SWEPT UNDER THE RUG

Here in Thailand, there is a major smoke problem in the North every March. That’s when farmers burn the rice husks and the corn stalks. Most people who are free to do so leave for at least three weeks during the worst of the smoke. It’s dangerous to health, especially the smallest particles, which burrow deep into the lungs and stay there. Kids who are in school and parents with jobs are stuck here, shortening their lives with every breath.

No one seems to be able to solve the problem, and the government is heavily invested in not taking responsibility for it, nor in implicating the CP corporation, parent company to 7-11 and True/Move, as well as the major agricultural products company in Thailand. If anyone could get farmers to mulch or compost corn stalks it would be the company that sells them the seed and buys the final crop. But I’ve never seen that mentioned. I’ve attended forums with panels of experts, each preaching his own brand of obfuscation, explaining why the problem is intractable.

There are also campaigns to transfer the blame for deforestation, making it seems like it’s everybody’s fault. Schemes to get school children excited about planting trees. Schools collude one day a year when they do just that, the richest taking field trips to have their pictures taken of their students planting trees. We do the same thing in America when we want to deny what’s really going on. Get children to consume food products that make sicken and eventually kill them and then launch a “Got Milk?” campaign where celebrities have their pictures taken wearing a milk mustache.

Here in old Siam, the trends and fads are a few years behind the States. Thailand has lost more than sixty percent of its forests since 1950, but no one wants to talk about that. Instead, the government makes trees seeds available for free! They announce contests to come up with ideas to improve the efficacy of tree planting. These are “red herrings.” They make the Ministry in charge seem to be taking effective action. But no number of individuals can plant trees as quickly as Agribusiness can denude hillsides.

The problem is not the technology of planting, it is instead the deliberate deforestation by Agribusiness of Royal forests cleared in order to plant corn. This isn’t small scale stuff. These aren’t the random actions of poor farmers. Pretending that we each can “save the forests” by planting a seed on land we don’t own is folly. It’s like blaming the smoke in March on hill tribe people looking for mushrooms. Most people don’t own land here, certainly not most foreigners. What good does it do to plant a tree on ground that is going to mowed or paved over?

In Iowa, where I spent most of my time in America, politicians claim to be a friend of the family farm. Except there aren’t many family farms left, and those that survive are enormous operations, with millions of dollars at stake. Much bare ground is managed by corporations, and the owners of the land have retired to Florida or Arizona. You can drive for an hour in Central Iowa and not see anybody working outside. But you can sure smell the hogs when you pass an anonymous looking metal building with a lagoon out back.

Animal confinement is the rule of the day, and in Iowa there are ten times as many pigs as people, and ten to a hundred times more chickens and turkeys than pigs. Their waste is spread directly on fields as fertilizer, and when it rains, their unprocessed shit runs into creeks, then streams, then rivers. Iowa has the lowest surface water quality in the nation. In many industries, this would be considered Hazardous waste, and be dealt with as such, but not in Iowa, friend to the farmer.

Like the smoke in Thailand, the problem can’t be solved, because it’s almost illegal to even talk about it. “Farm Friendly” administrations have passed laws to limit slander and libel concerning animal confinement. A candidate for office who brings it up will certainly not be elected. Nitrates in drinking water are a state-wide public health hazard. Public rivers and reservoirs are off-limits to swimming. Clear Lake, the only natural lake in Iowa, is often closed to swimming. Algae blooms take over by mid-summer. All this runs downstream to the Gulf of Mexico, where it forms the Mother of All Algae Blooms.

We’re just now coming to grips with how often and to what degree we have been lied to by the people we thought were in charge. Nixon’s secret war in Laos and Cambodia, Reagan’s Iran/Contra scheme, Better Living Through Chemistry, Our Friend the Atom, Low-Fat Diets, Hydrogenated Cooking Oils with an infinite shelf life and which the body cannot differentiate from plastics, Sugar in everything, and when we objected to that, high fructose corn sweeteners and aspartame.

“Where your treasure is, there is your heart also.” – Bible

When Albert Schweitzer was still a young man, he was a theology professor at a Swiss University and had recently won a prestigious award for his multi-volume book on Bach’s organ works. He was on top of the world.

But he was a Christian, and Jesus says many times in the gospels, “sell everything you have and minister to the poorest of the poor. Then your reward will be great in heaven.” So Schweitzer was in a quandary.

He prayed about it, asked himself where were the poorest of the poor. He concluded they were in Africa. He asked himself what they needed. Doctors. So he quit his job and enrolled in medical school. Then he began the process of fund-raising for the clinic he intended to establish in the Gabon.

All his colleagues at the University told him he was making a big mistake, that he was throwing away a brilliant career. Some of them gave him money. He finished medical school and his internship, bought the supplies for his clinic, and found himself slowly making his way up the Congo river, in a flotilla of canoes all paddled by naked black men. I imagine there were times on that trip when he wondered if his friends back home had been right.

Fortunately, he had bought an organ before he left Europe, and once they established the clinic and hospital he played that on his time off. The monkeys and tropical birds heard Bach being played on an organ that had to be pumped with a bellows in order to push air through the pipes.

He lived to be ninety. Here is a quote by him:

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

It’s hard not to like Vietnam. The people are friendly and open. Most don’t speak English, but the ones who do speak well and with confidence. They’re not afraid to look you in the eye.

I’ve just returned from a day of riding a rented motor scooter around the big national park outside of town, the one that’s famous for its caves. One of the caves is called the eight woman cave. It’s called that because eight young women died inside. Such a beautiful spot for such sadness.

According to the People’s Army Newspaper (Quân Đội Nhân Dân) of 17 May, 2009, one day in 1972 eight young volunteers were clearing a road near Eight Lady Cave (Hang Tám Cô) when an air raid sounded. The volunteers ran into the cave. A bomb landed, lodging a 100-tonne rock across the entrance. Nine days later, people outside heard the volunteers for the last time. The war ended that year and a temple was built near the cave to honour the eight and others who died keeping the road, Road 20, open. In 1996 the Government used explosives to remove the rock and found bones and hair.

Fact is, we bombed the hell out of this whole area in the early 1970’s. We bombed the cities, railway lines, we bombed the park. Following find a picture I took yesterday near the cave. Also a photo taken from an American bomber of what was left of Dong Hoi city. It’s just bomb craters and the foundations of buildings.

So I must admit, I didn’t sleep well last night. I tossed and turned, reminding myself that these people are too sweet to hold a grudge. When I first came to Vietnam, I was staying at a hotel in the old part of Hanoi, and I was reading a book about the war. Kissinger and Nixon had come up with a plan to convince the North Vietnamese that Nixon was crazy and so they’d better sue for peace at the negotiations table. Part of this plan was the Christmas bombing, cutely named Linebacker II, using B-52’s to carpet bomb Hanoi itself. It turns out that a bomb fell through the roof of the hospital next door, exploding in the operating room during an operation. Needless to say, not only the patient died. I put the book down and looked to my right, at the wall that separated my hotel from the  hospital. I wondered why there wasn’t an angry mob outside of my hotel, asking for my head.

True, we didn’t carpet bomb major Vietnamese cities the way we did North Korean ones, or Japanese or German for that matter, but then we weren’t really “at war” with Vietnam. We were there as advisors, right?

I just met a woman who asked if I’d be interested in teaching English as a volunteer at her school. I said I’d like to visit her school the next time I’m back here, but that I live in Chiang Mai. I am pretty pleased to have found Dong Hoi, and it’s only the same distance and cost as the beaches we go to in Southern Thailand. I believe next smoke season in Chiang Mai (March, April) we’ll come here.

As I’ve aged, I’ve found it harder to fall and stay asleep. Every night I was waking up after only a few hours, checking Facebook, browsing Amazon, and generally wasting time until I could drop off again. Somewhere along the line I found an online pharmacy that sold me Ambien, a newer drug that helps one fall asleep.

Even though I didn’t need a prescription to buy it online, I read the label and it warned against resisting the initial drowsiness. So of course after a couple of nights of using it as directed, I forced myself to stay awake. I remember staring at my laptop screen from an odd angle, talking to myself and drooling. Then I must have gone to bed, even though I don’t remember doing so.

The next day at worked I discovered a video on Facebook where I was wearing my underpants on my head, and giving a free-associative rant about politics while talking in the voice of the Kingfisher from Amos and Andy. I knew that something was seriously wrong. In disbelief, I watched myself roar “I’se Regusted” while stomping on my desk. By the time I managed to delete the video post it had been shared 250 times.

I had recently accepted an offer from Amazon to try out it’s Prime status for a free thirty-day trial, and to my knowledge I had yet to order anything taking advantage of one-day free delivery, but for the next two days I came home from work to find my front porch littered with boxes bearing the Amazon label. In them I found costume jewelry, sex toys, a metal detector, the entire set of Gene Autrey films on DVD, the Gabby Hayes VIP collection, and some very expensive oatmeal/raisin cookies from a cottage bakery in Vermont.

That evening I decided to forego the Ambien, and as I tossed and turned I heard a strange buzzing sound over the house. Turns out these were drones delivering even more packages which contained various herbal remedies, sex lubricants and cheap reproductions of expensive vintage watches.

That evening, just after dinner, there was a knock on the door. As I opened the door a cab drove away, and I saw a middle-aged woman dressed in a polyester pants suit of clashing floral patterns standing before me.

I invited her in and found that her name was Ludmilla, and even though she spoke very little English, learned that she had taken up my offer of free room and board in addition to a small salary to serve as my housekeeper. Though she has a doctorate in physics and had once been the director of a Research Institute, now it was impossible for her to find work in her native Latvia. I couldn’t very well go back on my word and send her on her way, so I invited her to start work the very next day. 

We are still together six months later. She’s a delightful woman who seems happy to read quietly when she’s finished with her chores. Since we can’t communicate we can’t argue. We like to take walks together around sunset. Since she’s arrived my sleep problems have disappeared and I gave the rest of the Ambien to one of my co-workers, who claims to have a hard time falling asleep.

A few years ago it became popular to encourage people to formulate a bucket list, a series of peak experiences they must have before they die. The concept pretended to encourage us to think outside the box, to eschew the everyday and mundane in favor of grabbing all the gusto we can out of life. It’s a travel writer’s dream, a resort owner’s fantasy.

A decade ago I went to Machu Picchu because the person I was traveling with wanted to. The whole way there I felt like a piece of meat with a wallet being herded towards a tourist destination. I never got the feeling I was on any kind of adventure at all, unless it was an adventure is being fleeced.

I’m happy to report that the site looked just like it does in pictures, perhaps with the addition of a thousand Chinese tourists who have recently become enamored and capable of leisure travel. The Chinese are the new Ugly Americans. They’re everywhere, dressed in clashing polyester fabrics and photographing everything in sight.

The fact is, we have no idea when we’re going to die, and so the idea that you can list items and then check them off when you accomplish whatever goal you set for yourself regarding them, is patently absurd. Likewise, a superficial visit to a place that has earned bucketlistability will not change you in any meaningful way, much less prove transformative, if that’s what you had in mind.

Far better to find the profound hidden in the mundane. Look around you and see what you’ve been ignoring or taking for granted. Stop trying to be a smart shopper in the adventure marketplace. You can’t consume an exciting life. When ordered, wonder and amazement do not appear on cue.

Much of what we do in this vast marketplace we call the modern world is to consume things we assume have value, and hopefully at prices that will prove us smart shoppers. Amazon Prime encourages us to see ourselves as members of a shopping elite, who can buy impulsively and receive the rewards of this action almost immediately.

My mother grew up on a farm in South Dakota and even when we lived in St. Louis, she still ordered our clothes out of the Montgomery Ward catalogue, delighted by how much time she saved by not shopping. The packages simply arrived on the front porch, much as Amazon packages do today, only back then they weren’t carried by drone, but by the mailman.

Consumption rarely leads to insight, or ecstasy. It’s all buildup and no payoff. It’s all anticipation and no delivery. Anyone who has ever directed a kiss in theater or film knows that the anticipation of the actually lip to lip contact is much more important and the mash itself.

Likewise the journey to enlightenment probably beats the pants off nirvana itself. Cartoonist Robert Crumb has Mr. Natural explain this to us at depth.

Dig what’s in front of you and you’re already in the right place at the right time. Long after other people’s travel photos and you’ve bought a one-way ticket to Palookaville. Facebook and other photo sharing sites and in the business to creating envy among those who wish they were anywhere but where they are.

There’s absolutely nothing “wrong” with Southeastern Iowa. True, it isn’t Western Montana or Southern Mongolia, but it’s doing a bang-up job of being what it is, which is completely sufficient for your happiness right now.

If you really want to change your location, you can do so nowadays far more easily than at any time in history. You will, however, have to face your fears and let go of the idea that security even exists, much less is preferable to what you’re about to undertake. Notions like security, or health, or it’s recently formulated cousin “wellness” are abstract illusions. Often they’re used to sell something indirectly, the way “diversity” is used to sell “affirmative action” which more directly would be called “racial profiling.”

I’d be glad to serve as a writing coach for any writers out there. My fees will be reasonable and I will do a good job encouraging any writer who pays me $30 to read 2,000 words and then have a Skype session to comment on it. I’ve taught for many years and I think I’m good at this.

I am not interested in copy editing. If you don’t know the rules of grammar, don’t expect me to teach those. I am, however, interested in supporting you as you find your voice. There’s probably something you know and want to say that only you can, and I want to encourage you to find it. As far as I can see, giving yourself permission to create a voice and then let that persona speak is the obstacle most writers are trying to circumvent.

I’ve had several books published as well as many magazine articles. I received a Master’s of Fine Arts in Playwriting from the University of Iowa’s Playwright’s workshop in 1975 and then for most of my life, supported myself by writing, performing and teaching.

Here is my Amazon Author’s page. https://www.amazon.com/Dan-Coffey/e/B005ANRTQA

I have a new novel Glass Eater  coming out this year via  Shipwrekt Books

If you’re interested, please respond to me via email at danieljosephcoffey@hotmail.com

I live in Thailand, so I’m twelve hours ahead of most of you.