So, what now?

I find myself asking this question after reading stories like this one by the late Michael Kreca. This information is not new to me -- the fact that FDR, Churchill and Stalin steered America into a war that did not need to be fought. The consequences reverberate today in the Empire that emerged from the rubble of WWII. So.

I know. I agree, disgusting piece of work. In fact, I see the parallels with today's wars. I catch myself (and ninjas are forced to listen to me) yapping about the WWI roots of the current War on Terrorism.

Its hard to stay De La Rocha, when Wu-Wei beckons smiling from the riverbank.

Old News and Forgiving Old Friends

Although we may already know that Bush's policies on pretty much everything have been resounding failures, this in depth analysis of the incompetence and duplicity of the Bush Administration is a good place to look if you want to get angry. Remember: McCain will be the same type of leader, haplessly sure of himself in a world that left him behind decades ago.

i had a conversation with my man Su Wei last night at his small bar on the outskirts of Chengdu. Its a beautiful place called Orange -- if you are in Chengdu go to the Hemp House and ask about it ...

He said that China's development has been all brain and muscle, no heart. He said Deng Xiao Ping mentioned back in the 1980s that China needed concurrent "civilizational revolutions" -- as in an economic one and a spiritual one. So far the spiritual has not manifested itself across the nation the way the economic one has, and Su Wei lamented this.

I played devil's advocate and said the government had provided one "religion" in the form of China itself -- the patriotic love of an ideal motherland.

He brushed this off slightly and spoke of "forgiving the culture of the past ..." for him, the resuscitation of the Buddhist and Daoist religions would be the greatest step forward. Right now, most temples and monasteries are tourist attractions and the "real" Buddhists in Tibet are under the thumb of the Party.

Su Wei looked wistfully into the night and said, "Imagine if all of the temples were alive again, and people went there to worship like they did back in the day .. how beautiful would that be ..."

The death of traditions

It is so hot and humid in Chengdu right now that my brain is bathing in its own liquid, humming strange tunes to itself and sending me images of massive artillery guns firing into the distance.

Spengler is a columnist for Asia Times who has derided the Europeans for lacking the courage to face the modern world, upholds the Christian belief in salvation through God's grace as the answer to the world's crisis of faith and who is certain that traditional societies must change in the face of today, or perish.

And many other themes, some of which he touches on in this latest column about America's special place in the world and what he believes is Obama's deepest desire: to rid the US of that which grants us this special place, modernity.

*********************

I lament the demise of funk streets the world over. I have been actively seeking out the jabbering markets where chickens are held up for inspection, approved, beheaded and plucked before your very eyes; the courtyards of stone and their rickety wooden enclosure, with door gods and drying tobacco leaf; the delicate dance of a family-supported courtship and marriage; the one stringed wailing and the gourd flutes; family charts, bamboo weaves and dog-hair sandbags.

But they are dying the world over. In some places quicker than others and a few places not at all, but their fate is sealed by the progress of the modern world.

In my own neighborhood, the old Hakka traditions are resting in the cataracts of an 80 year old as he sips tea and fingers his mahjiong pieces.

Every time I meet my man Zhuang Jian for tea, we trade bitter reports of this and that place lost forever to the modern hordes and whisper of the few that still survive. These conversations always end in silence, whereupon we turn to money issues and quote Candide:

"... one's own garden ..."

My heart aches when i read of this prognosis for the world: Modernity and the lonely quest of the individual for solace on earth and grace from heaven. Is it said any differently in Eccliastes or the Dao De Jing? I think tribalism is immortal in us and community is our last gasp to ward off death, but in the end i am my only keeper -- I suppose i lament what is gone until i am a part of what will endure.

Dammit, Spengler is right. Wherever I have gone in the world, people are choosing, being forced to choose and just plain drifting into the real world. The only way to reconcile the two worlds is to create things which cause others to dream. Make wishes and see them come true ... Aha! i finally know what the Auryn means!

And so the lamenting pray and hope for God's retribution before his grace. Only the ghosts of the dream world actually spout Mayan prophecies of 2012 to each other, discuss the civilizations that existed 10,000 years ago and that we are doomed to meet their fate.

2012 allows us to be there for it and have the last laugh on guys like Spengler when God's grace falls on those who longed for what's lost, instead of those who embraced what is. It is the Great Dream of all dreamers.

You can get with this, or you can get with that

Pictures of Qing Cheng Mountain

I posted some pics here of Qing Cheng after the quake. If anyone has any information or people they would like me to contact, please let me know. I am headed back up there this weekend.

A Theory of Relativity

First off: Blogger is blocked in China, so people cannot see it here, I cannot comment back to any of you and i do use a proxy.

There is so much to tell ... I drove from Chengdu up north to a place called Hanwang today, through the towns of Shifang and Mianzhu.

Shifang was the first stop. The city is a satellite of Deyang Town, which is an industrial city surrounded by wheat fields and rice paddies. Its a poor town with older buildings, near the mountains and itself surrounded by several destitute villages living off of industry and small time local business. The city center was hit, but not hard. Almost all of the buildings are standing and there is a refugee camp in the middle of town. The refugees are both shell-shocked peasants and workers from the suburbs and urbanites who don't dare return to their cracked and splintered apartments.

The outlying villages and towns suffered enormously. Thousands are dead, thousands missing, thousands injured ... in every such town in northern Sichuan, there is a large placard with figures, pictures and details of sorrow that each town experienced. There was one picture in Shifang of a school of 400 in a village called Yinghua -- more than 300 died -- and the picture shows two girls, bodies horribly stretched, twisted and shattered. They have running pants and sneakers on. They are skinny and both have light blue underwear.

A man named He was pointing at the picture and explained that the two were girls he knew. He pulled his son out the wreckage of that school. His son has two broken legs and is in a hospital in Chongqing. Later I was in an apartment nearby and watched three girls point out their teacher on TV whose daughter had died. They knew that girl too.

On the road to Mianzhu, the damage started getting bad. Its wheat threshing season, so there are mobile threshing machines on the road and peasants in the fields. They return to tents of red, white and blue plastic when the work is done. Their houses have all fallen in, or been damaged to heavily to support people so they wrap bamboo around trees and telephone poles and bring their beds out into the open. The road is lined with tent cities, spaced by government supply depots with field hospitals and bands of volunteers stopping and unloading. Some drive BMWS and Audis, others tiny CheryQQs and tinbox bread trucks. Some, like the French, arrive in a caravan of 30 double wide semi trucks filled with supplies.

The supply train stretches 156km long and probably twice as wide, spread out over highways, two- and three-laners, unfinished piles of stone and pavement waiting to be melted into asphalt and potholed dirt roads where we dodge tractors and blind men on motorbikes.

Mianzhu has rubble in the streets. The area has been cleared and is stocked with supplies. It took heavy damage, but here as with all cities in China, buildings built in different eras with different materials stand next to each other. The older buildings built of concrete, sand and brick are largely demolished. The new modern complexes with steel, re bar, good bricks and solid cement stand pristine, towering over a refugee camp in the middle of town. One guy came out in shorts and broken sandals and told me, this is all i got, the pants on my butt and these scruffy sandals. He laughed as he pointed down and everybody laughed with him. I joked with the kids there for a while. I named one Stankfoot and the other Boogerface. Everybody joined in the joke-fest. They kept offering me water and food. Everyone gathered around and I made the little kids laugh till snot came out their noses. Its easy: a big laowai speaking like a peasant makes everybody bust out ...

I said: you guys are awesome, smiling and laughing in the middle of this thing ...
They replied:
we're chinese, we can withstand anything.
It feels good to be alive
no matter what life brings, we always stay happy ...

It was a Hallmark moment so I brought it down by telling Stankfoot to go and wash himself.

Mianzhu to Hanwang is where we began to see the real devastation -- on a macrolevel -- that the earthquake did to northern Sichuan. Nothing was intact. Nobody was indoors.

Hanwang, named after legendary general Liu Bang, will have to be completely re-built. The whole city is a vast ruin -- those structures that still stand are gutted and split. There were people everywhere. Mine Rescue and Recovery teams from Shaanxi, Hebei and Sichuan Provinces. Army Units from Sichuan, Hunan and Hebei. Police lights flashed, heavy equipment rolled past, medics went from tent to tent looking at the survivors.

The mood was not chaotic or desperate, just methodical and even jovial at times. Some of the wreckage gave off the smell of rotting death and these were handled by teams of 10 - 15 soldiers with shovels and disinfectant who would wait while tractors sifted skillfully through the rubble,then they would dig out anything they would find. A local policeman pointed out his jacket and they retrieved it from the rubble.

The statue of Liu Bang in the middle of town had its head knocked off and the clock nearby is stuck on 2:28p, the time of the earthquake.

Yesterday, when I returned from Qing Cheng Mtn, I ate hot pot with Charlie and Ramon. Ramon seems bedeviled by the feeling that, although he had been in the middle of the earthquake and seen its fury face-to-face, he still remained untouched.

"I don't want to be untouched"
"Maybe you feel your experience was inadequate," said Charlie. "Maybe you feel like you don't deserve to have survived."
"Yeah, Survivor's Guilt," I said.
"Maybe," said Ramon. "All i know is, I was in the middle of the quake and I still feel like a tourist. Like somehow being foreign got me through it all ..."

We felt it comin ...

My friend Rachel wrote the day before the quake: "I feel like the world is shifting"

if ya'll check the first few lines of my post "The Illusion of Coincidence" you'll see that there was something in the air ...

just to embellish a bit: yesterday was Buddha's birthday.

The plates that caused this earthquake are the Tibetan plate rubbing againt the Sichuan basin (Tibet and Han rubbing against each other).

Earlier this year this area was hit with snowstorms.

Aba Prefecture, where the earthquake was centered, was the site of Tibetan protests in March.

China has invited the Dalai Lama to attend the Games.

The world is indeed shifting. How can one not be spiritual at a time like this?

A tremor, again, as I write.

who is the more foolish?

my people are busy lamenting, yet also enjoying, the brainwashing others have endured. it feels good to consider oneself free and to have a target to point at, proof of your powerful mind, resistant to the tendrils of subtle passivity.

it is the prisoner in D block laughing at the man in the hole.

brainwashing is not like in a movie, where aliens make you stupid and you are released by a kiss. brainwashing is the fog in your choices, the distortion of realities and the warping of emotions: all presented as doctrine, clean and precise.

when released from mental slavery, sorrow, pain, shame and rage are the emotions that dominate. not relief. Nothing is more miserable then the disciple of the God that failed.

relief is the feeling we have when we see the brainwashing of others and recognize it for what it is. we shy away from the brainwashed, where ever we may find them. its tiring to talk to them. spittle collects in the corners of their mouths and their eyes reflect the cult within. we laugh at them over coffee and praise Universalism that its not us.

how do we speak with the Christians in America who indoctrinate their children with fog, distortion and warp fields? How do we speak with the young Chinese, who stand as one in the spirit of the Red Guards -- attacking the enemy and purging the weak?

what do you tell a zealot about himself when he has already burned the one doctrine into his consciousness?

Consider:

The soft overcomes the hard;
The formless penetrates the impenetrable;
Therefore I value taking no action.

and

The sage controls without authority,
And teaches without words;
He lets all things rise and fall,
Nurtures, but does not interfere,
Gives without demanding,
And is content.

and

The loving do not act.
The kind act without self-interest;
The just act to serve self-interest;
The religious act to reproduce self-interest.
For when Tao is lost, there is love;
When love is lost, there is kindness;
When kindness is lost, there is justice;
And when justice is lost, there is religion.
Well established hierarchies are not easily uprooted;
Closely held beliefs are not easily released;
So religion enthralls generation after generation.

Religion is the end of love and honesty,
The beginning of confusion;
Faith is a colourful hope or fear,
The origin of folly.
The sage goes by knowledge, not by hope;
He dwells in the fruit, not the flower;
He accepts the former, and rejects the latter.

and finally

Nothing in the World is as yielding as water;
Nor can anything better overcome the hardened.
Just as the yielding overcomes the hardened,
The weak may overcome the strong;
Yet they do not.
The sage says:
"Who accepts responsibility for his people rules the country;
Who accepts responsibility for the World rules the World",
But his words are not understood.

tea baggins

well well well in the Du got my house almost clear of cat shit. garbage is piling up but i have a plan. the toilet is plugged but today i will get a plunger. its getting warmer and the birds are chattering madly. another two months and the good tea is plentiful and flowers will be blooming everywhere.

sammy's ass is gone so now my house smells much nicer. work wise ... well i am writing so i guess thats all that matters. i am grumpy a lot though.

there is a picture of the Tibetan Panchen Lama being criticized by a screeching mob of red guards holding up little red books. i have put on this man's expression as a mask. in chinese there is a saying for this, not as pretty as some Taoist or Buddhist phrases for such a state of mind, but it goes:

Sheng Zai Cao Yin, Xin Zai Han

The Ends Meet

This one is for my man Flesh if he ever reads this.

I have been in China for eight years. Eight, written as we write it, is formed of two circles, or a Moebius Continuum .. Infinity. As the Chinese write it .. it looks like nothing of the sort. But eight is auspicious.

When i first came to China, I was a blank space ... a whiteboard for this nation to scrawl upon. I lived in obscurity surrounded by a life i molded and melted into. i wrote. i learned. i grew. Then i escaped my life of obscurity and entered the fray. I watched river town convulse beneath itself, sprout concrete to cover up its wounds, drip slime and blackness into its hidden alleys. i sunk neck deep into the muck and committed the first of many sins. I spiraled until i had to leave. But i returned, more determined than ever.

Because now, thought i , I know the game. I can play. So i played and played, becoming a reflection of myself. Like Bastian in the Many-Colored Desert ... when he chased himself through the city of ghosts and betrayed his one true friend and the world he had helped save. At the apex of my self-denial, i met my blood father for the second time and resolved to never be like him. To crush all within that resembled him.

My best friend labeled me a snake. He commanded enough respect to convince half of our crew -- and even me. Cuz i knew my blood father to be a snake ... it stood to reason. I wilted and fell.

Then came the days of remembrance, leading slowly over time to redemption ... i was gathered up and taken on a cruise through jungles and mountains and islands and fell into a pool of rosewater, and given my name back. I remembered my life in obscurity, my obscured life remembered me. I shed my snake skin and flashed my brilliant scales. I accepted that balding Turkish bastard.

I was coming full circle, and i knew it. Being able to see it meet over the past two years has given me great pleasure and immeasurable confidence. I still suffer from cringe literature tendencies ... but yesterday i met three people i haven't seen since those years in obscurity. I have never forgotten them, they never forgot me. We spoke last night as if we had been neighbors not memories. I was myself, dazzling and in love.

And i knew, calm and pleased, that the ends are meeting. An eight has been formed and when they finally meet, they nod and twirl and carry on. I have another large circuitous route ahead of me. I face the north wind and raise my cup.

i am that i am

reading foucalt's pendulum has been a three month odyssey through umberto eco's dream library. i finally fell into the pace of the book, now, near the end. and everywhere i see lorenza, belbo -- i am belbo, no i am aglie ... the man with the scar was on my flight to chengdu. he chatted freely with belbo while lorenza smiled brilliantly. in heidelberg, i read of princess lizzie, and her love of butterflies and cherries. her husband, frederick the v, elector palatine, who started the thirty years war with a defiant run up white mtn. i looked down at the gardens that reflect the subterranean truth, conducting the starlight down to pools below. then while the lights went out on the flight back home, eco tells me who sculpted those gardens and why. in amsterdam, i remember, fleetingly, latin inscriptions on a doorway. the greater quest for christ. as they served breakfast, i reached the pages in foucalt's, dealing with struggles of the english, french and german arms of the templars. and the inscription jumped from the bricks of dutch buildings to the pages below me. i almost choked on my pudding. KLM food is the bomb. and the design is so apple. eco, as he admonishes admires and consoles the cowardly scholar during his one final attempt to seize the moment, speaks through Lia, the mother, of the threads that link us all, the umbilicus, the grail. i read the chapter and stood to look back several rows, where my belbo seethed, lorenzas multiplied, lias cooed to their children and i wrestled with a vision of myself as casaubon the addict, aglie the pretender. i shook my head as, once again, a book has found me just in the nick of time.