TOWER ON APHASIA
A first person narrative account of an adolescent orphan attempting to preserve the creation of the dialect he shares with four other --to be named-- persons amidst the serving out of juvenile court mandated communtity service
REGRESSION PLACE
Story about a young married couple`s trip to a theme park in which adults can experience the life of a baby infant
SPAGHETTI STRAPS
A retired social worker runs away from her abusive and indifferent family to rediscover her white trash roots.
ENDOCRINE BY NUMBER
A young physically immature Lawyer turns to con artesanry to build intimate relationships with younger people, but his partner at the law firm makes things complicated.
LEGS, THE PERSON TO TALK TO
An amusing story about 1 city block told from the point of view from a pair of legs
SUPLICAS DEL MURO DEL CEMETARIO
About the erotic experience of being mugged at knife point
IN THE MOLD OF CERTAIN DISTRACTION
A young alluring border in the house of a working family in a mining community becomes the object of everyone´s schaudenfraude after making deals with the town´s de facto story teller.
INVOLUNTARY TRUST
A community garden turns into an unforseen nightmare when the trophy wife of it´s executive director becomes supervisor.
DEATH WITH LESSONS
A young intellectual tries to convince himself and others of a conspiracy behind the death of a well loved professor
KARINA REVALES
A nymphet of a Honduran mercado owner makes a startling self discovery after using her beauty to win attension from customers.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
promise
Dammit, it is meant this time: no more writing about politics! Some measure of, not courage necessarily, but...audacity! Audacity --this is just a mocking allusion to the new figurehead that everyone in the states so lazily identifies with-- is needed to post things which preoccupy the self and have no relevance to any of your lives.
The only thing that can be said for both poetry (literature in general) and politics --which is to say, that allows for some coherence and continuity to this conscious life-- is that there is a strong concern for things not said, or not said enough. And that the aesthetic impulse, more pampered than most any other (if your single, childless and largely without immediate and challenging social responsibilities), leads me to the agony of considering how the way things are could be so many different ways.
****************************************
Things as hidden,
the inexhaustible loved source
for the simple effort
of keeping some lost thing intact
or of fingers under the crotch
crotch as if putting on a mask
in order to dream.
Some omissions will be emitted
Some omissions inspire reproach
always
reaching another lost detail
The only thing that can be said for both poetry (literature in general) and politics --which is to say, that allows for some coherence and continuity to this conscious life-- is that there is a strong concern for things not said, or not said enough. And that the aesthetic impulse, more pampered than most any other (if your single, childless and largely without immediate and challenging social responsibilities), leads me to the agony of considering how the way things are could be so many different ways.
****************************************
Things as hidden,
the inexhaustible loved source
for the simple effort
of keeping some lost thing intact
or of fingers under the crotch
crotch as if putting on a mask
in order to dream.
Some omissions will be emitted
Some omissions inspire reproach
always
reaching another lost detail
Teaching...learning
The crayon drawing is a gift received in Guatemala by one of our (my) english students, Miriam. This immediately provoked me into telling her about the band DEVO.
Miriam is kind of the leader of the rest of the kids, a real smart trouble maker. We call each other Monstrua y Monstruo.
The volunteer program of the school in which Spanish is being studied is a little disorganized. There is no training for teaching. The volunteers whose Spanish is most advanced simply take charge. However, one cannot expect much since most of these kids have little experience even being in a regular school. Most of their parents cannot read and have little time for the most basic of parent-child interactions.
Thus my other position at the school is that of the caballito or caballo (horse). Two of the boys in particular love to take rides on the shoulders. It´s a lot of fun but no nutritional substitute for my lifestyle back home. Because we are so many thousands of feet above sea level my lungs feel like a smoker´s.
The classroom feels comfortable and you can tell when you really have the kids´attention. My self is now found as the most experienced Spanish speaker in the group that teaches english to the older kids. The acting international coordinator has set our expectations low--otherwise hoplessness would be felt all around. The problems run really deep.
The temptation is felt to take pictures of the water line construction on the school´s block. My dad, a plumber might have some criticisms just by looking at the ditches. On top of the lack of comprehensive sanitation services, mentioned in a previous post (and can someone answer where the hell our garbage goes), there is very poor if any water treatment.
40 + to 60 percent of the women during pregnancy in this country die just prior to child birth. About the same percentage of kids age 3 or younger die from malnourishment.
Many ¨Reds¨ a term of endearment for members of the US Republican party, stolen from Lawrence based writer, Patrick Quinn, and in fact many North Americans in general believe that poverty is caused primarily by laziness. Does this belief of theirs extend to the poverty around the world, it is wondered? The historical iliteracy is astounding.
Almost all of Latin America and much of the third world has suffered from a poverty that can be traced to the issue of Land rights, land use, land exploitation, land theft, land degradation, land ¨expropriation¨. Although there is much evidence of enviornmental degradation prior, the massive inequality started with the arrival of the Spaniards by taking over land that was nurtured by the Mayans (all thirty + groups of them, each with their own language) and pushing them up into the mountains where land was less valuable. This is not simply history. This is still the issue. Most indigenous peoples were subsequently exploited for slavery and then cheap labor. After being ¨freed¨ from slavery it was impossible for many to go back to their way of life since what little land they held onto was in inherantly horrible condition. In most countries where land reform has taken place, like Mexico, the indigenous people are given the crap. It is not a result of self reliant hard work that about 7 families (of European origen and in mansions in the US)own an overwhelming percentage of the land.
It is economics 101: those who have lots of land have the money and thus the political power.
We also know from history that widespread individually owned private property can be an insanely beneficial thing for the public as a whole. This is one of the prime features of classical Liberalism, the foundations of which were made concurrent with the rapid decline of the Spanish empire between the 17th century and early 19th century. During this time the spanish were defeated and most of the leadership was maintained if not transfered to wealthy landowning elites. A kind of feudalism persisted.
Often when debating informally opposing theories of social change with fellow Leftists, the issue always comes back to the origen of private property. How to define it. The legal empire (that is to say the legal literature) protecting oligarchs from conceeding even a small portion of this land back to those who cultivated it in the first place is immense. And how is it possible to have a debate when the indigenous conception of the human relationship with the land is so radically different?
Land reform is possible and has been done in almost every country in the Western hemisphere, but Hati--and Guatemala. In recent years, as most of you know, a huge wave of grassroots activism in Latin America as led to amazing victories for indigenous people--and working people in general. (In hindsight, when we look at the power brokers involved in these victories, they would not have been possible without the help of many non indigenous, non poor and in some cases, even non Latino). In 1954 land reform was almost achieved for Guatemala under the democratically elected presidency of Jacobo Arbenz-Guzman until a CIA backed military coup sent the country back and sent many of the indigenous supporters of the legitimate government back to the mountains. A 36 year civil war followed. The US Supported the thugs, democracy was squashed, intellectuals, activists , students and campesinos (farmers, rural citizens) were arrested, disappeared, tortured and killed.
Bolivia has just won a stunning victory in a recent referendum on the establishment of a new constitution assuring not just land *re*distribution to the indigenous people but assuring that natural and other vital resources, such as gas, water, electricity and communications belong to all bolivians under public trusts. Worker´s rights have now also been written into the constitution. Something that must sound like gibberish to many Estado Unidodensians. Then again, outside of California and a few other places, so does the idea of voting for actual laws.
It does help that Bolivia has Evo Morales, an indigenous man (an Amarya indian) as President, that he actually comes from the same economic background as those who make up a majority of that country.
About the same number of indigenous make up Guatemala, but unlike Bolivia, there is a lack of communication (behind which a practical geographical explanation lies) among the 22 different Mayan clans. Each with their own language. Moreover, a deep suspicion exists among many if not most Mayan decendents towards participating in national or even departmental politics. There are places in this country to which no outsider can go because of the rawness felt over the government sanctioned genocide that took place during the early eighties (over 200,000 thousand Mayans were systematically slaughtered). Corruption in government is also still a problem. Although Alvaro Colom was able to win the 2007 with a huge indigenous turn-out, groundwork has to be laid for a grassroots infrastructure. Most of the indigenous communities are so small and scattered that it is unlikely to see the kind of political coalition that Evo Morales was able to utilize. However the shared experience of poverty (inextricably linked to racism) in numbers are there. Like loosing weight, the simplicity of achieving political victories depends on the numbers.
It feels extremely draining to the body to write about this. But the assumption exists that a lot of if not most of this is new to you.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Retail
In many ways this country serves a Libertarian fantasy (that's capital L, not for the political party necessarily, but for right wing Libertarians). If any zoning laws exist they do not restrict a person from selling almost anything out of his or her house. Only in this atmosphere could an empathy be attained for the L position in the states. Ofcourse the history of Guatemala is entirely different. Vigilantism is very common because the police here, while not corrupt like the police in Mexico, are not very reliable due to the lack of resources. Taxes are avoided frequently.
Sometimes things come across my person that provoke a liking of capitalism. Not love, but some significant measure of affinity.
People produce things here. While the productivity level is not as high as the US (including per capita), the density here is such that one cannot help but noticing all of the factories that make different and useful things. Strangely, tons of used US clothing is being shipped to and sold here. The NYU student that was met by myself and Jessica three and half weeks ago was studying the impacts of it. Every other person seems to sport an MTV backpack(?)--in Xela at least. Laundary mats cost a little bit more but they do your laundry for you. Where are all the factories in the US?
This is not a rhetorical question.
People are always fixing things too. Automobiles especially. There have been no sightings of new car sales lots. But tons of old cars shown individually for sale by a regular neighbor who works a regular job. The local mechanic close to my school is always smiling. Full of greased and dirt, and smiling. If this sounds simply banal and not charmingly banal to you, go outside and take a look.
Of course this means things are always broken. The problem is that there is no developed infrastructure for what is naively referred to here as an "preventative service economy". (And it seems like it would be hard to find a person who coud be called a perfectionist in this country. As opposed to Japan.)
And instead of building a bunch of new ugly suburban houses in patches of potentially productive land, the tons of new construction that is going on my neighborhood in Xela is all being performed in, on and around existing structures. It feels like the past and future all at once.
(With the excessive corn and flour Central American diet, there is no surprise. Thought for awhile that the starch was the cause of my decreased sex drive and need for excessive amounts of sleep. But it just took a while to get used to the altitude.)
The abundance of cars from the 70s also touches the core. Lots of Datsuns! And they are all given those wonderful Electric company Sesame Street bold primary and secondary colors. The lack of new cars on the streets has even allowed me to see the actually unique designs of the cars from the eighties.
Because internet availability at the home is still low, there is an abundance of internet cafes (this person pays $3.00 for 7 hours of internet usage).
And the chcken buses! It is nice to not have to buy a bus ticket. It is nice to be cramed cheek to cheek and shoulder to shoulder in a room full of people. It allows for a very in depth observation of others. Even putting up with all of the street vendors who are allowed to come in before take off to sell junkfood and bric a brac are more than tolerable. Often a hungry vendor will go on in detail about the colorful Disney character designs of a key chain. The desire to say, ¨do you have any cut off limbs to show off instead¨ enters the mind.
It´s hard to get used to: that a large sum of the impoverished in this country have to get by with doing this crap. Who are their employers? In moments of utmost clarity it becomes easier. There is a simple desire on their part to survive another day or week. In this you can see that it´s a human being performing their current craft. At the very least it is easy to respect once one sees the honesty in their eyes. Still a day with the least amount of human interactions involving monetary transactions is ideal.
There is a curisoity that won´t go away. Hard scientific data on the numbers of those in Guatemala doing retail would be very welcome. And how Many of them are actualy small businesses? It´s obvious that those seling food are. (Something crossed my path from a trusted source: the average Guatemalan woman makes over a hundred corn tortillas a day) To what extent is it an indication of what we could define as freedom?
To be continued... socio-economic questions must be asked that are not happening in the brain currently. It can be blamed on a woman.
Sometimes things come across my person that provoke a liking of capitalism. Not love, but some significant measure of affinity.
People produce things here. While the productivity level is not as high as the US (including per capita), the density here is such that one cannot help but noticing all of the factories that make different and useful things. Strangely, tons of used US clothing is being shipped to and sold here. The NYU student that was met by myself and Jessica three and half weeks ago was studying the impacts of it. Every other person seems to sport an MTV backpack(?)--in Xela at least. Laundary mats cost a little bit more but they do your laundry for you. Where are all the factories in the US?
This is not a rhetorical question.
People are always fixing things too. Automobiles especially. There have been no sightings of new car sales lots. But tons of old cars shown individually for sale by a regular neighbor who works a regular job. The local mechanic close to my school is always smiling. Full of greased and dirt, and smiling. If this sounds simply banal and not charmingly banal to you, go outside and take a look.
Of course this means things are always broken. The problem is that there is no developed infrastructure for what is naively referred to here as an "preventative service economy". (And it seems like it would be hard to find a person who coud be called a perfectionist in this country. As opposed to Japan.)
And instead of building a bunch of new ugly suburban houses in patches of potentially productive land, the tons of new construction that is going on my neighborhood in Xela is all being performed in, on and around existing structures. It feels like the past and future all at once.
(With the excessive corn and flour Central American diet, there is no surprise. Thought for awhile that the starch was the cause of my decreased sex drive and need for excessive amounts of sleep. But it just took a while to get used to the altitude.)
The abundance of cars from the 70s also touches the core. Lots of Datsuns! And they are all given those wonderful Electric company Sesame Street bold primary and secondary colors. The lack of new cars on the streets has even allowed me to see the actually unique designs of the cars from the eighties.
Because internet availability at the home is still low, there is an abundance of internet cafes (this person pays $3.00 for 7 hours of internet usage).
And the chcken buses! It is nice to not have to buy a bus ticket. It is nice to be cramed cheek to cheek and shoulder to shoulder in a room full of people. It allows for a very in depth observation of others. Even putting up with all of the street vendors who are allowed to come in before take off to sell junkfood and bric a brac are more than tolerable. Often a hungry vendor will go on in detail about the colorful Disney character designs of a key chain. The desire to say, ¨do you have any cut off limbs to show off instead¨ enters the mind.
It´s hard to get used to: that a large sum of the impoverished in this country have to get by with doing this crap. Who are their employers? In moments of utmost clarity it becomes easier. There is a simple desire on their part to survive another day or week. In this you can see that it´s a human being performing their current craft. At the very least it is easy to respect once one sees the honesty in their eyes. Still a day with the least amount of human interactions involving monetary transactions is ideal.
There is a curisoity that won´t go away. Hard scientific data on the numbers of those in Guatemala doing retail would be very welcome. And how Many of them are actualy small businesses? It´s obvious that those seling food are. (Something crossed my path from a trusted source: the average Guatemalan woman makes over a hundred corn tortillas a day) To what extent is it an indication of what we could define as freedom?
To be continued... socio-economic questions must be asked that are not happening in the brain currently. It can be blamed on a woman.
A contradiction about the country is finally showing up
Every house surrounded by concrete and metal. Barbed wire topping the walls which house the half indoor patio to the front of the living quarters. Many check the little door slot to see who's there before opening the gate. Private security guards are all over.
And yet the people here are surprisingly open and publicly communal. People actually converse all over the streets. The parks actually get played in. Lawrence, KS. does have its South Park, where younger parents with small children can be found every day. But other than Central Park in NY, the eyes have never seen such a per capita use of public park space.
Plus people run mercados (little convenient stores), restaurants, hotels and sell tortillas or fried plantains out of their homes.
And yet the people here are surprisingly open and publicly communal. People actually converse all over the streets. The parks actually get played in. Lawrence, KS. does have its South Park, where younger parents with small children can be found every day. But other than Central Park in NY, the eyes have never seen such a per capita use of public park space.
Plus people run mercados (little convenient stores), restaurants, hotels and sell tortillas or fried plantains out of their homes.
Honeymoons are not for presidents
Excuse the metaphor bashing, but this moment in history where the majority of Progressive minded US citizens bask in the glow at the inauguration first president since LBJ (maybe Carter) to be considered Progressive, the first to have black skin and a non Christian surname must end. Please stop making goo goo eyes towards the screen every time he appears or is talked about. please stop assuming that this president is going to do your will and/or please ask for more out of the history to come.
Granted, amidst the inertia presented by opposition backed by the motives of capital and general political repression, political movements need to be able to speak with one voice, thus human beings inevitably end up attributing (for all intents and purposes)divine power to one human being. It's unavoidable and it's why we, on paper and 8 hrs of less work anyway, celebrate MLK. But the actions of a president, like a party, a nation state or any organization are not holistic entities. They are only the sum of very complex parts that come together by a polyphony of forces. Power relationships are built and nourished, deals are made, some people will get more time to be heard from the decision makers than others. And you are extremely naive if you think that the quality of a person´s logic is what gets his or he point across to the decision maker.
Oh yes, it is not forgotten on my end, we know that you already know all of this. But step back and look. You don't realize that you still act(mostly addressing fellow activists here) under assumptions that contradict this simple insight.
Because his motive is to hold together a winning majority, Obama will very likely continue a lot of really dumb, immoral and perhaps ilegal things. He is going to allow idiotic *non national security related* military spending to increase with out fighting members of Congress. It is Congress after all that forces the Defense Department and the Pentagon to carry on with the buying idiotic cold war toys.
His secretary of agriculture is very close with the corn ethanol lobby. These guys are into selling us into the idea that we can achieve energy and oil independence in part by using ethanol from corn. If you haven't looked into it, you should. To produce Ethanol you actually have to spend more energy, that is to say a below zero net gain. Much of that energy is currently dirty and non renewable. Not to mention the burden it places on food.
Obama is going to continue cultivating the cozy relations we have with the current number one terrorist state, Israel. The US contributes 9 billion a year to this favored nation. Egypt and Columbia (also governments that are currently occupied by thugs) are 2nd and third. A majority of this 9 billion dollars, based on a previously signed agreement between the US and Israel, must be spent on US defense contractors.
Obama, in the spirit of "radical centrisim" --my term for doing something to make every one happy which results in just the opposite-- is going to throw some meaty bones to the very unethical health insurance companies by allowing them to remain in the paracitic business of sickness care. This will be a part of the universal health care plan, that is unless the Single Payer campaign (whose link, http://www.pnhp.org/action/organizations_and_government_bodies_endorsing_hr_676_single_payer.php, cannot be smoothly applied on this current computer) wins out...
This is not a judgement of the man or even the president. A request is being made here: Let´s start thinking in terms of building a progressive constituency connected by a series of issues that we can all more or less agree with. That constiutency is not always going to succede by partisanship. That is of course another problem: identifying with the Democratic party too closely.
Again not a judgement of the party. What the hell is a party? That question is not merely meant to be rhetorical. As with the new president, the party likewise is a maleabe fiction which can mutate into many different things depending on the actions of those engaged in those power relationships. Currently the Dems are largely under the excessive influence of a few private interest who do not share a stake in the public interest. Look at who contributes to each representative´s campaign chest, look at who is drafting the legislation and what Special interest is directly or indirectly funding that legislation. The enemy is not always the Republican party as much as those scattered elements of corporate lobbyist who court both parties.
The problem is that the organizational infrastructure that we have is being utilized too much to simply elect Democrats and, even worse, reelect the same old Democrats who have bought into the status quo (imperial foreign policy, free trade with out fair wages and environmental protection, welfare handouts to factory farmers and deregulation of the financial sector). More effort needs to be made in developing a broad non partisan coalition that acts at the grassroots level. That means more lobbying at the state and US congressional district level. It also means putting more money into public advocacy campaigns. But more important: Progressive lobbyists who have a network of PAC (Political Action Committees) and policy think tanks behind them.
Yes, it is easier said than done. But assuming that long lasting progress is on its way simply by having the Democrats in charge is not doing very much.
Before receiving a straw man arguement response please know that what the activist in me is proposing in this post requires pragmatism.
Granted, amidst the inertia presented by opposition backed by the motives of capital and general political repression, political movements need to be able to speak with one voice, thus human beings inevitably end up attributing (for all intents and purposes)divine power to one human being. It's unavoidable and it's why we, on paper and 8 hrs of less work anyway, celebrate MLK. But the actions of a president, like a party, a nation state or any organization are not holistic entities. They are only the sum of very complex parts that come together by a polyphony of forces. Power relationships are built and nourished, deals are made, some people will get more time to be heard from the decision makers than others. And you are extremely naive if you think that the quality of a person´s logic is what gets his or he point across to the decision maker.
Oh yes, it is not forgotten on my end, we know that you already know all of this. But step back and look. You don't realize that you still act(mostly addressing fellow activists here) under assumptions that contradict this simple insight.
Because his motive is to hold together a winning majority, Obama will very likely continue a lot of really dumb, immoral and perhaps ilegal things. He is going to allow idiotic *non national security related* military spending to increase with out fighting members of Congress. It is Congress after all that forces the Defense Department and the Pentagon to carry on with the buying idiotic cold war toys.
His secretary of agriculture is very close with the corn ethanol lobby. These guys are into selling us into the idea that we can achieve energy and oil independence in part by using ethanol from corn. If you haven't looked into it, you should. To produce Ethanol you actually have to spend more energy, that is to say a below zero net gain. Much of that energy is currently dirty and non renewable. Not to mention the burden it places on food.
Obama is going to continue cultivating the cozy relations we have with the current number one terrorist state, Israel. The US contributes 9 billion a year to this favored nation. Egypt and Columbia (also governments that are currently occupied by thugs) are 2nd and third. A majority of this 9 billion dollars, based on a previously signed agreement between the US and Israel, must be spent on US defense contractors.
Obama, in the spirit of "radical centrisim" --my term for doing something to make every one happy which results in just the opposite-- is going to throw some meaty bones to the very unethical health insurance companies by allowing them to remain in the paracitic business of sickness care. This will be a part of the universal health care plan, that is unless the Single Payer campaign (whose link, http://www.pnhp.org/action/organizations_and_government_bodies_endorsing_hr_676_single_payer.php, cannot be smoothly applied on this current computer) wins out...
This is not a judgement of the man or even the president. A request is being made here: Let´s start thinking in terms of building a progressive constituency connected by a series of issues that we can all more or less agree with. That constiutency is not always going to succede by partisanship. That is of course another problem: identifying with the Democratic party too closely.
Again not a judgement of the party. What the hell is a party? That question is not merely meant to be rhetorical. As with the new president, the party likewise is a maleabe fiction which can mutate into many different things depending on the actions of those engaged in those power relationships. Currently the Dems are largely under the excessive influence of a few private interest who do not share a stake in the public interest. Look at who contributes to each representative´s campaign chest, look at who is drafting the legislation and what Special interest is directly or indirectly funding that legislation. The enemy is not always the Republican party as much as those scattered elements of corporate lobbyist who court both parties.
The problem is that the organizational infrastructure that we have is being utilized too much to simply elect Democrats and, even worse, reelect the same old Democrats who have bought into the status quo (imperial foreign policy, free trade with out fair wages and environmental protection, welfare handouts to factory farmers and deregulation of the financial sector). More effort needs to be made in developing a broad non partisan coalition that acts at the grassroots level. That means more lobbying at the state and US congressional district level. It also means putting more money into public advocacy campaigns. But more important: Progressive lobbyists who have a network of PAC (Political Action Committees) and policy think tanks behind them.
Yes, it is easier said than done. But assuming that long lasting progress is on its way simply by having the Democrats in charge is not doing very much.
Before receiving a straw man arguement response please know that what the activist in me is proposing in this post requires pragmatism.
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