Shigeki

Shigeki Kamata is a 31-year-old high school math teacher. Thin and immeasurably kind, Kamata is a passionate devotee of classical music and devout violin player.

Though he lives in Tokyo, Kamata is from the Sendai, a city on the northeastern coast of Japan’s largest, and centrally located island, Honshu. The city was devastated by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that occurred on March 11, 2011.

When the earthquake struck, Kamata was in Tokyo, using his Twitter account. In his words, it was “the strongest quake I have ever had in my life.”

“Everything was swinging back and forth in very slow pace for about one minute. It was hard to stand still,” he continued. “It felt just like I was trying to stand on a deck of a ship in storm. And this is the story in Tokyo, which is about 200 miles away from the most damaged region.”

In the immediate aftermath of the quake and tsunami, Kamata’s first thought was simple. He had to get in touch with his mother, who lives in Sendai, and his sister, who lives with her husband and children in Shiroshi, jut outside of Sendai.

“The first contact was rather easy. I could talk to my mother by cell phone on the 10th try. So it was about 30 minutes after the quake.”

During that first conversation, Kamata and his mother spoke of the devastation on the ground in Sendai.

“According to my mother, the quake was OK. It did not destroy the house. The tsunami was not,” he said. “It was stronger than anyone had expected.”

Neighborhoods with one and half miles of his mother’s home were completely destroyed, the homes dismantled or swept out to sea by the tremendous power of the tsunami. One local resident, 60 year old Hiromitsu Shinkawa, was found on the roof his floating house nearly ten miles from the coast.

Back in Tokyo, Kamata spoke with his mother one more time in the aftermath of the quake, not long after their first conversation. Then, he endured two days with nary a word from either his mother or sister.

“The second call was right after the first one. The third one was two days later,” he said. “I heard the phone lines were jammed like a traffic jam. Everyone was trying to find out if their family or friends are OK. The phone lines were not capable enough to deal with this many calls at once.”

After two days of no contact, Kamata made a decision. He would drive from Tokyo to Sendai to find his mother and sister. He left Tokyo at 3:00pm on March 13 with a trunk full of food and water.

“I heard that all the lifelines -- electricity, water and gas -- was shut. That meant most of the stores would be closed. So I thought there would be shortage of food after a few days,” he explained.

Just before he left the Japanese capital, Kamata received a text message from his brother-in-law’s phone. The battery on his sister’s cell phone had died, and there was nowhere to charge it in the wake of the devastation.

“I received the text message from my sister that said they all moved to my sister's house in Shiroishi city, south from Sendai. So I drove there,” Kamata explained.

“About an hour after the quake, it became almost impossible to call anybody in Tohoku region. So until I got to Shiroishi all the communication between my sister and me was done by text messages.”

To reach his family, Kamata traveled on National Route 4, the longest ordinary highway in the country. The road spans a 462-mile swath of Honshu. The government reserved Tōhoku Expressway, a high-speed thoroughfare that runs parallel to National Route 4, to all traffic save emergency vehicles and the personal cars of members of the Japanese National Safety Forces.

At intervals throughout his northward journey, Kamata spotted sections of National Route 4 that had clearly been ravaged by the earthquake, scars in the road that spoke of the portentous event. Yet, in keeping with classic Japanese efficiently, the road had already been repaired.

Bypassing the center of Sendai, Shigeki drove straight to Shiroishi to find his family. He spent a handful of days at his sister’s house, reconnecting with his family and finally dealing with the disaster in his own terms.

“I still can not believe that is actually true,” he said. Yet along with his disbelief is a measure of anger. Kamata broke his perennially genteel manner when talk of the radiation fears from the nuclear plants in Fukushima arose.

Kamata is “pissed about the situation of the nuclear power plant."

"We cannot move to the ‘getting better’ phase because of that,” he said.

“The interviews done by the spokesmen of the government and TEPCO, the electric company in charge of the power plant, on TV did not provide us a list of options of what we should do such as whether we should evacuate further,” Kamata explained.

“They only talk about what is going on now, and do not tell us what are the possible outcome of the current situation and what is the worst case scenario. They’re being ridiculously optimistic…and near sighted.”

Though he believes that the Japanese government and TEPCO are not handling the situation well, Kamata has been able to find solace in an unlikely source.

“The internet has been very useful. Right after the quake, the timeline in my Twitter account moved very quickly and told me the magnitude, the center of the earthquake, possibility of tsunami, etc. I would have been very scared if I had not the Internet access.”

Will Japan be able to move on from this disaster?

“I think the current atmosphere in Japan is similar to the one after the World War Two,” he said.

Kamata expressed a belief that, once the Japanese government deals realistically with the problems in Fukushima and addresses the fears of its citizens, the country would move on and begin the process of healing. When the nuclear fears are settled, Kamata feels, there will hope for the future.

Shigeki

Vincent

Vincent Cassell holds two masters degrees, speaks three languages and works for a major international corporation. Like the movie star shares a name with, Cassell is French. He lives the expat life in Tokyo, where he works for his company’s Japanese headquarters by day and is lead singer and rhythm guitarist in an underground rock band by night.

Cassell is intelligent, precise, kind, funny and, like many of his countrymen, is not one to mince words.

When the earthquake hit on the afternoon of March 11, 2011, Cassell was at work in the Roppongi district of Tokyo, a center of the city’s nightlife filled with dance clubs, sleek hotels, cramped and ubiquitous apartment buildings, and two of the Japanese capital’s most recognizable land marks, the Tokyo Tower and Roppongi Hills, a 40+ story shopping mall and office building.

“During the quake, we felt it was much stronger than anything most of us had experienced in the past, so we ducked and hold under our desk while everything was shaking,” Cassell said.

Following the first large aftershock, company security gathered employees in the core corridor of the building.

“We held still there for about 2 hours, if not more, while the giant building was being checked out for any damage,” said Cassell.

“In the Japanese scale meter, it was said to be a ‘strong 5.’ To compare, the level felt in Sendai was 7. Not only was it very strong even in Tokyo, but it was also extremely long, the two main quakes lasting for minutes,” he explained.

Though Cassell maintained a cool head in the immediate aftermath of the quake, fears of radiation affected his perception of the situation.

“Quakes are punctual and there is not much that can be done about them. Radiation, on the other hand, is controlled by a company that has been lying through their teeth for years,” he said, in no uncertain terms. “It seems the Japanese community is not half as concerned as they should be, while the foreigners are borderline paranoid.”

Not long after media outlets reported the fear of a nuclear meltdown, Cassell and his Japanese fiancée left Japan for the Philippines.

“I actually had vacations planned already, and just decided to go Philippines one day earlier, after the French embassy highly recommend their nationals to go,” he explained.

However, the decision caused problems with Cassell’s work situation, which as an expat is already a minor Gordian knot of competing national identities and multinational corporate policy.

“My company, unfortunately, did not feel like the situation was dangerous, and didn't do anything to help their workers feel safe. Although we have robust systems allowing us to work remotely, no one was authorized, at least in my division, to work from abroad,” he told us.

Cassell’s response to this conundrum is frank.

“People have to take vacations, there is no other alternative. Personally, I feel it was inhuman to have people work under such circumstances.”

From the Philippines, Cassell was afforded the opportunity to assess the situation in Japan from a new vantage point, one informed by both the Japanese and foreign media. When asked whether he thought the Japanese government was lying to its citizens, he answered in measured cadence.

“In a nutshell, I wouldn't be surprised if it were the case - this is a pretty opaque government after all, and they probably want to avoid having 30 million people flee from Tokyo at the same time.”

Cassell’s perspective on the earthquake, tsunami, radiation troubles and the aftermath of all of these exigencies is divided: there is the micro version, the human toll, and there is the macro version, the assessment of Japanese society and the Japanese people at large.

When Cassell first saw the images of the devastation in Sendai and the surrounding area, he felt “deep sorrow for those who lost families and friends, and genuine concern for the survivors whose fate seems to be still undecided.”

Regarding the manner in which the Japanese people will respond to the disaster, the expat had as many questions as he did answers.

“Will they be willing to sacrifice themselves like their parents and grandparents did after WW2? Or will social inequalities rise exponentially? Or maybe it will be finally time for Japan to reconsider their social model altogether...”

On March 22, Cassell returned to Tokyo. Though he is decidedly pragmatic in his assessment of the situation, the Frenchman was able to find positives in the situation, in particular the fear of nuclear meltdown.

“One main question that will need to be answered by Japan is one regarding their energy plan,” he said. He explained his position with an anecdote.

“I was talking to a taxi driver yesterday, and he was saying the media thought there will be energy shortage for the next couple of years. I guess it could actually be a good time for Japan to reconsider their use of electricity, the most obvious being the air-conditioning in subways, malls and offices: extremely hot in winter, freezing cold in summer.”

What will Japan’s response to the disaster be?

“Japan has proven, after WW2, they were able to survive the unimaginable, so they probably can overcome this as well. One interesting point will be to see how the youth reacts to this - more and more young people grew a profound hatred to the social system that has seen their fathers lose all sense of private life to the benefits of their companies.”

And how will Cassell react?

“To be honest, this is probably to early to answer such a question. Am I traumatized? Certainly,” he asserted. “But did this change my love for this wonderful country and inhabitants? Certainly not.”

Author's Note: Vincent spoke on condition of anonymity. If you know who he is, please don't say anything.

Vincent

Midori

Around 2:45pm on March 11, 2011, Tokyo native Midori Hayama was at work at a clothing store in the northeastern part of the city. This is when the earthquake struck.

Though the 9.0 quake directly impacted Sendai, the capital of the Miyagi prefecture, some two and half hours north of Tokyo by train, the effects were felt in the capital. Said Hayama of the quake, “First, I thought ‘Its just another small earthquake,’ but it got bigger and bigger, and I couldn't walk straight.”

“It was the biggest in a long time,” she explained. “All the lights on the ceiling were shaking so much. Water bottles we sell fell… some girls were screaming.”

In the immediate aftermath of the quake, Midori was faced with dealing with the store’s customers; such is the service-oriented nature of modern Tokyo.

“I had to take care of customers. I took them outside, to an open space, for their safety,” she said.

Not long after the earthquake a massive tsunami devastated northeastern Honshu, Japan’s largest island. Images of the devastation found their way to every media outlet available, from television and newspapers to cell phones and the Internet.

“It looks almost like watching a movie. I still can’t believe what’s happening there. Just horrible,” said Hayama.

The aftermath of the earthquake has presented a number of fears and a vast amount of confusion and fear. Tokyo has experienced many aftershocks, some as powerful as a 6.0 earthquake. And there is the fear of radiation from the nuclear power plants experiencing reactor trouble.

“A few weeks ago, we didn’t need to worry about the future of our country. Now, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Hayama. She continued, “It’s scary…the radiation is something you can’t see. People are worried and trying to figure out how to deal with it. I think we have to be careful not to get in a panic.”

The wealth of largely contradictory information presented by the Japanese and foreign medias hasn’t helped clarify anything for Midori or countless other millions of Japanese people. As Hayama put it, there is simply “too much information.”

“Media tends to tell things more dramatically. Sometimes I almost think they are just trying to scare us,” she said. “Now, from the stores, water is gone. You can’t find water anywhere. Because the government and media announced the amount of radiation in water here is more than the OK level for babies under 1 year old.”

When asked whether she felt the Japanese government was, as the United States government insisted, lying about the radiation levels, Midori replied, “I don’t think the government is lying but they should tell us more details. And explain better.”

She continued, “I want to ask those experts talking on the American media to come here to help, instead of debating on TV.”

“If foreign media and Japanese media are saying something different, it makes people here confused and worried,” she concluded.

When asked whether she had considered leaving Japan in the aftermath of the quake and tsunami, Midori answered frankly.

“Yes, a little,” Hayama replied. “I heard many people from other countries left here but…they have somewhere else to go back. This is my home.”

Despite the confusion and fear that pervades in the aftermath of the disaster, Hayama stresses that, at least in Tokyo, the situation on the ground is not as bad as it may seem.

“Things are getting back to normal here,” she reported. “I’m trying to get over the shock from the earthquake, though we are still having aftershocks, and they bring back memories. I know a lot of people here who have had a trouble sleeping since the earthquake. Including me.”

But she points out that “Japan is a country who has recovered from a lot of disasters.”

“I believe that after this disaster, people will be more united and will help each other to get over.”

As it has for more than a millennium, life in Japan goes on. Though there will be trials and tribulations, and the path to recovery a difficult one, the extent of which is unknown at the present, the Japanese people have no choice but to continue living.

“Things are tough but a lot of people are trying to be positive and calm,” Hayama asserts. “I think a lot of people are worried, but still there are more hopes here.”

Midori

Japan Interview Series

An article posted on the New York Times website today (6/17/11) attests to a well known fact: just because the media stops paying attention doesn't mean something isn't still happening.

The radiation fears brought on the meltdowns in the wake of the catastrophic earthquake and resultant tsunami in March 2011 have yet to abate in Japan. Here in the states, we don't hear much about it these days.

In the wake of the quake and tsunami, I interviewed three friends of mine who were living in Tokyo when it all went down. I created a short series of articles based on these interviews, though local media outlets in Omaha deigned such news unimportant and passed on the pieces.

Out of respect for the people who were kind enough to respond to all my questions and help me craft articles based on their experiences, I'd like to make these pieces public. I'll be posting one a day, starting today and concluding on Sunday, June 19th.

Thanks for reading.

Japan Interview Series

Publication of Statistics Creates Domino Effect

16/35/11 – Cyberspace

Political group Duh!Mocracy created a domino effect last week when it published a set of statistics highlighting racial, social and economic inequity in the United States.

The statistics were posted in chart form on the organization’s website alongside an article admonishing the extension of the Bush tax cuts. The words “astonished,” “indefensible,” “liberty,” “democracy,” “American people” and “demonstrable” appeared multiple times throughout the article.

In the hours after the publication of the statistics hundreds of thousands of social media users posted the chart on their Facebook and Twitter pages.

Exclamatory comments such as “is this democracy?” and “the truth, kids…” often accompanied the chart, as did the occasional Dadaist quip, i.e. “Why does Stephen Hawking talk like a speak and spell?”

Nelson Scott, head researcher at Duh!Mocracy, was intrigued by the proliferation of the chart on Facebook, particularly the related commentary.

“I was honestly, like, really sort of amazed by how many peopled shared the chart, you know? Especially with all of these comments like ‘Oh my god! The government is evil!’ So I decided to do some follow-up research,” said Scott via telephone interview.

The researcher sent out a questionnaire to those who posted the chart along with said commentary. The responses to these questionnaires lead to another set of statistics showing that 88 percent of posters identified as white, 97 percent as upper middle class, 81 percent as over educated and 3 percent as dumb as a box of rocks.

Three days after the publication of the initial statistics, Duh!Mocracy posted these new statistics on its webpage. Again, a rash of social media users posted the chart and again Scott was surprised.

“Well this time it was like, ‘Who the hell is posting this?’ So I sent out another survey. Especially with all the accompanying, like, totally sardonic comments like 'Apparently Yale doesn't teach reality' and 'ha!', you know?”

The second survey showed that 65 percent of those posting the second chart identified as African American, Latin American, American Indian, Alaskan Native, Samoan, Siberian Husky or Other and 97 percent as working class or lower.

Responses to the question “Why did you post this chart?” ranged from “Can’t stand me some ignant-ass crackas” (interestingly written by an individual self-identified as “White”) and “Welcome to the jungle.”

Taking all of this information into account, Scott decided to take a third approach to the presentation of information.

“It occurred to me that the information presented by the first set of statistics, which showed racial, social, gender-based and economic iniquity, was only shocking because it was taken out of historical context.”

To rectify the situation, Scott created a line graph charting the treatment and social progress of the socially, racially, ethnically, sexually and otherwise oppressed peoples. The graph is more or less a straight line, despite minor fluctuations.

“Well, I looked at all societies, all periods in history, all types of oppression and exclusion, and that’s basically what it looked like,” said Scott.

The new chart, entitled “Blacks, Women, Jews, Gays, the Poor and More: Fucked in the Ass Since of the Advent of Human Society,” is available for download from Duh!Mocracy.

Publication of Statistics Creates Domino Effect

Important Event Happens

2/31/11 – Important Foreign Locale

Today, an important even happened in an important place. Important people have gathered to comment on the gravity of this event, and stress its importance. Experts report that the event is the result of direct action of the plebeian class.

After weeks of rising tensions between the ruling class and a number of dispossessed and impoverished agricultural and industrial workers, the important even occurred. The event has been alternately described as “erupting,” “exploding,” “boiling over,” “detonating,” and, in two isolated instances, “vomiting” and “spewing.”

Myriad think tanks, nonprofits, NGOs, academics, purported experts and self-anointed social media demagogues are busy analyzing the importance of the event from every conceivable angle.

Important First Name Important Surname Professor of Important Discipline at Renowned University believes that this event may well trigger a domino effect of like events in similarly crucial locations.

According to Important Event Watch, an influential NGO, this occurrence may well affect gender and racial relations in microcosmic communities within the affected nation, assuming that anticipated political result C will arise from the collision of Party A and Important Event B.

Dylan Hughes, a Brooklyn resident and central Ohio native, wrote the following on his Facebook before lauding the sound quality of the latest in a long string of 180-gram vinyl Obscure Band re-releases: “The Revolution Will Be Televised! Rise up, people of Important Place.”

Corey Budowski, a sort-of friend to Hughes and renowned Facebook cynic, commented on the post thus: “Easy for you to say. More than half of the participants in the Important Event have been jailed and tortured and no on cares.”

Privileged American liberals and conservatives alike are believed to be preparing rhetorical quips and witticism re: the Important Event and storing them on note cards. Experts posit that these quips will be awkwardly inserted into conversation at Important Social Event or used in similarly rhetorical conversations amongst like-minded privileged Americans and token foreign people at expensive and vaguely ethnic restaurants.

Despite all major global media outlets running heroic photographs of the common people of Important Place holding court against the typical powers that suppress them, it is believed that the event will in no way positively impact the lives of the poor who orchestrated it, in the long term.

When asked about the importance of the event, an uncouth local participant with little education and suspect dental hygiene responded, “I will be back at my horrible job tomorrow, working a solid ten hours of back breaking labor.”

When asked what he did for a living, he spat in the sand and replied, “I make shit for assholes.”

Did he mean objects literally for assholes, like butt plugs or enemas?

“Shove it up your ass,” he spat. The man then inexplicably mentioned carrion and vultures before defecating in a nearby bush.

Important Event Happens

Tennessee Employment Law Oddity

So I was researching Tennessee employment law this morning and I came upon the following, very strange piece of legislation.

Apparently, minors in Tennessee are forbidden from working in "Occupations involving...sexual intercourse, sodomy, sexual bestiality, masturbation, sadomasochistic abuse, excretion, or the exhibition of the male or female genitals"

Who would've thought?

Tennessee Employment Law Oddity

Bernie's Filabuster

For those of you who don't know, a quick summary: President Obama, presumably because he is afraid of not winning re-election, has partnered with Republican leaders on a new tax bill. This tax bill continues the Bush era tax cuts and would take a major dent out of estate taxes for the super wealthy, effectively increasing American debt by trillions of dollars.

Yesterday, Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator from Vermont, spoke for over nine hours about this bill, enumerating all of the reasons it is morally reprehensible and pragmatically infeasible. I went to high school in Vermont, and was a constituent of Mr. Sanders' for a handful of years, including the first election in which I was able to vote. For this, I am one of Bernie's people. Because I support what he is saying, and believe that giving tax breaks to middle class and rich people is a complete folly, I am one of Bernie's people. Because I believe that the working people (and I mean lower and working class, not the comfortable middle and upper middle class) of this country are what make America America, are the truly vital members of our society, the immigrants and children of immigrants who believe that America is what it purports itself to be, I am one of Bernie's people.

So, here's the first 12 minutes of Mr. Sanders' speech, for interested parties.

Bernie's Filabuster

The Thing About Real Estate in Bangladesh

If You Build It, They Will Come: The Bangladeshi Real Estate Explosion

My discovery of the surreal world of Bangladeshi real estate was accidental. Fall of 2008 I was working a temp job at the Hilton on the corner of 53rd and Avenue of the Americas, New York City. It was some sort of IT conference, a horseshoe bank of conference rooms full of people talking data optimization.

Parallel the bottom of the IT “U” ran a string of rooms separated by accordion-walls, all of which had been slid apart to create one long, massive corridor. The perfect antidote to the stodgy white shirts and black ties, the hushed tones and sharply divided think tank sessions of the information mongers, this corridor was a whirl of activity. Women in explosively colorful saris and men with mustaches that could only be described as walrusian were coming and going in a flurry of flying pamphlets, excited shrieks, handshakes, and hugs.

This was the 2008 stateside fair/expo for the Real Estate and Housing Authority of Bangladesh, for which the somewhat dubious and commonly applied acronym is – you guessed it – REHAB. REHAB is the only trade organization for real estate developers in Bangladesh; current organizational membership stands at 260 firms. What this means, among many other things that we’ll come to in a bit here, is that at least 260 companies are developing multi-million, and even billion, dollar real estate projects in a country that is more or less the size of Iowa.

What do we know about Bangladesh? Officially known as the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, it was at one point East Pakistan, though the thousand miles separating the country from Pakistan proper facilitated a rift between the partners that ended in the establishment of the independent country of Bangladeshi n 1971.

The creation of the independent state of Bangladesh coincided, in the mid-to-late 1970’s, with a tremendous population boom in the capital city of Dhaka that has continued into the 2000s. If history teaches us anything, it’s that where there are people there are profiteers. In an effort to keep up with the population eruption, developers emerged from the proverbial woodwork in droves.

Like water leaking from a cracked vase, slow but inevitable, the urban sprawl of the city spread through the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, drowning formerly leafy suburbs like Uttara, which until the late 1990’s was a quiet suburban enclave for the upper middle class. Lalbagh, another of Dhaka’s many sub districts, or thanas, reportedly has a municipal area of 9.14 km² and a total of 71,475 housing units, meaning that there are 7820 housing units per square kilometer, or more than 20,000 per square mile. The population of metro Dhaka is thirteen million people. At current growth rates, this number will be 40 million in 2050.

As it stands as of the 2009 census, the population of the People’s Republic of Bangladeshi is 162,221,000. That means that there are more than 150 million people in a country that is, to reiterate, slightly smaller than Iowa (we might as well tell you at this point that the population of Iowa is around three million). Bangladesh’s official landmass is listed at 55,598 square miles, though about 10 percent of this area is water, which means that the livable space within the country is closer to 50,000 square miles. For comparison’s sake, the population of Russia, a country that is more than 100 times larger the Bangladesh in terms of landmass, is 141,927,297.


A panoramic view of downtown Dhaka, Bangladesh

All of this said and done, it makes a good deal of sense, given all of these people and spatial constrictions, that a real estate explosion would be a necessity. More than 150 million Bangladeshi’s have to live somewhere. Enter REHAB, which formed amidst the population boom in an effort to agglomerate responsible building firms and garner the favor of what has been, on and off for the past forty years, a corrupt government bureaucracy.

Now, of course, this is all history according to REHAB, and if we’ve learned anything about history according to big money professional associations in league with the government, it’s that what you really have in REHAB is something of a monopoly designed to elbow out the competition while lining the coffers of government officials who deem it prudent to look the other way. While REHAB claims to exist in order to prohibit fly-by-night developers from throwing up slap-dash housing projects that won’t meet code, if REHAB’s building are being inspected by the government, with whom REHAB is in league, then we’ll never really know if these buildings actually meet code. There are no checks, there are no balances.

And then there’s the fact that REHAB is hemorrhaging money. The association recently petitioned the Bangladeshi government for a 1,000 crore Taka (roughly $150 million) loan, to help stabilize and encourage development. But why, really, do they need that much money? Yes, the population of Dhaka is 13 million, and yes all of these people need somewhere to live, but the average Bangladeshi lives on roughly $4 per day; not nearly enough for a luxury flat in the city.

Let’s break this down a little bit and look at some socio-economic data for the country, and in particular for Dhaka. First, population: Dhaka is an enormous city. But the population of the country as a whole is 162,221,000. As of 2008, 66 percent of Bangladeshi’s are agrarian, living and working from the land. Yet REHAB’s activity is focused exclusively in urban centers and metro areas, providing luxury apartments within commuting distance of cultural centers. Because of this disparity in population demographics, a good number of buildings in Dhaka are barely half inhabited; some of them are completely empty. But the building continues.

Trying to pin down how much a REHAB-associated apartment actually costs is difficult, thanks in large part to the plethora of websites claiming to be the official REHAB site. Dubiously, the most genuine contender for the actual REHAB site came offline during the course of this article’s writing.

And yet really we don’t need to know how much apartments in Dhaka run to know that the average Bangladeshi living on the country’s $1500 per capital income annually can’t afford them. To take it further than that, an estimated 36 percent of the country lives below the poverty line, as opposed to 25 percent in India, a country renown for its squalor (and no offense, India. We still love you). The gall of REHAB, trying to wrangle $150 million from the government amongst this level of poverty, is frankly astounding.

Indeed, Dhaka is known as the Rickshaw Capital of the World, and for good reason: the city is home to 400,000 rickshaw drivers. Dhaka’s lowest class, the bootleg hawkers, shoe shiners, rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, petty criminals, and homeless, is by far its largest. In a city with no affordable housing—in a city filled with empty luxury condos, that is—this economic disparity gives rise to, you guessed it, slums.

Tanwir Nawaz of The New Nation, an independent news source serving Bangladesh, calls the growth of Dhaka’s slums between 1996 and 2006 “nothing less than immense and spectacular.” The slum population went grew from 1.5 to 3.4 million people in that ten year period, or from 25 to 37 percent of the city’s population. The 37 percent of the city living in the slums is almost exactly equivalent to the 36 percent of Bangladeshi’s living in poverty. At these growth rates, the slum population is expected to exceed 8 million by 2020, meaning that Dhaka’s slum population will equal that of New York City as of the 2008 census.

We’re all intimately familiar with the slums of the subcontinent now thanks to Oscar-winner Slumdog Millionaire, but the psychology of the slum dweller is something we seem to get very, very wrong. While most bleeding heart Americans go on (and on. and on. and on.) about how awful it is that all those poor Indians live in those awful slums, author Suketu Mehta tells a very different story.

Mehta’s phenomenal Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist, attempts to put a face on the sprawling majesty and depravity of Bombay (or, Mumbai). The author was born in India, grew up mostly in Queens, and returned to Mumbai with the purpose of writing a book about what the city meant to him and to India, and, ultimately, what Mumbai and India mean to the world.

In writing the book, Mehta spent a good deal of time in Mumbai’s slums. We will admit here and now that we do in fact know that India is not Bangladesh. However, the country of Bangladesh is actually within India, and as such, as a subcontitental peoples with similar ethnic and cultural heritages, we will be talking a little bit here about India and then we’ll bring it back around to Bangladesh. So please, for the love of god, roll with it.

What did Mehta find in the slums? He found that people actually wanted to be there. He found that families enjoyed living together. He found that the life in the slums, the tightly knit communities and groups of children and close proximity to the outdoors and to the other families in the area, was actually very similar to life in traditional Indian villages, that those who came to the city to seek work were able to recreate agrarian communities in the slums of the city. He even found that a good deal of people living in the slums, such as one gregarious computer programmer, had plenty of money to get out, but the poorly constructed buildings and isolation inherent in “luxury” flat living in the subcontinent were completely unappealing to these people.

Of course there is poverty, and of course it is unhygienic to use the very same waters the gleaming and golden feces of rich is deposited in on a daily basis to wash clothes, take bathes, and cook with. There is disease, starvation, and crime. But the simple fact of it all is that life goes on, and many of Mumbai’s slum dwellers are simply content with that.

So now let’s bring this back around to Bangladesh: Unaffordable luxury flats, and a city filled with people making, to reiterate, $4 a day. All sources say that Dhaka has a slowly growing, very stable middle class. It’s quite possible that some of these middle class citizens live in the slums of the city.

If nothing else, slums offer a measure of security, because everyone knows everyone’s business and looks out for one another. Protection in numbers. And protection from crime seems to be important in Dhaka: A headline on a prominent Bangladeshi Real Estate Boom website reads “If we fall asleep, the gangs steal our children”. What you really have in Dhaka then is a city exploding with the poor, filled with thousands of near-empty housing developments that most people in the city don’t even want to live in. Indeed, the majority of REHAB’s customers seem to be wealthy Bangladeshi’s living overseas on the market for a place to stay when visiting home. But isn’t that what hotels are for?



Top from left (A) Bagladesh, inside of India (B) Slums of Dhaka (C) A typical residential real estate projection (D) Floods in downtown Dhaka

Then there are the natural disasters. Pretty much the entire country is a floodplain. Every year, Bangladesh is battered by cyclones, monsoons, and flash floods. The 1970 Bhola cyclone destroyed large chunks of Dhaka. The cyclone was one of the worst natural disasters of modern times, killing over 500,000 people. Bhola left half of Dhaka underwater, and displaced more than a million residents.

While Bhola is an extreme example, the country floods on an annual basis. Bangladesh is hammered repeatedly by natural disasters, while REHAB goes about building billions of dollars of structurally suspect residential estates that tower dozens of floors above the city floor. Rather than focusing on building affordable housing that will be quickly filled by Dhaka’s many lower class residents, housing that will protect these people from the elements, REHAB is busy building thousands of tower blocks that will like crumble to dust if another Bhola-like disaster. According to REHAB’s own statistics, 500,000 buildings need be demolished in the near future, as construction standards are neither being overseen by governmental agencies nor adhered to by builders.

So but really what does all of this have to do with you? Even in a straight shot from Miami—the two cities are only two latitudinal degrees apart—Bangladesh is almost 9000 miles from the United States. 160 some odd million people is a lot, but Bangladesh is literally engulfed by India, a country with more than a billion people, millions of whose descendents and relatives live in the United States. So what’s the big deal with an ill-planned real estate boom in Bangladesh?

The Bangladeshi Real Estate boom is important to Americans, and especially young, college-aged Americans, not because of what it is, but because of what it represents. Bangladesh has, like a number of developing nations, taken to Western capitalism like a piglet to a teat. The grand monuments and explosive proliferation of infrastructure mimics the luster of cities like New York, London, and Berlin. Yet unlike those cities, Dhaka’s enormous physical presence has neither a sound social nor economic foundation. Bangladesh has adhered to the very dangerous Field of Dreams school of capitalism: If you build it, they will come.

What exactly is this idea? It’s the notion that by creating the proper visible component to capitalism—i.e. the correct image—a sound capitalist economy will suddenly appear, a middle class will emerge, social mobility will become the norm, and the country will move forward. And where did this idea come from? From the west, and in particular America and its fight against the Evil Empire of Communism.

With the advent of television in the 1950’s, the United States began propagating an image of democracy and capitalism that was solely based on the cosmetic tendencies of American society. The image was, and still is, inherently false, not only because it shows a nation of smiling happy white people who all have TVs, homes, cars, and happy children who plays baseball, but also because it ignores the 175 years America needed to get to that point. It ignores the two World Wars, the one civil war, the revolutionary war, and all of our societal woes. It ignores slavery, racism, inequity, and the fact that skyscrapers didn’t appear overnight, only actually appeared after a certain measure of economic success and stability had been achieved, were in fact directly resultant of that financial success and stability.

Most of all, this image of capitalism, which has been taken to so lovingly by nations like Bangladesh, ignores the most cardinal rule of any socialized capitalist nation that we have come to learn over the course of more than 200 hard years: society must be built from the ground up. Capitalism is a pyramid, and the top of that pyramid will not stand unless its foundation is strongest, widest part of the structure. What creates a strong, robust, healthy foundation for society? A well employed, well fed, well paid, and healthy working class. A city with 400,000 rickshaw drivers living on $4 a day or less is no such place.

Now of course it’s possible that even this analysis of an image and its repercussions is cosmetic in-and-of itself. The Mughal Empire ruled in a wide swath from Afghanistan to Burma, engulfing what is now Bangladesh, from 1526–1858. Among its countless monuments to power are the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort of Delhi. Other regional empires, like the Maurya, left monuments that still stand on the subcontinent.

Elsewhere in the world, the Egyptians, Mayans, and Greeks all erected enormous monuments to their power. Ditto for the Romans, Aztecs, Babylonians, and Javanese. These structures, just like modern skyscrapers and urban infrastructure, created a bold and intimidating image of power that left their beholders stricken with awe. Perhaps then it is human nature to create an image of power, either in an effort to reiterate that power or through sheer will bring it to fruition.

Thousands of years of human misery have taught us that a new image is required if the world is to have a bright future. The exposed underbelly of New Orleans in a post-Katrina world attests to this. The global financial crisis attests to this. The BP disaster attests to this. If there is to be a future for mankind that we will actually want to populate with our progeny, it is up to the young people of the world to create a new vision of life, a new vision of socialized democracy that is realistic, workable, and user-friendly. An image based on attending to the needs of a society, not simply an elite class.

Dhaka is a city divided. A city of near-empty testaments to a non-existent socioeconomic stability, a city of rickshaw drivers and DVD bootleggers living in slums and shacks. The Bangladeshi Real Estate Explosion stands more than anything as a challenge to college students the world over, and especially in developed nations like the United States: the future is yours. Reconcile this divide. Do us proud.

Authors Note: This article was originally intended for publication in College Gentleman Magazine, hence the paragraphs at the end about what this has to do with "you." The magazine opted to go with another piece I wrote about the choices implicit in doing drugs, and that will be on newsstands at Barnes & Noble and Borders next month, if you're interested in reading it.

The Thing About Real Estate in Bangladesh

Thoughts on Things - Bullshit

A recent tour of Chapultepec Castle revealed some serious bullshit re: Mexican history and pre-Hispanic culture.

One of the first things our group learned on the exhaustive tour was that, well, despite what everyone might think, actually Spain didn’t conquer Mexico because at the time there was no Spain per se, and certainly not a unified notion of Mexico as a nation, so really all that you had was people fighting people.

While some might take this an effort to work some genuine historical analysis into an otherwise very literal relation of “Mexico’s” post-“Spanish” domination history, in the context of the rest of the tour, it reeked of the feces of a certain bovine animal. Bullshit alarm #1 goes off.

Let’s think about this. There was no Spain, as it were, as the country it is today. Granted, that’s the way it was. And of course there was no Mexico as the unified country known today as Mexico. But there were Spanish peoples, who came to what is now Mexico and perpetrated severe atrocities on people who are the ancestors of who are now Mexicans, thus they too are the Mexican people, if not in name then in blood and culture.

And so by saying that there was no Spain and there was no Mexico puts the idea in the mind of the visitor that it was just groups of people vying for supremacy, and that the European colonial power isn’t precisely to blame. It’s possible that this is done for PC reasons, to avoid offending Spanish visitors and invoking the ire of Mexicans (ire being directed toward the Spanish).

Reasons regardless, this attempt to deflect attention from things like rape and slaughter and slavery, and toward this relatively pointless minutiae about the development of kingdoms and modern-nation states gives a very suspiciously skewed perspective of what was actually going on at the time.

The tour continues, some rather pleasant images and historical nuances are departed upon us, and we come to a display of human skulls with giant holes driven through them. Thus begins the inevitable section in which we deal with violence, warfare, human sacrifice, whatever else you may have had back in the day that puts the weak stomach ill at ease.

Our tour guide tells that pre-Spanish Mexico was far from the wanton bloodshed of a certain Mel Gibson film. In fact (we’re told), human sacrifice didn’t happen that often and was done for a reason. We’re told, think of it like this:

It’s Christmas time and some aliens come down to earth and you invite them in for tea and you’re having this nice snack with these extraterrestrials, discussing a certain episode of M*A*S*H that had been beamed into space, when they see the dead tree in your house. Hold the phone.

The alien leaps to his/her/combination thereof feet. “Dear god! Why have you got a dead tree in your house?! This is a phenomenally grotesque display of arboreal sacrifice!”

And then it’s your job as the host to be like “Well, actually, it’s this annual ritual that we have, where we cut down trees and bring them into our houses and decorate them. It’s actually quite nice.”

“Oh. I see. Well then, forgive my impertinence.”

And thus was explained the human sacrifice of indigenous Mexican cultures: Dismembering and beheading captives, stripping their skulls of flesh, and impaling them in garish rows on fences as a totalitarian scare tactic is essentially the same thing as cutting down a tree and putting some lights on it and having a little gift giving ceremony.

Or, rather, comparing human sacrifice to Christmas trees is a way to imply a certain innocuous quality in the sacrifices, so that pre-Hispanic cultures are not seen as barbaric. Being relatively intelligent, we of course see that what’s going on here is that the castle and its emissaries are attempting to create a cohesive vision of Mexican culture and history for the visiting foreign legions of tourists so that said tourists will go home thinking Wow, Mexico has such a fascinating and rich cultural history and not Man that’s fucked up that they cut people’s heads off and impaled them on sticks.

And yet to assume that guests to this magnificent country are unintelligent enough to be unable to accept a country that is not as multifaceted and contradictory as Mexico is quite frankly insulting. Certainly, there’s no harm in seeing the human sacrifice from the sacrificer’s point of view, and it’s an interesting tidbit about the countries not actually existing per se, but to try to alleviate responsibility for what could be seen as barbaric in an attempt to placate tourists is a dangerous revisionist tactic.

We can only hope that this will be rectified in the future.

Thoughts on Things - Bullshit

Thoughts on Things - Japan

Emerging From the Shadows: Japan’s Poor
An article published April 22nd, 2010 in The New York Times details Japan’s increasing problems with poverty and the country’s obstinacy in doing something about it.

Japan’s Post War Economy
The rapid growth of Japan’s post war economy throughout three decades earned it the nickname “Japanese Post-War Economic Miracle.” The 1960’s saw an annual growth rate of 10%. In the 70’s, it was 5%, and in the 80’s, 4%. The Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) played a large role in sparking Japan’s economic growth with investment, due SCAP’s belief that a strong economy would prevent a re-emergence of militarism and the rise of socialism. On the first point, it seems as though a lesson was learned from the Treaty of Versailles.

The Japanese also played a strong part in building their economy by placing nation and growth before self and profit. During the Japanese Post-War Economic Miracle, the cooperation of manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and banks, formed into groups known as keiretsu, helped stabilized the nation. These groups allowed for horizontal and vertical integration that locked out all foreign competition.

The promise of lifetime employment at large companies and powerful unions in working class strongholds such as manufacturing plants also encouraged economic growth and active participation on the part of Japan’s citizenry. The participation of the government in investing in the economy and fortifying it through favorable legislation were each integral to Japan’s post-war economic growth.


The Shinjuku Skyline is a Testament to Japan's Economic growth; a tent city testifies to the Bubble's bursting

The Bubble Economy
The Bubble Economy and its bursting is an incredibly technical economic phenomenon, though to put in a nutshell: In 1985, the Japanese government deregulated interest rates on bank deposits. Because of this, banks had to compete for customers by offering the best interest rate. However, banks failed to raise their fees appropriately, and so were giving interest they weren’t actually earning as capital.

At first, banks sold stock to make up for the lost profit, though the stock well quickly ran dry. Banks began taking overseas loans, leveraged against which were property holdings. In 1990, the Tokyo Stock Market crashed, and along with it the banks, which found themselves with staggering loans to pay and no funds to pay them with.

The economic bleakness of the 90’s, in contrast to the bright lights of the 60’s – 80’s, have won the years the moniker The Lost Decade. Though the economy recovered well enough to maintain Japan’s status as second highest GNP in the world, the subsequent global recession of the 00’s has done the country no good.

While it’s easy to laugh about this (feel free to, though also take it seriously, please), Bloomberg.com published a report on escalating crime levels amongst senior citizens in Japan. Between 2006 and 2011, the Japanese government had made plans to cut $2.3 billion from its social welfare spending per year. In the middle of this, assistance to seniors began to run dry. Most senior crime is benign pick pocketing, though a 79-year-old woman slashed two women with a knife out of desperation.

After the economic crash, it wasn’t uncommon to see tent cities of Tokyo’s homeless sprinkled throughout the city. Complex communities lived beneath networks of blue tarps, a testament to the economic downturn.

Armchair Psychology
The New York Times humanizes its tale of poverty and politics by focusing on a middle-aged woman, Satomi Sato, raising a teenage daughter in the town of Memuro. Sato makes the equivalent of $17,000 a year, split between two jobs. In the morning she makes bentos (boxed Japanese lunch), while in the afternoon she delivers newspapers.

“I don’t want to use the word poverty, but I’m definitely poor,” Sato mused in an interview with the Times reporter. “Poverty is still a very unfamiliar word in Japan.”

Poverty being new in Japan is of course a fabrication. There were working and servile classes throughout Japan’s Imperial epoch, and rampant starvation, destitution, and violence during the time of the Shogunate. In the 50’s, Japan was suffering through the post-war malaise on a largely black-market economy. That Japan, however, is a Japan of the past.

What Satomi Sato is saying when she says that poverty is unfamiliar in Japan is that poverty in the modern sense, with its plethora of undesirable and highly visible baggage, is unfamiliar in modern Japan. Though Japan has always had it’s working classes, the idea that there are millions of citizens in the country who struggle and even need assistance to get by, is a massive blow to the Japanese ego.

Reads The New York Times Report: “Many Japanese…were further shocked to see that Japan’s poverty rate, at 15.7 percent, was close to the…figure of 17.1 percent in the United States, whose glaring social inequalities have long been viewed with scorn and pity here.” And while scorn is a large part of it, the Japanese also have their pride.

Having recovered from World War Two in startling fashion, Japan has been a nation with no need of foreign assistance for the better part of a century. To see that the country now has similar financial inequities as a nation that not only nuked Japan, but also embarrassingly occupied it in the post-war years and is rife with problem such as inner-city violence, racial strife, and homelessness, is a great blow to the Japanese pride and belief that the Japanese system – economy, social programs, education, health care, et al – is second to none.

Some poor Japanese citizens even try to obfuscate their poverty on account of this pride. An annual lifestyle survey in August of 2009 showed that 80% of Japanese citizens think of themselves as middle class. “Saying we’re poor would draw attention, so I’d rather hide it,” Sato said in her interview.


Satomi Sato works her morning job while the desperate elderly prepare to rob her.

Where To Now?
In the summer of 2009, Japan elected a left wing government in favor of previous office-holders and moderates, the Liberal Democratic Party. Headed by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, the government is finally owning up to what has long been a problem swept under the rug.

The new government has set a poverty line at $22,000, and gone public with years of secretly kept statistics on poverty. However, according to an expert quoted in the Times article, “We are at risk of creating a chronic underclass.”

Of course there’s a bit of Doomsday Prophesizing to all of this. The same survey (“Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries" – 2008) that listed Japan’s poverty rate at 15.7% asserts that, though wages nation-wide have declined since 1998, and poverty increased, the nadir of the problem has passed. Income inequality and poverty were at their height in Japan in the mid 00’s.

Japan has proven itself time and again an incredibly resourceful and intelligent nation. If the country focuses on this problem, they can no doubt make it go away. Japan has also proven itself, however, to be an incredibly prideful nation equally capable of ignoring the elephant in the room until the whole building crumbles.

We also must dutifully consider the fact that, despite the foreign fetishization of Japanese esotericism, there are very cosmetic tendencies in Japanese society. The Japanese mainstream may very well be willing to ignore this problem as long as it remains relatively unseen. But then, if it doesn’t, vanity may prove to be a great motivator. Which way the wind will blow in this pressing matter is yet to be known; here’s to hoping Japan rescues herself again.

Thoughts on Things - Japan

The Bullshit About Drug War Coverage
The intensifying drug wars ravaging Mexico have been the center of a U.S. media squall for well over a year. The one-sided and condescending tone of the majority of this coverage errs to the nationalistic and propagates a dangerous myth about violence in developing nations.

The basics are true: ruthless drug lords and cartels are kidnapping, mutilating, and publicly displaying the corpses of police officers, military personnel, and their rivals. Drugs are being stuffed into desperate, poverty stricken, bribed, coerced peoples and sent across the border. A drug caravan recently crashed the US border and started a shoot out in Baja California. These things are indisputable. In the lack of insightful interpretation lies the problem.

Let’s take a look: where are these drugs going? North. Where north? Into the United States. The US is the prime drug market in the Americas, and the world (we need only look to the poppy fields supplying our [endnote 1] heroin from Afghanistan as proof for this). The proliferation of cartels and drug lords speaks of the huge demand for illegal drugs in the US. American crackdowns on the border make it harder for drugs to come in, making it harder for the dealers to get their fists in multi-billion dollar drug pot, making said drug dealers very angry, resulting in murders, desperation, and, in some Mexican states, near lawlessness. The market exists because there is demand. Businesses proliferate because of this demand. Suddenly there are too many businesses for the market to support, and the bubble bursts.

It would seem, then, that all of this drug violence is due to the United States’ insatiable appetite for drugs. And where do drug dependents and addicts come from? From desperation, escapism, hedonism, abuse, sexual trauma, poverty, depression, narcissism etc. In short, not from anywhere good. The tremendous drug problem in the United States is indicative of severe societal shortcomings, not only in our inability to deal with drug addiction and possession in an intelligent and compassionate way (ie sending addicts to prison not rehab, imposing mandatory minimum sentences), but also in our inability to provide our society with a framework wherein happiness (by which we mean a modest happiness, not this vainglorious-15-minutes-gimme-the-loot American Dream) seems an attainable and worthwhile goal.

Now, of course, there are a few problems even in this argument. For starters, there will always be those who just want to get fucked up, not because of some problem or trauma or other extenuating circumstance, but simply because that’s who they are and that’s what they want to do. Additionally, to suggest some kind of utopian society wherein happiness for all is achievable is a naive and ridiculous thing. Contrapuntally, though, there must be some median, in which there are those who do drugs, as there will always be the hedonistic and depressed and whatever else, but in which the majority finds other means of occupation; basically, a nation without such a catastrophic appetite for drugs there that there is what has been deemed by most a war in another country to feed that need.

That the American media seems content to ignore the fact that a deeply problematic, uniquely American epidemic is responsible for most of this violence points to a troubling nationalistic racism and condescension, wherein other countries are represented not by their achievements but by their shortcomings. And of course the majority of these shortcomings are resultant of intervention by one or more colonial powers. Case in point, Newsweek’s October 2007 cover article on Pakistan, in which it named the Asian nation the most dangerous in the world. Now, is Pakistan widely feared and loathed by, say, China? Or neighbors like Afghanistan, Iran, or Nepal? Not in the least. Do Malaysia or Japan fear Karachi-launched missile attacks? No. Who is Pakistan really dangerous to? India, the US, Israel, parts of Europe, and of course the UK.



Typical US Media depictions of Mexico; Newsweek's not eve a little bit racist Pakistan story

Let’s break this down: Pakistan is dangerous to India because it was all an intricate system of kingdoms, tribes, and societies which had nothing to do with each other until Britain showed up, forced the whole thing into one nation, starting fucking shit up with Kashmir, and then, voila, 1947, it all falls apart. Due to the rise of radical Islam, and very deep colonial wounds, Pakistan is dangerous to the UK. Radical Islam is notoriously spiteful of the US and it’s cultural exports, and so Pakistan is dangerous to us. Israel is the US’s little pet military project in the Middle East to keep Arab and Persian peoples at bay so oil can be extracted, so of course Pakistan has it in for Israel. But enmity toward the US, UK, and Israel has accrued in the Muslim world at large, and in places as far flung as Somalia, China, Indonesia, and Venezuela (Chavez is a matter for another day, of course). So if a missile takes off from one of these places – say Pakistan, for argument’s sake – and lands itself in Israel or London or Munich or New York, who’s really to blame? The fucked or the fuckers? (endnote 2)

To return to Mexico, the US media seems perfectly content to perpetuate the belief that it is a crime-ridden, blood-thirsty, lawless, depraved nation of murders and psychopaths. While it would be ridiculous to pretend that Juarez, Tijuana, or Mexico City are utopian, crimeless cities, the US short list of Newark, Camden (endnote 3), Detroit, Gary, and even DC don’t exactly make Mexico’s den’s of iniquity look like “City of God”. In fact, more or less, they’re pretty much comparable. In his book First Stop in the New World, author David Lida cites crime statistics showing that for the average citizen, there's virtually no difference between living in Mexico City and Detroit. So what’s really happening here? Mexicans at large are portrayed as coming from a violent, depraved, backward place. This in turn creates problems for the millions of Mexicans living in the United States (endnote 4), who encounter resistance at near every turn because they are perceived as bringing some horrible tide of decadence and decay into the United States, when in fact said tide is only coming because there is demand in the US for it.

Though there are myriad pundits in the US who take a moralistic approach to their condemnation of Mexico’s drug business, let’s take a look at where it comes from. Latin America was very notoriously fucked by the Spaniards, French, English, and Americans. Job markets were virtually non-existent at a time when the global economy had set up shop and forced indigenous peoples to cough up regular payments to continue living their lives in their own fucking countries. Major western businesses shy away from a market called drugs. Indigenous and mestizo peoples tap this market, rake in billions, colonial powers realized they fucked up big time, and put the hammer down hard on the drug dealers, deeming them illegal and imposing severe and of course hypocritical prison terms on those who are trafficking. So while the majority of what’s been happening throughout the drug war is morally indefensible, it seems that in part the patterns of behavior and violence are due to external, colonial influences. Of course only an ignoramus would completely blame the brutality on external influence as we know the Mayans had a taste for a little bit of the old ultraviolence and the Aztecs really enjoyed fucking people up, what with their human sacrifices to vengeful gods. But, the fact remains that external forces were certainly involved in this whole debacle.

Though Mexico undeniably suffers its fair share of violence and societal woes, the American media’s portrayal of the drug war, and country at large, in focusing on the brutality and depravity of the situation and ignoring the American roots of the problem, presents a very one-sided, racist, and ultimately harmful vision of our southern neighbors.



Endnotes:

1.The author, being a US citizen, feels the need to make this clear and proceed accordingly, so this isn’t seen as yet another haughty-taughty European attack on the United States.

2. Now, of course, being what we hope is a relatively compassionate person, I believe no innocent person deserves to die, and that the generations of English and Israeli people living their daily lives have nothing to do with what transpired in times past, are simply victims of circumstance. But this doesn’t alleviate the problems that former colonies are dealing with, and their inability to find footing in a world economically dominated by their former colonizers. And while we must condemn any and all rash actions of violence and hate, can you really blame them for being peeved?

3. Very sincere apologies to the state of New Jersey here, as I am from there and often find myself defending it against ignoramuses, but the fact remains that these two cities are very violent, dangerous places.

4. And briefly on the illegal thing, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and California were all illegally taken from Mexico by the US, so who really is in a position to say Mexicans can’t live within the United States’ territories? Well, hypocritical assholes, mostly. And of course this lovely new legislation in Arizona that is-and there's no other word for this-racist, isn't helping matters any. But the of course the opposite argument is Well, if we hadn't been so rutheless to begin with, we wouldn't have what we have.

Thoughts on Things - Society

The Problem with Haiti's Eathquake
The recent, catastrophic earthquake in Haiti has drawn millions of dollars in aide and the world’s attention to Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. More than anything, the resultant surge of goodwill and relief efforts serve to highlight a very sad strain of subjective morality in our global society.

Haiti is half of the Caribbean island Hispaniola; it shares the territory with neighboring Dominican Republic, Hispaniola being where Columbus first made berth, and as such the veritable starting point for all of the New World’s racial, economic, cultural, and ethnic problems.

The Spaniards brought many slaves through Haiti; the indigenous peoples had offspring with the slaves and colonial powers, resulting in a Creole culture. The French eventually took the country, and lost it to slave rebellion. Through this rebellion, the first successful slave uprising in the modern world, Haiti became the Caribbean’s first independent Latin American country and the world’s first post-slavery, black-led nation.

The Haiti of the 20th and 21st centuries, however, is anything but a shining beacon of freedom and post-colonial potential. The majority of Haitians live on about $2 US per day. Illiteracy is at 50%. 80% of its population lives in poverty, and more than 80% of its college graduates emigrate. 40% of children are unvaccinated. Haiti now ranks 149th of 182 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index. According to the World Health Organization, nearly half the causes of deaths have been attributed to HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections, meningitis and diarrheal diseases, including cholera and typhoid. Ninety percent of Haiti’s children suffer from waterborne diseases and intestinal parasites. The country sees 30,000 cases of malaria annually. A fair number of Haitians are so poor they actually eat dirt. I’m not making this up. They make cakes out of mud and leave them in the sun to cook/dry, and then eat them.



(A) Hispanola chillin next to Cuba (B) Haitian Slave Revolt (C) Dirt Cakes Drying in the sun (D) Pigs and people in a Haitian slum

Now, before the biting criticism and moral high horsing I’m about to go into (and yes I openly acknowledge it as such but sometimes its merited, being more Righteous Indignation than Look At Me I’m Better That You finger pointing), some acknowledging is order. From the US alone, Haiti has received 1.5 billion dollars in aide. A fair amount of that came during the Bush administration. So let’s acknowledge that the US in fact does some very admirable things in the world at large, and that even an administration as globally deplored as that of the second Bush lived up to some of America’s promise, to make the world a better place by using it superpower status and wealth to help those in suffering.

The criticism them must be leveled at the average people of the world, as it seems the governments (many other countries throw a good deal of aide Haiti’s way) have done their part, and done it admirably. But apparently it takes an earthquake, catastrophic destruction, and an estimated death toll of 200,000 (this being more deaths than US soldiers passed in Vietnam, as a result of a few minutes’ earth shaking) for the people of the world to care.

So far, $210 million US has been raised to help rebuild Haiti. Jay-Z and Bono (and no disrespect to Bono who, as a musician, has done more for the world’s needy than most statesmen in their careers) have recorded a benefit single (that, despite it’s best intentions, is pretty much an awful song) to help raise even more funds. But Haiti, being one of the world’s least developed nations, doesn’t really need rebuilding, because it was never quite built to begin with. What the earthquake has done is it has taken a catastrophic human toll and further destroyed the morale of an already crushed nation. A nation so poor people were actually, let’s reiterate, eating dirt. And overnight, thanks to destruction on a scale we couldn’t sit around and ignore it anymore, $210 million dollars shows up.

Much like Hurricane Katrina and the racial disparity of New Orleans, Haiti’s earthquake has exposed to us the diseased underbelly of the modern world. The natural disaster has drawn attention to the moral destruction that has be reaped on the world’s peoples at the hands of the promise of a comfortable life. It all comes down to math; six billion plus people, limited resources, wealthy nations: the haves necessitate the have-nots, just as love cannot exist without hate. Though it’s lamentable that it takes near quarter million deaths to get the world’s attention, it’s better late than never. Hopefully with this, we will learn our lesson for good, and begin to look to the world’s struggling nations, to help them on their difficult path to prosperity. A chain can only be as strong as its weakest link.


Here's a short documentary about the Disney factories in Haiti, from 1996:

Thoughts on Things - Society

Thoughts on Things - Politics

The Problem with Being Barack Obama President Barack Obama has inspired hope in millions of people. He has taken the mantle from America’s least popular president. He is the first African American to ascend to the nation’s highest office. He has won the Nobel Peace Prize. All of these things are very big problems.

In inspiring in his populace such hope, Obama has run the greatest risk of all: blind faith. Those who follow him simply because he is him, a messianic, meteoric figure who went in four years from a virtually unknown senator to the most high-profile man in the world, fail him in the worst way; they lose their ability to be critical. If Obama is allowed to do as he does, unchecked by the jurisdiction that ushered him into office, what we find is a pseudo-fascistic state in which a leader is imbued with the blind goodwill of his people and permitted to do as he pleases.

And yet. And yet, a large portion of Obama’s supporters, those who do not step in blind faith, are Americans who came of age under the Bush administration, are therefore more inherently skeptical of government than is healthy. This contingency will hold the president to higher standards than are humanly possible in a system of checks and balances, will accept no compromise, and will, via their facebooks & twitters, copy and paste articles from The Huffington Post, Salon.com, and The Nation, offer jejune, bromidic, sardonic commentary, and be unwilling to back their president no matter what he does. They seem to expect, unrealistically, that Obama will, overnight, transform the United States into a European Socialist Democracy.

To paraphrase Dave Chappelle: Never be the first black person to do anything. Because Barack Obama represents the penultimate realization of the American dream, because his people were enslaved by the very country he now leads, he is under the utmost scrutiny. He must, while attending to the monumental task of taking office amidst the largest financial fallout in nearly a century, be very mindful of the past; it is upon him to look both forward and backward critically, all while carrying the Atlasian weight of the present crisis on his back.

Akin to the constant scrutiny of being the first African American president – scrutiny that comes, unlike the facebookese criticism of the previous paragraph, from intellectual and public forces of nature such as Cornell West and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, not to mention organizations such as NAACP – is the furor of criticism now arisen from the Nobel Peace Prize. Granted, the prize was decided upon when Obama had less than two months in office, yet the American people seem incapable of understanding that the president has been burdened with yet another behemothic responsibility – to live up to a prize previously given to Nelson Mandela, Amnesty International, The Dalai Lama, and, the largest elephant in the room, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Even more than the challenges of the present, President Obama faces the skepticism and blind faith of his own people. His hands are tied ideologically by those who would allow him unchecked to carpet bomb Beijing, could he present a forceful enough argument for doing so, and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, by those who, as he does his best to carry the US forward, make their glib, self-indulgent remarks behind closed doors, withdrawing ever further their support for his future candidacy. An ultimate, possible, troubling outcome of all of this? The man with the highest probability right now to change the world for the better may lose the support of his own constituency because he inspires such lofty aspirations and hopes in those whom he leads.

Thoughts on Things - Politics