TWO NEWSPAPERS, TWO HEADLINES, TWO DAYS APART

Here are two recent headlines from the two major Filipino newspapers, the type of headlines that would never, ever be seen in Canada:

"Limbo does not exist"

"Campaign death toll hits 22"

The first headline refers to a statement released by the Vatican that the higher-ups in the Catholic hierarchy have decided, after much internal deliberation, that there is no 'limbo', no place where the dead souls of children not yet baptized go to rest for all eternity. This was front page, above-the-fold, bold-black news here in the Philippines.

The second headline details the deaths of twenty-two officials running for public office during this hectic, maddening election season in the Philippines. That's right -- public officials, and the unfortunate bystanders caught in the way -- are routinely killed during election season. Shot. Stabbed. Bludgeoned. Blown up. Boom. Democracy at work. Pass the cheque.

Why would these headlines not be seen back home?

Religion and politics at work, essentially.

Canada is a religious country, yes. Well, not really. Perhaps. There are many Christians, many Muslims, many Jews, but we don't wear our faiths on our sleeves, and we certainly don't splash it on the front page of our daily newspapers. We keep it private, for the most part. Most Canadians couldn't tell you the particular faith of their elected leaders, and most Canadians couldn't particularly care, either.

Here, they do care, because almost everybody is a Christian, and most of those Christians are Catholic. (Not everybody, I guess. There is a substantial Muslim minority, mostly in the southern islands of the Philippines, and a small minority of that minority are the terrorists who are blowing things up left and right and trying to establish their own, separate country -- much like the Muslims in the southernmost part of Thailand. The Muslims here in Baguio are usually the merchants, staking out their corners on Session Road, selling the used clothes, jewelry, and assorted, bewildering knicknacks. Their children are also, usually, the beggar children.) In this Catholic country, if you are not religious, well, you're strange. Weird. A little odd. Everybody assumes you are, so they don't even ask. It's common for taxi drivers and teachers and the average folk to end a conversation saying 'god bless'. Almost every taxi, for that matter (and jeepney, too -- the half-bus, half jeep that serves as cheap public transport) is adorned with tiny crosses, miniature Jesuses, plastic replications of Mother Mary. E-mails end with 'God be with you'. Such an overt display of religiosity struck me, initially, as somewhat unsettling. Now I see it for what it is: the natural display of their innermost beliefs. Even now, as I type these words, the music here at the Internet cafe alternates between hard-core rap and Christian pop. There's no contradiction.

Which is why newspapers can get away with -- and, indeed, must-- proclaim major changes to the Christian doctrine up-front and big as life. When last year's film of Dan Brown's novel The DaVinci Code was released here, you would not, fucking, believe the controversy it caused. Its' rating as R-13 was front page news in all the papers. You would have thought Jesus himself was coming back to diss the flick. But so it goes. Religion is life here, and they treat it as seriously as life.

However, this is the Philippines, which means that it's poor, and massively overpopulated, a land where both divorce and abortion are illegal, and a country that was recently voted by foreign businessmen as the most corrupt in all of Asia, which means, ipso fact, that politics is a dirty, dirty business. I mean, shit, they have, on tape, the current president, Gloria Arroyo, fixing the last freakin' election, telling the chief election officer to make sure that she wins by at least a million votes. Due to the legality of the conversation's recording, however, not much can be done.

It starts from the top, and the sleaze slithers down. If I've learned anything from living first in Cambodia and now living here, it's that in poor countries politics is where the money is. Period. End of sentence. Full stop. Practically the only way to make any money is to become a politician, and once you are there, you want to stay there, forever and forever, the power and the glory, amen. President Arroyo was adamant about changing the presidency into a parliament system this year. Why? A president can serve only one five-year term; a prime minister can serve indefinitely. Big shock, her wanting a change.

So if you run for office here, you are upsetting the elite, the incumbents, and when you upset the incumbents, you could get killed. Not 'killed' as in you lose a shitload of votes; 'killed' as in shot in the head as you walk through your door. Out of all the countries in the world last year, which one was the most dangerous for foreign journalists, the place where more reporters were killed than anywhere else? Iraq? Afghanistan? Uh-uh. The Philippines.

Both of these -- the one about religion, the one about politics -- remind me of the vast gap that exists between where I'm from and where I am. This is a big, wide world, one where religion can hold sway and where public office remains a dirty, deadly business.

And at the root is poverty. Living without hot water. Generations of people living in shit and squalor. When all you have is shit and squalor, you look to the Lord. When all you have is shit and squalor, you will do anything, try anything, kill anything, to make your way up.

And stay there.

Two newspapers. Two headlines. Two days apart. The country in a nutshell.

All that's left to do is read between the lines.

Which is the work of a lifetime.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

So a troubled young man walks onto the campus of his university and kills thirty-two people. And an American Peace Corps volunteer named Julia Campbell is found dead in Ifugao province in the Philippines, not far from where I am, actually, and she was most likely raped, and killed, and left in the wilderness to die alone. And so we look at these events and we suck in our breath and look up to the sky, blue as it is, and try to understand why the world is the way that it is: brutal, unforgiving, merciless. And as we look at that sky we see the clouds, white and full, and the sun, bright and strong, and somehow the pieces don't fit; the ideas don't mesh; the emotions don't level out into something palatable and clear. If we are religious we thank the Lord above for granting us the mercy of His compassion, and if we are not we wonder what the fuck is going on. I mean, seriously. What, is going, on? (Something that the hundred-plus people killed in Iraq yesterday due to sectarian violence wonder daily.)

It all comes down to violence, and the sickness of violence, and the way that blood and brains and bruises make us wince and gasp. Something that makes us wretch and gag is not something intended to endure, let alone to advocate. It is not a sight to see, this violence. It is not something you put on a postcard and drop in the box, or boot up online, complete with vivid reds and deepest blues. We don't have blackened faces and torn-apart limbs as Polaroid mementos. All because pain hurts, physically and mentally, and we do not like to remember the things that make us hurt, and so we push them away, shut the door, chuck the key, fire up Idol. We don't celebrate that which wounds. We like to think that the goodness inside of us overwhelms the badness that has been so obviously manifested in recent times.

And yet by denying the violence we reduce it to an aberration, an anomaly, and if there's anything that history has taught us it is that violence has been, is, and will always be leaking out from our mouths and our fists. Until somebody sees our point.

I saw a play in Japan years ago about a student who comes into class and wipes out his comrades, and the message of his violence was clear: "You're not listening to me." That is what all violence is saying: You're not listening to me. We swear and we fight and kill and we maim because somebody is not hearing what we want to say, what lurks within us but refuses to come out.

We maim to communicate. The same way that we love and we console and caress and we stroke. You can't have one without the other. They come from within us, these touches and punches. We relish the one and abhor the other. And yet each reminds us of what we are capable of, and what we want others to understand about us. The nicest people I have met in the world have been Japanese and Cambodians, and yet these very same people, in the not-so-distant past, have committed perhaps the worst atrocities of the twentieth-century, on themselves and each other.

How do we explain it?

Somebody tell me. God, Buddha, Mohammed, motherfucking Dr.Phil -- tell me, please, why?

That's what it boils down to.

Why?

When the madness descends, we ask 'why', but we never ask 'why' when we are good to each other, kind to each other, helpful and considerate to friends and strangers alike. We take the angels of our better natures for granted. We do countless, endless mundane polite gestures of goodwill on an hourly, daily basis, and we give them, and we accept them, with nary a second thought. And yet violence has us questioning who we are and what we should be doing.

Maybe that's a good thing.

Maybe when violence becomes commonplace, ordinary and, yes, boring, that means we've reached a kind of tipping point. If we were to step back, step out, imagine ourselves as alien speices viewing the whole of humanity as a school project assigned for some intergalactic sociology workshop, perhaps a clearer picture would come into focus, a more sharper portrait of what us as humans actually are.

"Humans on the planet earth have raped, pillaged and murdered each other for countless millenia," such an alien scholar might write, "and yet each time an act of violence occurs in their otherwise civilized societies, humanity, on mass, reacts as if something unusual has happened. Numerous countries throughout this planet face war on a daily basis -- Iraq and Sudan being the most famous contemporary examples, where thousands are slaughtered on a yearly basis -- and yet when a few dozen are killed in one particular place these humans tend to question the very nature of their essential beings. Humans thus tend to be eternal optimists. Despite the historical and modern actualizations of violence that dominate their societies, they still have the capacity for shock and outrage at the actions of their fellow man. They still want to believe that they are more than what they are. They have yet to accept the history of violence and the inevitability of violence. They expect something different, and are surprised, horrified and traumatized when they receive more of the same."

Growing up means we accept the world as it is. There are bills to pay, jobs to go to, assholes to endure. Nobody gets out alive. But a part of us, despite our maturity, despite our knowledge of the past, despite the reality of our present, refuses to accept violence. Emotionally, spiritually, intellectually: we don't want it. We hate it. It forces the puke up inside of our throats, and we have to swallow the bile and feel it slide back down our throats and wait until it arises again, a week or a month or a year from now. We don't want to grow up, in other words.

I hope we never do.

TEN AFTER TEN, ALL THE TIME, OR HOW YOU, TOO, CAN WEAR THE TITANIC ON YOUR WRIST

As Socrates once said: "Sometimes the sublime subtleties of life need to be pointed out to us by twelve year old Korean students."

Maybe it was Descartes, not Socrates. Might have been Mao, actually.

In any event, it was my twelve year old Korean student who pointed out to me the other day that in almost every single watch ad you will see, the hands of the watch are invariably pointed to ten after ten.

I was trying to teach him something, but he turned the tables on me. There was an ad in Time magazine for a watch that cost, get ready, cue the music, $250, 000. What was so special about this watch? Why, it had pieces salvaged from the actual Titanic embedded into its structure.

That's right. You, too, can own a timepiece that has tiny metal fragments of the doomed cruiseship melted straight into its core, all for the reasonable price of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. American.

So I was trying to tell him that this was somewhat unreasonable, not to mention downright freaking odd.

Who would buy such a watch?

Is it good for picking up chicks?

You're sitting at the bar, sipping your gin and tonic, and up walks this blonde, and you say hi, and you point to your watch, and you say: "See this? Dropped a cool two hundred and fifty grand on it. See this metal? From the Titanic. Not bad, eh?"

At what point do national tragedies become fair game and prime fodder for our own captilistic, cannibalistic instincts? What's the statue of limitation on death? Because a lot of people died on the Titanic, and they're still dead, and it's somewhat creepy to be wielding the weapon of their destruction on your wrist.

What's next?

In ten, twenty years, are you going to meet some girl in a club, buy her a drink, sit her down at a table, at which point she'll open her mouth and say: "See that tongue ring? It's made from debris found at the World Trade Center?"

Sound impossible?

Not to me.

The Titanic tragedy was once the biggest, most tragic story of the century. And now you can put pieces of the boat in your watch for the price of a decent sports car.

But my student wasn't that interested.

"Ten-ten," he said. "My teacher in Korea told me that all watches in advertisements are set at ten-ten."

"Really?" I said.

I went home.

I checked.

Riffled through all the old Times and Newsweeks lying around.

And you know what?

The little bugger was right.

Next time you seen an ad for a watch, on a billboard, online, in a magazine, check out the hands. They will be at or near ten after ten.

It's like some little secret of the universe that has been unknown to me for years has finally been revealed.

Not only are there watches with pieces of the Titanic in them that sell for a quarter of a million bucks, but there are also ads for these little clocks that will always be set to ten after ten!

I feel like Jim Carrey in The Number 23, seeing strange patterns and shapes where none had existed before.

The moral of the story?

Always listen to twelve year olds. Korean or otherwise. They know what's cool in life. They know what's important. They've been to the places and listened for the sounds that we've long forgotten how to hear.

IN THE END, WE'RE ALL JUST CLERKS

The Good Shepherd is a great movie. Big in its themes, its ideas, its executions. Grand in its interweaving of the political and personal, the clerical and the tragic. Robert DeNiro's second film as a director -- after A Bronx Tale, years ago -- was dismissed by most critics and shunned by audiences when it opened in North America around Christmastime, but I'm telling you, The Good Shepherd is the real deal.

What do we owe ourselves? What do we owe our countries? Our families? How do we live with the decisions that we make? The film, written by Eric Roth, utilizes the complex prism of the C.I.A. to tell this story and ask those questions. We watch Matt Damon's character evolve through college and into a career C.I.A. man, step-by-step, in flashbacks and real-time, and through it all Damon maintains the same stoic, almost grim demeanour: rarely does a smile flash across this man's face. Rarely can we tell what he's thinking. Most of the time it seems that he doesn't know what he's thinking, either. That's the point. Lost in a labryinth of lies and deceptions, maintaining a moral code at all costs, he eventually comes to a point where loyalties intersect; where the right thing to do is impossible to ascertain; where good judgement merges with darker, fiercer instincts. One where we live with the decisions we are forced to make. Or choose to make, which can be even more tragic.

If The Godfather used the Mafia as a metaphor for the American experience, then The Good Shepherd utizilizes the C.I.A. for similar purposes. (In that regard, it's an interesting counterpoint to Norman Mailer's massive, majestic 1991 novel of the C.I.A., Harlot's Ghost.) Is it as good as The Godfather? No, but that's fine; almost no films are. But Francis Ford Coppola is one of The Good Shepherd's producers, and the film aims at similar ideals -- explorations of business and family, fidelity and trust in a world where neither notion applies, but both are expected.

The film is long, and slow, and it unfolds. It develops, then envelops. Everything is restrained, held-back, kept inside. Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, John Turturro, Billy Crudup, even Joe Pesci (!) pop up, but Matt Damon is the anchor. His performance is so low-key that it will probably put half the audience to sleep (as might the film, truth be told), but that's the point: these are men engaged in the most nefarious undertakings known to modern governments, and yet they must perform and act as if they nothing more than ordinary bureaucrats. These days, we want our actors to emote; Damon doesn't. He acts. Which might be even harder.

It has the density and complexity of a great novel, this film does, and near the end of the film, when things come together, when the pieces fall into place, it attains a sad and simple majesty that, yes, rivals The Godfather for emotional impact.

It's not for everyone, this film. It's pacing and its structure and its emotional complexity harken back to a different time, when people went to films for different reasons. Movies today, even the good ones, the Academy Award nominated stuff, relish and revel in pyrotechnics, computer-generated or otherwise. We want to see our actors explode with rage and anger; we want to see dramatic tensions unleashed in violence, verbal and physical. This is a film centred on quiet conversations in crowded bars. On the things left unsaid between fathers and sons. On mysterious looks across midnight streets. On the way a hat is placed just so, being noticed only by those who are trained to notice such things.

And it doesn't flaunt its depth, and its greatness. Its validity. That's the thing -- this flick is valid. My favorite line, a great line, the line of all lines, comes midway through the film, when DeNiro's character, one of the first C.I.A. recruiters at the dawn of the Cold War, hobbled by sickness, slumps into his car. He's explaining to Matt Damon where as an agent he'll go and what he'll have to do. Idealism doesn't come up. A film that previously allowed its characters to trumpet the necessity of God, and country, and stopping the spread of evil throughout the world, now dispenses with such obvious bullshit.

"In the end, we're all just clerks," DeNiro says. Offhand, almost.

And the car drives off.

That may sound like a throwaway line, but the timbre of it, the tone of it, the nonchalance, says it all.

In the end, we're all just clerks.

The tragedy of the film, the beauty of it, is that at the end you're left wondering: if that's the case, then was it all worth it?

ALMOST VIVID, DAILY

The news that the wife of John Edwards, Democratic contender for the presidential nomination, has had her breast cancer return hit me like a punch in the gut. Not because I particularly care about Edwards, or his quest for the presidency, but because cancer is one of those things that cut across all racial and national and class lines, and it demands to be heard. It cuts to the chase, cancer does. And Edwards's wife had supposedly been given the all-clear awhile back, and here comes the cancer, back for more. Stage Four: treatable, but not curable.

I think cancer should probably become a curse word. Put it in Bartlett's Quotations under Profanities, or Slang, or wherever the 'bad words' come to rest. It needs to be the word we say when we stub our toes, or hammer our thumbs, or forget to add the fabric softener. "Cancer!" we should say. Everything else sounds kind of silly in comparison. "Jesus Christ!" we say. I mean, shit, Jesus was, by the sounds of things, a pretty good guy. "Motherfucker!" others might blurt out. But c'mon -- who knows anybody that's fucked their mother? And why would that piss us off, necessarily? (Unless it was our own mother, I guess.)

But cancer.

Stephen King was going to name his novel Dreamcatcher 'Cancer', until his wife forbade it, saying that the book would then be practically begging for bad luck. Because what else is cancer but bad luck, ominous music playing in the background, the sound of a tree against your windowpanes on a dark and wintry night? It's a lottery played by fate, or body chemistry, or lifestyle, that chucks the dice and wishes you luck before it heads on out to another house, only to return, months or years later, still as potent and primal as ever.

I try not to think about cancer too much, which means only a few times a day. Self-pity is not an option, especially since I'm not the one with the disease. But self-pity seems to be what humans are built to execrete, then endure, so sometimes it can be a challenge. The thing is, this disease truly is everywhere. We're waiting for the CT-scan results for ovarian cancer in the oncologist's office in Manila last summer and on the TV is Larry King and he's showing a retrospective of interviews with Patsy Ramsey (former-suspect in her daughter Jon Benet's death) on the occasion of her death from ovarian cancer. ("Nice. Let's change the channel, shall we.") A month or so ago Angelina Jolie's mother dies of ovarian. ("Hmm. Wonder who's on Conan.") Turn on the news the other day and Maria Shriver is chatting about cancer with Sheryl Crow and everybody's skirting around the issue of how much time Edwards' wife has left. ("Right. Idol should be starting about now.")

And that's just from the famous folk. You sit in the doctor's office and watch the glum and frightened faces of young women, mothers, grandmothers, workers. Their kids play at their feet, oblivious. Outside the sound of the street maintains its usual hum. Life endures.

There's a sign in that office. 'My Life Has Gotten Better Since I Learned I Had Cancer' it says. You gotta be fucking kidding me, I thought, when I first read it. I've read it a bunch of times since then. Again and again. Read it until it started to make some kind of sense. I don't have cancer, so it's not truly intended for my eyes, but I know someone who does, so I've taken the liberty of studying its axioms.

It makes sense to me now, a little. Things become telescoped. Days are more intense. Fears are more acute. Tears are more real, and genuine, and accepted, if not earned. (After all, if tears are going to come, they might as well be for cancer.) Perspective becomes total. Difficult decisions do not seem so difficult. Excuses no longer seem as valid. Everything becomes intense. Almost vivid, daily.

The strange paradox is that cancer brings sickness and disease and decay and, most of all, death, to the forefront, but by doing so, it allows you to become more enveloped by life. You truly understand the yin and the yang of it all. (You don't necessarily accept it, or like it, but you can understand it. Slightly.) You marvel about the unfathomably minor things we worry about, focus on, obsess over. You appreciate the grace of mobility. You see the endgame brought up close, so soon. You understand that today is here, and now, and in your hands.

SO MANY TOMORROWS -- TEN YEARS ON

Arriving in the mail here in the Philippines -- alongside my brand-spanking new Ontario driver's license -- was a short story my mom found stuck in some box in the basement, a story I wrote around ten years ago and published, apparently, in a York University Fine Arts fanzine.

I say 'apparently' because I don't remember even writing this story, and I certainly don't recognize the rather strange illustrations that accompany the text. (I sure as hell didn't draw them, and whoever did was probably smoking crack. The bad crack, not the good crack.) It could have been for MyTake, the film department's magazine started up by my friend Eric and a few others, but why would they have stuck a short story in a cinema journal? There's no other pieces alongside my photocopied story, no masthead, no contributors list. As if it emerged in that box, whole and complete, waiting to be found.

Irregardless, here it is, my blast from the past.

I remember writing stuff back then and thinking: This will be interesting to read ten, twenty years from now -- a snapshot of who I was and what I was thinking. (Come to think of it, I still think like that.

It's not even really a narrative, actually; more of a character piece. About an old man who is going through his voluminous stack of diaries that he has faithfully recorded for the past fifty years. He finds an entry from his wedding night, at the age of twenty-two (older than I was when I wrote it). He is ecstatic. His life is all ahead of him. It can't get better than this, he thinks. And the old man, looking back at his younger self's words, agrees -- it didn't get better. That was the peak. After that, at some point in time, the old man's wife got sick, got cancer, died. And now he has all these empty days to look forward to. (The piece is called So Many Tomorrows, a title that literally makes me cringe -- but what the hell. If you can't be sophomoric when one is a sophomore, when can you, right?)

My younger self was right, too -- it is a snapshot of who I was and what I was thinking about.

Trying to turn my own rather mundane, ordinary Ontario upbringing into something simultaneously larger and smaller than itself. Remembering the details of who I was and where I came from and trying to elevate such observations into something universal. The story is set in Freemont, Ontario, a fictional town that later served as the centrepiece of a series of linked short-stories I wrote. (I even sent them out to a few publishers, receiving a few letters that said, essentially: "Um, no.") Based on St.Catharines, Fort Erie, and Manotick, all Ontario towns and cities, it was my own attempt to fuse various writers' styles -- namely, Ross Lockridge, Jr., Don Robertson, Alice Munro, and, especially, Sherwood Anderson -- with my own clumsy attempts at encapsulating all that I knew and thought and believed about small-town life. Various St.Catharines stores and street names pop up. I can see which authors' styles I was swiping from. I can sense what I was trying to do, even if I don't think I pulled it off.

Looking at it objectively, the piece is pretty terrible: overdone, maudlin, emotional. I like the writing itself -- the pacing, the rhythm -- but nothing happens, and what does happen dwells in its own moroseness.

But I have to say.

It feels like it was written by an old soul. What was a twenty-one year old kid doing writing about an old man who's looking back, dejected and defeated, at the best years of his life? What did I know about sickness, or disease, or death?

As I said, I have no recollection of writing it, so reading that his wife died of cancer, that he kissed her 'shaved head', kind of threw me for a loop.

I've had plenty of experience with cancer in the last year-and-a-half, something I'm sure I never, ever would have imagined back in 1996. (Where I did get the idea that people with cancer shaved their heads? Was I that naive? Didn't I know that the hair fell out from the chemo? Maybe not. Disease was a story-tool, not a reality.)

Eerie, a little bit. Reading that piece. An old man looks back on his life and his wife with cancer, realizing, now, that there's nothing left for him anymore. And here I am, having now actually experienced what that twenty-one year old kid was simply using as ingredients for what he thought would make an interesting, emotional story.

I can see now that I was trying to write about that which I did not know. Aging, grief, the remembrance of youth past. I had experienced none of that. I was trying to be a fiction writer. I was trying to imagine everything. I couldn't have imagined that even life sometimes outdoes and one-ups one's own imagination.

And here, in this story, the old man is wondering what he would tell his younger self. And here I am -- not old, no, but older -- wondering what I would say to my younger self, the one who wrote the story about the older man talking to the younger man.

Weird, weird, weird.

Boxes within boxes. Characters within characters. Myself, inhabiting each.

Writing is a window into another world, but, for the writer, reading one's own work is also a glimpse into one's self -- another self, a younger self. "Oh, that's what I was thinking about," we say. On one level we're looking at the technical craft of what we were trying to accomplish; on another level, a deeper level, the place where the writing begins, where the emotion orginates, we're recollecting all that was inside of us, and what we were trying to say, and why.

Strange.

Reading is all about and always about getting inside somebody else's head in the hope of understanding what's going on inside of your own. Reading one's own writing is akin to delving inside of your own head, refracted and removed by distance, time, maturity.

I actually haven't read the whole piece straight through. I've looked at bits and pieces, in and out of order. Read some passages here and there. It's only four, five pages long, but there's a lot of stuff lurking between those lines, and I'll save them for another tomorrow.

WHY PROFESSIONAL PING-PONG PLAYERS GET NO, I MEAN NO, RESPECT, AND WHAT WE, AS A PEOPLE, CAN DO ABOUT IT

I'm not saying that I'm a fanatical follower of ping pong, but if I happen to catch a match on TV I'll watch it for a moment or two, and because it's on TV in Asia a hell of a lot more often than it's on the air back home, I've noticed something important over the past few years: the players get no, I mean no respect.

Here's what I mean.

In the west, table tennis has mostly been relegated to the rec-room of middle-class suburbanites, Friday night fodder for the almost-tween-and-under set. (If you were a Canadian in your mid-twenties who was freakishly adept at ping-pong I'd be slightly worried.) In the east, however, for some reason, at some point in the dark and distant past (because of the famous Nixon ping-pong diplomacy of the seventies, perhaps?), table tennis has taken off as a genuine, unabashedly intense, fiercely competitive,well, sport.

But here's the thing.

The sad thing.

The almost almost pathetic thing.

So unbearable that it hurts to write about it.

These professional athletes, competing at the highest levels of their chosen craft, have to go and pick up their own ping-pong balls when they fly off the table.

Which they do after each and every point, because have you ever seen the way pros play ping-pong? Forrest Gump's got nothing on these guys, let me tell you. Balls are flying everywhere all the time, in all possible directions. The rallies in table tennis are unbelievably short compared to tennis, two or three back-and-forths between the players at the most, whereas a good volley in tennis can sometimes go on for twelve, fifteen whacks before the ball finally hits the net.

And what happens when that happens, the ball hitting the net?

Well, in country-club tennis, a young boy or girl races from the sidelines and grabs the ball and gets it out of the way, or throws it back to the players, or hands them a towel, a wet one. They might even fetch a double-latte from Starbucks for Serena for all I know, or a muffin for Mcenroe. A coffee for Conners, perhaps.

In ping-pong?

Uh-uh.

The ball flys off the table.

And the player himself has to chase it around the court, waiting for it to stop bobbing.

Think about it.

The, I don't know, indignity of it all.

Remember how often John Mcenroe (my favorite tennis player) used to flip out and go berserk? Imagine how often it would have happened had he had to chase the freaking ball around the court after every, single, point.

Or Roger Federer. Look at his graceful rhythm, his improbable, unstoppable dominance of the game. Would he be so cool, so calm, so collected, so Swiss, if he had to worry about wasting valuable energy scrambling after the freakin' ball three hundred times a match.

You may laugh.

You may scorn.

But somebody has to stand up for the rights of professional ping-pong players, goddamnit.

Get them a ball-boy, I say. (Or a ball-girl.) There's a lot of spectators in the audience. Couldn't they pass around a baseball cap, collect some coins, and give the cash to some little tyke for an hour or two's worth of work?

Then the table-tennis titans would be able to focus on the majesty of their sport. The strategy of their technique. The intensity of their ferocity.

Soccer is known as 'the beautiful game'.

But get some ball-boys to work in table-tennis, and within five, ten years, tops, ping-pong would be a serious rival for the sporting world's affection.

I'm telling you.

There would be parades, riots, hooligans. The whole deal.

If we write to our governments. If we unite as one. If we maintain solidarity.

Change can come. Change will come.

Am I asking for too much?