trailed the marchers. Some, armed with shotguns, were posted at street corners. Sunday’s security presence came after several days of a hands-off attitude by the authorities, who had clearly been trying to avoid provoking the well-disciplined and widely respected monks. One observer said “the military is not prepared, unless things get worse, to directly confront the monks in their uniforms but violence on a significant scale is not to be discounted.”

UPDATE Saturday September 22, 2007
London’s Guardian reported that witnesses say that upwards of 10,000 monks marched through the city of Mandalay in the 5th straight day of demonstrations against the iron-fisted military junta, the largest demonstration in a decade.

September 19, 2007
The associated press today reported that the Myanmar monks were taking to the streets for the second day in a row, marching in disciplined ranks as they extended a series of spirited demonstrations against the country’s military government into a second month.

The marches on Tuesday by thousands of monks in Myanmar marked the 19th anniversary of the 1988 crackdown in Myanmar in which the current junta took over after crushing a failed pro-democracy rebellion that sought an end to military rule, imposed since 1962.

The junta held general elections in 1990, but refused to honor the results when pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party won. Suu Kyi has been detained under house arrest for more than 11 years.

The Yangon march and rallies in other cities Wednesday were to protest hardship brought on by the government’s economic policies, especially a sudden hike in fuel prices. The hike last month sparked the persistent protests – first by pro-democracy activists and now primarily by monks. The rallies also reflect long pent-up opposition to the repressive military regime.

The authorities know that restraining monks poses a dilemma. Monks are highly respected in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, and abusing them in any way could cause public outrage.

In addition to protests, monks have threatened to cut off contact with the military and their families, and to refuse alms from them – a humiliating gesture that would embarrass the junta.

Monks have nothing to lose…except their lives.

Past President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, has written a new book called “Revolution Of Hope. In it Fox found the legal fight over the 2000 U.S. election “ironic.”

“At our request the United States had sent election monitors to protect the balloting process in Mexico,” Fox says. “But where they might have been more useful that year was in Florida.”

Which is an ironic statement in itself, of course, because the next election that gave Mexico Felipe Calderon is considered by many to have also been fraudulent.

The following has been taken by an article by The Washington Post this morning:

Mexico’s Fox, in Book, Chides and Praises Bush

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 19, 2007; Page A19

ANTIGUA, Guatemala, Sept. 18 — President Bush and Vicente Fox once portrayed themselves as diplomatic allies and close friends, but the former Mexican president takes some jabs at Bush in a new autobiography, calling him “the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life” and a “windshield cowboy” afraid to ride a powerful horse.

Fox sprinkles anecdotes about Bush and other world leaders throughout “Revolution of Hope,” recounting disagreements with Bush over the Iraq invasion and a shared hope for immigration reform that was undercut by security concerns after Sept. 11, 2001. The former Mexican leader also chides Bush’s administration for unilateralism.
……
Fox left office in December, six years after his election ended seven decades of one-party rule in Mexico. His book, written with Texas political consultant Rob Allyn and scheduled for release by Viking on Oct. 8, is likely to rattle Mexican traditionalists accustomed to former leaders quietly fading away.

“We’re going to get this done,” Fox recalls Bush telling him [about the immigration reform package before Congress]. Three days later, planes smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and “our revolution of hope came face to face with the walls of fear,” Fox writes.
…….

Fox, who writes that one of his aunts is a cloistered nun in Cincinnati and that his son, Rodrigo, attends the University of California at Santa Barbara, says that years before entering politics he passed up an executive job with Coca-Cola in the United States. (He had been a supervisor of Coca-Cola’s operations in Mexico.) “I didn’t want the Statue of Liberty, the streets paved with gold,” he says.
……..

I have been back in the house in Salem Oregon nearly a month now…a house I lived in for 35 years while raising the children…after traveling for over four years. Re-entry…always the most difficult part of traveling.

In Mexico, as in Asia, people practically live outdoors which offers great opportunities for interaction and friend-making. Here in Salem, I am savoring the fresh clean air and the QUIET! I can actually choose whether to listen to TV or not. Even the massage parlors in Thailand and the “comida corridas” (luncheon cafes) in Mexico were blaring with afternoon soaps. And driving here is heavenly! I totally understand why some people are objecting to Mexican trucks driving in the States! But I have to make an appointment to see old friends…no place to go to mix with people. I loved the Zocalo in Oaxaca…when I wanted to be with people I could just walk a couple blocks and always see someone I knew and could sit and talk for hours over a coffee. Even with my Mexican friends. I think though, even for Mexico, the layout of Oaxaca City, with the Zocalo and even the Centro as a whole, is a unique place and one of the reasons people love it there. I do miss it.

And then of course there is the shock of coming face to face again with a consumer society even though I am relishing the efficiency and customer service that comes with it. But the shock will never be as devastating as it was when I returned from Europe in 1965…a very radicalizing experience that shook me to my core. There is so much I could say about this… In the states we generally keep ourselves so insulated from death. I just groan and roll my eyes when I listen to people here complain about the most minute inconsequential things.

In Mexico you hear a lot of vitriol about global trade and NAFTA. The price of corn, the staple food for the poor in Oaxaca (the birthplace of corn), has risen and tortillas are 7% more expensive this year…a huge increase for people whose minimum wage is 50 cents an hour…even if they qualify. What’s worse, the people favor criollo (heirloom corn) which has a wonderful taste and the hand-made tortillas are delicious and moist…unlike those horrible sawdust-tasting things made by machine that you get in the states. The imported corn is cheaper than the criollo corn now and most people can’t afford the good stuff. And even worse, it is putting criollo corn farmers out of business which will cause the price of it to rise even more.

Yes, many people in Mexico are mad…except for the ones whose jobs and perks are tied to the power structure and benefit from the favors and the money creamed off the top by the government…money that never trickles down to the most destitute. With little rule of law, separation of powers, corruption and no transparency, the poor feel they have little choice other than to openly rebel. The middle class (many of whom are actually lower class by our standards) feel they have little choice other than to hold onto the status quo by it’s finger tips and was the most threatened by the 2006 uprising. It’s short term thinking, I thought to myself. If they only realized that if they were in solidarity with the calls for reform, justice and the end of corruption they too would benefit in the long term. But I also understand their desire to keep their distance from the internal disputes that have arisen within the rebellion because of the pursuit of personal and political agendas. The political and social implications are incredibly complicated and after a year in Oaxaca I felt I knew and understood little more than when I arrived.

And many expats in Oaxaca suspect that the CIA was afoot during the teacher strike last year…it is in the interest of the US and the Mexican governments to keep uprisings down because of the fear it could spread all over Mexico and to other leftist-leaning Latin American countries. And that is another story entirely!

For the moment I am occupied with tree trimming, pruning an overgrown yard, moss on the roof, resealing the deck, utility bills, auto maintenance. The housing market is in the tank right now so no time to sell. I am sorting through boxes and boxes of ___t that have been stored in the basement…stuff that I never needed in the first place and am now wondering what to keep and what to throw out…or give away. Four years living out of a backpack..a few t-shirts, couple pairs of pants and two pairs of shoes…taught me we certainly can live just fine without a lot of stuff in our lives although I do admit that half of what I carried was tangled computer and camera parts. Life was people centered those four years… I am struggling with incorporating perspective.

While traveling I got my news over the internet. After years of no TV I am now aghast at the trivia that is called news. I am noticing that almost every single maddeningly repetitious ad takes place in million dollar homes. “Average” families in the movies are filmed in million dollar homes. No wonder many people in the whole world, most of whom have never been out of their neighborhoods much less their countries, have a skewed view of beyond rich Americans! Even though by their standards we ARE rich. But when I told my motorcycle taxi driver in Viet Nam that one of my jobs here before retiring was managing a homeless program he was shocked. “Why they no work?” I didn’t even know where to begin. And “retirement?” Incomprehensible to most people in the world. “Jubilado” is the word in Spanish…I certainly didn’t have to live off the local economy where the minimum wage is 50 cents an hour and 68% of the people live on less than $90 a month.

In the zocalo in Oaxaca one day, I brazenly told an older Mexican man that I was amazed that the poorest of people living in squalid conditions all over the world could still laugh and be joyful. He just looked at me with incomprehension. That one look told me about all the preconceptions I was still unknowingly harboring about what is necessary for a person to be happy. This moment I will never forget.

From the Mexico Solidarity Network:

“President Felipe Calderon called for a 25% raise in the presidential salary, to more than US$20,000 per month. Calderon presented the request to Congress on September 10. The presidential salary is in addition to benefits for clothing, entertainment and travel which can easily surpass the official salary. The request comes after Calderon reduced his own salary immediately after assuming the presidency in an effort to gain popular support after a fraudulent election.”