HAPPY NEW YEAR

Happy New Year to all friends and family (and strangers, too...)!

Here's hoping that 2005 gives you everything you need, and a little of what you want.


"Life is either a daily adventure or nothing."


-- Helen Keller

ONCE A WEEK

Have you ever seen a dead body? Up close and on the ground?

I went twenty-eight years without seeing one, and then here in Cambodia I saw two within a month.

I was on the back of a moto with a friend heading home late one night, and the moto driver motioned towards the river.

"Dead body there," he said. "Dead body. You go see?"

So we kind of shrugged and said sure, why not. We thought we were going to see the place where the guy died, not the guy himself.

We wrong. A small crowd had gathered by the side of the road, as Cambodians are known to do. As we slowly drove past, we could see somebody on the ground, a pool of blood surrounding his head. He wasn't moving. He was dead.

Okay, fine, that's enough, back home, had a blast, go, now.

And that was that. Five, six seconds was all it was. But enough time to recognize that most human of conditions, the one we all instictively shy away from and are drawn towards, almost against are will. We don't want to think about death, or so we say, but the bootleg videos of those kidnapped hostages in Iraq getting their heads chopped off are doing big business here in Phnom Penh.

Did I want to see a dead guy by the side of the road? I guess I did.

A few weeks later I was out for a run, jogging past the Cal-Tex gas station when I saw, surprise surprise, another small crowd gathering. I slowed my run to a shuffle, and then to a stop. I poked my head through the cluster of moto drivers and mothers.

How old was he? Eight years old. Maybe nine. His body splayed out in a weird, contorted tangle -- left arm up here, right arm down there. His eyes were closed, giving him the gentle look of children who have somehow got themselves all bunched up in their sleep.

Only this kid wasn't waking up. His skin was dirty, his clothes shoddy, his hair a mess. Most likely one of those street kids that always ask me for money when I go to Star Mart, the variety store located next to the gas pumps. Had I met this one before?

Hard to say.

A car must have struck him, but there was no car in sight, no concerned, weeping driver begging for forgiveness. (Did he drive away fast? Did he feel the thump? Did he even glance over his shoulder, or into the rear view mirror?)

I guess it's a cliche to state that life over here is cheap, fragile, blunt.

Shootings happen back home, and kids are hit by cars, and the world moves on.

The thing is, most cliches have at least a sliver of truth to them. Death seems to loom larger here than elsewhere. Life itself here seems to be more, I don't know, susceptible. To what? To everything. If you're shot, guess what? Not many hospitals to take you in. If you're a street kid hit by a car, now what? Not many people are going to pick you up and haul you off for medical care. You're not on your own here, no, but the social structures we take for granted are somewhat...distant.

It's been awhile since I've seen those bodies -- five months, maybe six?

I probably think about them once a week.

SOMETHING ABOUT THE SUNLIGHT

It might have been the way that the early-evening sunlight painted the sky a dark and subtle amber over the dusty streets. It could have been the constant news of the tsunami's toll, a barrage of non-stop death. The root of it doesn't matter. What matters is that I found myself on the back of a moto in Phnom Penh suddenly remembering a chocolate milkshake I drank, God, must have been eleven, twelve years ago now.

Memories have a way of unleashing themselves upon you whether you're ready or not. (You're usually not.) There's no rhyme or reason (or so we believe.) They come, and you have no choice; rejection is not an option.

And here was this one, like it or not, a remembrance of a day at the cottage our family used to go to each summer along with our life-long family friends, the Craddocks. Near the cottage was a general store, presided over by a middle-aged woman who had the biggest moustache I've ever seen on a lady. A black and fertile centipede, this was. The fact that this woman was supposedly married, well, we couldn't believe it. Didn't want to believe it, because then that meant that there was somebody who, like, kissed her goodnight, potentially more than once. (Did it tickle, that moustache of hers? I'm betting it did...)

She couldn't keep us away, though, because at this store they had milkshakes, see, thick ones, monstrous ones, the kind that you can sip and slurp for a long, long time before even reaching the beginning of the end.

On this day I went and grabbed a shake with Tony, a big, funny, good-natured Italian kid who was a friend of my buddy Jason. (Tony had tagged along with Jason's family the past few years and joined us for a week or two at the cottage.) I don't know where Jason was at particular moment; maybe down by the beach, maybe napping, maybe watching the tube. Nobody else was around, I guess, so me and Tony decided to get a drink of that blissful chocolate nectar. I was, what, maybe seventeen? And Tony fifteen, I guess. That week (or had it been the year before?) he lost his wallet with all his vacation money inside, and so we all spent a lot of time scouring the beach and the cars and the cottages looking for the missing loot.

No luck.

Ah, well. He wouldn't go hungry this week, not with all the food we had, and the milkshakes were cheap, so what the hell.

I don't remember much about that particular moment. Just the two of us walking towards the general store, the sun slowly setting in the late-afternoon, mid-summer sky. Looking foward to the shakes. Making the kind of small talk you make with people you know, but not that well.

I don't think I ever saw Tony again after that week at the cottage. He died a couple of years later, killed in a car accident with one of his best friends. Somebody had fallen asleep at the wheel one night as they were driving back from Casino Niagara.

They were barely into their twenties. A double funeral for the two of them in Fort Erie.

Strange, the way the mind works. In the centre of Cambodia, ten, eleven years on, and something about the sunlight triggered an image, a flash, of a moment in time. Two Canadian teenagers going to grab a shake as dusk starts to fall.

Ten years on, one of them in Cambodia, the other gone. Gone for good. I've already lived a good five or six more years than Tony ever lived, come to think of it, and that's a scary, sobering thought. The kind of thought you don't know what to do with it.

There's nothing to do with it, I guess. You latch on to what you remember about a person -- the fact that he lost his wallet, the fact that he played a pretty good game of beach volleyball, the fact that we all went out one summer night on the boat and got together at the cottage of a couple of girls that we had met a few days before, a bunch of nervous teenagers sitting under a wide sky, in front of a blazing fire, making inane jokes. Those kinds of thoughts, memories, glimpses.

I think his dad had a roofing business, Tony's dad did, and I think that's what he was doing right after high school, laying tiles up above our heads, beneath the sun. Must have been hot up there. He was tough kid though, Tony was. He was probably pretty good at his work.

But --

Better to stop. Sometimes even glimpses are too much.

Just for a moment, for whatever reason, I thought about poor Tony (gone so soon!), about that point in time on a summer night long ago when we walked to get a shake, nothing on our minds but the taste of chocolate. I remembered it, I did, and then there was nothing else to do but grab onto the back of the moto and hang on tight and hope that the early-evening light would linger for a little while longer.

INEXPLICABLE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All of Cambodia's political elite were out in full force this morning for the wedding of Prime Minster Hun Sen's daughter. I know because I live right across the park from Hun Sen's palatial residence, and so this morning, while I waited for the van that conveniently picks me up and takes me to work, there was a parade of, oh, two hundred or so men and women slowly making their way down the closed-off streets, all clad in their Wednesday morning best, kissing the ass of the man who could crush their lives like an ant.

I know, I know. I'm being a bit harsh. I'm sure Hun Sen's daugther and her fiancee are kind, lovely people, wise and funny, deserving of their own, Cambodian version of Friends. And I'm sure all of the guests are just ecstatic to be there. Would willingly lay down their lives for the bride's father, no questions asked.

The thing is, weddings are weird here, as I discussed a week or so back. I haven't figured them out. Funerals either, for that matter. There's lots of people dressed really nice, in jewelry and gowns, traditional shirts and ceremonial gowns, and a lot sure happens, yes, morning processions and oh so much more, but I'm not entirely certain of what it all means.

Ah, but that's par for the course in a foreign country. You can't figure some things out. No. You can't figure most things out.

When I was kid, vacationing in Myrtle Beach or Florida, we could bop into a 7-Eleven and buy a can of Coke and that mother was big, I mean large, because the Canadian kind of cans were long, thin cylinders, but the American version was, like, angular, and thick, and why couldn't Canada get its act together like that? It eventually did, round about my ninth birthday. (All praises due to Allah.)

Coming from Canada to America, you noticed the small, little differences. (Like the fact that comics and books were a hell of a lot cheaper.)

Coming from Canada to, let's say, I don't know, Japan or Cambodia, you notice the big stuff. Right away. Straight in your face.

A lot of it has to do with the Asian approach to life and death, symbolized, for me, by weddings and funerals, with Hugh Grant nowhere in sight. Weddings are big and bold and glitzy and colourful; so are ones back home, true, but Asian ones have a certain, I don't know, inbred majesty to them. Maybe it's because I'm foreign, but they have a certain, solemn dignity that is inherent in the whole enterprise. (Of course it's contrived and insincere, but Asians at least present their insincerity a hell of a lot more effectively than those back home.)

It could be because I'm a hick Canadian, but one of the fundamental differences simply seems to be a view of life itself that is more mature, realistic, pragmatic, and yet, at the same time, undeniably mystical at its core. Myth and magic and superstition and tradition all seem to battle it out over here on a daily basis; they've been around, these people have, and hard-wired into their character seems to be this subtle, perhaps unnoticed approach to life that recognizes and validates its unknowable, uncontrollable nature.

Maybe that's b.s. I don't know. All I do know is that Asia -- meaning the parts I know, Japan and Cambodia -- seems to connect to something inherent in existence that we aren't connecting with back home. I can't put my finger on it, but it's there -- this elemental, inexplicable acknowledgement of life's glories and heartaches.

ONLY CURRENTS

What's that old saying? Five people killed in your neighbourhood is a tragedy; twenty-two thousand killed halfway around the world is a statistic.

Well, I guess I already am halfway around the world, and there were a heck of a lot of people killed right next door in Thailand, making it seem very unstatistic-like.

Events like this are too much to process -- the biggest earthquake in forty years, tectonic plates shifting, tens of thousands dead. Thousands more homeless. A grandson of the king of Thailand swept away on a jetski, while an Australian tourist loses his grip on his newborn as the waves fall down.

The brain can't handle that much tragedy at once. What are you supposed to do, and how are you supposed to take it all in? You can change the channel or put down the paper or surf to another website. There are worldwide tragedies all the time, of course, and this is but another one. Turn the page and disengage, as Rush once said. (The Canadian rock group, not the American commentator.)

(Oh, but how reckless and cruel we feel for doing that, don't we? I'm glad it's not me runs through your head and your heart, and you hate yourself for thinking it and feeling it, but it's there, and where does it come from, that selfish, instinctive gratefulness? That greedy thirst for life that allows us to feel for others misery but relish our own sanctuary? Does it makes us more or less human, this proper but craven desire?)

The strange thing about this is one is the indifferent naturalness of it. Terrorists you can almost understand. (Not condone; understand.) Meaning, angry, screwed-up people lashing out -- that's something that has an identifiable human texture and resolve. There are human motivations and psychological undercurrents you can analyze and dissect, poke and prope.

Here, there were only currents, period, unstoppable waves of force that went on and on and on for six kilometres at a stretch. A quake so powerful that it disturbed the earth's rotation.

Who do you get angry at? The weatherman for not predicting this development? The scientists for underestimating tsunamis? The earth for not being more, I don't know, sturdy?

I don't know. If you believe in God, these are the times when you wonder if He has a sick sense of humor or what. If you don't believe in him, you have little solace and even less comfort.

Random, consuming waves and quakes. Children tossed aside and flung away. The same old story of death and destruction, intensified to a horrifying degree.

Soon -- in a week, maybe two -- the story will die down, perhaps quietly, fading away from page one to seven to eight. Maybe another husband will kill his pretty and pregnant wife, and the media will find something else more sexy and racy and lurid to latch onto. In the real world, the sun will still set, the tide recede, the stars emerge. Everything will revert to what's considered normal.

This almost unspeakable human, personal tragedy will regress to a flat, emotionless statistic, or an indifferent afterthought, a 'remember-that-earthquake-last-year?' anecdote to be told sometime next Christmas, after the turkey, before the cake.

We can't be too hard on ourselves, I guess. It's natural (whether we like it or not) to grieve from a distance, and even more natural to move on, live life, look ahead. After all, there's only so much we are willing to hold on to. Only so much each of us can allow in.

What luxuries we have! To be able to move on, look ahead, turn away...

A CERTAIN POINT

Yesterday morning I was walking along the beach in Sihanoukville, marvelling at how still the water was compared to the day before -- no tide, no waves, no motion.

Not far away, disaster struck Thailand and southeast Asia, monstrous waves overwhelming people and cars and bungalows in one giant swoop. (I was about to say 'one fell swoop', but then I realized that I'm not sure I've ever understood what 'fell' means in that context.) Hundreds dead, swept away, submerged.

Unreal. And Cambodia, so close! Nothing. Hot sun and motionless water and light-brown sand, all untouched.

I had been thinking about going to Thailand over Christmas -- maybe to Bangkok, possibly to Phuket.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. Is it up to us, these seemingly innocuous choices that spare us or condemn us? Is the Big Guy upstairs actually in charge of the weather patterns and the size of ocean waves and the thoughts that leads us from person to person, place to place? Or is it randomness itself that guides our lives, a benevolent energy, an actual tangible force that distributes death and smiles without fear or favor?

Not sure.

I stood on the beach yesterday, looking at the calm, blue water that stretched out, out, out, and I realized that this was one of those rare moments in life when everything at a certain point in time and space is at peace. When everything is stable. Nothing but water and sun and sand. Nothing but drift. Nothing but feet-in-sand and sky-up-above and blue, above all, blue, clear and distinct.

But it was just a moment.

SUGGESTED VIEWING (BUT NOT ON, LIKE, NEW YEAR'S EVE)

If you want to watch a truly powerful, unsettling, deeply moving film (albeit one that is not exactly holiday viewing) track down a copy of 'Osama', the first film made in Afghanistan after the Taliban was ousted.

I won't say anything specific about it (except to note that the title does not refer to Bin Laden.)

It's a short movie, less than ninety minutes, but I guarantee that the impact of it will linger.

Probably one of the most moving and emotional movies I've seen in the last five years.

Don't read the ad copy. Don't scan the summary on the back of the DVD box.

Just watch it.

THE LATEST, ODDEST REMINDER OF HOME

Running along the Phnom Penh riverfront at 5:40 a.m., past the group of middle-aged, early-morning exercisers exercising en masse to a new techno-tune version of Ottawa's own Paul Anka singing 'Diana'...

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I hope all friends and family and random strangers who have somehow happened to come across this blog entry have a safe and merry Christmas and a rockin' 2005!

THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science."

--Albert Einstein


I was wandering around the Russian Market today, a rag-tag collection of food stalls and gift stalls and what-the-hell-are-those stalls that seems to symbolize Phnom Penh in all its messy glory. (But I'm not sure what the Russian angle is. I'll have to get back to you on that one, 'kay?)

This is the place where you can not only buy stuff -- food stuff and cool stuff and useless stuff -- but you can also always come in contact with the most pitiful, wretched people on the face of the planet.

I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Like so much of Cambodia, it simply is, and you have to determine how you deal with it.

You ever see that old movie The Elephant Man, with John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins? This lady today in the market came up to me asking for money, half her face shrouded by some kind of makeshift shawl, and beneath the shawl I could make out these bulges and bumps and bony protrusions that sprang out from the side of her face. Her smile was kind and her eyes were pleading, and the rest of her face was, well, if not an abomination, something pretty damn close.

Again -- it is what it is. The market is one of the places where the unwanted come to ply their trade. They come to beg and grovel. They come for mercy, if mercy can be classified as a few thousand riel per day, if they're lucky. They come to be seen, and are rewarded for their
deformities.

It's pretty heavy stuff, as Marty McFly would say. It's also heavy stuff that you can very quickly get used to, which is even more heavy, if you catch my drift. Not easy to process, seeing people like that, and then after awhile it gets easier to process, which increases the heaviness quotient by a factor of ten the more you think about it.

Which brings me to Einstein's quote. (You were wondering when I was getting to that. Thank-you for your patience.)

You enter Cambodia and you enter that realm of the mysterious.

I'm not talking about the genre, here; I'm not talking about the kind of stuff James Ellroy or Robert Parker or Agatha Christie get off on writing.

I'm talking about the kind of mystery that most of us have probably forgot even existed within us, that searching, restless wonderment at an inexplicable world. The kind of feeling you had as a child, laying on the grass, staring up at the sky. Why is it blue? There's never been a satisfactory answer to that. In space, there's no up and down, right? How can that be? 'Up' and 'down' are what orient us, right? So if that's all gone, there's...what, exactly?

These are the kind of thoughts I had, and still have, and the essence, the root, the base of these thoughts are what I'm talking about. The source of them. That sense of mystery that kids live with and embrace and run shrieking and weeping and wailing from on a daily basis. The monster under the bed, feral and there. The wind shrieking outside of the window. The supply-teacher who has a black welt on the side of her face. Things you feel but can't locate.

When you're in elementary school the specter of junior high looms every close, and what will it be like? At my elementary school, Pine Grove, it was 'open-concept', see, and what that meant was that there were no classrooms per se, with separate doors and windows, but only big rooms that contained four different classes separated by chalk boards on wheels. I don't know what the point of it was, since whenever you had your class you could look ten feet across and see what was happening in the other class, and you'd hear the Grade Three math lesson whether you liked it or not, but it made me wonder, it did, made me wonder what it would be like to have an actual classroom classroom, self-contained, with a door and everything, like the kind I saw on Different Strokes and Happy Days. Junior high held the promise of those classrooms. How big would they be? Could you actually, like, lock the doors? Would there be a window on the doors?

Oh, the mystery...

You may think I'm making a joke of all this stuff, but I'm not. I think we forget how unexplained everything is to our younger selves. The rest of the world, especially the adult world, gets what's going on, are in the loop, got the memo, but kids are cruelly, casually kept in the dark, waiting for someone to switch the light on, because they're too damn short to reach it.

Think.

Think back.

Think back to when you were seven and eight and nine, and try to remember what you knew about cars and driving and paycheques and aftershave and how records were made and how cigarettes somehow managed to drop down from somewhere deep inside the strange and unseeable centre of the cigarette machines. (Remember those things?)

And what was the deal with records, I used to wonder. (Incidentally, one little nine-year old boy who I used to teach in Japan, after hearing that I used to have a small record player as a child, said: "I've never seen a record", which made me feel old.) Where did all the music come from? I used to think that every time you dropped the needle down onto the record, it triggered some kind of light in some studio somewhere, and it let the band know that it was time to play the song, because someone had requested it. So I used to try and trick them -- whoever 'them' was -- by quickly taking the needle off the record, then putting it back on, and jeez louise they managed to play the song at the right point each and every time.) And traffic lights? How did people know when to go, stop, pause? I didn't know that people were following the lights; I thought the lights were somehow controlling the flow. I used to think there was some dude below ground controlling everything in some James Bond-like control centre, watching the flow of traffic, determining when it was a good time to go and when it was a good time to stop.

It was all mystery, these minor minutiae of life, and slowly and sadly the mystery disappears, is explained, becomes mundane and routine. And then we are in our twenties and trying to figure out our own lives, so we leave behind questions that were once very, very important to us, like:

Why does the man always, always, always miss meeting the Polkaroo?

(If you're not Canadian, you ain't getting that one...)

Which brings me back (somehow, a little belatedly) to the lady in the market. Where does she come from? How does she live? How did her face get so tragically wrong? To think about it is to revert back to the essence of who we were for the first ten years of our lives. To ponder a simple, everyday Cambodian greeting like this is to force us to confront a little bit of the uncertainty that lies beneath the surface of even the most placid of contemporary commerce and communication.

You can say I'm exaggerating things, or thinking about things a little too much, making tenuous links, or even exploiting some poor woman's daily existence for the sake of a semi-interesting, mostly roundabout, randomly written blog, and you'd be right. Can't deny it. Guilty as charged, councilor.

That's what I do. That's how our thoughts and our minds and, hell, our lives work, I think -- they bop around from here to there, looking for connections, hoping for connections.

Einstein was right. I'm not sure what he means by 'fairness', exactly, but I guess there's no shame in admitting that Einstein confuses me.

But it's something along the lines of: Art makes sense of the senseless; science gives form to the formless. And at the intersection of both is an unending, depthless mystery that we chip away at from the day we are born -- learning to smile, to walk, to talk, to speak, to read, to write, to learn, to love, to teach -- only to discover, if we think too much and feel too much, that the mystery can never be solved.

When I was a kid I used to love to write my own Star Trek stories that had Kirk and Spock and Uhura and McCoy and Scotty and Chekhov and Sulu struggling not to fall into the dreaded 'bottomless pit'. (How can a pit be bottomless, I'd wonder?)

That pit is it for me -- the black and endless symbol of mystery itself, the nagging, unknowable question given a cruel and illogical shape.

Our questioning of the how and the why of that poor and pitiful lady who spends her life wandering around the Russian market, hoping her ugliness generates pity, is a pit without end, a dark and vibrant hole, but also an affirmation and rejection of all that life generates and discards. Our questioning is what makes us and keeps us human.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN THE KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA

If you were the nephew (or niece) of the prime minister of Cambodia, and you were returning from a late-night party with your best buds, hot-rodding it through the crowded streets of Phnom Penh, and you 'accidentally' plowed into a group of people minding their own business by the side of the road, and an even larger crowd started to gather (as it always does here) to check out the commotion, what would you do?

The answer is obvious, right?

Take out an AK-47 and start shooting.

That's just what the Prime Minister's nephew did last year. He was caught. He was tried. And he was put in jail. The ancient, glorious bells of justice and freedom rang throughout the land.

Kind of.

Sort of.

Well, not really.

You see, just last week the right and honorable Prime Minister Hun Sen gave a very lovely, moving, tear-inducing speech about freedom and justice and punishment, in which he stated that it was not fair or proper or right for the children of the rich and the powerful to get off scot-free; it was good, very good, that his nephew was in jail, because then he could not get into any more trouble, and the citizens of the glorious kingdom of Cambodia could sleep soundly at night.

All very well and good.

Only problem is, he's not in jail.

Some enterprising reporter decided to check out the validity of the prime minister's comments, and, lo and behold, the nephew is now in China, studying computers.

Good for him, reforming his life and all. What a guy. There was some sort of secret trial for him back in August, and a decision was reached, and off to the orient he goes.

I'm sure, of course, that Hun Sen knew noooooooothing about it...

Yet another example of blatant, every-day corruption in Cambodia. As striking and out-of-place here as the blue sky and the hot sun. Reading The Cambodia Daily or The Phnom Penh Post on a regular basis will make you laugh or weep, or probably both. Just yesterday a high-ranking official announced that massive quantities of oil had been discovered off the coast of Cambodia, which could easily be utilized to rejuvenate the economy and the engine of his Mercedes, and all was well with the world. Until experts in the paper today said, well, yes, there was oil discovered, sure, but it's not really good for much of anything, anyways, so let's just settle down a bit, shall we?

And so it goes.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: I never realized how fundamentally crooked most of the world is.

Case in point:

Another story in today's paper details the corruption charges levelled against the former Prime Minister of Panama, who diverted twenty-five million dollars worth of discretionary funds traditionally spent on emergency disasters and medical care for the poor, all for a perfectly logical, reasonable reason: since she didn't want to look like a pauper, you see, her being the leader of a country and all, she decided to spend those millions on clothes and jewelry for herself and plastic surgery for her assistants. (And Canadians get upset about their politicians secretly buying a few extra flags. Which is not to minimize the recently unearthed scandal back home, but believe me, Paul Martin and Jean Chretien have got nothing on these folks. But Martin's young, he's still got time to learn...)

You can't think about this stuff for too long. Because, if you do, you will then put down the paper, and walk outside, and be forcefully, unavoidably confronted with human squalor in all its messy disorder, and the issues are connected, these two are, the waste of money and the waste that is poverty, and you can't figure out how, or why, and that's that, as they say.

The thing is, growing up in a nice, safe country like Canada, you don't really have to think about politics, or politicians. The mechanism is in place, and there are people doing their work, and all is well and good. Somebody's running the show; let's hope they do a good job, we wish them well, and what time is the game on, again? Eight o'clock, was it?

I remember being in Grade 3, answering Mrs.Knevel's question about how the prime minister of Canada was. (And I just realized that I'm probably older now than Mrs.Knevel was then, and that's impossible to believe, inconceivable, as the little dude says in The Princess Bride, so I'll move right along.)

"Elliot Trudeau," I said. Confident. At one with the universe and my nation's leader.

Ah, no. Close, but no cigar ( given that I was seven, and not allowed to smoke.) Pierre Eliot Trudeau, to be precise, but I had answered wrongly in front of a group of my distinguished peers, who probably decided that and, well, that was it for politics and me until Oliver Stone's J.F.K.

It's only now, confronted on a daily basis with the sheer, unending, monstrous inequality that exists in developing countries that I can appreciate and understand (a little) how good we have it back home compared to places like here.

I can also see the danger of complacency. The threat of inertia that exists when we treat politicians as somehow higher than ourselves and beyond our (limited?) reach.

If the nephew of Paul Martin (or George Bush) pulled out a gun and fired at innocent people, would he do time? Most likely, yes. Would he be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, free from any kind of judicial favor whatsoever?

I hesitate before answering that one, which indicates, perhaps, that we still have a little bit to work on back home, too.

Maybe a lot to work on.


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

As an interesting (?) annex, did you know what AK-47 actually stands for? I didn't think that it stood for anything (not that I had given it a lot of thought, true), but it means something like 'All Kalishnikov'. How do I know? Because there was an article in the paper about the gun, and the guy who invented it, whose name is, get ready for it, here it comes, Kalishnikov. He's still alive, this guy. Some Russian dude. Very proud of his work. Created the weapon in WWII. Famous in his village. Still looks like he could kick the living hell out of me with his big toe, and I bet he pours vodka in his corn flakes and orange juice every morning. Has a face not even a mother could love.

Can you imagine if that was your legacy, being the guy who created the AK-47? To have your name live long in the annals of eternity, not through your offspring, but through an endless round of bullets?

That'd be awesome, as Christ Farley (may he R.I.P.) used to say.

(I'm joking. I swear. Now, if it'd been an Uzi, sure, now that's a legacy to be proud of. But an AK-47? Not so much.)

A PHNOM PENH HAIKU (IN ENGLISH, WHICH MEANS IT'S NOT, YOU KNOW, COMPLETELY AUTHENTIC, BUT HEY -- MY JAPANESE AIN'T SO GOOD)

That still December sun, indifferent, with

aimless jabs fires quivering arrows jagged and piercing into

my eyes, as the moto moves on

SMILE!

What is it with Cambodians and their endless smiles?

The thing is, if you smile at a Cambodian, be they man, woman or child, they will, almost without exception, smile back. Broadly. Without any hesitation or fear. Even if it's a motobike driver who's stopping to pick you up, but you don't want to get picked up, right, so you smile and wave them off. The moto drivers almost always smile back.

Think about it.

In Canada, in Toronto, if I wave a cab off as it approaches me, smiling all the while, is the cabbie going to smile back? I'm betting no. If I'm walking down the street, and I happen to see a stranger, and I simply smile, will he smile back? Probably not. He will, most likely, high-tail it to the other side of the street, glancing back over his shoulder every now and then to see if I'm following him.

Maybe it's because I'm a foreigner here. That could be it. Foreigners are strange, exotic specimens of existence that most Cambodians don't interact with on a daily, monthly, yearly basis.

But I think it's more than that.

There's a certain lack of, well, cynicism here. In Japan, too. That lack of cynicism allows other, more noble human emotions to peek their way through to the surface more readily, I think.

In the west, right, we're told that we can be anything we want to be. If we try hard, work hard, the world is our oyster, our treasure, our Domino's pizza with pepperoni on top.

In Asia, it ain't like that. People grow up knowing their place, for the most part. There isn't a caste system here like in India, no, but it's much, much, muuuuuch harder to elevate yourself to where you would like to be in life in Japan, Cambodia, China. In the west, I think people begin to resent life itself as they get older, because they realize that (for them, at least) the dream they were promised was bogus. They worked hard, they paid their bills, they went to work -- and for what? The American (Canadian?) Dream eldued them. It ran away. Enter cynicism, stage left.

Cynicism emerges when we realize that the world is an unfair place. Well, a lot of people in Asia know that from the get-go anyways. Life sucks, we all die, we're screwed from birth, but hey -- what are ya gonna do? (Sho ga nai, as the Japanese say. It can't be helped. That's life.) So with that lack of cynicism comes a kind of gentleness that persists and endures.

Yes, yes, but what about the Japanese military in WWII, and what about the Khmer Rouge in the seventies -- you call that innocence, Spencer?

And my answer is: Hey, I'm from St.Catharines, Ontario -- whaddaya want? I don't got all the answers. I'm just bumbling my way through Asia, observing and, as Indiana Jones once said, making it up as I go along.

But it's here, that sense of spirit and open-hearted, unselfconscious generosity that we're somehow lacking in the west. It pops up when you least expect it.

If you doubt me, just come to Cambodia. Walk down the street. Wait for a crowded van full of smooshed together kids to come roaring by. Wave your hand and catch their eyes and let your smile beam forth.

And watch what happens.

CLIMBING (SORT OF) ANGKOR

If you want to see Angkor Wat, really see it, you have to climp up. And up. On thin, slightly unsteady rocks that jut out from the surface of the temple. It is not extremely high, no, but it is high enough to fall off of, and that fall would not be a pleasant one. There would be screams. There would be the sound of bones cracking. There could even be death, if you're not too careful. And it's not like I'm trying to scare you off, or anything morbid like that. I'm just saying: If you come to Cambodia, and you visit the 'pyramids of Egypt' (which is, to be honest, the only real reason that most people do come to Cambodia), and you go to Angkor Wat itself (as opposed to the myriad other temples that are there), in certain parts of the place, you can ascend. There is a sheer rock wall filled with little stone steps that give you just enough leeway to stand on. It's quite steep, and I'm quite certain that there must have been at least a dozen or so people over the years that have kicked the bucket trying to scale its (admittedly-meager-when-compared-to-like-a-mountain) heights, and while I didn't climb it last year, this year I did, and survived, and somehow made my way back down. And, contrary to popular belief, going down is not always easier than going up.

You can lose your footing either way.

STANDING VIGIL FOR...HOW MUCH LONGER?

Every morning outside the ASIA-EUROPE bakery on Sihanouk street in Phnom Penh there are two or three almost-teenage girls who stand vigil, freshly printed copies of The Cambodia Daily gripped in their hands. Foreigners are what they are waiting for. Foreigners with money. Foreigners who may buy what they're selling. Foreigners who might, if the girls are lucky, buy them a croissant or a cookie or the always popular Coca-Cola.

These young girls don't actually go inside the cafe; they wait just at the edge, as if an invisible force shield prevented their access. There's no door to the place. It's all open air, tables and chairs facing out with a view of the hot and busy street, so you can read your paper and drink your orange juice and nibble at your almond chocolate pastry-type-thingee and, if you're so inclined, tilt your head just a little bit up and to the right to catch a glimpse of cars and motos speeding by, and of teenage Cambodians watching you eat, bite by bite.

They don't go to school, these girls, probably because their families need them to go out and make some money, damnit, and, anyway, they wouldn't be able to provide the fine educational services that the Kingdom of Cambodia so graciously provides to its people; many students have to bribe the teachers just to attend class, and you can't bribe if you got nothing to give.

So let's look at their options. They are eleven, twelve, thirteen. They come from dirt-poor families. They have no educational future. Newspapers are theirs to sell because they are young and cute and liable to trigger the guilt-complexes of foreigners -- backpackers and residents, teachers and NGO workers. Soon they will no longer be cute in that 'Cambodian Little Rascals' kind of way that breeds sympathy and handouts.

And what's left for them is...

Probably the sex trade. Possibly not. They might get a gig selling gasoline from bottles on the side of the road. (Always a viable career option for the young, smart, upwardly mobile, poverty-stricken Cambodian female.) Or, if they can somehow swindle a mobile phone, they can set up their own little booth, a bona fide business, so phoneless people like me can stop by when I need to make a call for the pricely sum of eight cents a minute.

In any event, there will come a day, probably soon, when one or two of those girls won't be in front of the bakery. No excited, almost violent cries of : "Sah! Sah! Daily? Sah!" The morning air will be crisp and cool, and the good, sweet smells of freshly baked goods will welcome me inside, and I'll wonder where those girls are.

I'll try not to wonder too much.

After all, this is Cambodia.

FIVE YEARS

"Only two things will be different in your life five years from now -- the people you hang out with and the books you read."

-- unknown

Is that true?

I dunno. Let's see. Five years ago I was hanging out with a bunch of Japanese and reading, primarily, books about Japan -- history, philosophy, fiction.

Now my peers are Cambodians and people from everywhere but Japan (or Canada), and I'm reading a lot of history and a little bit of politics.

Maybe it's true.

In five years, things change. What's that weird fact -- that our body replaces itself every five years or so, regenerating new cells like Pampers generates diapers? (A bad comparison, but what the hell.) We are, literally, a new person. Why should our interests be the same?

(I think you can substitute 'the books you read' with the 'movies you watch' or the 'music you listen to' or the 'people you slaughter'. I mean, the 'people you like', not slaughter. That's, um, what I meant...)

Life shifts, moves, evolves.

So, how about it?

Is it true for you?

THE ONE AND ONLY (INSERT YOUR NAME HERE)

John Irving once said that you should never trust a novelist who writes a memoir, because they all fudge the facts a little bit, making this or that incident just a little more exciting, more interesting or even funnier than what actually took place in the so-called 'real' world. (This was before Irving wrote his own memoir, the wise and entertaining THE IMAGINARY GIRLFRIEND.) From a novelist's perspective, the opportunity to look back on his or her own life can be an opportunity too tempting to resist, a chance to give things a shape and a texture that it lacked the first time around.

We all are busy composing our own memoirs, whether we write them down or not, aren'twe? We remember things the way that we want to remember them; we pick and choose which details to emphasize in the photo-album of our brain, and pull out the pictures for another look whenever we are feeling down and out. The reality of events fades, but the impressions linger, and those impressions are what we try to embellish and brighten, if possible.

I'm reading a biography of Khruschev now, and the writer of the book, William Taubman, quotes generously from the Soviet leader's own memoirs. An interesting pattern develops: Taubman quotes Khruschchev's own written recollections of a certain event or incident, and then he instantly invalidates little Nikita's quote by saying, in essence: "But that's not what really happened..." So the version and validation of his existence that Khrushchev set down for posterity is being rewritten even after his death, by someone he never met. His own version of his own life is deemed to be suspicious, self-serving, inaccurate. History will not settle for one man's version of his own existence.

Most of us will not dictate into a tape recorder the events of our lives, or have our own, personal biographers watching and judging our every action from some future vantage point; we won't have to worry about somebody contradicting our take on events.

It's intriguing to think about, though. How would others write the story of your life? Not after you're dead -- I mean right now. How would your mother and father and boss and high school history teacher transform the daily details of your existence into words on paper? If you picked the same event -- let's say your first day at work in a new job -- would the narrative be the same? The emotions, the anxities, the small, unnoticed triumphs?

I'm guessing no. I'm betting that you would get as many different stories as there were partici-
pants.

And given that we're mired in the festive season (well, Cambodia isn't, but still), it's safe to say that, were Jesus's disciples asked to give a precis of the dude, a brief character sketch of who he was and what he accomplished, the results would have been uneven. The contradictions would have stood out. ("No, no, no, it wasn't wine that he turned water into -- it was apple juice, guy. No, man, he didn't walk across the water -- he boogie-boarded across it. Dude, I swear. I was there, alright?")

The point is, it's our world and our universe. We're dictating what we do and how we do it. But there's a million other people bumping and bopping off of us at any given point in time, and they're writing their own biography of each of us; they're compiling, subconsciously, their private databank containing information on the one and only (insert your name here).

Paul Theroux said that, like most people, his public self rarely matched his private self. (The Japanese recognize this more than others -- tatamae and honne, they call it.) We all have a face we show to the world and a face we look at each and every week while we brush our teeth. (That's a joke -- I know we're supposed to brush our teeth each and every day, not each and every week. It was a typo, I swear. I brush my teeth, like, all the time. Honest...)

We judge ourselves by the face in the mirror while everyone else renders a verdict based on the face they see in the classroom, the cubicle, the hallway, the street. We silently, wordlessly write our memoirs in our heads, not realizing that the people we're judging are doing the same. We're all the heroes of our own lives (if we're lucky), and that simple, grinning fool you see at Starbucks every day may have a life story that, were she to tell it, would take you out of your own biography and make you shake your head with awe, fear or even reverence.

You just have to ask to hear it.

CAMBODIAN WEDDING TRIVIA

One interesting (if mystifying) aspect of Cambodian wedding receptions:

While everyone else sits inside and dines on various courses and listens to the pleasant music provided by the live band, the bride and groom and their respective families wait outside the hall the whole time, greeting everyone who arrives, and they only join the reception near the end, after most people have finished eating and already left.

Which makes me, as a guest, feel very guilty about eating and enjoying myself while the guests of honor wait outside in the parking lot.

THE GREAT 'ALEXANDER'

Oliver Stone, whose new film ALEXANDER has been universally derided by American critics, was on a promotional tour in Europe this week, where he stated that one of the reasons for the lack of success back home was that Americans did not know their history as well as the Europeans did.

It sounded like a pretty feeble defense -- until I watched ALEXANDER, and loved it, and realized that Stone is right.

ALEXANDER is pure Oliver Stone -- melodramatic and forceful and over-the-top and the opposite of subtle. If you hate Oliver Stone, you'll probably hate this film.

I'm no Alexander the Great expert. I just finished reading one book on the guy (by Robin Fox, who was Stone's advisor), but it gave me a sense of the man and the context to understand the world in which he lived.

Almost all of other people's criticisms of the movie are attributes to me -- the narration by Anthony Hopkins, the episodic nature of the script, the emotional anguish of Alexander.

Particularly that last point. A lot of critics have stated that Colin Farrell does nothing but weep and moan throughout the movie.

All very true. But let's look. Let's look at what made Alexander particularly revolutionary. He agonized over his troops deaths'. He praised them before battle. He respected his defeated adversaries. He actually cried over his men. This is all historically accurate. This is what helped build the Alexander legacy. And this is what Stone gets chided for.

What Stone does, brilliantly, I think, is illuminate a period of history that will be little understood by those who watch the film if they don't have some basic knowledge of what events of that time were like. Is it Stone's responsibility to provide that context?

Well, yes and no. He does offer some historical information to set the scene, but how much can you give in a movie like this? I saw J.F.K. when I was sixteen, and I'd say sixty percent of the sixties' social context depicted in the flick went right over my head like a missle. Didn't affect my enjoyment of the film.

The difference here, I think, is that this is a story set long, long ago, before Christ. It deals with social customs and political ideals that are substantially different than what we now know. It's a time and an era that he has brought to life splendidly well, but I don't think a lot of people will have the patience or interest to sit through it, unfortunately -- it will seem baroque, unwieldy, sometimes silly.

All very well and good, but how is it as a movie?

This is my take on it. The film is called Alexander -- not 'Alexander the Great'. I think that's key. The Alexander from myth and history remains just that -- mythic. Somewhat ethereal. Not quite real. Stone has gone back and tried to imagine, conceptualize, depict, what it would be like for Alexander, himself, to come of age with his burden and his destiny. Stone depicts the boy and the man inside of the myth -- the tears and the rage and the confusion and the bloodlust. What would it be like to be considered the son of Zeus and the son of the most powerful man in the world? What would that do to you? Stone goes inside of the myth to try to bring forth Alexander.

If people don't like the film, fine. That's their perogative. But to see the joy that most critics' feel in dismissing a work that, for me, overflows with adolescent guts and passion and energy and grace is more than sad; it's debilitating. It smacks of cynicism and snarkiness and everything vile that growing old represents. Much of Alexander's life, and this film, focuses on the inevitability of glory's death, the long, inescapable fall that follows all those who seek to soar higher than the rest.

Perhaps, to some, this film is an example of that -- Stone's hubris expanded one last and final (?) time.

Not for me. For me, this film is an example of epic thinking. I think it has bravado and heart. It is long and slow, melodramatic and bloody. It dares to depict simple, primal thoughts. It beats with the heart of young dreamers. In its grandiosity, it practically invites the scorn it has received.

Let people scorn. The irony, I think, is that the young, who know very little about the present, let alone the past, will this film, and be intrigued, mystified, perplexed. They will want to know more about this strange man named Alexander. They will search the net, go to the library, explore. Somewhere in the world, a twelve or thirteen or fifteen year old boy or girl, just beginning to think of concepts like destiny and adventure, power and ambition, will see this film, and be enthralled, and marvel at one whose ambition knew no bounds, and whose desire, in all its multifaceted glory, had no territory or limits. They will, perhaps, wonder about those same qualities in themselves.

This film is for the young and the dreamers.

A JOLIE GOOD TIME...

Angelina Jolie appeared last night on this British discussion show called HARDTALK, which is, as the name implies, usually pretty hardhitting, politcally divisive stuff, meaning that the host grills the guests over the coals until they either cry 'uncle' or the program gives way to a commerical -- only this was a big-time-beautiful-famous-Hollywood-actress-kind-of- guest, so the questions were soft, sensitive, sympathetic. (I think the host was probably hoping to sleep with her, actually...)

They discussed her work with the UN, which mostly involves serving as a spokeswoman for various international causes related to issues involving landmines, refugees, etc. She has been to Sudan and Sierre Leone and basically every other horrible place on the earth, although she hasn't hit Welland, Ontario yet. (Maybe after the Fallujah thing settles down for good?)

She also talked quite a bit about Cambodia; she has an adopted Cambodian son, and has built a house up in Battambang province, although I'm not too sure how often she stays there. (I'm betting bi-annually, for a week or so at a time.) A few months back she was here in Cambodia, meeting with Prime Minister Hun Sen, flashing that Joker-smile of hers, talking carefully about how she would consider quite sincerely their offer of Cambodian citizenship. Last night on the British show she said she would accept it, so I guess she's decided to take the plunge and tie herself even further to the country.

There's two ways to look at celebrities like Jolie: 1) That she's a publicity desperate, emotionally
starved egotistical actress who is desperate for attention; or 2) That she's a genuinely good person who has led a life of extreme privilege, was gradually made aware of the fact that there's a wider, more severe world out there, and then, given what she has, and what is able to give, decided to do something about it.

I choose the latter explanation. Yes, she's probably spoiled, and arrogant, and condescending. (But aren't we all?) And it seems somewhat hypocritical to fly in and out of these places for a brief inspection tour of misery and carnage.

At the same time, as she herself said in interview, she found it hard to believe that people would think that she did all of this work with refugees, flew all over the world, witnessed all of this heartbreak, just so she could pretend that she enjoyed helping people. That's what it boils down to, I think; she's helping people. Not as much as the aid workers who give their lives, no, but she draws attention to causes, and arouses curiosity in young people, and perhaps sheds a little light, gets a little news time, for issues that would otherwise be neglected if a gorgeous film star wasn't discussing them through pouty, bee-stung lips.

And I can guarantee that the people she meets in refugee camps (and in Cambodia itself) do not hold any grudges whatsoever against her. They are poor, and they need help, and they see this foreign woman who would like to talk to them, listen to them, perhaps comfort them. They are told that she is important; they understand that she will listen.

And she is there.

That seems to be the clincher. She doesn't have to do this stuff. I don't imagine it's easy touring the havoc of Sudan, and I can testify that it's not easy to witness the maimed and the emotion-
ally torn in Cambodia. It takes something out of you. It also puts something back INto you as well, something foreign and invigorating.

The next time a celebrity appears on t.v., by all means, hold them up to scrutiny. Ask yourself why they are doing this, and what they're getting out of it, and what we're supposed to view them as -- martyrs, opportunists, wankers.

But remember that somewhere in the world there was a little boy or girl (definitely poor, most likely starving) who talked to that celebrity, and perhaps they smiled, possibly even laughed, and for a moment or two, someone was there. Someone listened. That Hollywood star left, yes, flew up, up and away, into the blue, that's true, but it was a moment, nevertheless; it was real and genuine and heartfelt. And I think that the poor (and maybe all of us) live from moment to moment, so one instant in time carries more weight than you may imagine. One moment can carry everything.

EVIL'S DAUGHTER

A feature article in The Cambodia Daily last weekend profiled the life of a typical teenage girl living in the northern provinces of Cambodia, a pretty young student looking forward to leaving the simple, somewhat secluded rural life behind as she moves to the big city of Phnom Penh to pursue her dream of studying accounting at a university; the only unusual part of this story, the only somewhat disturbing part, is the identity of her father -- Pol Pot.

Yes, that Pol Pot, the deceased lunatic leader of Democratic Kampuchea, that bizarre visionary who attempted to create an agrarian utopia, a worker's paradise, and instead launched four years of torture, deprivation and starvation that killed two million Cambodians. He ended up somehow surviving into the late nineties, eventually dying of natural causes in rural Cambodia.

The fact that his daughter is still alive, and contemplating studying at a university here in Phnom Penh is more than a little strange -- it's downright surreal, if only because, up until a few months ago, I was teaching here, and she could very well have ended up in one of my classes.

Think about it. It'd be like Hitler or Stalin's kid coming to class. Come on in, pull up the chair, have a seat. And what does your father do?

I'm not sure how much this girl knows about what her father did. I'm not sure how many other people know her identity. From the article, she came across as being, well, typically Cambodian -- kind and simple and a little naive. There was even a recent picture of Pol Pot in his final years accompanying the article, looking very much like a benevolent, content old codger as he posed with a group of grinning children, teeth flashing white against their dark sin.

There have been a few letters to the paper the last few days, angry letters, in which this young girl is reminded that yes, yes, of course, she bears no responsibility for her father's actions. She is innocent, and deserves the right to get on with her life and become the best person she can. Yet the smiling, harmless elderly man in the photos was the butcher of Asia, and many, many Cambodians were robbed of their own photos of wide grins and white teeth, fathers, grandfathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, slaughtered and starved and their families deprived of mementoes, companionship, life. There were millions of people whose lives were ruined directly due to the actions of father -- and she has the obligation (if not the burden) of understanding who her father was, and what his affect on this land has been. I don't envy her, or her years ahead.

Cambodia is a country that seems to live in the present and draw comfort (and horror) from the past. The future is far-off land that may very well be reached, but getting there is not a priority. The majesty of the Angkor Wat temples is offset by the destruction of Pol Pot's regime, a brutal reign that has put the country back fifty, if not a hundred years. The whole nation is an open sore and a gaping wound; the psychological wounds are not only fresh, but piercing. You live for today and only today, seems to be the strategy, in politics and business and life.

And here is Pol Pot's daugther, somewhat oblivious, it seems, to her father's legacy and impact on her native land. She has a shy smile and dark hair and, most likely, a shoddy bicycle that she uses to ride the uneven, bumpy roads of her village. She was a child of a horror that had finished long before she was born, true, but she is coming of age, and learning about life, and there will come a point in the not-too-distant future when she will more fully understand where her bloodlines run.

She deserves a good life, a fulfilling life. She has the right to go to school, learn about computers, plan for her future. Should she come to Phnom Penh, I wish her many nights of shining stars and cool, comforting quiet as she idly walks along the banks of the Mekong, while the motos buzz past and the monks shuffle by.

But there may come a point in time, too, when five, ten, fifteen, a hundred people in the nation's capital will learn of her true identity. They may treat her with sympathy. They may treat her with malice.

She will not be ignored, of that I'm certain.

And, like it or not, whether it's fair or not, they will be seeking answers. Perhaps a nineteen, twenty, twenty-one year old girl cannot, could not and shouldn't have to provide solace for what they seek.

But they will ask, nevertheless.

And, while she does not have to answer for her father's horrors, she has to, at the very least, be aware of them, in all their inexplicable terror and complexity.

That's quite a task.

"I wish you good luck," is what Cambodians often say, and it's what I say to her.

In the years to come, as Cambodia lurches forward to whatever destiny provides for this land and its people, I think she'll be needing it.

DO WE KNOW IT'S THE KHMER NEW YEAR AT ALL? (AND DO WE CARE?)

I hear that there's a new version of that Christmas song Bob Geldof put together twenty years ago for famine relief in Africa, the one featuring every living pop star together in one room, singing for a lot of charity and a little publicity. (There was also a Canadian song that did the same thing for the same cause called 'Tears are not Enough', bringing together Geddy Lee and Kim Mitchell and Brian Adams together in the same room, and that image right there is well worth the price of admission and, besides, it's enough to make a grown man weep, it is. I'm not sure who our version of Bob Geldof was. Maybe Mr.Dressup?)

I always liked that Geldof song. Still do. It's catchy and seasonal, with a melody, point and purpose.

But there's one line that alwasy struck me as kind of odd. It's the one that goes: "Do they know it's Christmastime at all?"

Now, that line is about the starving people of Ethiopia, right? And I don't think Ethiopia is the most Christian of countries, although I'm sure the various missionary groups that are out and about are doing their virtuous best to convert the country (and the continent, and the world, and...)

So, the question is: Why would they know it's Christmastime? Why should they even care?

I'm nitpicking, to be sure, and what the hell, it's only a song, and a song written and performed for a worthy cause, so I'm not knocking it for that reason. And I know that the line seems to represent something more than the season itself, but the whole spirit of giving and family and love that season represents. Got all that. It just seems like that's a good example of a western sensibility mixing itself up in a decidedly non-western place.

I'm not sure Cambodia knows it's Christmastime. Well, that's not entirely true; there are a lot of stores here in Phnom Penh that cater to foreigners, so there are actually artifical Christmas trees assembled here and there, with actual Santa Claus hats on sale, should the urge arise to wear one of these caps in the hundred degree heat. And there are, of course, a fair share of Christians here, too, most of them recent converts (recent meaning the last ten years. There was even a newspaper article awhile back about how a fair number of ex-Khmer Rouge soldiers had suddenly found Christ in their later years. Funny how that is...)

Still, I'm almost forgetting it's Christmas. The air is hot and the sky is blue and there won't be snow around these parts for another, oh, never.

Do Cambodians know it's Christmastime?

Some of them, maybe a lot of them, do. They've met foreigners. They've watched t.v. They know the deal. Maybe not the specifics, no, but they get the gist.

Of course, this past year in Cambodia, like every other year, there's been the Festival of the Dead, and the Chinese New Year, and the Water Festival. (There was even, no joke, a National Hate Day until a few years back, where the public could freely express their hatred towards their former Vietnamese oppresors.)

Maybe the question for Africa and every other non-Christian nation shouldn't be 'Do they know it's Christmastime'?

Maybe the questions should be directed at Canada and England and Australia and New Zealand and America. We've exported our celebrations around the world; how many holidays and festivals have we imported? (Or are even aware of?)

Do we know it's the (Chinese New Year/Water Festival/insert any other foreign country's holiday here, including Iceland and Burkina Faso) at all?

Do we?

Do you?

THE SUPERMAN III DOCTRINE

Living in Cambodia and seeing the scarcity of jobs, and the nature of jobs that are available, brings home how utterly, well, silly some of the occupations back home come to seem upon reflection, none being sillier, as the Oscar ceremonies loom closer, than that of a film critic.

Don't get me wrong. Film criticism is a necessary art, helping to shape, confirm and evolve people's critical faculties, but man oh man, it's rarely practiced well, if at all, in the western press. (Come to think of it, isn't that a really awkward sounding phrase -- 'don't get me wrong'? After five years of teaching English, you begin to recognize, quite quickly, those phrases that really seem to make no grammatical sense at all. This is one of those phrases. Try saying it to a Japanese or Cambodian who speaks pretty good English, but is not quite up-to-date on the latest colloquialisms, and marvel at the blank, uncomprehending stare you'll receive. That's the fun part about teaching a foreign language -- you can notice, literally, the moment when comprehension shifts (or bursts) into incomprehension; you see the light suddenly expire from their eyes. I've noticed it too, when speaking to someone in Japanese; as you're listening, it's as if you're brain is counting off all the vocabulary and grammar that you know and comprehend, saying: "Got it...got it...got it...oooh, don't got it. Got it...don't got it..." But I'm getting a little off topic...)

This is the time of year when every film critic, large and small (and Roger Ebert has actually gotten very small, will wonders never cease) trots out their ten-best lists, which are really just an indicator of one person's particular taste.

One thing that particularly ticks me off, about these lists and about the Oscars themselves, is that there rarely, if ever, seems to be any kind of criteria involved in determining what is 'better' than something else.

Think about it. In almost any other kind of contest or competition, you have some kind of rationale or reasoning for why you make the decisons or judgements that you do. If an employer has to choose between two people for a job, he or she is going to do have to be able to articulate why this person was/was not hired at the expense of the other person.

But in choosing somebody for Best Actor or Best Actress, there's no criteria. There's no guide-lines. (And why are the men and the women separated anymore, anyways? I could understand fifty years ago, when the genders were more stratified. But c'mon, it's 2004; there's not a separate category for blacks and whites, fat and thin. Acting's acting, right? Yes, there are better parts available to men, but that doesn't seem enough of a valid excuse.) People pick whoever they want to pick, and we never know why, most of it probably being decided by gut instinct and emotion.

These emotions are what most critics fail to acknowledge, however, as I've talked about previously on this blog. But emotions, and life, real life, are always somehow subordinated when talking about art and its effects on us. The personal is annihilated when it should be put back centre stage.

Let's put it this way.

The reason why movies affect us is because they slam us full-force with an intellectual or emotional wallop. They force us to think, laugh, cry -- whatever. Our reactions are tied into our own situation in life, our reaction to the world around us, our hopes and fears and anxiety about the job interview we have later in the day.

There's a deeper level, though, that a lot of these 'lists' don't acknowledge. They choose a film for its craftsmanship, its message, its embodiment of what cinema can and can't do. But there's more, more, more...

Take Superman III.

Generally regarded as inferior to the first two flicks in the series, while only marginally better the universally derided fourth film. (Which I kind of like, actually, but that's for another blog, the one that'll be about wrongly neglected sequels. I also like Cannoball Run II and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, so sue me. And, believe it or not, the sequel to American Graffitti titled, unoriginally, More American Graffitti, is not half bad...)

I saw Superman III when I was seven years old. I saw it in the theatre. I saw it on a big, big screen. I saw it again at a drive-in, along with Twlight Zone: The Movie. I remember all of this because Superman III was the coolest, wickedest, most awesome experience a seven year old can have.

In fact, I liked it so much that I bought (or my parents bought, most likely) the novelization of the film, and read it while lounging by the pool at the Aladdin Inn in Daytona Beach, Florida, me with a Pac-Man visor perched on my head, Superman with his hands full, trying to outwit that massive computer he was up against.
(There's a picture of me reading the book, wearing the visor, chilling.)

So what does all this mean?

It means that at one point in time you were a seven-year old, too, and there were movies, books, comics, music and experiences that not only rocked your world but formed your world. They were the best and brightest things in it. And we all grow up (whether we like it or not), and we learn critical standards, and we judge our past by the present, to a large degree, whether it's films we're looking at or our relationships to the people and society around us.

And so if you watch Superman III again, and you are no longer a seven-year old kid who likes to wear a Pac-Man visor, then you will notice things that you didn't notice at that age -- plot holes, bad effects, questionable acting. The inner critic in you will make its voice heard.

I tend to ignore that inner critic.

Superman III still rocks.

The real critics, the ones who get paid, seem to lose sight of all our quirky likes and dislikes, our idiosyncratic reasons for like what we do. They want to leech the joy and irreverance out of our own opinion. They want to pretend that there are, in fact, universal standards of grading and determining excellece.

There isn't. There is you, and a movie screen (and a life, too, if you're lucky) and your own dynamic, weird and individual way of reacting and responding to what unfolds before you. Critics always move in herds; the mainstream critics like the same ten, fifteen movies, and the avant-garde critics tend to like the same ten, fifteen movies. Why is that? Because they're responding to what they think they should be responding to.

If one of them, for once, actually bucked the herd and said that he picked Police Academy IV: Citizens on Patrol as the best movie of the year, not because of its craftsmanship or its thematic relevance to the world today, no, but because it reminded him of when he was a kid and how he wanted to be a cop, and how, as a kid, he used to like goofy physical comedy, and this film blended those two elements just right, in a way that he would have loved (and still does), and, besides that, it was a nice day, a glorious spring afternoon, and the Coke was cold and the buttery popcorn was hot and the air-conditioning was turned up just right, and the speakers amplified that wonderful rousing Police Academy music to just the right decibel, all of this occuring only hours after his kid came home with a report card featuring a B+ in history, a B+ for the first time ever in ANY subject, and that was the capper, right there, the perfect ending to a lovely day and a suitable beginning for an evening of light, ludicrous entertainment that took him back, back to when he was a kid, dreaming of a future that promised a bright blue uniform and shining silver badge, if one of them said that, throwing out their cinematic and cultural pretentions and acknowledging the randomness of movies and life and all their time-bending, nostalgia-inducing processes, I'd eat my words and call it a day.

THE CASE OF THE MISSING LAMP

This is the single case involving Sherlock Holmes that I pledged never to reveal, not because of its sordidness (one becomes accustomed to that over the years), but rather due to accusations of vanity which I can already imagine being formulated -- that I, Watson, hid this account for so many years because it involved Holmes' arrest for murder, and my own successful investigation that resulted in his acquittal.

If you are reading this then I am most surely dead, as is Holmes, although the simple thought of Holmes somehow gone from this world strikes me as somewhat absurd. (Indeed, the very notion that he was once a stranger to me, and I to him, seems almost illogical.) I have carefully hidden these papers, and I know not where, or even if, they shall be discovered. I cannot even be certain that my present reader even remembers the very name 'Sherlock Holmes', given the precarious resting place of this document, although I would assume that not only his moniker but his brillance still lingers, if not resonates; the aura surrounding a person of the caliber of Holmes does not dim easily, I believe, even given the restless whims of tide and time.

These words are intended for my heirs, and their colleagues and associates, and, should the occasion present itself, for the people of London, who provided me with the sustenance and stamina to endure what we all endure on this mortal coil, until we can endure no more.

I write the following account (and this rather lengthy prelude) not to glorify my own ingenuity, for I have none. Having known Holmes for as long as I have, I cannot even pretend to compare my acuity and intelligence with his. To do so would not only be considered folly by all enlightened citizens, but crass, in my opinion an even greater and less forgivable sin.

Should I begin the narrative as concisely and intriguingly as I have all of my other accounts of Holmes' adventures, you may be misled into believing that this, too, is merely another unfathomable mystery that had the good fortune to be solved, only this time by myself. You may think you are about to be lulled into sleep by the comfort of a tale told well. I aim to deny you that comfort, because Holmes deserves nothing less than the truth, in all its ribald, untidy complexity. Never has a case depleted more from me physically, mentally and spirtually; and never has my respect and admiration for Holmes escalated more.

No, my intent is noble, and my conscience is at rest. There may come a point in time, through circumstances that have yet to be enacted, when the events of this particular winter's eve may come to light, despite the best efforts and assurances of the municipal authorities that they would be as fleeting as the mist that shrouds London each and every fortnight. I trust these gentlemen, I respect them, but nevertheless, one's own diligence and persistence should never be belittled or disparaged, even by oneself; this document will serve as a counterpoint
to any who dare besmirch the good name of my trusted confidant Holmes, a name and a legacy that, in trying to uphold, very nearly cost me my life.

Rumors have the tendency and the means to live long past the expiration point of their instigators; such being the case, I shall douse the flames of such an inferno before they have the chance to ignite.

So let me begin the tale of Holmes' unfortunate imprisonment, and my own efforts at redeeming the reputation of one whose unlikely life was nearly destroyed by the very city he did so much to protect...

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

This was an extract from Dr.Watson's account of Sherlock Holmes' strangest, most unusual case (solved by Watson himself). This document was discovered in a London location (that must remain confidential) by the webmaster of canuckinasia.blogspot.com. Keep checking back periodically for further installments of this unusual tale...

IT'S A RIGHT-HANDED WORLD...(FOR NOW)

So you're seven years old, at the blackboard, answering a math equation. Maybe it's 2+2 = 4. Maybe it's 8-3=5. Doesn't matter. The point is, you're writing, and there's another student beside you writing, and you notice something. The side of their hand, the one this kid is writing with. It's clean. And then you look at your hand, at the soft layer of white dust blanketing the side of your hand stretching from your pinky finger to your wrist. (This section of the hand probably has a medical name, but I don't know what it is. I was absent that day in medical school. Actually, come to think of it, I was absent from medical school itself, wasn't I...) As you scribble your equation, your hand gently glides across what you wrote, smudging both the board and your flesh. Why doesn't it happen to the other kid? What's going on, here?

What's going on is left-handedness, and the curse of being a lefty in a righty's world.

(My brother Ted knows all about this. I'm writing this on his behalf, because he's too introverted to attempt a declaration as detailed as this one.)

There's an article in the current issue of that world-affairs-magazine-for-like-smart-people called The Economist, essentially making the argument that left-handedness may be more prominent in violent societies, because it is advantageous, in a fist-fight situation, to be a lefty; nobody knows how to fight a lefty. (It worked for Rocky against Apollo Creed, but then in Rocky II he switched from being a southpaw fighter to a right-handed fighter to confuse Apollo Creed even further, which was a pretty cool strategy, I admit, but I felt then, and feel now, that it betrayed Rocky's essential left-handed nature, but in some ways that was a moot point because by that point in the picture I was already confused, okay, because earlier in the movie Rocky signs an autograph from his hospital bed with his right hand, which made me think, wait a minute, is this guy an authentic lefty, meaning, does he write left or only fight left, or maybe it was an oversight on Stallone's part, a lapse in judgement and realism on the day of shooting, an embarassing insult to lefties the world over and a mistake that the director should have caught, but the director of Rocky II was Stallone himself, so I guess he's got a lot to answer for, is all I'm saying.) The better a fighter you are, the more impressive you are to chicks, so it's in a species favor to be a strongman.

Or something like that. Couldn't quite get the gist of the article, but the point is: Lefties can fight.

We have to. We learn early on that the world is not for us.

First of all, water fountains at school. Where is the switch-nozzle-thingee? On the right.

Next comes left-handed scissors. I always felt like I was mentally disabled in school having to ask the teacher if they had any left-handed scissors, you know, the ones with the green handle. 'Cause they always had scissors available (one or two, anyways), but they were usually for the corrupt, oppressive, right-handed majority. We got 'special' ones with green handles. Ooooooooh. (Actually, I shouldn't complain, because I learned in Japan that they don't have left-handed scissors at all there, so Japanese lefties are screwed, plain and simple, and Japan, like many Asian countries, still, I think, forces small kids to write with their right hand.)

Even gear shifts in cars are designed for righties. (In those countries that drive on the right, anyways.)

Point is, lefties learn early, yo, that it's not our world -- we're just visiting it. So I always notice, in films and on television, who's a lefty. Who writes with their left hand. Who wields a gun, uzi or otherwise, with their left. Who bats left and throws left. (Full disclosure -- I'm ashamed to admit that I was taught to bat like a righty. And golf like a righty. But I don't play either sport now --baseball or golf -- and I always, always throw left. And I bowl left, too. Proudly.)

I had a book as a kid full of famous lefties. A partial list:

Jack the Ripper. George Bush (senior). Marilyn Monroe. James Cameron. Amadeus. Eminem. Thomas Jefferson. Colin Powell. Glenn Gould. Hans Christian Anderson. James Baldwin. Richard Simmons. Jim Henson. Peter Jennings. Bob Dylan. David Letterman and Jay Leno. Franz Kafka. Beethoven. Ringo Starr. Fidel Castro. Jimi Hendrix. H.G.Wells. Phil Collins. James A.Michener. Helen Keller. Paul Simon. Celine Dion. (Uh, okay -- disregard that last one. Maybe we shouldn't be so proud of her, despite her Canadian heritage. My apologies.) John F.Kennedy. Ross Perot. Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton. Spike Lee. Bruce Willis. John Irving. Julia Roberts (I think).

(Okay, maybe Jack the Ripper isn't the best role model for a lefty, but still -- you see what being a lefty can drive otherwise sane men to do?)

I mean, come one -- J.F.K. himself was a lefty. And is it a coincidence that three presidents in a row (Reagan, Bush, Clinton) were lefties? Not to mention the two dominant late-night television hosts (David Letterman and Jay Leno)? Lefties seek lofty heights. Lefties have battled adversity to triumph against all natural known (and unnatural) odds.

Despite the fame and respect lavished upon the above individuals, lefties are still seen as somewhat freakish. Left-handed hitters and pitchers and baseball are a pain in the ass. As are left-handed boxers. They're problems to be conquered, these people are, genetic abnormalities that are perceived, not as people, but as dilemmas.

Another thing: You ever try writing with a pen on a lined sheet of paper with your left hand? Once you write a sentence, that part of your hand between the pinky and the wrist will, inevitably, unavoidably, pass over what you have just written. And if the ink of your pen is the least bit malleable, or wussy-like, it will smudge. So after twenty minutes you will look down at the paper to gaze upon your intellectual ponderings, and you will see smitterings and smatterings and splotches and glotches of blue ink. If you're lucky, a few words are legible. You righties are able to look upon what you have just written in real-time as you glide your pen across the page, marvelling at your exquiste penmanship, at the elegant grace of your thoughts. Us lefties, on the other hand, look only outwards as we write, towards the future, leaving the words and their impact and their resonance behind, a gift for the reader, whoever he (or she) may be. (It's only afterwards that we go back and look, to reflect and consider, and we see that it's all an illegible mess, but hey -- we're forward thinkers, is all...)

Anyway, for all your righties out there, don't think that lefties don't have their act together. We're waiting. We're watching. We're aware when our accomplishments are diminished or disregarded, and we remember these oversights. (After all, Helen Keller was blind, deaf, mute and left-handed -- the last part always being omitted in her biography, and look what she accomplished. I would like to argue that being left-handed was her biggest, most grievious handicap, but in these politically sensitive times, I can't further that argument publicly. I just can't. I'd be put away, or shot, or killed, or worse.)

Just think about it -- that utterly innocuous person you see walking down the street may, in fact, unbeknownest to you, be left-handed. You may notice them nervously glancing at your wrists, both the right and the left, trying to determine exactly which one has a watch attached to it. If it's on your right wrist, you're okay. You're safe. You're one of us.

If it's on your left...

Just remember: We don't always give back those bright and shiny lime-green left-handed scissors. Sometimes we keep them. In our pockets. As we walk the streets.

You've been warned.

IF YOU NOTICE

I've got a bit of a bulging right eye now, the result of who-knows-what, but according to the local Australian doctor who I visited the other day, a teeny tiny ant may have found the taste and texture of my skin too tempting to resist. (What a character, this doctor is. Mid-fifties Aussie lady, tall as a basketball player, married to a Cambodian, crude as a sailor. And on top of that, she knows her stuff.) The result is not quite as bad as what Robert DeNiro endured in Raging Bull, but it definitely looks like somebody clocked me a good one.

The remedy? A few pills, a few drops in the socket a few times a day, and there you go. Cured. Although it's been three days, and, while the swelling has been reduced a little bit, it still doesn't seem a heck of a lot better, medicine or no. I read the instructions that came with the eyedrops (yes, eyedrops do have instructions, funnily enough), and it mentioned that Cambodia is a dusty country, uh-huh, knew that one, and it stressed that this dust contains all kinds of nasty things that you don't necessarily want getting your eye. Or your nose. Or your mouth.

I knew that, too -- after a year and a half in this dusty place, how could you not -- but I'd never really thought about it before. Hadn't considered it much. What that dust could do, if it got inside me. What havoc it could wreak on my fragile body. Let alone my eye. (And it's my right eye, too, which is the one with the stigmatism, said stigmatism being the reason why the right lens of my glasses is so much bigger than the left one.) I briefly thought about what would happen if I happened to lose sight in my right eye. Scary, but I do have another one, another eye, and hey, I wonder what it would be like to read with only one eye all the time? (And now I've tempted fate, God, the controller of the universe, whatever deity is floating out there, and I'd like to declare that I will not tempt this force any longer: I like my right eye, alright? It's served me well. Please let me keep it. Amen.)

Point is, you get used to the dust. You get used to the little lizards called geckos crawling around your walls, croaking their rhythmic croak every morning around six. The smell of rancid water down by the river. The fog of dust that bobs and weaves its way through the crowded streets, guided by the mercy of the wind. You don't really think about what it does to you. What it can do to you.

Oh, the objects and forces malice that await us! The STOP sign the moto driver ignores. The brakes on the car that just, won't, brake.

Luckily, we have happy endings most of the time. We go to work, come home, sleep. We fail to notice, if we're lucky.

So, while I was sleeping and unnoticing, a peckish ant decided to give me a little peck and see what I had to offer. (I'm hoping it was an ant. The idea of, like, a giant cockcroach crawling across my chest, up my neck, over my cheeks and onto my eye is something I don't care to consider. Even though I just did.) Maybe it lingered on my face, staring at the closed lid of my eye. (Can ants stare? I guess they can, right?) Maybe it had to choose, this ant did, between a piece of my forehead and a piece of my eyelid. Maybe it deliberated, pondered, considered. Maybe it had a moment of mercy, when it was going to turn around and head back down the bed, angling for my knee or a few of my toes. Then it thought: Naw, screw it. And it dove right in.

I didn't know it was there; I was in dreamland. The clouds of dust and the piles of garbage and the stench of sewage are there when I'm awake. Not everywhere, no, but common enough, potent enough, to make me sometimes pause.

If I notice.

GET A LIFE

Since I've been overseas, I've read a lot of biographies. Right now I'm reading one on former Russian leader Khruschev. In the last few years I've read books about Michael Jordan, Jackie Robinson, Albert Einstein, Francois Truffaut, Condoleeza Rice, Alexander the Great, Fidel Castro, Pierre Trudeu, Paul Martin, Muhammad Ali, John "A Beautiful Mind" Nash, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and probably somebody else that I've forgot about, which means that their life wasn't meaningful.

Doesn't it? A good biography will make you believe that somebody's life, hell, anybody's life, did, in fact, have meaning, a shape and a purpose that can only be made clear by analyzing it in exhausting detail.

At their best, biographies allow you a glimpse into the totality of a person's life. Perhaps noone's life is ever meant to be examined in such exhausting detail, and there is, of course, the danger that the biographer has a particular axe to grind -- or, even worse, idolizes their subject so much that even obvious faults are rationalized to the nth degree. Even so, I think biographies are a perfect way to glimpse a significant person in their particular historical context. In other words, you learn the era through the man (or woman) being profiled. You see the tides of history recede or advance based on one person's actions. Character defines events, and events then define character.

At their worst, biographies can be, well, boring. There's a part in Stephen King's book ON WRITING where he's focusing on the primary, paramount importance of the story when writing, um, stories. Some people think it's all about character, King says (and I'm paraphrasing), but if you want character, go and read a biography. You'll get all the character you need.

I think I know what he means. Many biographies, after the first few hundreds pages or so, turn into a variation of: "And then he did this. And then he did that. And then he did this. Oh, and then he did that, can you believe it?"

What's missing? A narrative. The best biographers try to shape some kind of story into their profiles' lives, if only because the reader, to some degree, expects it. We live our lives through narrative, I think, creating one's for ourselves and expecting it in the examples of others. There's a fundamental need for continuity and structure in our existence; good biographies will look for those nooks and crannies in their subjects lives that indicate WHERE and WHY things took place. They will look for a framework. If necessary, they will make one up.

All written words are attempts at meaning. Attempts at biography are efforts focused on one life in one particular period of time. There may not be a logical story; there may not be an identifiable narrative. The author (and the reader) may search in vein for any kind of structure at all. Some people's lives are so chaotic and messy and, well, human that narratives elude not only their chroniclers but themselves, too. But by examining these lives and crafting an arc (as arbitrary and nonexistant as it may be), biographers allow us to revel in the sways and shifts of another's person time on earth. We can gain advice and seek solace in the actions of others. We can compare who we are and where we came from with the giants that once walked this earth. We can identify and empathize with the best and worst in ourselves.

IMAGINE THIS

Imagine this:

You're a thirteen year old Cambodian girl who has been sold into the sex trade by your parents. You live in a brothel, sleeping with God knows how many men a day. You are fed when the kindly pimp in charge of the place feels like feeding you. You look out the window at night and picture the day when you will see the moon that shines down on your home village. Is this moon the same as the one back home? Sometimes you wonder.

Luckily, you are rescued. (I say 'luckily', even though many 'rescued' prostitutes return to the sex trade, for reasons that are multiple and sad -- being scorned by their family, feeling an emotional attachment to their pimps, a sense of shame that has no limits or end.) An NGO specializing in the trafficking of women and children swoops down and takes you and over forty others to someplace safe, warm, protected.

But this is Cambodia. You are rarely protected in Cambodia.

And so, as reported by The Cambodia Daily the last few days, what happens?

An armed group of over thirty men and women stormed into the women's shelter and abducted more than eighty sex workers who had been rescued only the day before. They were forced into 'several luxury sports vehicles'. The two guards in charge of the place were too afraid to get involved. Eight police officers from the government's elite fighting force mysteriously left their posts soon after arriving, shortly before all hell broke loose.

I read something like this and I wonder, not what what kind of country I'm in, but what type of planet I'm on.

Women and children being trafficked for sex. Rescued by aid workers. Kidnapped by their old pimps, in 'luxury sports vehicles'. Guards being paid off to be conveniently absent at the appointed time of abduction.

There are so many factors at work here, all of them brutal, all of them horrifically sad, many of them focusing on the concepts of 'rights'.

I've become more conscious of this after working for awhile at the NGO (non-governmental organization) where I work now.

Many countries in Asia are, how shall we say, unfamiliar with the concept of people having 'rights'. If you are a child, or a woman, you obey those in control -- meaning, parents and husbands. If you are poor, you obey the rich. If you are a citizen, you obey the government, or they will beat you, torture you, kill you.

Simple.

It's a simple concept and at the same time mysteriously difficult to wrap your head around -- the fact that people don't know that it's actually not okay to sell your child into the sex trade, even if you need money, even if there are few other options. This is what we are taught at a young age (if we are lucky). Don't hit your brother. Say sorry to your sister. You can't take his toy truck because he's not done playing with it. Because it's not right.

This is not to say that these concepts don't exist here; of course they do. Humans are humans, pain is pain, and right is right.

But when you add in poverty, coupled with people in power linked to government, armed with wealth (and AK-47's), you create a system that acknowledges the rights of only one group: those who have the means to kick your frigging ass from here to next Wednesday. And then bury you while you scream.

Rights are violated all the time back home. The people who commit the offensive acts should be prosecuted, jailed, punished. We are right to complain about our rights in a democracy that represents the world at it's finest and demands respect.

It's just...

The next time you're on the street, and someone's bumped into you without saying a word, arrogant prick, or you're at work, and someone's screwed you over, and said something about you behind your back, and not paid you back the twenty bucks you lent them, like, three months ago, hello, I know he didn't, like, forget, because I see him every day, the next time that happens, just pause, okay? Just breathe. Think about a warm room, and eighty terrified Cambodian country-hick women shaking and crying and scared, really scared, upset and relieved and hoping, hoping, that they can maybe, if they're lucky, make it back to their home village. And then imagine the door to the room opening, thirty masked men and women armed with machine guns bolting in, screaming at them, striking them, taking them back to a life of servitude and rape and one more customer, just one, do as I say, and close the door. You stink.

Just think about it.

That's all I'm saying.