Author: Sprayon Pants

Sure. Why not.
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1600 Porky’s Avenue

The only way to describe the governing class of the United States of America today is as a frat party. Or a cage match on WrestleMania. Even as a frat party in a cage match of WrestleMania. 

A couple things got me jogging along this (in no way, original) line of thinking. One is the person of Pete Hegseth, a fellow Minnesotan who looks and acts the part of the president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, nominated some time ago, as America’s worst fraternity by Bloomberg. The Smooth Operator’s responses to questions in his Senate confirmation hearings about his excessive drinking and aggressive behaviour towards women call to mind that other Lord of the Realm, Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh.  Both men brushed aside detailed, multiple and intimately-sourced revelations with an entitled and unflappable wave of the hand as if to say, “Take a chill pill, dude! I was just having a good time. Is the other keg open yet?” 

The other thing that got me going was the book, Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. It’s a funny, sad and tangled story to follow about the influence of one man, Vince McMahon, founder and owner of the WWE (formerly WWF) and his product’s influence on a couple generations of American young people, and Saudi billionaires; I’m looking at you MBK. 

Aside from the garishly overdrawn characters, the blood, the steroids, the sexual assault, the violence and the appeal to our lowest human instincts (to act without consequences; to win at all costs) the biggest contribution pro wrestling has made to contemporary America is kayfabe. According to prowrestling.fandom.com, kayfabe (pronounced KEI-feib) refers to the portrayal of events within the industry as real, that is the portrayal of professional wrestling as not staged. Referring to events as kayfabe means that they are worked events, and/or part of a wrestling storyline. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe during a show would be likened to an actor breaking character on camera. In short, kayfabe is pretending that what is fake is real and what is real, is irrelevant. 

Ringmaster details how Vince completely destroyed the quaint ‘sport’ of pro wrestling that has been a popular sub-culture of American entertainment (not sport) for decades and built in its place a monopoly of gore, noise, excess, violence and abuse of people in and out of the ring. Something known as World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) which Vince recently sold to the company that owns UFC for 9 point 3 billion smackaroos. More than Disney paid for Marvel and Star Wars together! 

Of course, the American President, Donald John Trump is a “yuuuge” WWE fan.  Apparently, Vince McMahon is one of only two people whose phone calls DJT takes in private. And Melania is not the other one.  Vince’s wife, Linda, headed up the Small Business Administration in Trumpdom1 and is now slated to be in charge of American educational policy and priorities! She (and indeed, the whole McMahon family) has herself participated in wrestling kayfabe events. 

It is not hard at all to see in Trump the lessons he’s learned from Mr. McMahon. His promotion of violence, his mixing up reality and fakery, his wild stories, the sexual hanky-panky and the tearing down of all norms. 

It takes no imaginative stretch to see the lines that connect all these dots-Hegseth, Kavanaugh, ‘Hang Mike Pence’, Stormy Daniels, Oath Keepers and ‘Lock her up!’-with the cultures of the wrestling ring and frat house.  

An era of uncontrolled young man testosterone 

One journalist summarized the culture of that frat house as having a “history of mistreatment of women, of systematic racism and of providing a path for an already elite portion of society (white men) to get ahead even further, usually in lucrative fields of business, finance and politics.” 

Indeed, Geoff Duncan, a Republican and former lieutenant governor of Georgia, in a recent TV chat, said, “[Donald Trump’s] legacy is more built on a Ponzi scheme—a Ponzi scheme of populist ideas—and every day it’s going to get a little bit more edgy and a little bit more daring and bombastic. And I think you have to look no further than [his] nominees to see it as part of that next step in the Ponzi scheme. 

If you told me that Donald Trump was building an administration to run a frat house, I’d believe you,” he added. 

And so, here we are.  

Time to get the old toga out of the closet I guess. 

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The final nail? Trusk do away with USAID

The decision by Trump/Musk to do away with USAID should be a development we are not surprised by. But I am.  It does not bode well for millions of people and communities around the world whose American tax-payer-funded assistance will cease. But its certainly, a huge nail in the nearly completed coffin of the aid sector as we know it. 

The move to disappear stand-alone aid agencies is not new.  Canada did it. Boris Johnson did it. And it happened here in Australia in 2013 when a pugnacious let’s-move-back- to-the-past Prime Minister mandated the death of AusAID.  

Everywhere it has happened it has had a similar effect.  The quantum and impact of the ‘aid’ decreases dramatically. Experts with decades of experience and knowledge are turfed out and replaced by graduates and bland bureaucrats with no interest in the subject matter. When Australia did its downsizing over a decade ago, the budget for international aid had been growing steadily and significantly every few years. Both parties, pledged to make Australia a good global citizen and set a target of .7 GNI (gross national income) to be the annual goal.  This would have taken Australia from a medium sized supporter of community development and humanitarian response to the major leagues.   

When Tony Blair became Prime Minister of Britain in 1997, he removed the ’Aid’ office from the Foreign Office and created a separate and well-funded agency which dominated the sector for the next 15 years. DFID, as it was known (Department for International Development) was very well funded, filled with recognised technical experts and championed new ideas. It was the thought leader of the global sector, respected by all for its commitment to addressing some of the inherent problems that exist in such an agency. 

USAID was the Daddy Warbucks of the industry. The agency with the deepest pockets, largest infrastructure and a pioneer in the financing of major infrastructure projects like dams and roads that were critical for countries to building their sense of nationhood and post-colonial economies.  It had its political constraints imposed by Republicans (no support to abortion or reproductive services, for example) but it was so big these things got lost in the shuffle.

As a kid in India, one of the regular features on the landscape were American men sporting crewcuts and white shirts running around in the most remote places laying the groundwork for or directing the building of such projects.  I attended school with several kids whose parents were in India or Bangladesh or Burma or Ceylon for a few years, working for USAID or the Canadian aid agency on these massive projects. 

It seems those days are now gone forever.  I lament not the white men and crewcuts or even the massive projects, but that governments no longer consider soft power and aid to be something of value. And the implicit if unspoken belief that poverty can be defeated. And that the ‘West’ has a degree of responsibility for taking steps to reduce that poverty and vulnerability. 

DFID is no more. BJ smooshed it back into the Foreign Office and its budget was stripped to support other brilliant schemes like sending asylum seekers to imaginary camps in Rwanda. And to support other underfunded Tory projects. Where if once was a beacon, Britain’s aid program, like so much else in the UK, is flickering candle in a rainstorm.  Canada means well but has lost its importance as an aid donor.   

Australia, flying high with billions of dollars and ambitious plans to support climate change around the world, is now a sick, in-house joke.  Rather than .7% of GNI, the aid budget represents .19% GNI! The lowest level since the 1950s! It’s important presence in South Asia, Africa, and SE Asia has disappeared. It’s only significant programs are in Papua New Guinea (former colony) and a few other Pacific Island nations.  Its priority is pro-business and infrastructure. Issues like public health, agricultural support, education support or humanitarian response is as thin as the storyline the politicos spin in front of the cameras. 

For well over a decade now, Interntional non-governmental organisations (INGOS) have been struggling to find a reason to stay alive.  This is a long and inglorious story of strategic blindness, consolidation and refusal to face the reality of a changing world.   In this way, perhaps Trump’s bull-in-a-China shop approach will finally bring on the crisis that will at last bring reality crashing through the cubicle partitions. That could be good. But the damage will be massive and the chances of it leading to anything but chaos and corruption, extremely low.

More likely what we will see is the aid budget going to support Trusk designed projects (Trump hotels in Myanmar, rocket ships for Kazakstan, oil drilling in South Sudan, shopping malls and data farms in Greenland). And huge disruption to the financial viability of INGOs around the world that have built themselves into large often-bloated institutions whose main source of revenue is USAID. Which is now shuttered. 

I just tapped in “USAID.gov”  

Stay tuned for further developments on this front. 

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Letter from Dushanbe

Rudaki Square, Dushanbe

LETTER FROM DUSHANBE 
 
There are two things that could kill you in Tajikistan these days. The first is a massive earthquake. Tajikistan, the poorest of the former Soviet Central Asian republics with a population of six million, is the place where four major mountain ranges meet as the Indian subcontinent inexorably crushes and grinds northwards into Europe. You feel the earth tremor here almost every week: sometimes just a low quiver; at others a quick chiropractic snap that rattles your windows and creaks the walls. 

The second way you can be deprived of your life is to be slammed by a vehicle with tinted windows (could be a Jeep Cherokee, could be a tiny Lada 1500) whizzing dangerously through the shaded intersections of Rudaki Avenue, equally scornful of traffic signals and pedestrians as of the sour-faced militia that hang thick as bats along the main drags of the capital, Dushanbe. Not too long ago the odds on being kidnapped and then murdered, or shot in the crossfire of street fights were definitely better than the first two scenarios. 
 
So, on the face of it, things have improved in Tajikistan. Gangsters may be bad drivers but at least snipers aren’t drawing a bead on you when you go shopping. Tajikistan’s society fell apart the same moment the Soviet Union declared itself null and void. Seventy years of communist wall papering had done nothing but thinly cover the rifts that had been cracking across the landscape for centuries. Northern Tajiks, long the “blessed ones” of the political system began to squabble with uppity, uncouth Southerners. Democrats from Dushanbe and Islamicists from the isolated, honey producing Karategin valley joined forces against Communist party hacks. Ethnic Uzbeks, Russians and Germans were attacked, harassed and forced to quit the country. Fighting broke out in the streets of Dushanbe and carried on for five years. Tens of thousands of Tajiks fled into Afghanistan (could there be a worse place on earth to seek refuge?) as hundreds of thousands more became displaced within the country. 

Tajikistan, like many other recently independent states, is one of the lost nations of our world. Though not yet a failed state, Tajikistan is falling with increasing velocity towards the bottom of the misery stakes. It has always been a poor country and except for a couple of centuries a millennium ago, when Tajiks were the undisputed rulers of this part of the world, holding the northern borders of the first Islamic Persian empire, the Tajik people have always been lesser partners in the power arrangements of Central Asia. The fabled cities of Bukhara (ascetic and spare), and Samarkand (opulent and gregarious), are their proudest contribution to world civilization. But with the gradual loss of the northern realms to Turkic tribes the Tajiks were unequivocally usurped and subjugated to a life of cultural domination and political irrelevance. Until, that is, 1924, when the new Soviet state carved out a Tajik Autonomous Region. For the first time the Tajiks began to imagine themselves as a distinct national group. The Tajiks’ feelings toward the Soviet Union were, not unnaturally, largely positive. They were grateful for bringing them into the world. And being part of a sprawling powerful Union gave the tiny land-locked country much greater security and prosperity than it would have been able to acquire on its own. If there was any doubt about what their fate could have been without the Soviet Union, one only has to glance south of the border to the basket case called Afghanistan. Ten years ago, when Tajikistan followed the general trend and declared its independence the occasion was a cheerless event. Those once fond feelings have given way to bitterness and regret. The civil war that broke out almost immediately achieved little of positive consequence. The industry, farms and orchards of the most dependent economy of the former Soviet Union (40% of the budget had come in direct subsidy from Moscow) fell into utter neglect and disrepair. Nothing was produced and very little grown. Factories stood as empty as the revolutionary slogans that had suddenly fallen out of vogue. Bazaars were deserted. Restaurants were beyond imagination. Since an UN-brokered peace settlement four years ago Tajikistan has struggled to find its way in the big bad frightening world marketplace. It will be years before the people of this country enjoy the standard of living they had as Soviets when time extended securely into the future and holidays in Georgia were assured. 
 
Ten years after independence there remains little warm feeling for the capitalist, free market and democratic jargon their leaders mouth each day in the smudgy, thin, state-controlled newspapers. Hunger and poverty are growing in Tajikistan. The World Bank estimates that 96% of the people live on less than $28 a month. More than a third live on less than $5. Forty one percent of children under five years of age are seriously malnourished and weigh less than children their age in all except the poorest countries. Basic buying power is the issue in this country. Most Tajiks don’t have any. There is no work and what is available pays a paltry sum. Many agriculture workers working the old state and collective cotton farms have not seen a wage for three years. In most households outside of the capital (and increasingly here as well) the day’s meal is a loaf of round naan bread and tea. Russians, once the prime beneficiaries of the system, but now among the poorest, have taken to stewing dogs in some urban centers. Poverty can be measured in any number of ways. But if you calculate the degree to which a people’s standard of living has fallen (evaporated nearly overnight) then the collapse of most of the Soviet-dependent societies has produced one of the cruelest forms of privation. Recently I visited the home of a deaf pensioner who receives a small donation of American wheat flour and vegetable oil. The effects of a stroke twist his face. His flat, on the first floor of a concrete tower on the outskirts of Dushanbe, is shabby and dark. His trousers are pinned together and his shirt collar is worn; old spectacles off kilter. “I used to be a highly skilled type setter at a publishing house. Now all I can do is cry.” As I left the building I recalled what one man said to me when I asked him what he thought of the new world order. “The Russians used to say ‘We’ll screw you but then we’ll feed you.’ Now we are being fucked but there’s no food.” 

This piece appeared first on the blog Hackwriters in 2003

I lived and worked in Dushanbe, Tajikistan between 1999-2001. Dushanbe is the Tajik word for the second day of the week, (Tuesday) and was named for a historical weekly Tuesday market that had been held in the area for centuries. During the Soviet era the city was known as Stalinabad (1929-1961). With the ‘thaw’ that followed the death of Josef Stalin, the ancient historical name was reinstated.

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Dylan’s Turn of Phrase

I was lucky to get a pass to a pre-release viewing of A Complete Unknown, the new Dylan biopic, this week.  The event included a free drink (which turned out to be a Thatchers Gold Apple Cider in a can, which is so wrong on several levels) and an ‘Australian exclusive’ interview with director James Mangold and leading man, Timothée Chalamet. A great night. 

The film itself was very good. I can’t think of another film where an actor captured a character many of us think we know intimately, with near perfection. It was almost as if Dylan himself had morphallactic-ly returned to his early years in the physical form of Chalamet. All the essentials were there. His smirking disdain, his obsessions, his hair, the shades and the voice, bursting at the seams with creativity.  A stellar artistic performance by the actor.   

[Not to be discounted is Edward Norton as Pete Seeger. His understated performance as Dylan’s early champion is worth the price of a second ticket. The crushing disappointment he conveys when Woody Guthrie makes it clear Dylan is to be his successor, not Pete, is so good.] 

The Australian exclusive interview was prerecorded. It featured a local B grade entertainment interviewer who knew little of Dylan’s mystique or music and who received each response from Chalamet with a cooed ‘Ooo, that’s so great!’, more appropriate to an interview with parents of a severely disabled child or a granny fighting back against online scams.  Chalamet was pissed and swilled big gulps of vodka straight from the bottle. His answers were disjointed, sometimes coherent. He seemed to be channelling Dylan’s own irritated approach to dumb interviewers. For his part Mangold tried to keep disaster at bay by praising the drunken luvvy next to him and speaking of how they had ‘sculpted’ the performance and their relationship over ‘many years’.  O.K.

Definitely go see this film. 

As I walked to the cinema, I reflected for the umpteenth time on what it is about Bob Dylan that I love so much. I’m sure I could dig out several dozen reasons but the one that immediately jumped to mind was his ability to turn a phrase.  Though I’m a Dylan lifer, there are few if any songs of his that I could recite in their entirety. Maybe Blowing in the Wind if the wind were behind my back.  But I can rattle off dozens of phrases that absolutely live within my soul every day. 

All I really want to do, is baby be friends with you 

It ain’t me babe 

He not busy being born is busy dying 

She wears an Egyptian ring that sparkles before she speaks 

I contain multitudes 

Flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark 

I used to care, but things have changed 

Lincoln Country Road or Armageddon? 

A few words, seemingly simply, even thoughtlessly, placed together stand out like sparkling jewels throughout his work.  They are adornments. In Indian/Sanskrit aesthetics these are known are ‘alankara’, poetic ornaments or decorations designed to enhance the joy and delight of the reader/listener. 

I find myself repeating Dylan’s phrases at random moments and situations.  I get a kick out of marrying Dylan’s words with the situations and events of my meagre life. That feeling of delight, according to the ancient Indians, is the entire purpose of poetry, music, art and literature.  According to Vijay Kumar Roy, Associate Professor of English, University of Allahabad, “all artists are expected to have a kind of gift, through which imagination can provide the reader [something to] ‘savour’ or ‘relish’, [rasa, in Sanskrit], which is the highest form of joy or supreme bliss (delight). (1) 

Sometimes Dylan seems to throw all manner of phrases together, seemingly indifferent to whether they make sense as a whole narrative.  For years scholars and fans have tried to unpack and dissect the meaning of each of Dylan’s songs to find a coherent message.  Yet if you look at a song like It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) the phrases pile up and it’s hard to draw direct links of meaning between them. 

Darkness at the break of noon 
Shadows even the silver spoon 
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon 
Eclipses both the sun and moon 
To understand you know too soon 
There is no sense in trying 

Temptation’s page flies out the door 
You follow, find yourself at war 
Watch waterfalls of pity roar 
You feel to moan but unlike before 
You discover that you’d just be one more 
Person crying 

These verses are full of brilliant lines. Indeed, each line is full of meaning, but you’d be hard put to say exactly what he’s singing about. A simultaneous solar and lunar eclipse? Is the page of temptation a book or a young lad? I’ve seen waterfalls but don’t know what a waterfall of pity is and what that has to do with said page.  

But as the song progresses it’s clear Dylan is conjuring a scene of madness, darkness and confusion.  He is describing a disjointed disconnected modern society and so there is a certain rasa/taste to this song. Indian aesthetics identify 8 main ‘rasa’ or flavors that an artist may induce in a reader, observer or listener. One of them is Raudra: The Rasa of Anger and Fury which Dylan employs to demonstrate his righteous fury over the state of his country, society and times. It’s a heavy song. It’s got the weight of Jeremiah or Isaiah. But it is decorated and ornamented with the most beautiful turns of phrase. 

Darkness at the break of noon 
Shadows even the silver spoon 

While money doesn’t talk, it swears 

You never know how future generations will view yesterday’s heroes but it’s hard to imagine Dylan’s writing being forgotten.  His turns of phrase, dozens of them, have entered our daily banter.  

The times they are a changing.  

Blowing in the wind.   

It ain’t me, babe. 

You gotta serve somebody 

Pick up any of his records, or read his poems/lyrics on line and you’ll discover hundreds of magical delightful phrases that capture the whole gamut of human emotions. But which also mark Dylan as one of the greatest manipulators of words. 

Here is one of his phrases I use regularly, in a lot of situations. 

A change in the weather is known to be extreme 
But what’s the sense of changing horses in midstream? 
I’m going out of my mind, oh, oh 
With a pain that stops and starts 
Like a corkscrew to my heart 
Ever since we’ve been apart 

(You’re a Big Girl Now, Blood on the Tracks, 1974) 

  1. Roy, Vijay Kumar. 2012. “Indian Aesthetics and the West” In Explorations in Aesthetics, edited by Alka Rastogi. New Delhi: Sarup Book Publishers. 


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The Night Bus to Tarbela

This photo was taken at the massive Pirwadahi bus station in Rawalpindi. It is from Pirwadahi that long haul buses commence and it is at Pirwadahi that they end their journeys. At least up it was until the early 1990s, when my time in Pakistan came to an end.

I took this photo at my favorite time of day, an hour or so before sunset. It was winter, probably January or February 1989/90 giving the light a warm golden hue. The bus’s windscreen and body had just been washed so the usual dust and streaks of wipers are not a hinderance.

Pakistani bus decorating is one of the country’s great folk arts. What often looks like garish sticker-mania in fact often can be decoded. In this instance starting from the lower left: a religious poster depicting Hazrat Hussain, the Prophet Mohammad’s (PBUH) grandson and spiritual icon to Shi’a Muslims all over the world. The large script at the top of the windscreen is a Q’ranic or other spiritual saying and at the very top you can the words 1988 Model. Signifying the year not of the manufacture of the bus but of the decorations. Multiple stickers of vases and flowers reference one of the most popular design motifs from the Persian world. Scholars find many pre-Islamic references and continuities in such images. In this case, I would imagine the bus’s owner (a Shi’a) has used the stickers merely as pretty decoration, just like the image of the two kittens in the far right lower corner. The open palm stickers, like in many ancient cultures, represent an attitude of blessing and protection as well as invitation. Signaling to the passengers, “Come in, god Bless and protect you on your journey.” As these iron behemoths are not insured, its about as much assurance as you can expect. The calligraphy that balances the Hussain poster notes the destination of the bus, Tarbela Dam, one of Pakistan’s major pieces of infrastructure completed between 1968 and 1976. The pièce de ré·sis·tance is the pair of drapes which can be pulled close when the sun is too bright!

The following piece appeared first on my original blog Washerman’s Dog (17 May 2012). It included a mixtape of music you would be likely to hear on such a trip. The road system in Pakistan has improved immensely since I lived there (’86-’91.) And the music is a bit dated to that era. If you would like to download that mixtape check out the Downloads page.

When I first landed up in Pakistan I was surprised to discover that the way you got around between major cities was not by train, as in India, but by road. Unless your destination was Karachi or Quetta, in which case you flew.  And for your road trips you had several choices of transport: bus, Flying Coach or wagon.

Bus

Bus: usually a Bedford, gloriously liveried in multiple colours, decorated with beaten tin, twinkling lights, curtains, festooned with flowers (plastic, real and painted) and covered with pithy aphorisms like ‘Maa ki dua/Jannat ki hawa’ (A mother’s prayer is a breeze from heaven). Clientele: general public; those who have more time and less money.

Flying Coach

Flying Coach: a no-nonsense and business-like large Mazda or Toyota mini-bus with hydraulic doors that sigh when they open, excellent air conditioning and in most instances reclining seats. Clientele: businessmen, foreign students; those who want to get ‘there’ quick.

Wagon

Wagon: a Ford van imported from England by Kashmiris. Painted only one colour. Body dented. A few perfunctory invocations of Allah’s blessing on the front.  Seats hard. No aircon. Clientele: the slightly better off member of the general public; those with high-risk appetites.

One of the several issues confronting those who choose to travel long distance by road in Pakistan is that the vehicles (with the exception of the Bedford buses) are imported. They can move quite quickly and powerfully, designed as they are for motorways in Japan or UK.  The Pakistani highways, alas, are narrow, rutted, poorly lit and crowded. The combination, especially when blended with a driver who is exhausted, just learning his trade or stoned on charas (all three at once, is a permutation I’ve encountered) can give rise to anxiety. 

I shall never forget the dear driver (with me in front seat right beside him) who, as we sped into the fast-setting sun that nearly blinded us, decided to change the cassette and light a cigarette at the same time.  He did it! And we made it to Gilgit in one piece 12 hours later!

For some reason whenever I found myself on the road it was evening heading into night. Though the hazards increased significantly once the sun went down, I found barreling through the night in some strange way, relaxing and appealing.  Probably because there was inevitably a good concert of music to be had. After the first 45 minutes of the journey, most passengers were nodding off or whispering quietly to their companions. The driver would light another cigarette and turn up the cassette and entertain us with a selection of current and evergreen hits.

Inevitably, the concert would include the patron saint of all vehicle drivers, Attaullah Khan Niazi. Indian film music, qawwali and few sharabi ghazals, some folk and other odds and ends like a piece or two from the driver’s home region, often the Northern Areas around Gilgit.

I loved those trips because I was introduced, anonymously, to so much good music.

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Sometimes I Lie Awake at Night and Wonder

Some of Pol Pot’s victims, S-21 Prison. Phnom Penh

Tonight I’m in Phnom Penh and can’t sleep. I seem to always wake up at this time, when the day is still dark and the only sound is that of lazy thoughts shuffling inside my head. On the other side of the hotel window a boat bangs softly against the jetty.

It is windy and the monsoon is nearly at an end. I was told Cambodia is a land of dusty sunsets but I find the county resplendent with green paddy and the gurgle of the pale brown Mekong in flood. I expected, too, to meet a morose and sullen people. But the Cambodians are warm and can’t repress their smiles.

Throughout the town small but smart restaurants cater to the foreigners that work for the NGOs and UN agencies that finance and prop up the social welfare system of struggling countries like Cambodia. Banners pronouncing tourism as a ‘tool to build cooperation’ droop in the thick air. The tourists are back. Backpackers from Australia, packs of Japanese and most ominously, ugly aging men on the prowl for sex with young Khmer girls and boys. Cambodia is challenging Thailand as the premier destination for sex tourism. Such are the hairline cracks of a poor country’s development.

There is another macabre little industry in Phnom Penh centred around the horrific torture chamber known as Tuel Sleng or S-21. Tucked deep inside a residential neighbourhood the former high school transformed by the Khmer Rouge into a laboratory of evil, S-21 is a ‘must see’ for any visitor to Cambodia.  Along with the temples of Angkor, part of the grand tour.  Moto drivers call out to you, ‘Tuel Sleng. Look at Khmer Rouge jail’. You can buy T-shirts with disgusting recreations of faces behind bars on the backs.  They also sell bags and skirts made of bright Khmer silk right next to building B where Pol Pot’s most important enemies were kept in tiny wooden cages before being cut open like animals and fed to the demon, Angkar, ‘the Organization’. 

I certainly remember the name Pol Pot but his crimes were still unknown outside of Democratic Kampuchea in those years, 1975-1979. It’s an old story now, how this country was transformed, almost overnight, into a giant slave camp. Cities were evacuated and left empty and the population forcibly moved from province to province to reshape the face of the land. Canals were gouged out of the earth. Dams glued together. Millions of paddy fields planted. All done without the help of machinery, with only bare hands and fingernails. Machines were deemed impure and imperialist. Money was abolished as was religion, privacy and even talking. Democratic Kampuchea was a massive experiment in applied paranoia. The people were starved and then themselves became fodder: sustenance for Angkar. Hundreds of thousands, even more than one million, perished. There is not a family here that doesn’t harbour the loss of a sibling, parent, child or spouse.

Why didn’t we hear of this when it was happening, I wonder?

I recall an exhibit at S-21. Instructions painted on a signboard to those under torture. Among the many protocols is the command not to ‘yell out or make any sound when you are beaten with electric wire’.

The single most important factor in the success of Pol Pot’s revolution, according to most scholars, was the carpet-bombing by American B-52s between 1970-1975.  By the time Phnom Penh fell the people of Cambodia were massively traumatized from years of dodging falling explosives that wiped out their villages, families and animals.

I used to work in Iraq. One night the Kurds went wild and fired their machine guns into the air. We lived in tents against the side of a hill. We ate under a thatch and open sided cabana. For several minutes I felt the terror of having no control over my well being. Shells from the celebrating Kurds’ guns rained down from the sky thwacking into the earth and cracking into rocks. I ran for cover but why, I don’t know. There was nowhere to hide. How was a canvas tent to protect me from a hot piece of iron falling from the sky?

And how was a Cambodian peasant to protect himself from a massive cluster bomb falling from an unseen American warplane? And not just once but night after night, week after week? When the Khmer Rouge came to town they didn’t have to ‘recruit’. The people swarmed to anyone who claimed they could stop the bombing.

Daylight is breaking over the city.  I can hear street children laughing now and the sky is white. It’s going to rain some more today.

I wonder.

In the 1970s an American President doggedly pursued the ‘national interest’ and filled the air with airplanes and bombs and mighty words about the need to stop communism from sweeping across the world.  More quickly than Presidents Johnson, Nixon or Ford could have imagined and certainly more inelegantly than the American people were led to believe, communism and the horror that the planes and bombs were to supposed to eliminate, ran the Americans out of town. And tore apart the people and society they were supposed to save.

A year ago another American President began massive bombing against another weak and troubled Asian country. “We’re going to get him dead or alive” the world was told. And something else too. “This time we’re not going to let the Afghan people down. We’ll change the leadership, establish the rule of law and stick around to rebuild the country.”   One year on the Taliban are gone but still active on the periphery. Osama is neither confirmed dead nor alive, apparently relegated to the ‘too hard basket’.  The rule of law remains a fantasy in Afghanistan and donor fatigue has already set in. Of the billions pledged to rebuild Afghanistan to ensure that terrorism has no room to hide, much has not been delivered. The Afghans, it appears have once again been sold a line by their ‘saviours’.

President Bush is once more in dogged pursuit of American interests. Come hell or high water, right or wrong, support or not, we are told he must “change the leadership in Iraq, establish the rule of law and get the UN to pay the billions needed to rebuild the country”.

Sometimes I lay awake at night and wonder.

What sort of new horror is going to arise from the ashes of Afghanistan and Iraq, similar to that arose here in Cambodia? Will Americans wake up and see the links between their crusades against communism and their wars against terrorism and the misery and hatred that follow in their wake?

Phnom Penh, Cambodia 2003

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Early Morning

Early morning.

Listening to the most amazing birdcall I have ever heard.  A loud series of confident, audacious chirrups, growls, clicks, whistles and scratches.  At times a low coarse growl (very un-bird like) then a piercing whistle or two. Now, one, two, three, four; the strange almost metallic sawing sound like the inner workings of an old office chair that hasn’t been oiled in years. Just as quickly the creature finds its birdness again and lets loose a lovely syncopated series of crystalline, round, delicate squeaks. For a moment it is silent, then as if it were a one-man band playing an upbeat number, (thumping the loose bass strings, the tinkle of the cymbal, the squeak now and then of a sax and a droning harmonica) the concert begins again. Right outside my window.  She taps her beak against the branch on which she is perched, like a maestro tapping the podium. And then as that elongated moment of expectation stretches out, at last, the music, in a frantic tumble of tones, begins again.

This experience, this birdsong, is rare or seems so in this place. It has a lustiness and vibrancy of a tropical setting: a Thailand or southern India.  Not a bleak washed out Central Asian winter morning. But it is lovely and nearly humourous.  She’s a prophet. A voice from God reminding us that He is always with us-even in the most alien, isolated and uninhabitable places.

It is quiet now. The bird has gone.  In the distance further away and more subdued and barely audible above the morning traffic that is starting to whoosh through the streets, I can hear the slight, timid calls of a flock of small birds. This is how I will recall Russian Asia. Ordered, unspontaneous, uninspired. But how also will I remember Khojand—-in the winter nonetheless-—for the laughably unexpected concert that woke me up and got me on my way.

Khojand, Tajikistan. 2001

A Note on the Image

Titled ‘The Great Hornbill’ this painting dates from between 1620-40 C.E. (1030-50 Hijri). The artist, Mansur, was a leading nature painter at the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir; around 1600, he briefly also practiced as an illuminator. The emperor took a passionate interest in the natural world and established a compendium of natural history with Mansur’s help.


Mansur was extraordinarily talented for scientific documentation. His detailed careful depictions of plants and animals avoided all personal expression and are extremely valuable for their scientific accuracy as well as their artistic perfection. He became known as Ustad Mansur (‘Master Mansur’), and the emperor bestowed him with the title Nadir-ul-`Asr (‘Miracle of the Age’). The artist accompanied Jahangir on some of his travels and was then in charge of the documentation of plants and animals. Many of his paintings were left unsigned, and only one of his flower paintings can be clearly attributed to him today.

The Mughals (a corruption of the word, Mongols) were at their imperial apex at the time of Emperor Jahangir. They had conquered India several generations earlier and traced their lineage to the fearsome warrior/ruler, Tamerlane (Timur). I wrote this piece in the ancient city of Khojand (Leninabad), an ancient Silk Road city situated at the entrance to the Fergana Valley, the ancestral homeland of the Mughals.

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What’s in a name?

The phrase that names this blog is a hackneyed one and one that seems to have popped simultaneously and spontaneously into a number of heads at the same time.  It is now a dull commonplace that elicits grunts of acknowledment rather than laughs of revelation which it was designed to do.

It’s been used as a descriptor of all those who toil in ‘Aidland’ the vast global financial, institutional and spiritual infrastructure of those involved in delivering ‘aid’ to people in the ‘developing world’ or ‘global South’. Those people in the blue vests and red or orange hats with their employer’s logo splashed across them whom we see on TV in the immediate wake of a flood, tsunami, war or earthquake.

There is a whole school of research and writing on these people (of whom I am one) and perhaps one day I’ll read some it.  But I am not interested in Aidland, or aid workers here in this piece.  Rather, I’m interested in understanding why, when it came to naming this blog, this phrase jumped instantaneously to mind.

I was born into an actual missionary family in India.  I am an MK, a missionary kid.  I have done some pretty mercenary things in my life and know the temptations of that character.  As for misfit? Aren’t we all?

What has inspired this blog is a frustration with how I make sense of my world. Of my experience as a mid-60s male who has had a privileged life. And there is an urge within me to, in some way, document my journey. Not because it is particularly unique or dramatic but because I have never had the time or space to reflect on it.  To see how and whether and why these three strains of my personality and identity come together. Or don’t. Perhaps they are just frayed loose ends.

I’ve thought of writing a memoir. Perhaps an autobiography. What about a fictionalized life of a former missionary kid turned aid worker called Nate? But all attempts have fizzled. I haven ‘t been able to summon the energy to finish such a project.

But I have been writing all my life.  Short pieces, novels, the first draft of a history book, text books, articles on music, politics, ‘Aidland’ and strange figures of history. I’ve written sitreps and reports on humanitarian disasters, and hundreds of funding proposals.  I’ve translated books from Urdu to English. I’ve edited newsletters. I’ve written thousands of letters (though none in the last 25 years). Writing things down is how I validate myself and express myself.  Some people like to chat.  I write.

I’ve been blogging a long time too. I began in 2010 and since then have launched many blogs mostly on music, but also about photography and memoir. It’s a medium I know and understand and enjoy.  After months of hemming and hawing about whether to join Substack, I’ve decided to remain a blogger.  And use this new blog as a sort of laboratory, factory and think-tank; a messy sangam of the various streams that make up each of our lives.

Rather than a single volume ‘memoir’ this blog fills in as my ‘autobiography’.  Read this and you should get a pretty good idea of who I am and how I got from a missionary hospital in south India to the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. 

Before I leave, let me riff on the triple-barreled phrase that fronts this blog.

How can you tell how long a missionary has been in India?  Notice how they react to fly in their tea.  1-2 years, they grimace and politely push the cup of tea away. 5 years, they delicately pick the fly out and flick it on the floor.  10 years or more, they squeeze the fly of all the tea juices that have entered his drowned body and continue to sip the tea.