Travel Writing

The Best of Europe Journals
Below are the most well received passages from my 600 something page Europe Journal travelogue, which most people would not have time to read but if you are more interested in hearing about my travels through any country in Europe, please email me.

6/8/03, London, Britain
My job was at a trance rave called Escape From Samsara at a place called The Fridge in a multicultural part of London called Brixton. At first the security guys at the door gave me a hard time, telling me I couldn’t come in unless I had arrived at eight. The organizer with whom I spoke said nine so I called him up and he gave me his name, which sufficed though the manager was still pissed about the policy conflict or communication problem. They put me on the top floor near the women’s bathroom and bar, across from all these venders selling glow-in-the-dark rave necklaces. I plopped down my mat and went to work making some more elaborate signs than I used at Hyde and Saint James Parks.
In the signs I made mention of zen shiatsu, tui na Chinese massage, and jin shin acupressure having no idea what the kids there would know about.
At first, only a few people seemed to take much interest. Many of the organizers came by and responded approvingly, saying that this was exactly the type of thing they liked to have. Then I got this interesting stocky guy in black who told me he had a major back problem. Since I didn’t know the going rate for shiatsu in London, until that point I had been requesting three pounds for fifteen minutes on my sign. But when I asked him how long he wanted me to work on him, he replied, "Look, I have spent my life living a materialistic lifestyle. You do not believe in what I was doing if you are measuring it by money. I will pay you according to how well you help me with my back."
 Fair enough, as the English say, so I worked on him for a half hour, and he was so pleased with the result that he gave me twenty pounds, and made me promise that I would give away some free samples to people who otherwise wouldn’t be willing to pay. "If you want people to come to you,, just request people to give you what it is worth to them. People can only pay according to their ability here anyway."
And so some random fellow at a rave in London, with this theory, would completely revamp my established ideas about economics and pricing, as this would prove to be the only sensible way to earn money with bodywork as I traveled. By this strategy, throughout the evening I gradually built up more and more customers until around two or three in the morning I had a queue. They all truly exhausted me that night, but I had even better business than at the Jubilee. Of course, I was new to this sort of venue and I had a difficult time meditating and synchronizing my breathing deeply with the incessant trance rhythm and beat, but was pleased with the extent to which I got into the flow, only to be jolted out of it whenever they shot off one of those screaming rocket fire crackers which shocked me a few times. I am sure that I would grow accustomed to working in such an environment over time.
I was surprised by how sober everyone was at this rave. Certainly some folks were tripping on ecstasy, and to give them good bodywork was not even a challenge. But folks here seemed far more sober than at the Jubilee. I think with the theme of Samsara, they were trying to keep it as clean as possible, especially as many of the kids seemed still in their teens. Several people there also gave me there number. One guy named Ben told me to call him. "I could refer you to all types of people." I began to wish I had a card. I was not expecting to stay long in London, but the portability of my skills was certainly building a lot of confidence. While I still had many countries ahead of me, Britain and London in particular was a fine example of what I was searching for in terms of bodywork prospects.
Gradually, demand tapered off, and I packed up to leave. Stepping out into the morning sunlight was truly bizarre, as was having all these raver kids handing me thirteen different flyers for the coming parties. Some of them suggested I go to the “Mass” that night, which would be in the old abandoned church across the street and would go until the early Sunday morning. I thanked them, and eager for a possible breakfast with my current host, returned back to her home.
7/9/03
I had difficulty communicating with my next host, Auounn Bragi Sveinson. (I give his full name because he is a writer and a translator who believes himself to be famous, if not in the rest of the world, than at least in Iceland.) And unfortunately, though he claimed to speak Esperanto, German, Danish, Swedish, and French along with English, I had an awful time being understood. At first I thought maybe he didn’t speak English very well, but he must have had a hearing problem or a hard time listening, because when I made some simple replies in Icelandic (tak fyrir (thank you) and afsakio (sorry)) it didn’t seem to register either. So I tried to simply relax and listen to what he had to say.
"Do you know about Benjamin Franklin?" he asked me.
"Of course I know about Benjamin Franklin," I replied.
"You know Benjamin Franklin, do you?" he asked again.
"Yes," I stated loudly and clearly.
"You know, he was a great man. He discovered lightning, " Auounn said. "I am translating his autobiography into Icelandic. This sounded noble enough, but the way he talked about it, affirming his opinion to himself repeatedly, I can not imagine he would listen if somebody told him he was just wasting his time. For that reason, while I find Ben’s Old Richard Almanac to be a preachy volume of absolutist moralisms, and consequently laughable, I didn’t say this because I couldn’t sustain Auounn’s mind long enough to communicate with him on that level.
Instead, I attempted to explain something much more simple to him: that Benjamin Franklin was so famous in America his face was on a hundred American dollar bill. I tried to explain this by holding up a one dollar bill in my wallet and then tried pointing to a one hundred Icelandic kroner coin and saying “one hundred” with the coin and “dollar” with the paper.
But he took this as an insult, thinking that I was pointing out the obvious fact that since one American dollar is equivalent to one hundred Icelandic kroners, American money was worth far more Icelandic currency. Eventually, I completely gave up and listened to him point out all the pictures of cats he had on the wall, and explain that the cat kills mice and rats because that is its nature. I swear the guy repeated, “because that’s their nature” about three or four times, as though he was drilling it into my mind because I would be taking a test with a question like it before I left his home.  Then the news came on, so he was distracted for a while by that—I couldn't understand what the broadcaster was  saying, but Auounn from time to time would say something in English to contextualize the story.  It didn’t help much that one of the stories was about how the Icelandic kroner was becoming worthless relative to other currencies. By the time midnight came around, I was actually eager to go to bed.
7/10/02
                In the morning, Auounn wanted me to help him with his computer. I begin to get the impression that since I am young, older hosts assume that I am a computer technician. Along with the ancient Macintosh Classic, he also had an outdated Macintosh Performa. He had written an email and lost it, so I opened up all his files n search of it but could not find it. Like Betty, Auounn suggested I stay with this farmer Agnar up north outside of Reykjavik. "He is a self-made man," Auounn told me.
So I tried sending the fellow an email. But Auounn’s computer was so slow and his internet modem so obsolete, that it took me about an hour just to get into my account and send the letter. Eventually I grew so frustrated I told Auounn though he would probably save both time and money by buying a new computer that would surf the Internet faster. But it was almost impossible to communicate with this man since he didn’t seem to hear me.

7/16/02
Only when I got my stuff out and the bus pulled away did I see that the farm was on the other side. The farmer, who was in charge of the hostel said that he had a beautiful attic room for Louise, and for me…well, he was giving me a discount, because there was no more rooms in the farm, but I would get to stay with another guy in this little red cabin by the river. I waited around a bit for the farmer to escort me to my cabin, which I saw, but wanted him to show me around. After about an hour, he was free to do so. We passed by a tiny church and tool shed to the cabin, which was too simple to be of this world. Of course, it had electrical outlets for me to plug my laptop into, but besides from a table, two chair, and two cots, little else.
                Dropping my stuff there, and leaving without closing the door (I figured this was the one place I would go in my travels where I could afford to be cavalier) I immediately set off for an afternoon hike. Raised on summer vacations of camping sites in the California and the Western US, I have had my share of exposure to the forces of “nature.” If anything, I now found it boring and homogeneous. Yet I knew that I probably would be in few places as rural and unpopulated as Berunes in my grand tour of Europe, so I decided to enjoy a hike through the enviorns as I would as a child, even though this seemed a bit narcissistic.
As I headed toward the beach, I found plenty of barbwire fences that I had to carefully climb over. I also had to find places where I could cross long and deep ditches. Crossing the road, I walked toward this large hill that seemed to have formed from the otherwise flat plane in a geologically bizarre way. At its top was a pedestal formed from a pile of stones. I decided that I would sit upon it for a while, and so proceeded to climb up it, but it certainly was a fragile structure because the stones kept slipping from underneath me as I wiggled on top of this stool. If this was suppose to be a work of art, I am afraid that I ruined it, or perhaps I contributed to it. I’m not sure. Whatever the impact I may have had on that “natural” landscape, I enjoyed getting a little imperial gaze of it.
After studying acupressure, Russian and listening to my language tapes, I took out that book that Patricia had given me back in Manchester, No Logo by Naomi Klein. I found her subject of brand bombing, corporate merger synergy, and the commercialization of education not very threatening out there in the Icelandic nowhere, though I knew that outside of small farms in the Icelandic countryside these were powerful forces. I guess I thought that it would have been too easy to completely escape from society, and Klein’s book was a delightful anchor to this, which I consumed with joy. And her variegated examples of expanding corporate domination of markets, communities, and governments seemed utterly absurd and stupid in the barren expanse all around me. If I ever have the honor of meeting Naomi Klein, I would let her know that I read her book in Icelandic frontier, where no logos roam.
                I then took my reading and studies of Russian to the beach. I had to cross a number of ditches with brown-reddish waters which forced me to walk along them until I could find a crossing. I then ventured outward toward the sea upon these large aggregations of stones enveloped in yellowish orange and reddish sea-weed. Gaining traction on these slippery plants was difficult, and I realized that I really should not tread to the edge of these trails of rocks. Yet the child who explored the Californian forest had possessed me and remained determined to reach that edge of land that few would have the desire to reach—even if I had to crawl. Once I reached the very end, I was happy to slide down to sit right upon the sea-weed strewn rocks that hung over the blue waters like a precipice above a canyon. Before the cliff floated an illusory isle of seaweed in mud that perhaps had broken away from the mainland. Here, at an edge of Iceland (which one could consider an edge of the world) I resumed my studies of Russian, and continued burrowing through No Logo. I found the experience so quaint, I not only enjoyed studying Russian or reading No Logo by itself, but also derived joy from the fact that nobody else had probably done either there. And if they have, then there must be truly very little original things a traveler can do these days. Lonely Planet may have chartered almost every obscure territory and unbeaten path a traveler can explore, but there are still some places where globalization is a faint echo of a whisper in the wind, and places that have remained uncontaminated and “pure” in their interaction with, if not presence of, human society. After having read Klein’s book where perhaps nobody else has I arose from my throne of seaweed and made the treacherous venture back to what little civilization there is in Berunes.
And of course, only someone as foolish as I would have climbed out to this precarious apex thinking I could escape unscathed. For I had not counted to sixty in Russian with Oxford University Press when I slipped on the slimy livery of the wet stone and had to break my fall with my right hand. (You ever notice how you instinctively stop your fall with your most useful hand? Isn’t that stupid?) The sharp and cold rock made a cut right along a crease in my palm between my pinky and ring finger. I stopped my Russian number lesson and focused on climbing to the shore with my left hand.
Once both of my feet were on firm ground, I slowly walked along the shore while staring at my hand. I ought to have been upset about the blood oozing from my cut, but I really was not. For I had suffered plenty of others as a child and this was part of the joy of venturing out to not-so safe places. If anything, this was the sort of like being tickled, since I could have broken my hand or arm out there and been in some Icelandic hospital in a cast with loads of travel insurance paperwork to fill out. As it was I simply received a simple cut in my hand, from which I was delighted to see the red blood flowing outward. I recall enjoying the experience of accidentally breaking my skin as a child because I had often had become certain and somewhat fearful, given the mechanistic society we live in, that I was really a robot, and the whole, skin, bones, and muscle story was really all a big lie made up by adults like the tooth fairy and everything else—but when I saw the blood flowing from a wound in my body, I knew that I was a human being, and I found it hard not to be totally fascinated by the texture and layers of scabs, blood and flesh. So this experience was a reminder of my childhood.
                Lest I become too sentimental over my injury however, after pondering the wound with nostalgia I quickly washed it off in the Icelandic water, and walked back along the shore toward the farm. Little streams of red ran through the bland earth, coming perhaps from some chemicals manifested in the mineral runoff from the rock. At some points, the beach looked like it had been painted with blue watercolors, the hue of the sands manifesting different shades for the different levels of low and high tide After passing some large dry rocks, I encountered Louise, who of course was the only person out here. Apparently I had overshot the farm, according to her. I told her of what I had seen and showed my cut to her, which shocked her. Fortunately, Louise happened to be a nurse for the fire department in Tasmania, so she had the first aid supplies ready to use back at the farm. We both delighted in our experiences with the landscape. Louise seemed to enjoy her surroundings so much I enjoyed listening to her.
8/24/02
Judging it not diplomatic to call my potential employer, Nina, when I returned late the following evening, I waited until after nine to give her a ring. Contrary to Tania she could not speak English, and I had to give the phone to Anna, who was very helpful in explaining my inquiry. Anna told me she said maybe but that she was in a car at the moment and to call her back later. So after packing up and thanking Anna for everything and taking the metro to Belaruskaya again,  I followed up and caught Tania, the assistant manager. who sounded very intersted and told me to call back at yet another hour and to prepare to give a “lecture“ on what I did. I found this to be a bit discouraging. How was I suppose to give a lecture on acupressure in Russian when I had enough trouble carrying on an ordinary conversation? I called up Kate who said she would be willing to help be a translator later that afternoon if I could find no one else. I remained persistant and when I reached Tania at noon, she told me to come as soon as possible
She warned me that The Way To Yourself was difficult to find and to call them if I needed help, but I assured her I knew the way. But after trying to retrace my steps and being uncertain whether I was going the right way, I began to grow nervous that they would cancel the appointment if nobody could direct me to The Way To Yourself.
I called up Tania. "Can you meet me at the Bergmaneque clock with hand and show me the way?"I asked her.
"I don't know where that is. But don't worry. We will find you." I was a little nervous that they would not, but eventually I caught the eye of a woman with short black hair—Nina—and a woman with long dyed red hair—Tania. I expressed great pleasure at their kind willngess to guide me back to The Way To Yourselfe for an interview when I could not find it, and said I could not imagine any employer in the USA doing the same. Tania would only smile and say, “I have friends in San Francisco. They are very nice people.“
Nina and Tania took me not to the store but to a little office nearby where we would conduct an interview. What Tania meant by a lecture was for me to simply explain what I did in English and she would translate for Nina, who spoke mostly Russian.
Fortunately, I had the precious and beautiful signs Constatine had translated for me back in Alexandrovsky Gardens, which I could easily recite by memory in English by this time. I also had my shiatsu and acupressure literature to illustrate both the art and science of my profession and a record of my credentials as proof of my training. "After your last two days working here, will you return?" they asked me.
"If I found work here of course I will," I replied. 
They then invited this thin pale girl with short red hair and a yellow uniform scarf around her neck to come in. Tania introduced her as Natasha. She has a sore throat, a tight neck, sore back, menstrual cramps, and had been feeling a little dizzy that day.
When I took out my mat, Nina protested, "Nyet! Nyet!" She insisted that I could work on the massage table in the room, which I had actually never done with shiatsu before, but agreed. I was more nervous than ever before in shiatsu practice. Here I was, about to give someone shiatsu in a language I barely knew, for a greater multitude of symptoms than had ever been presented to me elsewhere, and on massage table, which I had never done before.
After taking her pulses, with a deep breath, I focused on sedating her gall bladder and liver meridians and tonifying the spleen and kidney and bladder meridians. Afterward she stood up and stared into her eyes. Her blue eyes glowed as a flush spread through her face, awash in gratitude. Until Tania returned, she simply stared at me, as though she wished she could express how she felt to me, but not knowing any English, could not--or could not even if I could fully understand her Russian.  When Tania emerged, she told me through her that her sore thorat, dizziness and pain and tightness in her back were gone.
I knew that acupressure works through my own self-experimentation but often could not believe it. But I had never been so challenged as with this girl, and now I could not only know, but believe that it worked. At that moment, I realized that I could do far more than I ever thought possible.
Regardless of how I felt though, this was clearly a good enough demonstration for Tania and Nina. They began calling one employee after another. They all wore these little yellow scarves to distinguish them from the customers. I treated a greater range of ailments that day than ever before, everything from fevers to leg soreness to nausea to headaches. I enjoyed this because I learned much from having such a variety of patients. Of course, my clients had not so much to offer me, at most about 100 roubles--but I felt more than adequately compensated by their appreciation which was greater than I had received anywhere. I knew that if I could find clients no where else, I would have plenty waiting for me in Moscow.
At around two or three, Nina brought in plenty of chicken, stew, and rice to eat together with the coworkers. Across from my new workplace was a Chinese lama of Tibeten medicine who worked with his children. One of his daughters, Lia, said she would be my translator for the rest of the day. After chattering with her father and sister in Chinese, Lia asked, “He wants to know if you are a buddhist.“
How was I suppose to respond to that? “No, I am a dharma bum“? I tried to be diplomatic and say that while I could not say I was a buddhist, my profession obligated me to follow many of the teachings of the Buddha. Seeing this lama eat and cheerfully talk, I was very inspired by his simple way of being and his life commitment—if I could spend the rest of my life healing with my acupressure as he did with Chinese medicine, I would be content.
While eating Tatina explained to me that the Dali Lama had planned to come to Russia that coming September, but because the growing political alliances between China and Russia, it would be impossible since the Dali Lama was an enemy of the Chinese government. I can only shake my head and shrug my shoulders to such misfortunes now…What can you do?
                One cheerful client who I most vivdly remember was this guy Andre. He was a peculiar and complex character but with much sophistication and a very open mind. He was a vegetarian who smoked and who had been trying to learn Chinese medicine. "I felt really sick about a week ago and had gone to see that Chinese doctor. He gave me some medicine and I felt completely better the next day!" he exclaimed in amazement. He asked me if I could teach him zen shiatsu, which I told him I would gladly do some day. I think that this was what I would ultimately want: to teach Muscovites how to heal each other, rather than depend upon me.
9/18/02, Minsk, Belarus
I then told Anton about this peculiar conversation I had with Paul. Anton laughed bitterly at what he clearly saw as Paul's delusions. "He's young, and has probably never traveled outside of Belarus. He doesn't really know the how life is in other countries. If you have never gone outside of Belarus, you might suppose it to be great too. But if you have traveled to the USA and Europe, you know how different things are."
"How are thing so different?" I asked, as always playing it naïve so that I could only learn more. His downbeat tone of speaking with his country seemed to contrast strongly with his earlier indignation at the negative stereotypes I received of Belarus.
He sighed as he lowered the glass from his lips. He spoke of how he spend all of his life trying to establish a career, go to school, get a degree, and training, but I would still be in need of money. “We Belarussians will do anything for money. I mean I offered you stay over so I could get some money from you here. In the USA and Europe you have opportunities to live a life on your own. Here," he said, his eyes lingering thoughtfully over the remainder of the wine in his glass, but making no movement to drink the rest, "there's no future..."
Those words would echo in my mind whenever I saw Belarussians and other bright and talented people with the misfortune of being a citizen of a country that did not fully tap into their potential and employ their capability. Having studied globalization I was well acquainted with how many from poor countries simply did not have the self-determination to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to succeed in what they wanted to accomplish in life. But Anton seemed to be a man determined to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to really contribute something to the world and make a better life for himself. And yet, as privileged as he was in this respect, his words very much expressed all too well his situation. "No future..."
I found it sad the way he spoke of Europe as though Belarus was not part of it. While Anton seemed defensive that it was not the mess others suggested it was, he nonetheless understood the situation of Belarus: that this was a poor country that hardly anybody—not even its closest neighbor Russia—seemed to care much about. I understood, in the glimpse of life from his eyes I had captured, why many of my international friends from countries like Nigeria, Burma and Ghana were so reluctant to return to their country with the skills and education they acquired in the USA. And while part of me found them to be cowardly for doing so, the simple fact that they had escaped their situation to an extent that Anton might never accomplish was an achievement. For men like Anton deserved more than many of the lazy idiots who occupy affluent but unproductive jobs in the USA, and I could only see his situation as grossly unfair.
So while I as an American citizen with a college degree from a prestigious university, technical skills, and a profession was deeply pessimistic about the state of the world, I can at least be optimistic about my personal future. But how could I console Anton except explain that in my field, understanding what causes development is very much a foundational issue that we have researched long and hard--but unfortunately to which no clear answer has been given.
"Because it is impossible..." muttered Anton bitterly. Shaking his head, he said, "The problem is not with economics here, it is politics. Years ago everything had changed in Belarus: They changed the flag, the currency, the language from Belarussian to Russian, and this of course made the nationalists angry." And now the country was embroiled in a cold civil war over its political identity between those who wanted to reunite with Russia and those who wanted to defend their culture. "It is all so stupid and senseless and a waste of energy. This is why I hate politics so much, because it seemed to get Belarus nowhere."
When I explained the concept of cosmopolitanism, he said he wanted to have compassion for all people like a cosmopolitan, but understood many of these cosmopolitans as Jews who only helped each other out, which he detested. And so I then understood how problematic the concept of cosmopolitanism was when it was more exclusionary in effect. When basically, almost everything presented a hope for your future seemed to be working against you.
9/21/02-9/22/02, Ukraine-Poland
My first encounter on the train was not all that remarkable: A couple of overweight bus drivers who, while they had a modicum of conversation with me, spent most of their time with their heads in violently bloody porno magazines. At some point though, they decided to take a nap, and began snoring. I had very much wanted to write in my journal but was really distracted by their songs of slumber, so I decided to go out for a moment to search for a quieter compartment in which to write.
Along the way to the compartment, I met a friendly train conductor, Hannas, who seemed very interested, as most Ukrainians, who I was, and what I was doing there. He had a tall lanky body and silky straw-like blond hair, with the face of some angelic and noble prince. Hannas asked me if I wanted a woman, as this one big guy had requested next to me, clutching a laughing chubby blond female train conductor and pulling her into the compartment. I declined the offer and said I merely wanted to change compartments and then write in my journal. He seemed to understand I needed my space.
I very much enjoyed my time along in that compartment by myself, seeing the Ukrainian countryside roll by me in solitude while Russian pop music blared through the speakers and I worked arduously on my journals. The day and evening passed by quickly, and soon the sun began to set.
At around seven I heard the door to the compartment slide open. Hannas stepped in and sat down next to me. He began speaking to me very quickly in Ukrainian with a smile, as though he had something very urgent and important to tell me. I could not totally make out what he was saying, but I gathered that he wanted to know again if I wanted to have sex in my wagon.
I assured him that I was fine and said I only wanted to be left alone to work on my journal. But he must have misunderstood, because he spoke a little slowly and suavely now, putting his hand on my thigh and before I knew it, moving in to give me some kisses. Clearly, in his mind, if I did not want to indulge in a little nooky with some strange woman in a Ukrainian train, I most certainly wanted to get into his pants.
Well, while I found his advances to be inappropriate, I could smell the alcohol on his breath and felt there was no reason to freak out. I mean, he probably just thought that the friendly way I had looked at him earlier, my telling him I was from San Francisco, or perhaps the way I had smiled at his playful sense of humor were signals that I was sending off. When I insisted I had no desire to have sex with him, he left me alone, and even seemed to feel a little embarrassed and ashamed. I could have reported it to the other conductor, but I did not want this guy to lose his job over this small if bold proposition. I imagine Ukraine, like Russia, has enough homophobia, sex was often how people made money, and that the poor guy was sexually frustrated enough.
After writing for some time more, I returned to my compartment, where the blood and semen comic book fans had left. My next two companions, two girls decked in nice clothes, came in with giant bags, and full of giggles. I had some difficulty communicating with them, as they spoke a strange dialect of western Ukrainian that I could not recognize with my Russian. And in any case, they did not have much time for small talk. The first girl once she had closed the door, immediately started pulling out box after box of Monte Carlo cigarette cartons out of her fat white plastic shopping bags and stuffing them into her pillow and more into their other bags. They stashed several large bottles of vodka beneath the bed wrapped in bags. And only if about an hour did they seem ready to settle down.
Since some people have little choice, I did not really see anything so terribly wrong with people smuggling such filthy and malignant substances over borders to exploit price differentials if this is what they had to do to survive. So I decided to play it naive and pretend like nothing terribly criminal was going on knowing I might pay for it later.
Yet the way they acted about it, you wondered how they would ever succeed at this business. ”Hide the Monte Carlo!” they giggled in Ukrainian like a bunch of girls in the school yard gossiping. I found it somewhat annoying that I could not engage in any other interesting discussion with them, as they seemed to be obsessed with the thrill of this activity. This reminded me of the way my schoolmates back in junior high would boast about all the things they had shoplifted so that after a while it seemed completely normal to me. It must have been quite an adrenaline rush for them.
9/22/02
By midnight, I did not really want to go to sleep until we crossed the Ukrainian and Polish border, since I did not enjoy being woken by border guards. But these girls kept urging me to do so, ”Sleep, Jake, sleep! It will be a long night!" one of them told me, and giggled mischeviously. I wished I had heeded their advice.
After the Ukrainian border patrol, with thin mustaches, swiped our passports through little machines and then departed, the girl on the bottom bunk immediately closed the door. Just as I was ready to go to sleep, she began digging up all the Monte Carlos frantically from the pillow case and from beneath her bed, and then crawled up began noisily pushing gallons of jarred vodka and pounds of cigarettes into the rectangular crevice above the two beds. I could not understand why this had to be such a damn complicated process. If they made it through the Ukraine border, why would the Polish border be a problem? I only wanted to go to sleep now, and after about fifteen minutes, I got so sick of all the fumbling of Monte Carlo boxes falling down besides my feet and the never-ending clanging of vodka bottles that I simply got up and left the compartment to sleep in another. How much stuff did they need to smuggle? I understood the concept of economies of scale, but maybe there chances might be better if they aimed they decreased the quantity.
I guess the girls sort of felt bad for keeping me up that past half hour, because they entered my new compartment and urged me to come back. So I went ahead and returned, hoping I could now go to sleep. But I had only been in bed for a less than minute when I began to hear all sorts of loud banging in the nearby compartments. I thought that somebody had come by with a sledgehammer and was pounding the sides of the train with it. Were we under attack, or what? Almost. When the Polish border guards arrived, they demanded us to leave, and like some Swat team on a search-and-destroy, they dashed in and totally trashed the place. Amidst all the clanging and crashing I could only raise my hand to my face as I wondered what sort of damage they were inflicting on my possessions to get at the booty.
From the compartment doorway, boxes of Monte Carlo and glass bottles of Vodka flew out by the pound, and the blond female train conductor quickly grabbed them and put them all in this giant gray duffel bag which, once it was fully stuffed with the sharp perpendicular edges of cigarette boxes, appeared like some drab overstuffed Christmas stocking. The train conductor dragged it down the compartment hall like some giant snake she had clubbed to death.
"Russian business," said a tall unshaven man in English with a smile. I suppose smuggling in this part of the world was known as Russian business because of the way Russians tried to dig themselves out of economic crisis.
"Are those girls going to get arrested?" I asked him.
"They only confiscate the things, and do not punish them," he explained.
"Does this happen all the time?" I asked him, impressed by the methodical and almost regimental way in which the customs officials stormed the compartments, one by one.
"All the time. They can get four times as much for a pack of cigarettes in Poland as in the Ukraine," explained the man. "So they will smuggle it whenever they can--Russian business."
Well, I was not too eager to see what sort of mess they made of the place, but I could not leave my stuff in there. My mat, upon which I was sleepping, was on the floor with my pillow, drenched with vodka like someone had pissed on it. My backpack was no longer beneath the bed, but hung in the middle of the room like some auto wreck. I had kept many other items, like my guidebook, Russian phrasebook, and maps and things in a plastic bag and these were spread out chaotically across the compartment like the textbooks and readers in my apartment during my last year at Berkeley.
Too tired to clean up and assemble my stuff, I retrieved what I could find across the room and moved to another compartment that, because it had less stuff in it, did not look so bad. "Can I sleep here?" I asked the guy in there in English, too tired to speak Russian. He consented and so I threw my mess of stuff from the other room beneath the bed and plopped my body down on my mat, and went to sleep with the scent of vodka in my nostrils.
Or at least tried to go to sleep. For apparently my new compartment mate had no intention of doing the same. No, for his trade was not smuggling but sticking his body halfway up the shaft between the two beds, from which his butt stuck, suspended by his two legs spread out between the two bed posts. He looked like he was trying to dig something out with a crowbar. Hundreds of white styrofoam flakes floated down onto the floor like a winter's day from his archeological excavation of the depths of the Ukrainian Nightmare Express. What was this guy doing? Was he trying to steal the heater or something? Dig up some smuggled goods he buried? "Are you going to be finish with this project of yours soon?" I asked him in English, too exacerbated at that point to speak Russian. "I do not think you are going to find any treasure in there." He just turned around with his big grin, which seemed to say, Don't worry, I know what I'm doing.
I am sure that he did, but while I appreciated his enterprise, I preferred to stay in a compartment with people who had day jobs. So I went some doors down and found a compartment where somebody was actually sleeping, and seemed too utterly tired to care much whether I joined him or not. "Perhaps we need separate compartments for people who want to sleep and those that do not," I suggested to the smiling blond female train conductor as I quietly carried my things to my third compartment for the evening.
Well, here in the third compartment, I finally got some sleep, despite the fact that the Ukrainian Nightmare Express was rather cold, and I had bury myself beneath my Mexican blanket. I got quasi-sleep for about an hour, until my door opened about three in the morning. And who was it, but my dear friend Hannas the train conductor, who appeared to have decided to pop by for a visit! Surely it must be for a serious reason, for I ordinarily do not do night calls on trains from Ukraine to Poland. But how could I be of service to him?
                "Please, come with me into the other compartment!" he asked me eagerly. He was no longer wearing his cute train conductor outfit, but in a wife beater shirt and jockey shorts from which sprung a large erection.
Oh, and what could he possibly want from me there!? I told him that, while I did not have a sign posted outside the door, that I thought he would have known that I had closed shop early for the evening, and for him to please come by during my office hours tomorrow during the late morning.  Unfortunately, I was on a reduced work schedule that week, and could not schedule any shiatsu appointments after midnight. In other words, "No, I am sleeping."
"Please!" he requested in the darkness, kneeling besides my bed. "I want you to come with me."
"No, leave me alone," I whispered to him, assuring them that I was fine where I was.
"Please!" he pleaded, putting his arm on me. "Please!"
He must have been terribly drunk, because I cannot imagine what would ever give him the idea that I was stupid enough to would go with him into another compartment and have sex with him, much less any stranger, on this train.
And yet, he would simply not take no for an answer. "Please, come. Please! Please!" he repeated again and again. He seemed to think that if he said please one hundred times, or maybe one hundred and one times, or maybe three thousand eight hundred and sixty four times, that I would suddenly jump up and  exclaim, "Okay, you seem to want me so bad, you've convinced me!"
                Maybe my whispers for him to go away were not aggressive enough, and I would have to wake the guy across from me up to get rid of this character. "No, go away," I commanded, feeling like one of her hosts scolding her begging dog beneath the dining table.
At last, he gave up, and went away. I tried sleeping to the thumping rhythm of the tracks for about ten minutes, when Hannas decided to try again. Perhaps, he may have been thinking, I had changed my mind in the past ten minutes? Maybe I did not find him to be such a bad guy after all. Surely the prospect of having sex on a train with a strange man from the Ukraine was all too romantic and enticing.
"Please, please!" he begged, taking my shoulder. “Come with me!” I rolled over and gave the guy a wave of negative energy, to which he backed off to avoid being knocked back. But then he lingered by the doorway. "Go away!" But he would not move. "Go away!" I screamed at him, staring him in the eyes. "Help police!! Heeelp!" I started yelling in Russian at the top of my lungs—not because I think Hannas would actually try to rape me—he sounded too weak-hearted for that—but simply because I was really getting sick of this character.
"No! No! Please don't call for the police!" he pleaded, frightened. But he would not leave and continued to stand in the threshold of the compartment door. And nobody seemed to be coming to help me. So I dashed at him and pushed him out of the room. His thin body was like a reed of straw with had little muscle on it, so it was not too difficult to ram the guy through the threshold. I almost wanted to knock the wind out of him, but I thought this would be excessively cruel. Once I got him outside, I quickly slid the door shut. I took a few steps toward my bed, but then my reflexes swung me around to quickly pull the door shut against his arm when he tried opening it again. He pulled his arm back and I slammed the door against his radius and ulna a few times until he withdrew his arm and only his fingers stood between the crevice. I felt terrible for hurting another human being like this, but I swear, if I was not a zen shiatsu practitioner and a writer and did not treasure my hands more than other part of body, I would have crushed this moron's fingers right there.  During this drama, I was screaming at the top of my lungs, more from madness than any sort of fear, until I almost lost my voice.
SLAM! Hitting the nerve endings on his fingers, they slipped through the opening. I had driven the beast out. But what was I suppose to do, hang my body weight with the door handle in my hands all night so he could not open the door? I wished the door had a lock on it. Eventually the female conductor, who I suppose was the real conductor and not some sex crazed maniac trying to get some action on the Ukrainian Nightmare Express, accompanied my visitor away. I was able, at least for an hour, maybe two, to sleep.
In the morning, as we pulled into Warsaw, I took inventory of my things as I reassembled them. The magazine that Kate had given to me was missing. My walkman with my Russian tapes, and German language instruction book, was not here.  My bathroom bag, with my shaver, comb, toothpaste, toothbrush, and massage lotion was nowhere to be seen. I went to the three other compartments I had occupied, but the folks there said they had not seen it. I wondered if and how they had managed to sleep through my drama the night before. Hopefully they might make a complaint for me, though it was not likely.
I considered making a report to the manager or the police myself so I could make another claim on my travel insurance, but what would I say? "Dear Whom It May Concern: As a valued customer of the Ukranian Nightmare Express—oops, Freudian slip, erase that—the Ukrainian National Railroad, I was somewhat dissatisfied by the quality of the services provided by your team of employees. In particular, I thought my baggage was a bit mishandled, had difficulty locating a compartment in which I could comfortably rest, and was slightly perturbed by persistent solicitations by your industrious but narrow-minded staff. I expect that in the future, your company will try to improve your product to better fit your customers' needs, so you will not lose their patronage to any potential competitors in the market. Thank your for consideration and I will look forward to better business relations in the future. Your faithful customer..." For some reason, as I stepped into Warsaw Centralna, I decided it was not worth the time.

10/16/02, Vienna, Austria
"I need to buy some bread," she said, as we reached the Naschmarket. "Naughty, aus!" she cried, as Naughty brought his sniffer to the ground. The pup was going nuts, intoxicated by the profusion of scents rising from the market.
But he was not alone in his ecstasy. "Ruff, ruff," a little golden chihuahua snapped.
"Rouf, rouf," replied Naughty with ferosity.
"Naughty aus!" cried Elizabeth, clearly aggravated by this point. The two dogs just kept barking each other, as though either one or the other would ever back down. Eventually Elizabeth and the owner of the chihuahua managed to separate the two, but Naughty continued to sniff away at whatever scent carried him away. "Naughty aus!" said Elizabeth once again. Eventually, we managed to purchase some bread and head back toward the car.

11/20/02
Sirci’s roommate, who spoke no English, said something in Serbian. “He wants to know if you know why we want Kosovo to be part of Serbia. But I think the guy you spoke to yesterday explained it…”
“Yes,” I told them, figuring I knew him well enough now that I could be honest here, “but I still do not really understand. But maybe I can’t understand. I don’t know.”
“The Albanians in Kosovo are criminals. Most of them simply trade drugs and weapons. This is why they are so poor.”
”This is not true,” I told them. “I have met Albanians and they are all not like this.”
”But most are. And they dress up in Serbian uniforms and shoot each other, so they can accuse us of killing them and have the USA bomb us.” This sounded ridiculous after hearing what Rinor had told me, but I did not waste my breath on it.
”I know what happened was an abuse of NATO. NATO was intended to be a collective security arrangement, not a military alliance to intervene in and police the internal affairs of other states. But why do you keep saying the USA bombed you? I know the USA bombed you, but NATO cooperated. Is it because it was with American bombs?” I asked.
“Yes, and it was Clinton that masterminded all this…We want to show you the bridge your country destroyed. Many NATO countries did not want to bomb us, such as Greece. The Catholic countries will only help Serbia when we both feel threatened by the Muslims, but the Orthodox countries will always support us.”
What a great example of how problematic these alliances could become. “Look, I do not like what the USA did. My friends were protesting back at San Francisco like they would with any war. But I still do not understand why you want Kosovo to be part of Serbia, even if creates all these problems for you.”
”When these terrorists in Kosovo destroy an orthodox church, it really hurts me and other Serbs,” Sasha told me.
“Uh huh… Have you read Amir’s Ghost by Michael Oddatje?” I asked him.
“No,” replied Sasha.
“It is by the author of the English Patient. It is about the civil war in Sri Lanka which is terrible though we hear little about it. Anyway, the memorable scene in the novel for me was when some statues are blown up by the Tamil Tigers and everybody is really upset about it. Similar to the international outrage when the Taliban blew up the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. But these were both single events in the span of a decade. Can you comprehend how many people suffer and die each year in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan? Far more than suffered in the bombing of Serbia. But the question the novel raised for me is this: Is the loss of these monuments—what the Russian author Andrei Bely would call allegories, whether they be churches or Buddhist statues or whatever—more tragic than the tremendous suffering and loss of human life in war?”
“Well…I don’t know, it depends I guess,” Sasha replied.
“Not an easy question is it? But when the World Trade Center was attacked in New York City, many Americans felt spiritually wounded the same way you did when the Albanians try to destroy a Church.”
“But the World Trade Center is just a couple of buildings,” Sasha replied. “It is not like a church.”
“But for Americans it is not just a building. It is emblematic of this freedom and prosperity Americans are bringing to the rest of the world, and of who they are. It may sound silly to you—it sounds dumb to me too, because I know the reality is much less morally uplifting—but this is what many Americans believe, and what they believe makes a difference. And so did the destruction of this building and the Pentagon justify us bombing another country and killing more people? It does not in my mind. But when people invest their souls so deeply in such allegories, they believe an attack upon them justifies anything. And all too often this destroys even more precious lives.”
”You know, there’s another theory here as to why the towers fell—“
”Yeah yeah, I know the USA did it—come on, let’s go see this bridge of yours.”
The air that evening was cool and crisp with just a faint breeze. “It is probably halfway constructed by now. But you will still see the damage,” Sasha told me.
We were on Freedom Bridge now, the largest infrastructural casualty in US “Operation Harmless Angel” according to Sasha and Sirci, and walking toward its uncompleted edge. “They bombed the bridge to stop the army. The ground totally shook when the bombs landed. Can you imagine how terrifying it was for little children? My little brother would cry every night before going to bed for weeks,” Sirci told me. But it was not the only destruction, as they informed me: The bombs also destroyed the central Serbian TV Tower and did damage to their oil factories, known as Kuwaiti.
“We better not speak English from here on,” Sasha said, noticing a police car near the edge of the  bridge. “The police don’t usually come to the bridge. But sometimes Serbian extremists come here and they might make trouble if they see an American here.”
We were about fifty meters from the edge of Freedom Bridge. “Probably a good idea,” I whispered back. A police car had pulled up near the edge and an officer came out to speak with some of the young men. Sasha, Sirci and I stood at the edge of Freedom Bridge and peered down. Below was a giant crane whose yellow neck ascended nearby from a pile of rubble and a stack of round gray metal poles. It reminded me of a similar crane I had seen in photographs of Ground Zero in New York City. Nearby was a large puddle of eerie lime green substance upon which the moon shined. It reminded me of similar pools of toxicity I had seen in photos of Afghanistan after the US bombing campaign. It really amazed me that my country could do this. I know Sasha and Sirci were sad and angry over how the carnage was beyond their control, and they wanted me to feel the pain they had suffered. But all I felt was a sort of numbness, like someone who had emerged from paralysis. Was I supposed to be responsible for this? I could understand at least one reason why many Americans do not travel outside the US borders and if they do, why they tend not to join organizations like Servas and interact with local people. The weight of responsibility others put on your shoulder was massive.
Yet I also realized then how remarkable it was that both Sasha and Sirci seemed so anxious to befriend and communicate with me. So large could be the gap between a government and a citizen, and then between our nations. And yet we were exceptional: the reputation of the Serbs had been tarnished among Westerners, and the Westerners and especially Americans were not so welcome here now. We were then, together on the edge of Freedom Bridge, a small glimmer of world-consciousness that can heal these wounds and prevent any more in the future. And if we could stand as nationally sworn enemies, then we could stand with others. I could only be grateful that I have lived to experience this.
Sasha tossed his cigarette down into the large green crater below. “Come on, let’s go,” he whispered.  When were far enough away, he said, “I was right. They are trying to make trouble.”
“Will the police arrest them?” I asked.
“No, they are rich kids. They try to pick a fight and then just pay the police officer if they get caught,” he explained. 
“Why did they bomb Novi Sad? I thought they bombed Belgrade.”
“They did bomb Belgrade, but they bombed Novi Sad too. I don’t know why. Maybe because we have lots of oil refinery factories here. I don’t know,” Sasha said. Amazing that they had thought so little about this.
The oil explanation certainly seemed consistent with most other aspects of US foreign policy. “Well it certainly wasn’t because it was a humanitarian crisis, which is what Americans heard again and again in the news and why the American public supported the bombing. There are humanitarian crises across the world all the time, with Columbians, Kurds, Tibetans, Tutsis and Hutsis, Somalis—and the US does not do anything. In this book I read recently that you might like, Rogue States by an American, Noam Chomsky, he reports the same number of Columbians lost their lives as Kosovars, so that is not the case…
"I told you we did not do anything to the Kosovars," Sasha insisted.
"Sasha, you should know that I believe it is tragic what happened here--I also find it terrible what happened in Kosovo, but you do not deserve this…The Serbian parliament, I have read, condemned the withdrawal of monitors and called for negotiations for political autonomy in Kosovo with an international presence before the bombing. Even if the USA wanted to end Milosevic's rule, it could have done so by supporting a democratic revolution by the Serbs. But, partly because you are close to the EU and for other reasons, the US wanted to obliterate the former government. But while I know you want to show me the material damage done to your country, I am frightened by the detrimental impact it has had on Serbian civil society. I know you angry at the USA, but please do not dwell on this. It is not worth it. If you do, then you will not rise from these ashes and Freedom Bridge will not be rebuilt." I was struck by how similar this message was to what I found myself telling Rinor in Kosovo. Two completely opposing views, and yet the healing process was universal.
"It is hard not to be angry with what has happened to us…" Sasha said, looking down at the ground as he walked. But then he looked up at me with a smile. "But it is also hard to be angry at you."
12/16/02
                Elton had told me we should leave very early if we wanted a full day in Tirana, so I quickly rose and packed when his alarm went off at five in the morning. He seemed really tired and not up to an excursion to Tirana, but went with me anyway. While walking through the dark and cold streets with some other early risers, Elton spontaneously whistled at a little van and then dashed toward it, urging me to hurry.
The  van, surely enough, was going to Tirana, and there was just enough room to squeeze I and Elton to in. Elton had warned me that the windy road to Tirana would be not be enjoyable due to the decrepit and broken condition of the roads, and he was not kidding. At some moments, I felt myself getting queasy.
Elton looked a lot worse though, with an expression of daze and nausea in his face. Midway through our journey, he spontaneously turned away from me and began vomiting a flood of liquid orange substance profusely. The bus stopped and everyone got out--I guess it was a good time to take a rest. One of the passengers came back with a squeegee and began raking the mess out of the van. Then another came back with some aerosol and tried to spray the putrid scent away. Elton meanwhile spit the yucky aftertaste out. They then gave him a bunch of transparent  blue plastic bags in which he could deposit the rest of his digested food if he felt the urge. He held the bag open in front of him the rest of the ride to Tirana, shaking it up and down whenever we went over some more bumps.
                At some point we stopped at a restaurant, and I felt it my duty to pull out my acupressure literature and suggest to Elton some points to hold for nausea and motion sickness. I suggested now that we had stopped, he best get out of the van and walk around a bit and get a breath of fresh air. But he only stared back at me with this dazed expression of incessant vertigo.
"Does this happen a lot?" I asked him. But he would not answer me.
1/8/03
                Once I had packed up my bags, Phillip told me that, “Anyway, I want to say that as much as I have enjoyed your company and talking with you these past days, I am glad you are leaving, because, I am a very solitary person and really enjoy having space to myself.” Being a writer, I could respect this intuitive need. He clearly lived the way he did for a good reason, and I understood how important solitude was for a writer.
“Well thanks for everything, I am really going to miss this place. I will come back, with someone else this time,” I told him.
“You know, before you go, I must say, I have really been impressed by how hard you have been working on this journal, and listening to you speak about your travels, in Yugoslavia and elsewhere…But the day you came in, I sensed you had an insecurity about you.”
“Why?”
“You just seemed really nervous, looking around a lot, and not looking me in the eyes. I mean after that first evening it was okay, but that first night you seemed insecure…And we are not going to help this by talking about it. I have talked hours and hours about someone’s insecurity, but it does not help it go away. This is something you have to do for yourself. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you this, because I think you are going to be really disappointed in the future.”
Wow, somehow that seemed like a much more realistic diagnosis of my character than the one given to me by the face reader back in Thessaloniki. And I do not think anybody had related me so personally and honestly in all of my travels through Europe. “But I think you will be able to deal with it. Anyway, I want you to know that I think you can overcome this, because you could really be a great man.”
“What do you mean by a great man?” I asked him, since like many concepts, this had been abused.
“Like Winston Churchill, Lao Tzu, Mahatmas Ghandi,” he rattled off a few names.
“You know, I think sometimes that I suffer from too many human weaknesses to be a great man.”
“I am sure they did too,” Phillip replied.
“But you think this insecurity of mine, like this unwillingness to look at people in the eyes will somehow prevent me from becoming this great man,” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said.
I always appreciate such thoughtful critiques of my character, especially when they had a constructive intention. And while I have many vices and shortcomings, I always appreciated when others brought them to my attention, because then I could be more conscious and mindful of them. I was not entirely convinced that I could be “a great man,” as Phillip described it, and I did not want to become famous unless it would make the world a better place in which to live, though if it could I would do my best. This was why I expected so little from the world and human beings, because I know otherwise I will not be so disappointed as Phillip predicted I would be. But I knew I could continue to strive towards perfection and self-actualization, so that even if nothing ever came of it, I would not die with regrets.              
1/27/02, Rome, Italy
Daniela had some medical condition that gave her some paid sick leave from her job at a bank in the morning, so we could stay at the home and have breakfast until about ten. I then went straight to the Beauty and Fitness Expo at the Feria di Roma, and having failed to contact her friend working there, paid to enter it. I had difficulty finding her friend working there, Eugenio, since the entire expo occupied many warehouse buildings and consisted of hundreds of booths. I passed through a maze of cosmetic, clothing, and jewelry companies in different departments. Some master hair stylists in black were giving women one hundred euro haircuts, and had attracted a large crowd around them. Another building was full of these thosuand dollar space age chairs with names like EuroSun that you sit in to tan your skin in “solariums.” In the aesthetic warehouse, rows of chairs had been put before a giant stage, where some men in three-digit suits were organizing a big fashion show. I asked some of them where Eugenio was, but they merely dismissed me. I heard the voice of Chico back in Naples telling me these people were from Milan.
I finally found the health related department, selling lots of herbs, pharmaceuticals and Eastern therapies, and spotting a table by two large white mats where two men were giving shiatsu for some clients, asked her if she knew where a man named Eugenio that was in the masssage business might be. She confessed that she did not know, but the booksellers next to her did know and pointed me in the right direction.
Eugenio, in a red and black checkered jacket and flamboyant orange tie, was busy selling the chakras to some Italians. While I had to wait about ten minutes for his pitch to be over, he seemed very understanding of what I planned to do and gave Daria a call on his mobile. Yet he could not contact her then, so told me to sit in a chair nearby. Eventually he came over and told me to set up next to his booth.
I did not receive many clients throughout the day, mostly because I was competing with many other shiatsu students giving thirty minute sessions for only ten euros. I was pleased when the administrators of the school saw me and finding my translation still a bit poor, took my paper and translated it better for me. While I guess I appeared like a real maverick there trying to find clients near some people who were clearly more organized and prepared for this event, enough people were charmed by my entrepreneurship that they requested sessions. Some clients seemed really uptight, the sort of people who were so obsessed with their beauty that they could not let go and relax. But the last client, with short frizzy red hair and flexible limbs to stretch and breathing with me all the way through was the type of client I would look forward to returning to if I came back to the Rome. I was shocked when after the session remarked that her body was terrible, as it seemed one of the healthiest and most fit I had worked upon. I wonder sometimes how much the beauty and fitness industry feeds on such insecurity and low self-esteem.
I could not help then to find the whole scene to be bizarre. While I appreciated the Expo’s attempts to link health and fitness with beauty, much of what the expo seemed to be selling was not beauty but simply image. And as since question of beauty would inevitably have to be addressed in Italy, where I have heard the word belissimo or some variation thereof perhaps more times than I have heard the word beautiful in English, I felt this was a good time to contemplate it. As I watched the young adults parade around on stage with what appeared to me to be costumes like many models that strutted down the aisles at fashion shows on television to the flash of camera bulbs, how cold, frigid, and utterly unbeautiful many seemed. Certainly, the aesthetic taste was much more dynamic and creative than what I have encountered in the USA and elsewhere, understandable since Italy has long had a grand tradition of beauty that has no doubt given them fine aesthetic sensibilities. They even had amusing monster masks and ghoulish make up artists here, and other exceptionally strange costumes. Though I have many problems with the way the beauty industry seems to manufacture needs for products based on some artificial notion of universal beauty, what Italians called beauty was much more sophisticated than a slim, young woman. As the advertisements suggested, the Arab, Chinese, or African woman could be just as beautiful as the white Europeans, as beauty was distinctive and diverse. And the way they used the word, beauty to Italians was not something extraordinary and obvious as it is in English, but something common that could be seen in everyday life if one had a sensitive eye.
And yet, I could not consider what I saw at the Beauty and Fitness Expo beauty. For beauty was not something that could be put on, by cosmetics, clothes or hair dye. Beauty could only come from the soul. In my eye, a person’s appearance was a manifestation of not only their body, but also their heart, spirit and mind. Perhaps this was why I so often found my shiatsu clients beautiful after our sessions, because they radiated with such serenity and happiness. A description of a person’s face meant nothing to me unless I could read what was in their face, because it told me nothing about who they were. And as I often could not read what was in the stoic model’s faces, or if I could found it to be utterly insincere, I had never been able to find them very beautiful. As cliche as it might sound, beauty in humans came from within, must come from within, so even the magnificent sculptural or painted masterpieces I would encounter in Italy I could not consider as beautiful as a breathing person was in my eyes.
I left the Beauty Expo thinking about society’s preoccupation with what is popularly understood as beauty, since it seemed to me to be a dangerous obsession. And after seeing such poverty in other parts of Europe, I could not help by finding the amount money spent on it here troubling. I wondered if I might be able to distill what I saw as a faux sense of beauty with my shiatsu practice and perhaps teaching it and promote health and happiness at the same time. For much of what I saw as beauty simply stemmed from insecurity. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote on an essay concerning magnaminity, so many of these people were searching to be loved, rather than lovely. To me, inspiring people to be lovely, by making them both healthy and happy, was what I wanted to do with my shiatsu and acupressure practice.
While Portugal might seem to have been Susan´s home, actually this school seemed to be a large part of that home, a home she had had a difficult time leaving forever. But she had managed, even with difficulty, to let go of it and leave it behind and find a new home in making tiles. She spoke of it as a far more significant decision than her move to Portugal. I suppose I would feel the same way about my work. The USA would not feel like home anymore than anywhere else I had been if I returned and would not do anything that mattered to me. Home to me then seemed not just a place where I lived but where I could serve a purpose.
“So, after all these countries, are you going to return to the USA or are you going to settle down to live in Europe?".Susan asked me.
She put the question so frankly and directly, as if suggesting that the answer was in no way certain. I was struck by her question because so many Servas hosts simply seemed to suppose that I was only visiting their country and at a certain point I would return to the USA. But the way Susan posed it, I did not at all hesitate to speak openly of what my plans were. "I would like to return to the USA to become an acupressurist and then return to live and work in Istanbul, Moscow, London and Rome for a while. Do you think you will ever return to Britain? Do you ever go back to Britain?”
“Yes, every few years we visit. But everything of ours, our friends, and family and possessions are in Portugal, so it would not be easy for us to return to settle down in Britain,” Susan answered..
“It would not be easy to return to Britain,” agreed Paulo shaking her head. “We go back to London from time to time, but is not such an easy place to settle back into. No, our life is here in Portugal now. I don’t think we would ever leave now.”
Clearly, Portugal possessed something very special that I would have never known if I did not visit. It was not a very wealthy country, nor a powerful one, nor a very attractive one in terms of its cultural capital. In relation to other countries in Europe, it always seemed to be on the margins. And yet I had met in my few encounters in Portugal not only an ex-patriot who had decided to return to home, but also two British citizens who had decided to make a life there, perhaps because it possessed a tranquility and lack of anxiety I found in few countries in Europe. I already found that its deep rooted traditions made it very special. And so Portugal no doubt had something to teach about my place in the world.
4/1/03, Paris, France
Along the way the Cafe Voltaire, which seemed to be a personal favorite of his, he told me of how he had lived in this same quarter in different places for some time every other year in his life. I guess for Ron, as for many people, Paris´ charm does not wear away fast. When we arrived, he told me he had known the owner and some of the people who worked fifty years, and indeed they seemed pleased to see him. I wondered if I might ever know anyone else the same way when I got older--perhaps things are different now.
“Fifty years,” said Ron, smiling and shaking his head and looking at the man behind the bar, who smiled back at him.
Ron still seemed particularly amazed at what I had done with my shiatsu in Russia, which I found interesting because it had been so long ago and I had so many other adventures. But at that moment my attention was on the French, who so far seemed nearly apathetic if not simply dense in respect to what I did, and whom I yet wanted to offer them what I had as elsewhere. "So, I take it the French are pretty sophisticated," I said it.
"They sure are! The French education system is so excellent; students who pass the bacalarate in the American high schools can skip half of the requirements at the university," he told me.
"So then, what do I have to do to impress the French?" I asked him.
"You can´t, forget about it," he said, laughing with good humor. An abundance of food came. He smiled. "Well there you go, now you know how people in Paris live! We go for a walk in the morning, have breakfast at a cafe, we go out and walk a little more, we have lunch and talk in another cafe, and then go for another walk and then later have dinner," he said with great jollity.
"Yeah, but--"
"Could you please keep your voice down? You do not need to speak so loudly," he said to me. He seemed quite perturbed by this.
I kept forgetting. It was nice to have someone remind me after all those months in Italy and Spain. "Yeah, but get real Ron," I said more quietly, "most people do not live this way. Not even most Parisians live this way. This is what tourists do. Most people are working now."
"No, many Parisians live this way. This is a city of rich people who spend their time enjoying beautiful things!" he said flamboyantly.
 "Yes, but not everyone cannot spend your life simply consuming expensive beautiful things that most people could not afford. You have to produce also, or an economy would not exist."
"I think you have a very narrow idea of an economy. How could these beautiful things exist if nobody was there to consume them?" he asked me.
Well, I could appreciate this insight, especially as an artist because if everybody consumed the mediocre, then no one would have reason to produce anything grand and beautiful. And this, as I already recognized, was partly what made Paris such a captivating city, especially for Americans normally immersed in the banal and mediocre who would otherwise not enjoy dealing with the bureaucracy and stress of working there. Yet I had visited enough cities as a tourist the past year that simply eating, talking and walking did not seem to be a meaningful existence. Of course, I did not want to be exploited to misery in some country either the way I imagined many Parisians were who somehow escaped Ron´s attention. As with everything else, a balance was necessary. But I knew now that for me, the most significant way to understand a country was to play a part of it, and if I could not do this in Paris it would not enrapture me the way other cities have, no matter how magical it supposedly was.
I was amazed by the amount of food we were wasting, both at lunch and dinner. I could not eat three big meals a day as I once did, since typically a European breakfast is very meager. After being Europe for ten months, the waste struck me as shockingly American. Yet Ron did not seem to give much thought to it, and he was taking me out, so I was not going to make a fuss about it.
"These are not the type of guys you are going to give shiatsu," declared Ron on the street as we passed some guys with stiff looking shoulders in suits.
"You sure, Ron?" I joked. "They wouldn't want to come to my mat?"
“No, I'm sorry!“ he said laughing

The Best of the Mexico Journals

6/6/97: Monte Alban and Oaxaca
On the bus back I met this woman named Daniela from Tabasco who was doing her masters in psychoanalysis at the university at Mexico City. So I started talking about the recent wor ulinity in Tokyo hostess clubs, and the surrealism in the films of Luis Bunuel, and we hit it off well and agreed to practice our English/Spanish together. I joined her and her friends, Cynthia from Cuba and Hilde from Puerto Rico, and went to this this little pueblo where they had these wacky and colorful crafts. My favorite which were these women in bikinis with animal heads. Cynthia commented on how surreal the town was, with bugs on the ground, giant oxes and roosters in peoples yards, and "Hip Hop Hooray Ho!" playing in the background.
At lunch I learned that Hilde studied psychoanalysis too and Cynthia studied community organizing. I talked about the feminists I liked and was pleased to hear they knew them. When I gave the post-structuralist critique of feminism and they nodded their heads, I knew I was around some smart people.
We went back to the city where the Zocalo now resembled a circus, with little kids chasing after balloons, guys in sombreros, and a marimba band (Mexican but African-influenced according to Daniela) playing. Here Daniela got me to say the longest word I have ever uttered in Spanish: fenomenologiamente (phenomenologically).
We later met k of bell hooks on phallocentrism, the anthropology of Anne Allison on corporate masc to attend the Guatezuela together at that restaurant, which was a weird experience because all these extravagant dances and lively music were interspersed with dead silence. My female companions's favorite moment was when one of the dancers told me on stage that I could have many women near me but it did not matter because she was the one I wanted. Afterward we hit the Zocalo again, where we saw some excellent capoeira (capawhera, the afrobrazilian martial art and dance), and this marimba band which Daniela said her uncle claimed originated from Africa. Daniela told me to email her when I reached Mexico city, for which Iwas really grateful. It is comforting to know you have a friend in the third largest city in the world before you go there.
6/15/01: Tuxtla Guitarrez
                That evening I caught another bus to Tuxtla Gutierrez, where I found about four different protests outside the state government building: disabled people wanting better public transportation, an ethnic community refusing to politically integrate with the state, teachers demanding more pay and some students from all over the state who had gathered to demand more money and resources for their community center. I talked with all of them, but I ended up spending the night with the students who had constructed an excellent tent with wooden poles and sheets. They all surrounded me as I spoke with their lead organizer, translated their proclamations of demand into English, and sung songs they might know in English. I played soccer with them in the plaza and afterward stayed up late talking to these Mayan kids and learning how difficult it is in Chiapas if you are Chole, Tzotzile, Tzeltale, or Zoque to not only receive social justice from the government but to succeed economically. Many of these kids felt protest was the most empowering thing for them.
6/20/01: Cancun, Yucatan
                I was glad when I got back to the beach, where at least all I got were strange stares from the gringos there. At about three in the afternoon, I had begun to become dehydrated and hungry, and the last 5 kilometers began to seem utterly impossible. Man, forget Bay To Breakers!--try walking 21 kilometers in the sand with a huge backpack and sleeping bag! The moments in which my legs collapsed beneath me and I rested on the sun deck chairs were probably far more wonderful than anything that the other tourists there were experiencing, staying close to their hotels. My body begged me not to continue, saying every next kilometer was becoming longer and longer, but my mind and spirit were set on reaching Club Med (the last resort) by nightfall, so I could take a bus to Islands of Mujeres and get some affordable lodging. I walked close to the water, as the sand was more compact here and the water was a relief (even though salty, and wiping out and soaking my wallet, dictionary,passport, and Lonely Planet in my pockets and money bag).At one point this guy saw how dehydrated I was and gave me a fat bottle of purified water. Then, my stomach reminding me that stupidly I had not eaten that morning and that it would not wait any longer, I stopped by a restaurant and asked for some tortillas, which the owner gave me a whole packet. These were the most delicious tortillas I have ever had, and they melted in my mouth as I devoured the carbos. I took a short nap afterward.
I woke up and decided I had enough strength to reach the last few miles, and slowly (oh so slowly!) came closer and closer to the pink hotel next to the Club Med where I planned to stop for a breather before reaching the end. Once there, I dropped off my backpack and continued onto Club Med, which I have an interest in because my anthropology of tourism professor has talked a lot about it. It had this real nice bar and restaurant, a dance club, a beauty parlor, a swimming pool, and gringos gawking over their pictures, which were taken for them.
I went back to my backpack, where I decided that it was too late to go back to the city and that I would crash on the beach for the night. This old guy from Illinois came out expressing concern for my safety in traveling alone and sleeping on the beach, as he had a boy about my age with him. I assured him that so few people probably sleep on this beach like me here that the probability that some night prowlers were lurking about these high class parts was low, which he agreed was probably right. Later his son came out with some pizza and Pepsi, and we talked about Cancun for a while. I said that Mexico was such a diverse country that Cancun did not represent at all and that one must really travel through Mexico to know it in its totality. He said I reminded him of this backpacker in his favorite book, Beaches--I think I may have inspired him to travel like me.
Mexico City, 7/14/01
                Afterward Daniela had to go to this quincinera party, which we both presumed was private. Yet I told her honestly that spending more time with a Mexican family, especially at this event, would be not only enjoyable but an experience of great importance to both understand Spanish and Mexico. This was enough to get her to call and get me invited.
I was so thrilled and grateful to come to this party. (How many American tourists get to go to a quincinera?) A quincinera party is the fifteenth birthday party of a Mexican females, which supposedly marks the point where they pass from girlhood to womanhood. Or, as Daniela wittily described it, it is where they show you off like a cow. However arbitrary and ridiculous it may seem, Mexican families take this seriously. Daniela said the family was poor but they had sold many of their valuable things to pay for this expensive party! Everybody was all dressed up, and it was not until Iker, the little cousin of Daniela, ran around the house with a flag declaring "I'm hungry!" that we finally got going.
At the party was lots of American junk food and pop music playing in the background. This struck me as odd but Daniela said that if Mexicans have a choice over a Mexican thing and an American thing they will always choose the American thing. Still, somehow I doubted that quincineras were the same as this twenty or thirty years ago, since the event was nothing like that described in my Spanish textbook. During the first act the birthday girl wore a white dress and these four young guys in suits held her up and treated her like some flower, and then she had to dance with her father  and just about every other man in the house. Much to the frustration of her family, Daniela and I psychoanalyzed all this in English, interpreting it as perhaps an liminal enactment of a polygynous fantasy defying the reality of a monogamous, patriarchal society, or a fetishization of her as an object of desire for all men to share that evening before they must give her up to one man. But then our birthday girl came back out in leather pants and a UK tank top and started dancing Madonna-like to that Britney Spears song that goes (excuse my ignorance of pop
culture),"Oops, I did it again! I have broken your heart! You trusted in me, but I am not
that innocent!" or something like that. This scene was clearly a declaration of her self-determination and freedom to be the sort of woman she wanted. Somehow I imagined this was not performed around twenty or thirty years ago. Finally, the final act involved her coming out in this skimpy outfit and dancing to salsa music. This seemed to correspond to the reality that to be self-reliant today women must make a living somehow, and there is no business like the tourism business. I liked how the crazy woman who had supposedly choreographed the whole performance, expressed these different (though ridiculously idealized) aspects of womanhood, and wondered just how much time these kids had put into rehearsing all this.
The rest of the party was more organic, with everybody just getting on the floor and dancing. Many people suggested I dance with Daniela, but she did not want to and seemed really estranged. She said the mother and father of the girl were acting like they were so happy, but in reality they just fought all the time and this was all a big lie. After a while she started to get depressed and so we left for her house. She got lost driving around in her own neighborhood, and then we had some car problems. Eventually her aunt and uncle found us, and I ended up spending the night on the couch in their living room, the chrome of the cars front bumper inches from my face in the living room because they were afraid of having it stolen outside. Really bizarre.
Now getting to Real De Catorce was complicated: first you have to ride a bus to Matehuala, and then wait for a special bus to go to this dirt tunnel, where you have to board another bus and wait until another car came through the one lane tunnel before you could pass through to the town. But I must say that, even if you go away from Real De Catorce not liking it, I think visiting the place is a really enriching experience, especially if you have never been to a ghost town. Supposedly it used to be a boom and bust silver mining town until it was abandoned before the revolution and never experienced further development because the price of silver slumped or bandits took it over.
Yet I almost believe the government has decided to keep it the way it is in order to draw in tourists. Many wealthy looking Mexicans and foreigners were walking about, being all bizarrely modern in such an antiquated place. Coming here is like going back a century, with buildings composed of old grey crumbling brick and mortar, as though an earthquake had levelled the town and nobody ever bothered to repaired it. Even the government building looked boarded up and abandoned, with nothing inside except a small room with a desk in it and some papers on top of it. Lots of animals went around liberated, with kids play-fighting with sheep and goats, donkeys eating garbage, people on horses, and dogs running freely around. The landscape looked really rugged and merciless. By the arroyo, the countryside looked like it was encroaching upon the town from all sides and about to swallow it up.
I met some strangefolks here too: One woman from Monterrey said at night she had dreams ofhaving spiritual communion with the ghost of Pancho Villa. This other guy who had gotten (perhaps too much) into Hara Krishnaism talked with me about mysticism and spirituality, and proposed, like the Huichols, we go out and rediscover the spiritual homeland Winikuta by ingesting some peyote (a hallucingenic cactus) and have some visions in the middle of the nearby desert. Though I could imagine my co-worker Matt back in California, a big Carlos Castenada fan, eagerly accepting, I decided I was not ready to see the cosmos tonight.
All the hotels were all either booked or really expensive here and I decided I would leave. I asked a guy when the next bus went back, and he said not until tomorrow morning, and the only other way back was to walk or ride a horse through the desert, which would take four hours. This smelled deadly to my senses, so I asked if I could take a taxi. He laughed and said if I could not see any ATMs in sight, did I think I would find a taxi? Fortunately, after waiting by the main road for long enough though, a taxi did come through with some people. It cost me a ridiculous 350 pesos to ride back to the Matehuala,which was more than I pay most buses--but I was not about to spend a night in a ghost town...
8/7/01-8/10/01: Northeast Mexico: Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo
On the bus ride to Reynosa I met this homeless guy from Monterrey who could speak some English and said he was homeless. They played some soap operas on TV, so I asked him if he thought Mexican men found the white women more attractive than darker skinned women, which he said they did. (Some women on the bus, however, said the color of the men's skin did not matter to them.) I asked him why Mexicans like to consume so many American products, and he said because they were better. When I said I thought Jumex was better than Coca Cola he said that was because Jumex was produced by America. The equation seemed to be America eauals the best.
When we arrived in Reynosa, we went to eat in this economical restaurant, as he had little money. He had talked about immigrating to the US illegally because he had no papers, so I tried to tell him the dangers he would meet while crossing the frontier. But I soon realized that he was not listening to me at all, and that he was totally transfixed by this track race between Mexican, American and Canadian women on TV, which all the other people in the cafe watched, enraptured, as well. He told me to be quiet for a moment and watch the race. As the women raced around the track, I asked him, Why is this more important than discussing the potential life threatening dangers of crossing the border? He would not answer me, but simply stared blankly past me. After the America won, Canada followed, and Mexico came in last, they played the whole thing over again in slow-mo three times and had all these Very Important People (like the Mexican president) assured the Mexican woman that she had done a great job representing Mexico and that her country was proud of her. (Why they did not show the American and Canadian woman is beyond me, as though all that mattered was that Mexico lost.) Once a commercial came on, the spell was broken, and I asked my companion if he considered the Mexican woman's defeat important because he was Mexican, to which he replied yes. I think most of the other people in the cafe would have answered similarly.
Most of the hotels were very expensive here, both because they are near the border and require air-conditioning in the sweltering heat of the night. My companion decided he would sleep in the same cheap hotel I was staying at, so he picked up some cardboard to sleep on while we walked back. The hotel room, with only a very slow ceiling fan, was like an oven. He said I ought to hold onto my stuff since many robberies occurred in cheap hotels like this, and after I saw people sticking their head through the window and thought the owners lounging outside the door did not consider themselves liable for anything going on here, I decided to take his advice.
In the morning I asked him if he still planned to immigrate. He said no, he decided to stay here. I suggested he get a job and get some money to return to Monterrey and get his papers for better work. I said his ability to speak English was valuable social capital he ought to exploit near the border or in the tourism industry. But he did not agree and said he would be all right because he was a Christian and God would look out for him. I suggested if he was so religious that he find some work with the local church, but he said he was Protestant and not Catholic so this would not work. So then I told him that I could not help him any longer unless he could help himself. I told him I wanted to go see the maquiladoras (where he could not obtain employment without papers), so we parted ways.
A guy I met in a long line of Mexicans waiting near the immigration office to obtain a daily passport told me where the maquiladora zones were. I took to the largest zone, but I could not allow me access as a student doing research on the maquiladora factories even with my IDs. Security and reception said I would need to have a letter from a professor to do such a research. After two hours of walking around under the scathing sun in this waste land of roads running by fence-enclosed factories, I was exhausted and decided to give up. I did find one of those wholesale warehouses, where you can buy corporate products in bulk, which is probably where all the merchants in the city obtain them. I talked to several workers on the way back, and they said that they only earned around 80 pesos a day, though they thought the job was fairly easy. I do not understand how Mexicans can afford to live in Mexico on such a low salary, as the costs of living seem more indexed to American prices than what Mexicans can pay, especially near the border.
Downtown, I met this guy with whiskers and chin stubble who spoke some English, having spent sometime in Texas. He said that if Mexicans can go over and work in the states, they can come back and "live like kings." He kept telling about this sleazy part of Reynosa, called "Boys' Town." My curiosity could not resist requesting a tour of this place. So he walked me down this street until it became a dirt road with large muddy puddles. We crossed through this gate with guards that he said ordinarily request 100 pesos for entry, but knew him too well so they did not ask me. On all sides were more strip clubs than I have ever seen--I wondered if they competed or if the "boys" visited them all. Continuing down the walk, we passed by several wooden doors, some locked, and others open with women either standing outside or lying on the bed within their rooms, wearing high and low cut dresses and ghostly make-up. My guide asked me if I wanted any "fucky fucky" or "sucky sucky" from them, but the women seemed to miserable to enjoy such a thing. I wondered if they lived in these rooms and how often they traveled outside "Boys' Town."
My guide took me to his home and introduced me to his mother and his sister, both prostitutes. They kept trying to offer me beer, which my guide ended up drinking instead. He told me to relax and then went outside. His mother asked me if I wanted some "fucky
fucky." When I said I did not even know her that well, she asked me if I wanted to marry her. I told her that I did not believe in marriage because it brings burdensome economic and legal structures into people's personal lives. She was not even listening at that point though and took some Brute from out of her pants and sprayed it under her arms. I went outside to
see my guide leaning up against the wall, very drunk. Then suddenly his sister came from behind me and stuck her hand straight into my pocket, trying to extract my wallet. I stopped her thievery, and I tried to throw her off, but she clinged to me like a burr, and eventually I had to violently pull away, ripping my blue denim shorts. My guide and his
mother just laughed like loony hyenas, until my guide eventually escorted me away from his psycho sister.
I had a hard time understanding him now because he had slurred words and bloodshot eyes. I talked to some of the strip club guards, who seemed like a very insecure and unhappy bunch, as though uncomfortable with me taking a tour of "Boys' Town" out of mere curiosity. I wanted to speak with some of the prostitutes, but they would merely avert their eyes and get quiet unless you asked to go into their room with them. So I decided to do so with a seemingly friendly and unlascivious prostitute who my guide said wanted me for free. Once in her room, which was basically a bed and a table with toiletries spilled across it, I started asking her questions, as I was curious about what her life was like. She said she had come from Tampico four years ago and only worked her for part of the year, then went home with the good money she earned there. I then asked her how I knew she did not have AIDS and she said she always used contraceptives and went in for a medical examination every month, showing me this piece of paper with a list of all the diseases she had been checked for. I said this was a lot better than legal prostitution, but it still did not insure that she was not infected all the time in between. I wanted to ask her more sensitive questions, but at that point she clapped her hands and said, "Okay, take off your clothes!" I cannot imagine how alienating it would feel to have sex with someone I barely knew or trusted. And so I could not understand how either the men or women there could objectify their flesh to strangers night after night without becoming totally estranged from themselves. I also could tell that I was causing offence to her however by analyzing her situation, so I said if she didn't want to talk anymore, then I would like to leave. She became so angry, incredulous, and hurt, she demanded I pay her 200 pesos, which I did, feeling like I had wasted her time.
I was ready to leave at that point, as I began to gain a sense walking out what "Boys' Town" would be like the rest of the night: Young Texans riding their trucks into town through the muddy puddles, then stumbling around whore to whore and boasting of their sexual exploit(ation)s to each other as though they were some Don Juan. Perhaps this mindless and spiritless revelry did not alienate them because they rarely experienced intimacy with themselves or another human being, or this bodily orgy was about only an temporary intentional misrecognition or disassociation of that intimacy they knew
by reducing their relationships with others to meat. The women I could only have compassion for, since while they did have a choice many were drawn to prostiution simply because it offered them possibility of escaping their poverty. If they didn’t enjoy their sex work, then they suffered the denial and destruction of that intimacy and sensitivity that creates mutual and genuine relationships between whole human beings, upon what I imagine a harmonious society could be based upon.
A feeling of deep emptiness would not leave me until I got on the bus for Nuevo Laredo. Yet, as depressed as I was, I was glad I had experienced Boys' Town that night. It would have be too easy for me to superficially morally condemn the place as many do without having gone there and learning on my own what it really meant to me.
Early in the morning at Nuevo Laredo I met these three kids in the plaza who all had family in the US and were trying to immigrate there. Two of them had paperwork.
But a third, Julian, with a hard, tired face did not. A cop came up to us and told the immigrant kids to scram, so I walked with Julian to the pavement by the church in the other plaza, where he said we would not be bothered.
Julian said he had been trying to cross the river at night for three weeks on a tire. He said he did not make enough money in the factory to support his mother and little brother and so would have to go to the US to earn more. A priest came by and invited him to come to some dinner and hear the Word of God. Julian put his hand on his stomach and winced, so I took him to a comedor and bought him two burritos. I asked him if many people did this for him, and to my relief he said yes. I told him he ought to go to the religious deal for dinner, regardless of what propaganda they were spreading, and that I could go to Monterrey and let his family know he was okay. He gave me his address so I could visit them. Before leaving for Monterrey, I walked through the artisan market and I was amazed by all this dross that Texas day-trippers probably spend their money on, and wondered if they knew that meanwhile kids were starving in the streets trying to immigrate to work.
When I reached Monterrey, I had some difficulty finding the neighborhood that Julian lived in, as this traffic cop said he could not help me. But then this very kind girl told me to take this bus and where to get off for the bus that went to Julian's home. Then she
gives me her phone number and tells me to call her if I have any more problems. How kind! And all knew about her was that she went to prep school and lived in this poor community!
When I reached Julian's neighborhood to see all these little kids playing in the streets while their parents and grandparents sat in chairs outside, talking and watching them. Julian's mother and uncle were very surprised when I came to assure them that Julian was still safe and alive in Nuevo Laredo. They told me that Julian had made this journey several times as other people in the family, like the uncle had and they were not terribly worried about him. I inquired into their living situation, and Julian's uncle told me that he was a bus driver that only earned 80 pesos a day because many people would not pay or thieves would rob him in the mountains. He told me his weekly living expenses budget, and again I wondered how Mexicans can afford to live in their country. I told him that I was hungry and wanted to leave to get some food, but they offered me dinner, which I felt would be
rude to not accept. Though only beans and tortillas and chips, the meal was very filling and delicious. I offered them 200 pesos to help the family, but they refused and then asked if I would like to stay the night, as it was no dark outside and buses would soon stop running. I was quite puzzled until I realized that my coming there to tell them that their son was alive and well was a gift enough. So I ended up spending the evening with them and their neighbors talking Spanish on the porch, while these girls down the street sang Ricky Martin verses and screamed. I am really in a barrio I thought, as I fell asleep in their living room.

Creative Writing

Below are some sections from my creative writing, if you are interested in reading more please email me.

Selected Passages of Prose

                                                                                           
 7/3/95          
An Adored Baby, a Jealous Boy, and an Imprisoned Hamster

            My cousin struggled hard to cross the room on his hands and knees. It inspired my mother, and she cheered him on. All my other relatives, my aunt, two uncles, grandmother and two grandfathers stared in amazement at the baby’s feat with big goofy smiles.
            “Yes, good boy! Oh wow! What a good coochie woochie baby!” my mom exclaimed, leaning over in her chair and holding her arms out to him to come to her.
            I was the only one not interested. “What’s the big deal? He’s only crawling! Every kid learns it eventually.” I couldn’t help saying it, and for the first time that visit my relatives rested their eyes on me.
            My mother had an anoyed look on her face. “Robert, if you are going to sit around and criticize the baby why don’t you leave?”
            Well, that sure made me feel good. I didn’t feel like getting into an argument though, because we never got anywhere. I didn’t want to be around that baby and his fans either though, so I left the room.
            I went into the kitchen, looking for something to eat. I picked up a bag of chips on the counter—even though it was close to dinner time—and began munching on them.
            I then wandered down the hallway into the far back room of the house, where I often went when I needed refuge. I closed the door behind me hoping it would muffled their voices and I could have some quiet. I flopped myself on a nearby bed, feeling like a derelict of the household.
            In this sanctuary of mine there was a cable TV that got all the channels, including my favorite one, Nickelodeon. It also had a bed to lie on and think about things. My favorite thing in the room however was a hamster named George. I often felt salvation when I saw George and reassurance that I wasn’t the only one neglected. Now that the house was echoing with talk of the baby nobody ever seemed to stop by and ask how George was doing. He was like an antique, something my aunt and uncle had but didn’t appreciate any longer and sent back into the far reaches of the house. I would talk to George for hours about how they never paid any attention to me and he would never make a sound, only listen politely. George understood the way I felt, because he was in the same neglected position.
            He lived in a clear plastic cage, with the front cracked. Extending from it were plastic tubes to crawl through, though George never did. On the bottom surface of the cage was a metal grating that provided space to land his droppings on the bottom of the cage. A stench rose from it, but it wasn’t oppressive. His cage hadn’t been cleaned for a long time; hamster manure covered the bottom. A water bottle hung on the far right and provided George with a drink. This to, hadn’t been tended to; the water level was very low. Next to this was his yellow food bow, filled with dry seeds and other small trail mix victuals. On the far right was a little cot that he would lie on when tired. In the middle of it all was an exercise wheel. He never understood that he couldn’t go anywhere in it, no matter how fast he ran. Sometimes I thought he was trying to escape from it all, escape from the sad life he led to a place where other masters were and he could be free and happy in their company. A few times he had really tried to escape, but he never made it out because a cover rested on top of his cage. Aunt Polly had told me never, never to lift the cover off the cage. I knew that George longed to escape, and I was for his motives, yet only stood by cheering him on in his attempts to escape, afraid to help him. If he ever did manage to get out of his cage though, I wouldn’t stop him. The whole atmosphere of the unsanitary cage was depressing. George couldn’t go anywhere to see anybody but had to stay and wait for them to come to him, and then only if they wanted, which besides me, few did.
            Feeling depressed I went over to talk to George now. Usually the main topic of our talks was my jealously for the baby because I knew he felt it too, even though he may have never really seen the baby. He knew some attracting force was keeping people from seeing him. In the past family gatherings the two of us had received hardly any attention at all. A few months ago—I didn’t know exactly when, nor cared—my aunt and uncle had the child. I was the only one who didn’t jump for joy. My mom went into ecstasy though, and was on the phone for hours asking questions, making periodic checks of how many times the baby went to the bathroom and at what times he went to sleep.
            ”It was like she was writing the baby’s life story or something,” I said to George. “Whenever dad is home from one of his business trips, mom comes over here to visit; she never did that before they had the baby and it was only you. Lately every family gathering takes place over here and we never have anybody come over to our house anymore. I’d like them to come over to visit me for a change and see how I’m doing. It sure seems like a long time since any of the family has noticed me. You know what I’m talking about huh? Besides me nobody ever comes back here to say hi to you.”
            At this George looked up from the seed he was nibbling on and wiggled his whiskers by twitching his nose. He had little black beady eyes that glanced up at her, little claws that clutched on to his food tight, tiny ears rose up to hear her voice with sympathy, and tan fur that sprouted from his skin like grass from a meadow. His character was something right out of a storybook. I smiled at him and eating my chips, continued.
            “The only thing everybody is concerned about around here is the baby. They always make a big deal about everything it does. Whether it cries or just burps they make a big fuss over it. They never quite saying how ‘cute’ and ‘what a darling’ it is. It makes me sick.
            “Dad isn’t all that bad about it though. He is nicer and realizes that the baby isn’t the only thing in the house that needs attention. In a way he is sort of my buddy during family gatherings lately. But he isn’t going to be at this one until tomorrow, and I’m still surrounded by a bunch of adults worshipping that kid.
            ”Sometimes I try to get their attention by doing something really unusual, but they always get mad and tell me to settle down. Well, I’m sorry but nobody sees me if I sit around and do nothing; I don’t have it that easy. Whenever I complain mom says, ‘He’s an only child, he is used to getting more attention.’ Maybe, but I’m not going to need as much attention as that kid when it grows up. Now that I am growing up, my mom doesn’t care about me anymore. I guess the new kid is suppose to help her relive the experience she can’t have again.”
            After I was born the doctor told my mom that she wouldn’t be able to have another child again. This upset her, and she brought up this fact often in self-pity. Noticing that most of my friends who are siblings often fought, I didn’t really want a sister or brother. My mom however planned to raise a big family. People told my mom that she had to make the most of what she had. Except, I don’t know if that was such a good thing to tell her. She was always overprotective and concerned about what I did. She worried every time I would go to the park and play with the other kids. She always wanted to meet all my friends before I even went to their house.
            “I like getting watched over a little bit though, at least more than I do when I come over here. Attention isn’t the only thing the baby has more of though; it gets a lot more presents too. Do you know how many presents it got last Christmas? Well, I don’t know exactly but I know it got a lot more than I did. I admit that when I was younger they gave me more presents on special occasions as others, but not as much as that baby. It got everything! It’s still in diapers and he already has tons of clothes waiting for him. He can wear something new everyday for the rest of his life! The kid has hundreds of toys to play with, way more than I do, and if you went and bought him another, it’d probably already have it!
            “Everything wouldn’t be all that bad if I was more interested in the baby, but I’m not. I can’t see what’s so great about it at all. It doesn’t do anything great, at least nothing that I couldn’t do. I would much rather be playing baseball with the other kids than watching a baby crawl across the floor, wouldn’t you George?”
            George was busy sucking on his water bottle and didn’t answer my question. “Oh, that’s right, you can’t,” I answered for him. I watched him stop drinking then crawl back to his bed to sleep, since there was little else to do. I suddenly felt a deep compassion for George, who led a boring and languid life. Like myself, nobody paid much attention to him anymore, but in many ways he had it worst off than I did. At least I had the freedom to do what I felt like—that is, under my parent’s rule of authority. Everyday of his life restricted to the limited premises to his cage, when George probably wanted roam wherever he pleased. What could he really do in there besides sleep, eat, drink, crap, and exercise? I could feel his fervent adventurous soul burning in that tiny body to break out of that confinement and go wherever he wished; though in time he probably learned that he couldn’t. By now he had lost hope in escaping and felt indifferent toward his fixed condition. Sadly, it seemed like something he had to accept. No wonder he sat there and listened to me bable on; he had nothing better to do.
            “I can’t see why they ‘adore’ the baby so much, can you? What’s so ’adorable about the baby? Is it because it is small? Well, I’m sorry I got so big but there was nothing I could do about it.” I paused and then added, “No, that can’t be the reason, or they would all be standing around, staring at you, wouldn’t they?”
            From downstairs my aunt called, “Dinner’s ready!” I whispered, “I’ll be back after dinner, okay George? I’ll see if I can sneak off some food for you.” I then plodded over to the dining room, dreading to hear the corny baby praise ring in my ears.
            In their plans to raise the family, her aunt and uncle had bought a huge new house. Along the back room it had about four bedrooms, a garage, and about four closets; I had explored it thoroughly and counted them. The roof was too high for me to climb onto and safely jump off, as I did with ours. Their backyard lawn was huge and at the far end of it was a little chicken shack. My aunt often asked me if I could fetch the eggs. A classmate of mine named Tommy had once told me that he had gotten pecked in the eye by a chicken. Because of this story and that Tommy wore glasses I often hesitated when my aunt asked me for this favour. The house made our home look small and I didn’t see why they needed such a big house to raise such a small child. It wasn’t as if it was going to grow into a monster or anything.
            When I entered the dining room all my relatives sat at the table except my aunt, the proud cook in her apron, who walked from the kitchen to the dining room serving the food. Seated at the table was my mother, uncle, grandmother, grandfather, my other big aunt, and of course, the prince himself, baby Phillip. They all dressed up for the dinner; even my mother had gotten me out of T-shirt and jeans and into a little gray over a white shirt. A fine white table cloth covered the table. Fancy silverware lied on the dinner mats. Flames danced upon the candles, slowly burning the taper away. I never liked the whole formal setting; it made me feel discreet.
            I sat down at the empty seat between my mother and grandfather. “Don’t you look nice this evening,” complimented my bigger aunt. I acknowledged by nodding even though I didn’t care much about how I looked. What I looked like wasn’t anything better than crawling acorss the floor, and not exactly the sort of thing I wanted to be recognized for. I didn’t understand why adults appreciated the stupidest little things….

Bugged Out

2/2/96

            The sun shined brightly on a jar of grasshoppers he held in his hand. The bugs lay on top of each other in a mass of decay, those on the bottom dead and those on the top jumping up and hitting the lid.
            “Yeeew, that’s gross Tommy! I’d never touch those bugs!” remarked Sherry with a look of disgust. She turned and walked away.
            “I have to be careful whenever I put a new grasshopper in now, because then they might all leap out,” Tommy said as he stared into the jar observantly.
            “Have you ever had one jump in your face!?” exclaimed Micheal in his whiney voice, turned on by the idea.
            “Yeah. They jump at your eye and try to chew it up,” Tommy explained, with the awkward movement of his jawbone.
            ”That’s so gross,” Micheal replied. “Have you ever eaten one?” His eyes lifted in both curiosity and incredulity.
            Tommy looked at the jar, at the brown grasshoppers down at the bottom. He brought his head back up. “No, but one time I put one in my grandma’s salad.”
            “Did she freak?”
            “Naw, she didn’t even notice.“ Tommy shook his head. ”She ate the whole thing!” claimed Tommy, smiling.
            “Next time you should put two in there! They can’t taste like nothing. Not if they eat out your eye,” said Micheal, shaking his head.
            “What’s all that stuff on the bottom?” asked Shaun.
            “Grasshopper turds,” answered Tommy, turning to him.
            “That’s really gross!”
            “Well, that’s what they are,” Tommy replied matter-of-factly, shrugging his shoulders.
            “Oh man. I don’t ever want to see that jar again,” said Shaun. He moved away.
            “Yeah, that’s pretty gross Tommy. I don’t think anybody would be sick enough to do something like that except you. Come on Shaun, let’s go play football.” Micheal ran out to the field, Shaun following him.
            Tommy looked around. They were all gone. Now he stood alone there on the middle of the blacktop with a jar of grasshoppers and nobody to discuss them with. He didn’t want to leave his jar on the blacktop, because then someone might kick it over. But he also knew that Mr. Warder wouldn’t let him keep it in the classroom either, not even in his cubby hole.
            He wanted to play with the grasshoppers eventually, perform some experiments with them. But everyday he was afraid that if he opened the lid, they would all escape—at least all except those on the bottom. . . Still, he wanted to play with the those that were alive, see how people reacted to them.
            The isolation he found disturbing, as it cast him off into the realms of inattention. He looked around and decided to raise some madness. Here’s the final stroke, he thought to himself as he unscrewed the copper lid to the glass jar. The living grasshoppers fell out like bombs released from a jet. To empty out the dead grasshoppers, Tommy had to hit the bottom of the jar, until they all fell off and hit the ground. From the center of the blacktop grasshoppers hopped sporadically, starting as a mass, then slowly dispersing, while another large amount lay in the center among their waste and feces...

Classroom Conflict

11/12/96                  

            Mint candy melted slowly in my mouth. In a stark room adorned only with desks, I shot my hand up--in a gunshot--again. "Adam?" Mrs. Boone called on me.
            "Marie Antoinette," I answered confidently. She threw another mint at me. The class growned. Was I the only person here who knew about the French Revolution?
            "That's not fair Mrs. Boone! Adam is the only person who knows the answers!" complained Arnie, a large football player who sat in the back of the room, said little, but had an occasional outburst whenever he found such and such disagreeable.
            "Yes it is," contradicted Mrs. Boone assuredly. "Adam was the only person who studied. I told you we were going to have a test today Arnie."
            "Yeah, but you didn't tell us we were going to get candy. Usually you just give us points," protested Orlando, Arnie's louder friend.
            "I can't imagine how you can think candy is more important than points, which translate into grades." Like any teacher who's attended private school, she stressed the last word with the utmost importance.
            "Candy tastes better," stated Arnie, if only to support his argument. Whenever he fell into a conflict with Mrs. Boone, he wouldn't give up easily, and the class suffered for it. Several eyes peered deperately at the grey, militant clock on the wall.
            "Don't your parents ever ask you about your grades?" inquired the astounded Mrs. Boone. She moved back in the straight, firm chair, a strong chair to hold her enormous weight.
            "No, they don't care. My dad just wants me to play good football. And to do that, I need candy," he reasoned.
            "I think you need to improve your grades. You aren't ever going to get into college football with the grades you have," argued Mrs. Boone fiercely. Her eyes sharpened and creases formed on her forehead.
            "Yeah I will," said Arnie. "I'll get a scholarship too. They always accept athletes."
            "Not athletes with F's," Mrs. Boone struck back. The class had entirely lost interest. Several people put their heads down.
            "Are we going to ever learn anything in this class?" exclaimed Rebecca, a girl with red pigtails. She had been reading for an hour, but now turned up from her book, her face very annoyed.
            "I'm sorry Rebecca," Mrs. Boone apologized as sweetly as she could. "I'm trying to teach Arnie the value of an education."
            "Well you aren't doing a very good job of it. Teach us instead," she suggested, giving herself a moment to look up from her book.
            "We were just playing a game Rebecca. You'd notice that if you looked up from your book once in and a while," Mrs. Boone told her.
            "Yeah, bookworm!" taunted Orlando from the other corner of the room.
            Rebecca ignored him. "But that's not learning. That's just some stupid game! Why do you have to waste our time throwing candy out to us like were animals in a zoo!"
            "Well you weren't exactly participating in this activity, Rebecca," Mrs. Boone reprimended harshly. She leaned forward with her text book, her eyes again sharp and glaring. During the intellectual conflict her dress had remained smooth, but that same smoothness contained a potential anal malice about it, a constrictive decency in the fine texture of the fabric. In the mornings she doesn't look this way at all, thought Rebecca, recalling those mornings when they had pleasant discussions about the books on her shelves. What happens to her through the day?
            After staring at her teacher a few moments, Rebecca said, quite assertively, "No, I'm not; because I think it's stupid." She refused to comply with her teacher just to make her life easier, especially after Mrs. Boone had turned on Rebecca so rudely.
            "That's great Rebecca. Now can you mind your own business while we finish up our game?" Contradicting exactly what she spoke earlier, she apparently did not want to fight with Rebecca anymore, since Rebecca had stolen the more instructive conflict she had with Arnie earlier.
            "Yeah, give us a break Rebecca," said Shirley, a thin blond haired girl a few rows to the right of her..     
            "All right," she complied, turning back down to her book. She had spoke her mind. She sank back into her chair and retreated into her world of self-fulfilling intellecutal stimulation.   
            "Okay, next question: 'Who was Robespierre?'"
            Again, my hand flew up, this time without even thinking, and Mrs. Boone called on me. "The leader of the Reign of Terror," I recited from memory. I didn't even have to think about it for a moment; the answer just spilled from my lips without any other possibility.
            Another mint. I had quite a monopoly, I thought, looking down at my stash.
            "Man, how do you know this shit? You read the book all the time?" asked Arnie, quite annoyed.
            "That's what I suggested you do," Mrs. Boone said, "isn't it? Read a chapter every night everybody. Then you'll know the material for certain."
            "Man, that's stupid! I ain't got time to do that shit! You know when I get off of football practice? Six-thirty. I get home about seven, and then I've got about an hour to eat and do my chores, and then I don't feel like reading shit. I only fall asleep in front of the book if I try." The look on Arnie's face darkened with a negative circuit that could not be reversed.
            "Well, perhaps you should just try to read a chapter every a couple nights, until the material becomes interesting enough for you to stay awake," Mrs. Boone dictated, sitting at her desk the whole time laxly and talking genuinely. I've never had a teacher that sat at their desks so much. I think she liked the students to think she was on on an equal level with the students, even though she was a teacher at heart.
            "It don't matter," deflected Arnie morosely. "I'll never care about this crap."
            "All I'm asking, Arnie, is that you try," argued Mrs. Boone. "And that goes for all of you," she added, looking around the classroom. Though many of the kids didn't know it, they were having philosophy instilled in their brains for perhaps the first time.
            "No thanks," countered Arnie quickly. "I think I'll stay with what I'm good at. I'm not going to be a loser at something I don't even care about."
            "Now that brings up another interestng topic, something I've been wanting to speak to you kids about. Do you all know the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?" she inquired, genuinely waiting for an affirmative.
            "No, those are words only English teachers used," hollared Arnie, slouching in his chair in the middle room.
            "Yeah, like I'm going to say, 'Don't be such an optimist' out on the football field," said Orlando. The class laughed. Much of them weren't exactly sure what they were laughing at; the idea of it was so vague and obtuse; but they knew that Orlando was poking fun at the maniac vocabulary of their teacher; so as a class, they felt obligated to laugh.
            I really didn't care. I wanted her to keep asking questions on the French Revolution, because I had studied that chapter carefully. I was ready to take the test. I wanted my A. I didn't care about what an optimist and a pessimist was.
            "An optimist is a person who believes the future will be better and a pessimist is a person who believes the future is going to be worse than it currently is," expressed Rebecca in a rather bored tone. Then she dived right back into her book, without the slightest care for recognition or approval.
            She received it though: "Very good Rebecca," Mrs. Boone commended. "That, class, is one of the many fruits of reading--you know what sophisticated people are talking about. I wish you could all read as much as Rebecca here, so that when you fall into company that expects you to know more than football, you can deal with it appropriately."
            Big deal, I thought--I wanted to go to back to the French Revolution. I wanted more candy. Of course, I dared not say this out loud.
            "That'll never happen to me," argued Arnie. "Football's my life!"
            "Football intersects and involves many things," countered Mrs. Boone. "Like I said, you can't get into college unless you know something."
            "Psh! It don't matter--I'll get around it. . . " Arnie slouched further in his chair.
            The bell rang. I gathered up my books thoughtlessly, then walked with the rest of the class outside. I felt Arnie and Orlando's big shoulders grind and bump against mine on purpose. They laughed softly and sadistically between themselves.
            They didn't like me at all, I sensed. Nobody in this class liked me. I was the Bill Gates of the classroom. Who hated me more than anybody else--for reasons I can't explain at all--was Rebecca. In the hallways, alone--like me--in her black leather jacket and dyed phoenix hair, she would always glare at me with pure malice and a kind of pity. No matter, I reminded myself when I caught her horrible demonic stare; I received better grades than her, of that I was sure of. And that was all that mattered.

Playing A Lie

4/2/96
   

            The lady behind the desk had called the boy who sat across her Tyron. He looked like an extraordinary kid, but an extraordinary kid who was in the office for a bad reason. The secretary, a woman with orange hair who wore a pink sweater, spoke to him in manner that was slightly condescending and wearily familiar: “Sit right there Tyron,” she told him, while she walked around the parition that was suppose to separate the administration from the students. Tyron walked with a idle, negligent rhythm in his gait, then sat down with a calm expression on his face
            Strangely enough, he looked at Priscilla while they waited to be called on, as though she could be of any interest to him. The new girl wore a purple skirt that first day at Larkspur High, with some new nets her friend had given her before she moved from Seattle. She had hoped that the hot Californian weather would tan her legs so there would be a hundred little dark spots on them. Unfortunately, the weather in “the golden state” was not as sunny as she expected, and her new mode of fashion seemed to attract attention of a different kind.
            He said nothing though. He wore a black vest that bulged out like stomach muscles all over his body while his bare arms, covered with tiny goosebumps hung outside, naked. A black beanie was pulled over his head, at an askew angle to the right, and his lip revealed a brown incipient mustache. His eyes were dark too; the two black beads stared at Priscilla without any feeling, an expression that his stolid face accompanied. His hands sat before him, his fingers clenched on a folded piece of white paper, rubbing the fold into a crease while he eyed her without break.
            If only he would speak to me, she thought, quite disturbed. She looked at him with little attention, her eyes purposely wandering in his direction, almost past him, at the wall, where many portraits of past sport teams hung in black frames. But she was actually very scared. His gaze distilled a fear in her body that uncoiled and grew inordinately inside her chest.
            Eventually, the principal called him in. Tyron walked in with that casual gait again and went around the corner toward the office. Priscilla felt much better once he had left. Now she could think. Her first encounter at the new school frightened her; she could only look toward the future with foreboding.
            An administrator, standing before her, said her name. ”Hi, Priscilla, I’m Mr. Brodder,” he said, holding out his hand. He had a head crowned only by a dying layer of brown hair that circled about his scalp like a rotting halo. He smiled grandly above his white striped shirt from where a pen latched onto his pocket securely..
            “Hi,” she replied, in a voice as delicate as china. She stood up and held her grey bag before her.
            “Come into my office and we’ll have your schedule planned out,” he addressed her, gesturing toward his small office behind the partition. With the short, demure steps of her brown pointed shoes, she followed him with her grey bag around her shoulder.
            The room had brown walls with black lines in them. The white blinds covering the window allowed sun in moderately. A desk sat against the wall, with many books and papers held together by book holders at the end. A pen holder also sat upon the desk.
            “Welcome to Larkspur High,” the principal said with a cheerful smile. Priscilla smiled and shook her head shyly, almost embarrassed. “You’ll be a junior?” he asked, examining her transcript in a manila folder.
            “Yes, a junior,” she said, and nothing more.
            “Great, the juniors are a great class. Lots of academically ambitious people in that year,” he said, smiling and turning is eyes back to the folder’s contents. “You seem to be a very motivated student, Priscilla. I don’t see a B on this grade report.”
            “No, most of the school work where I went was easy,” she explained, leaning forward to scratch her leg. Her nets itched already. She knew she shouldn’t have worn them.
            “Good, good,” he said, shaking is head and continuing to examine her record— “Well, I wish we could put you into some of the tracked classes, but unfortunately a lot of those are full. The selection process for those classes was last year, so you missed out. . . unfortunately. We’ll see what we have for you though.”
            He rose with her folder and headed to the door. “Follow me,” he said, and she followed him out to the hall, where a large woman with skin of an ebony hue sat typing with rapid precision. Her face was militant and rigid, and her fingers danced upon the keyboard like random mad little men. She was completely absorbed and focused with her work.
            “Mrs. Miller, this is Priscilla Goswald, a new student here at Larkspur High. She’d like to sign up for some classes,” said Mr. Brodder, putting his hand on her shoulder quite casually. Priscilla’s shoulder muscles tensed when he made this motion, and the principal guided his hand away.
            “Fine by me,” said Mrs. Miller. “Sit down girl. We’ll get you a nice schedule real fast. Junior huh? Well you need some English, and you need some World Civilizations, and then the rest of it’s your choice. What interests you?” asked the large woman, turning to Priscilla. She looked intently at the girl, with great depth and attention.
            “Well, I really like languages. I went to a private school, where they teach you five languages, so I don’t know if there’s anything I could learn here, but—”
            “They got Spanish and French—take your pick!” said Mrs. Miller, after darting her fingers about on the keyboard for a few moments.
            Priscilla thought for a moment, then replied, “I know both of those languages quite well. Will the higher level classes be challenging enough for me?” she inquired.
            “Oh sure, they’ll be good enough for you! We got some great teachers in the language department. Here, we’ll put you in French, because nobody want to be in that class. Now, you want some mathematics?” asked Mrs. Millar.
            “Yes. I want to go to Harvard, so I suppose I better. I took Calculus last year,” she told Mrs. Miller.
            “You took Calculus last year?! Boy, girl—you’re smart. I don’t think we have anything harder than Calculus!” she exclaimed, her fingers continually dancing upon the keyboard.
            “Well, it was Calculus AB, and there’s suppose to be a Calculus BC,” if you offer that. . . “ Priscilla hinted.
            “I’m sorry honey, I think we only got one Calculus,” she admitted, shaking her head. “You want it?” she asked, turning to Priscilla.
            Priscilla nodded her head. “I guess. What science do you have?”
            “You want Chemistry? We have that?” Mrs. Miller told her.
            ”What else?” Priscilla asked quietly.     
            Mrs. Miller, while she taps the arrow key: “Biology, Physics. . .”
            “I’ll take Chemistry,” said Priscilla.
            “Okay,” replied Mrs. Miller. “You got your PE taken care of?”
            “Yes, I waived it,” she explained. “They said my waive would carry over to this school.”
            Mrs. Miller’s face lighted up as she laughed. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to do that, but since you’re such a sweet girl I’ll act like I wasn’t looking,” Mrs. Miller said, touching her hand. A chill ran through Priscilla’s hand as she felt those deft, manipulative hands.
            “Okay, and you got an elective. Anything else you like?” asked Mrs. Miller, turning her face away from the monitor with expectant eyes again.
            “I like drama,” answered Priscilla.
            ”Perfect, drama fits right in. Wait a minute, and I’ll have your schedule for you.” With a grand motion she pressed a key on the top of the board and sat back while the printer slowly released Priscilla’s schedule.
            Mrs. Miller looked at her watch. ”It’s fourth period honey, so you’ll be going to English.” The printer spewed out the entire schedule and Mrs. Miller ripped it off. ”Here you go,” she said, handing Priscilla her schedule. “Have a nice day,” she told the girl with a warm expression, then immediately hardened her face into the former assiduous mold she had assumed before as she turned back to her work.
            Priscilla, with the uncertain footsteps of a traveler heading toward the unknown, walked out of the office, with the instilled motivation of going to her class. Ahead of her, she saw Tyron, whom the principal seemed to have taken care of: nothing was different though; he still walked with a slight bend in his stroll, his left shoulder sunk down, and she could imagine his relaxed, dispassionate face; though from behind she saw little of him.
            She stayed behind him, wary of being in his sight again. As he passed into the same hall of her classroom, she wished her high heels wouldn’t click so much on the linoleum as she walked. Fortunately, he didn’t glance back at all. A cloud of style seemed to blind him. To look back would to venture outside of his careless world of ”cool.”
            He pulled upon a door to a classroom on his left. She held her breath as she read the door number before it and realized that the next classroom had the same number that read on her schedule in the row of fourth period. For a moment, she had the strange desire to go back to the office and request a change in her schedule. Then she decided that this would appear very irrational and strange to the administration, she having not even stepped inside the classroom, and since she did not wish to be judged already as abnormal, she suppressed that temporal wish to flee back to the office and reform her intinerary.
            The room was arranged by round tables, around which two or three students sat. At the moment they were talking loudly and boisterously, their voices clashing here and there and not any distinct word decipherable at first. Then she heard a girl complain, ”I still don’t see why he’s going out with her. . .” and saw the teacher’s eyes rise as the tall, slender man with a greek-like face approach him with a pleased smile.
            “Hello,” said the teacher, Mr. Morrow, according to the print-out. “I’m Mr. Morrow. Are you the new student?” he inquired, with raised eyes.
            “Yes, from Bel Air,” she responded, feeling very vulnerable in the middle of the chaos around her that the teacher seemed to regard as normal.
            “Wow! Bel Air!” said Mr. Morrow in a misty tone, raising his eyebrows. “That’s quite some school,” he noted, with an air of knowledgeable respect.
            “Yeah, well, my dad lost his job, so we had to move down here. . . “ said Priscilla, immediately scolding herself for saying this. She had a great problem with containing the truth.
            “Well, let me introduce you here. Class!” Mr. Morrow announced, above all the noise. “You aren’t working at all—I need you listen here for a minute.” He waited patiently until the talking ceased. Two girls by the window talked about what they did after work the night before, oblivious to the drop in volume, and Mr. Morrow had to say, “Jackie and Pam, please listen for a moment.”
            When he had gained all their attention, he began speaking, “Class, this is a new student here at Larkspur High. Her name is Priscilla Goswald. She’s from Bel Air, a very prestigious private school. I hope you can all welcome and befriend her, and I’m sure you will.” He looked around, standing on his toes, then said to her, “Okay Priscilla, why don’t you sit over here, by Tyron. He’s sort of broken off from all the groups and needs someone to work for the group activities. You seem flexible enough—I’m sure you won’t have any difficulty. Okay?” he said, with a kind smile.
            Priscilla wanted to respond in the negative, but felt it not within her power. Instead she shook her head and conceded.
            “Thank you,” he said, with a grateful smile, and guided to the desk with his hand on her back. The increase of blood flow in her veins caused her shoulders to widen as she felt his hand her back.
            Drawing away from this with a shudder, she made it over to Tyron’s table without deviation. She seated herself as properly as she could, as they would do in their private school, tucking the chair in and putting her notebook on the table with a pencil, then looked at her partner across from her.
            “What’s up,” he said in a mellow tone, letting the greeting sink in deep.
            “Hello,” she said demurely, then no more.
            They sat in silence while the rest of the class interacted animatedly. A circle of football players—they all wore their school uniforms—talked about their coach with great jollity. Another table comprised with girls, many with long blond curly hair inundated in hair spray, conversing with their personalities and very present, not leaving out their opinion on anything as they talked about how soon they would obtain their driver’s license.
            Priscilla wondered what they were suppose to be doing. This was English class, wasn’t it? Weren’t they suppose to be reading or writing something? But people only talked about their lives outside of school, as though they weren’t really in the classroom. A large piece of white paper, a smaller sheet of orange construction paper, a glue bottle, and a pair of scissors sat between Tyron and Priscilla, as they did on all the tables; but to their purpose the other groups gave little example.
            Finally, Priscilla asked Tyron, quite shyly, “Do you know what we’re suppose to be doing?”
            Tyron shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said, letting the following silence speak more than his words. Little motivation stirred within him.
            Priscilla raised her hand and waited patiently for the teacher to notice her. After about eight minutes, Mr. Morrow approached her desk with the blank expression of a child. When she saw him she was uncertain of whether she would even gain any real, definite answers from him.
            “Mr. Morrow, what are we suppose to be doing?” she asked him.
            “Oh, I’m sorry!” he said. “We are making these art pieces, you see, where the students cut out letters from the construction paper, then glue them on to this white sheet. The message you write is suppose to express our unity as a class,” he said, with a joyful expression.
            Priscilla looked down at the tools with a deep contemplation. ”Okay,” she said, without judgment, but Mr. Morrow caught the awkwardness of the idea.
            “Oh, of course you don’t have really know how well we hold together as a class, so you can ask Tyron about that,” he told her, pointing to the relaxed Tyron, whose back and hindquarters formed a smooth arch that didn’t even touch the corner of the seat. “You can do the artwork. You look like the artsy type anyway.” He smiled affectedly at this astute comment of his, his folder tucked beneath his arm, then returned to his desk where he seemed to lose himself in his computer while the class did everything except the assignment.
            Priscilla looked at Tyron nervously. She wished they had spoken with each other earlier; that have would made things easier. With a deep breath, she asked him, “So. . . you want to tell me about what holds the class together?” The business was what she tried to focus on.
            “No,” he said bluntly, “‘cause it’s all a lie.”
            She could not respond to this. He was right. It was a lie—she could imagine.
            “Well,” she said, after a few moments of thought, “could we just lie a little bit, just to get the assignment done?” She lifted her eye brows and held out her small hands.
            “No, I’m not going to lie,” Tyron protested, sinking deeper into his seat while he stared ahead, with a stubborn frown.
            “Well, I’m going to go ahead and make something, just so we can get some credit.” Quietly, she began to cut out letters, and quickly loss herself in the muse of the activity. After twenty minutes, she had swiftly cut out many orange letters that she spelled out to read, “We all like to talk.”
            Tyron had watched the whole time apathetically. When she finished, he put his hand on the table, looked left, then turned back to face her and asked, “You happy you did that?”
            “Yeah, it makes me feel productive,” she expressed, a bit defensively.
            “Nobody else did it,” he pointed out. He leaned back into his chair.
            She looked about the room to see that, truely, nobody had done it. They all continued to talk, the items on their table untouched.
            Mr. Morrow looked at his monitor with enraptured eyes that the screen reflected light from. He had the expression of a mad scientist, consumed by his own wild experiments.
            “Nobody cares,” Tyron said, leaning back in his chair. “They can do it Sunday night, because it ain’t due ’till monday. You could have taken it home and done it,” he pointed out, as though she had made some terrible mistake.
            “Well,” she responded. “I just thought I’d do it here, since there was nothing else to be done.” She crumpled up the remaining paper. She rose and walked to the trash, throwing it away. Mr. Morrow jumped back as she approached his desk.
            “Oh, hi Priscilla,” he said, quickly moving the mouse around and clicking on it. Priscilla thought she saw a naked female on the screen. “Are you finished already?”
            “Yeah, Tyron and I are done. Is there anything else you want us to do?” she asked him.
            “No, that’s all for today Priscilla. If you want, since you’re done, I can write you a pass to the library,” he told her. He seemed quite nervous and uneasy around her.
            “That’s all right,” she said, “I have a book with me,” she told him, waving her hand.
            “Are you sure?” he asked, with a tint of genuine concern for her new and awkward position.
            She listened the loud kids behind her; their voices clanged against her eardrums like the bell tower of a cathedral.
            “On second thought, maybe I will. I might find a new book there,” she explained hurriedly.
            “You just might,” he responded, as he anxiously scribbled her a pass. He handed it to her and she was glad as her fingers touched the treasure of privilage and responsibility.
            While she packed up, Tyron looked at her sorely and asked, “Where you going?”
            “To the library,” Prisiclla answered, wanting to leave Tyron as soon as possible. Though she felt greatly alienated at this school, nobody made her feel more uncomfortable then him.
            “What’s up with that?” he said, quite perturbed. ”You get out of this class and I don’t, just because you’re a new kid?”
            “I don’t know,” Priscilla responded uneasily. But Tyron had already rose and now walked toward Mr. Morrow’s desk. He startled the teacher again, and after a few heated exchanges, Mr. Morrow wrote Tyron a pass. Priscilla stood by the whole time, watching in anticipation.
            When he turned away from the desk, however, she immediately headed for the door. So he was going with her. . . but why him? Why did he have to be wherever she was in this school?
            Priscilla placed her bag on the table in the library and digged through it  She took out her book, but after looking at it for a moment, decided that she didn’t really want to read it. She put it aside, then rose to look at the other books.
            Tyron came in, with that same strut of the cool that he carried with him everywhere. He sat at a nearby table and stared at the windows that illuminated the whiteness of the day. The library was quite dark and calm in comparision. He turned away from the outside scene, and looked at Priscilla with hostile eyes.
            Though she looked at the novels of D.H. Lawrence, she sensed his presence. She picked out Sons and Lovers and returned to the table in the center of the library, where she took the book out and began reading it, trying to ignore him. She could only maintain her guise of unawareness for so long however; eventually, she turned toward Tyron, and, her voice more demanding than usual, she inquired, “Why must you look at me that way?”
            He didn’t reply for a moment. He seemed to be thinking it over. “You’re different.” He said it as though it was indeed something extraordinary and uncommon.
            His reply struck her as uncommon as well. But she wouldn’t let down her guard, not yet. “Why do you say that,” she asked, her mind searching.
            His answer unfolded by great degrees. Finally, they found themselves talking with each other quite amiably.
            “I’m sorry you have to come here,” he said, very bitterly. “This school really sucks,” he expressed honestly. He looked at her to see her reaction to his blunt judgment. ”I just wanted to let you know that.”
            “Yeah, I figured as much by what I’ve seen.” Then she looked at him, with a peculiar expression. “I’m surprised you see that.”
            “‘Tuh, I’m not stupid,” he replied, looking doggedly at the table. “There are places I’d rather be right now.”
            “Like where?” Priscilla inquired.
            “Like at home, writing poetry,” he said, tilting his head to the side, his face sly and still lax, as though a rebuke would be of no effect.
            ”You write poetry?” she asked, finally interested in something about him.
            “Yeah, all the time. That’s why I couldn’t write that shit in English class. They just try to make you write lies. I write poetry, not lies,” he asserted while leaning back in his chair.
            “Well, that’s great. I’ve never known many poets. At my school everybody was too busy studying to be a poet. But I like poetry. That’s my favorite form of writing.”
            “Cool,” he said, while the bell broke out in a ring.
            “Shit,” he said, “now I got to go to math class.” He rose from the table where he had joined Priscilla and picked up his backpack besides him. “Fuck!” he suddenly yelled out loud, clutching his leg.
            “Are you all right?” asked Priscilla, scared and worried.
            “Yeah, I’ll be okay. I just pulled my leg again. It’s all fucked up. That’s why I walk funny,” he explained, holding his leg as he swaggered toward the door.
            “Oh,” Priscilla replied, slightly embarrassed. “Do you want to go to the office. You probably should visit the nurse.” Priscilla didn’t want to go to math class; she found the idea of helping out her new friend (she blinked her eyes greatly when she thought of Tyron as a friend) to the office.
            “Naw, that’s all right—this shit happens all the time,” he told her, as they left the library.
            “Come on,” she bidded him with a playful smile. “Do you want to go to math class or fake a terrible wound?”
            He responded with a slight upper curve of the mouth. “All right. You got a good idea girl,” he told her, and turned around to head to the office. Priscilla matched her steps with his.
            They entered the office with mischievous smiles. When they crossed the threshold, Tyron immediately brought his hand to his leg and winced.
            “Excuse me,” Priscilla addressed the front desk, “but my friend is terribly hurt. Can he see a nurse please?”
            The woman behind the desk, with a mass of orange curls that hung down around her, looked at Priscilla and Tyron blankly, as though meditating her next action. After a few moments, however, she rose and said, “Yes,” headed back toward the backroom, and told them, “Follow me.”
            Tyron and Priscilla walked around the partition that before they had stayed behind so domestically. They entered this small backroom. Here there was a bed covered with white cotton and formed by a iron metal frame, and across from it was a cabinet that hung out from the wall.
            “Here, lie down here,” she gestured to the bed, talking to Tyron. ”Our nurse isn’t in now, but she’ll be here at noon. For now you better rest.” She looked at Priscilla. “What are you doing here?” she asked, with a censorious expression.
            “I’m just here with him, as a friend. His mother always told me to watch him, make sure he doesn’t hurt himself.” From without, her face was serious and honest; but inwardly, she was smiling and laughing—she had to lie.
            “Well, I still think you should return to class,” she told Priscilla. “You should be in class learning right now, not worrying about your friends.”
            “All right,” Priscilla gave in, and exited the small room. Before she left though, she turned around and waved at him. He waved back. She guessed they were friends.

My Romance With Yogurt

7/8/96
           
                                                A Romance With Yogurt

            I had not had yogurt in a long time. It was one of those Safeway items my parents rarely bought. They would shop every week, and I would look foward to that day when all the good food would come in: peanut butter, ice cream, granola bars, Fruit Roll-ups. Then, yogurt--yes, perhaps the healthiest modern delicacy I had taste for.
            If not Cocoa Pebbles or Fruit Loops, it was yogurt. Peach yogurt, strawberry yogurt, even chocolate yogurt. Yes, these were the flavors that suited my tongue. My parents encouraged my consumption, because, to them, it was the best thing I ever ate. At least he's getting his calcium, they must have thought.
            Then, in the first grade, something very unusual happened that changed my view on yogurt.
            I met Brad, a fellow with a taste for yogurt himself. Only Brad was rather strange. He was tall and thin, with blond shaggy hair around his head and red freckles spotting his face. His movements were awkward and dangerous. Once, while passing by a girl with crutches, he flung his arm out and knocked her artificial limbs out from under her, causing her to break her leg again. He almost got kicked out of our school for that.
            Like me, Brad didn't play sports too well, except instead of being too short and small and low on confidence like me, he was too tall and strange and haughty about everything. If he felt like being weird, he would be weird. (Though most of the kids seemed to think that he was being weird without trying.)
            I didn't like Brad much either, just because he was hard to relate to. The worst thing about being ostracized or unappreciated socially is if you can't even relate to the other weirdos. That was me. I was the worst off.
            One day, a short kid, Arnie, who would play basketball up by the courts, threw his styrofoam tray, still filled with his strawberry yogurt on it, into a metal garbage can lined with a black plastic bag. Somehow, I managed to approach the garbage can the same time as Brad, so we met Arnie just as he tossed his unfinished lunch into the garbage.
            "Hey, what'd you doing!" shouted Brad in alarm. He approached like a giant robot ready to storm a city, an overdeveloped ape that had evolved into a freakish alpha-human.
            "I threw away my lunch," responded Arnie, looking at him out of the corner of his eye. As usual, the vibes toward Brad were not good.
            Brad, in his impetuous way, then said, "Don't throw away your yogurt! That's good stuff!"
            "You want it?" asked Arnie, in disgust. "Go ahead. I'd never eat that crap in ages." Then he walked away without another word.
            At first I thought it might be the yogurt, that it differed from the store brand stuff we bought at home. Then, looking up close, I noticed it was the same strawberry hue, same form, same tiny red spots--yep, same yogurt.
            Yet, I still could not help from being tinted by the experience: Brad, whom I thought strange in the first place, grabbed the styrofoam from all that garbage, and then, without inhibition, began eating off of it. I stood by motionless, my mouth open, my hands on my side, as he walked away, munching the rich strawberry flavor away.
            Yogurt would never be the same for me.

Remains Of the Day

3/2/95
                     The Remains of the Day

     Marriane squinted up at the building, observing it carefully.  It was a bright, sunny day and she had to shade her eyes with her hand to see it clearly.
     It was a stone building shaped into a perfect, upright polygon.  It's shape was so perfect that it seemed that God himself molded it out of a piece of clay.  What it was used for wasn't exactly practical however.  It would have been better if it was left alone where it is.  The city however, thought it would be a better idea to make it a circus.
     That's right, a circus.  A circus that isn't in a portable tent that could travel and share the wonders of the circus world but a permanent, stationary circus.  It may seem like a totally absurd and very unusual thing to do but someone actually tried it before.  Of course, Marrianne told herself, it was entirely a coincidence that the same building held a circus inside it only twelve years ago. 
     The history of the building was very bleak and was long forgotten by now.  She wondered if the person in charge of the whole project of re-building the circus even knew about the building's disastrous and unfortunate fate.  Either they didn't or they thought that there was little chance that it would happen again.  In any case, Marrianne thought it was at least something to be looked over.  After all, there was no reason to make the same mistake again and they could try to change the design to prevent another disaster from happening.
     The circus that had failed was actually quite a success for a while.  Even people from other states came to their little town oа Taylor, Arizona just to see the big show.  It became very popular and turned out to also be very profitable.  They even had a couple of billboards and local TV commercials along with plenty of ads for it in the papers.  The ticket prices went up and the value of the town went up with it.
                             *
     Marrianne was a petite, blond haired, seven year old living with her mom, dad and twelve year old brother Robert when her family began to have big finacial problems.  They always seemed to have them but as the circus opened they got worse and worse.  Marrianne's family was a lower-class one trying to survive in a middle-class neighborhood.  They couldn't endulge in life's pleasures whenever they pleased, including the circus.
     So she put up with the fantastic stories of the amazing, the funny and the spectacular things
     ("and then he got shot out of the cannon and then the clowns came out and oh boy they're sure funny and then this man tamed the lion and oh wow it was so cool and then")
     that went on in the circus for the price of only $9.99
     ("my gosh, Marrianne!  Don't you even have that much money!").
     Soon she figured out she could live without it and stopped whining
     ("Everybody in the world has been there except me and they won't stop talking about it!  I don't care if we don't have any food on the table for a week.  I just want to go just once.  Waaaahh!  Waaaahhhhhh!!!!  It's not fair!  It's just not fair!)
     about not being able to go.  Still, it always annoyed her when people were talking about something she hadn't even experienced once.
     ("You still haven't gone to the big show at least once yet!  Marrianne where have you been!  I don't see how you could of missed it!  Let me tell you about it.  There's these clowns that are so funny and the elephants, oh boy they're big and blah, blah, blah, blah, BLAH, BLAH,"). 
     Sometimes she thought she really would never get to see the circus.
     But either God had been listening in on her bedtime prayers or throwing a penny into a water fountain really did make wishes come true because the day after her eighth birthday (which was a saturday) her dad came in and said, "Wake up, honey!  You've got a big day ahead of you!"
     "I don't want to go to see Aunt Barbara and Uncle Marty again this year daddy!" she complained.  It seemed that every year on her birthday they went up and spent the whole day with her relatives.  Yesterday, it was her mom's side of the family and now her dad's.  If she had it her way every Christmas and birthday kids would get to visit their friends and marvel over their presents.  But her parents believed that birthdays were not times to have parties with her friends but to visit with relatives.  "Christmas and birthdays are to be spent with the family," her mother insisted when Marrianne asked her if she could visit with her friends when she actually had something to talk about.  Just for once Marrianne would like to have her own birthday, her family could mail her presents.
     But she was obviously jumping the gun for her Dad mearly laughed and told her, "Oh no, we're not going there!  This year, we're off to the circus!"
     So her plan had worked after all.  She decided to make it hard on her parents by not saying what she wanted even though they really knew.  Maybe then her parents would give in and let her go.  "I just want to go to the circus once.  That's all I want for my birthday," she told them through silent, sad and hurt eyes.  She was desperately afraid that her parents would give her something that she really didn't want rather than something that she really did.  So it was quite a gamble at high stakes but if her ears did not deceive her she had won.
     Just to make sure she had heard him right she quickly asked enthusiastically, "Really?!"  She tried to act as ecstatic as she could so her dad would see that she was very grateful.
     He answered her with a great big grin, a nod, and by saying, "Yep!  Right after your own birthday party this afternoon and your birthday potluck we've been saving up for.  Everybody is coming too.  All your relatives and friends from school are going to bring something to eat.  We've been working on it for weeks planning it to be a surprise.  I hope you aren't too overwhelmed by all this."
     So that's why they had been excluding her from the latest family conferences and making her go to bed early.  She had thought that they didn't want her to join in on the family conferences because they thought she was dumb and couldn't give advice on money; as if all she would do is ask if she could go to the circus.
     Of course she had tried to listen in on their conversation when she went to bed, but the living room was clear across the house.  She also thought they talked quietly because she could hardly ever hear a sound from them.  It was like they had this big terrible family secret they were keeping from her.  Of course they had been keeping a secret away from her but now that she had heard it, it didn't seem terrible at all.
     "Oh thank you Daddy!" she shrieked happily and buried her face in his chest.  "You're the best dad in the world!  I'll never forget this!  This is the best day of my life!" she said gratefully.  She would later believe her first two statements to be true but her third one not.
     The potluck was a success.  Almost everyone invited had come and the whole time she had gotten so much attention, something she had been lacking in the past month.  They had lots of food, games and so many presents she could hardly believe her eyes.  At the time it seemed she had enough presents to last the rest of her life.  That was before she got bored of them though.  Most of her friends even admitted that she was luckier then they were because she got to have a big party and go to the circus on the same day.
     Of course the real climax of "the greatest day of her life" didn't arrive until her father and her got all bundled up in their coats and walked out the door on that winter night.  She was so excited she could hardly sit still on the ride over to the circus.  She just couldn't stop thinking about what a great show it was going to be.
     Once they finally got there and the show started she could tell why everybody was so excited.  But the greatest thing was that now she could talk about it with her friends and she wouldn't be left out of the long conversations that usually bored her.  She wouldn't be the only one trying to change the subject (although only a few weeks it wouldn't exactly be a happy coffee talk topic).
     It was a indeed a magnificent show until a fire broke out and blazed out a few bleachers to the left of Marrianne and her dad.  She couldn't tell who kindled the flames and as far as she knew nobody found out.  It could have been careless smoker who accidentally ignited the fire or a skilled arsonist who craftly planned it all out.  Either way, at the moment it didn't matter.  Marianne couldn't have of cared less if Smokey the Bear started the fire.  The only thing she cared about than was getting the hell out of there before the flames toasted her.
    People screamed and hollered for help while others saved themselves by running for their lives.  The fire grew bigger and bigger quickly.  Some actually tried to put out the blaze with a fire hydrant but by the time they got there the blast and amount of water was not enough to weaken the flame.  People began to run everywhere causing total disorder.  The size of the blaze got so big it seemed to resemble a giant monster made of flame and smoke, destroying victims beneath it.
     Marianne always thought she would have never made it out if it wasn't for her dad.  He had played high school football and was built like an ox and could run like a cheetah that got shot in the butt.  He let her ride piggy back style on his shoulders as he ran outside a half of a mile away from the building.  Once she got off him he whispered, "Wait here!"  He ran back in and out three more times and ended up rescuing five other children, one of which was a baby.  Marrianne along with four of the surviving parents would always remember that and always be proud of her dad for being so brave and heroic.
     But the digits of the people that were saved could not compare to the death toll.  Hundreds of lives were lost that night and not just by fire.
     Fire wasn't the element that killed the most during the fire.  The real manslayer was the smoke.  It suffocated people, making it difficult for them to breathe and choked them to death.  The flames finished the job, consuming the bodies until there was nothing but ashes, embers and cinders, whether the unfortunate souls wanted to be cremated or not.
     Another thing that took the people down for the flames to feast upon was the people themselves.  On the brink of survival the crowd's instinct to stay alive made them push, shove, kick, hit and trample in order to do so.  The result was nothing but total chaos.  Many people either got knocked out, wounded themselves somehow or broke or twist something in all the mayhem.  All the poor paralyzed victims could do was just lie there and wait for the massive conflagration to cook them down to their bones if they did manage to survive the smoke.
     The things that Marianne saw during the fire before the smoke pushed her out of a conciousness were enough to haunt her and give her bad dreams for many nights to come.  It was worse then any horror movie or book she had ever seen or heard of.  It was like getting a preview of what hell was like in 3-D.  Screams, shouts, howls and cries for help were so loud that she could hear them over the mighty crackle of the fire and the interior of the building falling apart.  She could hear the sickening crunches as people were crushed under feet nearby.  Some people that were on fire still ran for safety and caught others on fire when they bumped into someone or stepped on them.  A blind man knew a disaster was taking place but didn't know what until someone hinted, "Fire!  Fire!"  By then the man's cane was on fire.  Soon his coat caught on fire he knew it was too late.  The lions roared with the elephants in unison while the man on stilts burned helplessly like a man that was crucified the wrong way.  The painted clown's faces didn't look so happy and they wished that clown cars weren't so small.  The lion tamer didn't look brave at all now but like he was ready to wet himself.  It seemed that every beat of Marianne's heart ten more other people's stop beating as they bit the dust.
     That was all she remembered of that night when the fire had burned the inside of the building into nothing.....                                      *
     But that was twelve years ago and the winds of time had blown the leaves of memories away.  The short unfortunate history of the building was now gone and long forgotten by many who were blind to the fact that the whole crisis could happen all over again.  And although Marrianne didn't enjoy thinking about that night, it wasn't something to be simply dismissed as an accident that will probably never happen again.
     What had brought her back to this childhood horror?  Was it curiosity of what the building's condition was now?  Hardly, she thought, more like doing maintainence work for the city after she got caught up in a bit of trouble with the law.  Although she had never been one to break the law, it seemed that this time she had bended it one time too many.  And whether it was destiny or her fault, she had been sent back to face this fossilized nightmare that she had thought was gone.
     It didn't matter now anyhow, because she was stuck with the chore of cleaning up the damned building for the next generation of circus fans.  Believe it or not, during the twelve years since the Hoftman circus disaster no one had bothered to improve the unsanitary living condition of the internal part of the building.  People stated that it unoccupied, which was true to some extent.  It didn't house much except the ashes and embers of burnt wood sitting among the nonbiodegradable plastic.  It may have of also been the home for animals that people call annoying pests just because they aren't cute and furry like bunnies and kittens.  Sometimes, mostly around Halloween, kids would have it be the town's "scary haunted house".  Some teenagers would make each other do the "one night in the haunted house" for initiation to their gang or clic.  There were countless tales told by people about the building.  It got to the point where everybody had totally different opinions on what was inside of the building and eventually everyone just forgot about it.  Except Marrianne.  Who seemed to be the only one who remembered the mishap and the only one that seemed to take observation of it into hand when they decided to redesign the building.
     She looked at the building once again and a shiver ran down her back as a thought ran through her mind.  She realized that the long dead corpses lied in there piled on top and under the mess that used to be a entertaining night of popcorn and peanuts.  The bodies no longer shaped like any of their fellow living slowly decaying through time.  Going into that place would be like entering an unkept graveyard; a land of the dead that was not kept under surveillance and therefore could not be proven to be safe.
     A short shriek suddenly came from the building, then faded.....
     "What the hell was that?!" her co-worker Martha asked to no one in particular. 

Wandering Towards Destiny

12/13/97

            Birds flew above the beach in masses, where the ocean met the shore. Micheal walked with thin, clear framed glasses perched upon his face, each footstep supported by the third leg of his cane. His face was old and wrinkled as a raisin, with a moustache decidedly beneath his nose. On his feet were black, shiny dress shoes that sunk deep into the wet sand, but not far enough so that sand could seep into the crevices between his shoes and socks. Behind him, a trail of two footsteps and a small round imprint followed him.
            He softly breathed in the ocean, for he knew he could no longer handle inhaling large amounts of the salty air, that the oceanic fumes would hit him with a whirling intoxication; consequently, he took in the air with soft, short breaths through his nose, and thought of his childhood.
            He saw a little boy running along the shore. A small child with sandy, mussy blond hair, the strands running together to form curved, chaotic waves shaped by the forces of nature, their tips narrowing up high here, and down low there, and all brought into the unity by the sensuous shape they formed, the shape of ice cream at the top of a cone. His shirt was plain and ordinary for a little boy to have on—a white cotton, with straight and uniform blue and red stripes on it—and rumpled up and down as the winds ran beneath it and undulated the fabric with the sound of a waving flag; he wore it as though it meant nothing to him, as though it were only a rag that his mother required him to throw on before he went outside. Denim shorts covered the boy‘s legs, but below that, his legs sank into the cold wet sand naked and innocent.
            The speed and the spirit with which the boy ran amazed Micheal. He was soaring like the birds, his legs sprinting upon the cool beach so quickly and lightly that they barely touched or sank into the sand. Micheal wished to himself that the boy could fly. . . fly, fly away as his nature once aspired to, into the sky to join those black birds, and gliding off beyond those still, puffy clouds—at least beyond the clouds—and then, his dream fulfilled, have the boy lose his angelic wings and crash into the merciless rough waves of the far sea, satisfied. He wanted the boy to die with his dream met.
            The boy never left the ground though; he continued along the shore, softly skipping near the lapping tide where it tenderly carressed his feet shortly, causing him to laugh with delight. Eventually the boy’s figure slowed down to a simple stroll, his head turned down, and he vanished before the man’s eyes.
            A hot dog vender stood near Micheal, selling his red and wrinkled franks with a pale face and a white hat on his head that were as doughy and puffy as the buns he sold them in. “Hot dog?” he asked, holding out a sample.
            Only out of hunger, Micheal went up to the vender and pulled a torn and faded dollar bill from his black wallet, putting it on the shiny aluminum counter that reflected the sunlight. The vender’s hands fell upon the dollar bill and snatched it up savagely, all the while tapping buttons upon the cashier. When the cashier opened for him he deposited the ugly, worn dollar bill in carefully. The vender then turned back to the man and smiled generously and pleased, one hand on the register and the other on the hot dog machine, as though posed for a portrait.
            “My hot dog?” Micheal inquired dispassionately, his hands folded before him.
            “Oh, sorry!” the vender said, then hurriedly and anxiously prepared the frank with the sharp, efficient movements of a hot dog vender, who does this a hundred times a day.
            “Sorry,” he apologized again, handing Micheal the frank; then stood back detachedly, his eyes fixed past Michael while he waited for another customer.
            Micheal turned away from the vender and walked along the beach with the hot dog suspended meaninglessly in his hand. A small boy and a girl, right in his path, hit a beach ball to each other over an imaginary net between them, their faces radiant and joyous under the sunlight. Demurely, Micheal stepped aside and walked around them, while a woman in a bathing suit passed by him with a smile—aimed not at him, but at some far affixed object, most likely the face of someone.
            Here Micheal stopped and looked up to see a large and tall building composed of white stone in the distance, a few ledges above from where he now stood. After the pause, he continued his steps toward the prominant pale structure, his feet passing over the uneven surface of the rocks as he ascended the ledges of land. Clouds, he noticed, hung still and lifeless above this building with little else in the stark landscape, as if they alone were part of the structure. The sounds of the tide diminished as he drew closer to the building.
            In this building, just as Micheal walked inside it, were a set of narrow steps that ran up along the wall shortly and frugally and ascended to the next floor. They continued to rise upward for a very long time, until they had passed many floors. When Micheal entered this ground floor, he saw two women with sheets of cloth hung over their heads, who seemed to have only a modest amount of hair beneath. They held candles and spoke ambiguously in an archaic language, with the intonations of a bad omen. Urgently, they warned and compelled him not to ascend the stairway.  When they had finished speaking Micheal nodded at them, put on the hat he had taken off upon entering the building, then departed back down toward the beach.
            Warily, he descended back down the rocks to the beach again, where little had changed. He walked for a long time upon the porous sand, until he reached a tavern located, quaintly, near the shore of the beach, the door perpendicular to the foamy tide. Micheal entered into the dark interior of this tavern...

Wanting To Be Lost, Wanting To Be Found

4/14/95
   

            He was lost. Lost in the shopping mall. He remembered his mother walking right in front of him, her steps militant and cloppy with her red high heeled shoes; the smooth sheen of her legs coated in nylons; and her light blue pleated skirt, the color of the sky, billowing behind her. Her bright yellow purse, with black static dots covering it and shiny brass hooks, hung from her shoulder warily, bouncing away from and twirling by her side like a flag. Phillip even recognized her warm auburn hair--so distinct, because it was the only hue of hair he had even seen that reminded him of autumn. She walked straight and rigid, though her shopping was the simple execution of errands, and her errands were simply missions, to be completed as quickly and efficiently as possible.
            Though he understood why she moved with such a rapid and steady gait through the mall, Phillip could hardly keep up with it. From behind, where he stood not much taller than her waist, her legs seemed enormous, able to take strides three or four times longer than his pathetic sticks could. And because of her long, thin legs, she seemed capable of taking a quicker pace too, maybe because the joints at the thighs had more space to swing back and forth; Phillip's legs felt so short and stubby that he could only move them so fast, with fear that they might become detached if he pulled on them too hard.
            "Mommy!" he wanted to call, but she seemed unable to hear. He could picture her face, even though she moved away from him: tight, determined, absorbed with the next objective on her list.
            With a sudden surge of alarm, Phillip broke into a run against the barrage of approaching bodies. How much time he spent, as a young boy, looking up! For this, he merely looked straight ahead, and dodged the mass of pants and skirts. He needed to find his mother! The blue skirt, the blue skirt, the blue skirt, the blue skirt . . . Nowhere here, nowhere here! How could she do this to him!? He was very angry. Fine, he thought resolutely and affirmatively, if she doesn't want me, I don't want her. He went toward a bench near the center of the mall and sat down, to avoid getting trampled on by the masses of feet and legs.
            The bench, covered with a lush red carpet typical of expensive shopping malls, sat near a large round portal that gave view to the lower floor. Of course, a railing and metal bars surrounded the portal, to prevent a careless slip that would lead to a fifteen foot plummet to the bottom floor. But the bench was set up at a way that it gave easy access to the drop, which descended down into a small garden of large green jungle-like plants enclosed in black spherical bowls. Phillip had always strongly disliked these openings. He was prone to indulge his imagination with suicidal fantasies, often to the point where he realized he could do it, and became scared that he would. What would it be like to fall like that, and hit that metal floor below. Would it kill me? he wondered. His curiosity did not fear death; he would have easily confronted it for the thrill of the experience of dying if he didn't know that he would lose all other experiences as well. He was overwhelmed and ecstatic over his power of choice to kill himself, now sensing the freedom that he had never tasted before under his mother's supervision, before she carelessly left him there.
            He wondered if anybody else pondered this death, even the people who built the damn mall. Phillip figured that plenty of mid-life crisis cases had pondered it, as well as many teenagers, especially girls, who felt extremely depressed and suicidal after some small drama, like a break-up. Yet this was a shopping center, he reminded himself, so things like that never happened here, or the security would go into a frenzy. But wouldn't it be great if it did? Phillip pondered with a grin. In his mind he painted the entire picture: he would have one of those sharp knifes from the kitchen--the biggest one!--with the silver blade you could see your reflection clearly with and a safe, black handle designed for a hand's grip. He could jump easily over the bars that bordered the portal from the bench, if not from the ground, and could sail down head first, knife held away from the stomach, so that he would land on the blade if not break his neck. And stuck on his blade thrust deep into his belly would be a blood-drenched note: I KILLED MYSELF IN THE MEGA MALL.
            How everyone would go crazy! All the prim and proper woman, dressed in clothes they had purchased in the stores they shopped at to purchase more nicer clothes, would scream and drop their bags, cover their mouths and looked at him with horrified eyes. How the men would curse and come closer to examine his fine self-masacure. How the store managers and employees would yell and protest in denial of the fast and sudden murder ten feet from their store as they think of the prospects for their business in the upcoming months. And the security guards, how angry and alarmed would they be at such a disaster occuring in their mall, and what it might due to their reputation. And his mother, what would she make of it, but feel guilty and irresponsible as a whore and repent again and again without any respite. He wondered if it would make the newspapers, and what it would do to this horrid place.
            He grinned once more as he felt more and more attracted to his idealized tragedy. Then he sighted a toy shop across the way. Suddenly his self-destructive desires evaporated by the image of Toy World. Leaving the site of his potential suicide, he walked across to the other end of the mall, where he saw the large block letters for Toy World. A large wooden nutcracker, with a black hat, white beard, and rosy cheeks stood straight and dutiful in the right window, ready for Christmas. In the left, a large, jolly Barney doll, with arms wide open and a huge smile, stood in a frozen welcome. Phillip wished he could talk to one of them. For the first time that day, he was lonely for company. He had not talked to anybody since his mother had told him, upon getting out of the car, "Follow me," and he replied languidly, "Okay. . . "
            Then, with sudden joy, he realized that there were toys in this store that could talk--you only needed to squeeze them. So, eagerly, he entered the store packed with joys everywhere. Boxes sat piled on the shelves, in display pyramids, even hanging from the ceiling. Phillip moved away from the pink ambiance of Barbie and headed toward the darker green and red hues of GI Joe and the Transformers, until halfway he stopped to find the ultimate contemporary toy: Tickle Me Elmo. His sat on a box of clothes, his body leaning back and his mouth strangely awry, as though he had seen something that scared him to death, or he had become exhausted from some activity. For some reason, he appeared lonely to Phillip, who immediately felt a connection with the stuffed toy. He moved forward, unable to control his affection and love in the presence of the red furry animal, and squeezed it hard and firmly.
            "Hi, my name's Elmo," the doll said, still with that strange, confused look. "Excuse me kid," an officer said from behind him, tapping his shoulder. "Is your mother somewhere in this store?"
            Phillip immediately became scared, and felt his bladder ready to burst and spill onto the smooth blue carpet . He knew not how to reply, until, nevous of his paralysis, he let out the truth: "She left me an hour ago. She was in a hurry to run an errand." That, really, was all she said she was doing.
            "She leave you in here?" the security guard asked, with a perplexed expression.
            "No, actually she left me out there," Phillip indicated, pointing outside the store. "But I came in here to play with the toys."
            "What kind of mom leaves her son out in the middle of the mall?" the security guard questioned incredulously.
            "My mom sir," Phillip answered sincerely.
            "Fine. . . you can stay in here. Just don't raise that much trouble, or the manager will start complaining. I'll keep a look out there for your mom. What does she look like?"
            Phillip looked intently and innocently at the guard, as though deep in thought. Then he answered, "She had long legs sir, and a blue skirt. That's all I can remember. She's my mom. I know her, but I can't really describe her."
            "Fine, fine," the guard said. He put a hand on Phillip's shoulder. He had a very intense and controlling touch. "You stay here. Don't make a lot of noise." Then, with a careful and concerned gait, he headed out of the shop, careful to not knock anything over.
            Phillip stood there in the toy store deep in thought, no longer mesmerized by the color and splender of the toys around him. He was questioning whether he really wanted to be found by his mother so quickly. He decided he didn't. He wanted her to feel really guilty for losing him today. He knew the guard and his mother would meet once she passed through this area of the mall, and then he would lead her here, where she would no doubt find him. He decided he didn't want that at all, and was determined to avoid meeting her for as long as he could.
            If she wants to lose me, he thought to himself as he headed out of the store along the right wall, I'll try to lose her. When he reached the entrance, he scanned the entrance for a guard. Phillip saw him, in his ugly brown uniform, talking to a woman with a light blue dress and a sun hat, but certainly not his mother. She had brown curly hair beneath her hat for one thing, and a much larger bust. Had he said a blue dress? He hoped he did. The more the guard was sidetracked the better.
            Careful not to be seen, Phillip darted out of the toy store while the guard's back was turned, went quickly behind some people, and slipped into the music store next door, Tower Records. Everything was very yellow and red here. He heard Whitney Housten's voice emanating the store, and wished it could somehow completely cover him. He rushed to the very back of the store, to the easy listening and classical section, where hundreds of racks stood between him and the officer's askew vision into the store. He wondered if the guard would look here when he found him not to be in the toy store any longer. It's extremely likely, Phillip thought. Phillip then wondered if the cashier had seen him as he had come in. Right now, seen from afar, the cashier seemed to be helping a large man in a blue shirt and brown pants with balding grey hair at the pop section. Hopefully, he had been distracted for some time.
            Relieved for the most part, Phillip turned back to the classical section and examined what CDs he could listen to. Nothing of real interest, except--The Jurrasic Park Soundtrack! He wasn't too fond of classical music, but he rather liked this movie, so he listened to some tracks from it, and enjoyed it fully because of the familiar songs. He started humming the theme song when someone tapped him on the shoulder. Terrified and surprised at once, he turned around startled, to see a very tall man with a long, steep nose. Phillip pulled the earphones off immediately and obediently.
            "You with somebody kid?" the retailer asked. How come nobody could leave him alone? he wondered. What was wrong with a kid off by himself? he wondered to himself, now offended at the insolence of adults and their apparent fear of him.
            "No, my mother left me. I'm okay though. She'll come back when she needs me," Phillip replied assuredly.
            "Okay, but we need your mother's permission before we have you listening to all the music in the store, all right," the retailer asked with raised eyebrows.
            "All right," Phillip consented wearily, and put the headphones back. He waited for the music man to go away and leave him alone. Fortunately, he did. Still, Phillip was quite perturbed about not being able to listen to any of the music. How come little kids weren't allowed to do anything? It was almost as though he had more freedom when his mother was with him. Now he could only see the different things in the store, and not interact with them.
            Phillip didn't like this realization, so he made a conclusion from it. He decided then that he didn't like any adults. They only wanted to control everything and wouldn't allow kids to have any fun unless another adult was with them. Yet, he felt powerless with his dislike because there was no real way to rebel here. The grown-ups controlled everything, and he would get in big trouble if he tried to break another rule. This realization made him angry when he thought of all the fun he could have if they weren't around, and any possible reason they might prevent him from playing with things. He wasn't going to break anything after all. Phillip stood deeply in a muse, in his ragged t-shirt, denim shorts, and Vans sneakers, while he thought of what he should do next.
            Maybe I should kill myself, he considered once more, recalling the horrific image he had planned in his mind earlier. I can still do that: may not be able to play with Tickle Me Elmo, or listen to the Jurassic Park soundtrack, but at least they made it accessible enough for me to kill myself, he considered, recalling the bench next to the hole. Thinking and turning it over in his mind, he walked to the edge of the store, where the store literarily became the mall.
            The guard was still there, patrolling the front of the toy store. He had a thumb hooked through a belt loop of his pants and his belly bulged out like a wave on the ocean. By his attentive and gruff expression and his idle steps back and forth Phillip wondered if he was accomplishing anything by patrolling the area. Phillip could easily slip out of the toy store and make it to the giant hole that would gladly welcome his death. Yet he didn't. Something stopped him from suicide: he wanted to see how much more he could annoy the adults. So, with a quick turn, he slipped into the next store, with little idea of what it could be.
            His nose told him as soon as he stepped in: a perfume store. So many artificial scents had been sprayed from the clear, fluid filled bottles stacked on glass for display that they created dissonance. Phillip immediately recalled a perfume his mother liked to wear when she went out to parties, and his nose searched for it wonderously. He could not find it.
            Since he couldn't distinguish his mother's perfume from the mass of other perfumes that permeated the air, he found the store of no interest to him. The smells were so oppressive to him that he felt ready to choke if he inhaled one more time. And yet, in the bright yellow lights that illuminated the store, he wanted to do something really bad--not because he wanted to stay here--but because he really wanted to perturb them. The owner was a very tall woman in a purple dress, whose skin was extremely pale except around the cheeks, where--perhaps out of embarrassment--they were warm with a red hue. She gave off the most incredible reek: it reminded him of lilies amplified one hundred times. It abused the word sensitivity. He pictured her being dipped into a tub of slaughtered pigs and smiled. He wished he could do something that extreme, but the reality at the present prohibited it.
            While the woman in the purple dress was describing a bottle of perfume to a rather outrageous looking woman with a large, orange head of hair, black glasses, and a blue and green dress, Phillip swiftly made his way to the back of the store. Here he took a yellow vial of perfume, and sprayed a little of it on him. Then he took the next bottle, filled with a green substance, and sprayed a little. So he continued, until he had at least twenty different perfumes donned. Strangely enough, though he could smell the perfume initially when he sprayed it toward himself, he could now not smell it at all. It's probably emanating outward, he thought, then decided this was a good thing.
            Careful not to be caught, he swiftly and quietly left the store and entered the mall. The guard was very far away now, with many people between him and Phillip. He decided to make a complete break for it, all the way to the escalator. As he broke into a dash, several people took a whiff of his mad, experimental olfactory concotion and started coughing terribly. Did he really smell that awful? His hypothesis was right: Many extremely different perfumes don't really go well together. A man in a dark brown hat and coat leaned over and began hacking terribly. Two women, walking along with ridiculous feathered hats in their head, sneezed spontaneously as Phillip raced by. And an eldery man in a wheelchair began wheezing terribly, as though struggling for breath, as Phillip flew by like an odorous phoenix and left his scent behind.
            A guard, ahead, raised his head to see what the commotion was about, and when he saw the boy racing, he began running toward him as well. When Phillip turned around and saw the other guard rumbling behind him as well, he figured there was no escape. Even if he ran into another store, they would corner him. He looked at the JCPenny's to the right, however, and wondered if he could perhaps hide in one of the clothing racks. Impusively, and with fear, he decided he could, and chose to jump onto the seat next to the hole and dive down to the lower floor. Anything, he decided, to not get caught by guards again.

Poetry

Bitter Nostalgia

10/12/99

Bad memories
Of those days when my parents smoked
And I walked around like an ashtray at school,
Ready to take in anyone’s waste and smile at the same time.
Like times now when I go to parties full of people
Blowing clouds
And I come home to find my clothes smell the same.
Horrible remains,
Like the curtains rotten with ash and aged dust
After years of my parents in the room I moved into later,
Breathing not their own breath. Disgusting.
What a waste of beautiful lungs.

Creative Perceptions

8/2/96

I see a maze on my desk.
My fingers wander around the walls of dark lines on the brown wood.

I see a danger in putting my foot over the cracks,
So I step with caution.

I see that the hour digit equals the sum of the minute digits on my clock,
I decide to wait before calling.

I see the multiple choice answer bubbles form a staircase,
I fill in the rest of the test in the same manner.

Call them superstitions if you wish but
They’re really only my idiosyncratic way of perceiving.
If you can’t understand my subjective conceptions
You must be bored because you don’t know what you’re missing.

Drifting Away

12/29/99

Death,
So close,
So imminent,
A large hand creeping above the bed,
Ready to snatch the soul away,
Decay—
Not dramatic loss,
But a slow, gradual decline,
Full of miscommunication and angst.
Her gray hair like a mad professor,
Her hand in between her legs,
Touching herself.
A mistaken gasp of pain
Merely a yawn stretching her mouth to speak.
Before her—an alter of her grandson’s finger painting, her son’s high school graduation picture, a Christmas tree
(As though she could still remember what Christmas was).
Tired,
Trying to keep her eyes open
With her fingers.
Her eyelids a crimson red
Against a pale face.
My grandmother,
The woman I used to make up card games with,
Can probably no longer tell a jack from an ace.

She said the other day she saw me—and so I asked her where,
Assuming it was a dream,
Because the subconscious seems to take over at her age.
The conscious mind is so useless,
That it falls back continuously upon that swarm of past images.
I could talk about the classes I was taking next semester,
As my dad wished but no,
I wanted to communicate, however difficult it might be,
And if not communicate,
I wanted merely her to speak.
Because she could not understand me
But I could understand her,
And if that was all we had,
Then that was the best there could be.
If she wanted to talk about how she used to paint,
How her grandson painted the picture on her alter,
I only wanted to hear this,
What was on her declining mind.
For trying to tell her about college would be like babbling away in Latin,
Confusing, disorienting.
To speak is so much more warming than to hear,
To know how much someone cares to listen—
That, on the monotone emotional level, can be defined as communication.
The good teachers are those who speak on the same level as the students,
And work their way up from there.
So all you can do is think small and listen, respond, ask simple questions, listen;
The words come like a dream translated,
Those random thoughts that you have every morning while in bed
Almost every moment in your day,
The repercussions of memories and myths collected through your life intertwined,
A string of associations through your mind,
A pleasant boat ride,
Out toward the wide and expansive sea,
Slowly pulled out with the tide,
Toward eternity.

Growing Up A Tree

Quiet hands caress the surface
They have forgotten to touch—
Innocence—
That part of the tree bark that has been chipped away
To the bone of the trunk,
That coarse skin that only rubber soles can climb,
With rough, manipulative hands,
And muscular limbs.
The tree smells like a hundred fruits I will eat in future years,
Freshness,
A surge of new life inspired by the lungs,
A vigor that gives the rhythm to the heart‘s drum;
For youthful eyes can see with a hundred different faculties
Lost to the blind elderly,
The cobwebs between their glasses and face,
Even in the distance between the retina and the lenses
That begs of truth,
That holds all perceptions that really matter,
Those that are in closest proximity.
When the body stops at the top,
The soul feels the precarious position of its precipitous distance to the earth,
An intoxicating state if a person has ever found himself in it:
The attraction of gravity is enormous,
And yet the will can resist,
Continually yielding to and rebelling against the passion in turns,
A metal teasing a magnet below a table’s wood.
At such altitudes a sort of mysticism settles in,
A revelation of personal place and orientation,
A calm contemplation that explores the soul thoroughly in isolated height,
That enlightens the obscurity that has surrounded it;
So that, when the climber descends the branches,
Softly and calmly, still in deep thought,
Despite the danger,
He realizes that he can see the sharp lines to everything,
The root that sinks into the ground,
The tiny branch with only a few—but extremely meaningful—leaves,
That sprout never the way a common mind would imagine them to.
His foot touching the ground,
More flatly,
As though not a part of his foot
—the heel, the arch, or the toe—
Misses contact with the earth.
The refreshing air, blowing between the open fingers cooLly;
Judgments, preconceptions, and standards
Break and snap with the twigs and branches beneath one’s feet,
And the lungs take in a fuller breath,
That liberates the heart and body to a new peak,
A height unachievable even by a tree,
A subliminal, yet serene state, of elation,
Of a glowing mind.
A smile slowly curves the lips downward
In a surrender to pleasure,
To the gods of nature;
The heart blossoms and grows at their divine water,
The sweet crystal nectar of bountiful existence,
Of being that child that first saw the world,
That smelled the flower, heard the bee,
With an incredible sense of curiosity,
A wide mouth that could only be closed by authority—
And time,
That spread the perceptions out thin with warnings,
So that the muse would have to be coated with them again and again
For warmth and security,
To stick its head out once more,
Without fear,
A heart brazen with an eye that won’t stop twinkling.
A naive grin at a deer,
Legs sent soaring,
Every sensation entering
With a definite personal meaning,
A clear emotional universality,
An unblemished intellectual understanding,
So that as the eyes glance back at that towering tree
The body has miraculously scaled before,
A sense of enrichment and gratuity returns to the soul,
An awareness, or learning, attained by ascending that formidible wood,
That causes the body to rise up straight,
And walk with an air of freedom and expansion
That will perpetuate for the rest of its life.

Her Hair Is Never Cut

12/8/96

Her hair is never cut
Although she sheds it every year,
Turning it into colors
Naturally dyed (died).
Each tangled hair
Firm and to gravity
Holds no fear.
Her tresses stretch far
Out to the skies,
Shielding her slender body
From the cold rain.
I often love to embrace her
Solid matter.
Squeeze her hard
I cannot break her.
In the fall I sit
Among her decaying remains,
Watching them decompose.
In the winters I lie
Under her umbrella fro with which
She shields herself, me and them from the chilling snow.
In the spring I visit her
And marvel over her growth,
Feeling the life that radiates from her skin.
And in the summer the shadow of her long luxurious locks
Are my cool salvation from the
Scorching ruthless heat.
Years pass by, and she never leaves;
Proud and loyal she stands,
Never to cease.

Irrational

                        5/29/97

The irrational root of a
Quadratic equation equals the
Imaginary number of this variable when
Solved for y. Plant your coordinates on a
Large graph and draw a line. Label your
Polor coordinates carefully or you won’t
Be able to calculate the intersection point.
Trignometric functions are very valuable
To have, since you are expected to know these
Relationships in triangles. Also understand all these
Theorems that will give you the answer
If you plug the values for n, k, and x in
Properly. After you have found the angle
For theta, you’ll need to add 180 degrees
To get the second quadrant angle. Then, you
Can find alpha by multiplying it by its
Arc tangent. Shade in the inequality, then sketch the
Inverse function f(x) before you determine where the
Axis of symmetry and vertex is.
You’ll also need to understand synthetic division and how
To multiply complex conjugates. Finally, know the relationships between
Logarithms, exponents and the value of e.
Study hard to comprehend all of this and
You will be ready to take the test.

Living(And Experience)

12/13/96

Star light,
From the source of life;
That’s what guides me through these pages
Of otherwise meaninglessness.
To have that poignant or ecstatic experience
Everyday--
That incident, which, perhaps because of its rare circumstance,
Might never happen again.
Maybe, merely because of time and emphasis,
Those moments must come in intervals,
Unexpected,
Or else, like every other thing, they become routine and boring.
That time Helen, Laura, and I ran through the sprinklers in bare feet,
The prickly grass stabbing the underside of our skin;
Or those moments when Carl and I would race through the streets
Screaming about walnuts and cashews.
In the evenings
In the evenings
In the evenings
When I returned home,
I could sit in my quiet, dark room,
And contemplate what I had been through.
The shadows were long,
And stood next to me in quiet thought,
Like those tall sentries with spear and pointed hat,
Loyal and stony.
The rave party at Point Reyes,
Strangely displaced as the sun slowly set illuminating the sky with a fabulous orange.
And Carrie and I,
Giving the Latino couple a ride home after their car broke down,
When we could have been hanging out.
Maybe I’m still having these precious moments,
Only,
I don’t appreciate them;
Because they are so saturated in hundreds of other incidents.
Maybe I just need to relax,
And let them all melt
From their gooey mold,
Like flies trapped in syrup.
Maybe, instead of stressing,
I should do nothing for a while;
Let these moments congeal for sometime
At least until I can see them clearly;
Then maybe my present life won’t seem so empty,
And I can go on my happy way,
Living.

Mornings Before Work

4/13/98

A can opener
Makes noise in the morning,
As the cat runs under the couch to hide.
Pork and beans at dawn,
In your own kitchen,
Where a hundred other choices can be taken.
Soap bubbles in your sink,
With the edges of dishes rising between the mass of suds.
Someday, you'll have to get to them;
But for now, you tell yourself you don't have the time.
At the kitchen table,
You put the can on the white cloth that spreads over the wood,
Dip a spoon in and eat the pink pods and mush,
As the orange sun glows in the distance like radioactivity.
There was once a time when you could see it rise all the way up,
But now you must get to work by 6:30.
Driving to your job,
Your eyes barely open;
You focus on the stop signs, traffic signals and cars ahead of you
With little visual energy you have.
You cannot passively gaze
On that flourescent orb that slowly lightens the sky.
When the divine canopy has taken on lighter colors,
You finally noticed it ,
After the heliosphere has reached its apex.
And with hairy arms outstretched,
Grabbing the steering wheel with callus hands
While your back is straight, militantly, against the seat,
You ride to work dutifully.
Until you are suddenly there,
Where you must stop
And unload the car of your cooler.
The cool air nips your skin--
Your ears and nose especially--
As you get out to walk to your office in the morning stillness,
Plastic cooler in your hand,
Hat meaninglessly on your head,
You stumble to your station to greet your boss,
Though you'd rather be sleeping.

Natural Health

2/8/96

Simple chicken tells more truth
Than red ground meat.
I eat my beets because they remind me of blood;
And bread, because it gives no pretense.
The strawberry sunday is covered with syrup;
And the cotton candy is merely fluff.
I eat my rice with quiet ascetism,
A nutritional wholesomeness in the back of my mind.
Those Cheetos make my tongue itch,
The cookies—my stomach turn.
The popcorn causes my saliva to thicken,
And the soda only provokes my thirst.
I am of the mind that all hunger must come to an end
Only when it is satisfied,
By whatever means that may be;
I prefer the rich, for the substantiality fills my spirit—
Opens my eyes, sharpens my hearing, clears my head of junk.
My blood flows through my veins like a river,
And my breathing is smooth, not rough.
My health sprouts like a tree from the natural desire to grow,
To gain a few inches,
To thicken my bones out,
And strengthen those ligaments that hold my limbs together,
Like the vast infrastructure of a skyscraper.
I am sure architects have the same plan
When they compose their works:
The blueprint is there, just like a diet plan,
And all they need to do is guide and direct it.
Of course, special orders can be made:
A construction crew can be paid to do the job;
But diet plans rarely succeed
And only rob the obese of their finances.
I prefer the more natural way,
Running, thinking, greens;
These are the elements of a healthy body,
And—science proves—a healthy heart.
Maybe someday people might try to choose a more active life,
And disinherit the junk food.
The lettuce is nuturing, isn’t it?
And the milk glues the limbs together.
The apples almost make your teeth shine,
And in times of sick, the orange will make you better:
Yes, this is the food that makes a strong, vigorous life—for certain.

Poetic Lecture on Literary Devices

                                                10/23/95                     

High headress from heaven.
That’s an alliteration,
Pretty good, huh?

Well, that’s nothing—
Check out this metaphor:
The sky is the topsy turvey sea.

That impress you?
Then you’ll love this similie;
The kite sailed through the air like a graceful sparrow.

It’s raining so hard there are holes in the roof!
That was a hyperbole
In case you didn’t know.

The baseball bat is long, slender, and young.
That was a personification—
You’d think I’d be describing a lady, wouldn’t you?

I’ll finish this off with a paradox—
Leaving you knowhere:
You have learned much from this pointless lesson.

Class dismissed.

Slivers

7/13/98

Slivers in my palm
Where the past scars exist.
I stare up at the sky with a pleasant light-headness,
Lean against the wall of earth
And expel short breath.

Large wheels roll by,
Over the gentle dirt,
A machine harnessed by human mechanism.
Bizarre metal,
I murmer to myself,
As I picture the trees that have once been.
Sleeping on a freeway
Once a path to a forest;
The chemical alkalies improper,
Obscenely mixed by some mad laboratory mind,
Then planted here?
Why must this metal plate stick from the bark
Like a butcher knife from a child?

I like the chips of wood beneath my skin,
More than this metal massacre slicing through my friend.
At least the natural injury is repairable,
Whereas the razor edge splits flesh cleanly,
Irreversible cut,
Leaving the gushing of blood behind
As the blade proceeds on to its next victim.
The industrial killer is more like a human-created genocide
Than a bee--
That sacrifices its life for survival in natural irony.
Why have the trees disappeared
When I still have this splinter beneath my skin,
Like a lock of hair from a murdered lover,
And wonder where, or if, they ever existed?
My memory of them so naturalistic as to be a cliche,
I the aesthete of the mother's way.
Here though,
That memory of a tree before me,
A tree behind me,
Trees on all sides,
Like some self-sufficient temple of ruins
That enshrines a precious and invisible life.
Have they been used to build the houses above,
Shaved into straight lines and boards,
Then constructed,
Until the surface is too smooth, too white, too linear
To hold any individual origin?
Certainly, in the pale interior a dark ringlet core can be seen,
But these are sparse now,
And, perhaps like humanity,
The overall character of wood has been shaved down--
Transfigured--
Into a standard, mediocre form;
And how will even the mother of these manipulated children
Reclaim her offspring,
When her powers,
As all powers should be,
Resides simply in her fertility?
Surely,
Storms will ravage the houses,
Earthquakes may rattle the land,
But, deep in the ground and high in the wind,
She cannot understand nor confront the source of her dilemna,
That destroys her generations
With the fingers she has offered them,
Until she can barely breathe,
And closes her eyes as she grows less and less present.

Funny how a splinter will never make you bleed,
Only a trivial inconvenience
To the fatal injuries
Caused by the toxic pollutants,
The large tractors,
The loud chainsaws—
How could I have trusted
That this land would be cherished,
Before a man named Fremont
Inspired hundreds to ravage it.
Somehow, the masses have been able to invade every part of life,
Spread themselves out fully over the sensitive planet
As though they owned it,
And swallow every last tract of their support system,
Of their God
'Till in atheism they crush
What has nourished them
From the birth of the first neandrathal.

Swelling Blindness In Uninterrupted Silence

                                                                                                            5/4/97

Swelling blindness in uninterrupted silence
I fly out into existence and realize my deprival:
My throat parched, my bones dully tired;
Thin long hands caress them with fingers
That touch lightly in swift elation;
Cloudiness between my eyes
That look outward to see what’s ahead:
The blazing heat rots the ground to singe
Life out of the sand, which once rolled and flowed in oceanic waves Slamming against ships nearby.

A hawk spreads its wings and flies down with a small child in its claws—
A baby longing for life as his days of his youth,
When his mother held him carefully in her arms.
Even then the dark bliss remained
Like a soft glowing light, causing this morning to
Split at the incision of the tender surface of an embryo.
A scream emits, but no one listens—the world is utterly black to a woman’s
Terror under the faint lights onto the street, crying in pain, as a
Raging truck breathes smoke through the slits of its grill
And rolls over her with unhalting tires that push on perpetually.

Other forms exist without explanation:
Take the pendulums around us,
That swing slowly back and forth in wicked arcs,
Like trecherous eyebrows, suggestive knifes to cut into skin.
The angst that fills the victim
Under the blades stemming from rotting pirate ships.
I want to escape this sordid scene of strife,
But there is no apparent way—
The sky, before soft and tender, cries out shrilly in hysterics,
A hard blue plastic shield embedded firmly in the sky to keep me out
From the mania of my visions created genuinely by my mind—
The flat and stolid plane hangs in the sky like a high-tech canopy—
Almost parallel to the ground—
In neat little lines that can’t be undone.
Rotten sun that never quits,
I scream and cry at it in spite of my life
While in raving despair my body drops on the desert landscape--
Desiccated and weak,
Unscented on the strong firm million of tiny grains
That composes the ground's compact presence.
Gasping tears from my blazing eyes,
Frying on the small strands of writhing green grass that has survived—
Through smoke and haze that infects my obstructed carcass—
Crop up lonely nearby as dry, hollow insects,
My corpse opaque yet lifeless—unheard of here.

The ground rips apart spontaneously,
Cracking apart at unpredictable places,
Random rocky patterns unprecendented, .
Prodded from the dirt in meager effort of archeologists
In search for fossil remains.
Awe-struck, unthought of horror meets me
At the end of this long passage of a spinning light
That grows smaller and smaller
As one descends into the madness that never ends
And where the form of a mysterious dark creature, looms ahead--
Or perhaps farther away, as you fall into further depths of
Darkness that cannot be taken with easy paced breath,
But defiles your unhelped presence unmercilessly.
            Unconcentrated, but saved by your lightness,
You float up back to the surface of that world
You remembered in your dreams as you fell into silence.

Transcending the Circumstances

            Moonlight
In a dog's eye,
Barking at you as you run by.
His black fur cut short,
Like any unfashionable butch,
You're ass saved only by the leash holding him to the tree.
Still, you stop suddenly,
Fearful that he may attack you any minute,
You walk away backward, slowly,
With your hands up,
Telling yourself either you shouldn't be running on these streets
At night
Or people have no need for such ferocious dogs,
Such as the little one that chirps and chases after you without a chain.
The people, contemplating, tired,
Hanging out in the back of their pickup
Or in front of their garage,
Their faces apathetic and unsurprised as you dash by--
Guess they've seen you too many times.
The cars that drive by,
Always with fear that someone will shoot you--
That fear you used to have at your old neighborhood--
Arising,
Maybe for just a thrill, a real thrill,
On your midnight run.
The latinos playing their lively music from the illuminated garage,
Their kids chasing each other on bikes
And on the other street, the teenagers listening to hip-hop and the bee-bop
By the basketball hoop, gazing at you incredibly.

You run in the dark because of denial of your situation--
Then why do you notice all this?
You desire everything to become static,
Lifeless, unpopulated, tolerable in its dead physical existence.
That appreciation for the quiet and solitude of after nine,
When you're the only one out,
Not inside watching TV or in bed
Like all the mediocre residents.
And yet you are aware,
You are aware of where you run,
The deep suburbs,
And know that you don't belong here,
Love to run not because of the place where you run
But because of the running.
Your desire irrepressible,
Your daily consumption of endorphins intolerable,
You dash out of your home because of the physical need
For movement.
On most nights,
That's what keeps your legs pumping,
That insistence that you can't let your environs defeat you,
And must transcend your circumstances
With a force called life.
So with your mind barely present,
But making a thousand associations per minute,
Painting an image of a fantasy in your brain every second,
You create from imagination
And give your movement energy
In a world where everything's dead.

Wild Animals Becoming Civilized

12/9/99

Large grassy hills,
Hundreds of animals,
Strangers to each other's species,
Talking to their older guides
And eating the food the zoo gives them
At the troughs under the tent.
Spread out randomly,
Lonely,
Thinking,
Eating,
Talking briefly but also meditating.
The happy older hosts,
Sitting on their lawn chairs
And chewing grass, ruminating,
While they offer information,
That the animals, dumb, take from authority.
How fares this, one animal thinks,
To what the zoo will really be like,
To the chaotic institution
Where the animals will have to go into the cage themselves
And chat with each other idiosyncratically.

These rather urban photographs are charming,
So full of varied emotion,
Sociologists can analyze them for hours,
Notice the psychological and cultural overtones between people,
Collectively of rich texture and values,
In a picture that even the greatest artists might have difficulty painting,
Much harder than a simple cherry tree blossoming,
Each person with a story--

And yet, strangely disconcerting,
The fear and intensity between them,
Structured this way unnaturally,
All therУ because of program rather than circumstance,
Everything planned architecture, not like the stormy sea,
Knowing you'll all be together later,
Communing,
Knowing you're all crazy,
You may as well start grazing,
Without ever turning your cow's eyes toward each other.
The domesticated animals, intelligent and solitary,
And yet,
Uneasy at each other's presence.
Happy to be where they now are,
And yet not ready for what might come next.
Moving into those pens the masters order them,
Yet apathetic and dull to the experience,
Unintrigued by the mystery that sounds each species,
(That cat a hybrid of you and me)
And taking the introduction in a calm, idyll manner,
As though they are there for a reason they don't understand.
When did they lock me in here? asks a panther,
With desultory eyes.

At the introduction announcements,
Obedient and quiet,
Curious and bright,
Asking questions to suit their individual needs
In a demanding way:
That's probably how they got here.

At the overview of feeding times,
The feeder asks them to differentiate between different types of meat,
And they, in turn, answer eagerly,
Though no prize of flesh is delivered.

Then, marching through the zoo they go
To the eating cages,
Where they fight over their meal,
And socialize
About the history of the zoo,
About its civilized events in the context of the wilderness.

Then, in the evening,
When the only light is those from the street lamps,
The civilized animals lead the hordes into even smaller, more sealed cages
To talk about their differences,
Recognize traits of each other's species,
And try to come to a better understanding of their awareness of each other.
When asked to express fears about coming to the zoo,
A zebra honestly admits
That he worries about finding the right niche,
And the experienced, refined animal must smile and agree,
Before they warn, at the prompting of a question,
The dangers of the wild herbs and uncivilized animals native to the area.

Then they head to a large auditorium where they listen to former beasts
Talk about their adaption to the zoo,
How they still went back to the wild now and then
Because they miss their old friends and family,
But how it isn't the same,
How some had to run away from their jungles
In order not to tell their parents where they were running off to.
How they admit that many of them,
Upon arriving,
Had difficulty settling down and took advantage of their freedom,
To the cost of taking longer to become civilized,
But how in the end they did, and were happy for it.

Late at night, they gather around the park,
Hesitant to return to their lairs yet,
And chat with the civilized animals
About what they will encounter later.
The most thrilling event however,
For the most part, takes place in the shadows,
Behind the leaves and branches
That obscure the cages they will sleep in this evening.
In a circle, apparently, a lion, a bear, a hawk, and a tiger gather around,
And humbly and truthfully discuss their weakness--their lust--for the flesh,
How it often comes from an uncontrollable anger and depression
That they are unable to find other outlets to,
How they fear it,
For this desire to hunt and kill
Is what has left their untame brothers back home,
Roaming the plains like bloodthirsty monsters,
Their lips craving the pray they chase after.
They tell wild, absurd stories,
Of lions who slew large elephants
And still shared the flesh with their pack,
But that later lost themselves to selfish greed
Once they killed tiny rabbits,
And consequently are still stuck back in the middle of the jungle.
Together, they come to the conclusion of what separates
The civilized animals from the beasts--
Their ability to offer their meat to each other,
And not devour it without satiety.
At the end of this profound event,
They decide that it is time--
Even though hundreds of delicious critters probably roam the territory--
To go to their assigned dens and think about it,
Be responsible with their stay here,
And retire to their caves like mature beasts.

Plays

Birding

3/2/95

Grandpa flies kite with Grandson in a park.

Grandson: Grandpa, I’m bored. Can we go home now?
Grandpa: Not yet Billy. Be patient. We’ll catch one soon.
Grandson: That’s what you said an hour ago.
Grandpa: Billy, you’ve just got to enjoy the surroundings: the puffy clouds, the nice tall trees, the way the wind blows the grass. . . Oh look! We’ve got one. (Struggle with kite, wring in.)
Grandson (jumping up and down) Pull it in grandpa, pull it in!
Grandpa (grunting): It’s a big one all right! Looks like an eagle Jimmy!
Grandson: An eagle!
Grandpa: I’ve got you now, you yello‘ belly sapsucker. Like that worm, don’t ya? (Wring in.)
Grandson and Grandpa: (Turn heads to ground.)
Grandson: Oh Grandpa! That’s no big bird. That’s just one of those stupid little black ones that sit on the telephone poles.
Grandpa: Sorry Jimmy. It looks like we’re going to have to throw this one back up.
Grandson: Another one? Why?
Grandpa: The park won’t let us keep any birds under two inches. Regulations. (Throw bird back up.) Come on, we better go home. Grandma’s probably bought a bird from the grocery store anyhow. We’ll have better luck next time. (Exit.)
Grandson: You always say that. (Exit.)

 

Plays

                                                                                                            3/7/97
                                                Birthday Bash
Characters
James
Ricky
Shaun
Jordan
Eric
James’ Mom
James’ Dad

Scene 1
(An arcade. Video game machines stand about, blinking and flashing. James walks about, looking at the different games. Ricky enters and enthusiasitically runs up to James holding something.)

Ricky: Hey James! Guess what I found?
James: What?
Ricky: One hundred dollars!
James: Where?!
Ricky: Over in the middle of the floor. (He points.)
James: You’re so lucky!
(James’ Mom enters.)
Mom: Come on boys, we’re leaving.
James: Guess what Ricky found Mom?
Mom: What?
James: One hundred dollars!
Mom (suddenly interested): Really? Where?
Ricky: Just over by the floor over there.
James: You’re not going to make him give it back, are you?
Mom: (Laughs.) How could he give it back? It isn’t like it has anybody’s name on it!
(James and Ricky laugh in relief. Eric, Jordan, and Shaun join them and they all begin walking to the left.)
James (to Eric): Hey, Eric, did you here what Ricky found?
Eric: Yeah, he told us.
Shaun: Man, you’re hecka lucky!
Eric: Hey Ricky, I bet James wouldn’t mind if you gave him that money you found as a birthday present!
(They all laugh.)
James: (Laughs.) Yeah Ricky, here, I’ll take the money.
Mom: I’m sure James wouldn’t mind receiving that present at all.
Ricky (playfully): No, no that’s all right. I’m sure you would want something else.
James: Oh no, that’s fine. I’ll be fine with the money. Just give it to me, here.
Ricky: This is the second time this has happened to me. I can’t believe it!
Mom: Where else did you find money on the floor?
Ricky: One time when I was in an arcade the same thing happened to me.
Shaun: How come that happen to you twice?
Jordan: Man, you’re hecka lucky! I wish I found one hundred dollars on the floor!
Eric: Hey, James, where are we going now?
James: We’re going out for pizza, remember?
Eric: That’s right! The Pizza Palace!
Shaun: I love the Pizza Palace! It’s my favorite place in the world!
James: Calm down Shaun.
Ricky (to James’ Mom): Shaun’s a pizza maniac!
Shaun: Piiizzzaa! Piiiizzzaaa!
Eric: You should have seen him at Jordan’s party. He ate nine slices!
Ricky: I don’t get how you can eat so much pizza and still stay skinny.
Eric: You’d think he’d be fat from eating that much.
Ricky: Hey James, what movies did you rent for tonight? Did you rent Hell Beast?
James: Yeah, and I also rented Ghoul Town..
Ricky: Cool! Have you seen Hell Beast Shaun?
Shaun: No. Is it sick?
Ricky: It’s the sickest movie I’ve ever seen! Wait ’till you see this one part where he takes this glue gun and burns this ladies eyes out—
James: Ricky! Shhhh!
Ricky: What?
Shaun: Don’t tell me the whole movie! Then I won’t even want to see it!
James: And you always talk so loud! My mom could be listening.
Ricky: Oh yeah. Sorry. (He grins.)
Shaun: Are we going to sleep in your backyard?
James: I don’t know. If you guys want.
Ricky (enthusiastically): Yeah, let’s do it!
Eric (whining): I don’t want to sleep outside. There’s too many bugs out there!
Ricky: Oh, come on Eric. You’re just scared. You can sleep inside by yourself, and the rest of us will sleep outside.
James: Shut-up Ricky.
Ricky: You shut up!
Mom: Hey, hey! Knock it off!
Ricky: Fine. (Silence.) So are we going to play flag tag when we get back?
Shaun: Yeah, let’s play flag tag!
James: Where would we play it?
Ricky: By the school near your house.
James: But it’ll be too dark by the time we get back.
Ricky: Why can’t we do it in the dark?
James: I‘ll talk to my Mom about it.

Scene 2
(James’ Mom, James, Eric, Ricky, Shaun and Jordan enter the Pizza Palace.)

Shaun: The Pizza Palace!
Mom: Okay, what do you guys want?
Shaun: Mega Pizza! Mega Pizza!
Mom: Okay, I’ll get one of those—wow, that’s pretty expensive!—and what else do you want on the other one?
Shaun: Get two! Two!
James: Just get a medium mom, with pepperoni and cheese. (To Shaun) We’re just going to get one, okay Shaun?
Shaun: Okay.
Mom: What do you guys want to drink?
Shan: Root beer!
James: Coke.
Eric (to Ricky): You should see this one game they have here. It’s better than all the games at Starcade.
Mom: Eric! What do you want to drink?
Eric: Uh, I’ll have a Sprite.
Ricky: I’ll have a Dr. Pepper.
Jordan: Hey James, do you have any new games on your computer?
Vender: We don’t have Dr. Pepper.
James: No, but I got this new role-playing game called Lost Legends.
Ricky: Okay, I’ll have a Sprite then.
Jordan: Oh wow! What’s that about?
Mom: Jordan?
Ricky: Hey Jordan, what do you want to drink?
Jordan: Oh, I’ll have a Coke.
James: You’re this pauper guy and you go around and explore this kingdom. I can’t figure out what you’re suppose to do yet though. It’s really hard!
Jordan: Why, are they enemies tough? (He follows James and the rest to the table.)
James: No, I just keep getting lost in the mazes, and I get all these hints, but I don’t know what they mean.
Jordan: Can I start a game on it?
(They all sit down at a long table.)
James: Sure! You’ll probably figure it out faster than I will.
Ricky: Jordan can beat any game. He’s a video game freak!
James: Eric really likes video games too Jordan.
Jordan: What kind of games do you like?
Eric: I like the Phillip the Penguin games.
Jordan: Me too. I love Phillip the Penguin. One the best games ever made is The World of Phillip the Penguin. The graphics to that game are spectacular, and it’s really fun. Another really good game is the Quest of Owen.
Eric: Yeah, I really like that one too. Do you like The Rage of Daniel?
Jordan: Yeah, that’s one of the best fighting games there is. It’s got good play control. Have you played Sar’s Blast?
Eric (nodding): Good game.
Shaun: How long is the pizza going to take to get here?
James: It usually takes a while. We can go play games for a while if we want.
Ricky: Don’t go and play those baby games! Those games are for little kids!
James: Hey, I won a mininature golf club from those baby games last time I was here at Eric’s Party.
Ricky: I don’t care. They’re still baby games.
Eric: Last time I was here they played ‘Happy Birthday!’ You should ask them to play it for you James. King Pizza comes out and dances on your table while he sings. You can see all this cheese dripping off him. It’s really cool!
James: Cool!
Ricky: One time I pulled of King Pizza’s mask and all the little kids screamed. He was this old ugly guy.
(They all laugh.)
Ricky: All the little kids went home crying. It was great!
(They all laugh again.)
James: Cool!
Ricky: What I really hate is that stupid Duke of Dough!
Shaun: You hate The Duke of Dough?
Ricky: I hate the way he walks around with his nose up in the air all the time, carrying the Pizza flag.
James (nodding): Ricky hates The Duke of Dough.
(James’ Mom comes to the table with the pizza.)
Shaun (jumping up and down in his seat): Mega Pizza! Mega Pizza!
(The kids put the pizza slices on their napkins in begin eating.)
Eric: Ummm! Pizza Palace pizza is the best in the world!
James: Or, as they say on the commercials, “Pizza Palace pizza rules!”
(They all laugh.)
Ricky: I hear they’re coming out with a Pizza Palace cartoon soon.
Shaun: Not ah?
Ricky: (Shakes his head.) I heard about it on channel two. It’s gonna start this fall.
Shaun: That’s so cool! I’m going to watch it everyday! What time is it?
Ricky: I don’t know. They didn’t say. But it should be coming out this fall like all the other cartoons.
Eric: That’s the good thing about the fall. Even though we have to go back to school, we have all these new cartoons.
Ricky: Don’t bring up school. I don’t even want to think about it! Hey, James, are we going to stay up all night tonight?
James: Sure! My mom doesn’t really care, as long as we’re quiet.
Ricky: Yeah. We’ll be quiet. But the first one who falls asleep gets Cheetos in his sleeping bag! (He laughs and looks at Shaun.)
Shaun (his mouth full, looking at Ricky): Don’t do that!
Ricky: You’re such a sucker. You couldn’t even stay up past eleven at Eric’s party. (To Jordan.) He fell asleep in the middle of Chaos—Damn Shaun, what pizza are you on now?
Shaun (his mouth full): Seventh.
Ricky: You’re crazy boy!
Jordan: Hey James, I’m going to go check out the games.
James: All right. See you later Jordan.
Ricky: Hey James, when are we going to open your presents?
James: When we get home probably. Mom doesn’t want to make a big mess out of everything. You remember what happened last year.
Ricky: No, what happened?
James: We left that G.I. Joe toy here.
Ricky: Oh yeah. That giant big one. That was the best present you got too! Bummer. Anyway, you’re going to love my present. It’s the best.
(Jordan comes to the table.)
Jordan: Hey, James, they got this cool racing game here. You want to come play it with me?
James: Sure. (He finishes his Coke and leaves with Jordan. Ricky gets up and leaves also.)
Eric: What pizza are you on now?
Shaun (still eating): Eighth.
Eric (shaking his head): You’re crazy!
James’ Mom: Has everyone had a piece?
Eric: Yeah. They all left. Shaun can eat the rest of it. I’m gonna go check out the games. When are we leaving this place?
James’ Mom: Probably about four. That’ll be in another hour or so. Can you tell the kids if you see any of them.
Eric: Sure. (He gets up and leaves.)
(The curtain falls.)

Scene 3
(James’ house. James, Ricky, Eric, Shaun, and Jordan are in their sleeping bags. James’ dog Nero walks about, sniffing all the new-comers. A TV is set up in the corner, and the Ricky plays a video game.)

Ricky: Hey, James, you want to play roller hockey tomorrow?
James: I don’t know. I don’t know if everybody has a pair of roller blades.
Shaun: I don’t.
Jordan: Neither do I.
Ricky: You can borrow my brother’s Jordan. And we can have somebody sit out so you can play too Shaun. Have you ever played roller hockey Shaun?
Shaun: No, but I have some friends in Ohio who play it. It sounds like a lot of fun.
Ricky: It is. It’s really dangerous. I almost thought I broke my arm one time.
Shaun: Cool!
(Jordan looks a little wary.)
Ricky: Oh don’t worry Jordan, it’s not that bad. Once you start playing you don’t even worry about it.
Shaun: Hey James, what time is it?
James: About 7:30.
Shaun: You want to start watching Ghoultown soon?
James: Sure.
Ricky: I want to watch Hellbeast again!
Shaun: What’s so great about that movie? You never stop talking about it!
Ricky: Shut-up Eric. You haven’t even see it.
Shaun: No, but I’ve seen clips, and it looks really dumb.
Ricky: Well, let’s go outside then. It’s still light out there. We can play hide and go seek.
James: Cool idea! Let’s do it.
(They all go outside—the other side of the stage—to play hide and go seek.)
Ricky: Okay, the back of the station wagon is base. And you can’t guard base.
James: And you can’t go anywhere beyond my house. I got in trouble last time we did this.
Shaun: Whose gonna be it?
James: I’ll be it. (He puts his head down on the base and begins counting.)
(Everybody scatters, hiding behind curtains. James lifts his head, and approaches the left curtain. As he does Eric, Shaun and Jordan hide behind the right curtain run up and tag base. He runs to catch them and Ricky comes out from the right. James sees Ricky and stands between Ricky and the base. Ricky makes motions to fake James out, but James doesn’t flinch. Then Shaun sprays Ricky with a water gun.)
Ricky: You dork! Why the hell did you do that? That wasn’t even funny.
Shaun (laughing): Got him! Got him!
(Everyone except Ricky laughs.)
Ricky: Punk!
James: Oh come on Ricky! You deserved it.
(Ricky goes over to Eric, pushes him over. James jumps on top of him and starts hitting him. James and the others try to pull Ricky off Shaun.)
(James’ Dad comes out of the house.)
Dad (yelling): Hey, knock it off! (He pulls Ricky off Shaun and holds him by the arm.) What happened here? I thought I told you kids to stay inside for the rest of the night!
James: We were just playing hide and seek dad! Ricky’s been acting like a jerk all night, so Shaun got him with the super soaker, and he got mad and tried to beat up Shaun.

                                    5/23/97
                                   
                                                For This Relief Much Thanks

Characters (in order of appearance)
Helen Roberts, daughter of William
Todd Daniels, son of Earl
Brad, friend of Eric
Eric, friend of Brad
Earl Daniels, father of Todd
Bernard, Helen’s parrot
William Roberts, father of Helen
Grandma, grandmother of Helen
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Act 1

Scene 1
Library. Helen sits at a table, reading a book.

Todd: (Enter.) Hey Helen!

Helen: (Look up from her book. Look at him patiently.)

Todd: What are you reading?

Helen: Shakespeare.

Todd: Oh really? I like reading too. You like Batman?

Helen: No, I prefer literature.

Todd: Oh. Well, if you want something really classy, I could show you my Star Wars collection. I got the one where Chewbacca and Han Solo shoot at the termites.

Helen: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Todd: That’s why I’ll show you.

Helen: No, I’m content with Shakespeare. I suggest you pick yourself up some of his work sometime.

Todd: What he write?

Helen: Oh, Hamlet,—

Todd: (Slam the table with fist.) I know that book!

Helen (surprised): You do?

Todd: Yeah, we’re reading it in English! In fact, I’ve got it right here. (Take out Hamlet, hold it forward it with a huge smile. Look at it.) It’s about a guy who is all bummed out.

Helen: That’s Hamlet.

Todd: Yeah—he’s on the cover; and he kills himself and everything! I love it!

Helen: That’s funny, I don’t recall that Hamlet kills himself.

Todd: Yeah, but he sure wants to, the dude’s so down.

Helen: Yes, he certainly is a very melancholy prince.

Todd: Hey Helen, why don’t you ever talk to anybody?

Helen: Because I don’t care to. Why? Do I need any other reason?

Todd: No, I guess not. I just wonder how someone can go around and not talk to anybody. You must get a lots of strange ideas from reading all these books.

Helen: (Shrugg.) You can say that.

Todd: I wish I could read as much as you. After about a hundred pages I give up.

Helen: I suppose it is an acquired taste.

Todd: Yeah, well, I’m getting it; I’m going to read some more Shakespeare, just you watch. I’m gonna read King George next.

Helen: That’s King Lear.

Todd: Oh well, one of those books. They’re all the same to me. It’s all fine literature, ain’t it?

Helen: Yes, I suppose it is, though there are some discriminating differences.

Todd: Yeah, I guess so, but when you come right down to it, it’s just entertainment. I think I’ll finish Hamlet now though. (Take out the book from his knapsack, sit down, and read. Laugh randomly while reading.)

Helen: (turning her head towards him): What’s so funny?

Todd: Oh, I don’t know, just how these people talk. They like to mix up words and stuff.

Helen (defensively): That’s the way people talked back then. There’s nothing strange about it.

Todd: Well, I think it’s kind of weird. But then again, maybe I’ll get use to it—hey, that was pretty smart of me to figure that out, wasn’t it?

Helen: It certainly was. Keep reading. You’ll only get smarter.

Todd: You bet. So, what are you doing this weekend?

Helen: I’m going to visit my grandmother.

Todd: Oh yeah? Where does your grandmother live?

Helen: In the mountains somewhere. I don’t know. (Shake head, turn back to her book.) My parents drive me there.

Todd: That’s funny; my grandmother lives in the city.

Helen: Well I guess we don’t have much in common then, do we?

Todd (leaning over): Who’s Bernard? It says, “I love Bernard“ on your binder.

Helen: Bernard is my parrot. He speaks seven languages.

Todd: You have a parrot?!

Helen: Uh-huh.

Todd: Wow, that’s so cool! I want to see it. You think I can come over to your house today after school?

Helen (warily): I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my dad.

Todd: Well, yeah; I’ll have to ask my parents too, so I can go, but do you think you’d want to?

Helen: I don’t think you can come over today.

Todd: Why’s that?

Helen: I’m going to my grandmother’s, remember?

Todd: Oh yeah. Hey! Can I come with you to your grandma’s house?

Helen: Probably not. She definitely wouldn’t want you to come over.

Todd: Why not? We could do all sorts of stuff!

Helen: I don’t know. (Pause.) I’ll ask, okay. I’ve really got to go now. I’ll see you later, all right? (Wave at him in a friendly but concluding way. Exit.)

Todd: Why doesn’t she ever want to hang out with me? (Pick up Hamlet  and continues reading.)

Scene 2
Todd’s house. Todd with his friends Brad and Eric, pillow fighting.

Todd: (Swing pillow at Brad.) Take that, Doomsday!

Brad: Foolish cretin! You are no match for us!

Eric and Brad: (Swing pillows at him.)

Todd (laughing) Stop, I will blast thou with my poison gas!

Eric and Brad: (Laugh, put down pillows.)

Eric: Thou?! Why the hell did you say that?

Brad: It’s that girlfriend of his: Helen. (Mockingly) She’s been making him read Shakespeare, so they can read poetry to each other.

Brad (shaking his head): God Todd, Shakespeare is bad enough at school. Why waste your time reading it to some girl?

Eric: Yeah Todd. How come you don’t hang out with us more?

Todd: I hang out with you guys all the time, don’t I? Look, I’m hanging out with you guys now! We were just pillow fighting a minute ago.

Brad: Yeah, but we could hang out more if you didn’t read Shakespeare all the time! Geez!

Todd: Hey, I like Shakespeare. You’d like him too if you tried reading him sometime. (Throw his pillow at Brad playfully.)

Eric: Yeah, you mean if we fell for some boring girl down the street that read him all the time!

Todd: Helen isn’t boring. She just likes different things. I bet you didn’t know she has a parrot that can speak seven languages.

Eric and Brad: (Burst out in laughter.)

Brad: Who wants a parrot when you can’t even tell what the hell it’s saying?

Eric: Not me, I’d shoot it before it could speak two languages. She probably made it up anyway.

Todd: She didn’t make it up! She wouldn’t lie!

Eric: How do you know? Have you seen it?

Todd: No, but I believe her. I’ll have her show it to you, too, if you want!

Brad: She won’t do that. She’s a hermit. She never leaves her house, except for school.

Todd: Listen, let’s play X-Men again. Don’t bother my girl.

Brad: Your girl?! You mean Helen’s your girl?

Brad and Eric: (Burst into laughter.)

Todd: No, no! I meant to say that girl. It just came out that way.

Brad: Great. Now we can tell the entire school that Helen is Todd’s girl!

Todd: Don’t be stupid guys! She’ll just get mad at me if you say that. Then she’ll never show you her parrot.

Brad (pointedly): Why should you care? You just said she really isn’t your girl!

Todd: That’s it! Leave my house! (Point to the door.)

Brad: Fine, be a sore sport. Can’t even take a joke! Geez! (Throw his pillow down and go to the door.)

Todd (looking at Eric): You too!

Eric: Fine, Todd. You use to be a lot more fun before you went crazy for that girl. You take everything too seriously now. (Go to the door.)

Brad and Eric: (Exit.)

Todd: (Sit down, distressed. Pick up Hamlet and start to read.)

Earl: (Enter.) What was that all about?

Todd: Brad and Eric left.

Earl: You get in a fight or something?

Todd: Yeah. . .

Earl: What about?

Todd: (Shake his head.) Nothing.

Earl: Well that’s not worth getting mad about. You were having fun last time I looked. What the hell happened?

Todd: Brad made fun of me.

Earl: Why let that bother you? Just make fun of him back; it’s not like it’s gonna bother him or anything.

Todd: I didn’t feel like it. I just wanted them to leave, that’s all. I’m fine.

Earl: Okay. I’ll see you in the morning.

(Lights fade.)

Act 2

Scene 1
Helen’s room. Door on the left, neatly made bed against right wall, a bookshelf against the back wall, and a covered bird cage in the middle.
 
Brad: (Enter through window.) Oh my God, there it is!

Eric: He wasn’t lying! Come on, let’s take it. (Pick up bird cage.)

Brad (with a smile): Wait a minute. (Throw books out of shelf; mess up the
bed: strip it to down to the mattress, then throw the covers across the room on top of the books.)

Bernard (hopping up and down and fluttering its wings): Porka Troya! Plokha! Ce n’est pas mon jour!

Eric: Shut-up bird! We can’t understand you. (Go over and take the cage.) Let’s get out of here Brad. Quick!

Brad: (Throw the last of the books on the floor.) Look at all these stupid books!

Eric: Come on Brad! They’re here!

(Lights sweep across stage.)

Brad, Eric: (Exit through window.)

Helen: (Enter her room and scream.) Mom! Dad! Somebody’s ransacked my
room. They’ve thrown all my precious books on the floor, and Bernard! Oh noooo! (Begin crying.)

William: (Enter. Incredulously) My God! She’s right! But all they stole from the house was the parrot? Who could have done this, Helen?

Helen: I don’t know! It was probably that stupid Todd!

William: Who’s Todd?

Helen (bitterly): Some stupid boy who goes to our school. He likes me a lot, and always tries to talk to me. He found out about my parrot. Probably blabbed it off to the whole world.

William: Do you know where he lives?

Helen (pensively): No, but he‘s probably told everyone in school. Well, you can try anyway. I’ll get his number at school tomorrow.

William: I’m sorry honey. I’m as upset as you are. I know how much you loved that bird. We’ll get it back; don’t worry.

Helen (weeping): Okay.

William: Here, let me pick up these books for you. (Begin picking up books scattered about the floor.)

Helen: I’ll talk to Todd on Monday and get his phone number.

William: You do that. I’ll clean up this mess for you, don’t worry.

Helen: (Exit with forlorn look.)

William: (Pick up the disarrayed literature.)

(Lights fade.)

Scene 2
Library. Todd sits at a table, smiling.

Helen: (Enter, walk angrily up to Todd, slam books on the table. Whispering, fiercely) Where were you last night?

Todd: Uh, I was at home, reading Hamlet.

Helen: Sure you were!

Todd (panicky): I was!

Helen: Then who broke into my house that night and stole Bernard?!

Todd: (Silent for a moment.) Oh no! They didn’t! (Drop head in between arms.)

Helen: Who are they?

Todd: Brad and Eric. They threatened to break into your house and steal your parrot if I didn’t keep hanging out with them!

Helen: What the hell did you tell them? That we were best friends? Well we‘re not!

Todd: No—I got mad when they mad fun of me for being so nice to you! They said I shouldn’t spend so much time trying to be friends with you!

Helen: Well maybe you shouldn’t, if things like this are going to happen!

Todd: Then, Helen!—they made fun of Shakespeare! Just because I recited a part from Hamlet! They said I shouldn’t hang out with you because you are getting me into literature and all!

Helen: Well, that’s their problem.

Todd: Yeah, that’s what I said! I told them to get the hell out of my house and that I never wanted to see them again, those Shakespeare-haters!

Helen: Well that wasn’t too smart. Now they’ve stolen my parrot. My dad’s ready to sue for Bernard. Who are these kids again?

Todd: Brad and Eric. They’re these two big guys, and they’re really good at kickball. Haven’t you heard of Brad? He can kick the ball half-way across the entire black top!

Helen: That’s nice. Do you think you could get their address and phone number?

Todd: Yeah, we go over to Brad’s house all the time, but Eric’s mom will never let us in his house. I don’t know what her problem is.

Helen: What about their phone numbers?

Todd: I don’t got those.

Helen: Well do you know their last names?

Todd: Um, no, but the teacher probably calls them out in the classes I have with them. I’ll listen next time.

Helen: Well, let’s hope they’re unusual ones.

Todd: Sorry about all this Helen. I just I got really carried away when they made fun of you and Shakespeare. You and him are my two favorite people in the whole world now.

Helen (doubtfully): I wish you wouldn’t say that Todd. I know you like me, but I hate lying more than anything.

Todd: But I’m not lying! I’ve really developed some good tastes Helen. Really! Why won’t you believe me?

Helen: Because most people your age just aren’t like me. They like afternoon cartoons and scary movies their parents won’t let them watch. And I doubt that you’re any different.

Todd: Yeah Helen, but that’s the thing--I am different. Like, the other day, I was pillow fighting with Brad and Eric, right? And I was thinking, Geez this is stupid! Why am I wasting my time with this? And when I said that to myself, I knew that you would have said the same thing! I mean, before I wasn’t sure if you and me had anything in common, but when I had that thought--I knew we did!

Helen: Todd, most kids just haven’t been through what I have. They simply don’t understand where I’m coming from.

Todd: How different can we be? Everytime I try to agree with you on something you’ve always got to say we don’t. Why do you do that? Do you not like me no matter what?

Helen: No, I don’t dislike you no matter what. I just—I don't know Todd—you just aren’t like me at all.

Todd: But you always say that! I try hard to be interested in the same things as you are, but you keep telling me we aren’t the same. I think that’s stupid. We both like Shakespeare, don’t we?

Helen: Yes, Todd, but we don’t read it the same way.

Todd: Yes, we do. You read one line, and then you go onto the next line, then the next, then the next—what other way can you read it?

Helen: It’s not how we read it, it’s how we interpret it.

Todd: How do you interpret it?

Helen: I see myself in these characters Todd—real people! Not comic book characters.

Todd: Well, I see real people in it too. I mean, you remind me a lot of Hamlet, if you ask me.

Helen (nervous): I do?

Todd: Yeah. I mean you are always griping about how nobody understands you, like him. And you always have some sort of regret, like him. I don’t get either of you, but you still remind me of each other.

Helen: Wow, that’s a pretty impressive analogy. Maybe I should take a closer look at Hamlet. I would have never realized I’m so much like him.

Todd: Well maybe if you spend time with other people they can tell you about these sort of things. You can’t figure everything out on your own—that’s no fun anyhow.

Helen: Well then, what do you suggest I do Todd Daniels?

Todd: I don’t know. Do something fun! Like go to your grandma’s with me for a change.

Helen: All right.

Todd: You mean she’ll let me? I thought you said your grandmother doesn’t like to have your friends over.

Helen: Did I say that? You must have mistaken me; my grandmother is the biggest socialite I know! Whenever I stay the weekend she's always trying to invite other kids over so I'm not alone all the time.

Todd: (Pause. Baffled) Well that’s good. I don’t want it to seem like I’m barging in. You know how I hate to do stuff like that.

Helen: Of course! She has a swimming pool over there--so we should have lots of fun.

Todd: How cool!

Helen: So you think you can come?

Todd: Sure! My parents don’t care! They’ll always trying to get rid of me anyway.

Helen: (Laugh.) Okay, great. Here’s my number. Call me by tomorrow and we’ll pick you up. (Seriously.) Now what should we do about my parrot.

Todd: Oh just have your dad make Eric give it back. I’m sure he’s the one with the bird. Either that or you could sue him.

Helen: No, I don’t want to do anything cruel. Let’s just get my bird back and then we can ignore them.

Todd: Right, give them the silent treatment!

Helen: We’ll have way more fun up at my grandmother’s than they will down here.

Todd: That‘s what I say!

(Lights fade.)

Act 3

Scene 1
Outside grandma’s house. Helen and Todd sit in the living room with William, Lorraine, and Grandmother.

Grandma: It’s so nice to see you and your friend. Did you get your parrot back?

Helen: Yeah, it wasn’t any real problem. Dad just went over to Brad’s house and asked for him, and Brad’s father immediately scolded his son and ordered him to give back Bernard.

William: Only, it was at the other kid’s house, so then we had to drive over
there to get it.

Todd: It was great! They both got in trouble before we even left. Now they’ll be grounded all weekend!

Helen: Yes. Eric’s father got even madder at him than Brad’s parents did.

Todd: He probably beat him!

Grandma: (Shake head.) I can’t believe how some of these parents discipline their children. No wonder they turn out so awful! They must like getting punished!

Todd: Yeah, Eric’s real gross. He use to like to show me his beat-marks back when we friends—a long time ago—like he was proud of them or something!

Helen: How silly. . .

Grandmother: I’m delighted to have you two this weekend. I’ve been begging Helen to bring over one of her friends for ages.

Helen: Well that’s because I don’t like most of the kids that live around our town grandma. Most of them just aren’t that intelligent enough to talk to.

Grandmother: What are you interested in Todd?

Todd: Oh, I like Shakespeare—especially Hamlet,—and all sorts of literature. I don’t know. I’ve been learning to like new stuff. The other stuff just gets old after awhile, you know?

Grandma: Yes, I know. Helen went through it all too. She used to like Princess Playtime.

Todd: You liked Princess Playtime?!

Helen: That was a long time ago. That toy is probably up in the closet somewhere. I haven’t played with it for years.

Grandma: Two years.

Todd: (Laugh.)

Helen: Still, I’ve cultivated a greater interest in Bernard over the past two years. I’m learning German from him now. He’s been speaking it for almost a week dad—non-stop!

William: That’s great. Maybe you can go to Germany someday.

Helen: Oh that would be so much fun! Maybe Todd could come with me.

Todd: Could I?

Helen: Sure, but you’ve got to learn German first.

Todd: Oh. (Think.) Well, that might take me a while, but I’m sure I could do it; just give me some time.

William (whispering, to Grandma): I’m really surprised of Helen. She hasn’t read a book all day.

Grandma (whispering to William): It’s her new boyfriend!

Helen: He’s not my boyfriend! He’s just a friend.

Grandma: Okay, he isn’t. I just thought he was.

William: She’s too young for a boyfriend mother. Let them be innocents!

Todd: Me and Helen just like to have fun together ma’am, like talking about Hamlet and stuff. It’s not like we are going to get married or anything!

Grandma: You might. . .

Helen (to Todd): Don’t mind Grandma She just likes to talk about my future marriage plans.

Todd: My mom always says no woman will ever marry me, the way I am.
Grandma: (Laugh.)

Todd: But that’s all right with me, ’cause I’m never going to get married. I think it’s all stupid.

Helen: So do I.

Grandma: Well, you two are young. You might change your minds.

Helen: No I won’t; I know I’m not going to get married.

Todd: Same here. Hey, where’s your swimming pool?

Helen: It’s out back. Come on, let’s go! (Exit.)

Todd: (Exit.)

William: I’ve got to go. Take good care of them mom, especially Todd. From what I’ve seen that kid has a hard time.

Grandma: I will. I’m so glad Helen brought a friend along this time. I’m sure it will really do her some good.

William: I think it already has. Look at her: She’s almost the way she was two years ago. . .

(Lights fade.)

Scene 2
Night. Helen and Todd lay outside, stargazing, wrapped up in towels.

Todd: Ah, that was a nice swim, but now it’s c-c-cold!

Helen: Yes. I want to go back in too, but it’s late, and Grandma doesn’t want us to swim in the dark.

Grandma: (Come out. Entreatingly) Do you want to come inside you two? I have some movies for you two to watch.

Helen: No that’s all right Grandma. We don’t want to watch any movies.

Grandma: (Sigh.) All right, I’ll leave you two alone. I remember when I would want to do the same. (Exit.)

Todd: What was that suppose to mean?

Helen: Grandma’s still entertaining romantic possibilities between us.

Todd: Oh. Hey! Ya know what this porch looks like? Rice Crispies treats!

Helen: Wow! I never thought about that! You’re right though, with all these little stones packed together and everything.

Todd: Too bad it really wasn’t Rice Crispies treats, or else we could eat it all up!

Helen: But then we wouldn’t have a porch dummy. What would we stargaze on?

Todd: (Laugh.)

Helen: What?

Todd: That was the first time I heard you say ‘dummy.’

Helen: Oh, well, I can say that too. Just because I’m well read doesn’t mean I can’t use colloquialisms.

Todd: I know, it just sounds funny coming from you. . . Thanks a lot for letting me stay over here. I get tired of staying home every weekend, even if Brad and Eric come over

Helen: Why do you hang out with them?

Todd: I don’t know. I guess they’re just fun to be around. But sometimes they can be really mean, you know? Like make fun of me when I show them something they don’t like.

Helen: Like most kids at our school. . .

Todd: I guess so. And sometimes, I try to explain something to them, but they just don’t get it. I don’t know if I’m stupid or if they’re stupid.

Helen: Well I think they’re stupid.

Todd: Still, it’s better than having no friends. I still don’t get why you like to be alone all the time.

Helen: I have my own friends. I have Bernard, remember, and all my books, like Hamlet.

Todd: Yeah, but it isn’t like you can play X-men with Bernard or Hamlet.

Helen: Well it isn’t like you can listen to seven different languages or Shakesperean verse from Brad and Eric.

Todd: That’s true. . . Anyway, I’m really glad you got Bernard back. I would hate to lose a parrot like that, especially one that spoke seven languages. I mean, I once had a dog, but all he could do was bark! (Imitate his dog’s bark.)

Helen: (Laugh.) You’d make a good dog.

Todd: Thank you.

Grandma: (Enter with cordless phone.) You’ve got a phone call Todd.

Todd (taking phone, sitting up.) Hello? . . Really? (Disappointed) Oh, okay. . . Yeah, sure. She’ll tell you. (Give Grandma phone.)

Grandma: Yes. . . Oh. Yes. It’s at 744 Elm Street, up the hill on Azuela drive. You’ll meet it at Granada Blvd, right off of 286. Yes, toward Modesto.

Helen: What happened?

Todd: My mom got sick. They want me to come home.

Helen: (Sitting up) How awful!

Grandma: (Turn off the phone.) Well, I’m sorry you have to leave Todd. But you’re always welcome back. I know how much fun Helen has had with you. You're the first person she’s ever brought over here.

Todd: That’s all right. I’ll come back some other time.

Grandma: Anytime. . . (Start to exit.)

Todd: Wait a minute, I forgot something. Can I call my dad back?

Grandma: Sure. (Give him the phone.) Just put it back when you come in. (Exit.)

Todd: (Dial number.) Hello. Dad? Can I bring Helen home with me? . . Yeah, it should be fine with her parents. . . Okay, bye. (Hang up.)

Helen: Todd! My parents aren’t even home this weekend? How am I suppose to tell them that?

Todd: Don’t you have your dad’s work number or something?

Helen: No. He’s a businessman, remember? He travels!

Todd: Oh, well what about your mom?

Helen: My mom lives in Los Angeles. You know how far that is from here?

Todd (disappointed): Oh, I’m sorry . . . I guess you can’t go then . . .

Helen: I mean, it’s not like I don’t want to. I know how much it hurts to have a family member sick and everything. I felt the same way when (trails off)

Todd: When what?

Helen (darkly): Nothing.

Todd: No, what? Who got sick?

Helen: My grandfather died last year Todd. That’s why grandma’s so lonely; she isn’t used to not having anyone around. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you I know how it feels to lose someone close to you when you’re real young. I mean, my grandfather was bad enough—but your mom, that must hurt!

Todd: Well, I’m not really worried about it, but I want to be there for her if she needs me. But I didn’t want to leave you too. This happens all the time, really. I almost get tired of it.

Helen (pensively): When my grandpa died—he died so sudden. It wasn’t even expected. He had a stroke, and the next day he was gone. I didn’t even get to see him as he was dying. The last time I saw him was the Christmas before.

Todd: Was he nice?

Helen: Of course! He’d always play with me when I was a baby; he was my favorite person in the whole family. He always let me get away with things when I was little that my parents wouldn’t—you know that big birch tree in the front yard?

Todd: Yeah.

Helen: He’d let me climb that while he watched, all the way up to the top. Most of the family wouldn’t because they were always worried about me falling down and getting hurt, but he’d stand below and watch me scale that tree, limb by limb. He’d always watch me with a optimistic smile and I would grit my teeth and grab onto the next branch, even though I had to push off from the branch I below. When I made it to the top, he’d silently cheer for me, swinging his hands, and I would smile back down really proud. It was those moments that I was most happy, probably the happiest I’ve ever been. . . He used to read Shakespeare to me too, with lots of feeling and emotion, so I didn’t even need to ask him what this meant, what that meant—I knew by the way he read it. Then sometimes he would recite his own poetry to me. That’s another thing—he was a poet, so he was really witty and funny.

Todd (understandingly): Sounds like a pretty cool guy. No wonder you were upset when he died.

Helen: Yeah, well, he was an alcoholic. He drank mostly by himself, so he wouldn’t bother anybody—I didn’t even know about it—but it eventually caught up with him.

Todd: My dad, he’s—I mean, he has had a hard time with my mom.

Helen: What’s wrong with her?

Todd: She has epilepsy. She convulses every now and then. We’re never ready for it any more than she is. Anyway, she can’t control herself when she goes into a fit.

Helen: So why are you so mellow about it?

Todd: (Frustrated) You don’t understand! This thing happens all the time! They’ve put her in a hospital five times. . . Most of the time it doesn’t hurt her, but whenever she’s doing something like cooking she hurts herself all over! Dad tries to stop her, but when she goes out of control, she’s stronger than he is. Then she’s all hurt so we take her to the hospital. . .  Usually we can lie and say she tripped and fell or cut herself or something like that, but when she has bruises and burns all over her body they know that she went into a seizure . . . unless my dad says that he beat her or something, and then he’d go to jail all because of a stupid lie.

Helen: So it’s just something you’ve learned to live with? It doesn’t really bother you?

Todd: Yeah, but I still wish she wasn’t this way! It’d make life so much easier. I used to wish she would just stop when I was a little kid, get over it, you know? Sometimes I still like to think she has when she doesn’t do it after a long time, but then I’m never ready for it when it does. My dad tells me never to hope too much.

Helen: Was it a shock the first time?

Todd: (Laugh.) The first time I wasn’t even sure whether I knew what it was about. She dropped me when I was a baby.

Helen: How awful!

Todd (nodding): I mean, it didn’t kill me, but it cracked my head open and gave me a scar. (Shows her scar on forehead.)

Helen: My god, that’s so big!

Todd (shaking his head): Cracking your head open when you’re a baby is no small deal.

Helen: And did it shock you?

Todd: (Think.) No. I was too innocent to really understand back then. I got used to it all. I just learned how to act like the other kids when I got into school.

Helen: Sort of.

Todd: What?

Helen: You’ve always reacted more emotionally and quickly toward things around you than most people your age, even when you don’t know what they’re about. That’s why I didn’t expect you to be interested in Shakespeare. I thought you wouldn’t take the time to understand it.

Todd: Well, yeah, I’ve always gotten excited when I see something I’ve never seen before. I get kind of bored with the same old thing. I never knew I got all emotional about it though.

Helen (nodding): You do. Most people are much more reserved.

Todd: (Laugh.) Well, I don’t see what harm that’s gonna do. I never got why people don’t even bat an eye when they see something really out of the ordinary. I mean, I live with two parents who are really strange, and I’m used to it.

Helen: I think most people are just scared of anything they've never seen. You have a very outward and adventurous personality. That’s why I think it’s healthy for me to hang out with you; you get me to stop thinking about myself.

Todd (increduously): I think that’s great too! I don’t see how people are suppose to get what’s going on around them if they only think about themselves all the time. I mean, would I have met you and Shakespeare and your grandma and all them if I just sat around at home and thought about myself.

Helen (smiling): No, you wouldn’t.

Todd: (shaking his head): People just don’t know what they’re missing out on when they’re like that. (Look at Helen.)

Helen: (Looks down shyly.) . . . Okay, I guess I’ll come with you.

Todd: Thanks a lot Helen. You’re my best friend in the world. (Hug her.)

(Lights fade.)

 

The Cracker Controversey

                        5/17/97

(Several crackers walk onto a large counter: Graham Cracker, Better Chedder, Wheat Thin, and Triscuit.)

Graham Cracker: Hello everyone. We have all gathered here to debate which cracker among us is of the highest quality. Let us begin the discussion.

Wheat Thin (stepping forth): I propose that I’m the best, because I contain less fat than most other crackers.

Triscuit: Well so do I. I only contain five grams.

Wheat Thin: Yes, but you are very high in sodium. I heard that you have 170 grams of salt per cracker.

Triscuit: That’s true, but you can’t be totally nutritious, or else you are only selected by the ascetics on the market due to your lack of taste.

Better Chedder: I second that opinion. That’s why I’m the best cracker avalaible. I may have high salt, but there’s no other type of cracker that has the rich flavor of cheese like I. What’s more, my hybrid composition represents not only one food group, as most of you, but two.

Wheat Thin: Oh please! Most of the “cheese” in you is cultured, just like those dreaded Vegetable Thins with their additives and preservatives! Not only that, but your superfluous cheese color is merely a result of artificial dyes, whereas I am composed simply of one basic substance.

Triscuit: And my dear Better Chedder, I didn’t propose we should blatantly disregard the nutritional value of a cracker—for it is an important quality of a excellent cracker— only that we shouldn’t become so severe about it, as our chap Wheat Thin is here. All that fat you carry can cause heart attacks later in life, and many old people restricted to a low sodium diet cannot enjoy your spicy exotic taste.

Graham Cracker: I do believe we forget that many people only choose to eat crackers because they’re delicious, and care little about the long-term consequences of their consumption. Although Better Chedder certainly has its own tasty flavor, I have facts and statistics to prove that Graham Crackers are the more traditionally chosen cracker in preference for taste. They even go great with milk, which unlike you, Better Chedder, is a pure dairy product substance. For years little children have eaten me with joy, and so parents often select me with reliability. Because of my renown fame and familiarity, I am more likely to be chosen by the ordinary consumer.

Wheat Thin: Oh please! Next thing you know you’ll be telling us that the entire consumer civilization has regressed back to Saltine Crackers—which years ago people also thought to be the standard, but now has discovered to be dangerous to one‘s health. Now call me a bit radical in my views, but I’ve always enjoyed progress by setting health standards in what the consumers should eat, until they accept them as the salutary norm. With such high demand for weight loss, I sometimes wonder why people buy unhealthy crackers as yourselves sell. Wheat is one of the most natural crops raised, farmed since ancient times, created by God--

Better Chedder: Oh no! Don’t bring religion into the arena, or I’ll have to expostulate on how Darwin’s ideal theory of evolution justifies my distinct hybrid state!

Triscuit (to Wheat Thin): You may be right my friend, and I agree with you that wheat should be one of the most fundamental components of the contemporary cracker, but I think that you get a little extreme with your puritan views. Many consumers simply won’t be satisfied with a bland wheat cracker such as yourself. That’s why you must have a more subtle, avant-garde cracker, such as myself—a medium between the nutritionally high value of your wheat, yet containing the appreciated and delicious flavor of the Graham Cracker. . . and staying away from any outlandish chemically-processed confections, such as Better Chedder.

Better Chedder: What do you mean, "outlandish chemically-process confections"? Why I’m the first successful pure cheese-flour blend since Cheeze-Its—and I’m preferred over them.

Triscuit (pointedly, in improptu): That’s exactly my point: you, my friend, are simply an imitation.

Better Chedder: Well, I think any improvement over a former cracker, such as Cheese-Its, is progress. Crackers change over the years, you know, as do the consumers’ preferences.

Graham Cracker: The consumers may be swayed by popular opinion to be in favor for you a while, but it's only a matter of time until you become out-dated, as your late friend Cheeze-it and the rest of you have. I, however, will always survive on the market, for I, am a classic.

(An uproar breaks out.)

Triscuit: If you do remember, they said the exact same thing about Saltine Crackers a decade ago, and now they are becoming quickly forgotten except by isolated soup kitchens.

Graham Cracker: Yes--but Saltine, though an original, was easily developed into other crackers. The Graham Cracker, though, can never be improved upon, because it is not only original, but the pinacle of cracker evolution.

Triscuit: You see, that is the problem with you traditionalist crackers: you lack vision with what can be done. Do you think the creator of the Graham Cracker had the same frame of mind?

Graham Cracker: No, but Thomas Graham was an utter genius! He knew what he was doing! He knew he just wasn’t going off on some fling of his own. He knew that he was about to create something that would survive for ages to come!

Triscuit: I’m sorry to inform you my friend, but I believe that all cracker inventors have to take a little risk in following their intuition in order to create their revolutionary crackers—even Thomas Graham—and part of what drives them to take that experimental risk is the belief that all of them are on the verge of discovering something revolutionary, even if their conservative contemporaries, such as yourself, believe they aren’t.

Graham Cracker: All right, I‘ll agree with you there, but I still think that inventing crackers has a little more to it than just intuition. It also takes careful planning and construction.

(Outroar breaks out.)

Wheat Thin: (Overwhelmed)--Stop! We’ve debated this long enough. I grow tired of this argument. We are only out to defend ourselves.

Triscuit: I agree. Let us instead have the consumers decide which cracker they believe to be the best, and whoever dies on the market, dies.

Better Chedder: I like that philosophy. It rings of natural selection. I too, grow weary of this repetitious quarrel. Let the world of consumers enjoy us for what we have to offer.

Graham Cracker: Very well. It’s agreed that this meeting should end. Let us go back to the store to be sold. . . until the next time we grow tired of sitting on the shelves and feel we have to prove our worth to each other.

(All exit smugly and self-righteously.)

Academic Writing

Deconstructing Al-Qaeda,
Critiquing the War On Terrorism,
And Proposing a Cosmopolitan Strategy For Global Security

 

Jake Thomas
Senior Honors Thesis
Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major
University of California, Berkeley
Spring, 2002

Thesis Advisors:
Professor Renate Holub
Interdisciplinary Fields Studies Department

Professor Jerry Sanders
Peace and Conflict Studies Department

University of California, Berkeley

 

Abstract

                Many intellectuals with differing views have fallen back upon their previous ideas about the world to explain what the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by Al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001 mean and debate about what the US should do to prevent future attacks. Frequently these explanations are in no way grounded in an analysis of the Al-Qaeda network. though any viable strategy for global security against future attacks must be grounded in such an analysis. A study of Al-Qaeda’s cultural psychology offers a deeper understanding of what motivates men to dedicate and sacrifice their lives to such causes than many superficial descriptions of the attackers. An examination of the political economy of the Al-Qaeda network offers a more sophisticated comprehension of how the attackers were able to successfully carry out the attacks than many commentators provide. Based on my detailed analysis of the Al-Qaeda network, I argue that the current security strategy of the US government and other states will fail at defusing and dismantling future attacks by the Al-Qaeda network and will further endanger the world. To maintain national security in the long run, the U.S. and other states will have to revise their current strategy in respect to homeland protection, intelligence networks, international law, transnational finance, economic development, and regime democratization. My analysis of the Al-Qaeda network illustrates how if the future of globalization is to be sustainable, nonviolent, and just, an effective strategy to maintain national security must also be a strategy for global security.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table of Contents
Introduction: Misreading September 11th, 2001 pg. 4
1 Chapter 1:The Mind of Al-Qaeda pg. 14

• The Depths of Rage pg. 14
• Al-Qaeda in Islamic Context pg. 17
• Globalization and America As the Enemy pg. 22
• The Social Seeds of Terror pg. 35
• The Charismatic Power of Osama bin Laden’s Declaration of War pg. 50
• The Belief in Cosmic War  pg. 57
• The Heroism or Martyrdom of Militant Jihad pg. 63
• The Stages of Empowerment pg. 66
• The Need For Empathy Toward the Mind of Al-Qaeda pg. 69

Chapter 2: The Body of Al-Qaeda pg. 71
2.1 The Complexity of Networks pg. 71
2.2 Capitalizing On Terror: the Financial Resources of Al-Qaeda pg. 73
2.3 Transnationalization of Militant Jihad: The Recruitment of Al-Qaeda pg. 85
2.4 An Asymmetrical Enemy: the Organizational Structure of Al-Qaeda pg. 96
2.5 Swarming the States: The Globalization of Al-Qaeda Operations pg. 114
2.6 The Need For Knowledge of the Body of Al-Qaeda pg. 126
Chapter 3: New World, Old Order pg. 128
3.1 Blinded by Terror pg. 128
3.2 The US “a La Carte Multilateralism” and Military Strikes on the Taliban pg. 131
3.3 Bringing Al-Qaeda to Justice pg. 152
3.4 Exploiting “The War On Terrorism” pg. 155
3.5 Cries For Aid, Law, and Peace pg. 158
3.6 The Financial Freeze pg. 164
3.7 Civil Illiberties pg. 171
3.8 The Bioterrorism Reflex pg. 177
3.9 The War on Perception pg. 179
3.10 The Globalization of “Counterterrorism” and Institutional Insanity pg. 184
3.11 Will “The War On Terrorism” Create Greater Global Security? pg. 196
Chapter 4: A Cosmopolitan Strategy For Global Security pg. 200
4.1 Rethinking the Meaning of Security pg. 200
4.2 Preserving the Local: Homeland Protection pg. 202
4.3 From Realpolitick to Noopolitick: Intelligence Networking and Civil Liberties pg. 211
4.4 Delegitimating Al-Qaeda and Legitimating States: International Law and Transgovernmentalism pg. 232
4,5 Starving the Capitalism of Al-Qaeda: Transnational Financial Regulation pg. 236
4.6 The Material Foundations of Counterterrorism: Sustainable Economic Development and Justice pg. 240
4.7 Overthrowing the Symbolic Rule of AL-Qaeda: The Glocalization of Democracy pg. 252
4.8 Global Security As the Only Future For National Security pg. 263
Conclusion: Towards A More Thoughtful Future pg. 268
Bibliography pg. 273

Introduction: Misreading September 11th , 2001.
                One could say that on September 11th, 2001, Americans learned what they really knew, thought and believed about the world, precisely because that day threw Americans into a state of shock and much of what they previously knew into question. The attacks upon New York and Washington were so overwhelming for some that they immediately and thoughtlessly lashed out at others in fury. Most other Americans, immobilized and paralyzed with fear, could only mourn at the lost of life. They did not understand why the US government had not prevented the attacks. They did not understand why anyone would wish to do such a hideous thing. They did not understand how they could have done anything to anyone to justify such a horrid act. And, feeling powerless, they did not understand what they ought to do next. In search of answers, they turned to their televisions, magazines and newspapers for an explanation of what had happened, with great fear of what would happen next.
                And they received plenty of answers. Immediately, commentators offered their explanation of what had happened, why it happened, how it happened, and what needed to be done. Much of these remarks were pure ignorance, offering little critical thought, insight or inspiration for people already paralyzed with fear. September 11th quickly became an event that many popular commentators seized upon to prove their point. Thomas Friedman took the lead in calling the Al-Qaeda attackers “evil, educated, and suicidal.” The defense contractors said they had told the government it paid them too little. Jerry Falwell shouted that this was God’s revenge on feminists and homosexuals. Some naively called the attacks a “loss of innocence.” Others with more historical perspective immediately attacked the oppression caused by past US foreign policies, implying that the US deserved the attacks. Conspiracy theories—from all kinds of ideologues—suggested that the attacks were engineered by the Jewish establishment, the Illuminati, and/or the UN in a desire to establish a “World Dictatorship.” Such knee-jerk responses do not deserve much critical or analytical attention, except to say that they demonstrate a lack of reflection and present a danger to those who would design policy solely based upon them.
Yet public intellectuals had previously produced a whole slew of more intelligent explanations of why such an attack could occur, and many commentators seized upon these pre-9/11 ideas about world order. These critical readings of September 11th correctly argued that it should not be understood as a meaningless act of “evil.” They properly and historically contextualized the attacks, by explaining that it should have been expected given the past and current state of world affairs. Unfortunately, many of these sweeping conclusions about September 11th still involved little analysis of the rage that caused and the capabilities that enabled Al-Qaeda to carry out the attacks, and lacked the focus to comprehend why one would be willing to commit such an act, how they managed to carry it out, and what the proper and effective response to the attacks should be.
The public quickly embraced many of these explanations inappropriately. Some theories focused on the cultural aspect of the conflict. One such popular explanation was the “Clash of Civilizations” thesis of Samuel Huntington, which argued that the basis for conflict in the future would be not ideological but cultural, as tensions between different societies have long existed and will not easily dissolve with globalization. Such a view has been readily embraced not only by academic realists, but also by Osama Bin Laden, his Al-Qaeda followers, Americanists, and a few US and other government foreign policy makers that emphasize cultural differences over political similarities between states. The problem with this explanation is that it is simplistic and reductive talking about the diverse and conflict-ridden civilizations of the West and Islam as homogeneous totalities.   This theory does not consider other dimensions of conflict aside from the essentialistic notion of civilization such as economic interests which are critical to understanding the cause of many such conflicts.
Another culture-based perspective was the “Jihad versus McWorld” theory of Benjamin Barber, who has depicted the chaos in the world as resulting from a lack of democracy simultaneously under the assault of anti-modern religious tribalism fragmenting the political landscape and pro-modern corporate capitalism dissolving social and economic barriers. Civic values, public participation, and free expression, say these political theorists, are the only firm foundations for a liberal society that can prevent these mutually antagonistic forces from destroying the world. However this binary opposition ignores the fact that most ordinary people, to create a more liberal order, have found much of value in the spiritual morality of jihad and the technological tools of McWorld and that the two need not be mutually exclusive or destructive. Furthermore, it seems to gloss over the fact jihad used the tools of McWorld to further its religious goals, just as McWorld has exploited the idea of jihad to maximize its economic profits.
Other cultural theories depicted this as a conflict between modernity and tradition. Ignorant about much of the world, many Americans have settled for the “Ancient Hatreds” theory, propounded by President Clinton during the Kosovo conflict, that states that the source of rage the attackers feel toward the American people and property is so deep and ancient that Americans cannot possibly understand it. This perspective seems to depict “the West” as the pinnacle of a linear evolutionary history from which people in less developed societies reject and wish to destroy because of some obscure and ancient myth that shackles their minds, leading them to unleash a coming anarchy upon the world. Such a view seems simultaneously to orientalize the Other beyond the possibility of mutual understanding or constructive dialogue, rather than trying to understand the Other with empathy. Furthermore, this view also excuses “the West” of any responsibility for the terror unleashed upon them, which could be dangerous if “the West” is in any way responsible for what has happened.
In contrast, “The God(s) That Failed” thesis of Arthur Koestler in relation to Stalinism and Hermann Hoppe in relation to democracy purports that the rage stems from the failure of modernity—in either its capitalist or socialist forms—to satisfy the need for human fulfillment and meaning. Many have seized upon this thesis to attack Western capitalism and/or Soviet socialism alike as constructing a utopian and secular Modern Man that is too one-dimensional to account for the complexities of a culturally pluralistic world. This argument puts the blame plainly on the failure of both forms of modernity from living up to their promises while failing to offer any alternative and absolving the perpetrators of September 11th of any responsibility. This unicausal explanation also traces the problem back to failure of a political-economic system, when the cause of rage is more likely to stem from multiple sources.
Other views appeared to stem from more ideologically-rooted views. The liberal perspective seemed to represent the “liberalism of fear” thesis propounded by Robert Keohane who has argued that the September 11th attacks were simply a risk with which liberal societies must learn to live in an increasingly globalized world where no nation-state is invulnerable to outside influences. This view considers the attacks the completion of globalization because now it is certain that no country can be unaffected from the growing global flows. Unfortunately, this offers little agency and a strategy for ordinary people to take advantage of their precious liberal values and rights to work at preventing such attacks in the future, which will be critical to preventing such future attacks. Rather than asking them to think critically and inquire into why what has brought September 11th upon them, it simply suggests they live with such terror.
Likewise, neo-Marxists have drawn on the Empire thesis of Antonio Negri and Micheal Hardt, which has depicted the September 11th attack as an act of resistance against imperial domination by those who in their words use the tools of empire to bring down their oppressors. Some such as Slajov Zizeck went as far to say that the attacks represented the first anti-colonial rebellion against American  globalization. The problem with this thesis is that it seems to unquailifiably celebrate the crossing of boundaries and subversive acts of resistance. This could lead one to equate Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda with other more secular freedom fighters such as Che Guevera and Simone Bolivar, when they both had both very different motives in rebelling against something very different with hatred and rage that do not constitute any sustainable political opposition to the hegemony of the United States.
Other readings drew on the problems of past US foreign policy. One such popular and common reading, argued most brilliantly by Chalmers Johnson in Blowback, is that the September 11th attacks are simply one among many examples of the consequences of the continual expansion of US military and commercial hegemony throughout the world. Many others such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Said have substantiated this critique by correctly arguing that while the 9/11 attacks were horrible, they are insignificant in comparison to the state-led terror that the US has pushed across the world, claiming that the US has created these problems for itself and will continue to do so until we disengage with the rest of the world. While I agree that resentment against a US foreign policy is a root cause in the rage unleashed upon the US on September 11th, one cannot draw a direct causal connection between these policies and the attacks. Nor US can afford to “demobilize” or withdraw from the world when many people seethe with such anger and aggression toward the US.
From the opposite perspective, Niall Ferguson believes that the US has failed to take up its post-WWII role of building up its own empire to stabilize world order. He points to the establishment of political peaceful economically prosperous democracies in Germany and Japan through US occupation and argues that the USA must expand an empire until all countries are formal democracies. To establish peace and prosperity in the world the US must convert countries to free market capitalism and liberal democracy. But this ignores the fact that much of the rebellion against the USA was in response to such an empire.
Other theorists attempted to see some hope for a better future in the attacks. Some such as Francis "End of History" Fukuyama, have put forth a sort of “Return of History” thesis that September 11th resulted from Americans wallowing excessively in their own self-indulgence, complacency, and trivial matters, and that the adversity the US now faced would be good because enduring national character would be shaped by the shared trauma. Seeing strength in tragedy, this view both implies that the September 11th attacks were good medicine for a country that had gone into a historical coma and would make us a stronger nation through national solidarity. Such a benign view of American patriotism dangerously ignores the perils such blind faith in national solidarity has brought about in the past. Furthermore, this view suggests that the 9/11 attacks were necessary for the US to change its course, which is too historically deterministic to offer people the agency to do otherwise.
Similarly, countering the misleading rhetoric of neoliberalism about the “decline of the nation-state” some like William Zartman have argued that September 11th signifies the importance of the state which was previously woefully inadequate, demonstrating its resiliency and ushering its return into political life. Such an interpretation seems to suggest that “bringing the state back in” will solve all of the complex problems that interactively compounded to lead to the September 11th attack. However, one must be careful to disaggregate the term “state” here, as the state has many roles. The role of the state can be both facilitate and disruptive toward global security depending on the form of state intervention considered.
                In contrast, several scholars like Steve Smith have suggested that the September 11th represented the fall of the last nation-state in a globalized world, requiring even the US to recognize that it can no longer act unilaterally according to domestic demands to preserve its unipolar power. Such a view implies that September 11th will bring an era of multilateral cooperation to solve the world’s future conflicts. Evidence seems to suggest the contrary, and that the legacy of nation-states, despite globalization, has been strengthened and undergone retrenchment. With the sovereignty of states endangered, states have attempted to preserve themselves by attempting to gain further control over their territory.
                While all such historical interpretations of what the 9/11 attacks mean to the future of the world are both necessary and critical to a full understanding of the attacks, I do not believe that such explanations provide an adequate answer of how to prevent future attacks brought about by Al-Qaeda nor how it will specifically challenge defense analysts to rethink strategies for security. Any sophisticated examination of how the events of September 11th pose a challenge to the future of global security must be grounded in a study of the organization of the attackers, their motivations, and how they were able to carry out their attacks. While one must historically contextualize an examination of these networks of informal  violence , attempting to design a security strategy simply based on theories of changing world order will probably not effectively eliminate the specific threat that Al-Qaeda poses.
Instead, to understand the sources of conflict that have both driven and enabled Al-Qaeda to carry out the 9/11 attacks will require an analysis of the organization as embedded within the larger historical context. To defuse and dismantle the Al-Qaeda network, security analysts must understand how both the mind and body of Al-Qaeda made the attacks possible. They must understand what motivates young Muslim men to dedicate and sacrifice their lives to a war against America and to sacrifice their lives to destroy it. They must also comprehend how the Al-Qaeda network has established and organized its operations worldwide and successfully coordinated their activities. Only then will they be able to properly assess why the previous policies of the US and other states have failed to prevent the catastrophe of September 11th from occurring and what they can do to increase global security. In this book, I will attempt to undergo such a process of multidimensional analysis of Al-Qaeda, an assessment of the past policies taken toward it, and a formulation, based on the examination of Al-Qaeda, of what policies are likely to be most effective in ultimately destroying the Al-Qaeda network and maintaining global security.
The structure of this book will accordingly follow this methodology of analysis-critique-prescription. In Chapter 1 I will attempt to empathetically understand the conditions and motives that cause Al-Qaeda members to undergo training, education, and commitment to operations that ask them to sacrifice everything for the cause of the group. In chapter 2, I will provide a detailed analysis of the complex and multidimensional structure of Al-Qaeda, how Al-Qaeda has managed to establish operations worldwide and carry out acts of violence, and the form of its current operations. Chapter 3 will unpack the set of policies implemented under what George W. Bush has called “the war on terrorism” and will show how it will weaken society’s ability to prevent such future events, failed to dismantle networks like Al-Qaeda, and has exacerbated the resentments against the US further. Chapter 4 will illustrate various short-term and long-term measures that supranational, national and subnational actors will need to adopt in order to ensure future global security. I will then conclude the paper by explaining why, based on my personal observations of people’s reactions to the attacks, only with a grounded analysis of the Al-Qaeda network will the US be able to determine how it can strengthen it policies to form an effective strategy that will ensure that September 11th, 2001 is a day that will not have to be lived again.

….(the thesis, around 300 pages)--let me know if you are interested

Conclusion: Toward A More Thoughtful Future
I began this book by examining many interpretations of September 11th, 2001, arguing that few of them seemed to be informed by any knowledge of Al-Qaeda. In times of crisis however, people will cling to such explanations in order to make sense of the madness occurring around them. Terrified by the uncertainty that such terror and fear brings about, they want to cling to some kind of totality, if only to have an anchor from which to assess what has happened and to chart a new course to prevent another crisis from occurring. I find this desire to understand commendable, as an understanding of what caused a crisis and what people must do about it is the only way by which society can decide on how to remedy the situation that has brought about the terrible problem and then act appropriately.
However, if people are not critically engaged with what is going on around them, then they can easily fall upon those ideas which are most comfortable to them, even if the factual circumstances in no way accord with the idea. Lacking in depth of understanding of what they are confronting, they may prescribe solutions that are inappropriate and may even worsen the situation. Such a desire to cling to theory in the absence of knowledge, and follow through with actions accordingly, while it may provide much comfort and assurance to those who are terrorized and fearful, will not necessarily remedy the situation.
On September 11th and the days that followed, I knew that I had much to learn from this historical moment, and so kept my ears open, and yearned for knowledge. I was amazed at how people, after an initial reaction of shock, indignity, and fear, would quickly come to such conclusion of what the attacks meant. As a student, I heard so many of the same explanations so many times—without any clear analysis of what led to the attacks—that I found most of it to be mindless and frustrating. At a certain point, I tuned out.
Even among those who seemed most affected by had happened, I didn’t find much insight of what Al-Qaeda was and what had to be done. I was frustrated by the university student activists who seemed to seize upon the moment to say this proved their point of how horrible American foreign policy. In an anti-war march, I recall thinking how insignificant and unimportant it was that a huge crowd of students march up and down the streets shouting chants about against the “war.”  In a sense it seemed to be as opportunistic as the military contractors who were insisting that we must build up arms and crack down on civilians to protect the country.  Likewise, I was shocked by the blind patriotism that emerged all around the country. Watching politicians sing songs of American nationalism, I wondered how they could really so uncritically embrace their identity as Americans. They seemed ridiculously cowardly at a time when the country could not afford it. Nobody seemed to know what they were actually dealing with or desired to even think about it seriously.
This all seemed totalitarian to me. After we mourned the lives of 5000 thousand people mercilessly killed for some cause that was still ambiguous, we sought to reconstruct ourselves with either blind support or deep anger for America. A man passed me by on the street with a self-righteous expression and an American flag cloaked around his body. Young students would step up at rallies and read poetry about how the horrors of September 11th were nothing to the terror committed by the CIA-Pentagon-FBI establishment. Obscene huge white pick up trucks would begin appearing in the middle of campus, with American flags waving. People would argue anti-war movement meetings about the principles by which they would stand together. At candle light vigils, some patriotic students would shout, “USA! USA!” while waving signs that read “Remember the WTC!” Meanwhile, the children of the wretched would step up to the mic and speak of the injustices historically committed by the US. While at first I thought that maybe everybody wanted to be a hero, it seemed at other moments that people only wanted to reassure themselves. They would laugh and embrace each other as they bonded through their pro-America or anti-America discourse, as though after that terrible day it all became a kind of a game. For some reason, I did not find comfort in any of this the way that many did, but only became more depressed as I read the news day by day and watched people on all side butcher the facts to argue their view. I found myself withdrawing from it all, attempting to find some quiet space where I wouldn’t be consumed by all of madness. For a time, as a student, I felt there was little I could do aside from what most others were doing, and yet wanted to make an important and unique contribution and offer a way out of the confusion the country seemed to be in.
While I could have left college a year early, I was glad that I didn’t, because after September 11th I realized I could no longer be as certain about the world as I once was. I simply did not find my existing knowledge sufficient to comprehend what happened on September 11th, which challenged much of what I thought about the world. I could not ignore it. I decided that I would not be ready to leave the university as the social scientist I wished to be until I had proven to myself that I could radically rethink what I thought in the event of another crisis. From that day on, I was grateful that I had not left and would have the opportunity and privilege to reevaluate what I knew at a critical juncture in the history of the world. In my decision to write this book, I found my way to make sense of September 11th and the critical events that would follow.
In writing the first chapter, I was deeply fascinated at why someone would sacrifice their life to kill thousands more, and at moments felt both empathy and dismay with those would take measures I would not to express the rage and frustration that I sometimes felt as well at the state of the world. In the second chapter, I was amazed by the scope and scale of the Al-Qaeda network, which for all its violence gave me encouragement of how much agency there was in the world, even as people speak about structural oppression and enclosure. Working on the third chapter, I found all the misgivings I had had with the “war on terrorism” very much manifested in its inability to effectively go after what I had studied as the target and how this only seemed to further increase insecurity in the world. And in working on the fourth chapter, I was able to use my knowledge of Al-Qaeda and my imagination to construct what I believed the world ought to be if we are not to suffer any more atrocities, the most intellectually empowering task I have undergone in my academic studies. I had completed my project of reflexive education in a way that many university students do not, and felt that I could make sense out of anything.
While at times of great fear and uncertainty, people would like to find security in what they believe the world to be, often this is not sensible. The contemporary world is a place much too complex, dynamic, and interdependent to respond to any crisis with a knee jerk reaction. People cannot afford to cling to what they thought to preserve themselves when the world is constantly changing and challenging people to question what they think. To decide what must be done in response to September 11th, people must have empathy and an honest understanding of those they speak of as actual human beings rather than stereotypes or abstractions. They must possess knowledge and not understand those they speak of not as atomized, ahistorical figures, but as people that exist in a nexus of many other social relations. They must look upon what has been done to solve a problem, and ask themselves honestly if they increases their sense of security. And if not, then they must, based on what they know about their concern, decide on what would be a better path. This is how people should think about September 11th, Al-Qaeda, and the “war on terrorism,”  and this is what I have sought to do in this book. I believe that self-righteous and reactive explanations, however much they might increase a sense of personal security, will not increase the long term security of the world at large. To protect each other and those who threaten to destroy us, people must learn about those they fear and then think seriously on how they can change this. Beneath the self-righteous rhetoric of holy war against America, the attacks of September 11th by Al-Qaeda were a cry of desperation, a cry that would make Americans and the rest of the world realize that the security of their lives was tied up with those of previously ignored people a millions of miles away. They should justify neither anti-American rhetoric nor massive military action, but were a sign that people will have to relate to and understand each other with both empathy and knowledge  if humanity is to survive. In the way I have attempted to understand why September 11th happened and what needs to be done, I hope that I have demonstrated a way that other  people can do so.
Jake Thomas
Berkeley, California, USA,
April 20th, 2002

Footnotes

Ideologies of Beauty and the Cosmetics Industry in
Africa (still trying to obtain from old computer, sorry!)

Jake Thomas 5/14/02 Anthropology 139: Controlling Processes Professor Laura Nader Skin-Bleaching and the Post-Colonial Conquest of African Cultural Identity For decades, imperial powers had ruled over Africa and violently imposed their cultural notions of knowledge, beauty, and spirituality over their colonial subjects, often forcefully and through direct control. When the citizens, intellectuals and religious leaders of these colonial countries could not bear to hear any stories of how they had brutally enslaved, robed, raped, beaten and massacred the populations of these indigenous nations through outright genocide, they quickly intervened only to proselytize them to their religion, inculcate them with their language, and reeducate them according to the political ideology of the empire, establishing a form of more indirect cultural control. During the decolonization of African territories in the 1960s and 1970s, many African people asserted a common belief in the value of their own wholesome and authentic cultural identity, embodied by the phrase, “Black is beautiful.” Yet long after decolonization, Africans in many countries have embraced the colonial ideology of white supremacy in the practice of bleaching or whitening their skin. This paper, by drawing on the literature of controlling processes, will attempt to explain the forms of control that cause Africans to sacrifice at great physical and economic cost their belief in the beauty of blackness and adopt Caucasian ideals of lighter skin. Majid Rahnema’s explanation of how the teleological ideology of development, in its assumptions that economically wealthy countries are at a higher stage of evolutionary progress than those that are more materially impoverished, causes many Africans to believe that societies with lighter skin that have attained greater “development” and are therefore superior. Jerry Mander’s thesis that the mass media does not address “the dark side of globalization” also explains why many Africans continue to consume skin-bleaching products with little debate over their effects. Lastly, Feyerabends’s argument about how the belief in the superiority of Western thought effectively marginalizes African and other non Western cultural contributions to the world, illustrates how this devalues African civilization and encourages them to efface the signifier of dark skin to attain the white skin of the predominant civilization. Together, these controlling processes of development, globalization and marginalization work together to cause many Africans to deny and erase an important aspect of their humanity. Historically, Africans have not embraced the practice of whitening their skin with chemical substances. During the 1980s, South Africa had banned bleaching crèmes for disfiguring thousands of black women. (1) Likewise, on March 29th, 2000, nearby Swaziland passed a bill that would ban skin bleaching creams. (2) These chemical exports, while banned from Britain by the South African government in 1989, have now found their way to South Africa through other countries such as India and Pakistan, which derive them from Europe and the United States (3). From South Africa, many of the creams go to Ghana and Nigeria, the two leading consumers, followed by Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone, according to dermatologist Dr. Andrew Kosia of Sierra Leone and Dr. H.D. Addo of Ghana. Though doctors forbid the use of mercury and hydroquinone and only suggest corticosteroid by prescription, many attain these smuggled chemicals illegally anyhow (4). Melanie Miyani, a dermatoligst from Nairobi, Kenya, says that no more than 2% of hydroquoinone is permitted in non-prescription medications but regulations are ignored and public information is lacking (5). Many Africans have viewed the import of such substances as endangering their cultural identity, which they now see as tied to their dark skin. Beyond the symbolic significance of resisting such chemicals, Africans have many practical scientific reasons for doing so as well. Often these skin creams, which contain damaging chemicals, only resulted in ghastly skin conditions. Sometimes, skin bleaching resulted in thinner skin that is prone to bleeding, infection, acne, patches, excessive perspiration, and an unpleasant scent. Many of these chemicals in these substances can actually darken the skin, damage bladders, kidneys, and cloud users’ eyes permanently (6). Dermatologists warn that hydroquinone, a white crystalline de-pigmenting agent can be fatal in large doses, and create symptoms of ringing in the ears and nausea, shortness of breath, convulsions and delirium. Mary Goretty Abhiam, after applying excessive amounts to the cream to her face, developed red patches on her face, green veins on her forehead and arms, black lumps on her stomach, and a thick mustache (7). Few users regain their original skin color (8). Statistics on the damage caused by the products are hard to obtain, but dermatologist Souleymane Chehadi of Dakar has reported that, “Out of 200 people who come (to the dermatologist), between 80 and 100 come because of problems linked to skin-whiteners.” And out of these 80 to 100, one half have suffered permanent damage. Nor are these drugs cheap. The two biggest industries of these products, in the Ivory Coast and Nigeria, have captured huge profits due to the high income inelasticity of demand of skin-whiteners. For each of the two tubes they use a day, women pay around 10000 to 4000 dollars, a huge amount of money in African countries that is only attainable by the wealthy. For this reason, consumers of the creams are usually young, educated and rich (9). However, the social value put on light skin is so high that often poorer Africans will choose to forgo food to pay for expensive skin bleaching products (10). African women therefore spend significant amounts of income and wealth produced in African economies for the import consumption of these products. Yet despite these terrible effects of these costly drugs, in the post-colonial and post-apartheid era African women have begun to use these substances more and more to whiten their skin, a choice that economists cannot explain as simply as demand composed of individual consumer preferences. To comprehend why so many women choose to endangers their health to whiten their skin, one must look at how the controlling processes that induce them to consume these products. First, a historical analysis of this consumption would recognize how typically people in the materially wealthier countries and the elite in the poorer understand the problems and conflicts of African humanity through the ideological lens of development. Mahjid Rahnema defines this ideology of development as a new form of colonialism designed to maintain the power of the materially wealthier countries in the world over the poorer countries after decolonization. By embodying an idea that humanity is linearly and progressively evolving towards the same “universal civilization,” many Africans who accept the ideology of development begin to believe that to attain the economic prosperity and political freedom of Europe and the United States, they must also attempt to accept and manifest Western values of aesthetic beauty as well. The belief in development can imply to many Africans that the “underdeveloped” society of Africa is inferior to the “developed” world not only in terms of its economy and politics, but also in its cultural values and ideals. The result of the current “development project” consequently has more continuities with colonialism than might be expected as it represents a form of mind colonization, a mechanism of indirect control that causes Africans to control the appearance of their bodies through practices like skin-bleaching. Furthermore, the “development” discourse in reasserting the superiority of the West typically invokes in Africans beliefs of inferiority from the colonial past (11). Several African intellectuals like Khany Dhlomo-Mkhize believe that the practice of skin bleaching represents a postcolonial residue of South Africans colonial and apartheid era acceptance that blackness is inferior (12). Such a belief becomes confirmed by contemporary manifestation of beauty, which the belief in turn reinforces. When Africans watch television and see false images of the splendor and liberty from the “developed” country, they may see this as stemming from the cultural make up of the “developed” world which is still mostly white. To integrate into the modern, global world with all its wealth and power, the people of “underdeveloped” societies begin to believe that they must sacrifice their culture and lifestyle to attain the “development.” The development project then involves not only skin bleaching but also is embedded in and connected to a number of other social practices from “developed” countries, such as diet clubs, cosmetic surgery, and hair straightening products in the big cities that attempt to encourage to adopt Caucasian ideals of beauty (13). In this sense, the development is an integrated process that involves transformation of many aspects of African culture. The bleaching of skin, then, is simply an extreme example of this desire to become “developed” by those to believe that their race is somehow connected to their failure to succeed in what Rahnema called the “development project.” However, the acceptance of the practice of skin bleaching by Africans necessarily requires a constantly active portrayal of it as an uncontroversial part of globalization by the media so that Africans will not see it as a great problem. Jerry Mander notes that the media, by emphasizing the positive benefits of globalization while ignoring or giving short mention of its dark sides, such as the detrimental effects of skin bleaching, is a controlling process in failing to fully inform Africans of the costs of such practices and that they have a choice to reject this aspect of globalization and not others. By frequently depicting practices such as skin bleaching under the rubric of “free choice,” the media will obscure the fact that cultural hegemonic structures and controlling processes offer Africans little other choice in their pathways to success. And yet the media contributes to the myth that Africans choose to bleach their skin out of individual choice rather than due to the social structure under which they live (14). This narrative ignores the large historical and social forces at work in inducing Africans to whiten their bodies. Many analysts attribute the practice of skin whitening to the influx of Western television, movies, magazines, and books, which transmit and inculcate white supremacist values into the black population. Furthermore, the advertising for such products, such as the best selling Fair and Lovely marketed by a subsidiary of Unilever is highly deceptive (15). According to Penagnini Toure, skin bleaching tends to sweep parts of Africa—in particular the big cities—where television represents lighter skin as attractive, popular, and a potential for success (16). By accepting such positive portrayals of skin bleaching by the media, black Africans adopt a mechanism of indirect control that encourages them to whiten their bodies in any way possible. However, to maintain hegemonic depiction of African skin bleaching as a beneficial and unproblematic process and encourage Africans to whiten their skin also necessitates the hegemony of white supremacist values and consequently the marginalization of any dissenting or alternative views on this potentially controversial practice. As P. Feyerabend has observed, non-Western cultures like the many in Africa have made important achievements in many fields of science due to their cultural, geographic, and ecological heritage that might challenge the supposed social benefits of skin bleaching (17). For example, the dark pigment of African skin has enabled them to live and work in hot, tropical climates and terrain from which they have made significant contributions to the world. Yet due to the predominant global belief in the superiority of European and American intellectual world, African heritage, wisdom and world views did not travel well as those of the West and would become inscribed by the Eurocentrism inculcated into African minds. If Africans ever continued to dare promote ideas of African identity the way they had during decolonization, Feyerabend would argue, they would not be examined and instead would be ridiculed or conquered by the commercial, political and cultural hegemony of Western religion or science. Furthermore, to appear and to become recognized in the global mass media, Africans believe they must adopt Caucasian standards of beauty or they will become marginalized because many of those who are famous have done so. Feyerabend notes that while many spoke of liberation and racial equality in the midst of decolonization, what this meant was not the equality of different racial groups and cultural traditions, but rather the individualistic equality of people in all racial groups to compete in Western notions of science, medicine, technology, politics—and, one might add, beauty (18). Hence, if they wish to be recognized and appreciated not only by the Western world but also each other, Africans believe they are not free to manifest their own forms of black indigenous beauty but only the elegance of the anthropomorphic Caucasian ideal. For example, many African women say they feel like they must bleach their skin to attract the most financially and politically successful men, who show a preference for women with lighter skin. This becomes particularly intense in the predominately Muslim Senegal, a polygamous society where rival wives lighten their skins to compete for the husband’s favor (19). Likewise, in the poverty stricken Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, women strive to attract rich men by attaining “tshoko” (fair skin). Commercials in Kenya which promote skin creams attempt to tap on African people’s belief in how black skin makes them inferior by depicting the success of female courtship as directly correlated with the lightness of their complexion (20). The racist exclusion of black Africans from political and economic opportunity therefore stimulates efforts on their part to change the hue of their skin at whatever the risk in a quest for inclusion. African consumption of dangerous and expensive substances to whiten their skin is a phenomenon that one can only explain with an analysis of controlling processes of development, globalization, and marginalization. The ideology of development, as described by Majid Rahnema, causes them to understand white skin as a signifier for an advanced stage in humanity which has accumulated significant political power and economic wealth. The positive depiction of globalization in the mass media, as suggested by Jerry Mander, leads Africans to ignore its negative impacts and even embrace them uncritically. And the privileging of European and American values, beliefs and ideas around the world debases African’s pride in their own cultural heritage, leading them to seek to adopt Western notions of beauty to attain opportunities otherwise not open to them. Together, these controlling processes have caused many Africans, who formerly believed that black was beautiful in an era of apartheid and colonialism, to consume substances that destroy important aspects of their cultural identity in a post-colonial era to an extent that the violence of colonialism never could. Footnotes 1 Corina Schuler 2PanAfrican News Agency 3 Corina Schuler, 4 Penagnini Toure 5 Anne Simmons 6. Pan African News Agency 7 Simmons 8 Annie Thomas 10 Skin bleaching products come in three forms: hydroquinone, mercury and corticosteroids. Often they can be incorporated into medicated soaps. Brand names include Xessal, Ambi, Venus, Topgel, Topsym, and Movate. 11. Majid Rahnema 12. Corina Schuler 13. Toure 14 Jerry Mander 15 Simmons 16 Toure 17. P. Feyerabend 18 P. Feyerabend 19 Toure 20 Simmons Works Cited Feyerabend, P. “Part II,” in Science In A Free Society, New York, Schoken Books, 1978, Pp. 119-120. Mander, Jerry, “The Dark Side of Globalization,” In the Nation, July 15/22, 1996, pp. 9-14 PanAfrican News Agency, “Swaziland Passes Bill To Ban Skin Lightening Creams,” 3/29/00 Rahnema, Majid, “Under the Banner of Development,” Development, June 1996, pp. 1-12 Schuler, Corina “Africans Look For Beauty in Western Mirror,” The Christian Science Monitor, 12/23/99, pg. 1 Simmons, Anne M. “Quest For Light Skin Is Darkneing Lives In Africa,” Los Angeles Times, 8/15/00 Thomas, Anne, “Ravaging Skin-Lighteners Still Just as Popular,” Agence France-Presse, 9/3/00. Toure, Penagnini, “Skin bleaching Fad Spreads to Africa,” Reuters, 3/6/97

Symbolic and Material Green Imperialism in the
Environmental Conservation Movement

Jake Thomas
11/18/01
Anthropology 148: Anthropology of the Environment
The Symbolic Consumption and Material Production of Environmental Imaginaries and the Global Transformation of Symbolic and Material Human-Environment Relations

Cultural representations of many environments in the world today, far from being "natural," are reproduced, legitimated, and determined both symbolically and materially by power structures through the processes of global consumption and production between rich and poor societies. Much of the green merchandise sold at nature stores in wealthier societies portrays the environment of poorer communities inaccurately and ahistorically, such as pristine, uninhabited, and wild landscapes, which consumers incorporate into their minds as environmental imaginaries. Wealthy tourists expect to see such imagined environments when they visit the actual landscape they saw represented in order to alleviate their sense of alienation from a modern human environment of “culture” they see as in binary opposition of "nature." This encourages owners of these environments, who seek money from tourists, to create policies that materially manifest such an environmental imaginary. Such policies lead to actual transformations and regulations of human-environment relations in poorer communities as local people and the environment must adjust their lives to actualize the imagined environment. Consequently, the consumption of culturally constructed environments in wealthy societies and their production in poorer communities interact to symbolically and materially transform understandings of human-environment relations across the world.
            Companies such as the former Nature Company and the new Discovery Channel Store gain profits by selling particular cultural representations of nature to wealthy consumers in metropolitan societies. In order to maintain sales, these stores sell products that reflect not what nature is but what nature means to its consumers as a reflection of their desires (Price, 189). One must culturally contexualize these particular meanings: Beinart and Crotes observe that while Europeans tend to perceive the environment as an eminently cultural product, South Africans and Americans have cultural visions of pristine wilderness or untouched frontier landscapes. (Beinart and Crotes, 87). While people don't really need these products materially, they fulfill symbolic functions (Price, 194). For many metropolitan shoppers, nature represents a recreational escape from all that reminds them of human society: urbanism, commercialism, placelessness, artifice, and alienation (Price, 190). The green products both sustain these ideas of nature and make them feel less environmentally guilty about their complicity in the materialism and artifice of consumerism, while also sustaining through this artifice the consumption of natural resources that their consumerist lifestyle an the global capitalist system depends upon (Price, 201). The consumption of nature in this way legitimizes the perpetuation of the consumerist lifestyle without questioning either the representations of the environment or the sustainability of this lifestyle.
            The proliferation of particular cultural constructions of imagined environments in metropolitan societies influence ideas of what nature really is. These simulated experiences of nature once purchased become incorporated in urban society. Shown on walls, TV, photos, books, and shops, they are seen more than the actual environments they represent (Price, 193; Beinart and Croats, 81). These environmental imaginaries tend to include some aspects of the environment and exclude others from the frame of representation. In America, the fiction of a pristine wilderness, embedded in popular conceptions of national parks and wilderness, obscure the fact that the landscape had to be created through dispossession of Indians (Spence, 131). Ahistorical representations of America’s national heritage as such uninhabited landscapes legitimate it as “natural.” Candace Slater observes that in contemporary images of the Amazon rainforest human presence remains circumscribed, lumping together a diversity of Indians and excluding ethnic minorities who played a large role in Amazon history. The problem with environmental imaginaries is that they often misrepresent human-environment relations and cause people to ignore how different cultures understand the environment differently (Slater, 78-79).  These images become what many people expect when they visit the actual landscapes.
            Such environmental imaginaries of wealthy societies have enormous influence upon how environments are constructed in poorer communities that seek to attract and attain material wealth by adopting policies that attempt to create the imagined environments sought by those with money. Conservation of national parks or reserves gained importance once states recognized tourism had a pay-off for the investment in protected national areas (Biner and Croats, 78). Slater notes that American environmental imaginaries of Amazonia represent it as a source for more environmentally sustainable development that pragmatically utilizes natural resources without destroying them. Consequently, indigenous people can only receive help from wealthy northerners with appeals of environmental protection. However, this also prevents Indians, such as Kayapo, from engaging in activities such as selling the rights to trees and minerals on their lands (Slater, 75-78). Indians must therefore play the role of an ecologically noble savage. In Africa, Neuman notes that as long as a tradition of living "in harmony with nature" is maintained in a way suitable to buffer zone planners of Integrated Conservation Development Projects, local communities may remain on land. This puts a tremendous burden upon them to demonstrate a conservative relationship with nature at the risk of losing their land rights (Neuman, 565-566). In such ways, expectations by powerful outsiders put great pressure on locals to represent the landscape to suit the fulfillment of metropolitan symbolic expectations rather than local material needs.
            The transformation of environments to fulfill the fantasies of rich urbanites is nothing new. As Grove notes, European colonialism and its successor states established its foundations by changing human-environment relations in unindustrialized countries from locally evolved human-land relations towards direct private property status or direct state control, leading to capitalist exploitation of the landscape for commodity production and erosion in customary controls and common property rights. Such transformations included the gazetting of game reserves, the enclosure of common grazing lands, the draining of marshlands, and the destruction of indigenous irrigation systems and the creation of new ones (Grove, 179-180). However, today private capital and state policy drive such transformations. Secure control by private landowners becomes more common as free market enthusiasts say that it will preserve wildlife and habitat (Biner and Croats, 343). Policies toward Amazonia that preserve it for those from the outside, often do not meet the needs of those who live in its borders (Slater, 79). They may also heighten insecurity as the landscape becomes militarized for conservationist purposes and local usage of the environment becomes criminalized. In Africa, Neumann says proposed "buffer zones" meant to preserve the environment expands state power with policies of hunting bans, destocking, and evictions that lead to land alienation and local impoverishment. When indigenous people fail the sustainability test, they are removed from rural communities or have resource rights curtailed (Neuman, 570).  For park superintendents like Charles Thomson, peoples’ pristine vision of Yosemite required not only tightly managed presentation of waterfalls, forests, granite cliffs and docile game animals, but also the extension of the park's western boundaries over forest land and the forced removal of Indians, which visitors saw as an unsightly presence (Spence, 125). However, policies that change local ecology also endanger spiritual and culture order as well, as it alienates locals from their environmental context (Grove, 195). Consequently, often the preservation and dominion of the landscape for outsiders takes precedence over the survival and stability of poor local communities that materially depend upon it.
            Unequal power structures in the global capitalist system clearly determine and legitimate how human-environment relations are manifested, both symbolically and materially. People in metropolitan societies purchase inaccurate or ahistorical representations of the environment to alleviate their alienation toward modern life. The wide consumption the products often create a belief that nature can exist only in the absence of human culture. When these wealthy people travel to see the actual landscape, the states and individuals who have control and ownership over the land seek to materially produce or maintain those imagined environments that those wealthy people expect to see. Consequently, they implement policies to transform or regulate the landscape that marginalize and dispossess the local people of their material and symbolic lifestyle. While seemingly separate, the symbolic consumption of culturally constructed environments in wealthy societies and their material production in poorer communities are deeply interconnected, and determine the global fate of human-environment relations.

 

Jake Thomas
3.
How is the consumption of cultural representations of the environment by wealthy societies to relieve people from the alienation of modern life related to the production of environments in poorer societies that actualize these environmental imaginaries through the transformation of the landscape and society?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Beinart, William, and Peter Croates. 1995, “Nature Reserves and National Parks: Revaluing and Renaturing the Wild.” In Environment and History, NY: Routledge. 72-92.

Grove, Richard. 1997,  “Colonial Conservation, Ecological Hegemony and Popular Resistance: Towards a Global Synthesis.” In Ecology, Climate and Empire. Cambridge, The White Horse Press.  179-223.

Neumann, Roderick. 1997 “Primitive Ideas: Protected Area Buffer Zones and the Poltiics of Land in Africa.” Development and Change, 28 (3):559-582.

Price, Jennifer. 1995, “Looking for Nature at the Mall: A Field Guide to the Nature Company.” In William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground. NY: WW Norton, 186-203.

Slater, Candace. 2000, “Justice For Whom? Contemporary Images of Amazonia.” In Charles Zerner, ed. People, Plants, and Justice. NY: Columbia University Press,. 67-82.

Spence, Mark David. 1999, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removals and the Making of the National Parks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 101-139.

The Politics of Labor and Gender in Thai Sex Tourism
and Malaysian Semiconductor Factories

The Integration of Civilizations in Asia
     In “The Clash of Civilizations?” Samuel Huntington argues that the fundamental source of international conflict in the future will not be between different economic systems or ideologies but primarily between different cultures (Huntington, 3). However, this description of international relations, while noting the factor of culture as a determinant of conflict, does not situate these clashes of civilizations in specific contexts. Consequently Huntington doesn’t describe the actual cultural interactions and syncretism between cultures through the process of globalization. Ethnographies of sweatshops and female foreign domestic workers in Malaysia, and the sex industry in Thailand illustrate how supposedly immutable cultural essences of non-Western cultures, specifically gender identities, actually transform because of powerful labor market forces in a globalized capitalist market.
In “Japanese Factories, Malay Workers,” Aihwa Ong describes how Malay factory women in Western Malaysia struggle to construct a stable gender identity amidst the conflicting forces of the cultural influence of Malaysian familial traditions that justify gender domination and familial dependence, the Western labor market and factory management that promotes consumerism and individualism, and Islamic fundamentalist revivalism that advocates ascetism and moral purity. The gender-specific norms of modern Malay society, Ong argues, are historically produced categories. In kampung (traditional Malay) life, according to derived Islamic ideas, men are obligated to protect women’s honor and socioeconomic security because they are more endowed with akal (reason and self-control) than women, who are influenced by hawa nafsu ( disruptive emotions) (Ong, 64). Malays use valuess of male prerogatives as a justification to control and protect young unmarried daughters within individual households, but this male authority never takes the form of systematic male domination of all women, who enjoy a moral authority of their own (Ong, 67).
     Export oriented industrialization introduced in 1970 has brought in multinational microchip factories to Malaysian Free Trade Zones, drawing in a semi-skilled labor force of young rural Malay women and signficantly impacting their gender identities (Ong, 66). Given an abundance in labor supply, Japanese companies can be selective in their employment and so usually hire young unmarried women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four,with at least primary education and turn away married women because they are not fresh labor and cost more than young single women (Ong, 68). Ong suggests Malays see their daughters and sisters as vulnerable and controllable and wives and divorcees as petty and manipulative because of the inability of Malay men now to actually protect the socioeconomic interests of their women (Ong, 65). Wives have to resort to private strategies to secure their interests and those of their children even at the expense of husbands and kinsmen, so a woman’s control of her private resources is seen as a manipulation of the marital relationship. Due to the practical management of their affairs, divorcees and widows gain the image of the sexually experienced flirt, not attached or protected by any man. Such women Malay men see as a threat to family interest. (Ong, 66) American companies and their Western influences encourage women to spend much money on cosmetics, clothes, and junkfood, and to be more individualistic and loose (Ong, 66). Malay village women are exposed to modes of management in Japanese capitalist industries they have never encoutered in peasant society that reconstitute Malay norms of male-female relations and transforms them into a corporate ideology rooted in non-Malay Confucian patriarchal values (Ong, 67). Factory disciplinary measures generate ideological and social acceptance of systematic female subjection to male control, producing a new gender hierarchy along with microcomputers (Ong, 67).
Rather than basing the exploitation of women entirely on traditional patriarchy, Ong argues that the corporations intervene to produce and reproduce, in daily conditions, the ideological and social mechanisms whereby conepts of male domination and female subordination are infused into and become the status quo of power relations in the industrial system (Ong, 69). Malays believe that men should perform tasks involving much energy while women should engage in activities that require less bursts of strength and force, so industrial brochures characterize Asian women, with their nimble fingers, fine eyesight and tolerance for tedious labor, as biologically suited for the painstaking and fine handiwork required in labor-intensive processes, which corporate multinational subsidiaries embrace uncritically (Ong, 68). The Japanese corporate policies, finely tuned to Malay values of females as possessing junior status and the moral obligation of Malay men to protect them, treat the female workers paternalistically, as to ensure authority and domination over the female labor force. This sexual division of labor enables employers to pay lower wages for female jobs that the men wouldn’t accept. (Ong, 68). Malay women are not dissuaded from low-paying jobs so long as their families depend on those earnings, which they do (Ong, 69). Kampung Malay daughters have moral obligations to return a portion of their wages to their families to conserve a declining agricultural economy. (Ong, 77). Managers organize production processes to maximize power differences between men and women, massing women at the lowest levels of the occupational hierarchy so that most of them will not work for more than a few years and denying them training that would qualify them for technical jobs. Therefore the industrial system structure insitutionalizes the male-dominated hiearchy whereby women become dependent on the orders and rewards of male workers (Ong, 70).
     Many parents view social emancipation (especially consumer behavior) as destructive of the very kampung social relations the women’s wages help to sustain, so families discourage individualism promoted by the Western influences (Ong, 77). Many villegers see the women’s free association with men in a Western manner as a violation of kampung adat, which expects an informal segregation between men and women. Families see bebas (factory woman untied to convention) as less hard working, more careless about their work, more interested in self-gratification, and less restrained by parental guidance (Ong, 77).The state tries to justify gender inequality by portraying factory women not as socially autonomous but as wanton, childlike and dependent, which women feel is an affront to Muslim womanhood. Ong argues that increased monitoring of young female muslims by state Islamic institutions is due to many Islamic insurgent groups have calling for greater state control of women whom they see them as asserting social independence and doubting offical Islamic culture. (Ong, 75). The “immorality” of women is seen as stemming from Western culture, rather than industrial employment (Ong, 74). Ong claims that the woman demonstrate their resistance to male authority by their consumer behavior, use of savings for alternative careers, resistance to undesired marriage matches, more daring enjoyment of premarital sex, and refusal of money to parents who remarry, and at the same time, uphold family loyalty, Islamic asceticism, and male authority. Gender consciousness of Malay women is torn between integrated adherence to kampung communal values, asceticism, and male authority, and different forms of incipient claims as wage workers and resistance to male control in home and in factories, upon which they struggle to create new gender identities (Ong, 80-81).
In Night Market, Ryan Bishop and Lillian Robinson examine the sex industry of Thailand. They discuss how prostitution that has long been a part of the country has become internationalized due to Bangkok’s reputation as a traditional site of prostitution, the declining agricultural industry and the in-migration of young men and women into the service sectors of the city, and the Thailand government’s determination to develop economically through their tourist industry that can capitalize on prostitution as a nationally legitimate consumption commodity.
 Nobody denies the existence and the scale of the indigenous sex trade in Thailand. Both the widespread prostitution and the pattern of family authority and loyalty that sustain it have deep roots. Courtesans, concubines, and prostitutes all play a role in traditional Thai life, each reflecting “a particular class accommodation to extra-marital sex.” In the earlier part of the 20th century a relationships with a concubine or secondary wife was the recognized privilege of elite males, providing social mobility for the favored women and fueling the dream of it for many others (Bishop, 96). According to Bishop and Robinson, desire and fulfillment seem to have no female voice in either the traditional or the contemporary culture of Thailand, so that she becomes an exploited commodity without subjectivity (Bishop, 12)
This genderized power dynamic becomes exploited on a global scale when Thailand decided that the economic path toward modernization was tourism, which it poured money into, trying to attract rich Westerners and other affluent Asians to its shores. Soon Thailand realized its strongest cultural appeal to the West was its reputation as a brothel, and decided to capitalize on this. A massive in-migration of young people into the cities and their service sectors from the rural country due to a collapse in the agricultural industry offered an abundant supply of labor (Bishop, 94).  Following this was a confluence of European, Japanese, and American men, lured by the promises that Thai women were the most beautiful in the world, whom they expected to represent both subservient sexual objects that are at once more sexually promiscuous than Western woman and inferior exotic “Others” that affirm the client’s own ethnic superiority. 
The Thai government has mostly evaded public discussion of the sex industry, thereby implicitly asserting that it is a normal part of the healthy tourist modernization project. Meanwhile, the tourist companies extravagently advertise it. Classic Thai love poetry, with the orgasm as a gift of divine grace, articulates a male fantasy. Established Thai institutions such as concubinage and prostituion tourism are used as an explaination for the existence of less delicate male fantasies (Bishop, 12).  The “subjective” ideological model of patron-client  relationship is a hallmark of Thai society in all sectors:  the military, the civil service, politics, private business, and even in a sense the family, and explains the lack of class tension in the sex industry, as patron client analyses prevent class based ones (Bishop, 107). The high premium Thai male privilege places on female virginity prior to marriage can be used to force a woman’s entry into the sex industry: the much prized virginity brings a higher price for a girl sold into the industry, making the offer more lucrative and attractive. Recruiters also often rape young girls, rendering them culturally damaged on the marriage market and therefore more likely candidates to become sex workers. In both of these ways, modern interest manipulate traditional values (Bishop, 160-161).
     In In Service and Servitude, Christine Chin discusses foreign female domestic workers from Indonesia and the Phillipines who serve middle class Malaysians striving for modernity. This phenomenon illustrates how the project of modernization and the desire for middle-class affluence, status and freedom of women from male familial patriarchy have led to the ethnic-class-gender exploitation of immigrants.
     After the British colonialism brought Chinese and Indian workers to Malaysia in order to aid industrialization, the Chinese came to dominate the economic sector of the country. After the racial riots in 1969, in which Malays attacked the property of the Chinese, the government of Malaysia attempted to reduce ethnic tensions between Malays and Chinese by recognizing Malays as “sons of the soil” and instituting the New Economic Program, an affirmative action program which would dramatically increase the economic wealth of Malays over the years, and bringing them into the middle class.
     As Malays became increasing affluent and formed a middle class, the government implemented pro-natelist policies and encouraged the formation of nuclear families to form a middle class and alleviate Chinese and Malay ethnic relations. Soon however, the wives wished to work as well as the husband,the Malays found people to help manage the house and enable families to attain dual income economies in the imported foreign female domestic workers from Indonesia and the Phillipines, two countries that were struggling at the time to pull out of economic recessions, and that by exporting female workers could reduce unemployment and increase foreign exchange earnings (Chin, 97).
     The Malaysian government turned a blind eye to many of the illegalities of importing foreign labor because it saw the maids as the key to further development of a Malaysian middle class (Chin, 193). The cultural rationale behind the fact that all the foreign maids were women was that the job of a maid is unskilled work that should only performed by women (Chin, 102). Men, when asked whether they would go abroad to Malaysia to work as a maid, would respond in a profound negative, claiming they are biologically incapable of doing housework (Chin, 105). Traditional conceptions about gender don’t change even as Malaysia industrializes and modernizes, as men remain in the eyes of the law as the more legitimate gender possessor of civil-political rights (Chin, 168). With foreign maids, the woman of the house, who formerly did the housework, can delegate much of it (or most of it) to the maid and be more free to pursue her own lifestyle, escaping male patriarchy by passing it on to another (Chin, 173). Chin argues this only replicates the oppressive domination that Malays faced toward their British colonizers (Chin, 169). However, this oppression is also different because the “possession” of a maid in Malaysian society represents the attainment of middle class status, and, more importantly, an increasing commonality among the affluent middle class, peripheralizing ethnic, religious and cultural differences between Chinese and Malay middle class Malaysians (Chin, 183). Hence, while female domestic labor perpetuates gender inequalities, they also attenuate ethnic and cultural conflict within the middle class through class and ethnic exploitation of immigrants.
     As situated ethnographies of Asia in the process of modernization illustrate, civilizations are becoming more culturally integrated and syncretized under the auspices of globalized capitalism, transforming traditional gender identities by the economic forces of the labor market, while corporations and governments tailor the industrial process to harmonize with traditional values. In Malaysia, traditional concepts of akal and hawa nafsu justify gender domination, women remain dependent on work to fulfill moral obligations to their families economically, and the promotion of Western consumerism and individualism and Islamic asceitism and moral purity create a contradictory consciousness among Malaysian factory workers. Thailand’s long cultural history of indigenous prostitution, the poverty of rural female peasants migrating from the declining agricultural sector to the urban service industries, and the government program to develop the Thai economy with tourist services offered to foreigners looking for the sexually exotic Other, all contribute to Thailand’s growing sex industry. Finally, in Malaysia the desire of middle class women to escape familial male patriarchy, the massive influx of foreign female domestic workers from Indonesia and the Phillipines, and the growing symbolic signficiance of the international maids as an attainment of much desired middle class nuclear family status all have led to the exploitation of foreign female domestic workers. In Asia, civilizations, far from simply clashing, are meshing together to transform traditional gender identities due to the globalized labor patterns created by the forces of transnational capitalism.

Works Cited

Bishop, Ryan and Lillian S. Robinson. Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle.
Routledge, 1998.

Chin, Christine B. N. In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian “Modernity” Project.
Columbia University Press, 1998.

Huntington, Samuel. “The Clash of Civilizations?”
Anthropology 147A Fall 2000 Class Reader, 3-22.  University of California, Berkeley.

Ong, Aiwha. “Japanese Factories, Malay Workers: Industrialization and Sexual Metaphors in West Malaysia.”
Anthropology 147A Fall 2000 Class Reader, 62-81. University of California, Berkeley.

 

Biotechnology In Chiapas
And
the Biocolonization and Enclosure of the Genetic and Ecological Commons

Jake Thomas
May 11, 2001
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management 165:
International Rural Development Policy
Professor Claudia Carr
GSI: Diana Wu

Preamble
Often a particular indigenous group in the world, of the many that exists, becomes romanticized by people because its rebellion against state- and corporate-led "power" or "development" gained much attention in the media. Since the Zapatista uprising of 1994, this has happened with Chiapas, which for many has become the poster child of agrarian resistance to corporate and state-controlled modernization and development of indigenous societies. Unfortunately, the struggle for resistance, told over again and again, often becomes "living history" that obscures recent developments and their future implications for the survival of the community of concern. For this reason, I decided to focus my paper on recent developments in biotechnology in Chiapas, which I have found little literature on, and yet may pose more long-term dangers to the ecological--and consequently cultural, political and economic--cohesion and stability of communities in Chiapas than the impact the "Green Revolution." While it is impossible to predict the future course of development for certain, a historical examination of the "Green Revolution" and its political and economic impact of the Chiapan's community can illuminate the implications of the more recent biotechnological revolution for the survival of communities and ecological system in Chiapans. By examining three recent developments in biotechnology in light of the history of the modernized and commercial agriculture, I hope to inform development policy makers of these implications and help them determine whether the policies are in the interest of Chiapas community. My hope is that the academic and NGO scholarship can keep up with the development of such policy in practice and help inform policy-making decision rather than being a mere diagnostician and critic of development policy failures in the past. As to concrete policy solutions to solve such problems, I hope other scholars will continue such research into biotechnology in indigenous communities, and then propose thoughtful alternative policies to the current policies toward biotechnology development.

 In the past thirty years, agriculture in the Chiapas region of Mexico has experienced enormous changes, transforming the means of subsistance, local economy, and social relations, from subsistance agriculture to cash export agricultural society. Some have argued that while the global and national macro-economic pressures marketizing much of their local economy and privatizing land and labor have largely worked to local detriment of Chiapans and to the benefit of the government and foreign transnational corporations (TNCs), Chiapans can respond to these pressures with their own locally-designed rural development policies that give them control over their resources, which can ensure social stability, health and survival of the Chiapan community. With the recent introduction of various forms of biotechnology into the region, I argue that these pressures will only accelerate and multiply and that Chiapans must gain control over their resources to protect their genetic and ecological resources from the ownership and exploitation by foreign TNCs or they may permanently lose control of not only their former agricultural system, but also of the genetic and environmental landscape that supports it.
            Chiapas has been making a transition from subsistance agriculture to cash crop export industrialization during the past 70 years. Over half of the land in Chiapas is controlled completely by ejidos or agrarian communities with communal land titles, approved by the Mexican government since the late 1930s. However, the 11% of private agricultural producers, producing 90% of the produce, dominate the Chiapan economy more than commercial producers in the ejido sector. The subsistence peasants, with about 27% of the land, consume most of what they produce and only market 1/3 or less of their production, an amount that doesn't enable them to escape poverty (Rosset, 3). The World Bank noted that "Mexico is probably the best representation of a bimodal agricultural system," with "a small number of powerful, well capitalized" enterprises, and the vast majority who are impoverished" (Dewalt, 44). According to U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and Caribbean (ELAC) study, the viability of commercial production depends on high access to bank credit, the use of tractors, fertilizers, and pesticides on their lands, the employment of wage labor, and high access to irrigated and high quality lands (Rosset, 2). However, the use of such inputs often creates dependency on them, allowing corporations to gain greater control of local agriculture.
            To understand any development in Chiapas today, one must understand its current condition as tied to both its national and global contexts. In Mexico overty is highest among rural Indians concentrated in Chiapas and other rural regions, which make up 40% of the poor in Mexico while constituting 8% of country's population. Since Mexico has joined the NAFTA in 1994 and their commitment to eliminate tariff barriers, the modern export sector may not be able to compete on the international market, since exports of fruits and vegetables have largely stagnated in the 1990s (Rosset, 4). The prices of commodities produced by peasants will be driven downwards as international grain companies import cheap agricultural commodities into the Mexican market (Rosset, 9). Nor does this necessarily feed people, as Vandana Shiva has noted that Mexican imports increased from 20 per cent to 43 per cent between 1992 and 1996, and yet one in two peasants are not getting enough to eat (Shiva, 3). Mexico has experienced a widening agricultural trade deficit with the U.S. (Interpress Service, 3/3/94). With dependence on northern inputs for mechanized agriculture, as Chiapas trades with U.S., it gets relatively poorer.
Since the 1930s, the Mexican government has failed to fulfill its promise to redistribute land and increase productivity. The government instead invested in building rural infrastructure of dams, irrigation, roads and electrification projects for large scale private investment in commercial agriculture, which increased exports in northern Mexico but impoverished people in the Southern states because here agrarian reform was slow and so the most productive land remained in control of wealthy farmers, plantation owners, and rich cattle ranchers, who owned the best machinary, buildings, and agricultural processing facilties. Government subsidies tend to go to the rich capitalists who produce on large scale, rather than small scale farmers. The farmers could not produce enough on their own poor plots so they served as laborers on estates to increase their incomes (Gates, 34-48).
In the 1970s, the Mexican government financed investment in agriculture projects in anticipation of revenues from future oil sales, but the collapse of oil revenues in the 1980s led the Mexican government to terminate ejido sector programs. Agricultural lands were destroyed and peasants were uprooted from their communities, leading them to migrate to towns with problems of prostitution, violence, crime, and alcoholism (Gonzalez, 283-285). Those peasants who had earned capital began investing in and producing with Green Revolution technologies, leading to further class stratifications through the commodification of less-demanded labor (Rosset, 7). The anthropologist George Collier describes how now many Zinacantecos now seek money instead of food, as the economy has switched to cash, impacting gender relations as many women produce for food but men want to experiment with foods that aren't corn, and explore popular clothing, music and electronics (Collier 12-15). Such cultural elements are the usually property of Western companies and tend to displace indigenous lifestyles and social structure and further impoverish Chiapans by not spending money to meet basic needs. Furthermore, the politics of Zinacanta have become increasingly class based, between large scale farmers who become dependent on truckers affiliated the PRI for produce transportation and peasants who are dependent on wages to survive (Collier 22-23). Thus the Green Revolution is not only an agricultural revolution, but also a fundamental cultural and political revolution.
Agriculture slumped in 1986 as cuts in subsidies for staple food and slashes in government bureaucracy resulted in demoralization and increased corruption. As farmers defaulted on their US loans, the subsequent debt crisis led the government to implement land distribution policies favoring the wealthy farmers at the expense of the poor peasants. New legislation enacted by the PRI-dominated Congress ended land redistribution and made it possible for private and foreign investors to invest or buy existing ejido lands (Gates, 46-48). This has led to drastic loss of ownership and control of land by Chiapans.
Many believe the ejidatorios and others who produce for export that can't compete with imported grains will gradually shift to more profitable areas of production and income provided by the PROCAMPO, which will help finance that transfer before the program phases out. But Peter Rosset believes this is highly unlikely because the shift to fruits and vegetables will be very costly on rain-fed rather than irrigrated lands and will be dependent on credit, technical assistance, insurance, marketing, delivery of inputs, and extension services that were formally delivered by the government, but aren't anymore (Rosset 10).
The benefits of cash export production are questionable, as Altieri and Hecht have shown that smaller scale production with more labor can outperform large scale commercial farms in yields per unit area, production costs, and employment (Altieri and Hecht, 1990). Chiapans must decide which form of production will serve their interests.
Likewise, Peter Rossett argues that since Mexican policymakers have not addressed the crisis of Mexican agriculture, Mexican civil society must formulate their own path of rural development that both meets the needs of the rural poor and of the national economy. (Rosset, 12). The recent introduction of biotechnology into the Chiapas region only increases the importance of the Chiapan's need for self-determination, as foreign corporations will use dependence and intellectual property rights to make control increasingly difficult for the Chiapas community, as shown by the three cases of bioprospecting, the introduction of GMO crops, and the emerging mutant eucalyptus tree plantations.
Chiapas is a very diverse region, and because of this pharmaceutical and biotech corporations are attempting to illegally appropriate genetic data and patent life so they can conduct research and development with gene samples in corporate, university, and government labs and produce new products. Known as "bioprospecting," "biopiracy", and "biocolonization," these activities began with an initiative funded by the US government called the International Cooperative Biodiversity Group-Maya (ICBG),  led by the University of Georgia-Athens, USA, the Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR), the Mexican government, and Molecular Nature Limited (MNL), a Welsh biotech company,  which called for a project to collect and evalutate thousands of plants microorganisms used in traditional medicine by Mayan communities. ECOSUR and the University of Georgia said the project will serve the interests of Mayan people by conserving and sharing endangered indigenous knowledge while making sure that any resulting commercial benefits are shared with indigenous peoples. However COMPITCH (the Council of Traditional Doctors and Midwives from Chiapas) considers such activity as piracy of knowledge and resources that indigenous peoples have collectively shared and developed for generations, demanding that  all such projects shut down until all the communities of Chiapas are fully consulted, evaluate the impact of the projects, and see the management and organziations as transparent. Furthermore, Luna Sebastian of COMPITCH says the project is violating International Society of Ethnobiology's Code of Ethics (which requires "prior informed consent"), the UN Convention on Biological Diversity Article 8j (which addresses traditional knowledge and equal benefit sharing), and the ILO 169 Convention on Indigenous Rights, all which Mexico has signed.  ICBG's efforts to seek prior consent have ignored traditional processes and have not divulged their operations (RAFI, 10/23/00).
In order to cultivate legitimacy for intellectual property rights in the Latin America, ECOSUR invited academics and indigenous leaders to adopt a declaration that sets standards for practices and intellectual property rights of indigenous knowledge, but the indigenous leaders rejected it. The Mexican Department of the Environment, Natural Resources and Fishing, the authority in charge for granting permits for bioprospecting projects in Mexico, called ICBG-Maya and COMPITCH together to begin a "negotitation process" in April of 2000, but COMPITCH said it never expressed interest in the negotitation process and published criticisms of the government strategy. On September, 26, 2000, COMPITCH received a letter informing them that the bioassay permit to the ICBG-Maya had been denied. Already however, 1000-15000 distinct species have been collected from other regions and their data entered into computers. RAFI has criticized ICBG-Maya's process for its 1) a lack of context, disguising how their contractual ethical promises of ICBG not to patent of organisms or genes, use transgenic products, contract with a big enterprise, patent traditional knowledge, and hinder social/ecological use, directly contradicting the long run implications as the rights are given to large biotech corporations, 2) inability to recognize local forms of decision making, 3) inability to recognize resources and knowledge are collective, and 4) inability to recognize that their laws are contradictory (RAFI, 10/23/00).
In response, ICBG has created PROMAYA, a nonprofit organziation which is intended to help communities to participate and give consent to patenting, but PROMAYA receives nothing and will only participate in the technical committee created by ICBG Maya to determine which community development initiatives should receive the 25% royalty belonging to the communities, which ICBG say compose the 1% of profits the pharmaceutrical TNCs earn and may take years to come. The pharmaceutical corporation will retain control over the technology necessary to exploit the genetic data. For this reason, RAFI argues that, like Green Revolution technology, biotechnology is likely to benefit corporations at the expense of the local community, introducing alienating cultural practices such as the individual/community sale of public and collective resources, the patenting and privatization of communal resources and knowledge, and the integration of communities into a market economy as suppliers of raw material and cheap labor. RAFI concludes that it should immediately terminate the project (RAFI, 10/23/00).
            The introduction of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) as crops into agricultural production will also create a loss of Chiapan's control over resources in Chiapas. GMOs carry the genes from another animal, plant, bacteria, or virus. Biotech firms such as Monsanto claim that GMOs are necessary in order to feed the world's growing population. While many GMOs are pest-resistant and so have higher yields with certain chemicals, they also have many disadvantages. According to Andrew Kimbrell, most of these GM plants have been genetically engineered to inprove their appearance and increase their shelf life, rather than increase their nutritional value (Kimbrell, 138). Polls show most of the international public is opposed to biotechnology (Kimbrell, 133). Monsanto's Roundup Ready genetically engineered soybeans have been found to produce higher yields than traditional beans only with Roundup Ready pesticides (Benbrook, 1999). Gene transfer can occur between transgenic plants, bacteria, and mammalian cells. Close to 99% of commercial transgenic crops have viruses that can cross with other viruses to form new diseases, allergens, and toxins. The varieties of GMOs planted in open fields may cross with other wild varieties and displace them, thereby decreasing biodiversity. Their environmental impact on non-northern ecosystems is untested. Biotech firms located mostly in the U.S. and Europe have monopolistic ownership over GMOs, and their patents on seeds, enforced by the WTO, prevent campesinos from saving seeds of patented varieties for the next sowing. Furthermore, no regulations exist in Mexico over GMOs (CIEPEC, 1999 and Fox, 2/13/99 ). While most research into GMOs is scarce or suppressed, Dr. Putszai has recently raised much criticism of GMOs in his research, which has found that the eating of transgenic potatos results in reductions in the weight of many organs, depression of immune responses and intestinal infections (Davies, 1999; Putzai, 1999). John Losey has also found that pollen from Bt-corn, a popular product in Chiapas, kills monarch butterflies (Losey, 1999). Such research illustrates the potential dangers GMOs pose to agricultural and ecological systems in Chiapas which tend to work to the advantage of agro-chemical transnationals and to the disadvantage of medium and small campesinos who won't have the economic resources to acquire the improved varieties and will be unable to compete with agro-business, who often own such crops as patented intellectual property.
            Transnational corporations are also introducing genetically engineered eucalyptus tree plantations into Chiapas, Mexico. Orin Langelle reports that the US pulp and paper industry is becoming genetically engineered with International Paper, Fletcher Challenge Corporation, and Westvaco allying themselves with Monsanto to produce herbicide-tolerant trees (Langelle, 1999). The huge demand for paper in the US, the paper industry argues, is the driving force of planting mutant plantations, most of which are Roundup-Ready or Bt toxic, on a mass scale. The companies are again able to patent the mutant trees as intellectual property, preventing local people from profiting from their production and sale.
NAFTA has opened up Mexico and other underdeveloped countries to transnational paper companies so they can plant mutant trees now that land titles have been handed over to corporations through provision of Article 27 in NAFTA, which allows for the privatization of communal landholdings. WTO's efforts to reduce non-tarriff barriers to trade in the forestry industry, which include eco-labelling, sustainable forestry and forest production, will probably assist the expansion of these mutant trees.
            The mutant tree plantation have many harmful social and environmental impacts. These new mutant tree plantations are displacing Chiapans from their former agricultural land and cutover forest land. Alvaro Gonzales says such whole tree harvesting rapidly deplete soils with Bt, leaving little organic material to go back into the soil (Gonzalez, 2000). Such trees also have low lignin content, which give trees their structure, protects against insects, prevents rotting and reduces carbon dioxide release. Rapid growth of the trees harm local hydrological regimes through increased water absorption and salinification (Sampson and Lamon, 2000). While Shell Oil, BP, and Toyota are planting such mutant trees for carbon credits, no scientific basis exists for the claims that they offset carbon emissions and they may contribute to global warming by displacing old-growth trees that do (Gonzalez, 2000). Finally, efforts to calm public fears about gene transfer to neighboring wild forests have led biotech companies to design sterilization techniques, all of which fail because of ecological changes throughout generations and the impossiblity of stopping horizontal gene transfer, but if successful will lead to trees barren to insects, birds and other animals (Petrie, 2000). CIEPAC's Gustavo Castro reports that TNCs rent the land for a few years from the campesinos to set up plantations and then give it back to them once the land is ruined (ACERCA, 1999).
Cloned mono-plantations of mutant trees are more vulnerable than other GMOs because of susceptibility to different unexpected insects and diseases at different stages in their development. They meet stresses over longer periods of time, such as cold winter temperatures, droughts, and wind storms. Most research on such trees is difficult to access or find, because studies that reveal problems have been censored by universities and corporate researchers (Steinbrecher, 2000).
The "biotechnology revolution" in Chiapas, Mexico is in a way not a revolution because TNCs continue to transform rural agriculture so that they can profit from it at the expense of poor peasants. However, what has changed is that now TNCs not only maintain this power through the creating dependence on chemical and mechanical inputs but through both a biotechnogical acquisition of the former genetic map of Chiapas and a transformation of the ecological and genetic landscape of Chiapas to the benefit of foreign TNCs. Such developments only emphasize the importance of Mexico giving Chiapans control over their genetic and ecological landscape and to protect them legally from any further developments that occur without their consent and knowledge of its implications. Otherwise, the people of Chiapas will gradually experience further enclosure and biocolonization of their genetic and ecological commons until they will eventually forget they ever had choice to preserve their genetic and environmental heritage.
Works Cited

Action For Community and Ecology in the Region of Central America (ACERCA).
"Eucalyptus, Neoliberalism, and NAFTA in Southeastern Mexico." ACERCA, June 1999.

Altieri, Miguel and Susanna Hecht, Agroecology and Small Farm Development. CRC Press, 1990.

Benbrook, C. 1999. Evidence of the Magnitude and Consequences of the Roundup Ready Soybean Yield Drag from University-Based Varietal Trials in 1998.  Ag BioTech InfoNet website at:[http://www.biotech-info.net/]

Center of Economic and Political Investigations of Community Action (CIEPAC), A.C. "Genetically Modified Organisms: Implications for Mexico and Chiapas" (translated).
CIEPAC, August 8, 1999.

Collier, George A. "Seeking Food and Seeking Money: Changing Produtive Relations in a Highland Mexican Community." United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Discussion Paper 10, 1990.

Davies, Jill. "The Putszai Story For U.S. Readers." Biodevestation, 2/19/99.

DeWalt, Billie R. and Martha N. Rees with the assistance of Arthur D. Murphy, "The End of Agrarian Reform in Mexico: Pas Lessons Future Prospects," Transformation of Rural Mexico, Number 3, Ejido Reform Research Project, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, UCSD, p. 44.

Fox, Micheal W. "Will Genetically Engineered Crops Mean Contaminated and Toxic Food, Bodies and Ecosystems?" Biodivestation, 2/12/99.

Gates, Marilyn. In Default: Peasants, the Debt Crisis and the Agricultural Challenge in Mexico, Westview Press, Boulder, CO. 1993.

Gonzalez, Roberto Thompson. Explotacion Petrolera y Problematica Agraria en el Sureste de Mexico. Centro De Investigactiones Ecologicas del Sureste, San Cristobal de las Casas. 1989.

Interpress Service. "Mexico: Crecio 158% en tres anos la cartera vencida." IPS wire service report, 3/3/94.

Kimbrell, Andrew. "Biocolonization." In Mander, Jerry and Edward Goldsmith, The Case Against the Global Economy, Sierra Club Books, 1996.

Langelle, Orin, Mick Petrie, Alvaro Gonzalez Gervasio, and Ricarda Steinbrecher.
"Mutant Trees." Biodevestation Conference, March 26, 2000.

Losey, John."A Response to BIO's Claims About His Research.Biodevestation, 7/30/99.

Pusztai, Arapd. "Why I Can't Remain Slient: Dr. Pusztai Talks To GM-Free." GM-Free, Vol 1, no.3: August/September, 1999.

Rosset, Peter, and Roger Burbach. "Chiapas and the Crisis of Mexican Agriculture."
Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1994.

Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI). "Stop Biopiracy in Mexico." RAFI, 10/23/00.

Sampson, Viola, and Lohmann, Larry. "Genetic Dialectic: The Biological Politics of Genetically Modified Trees." The Comerhouse Briefings.

Shiva, Vandana. "The Threat of the Globalization of Agriculture."  Voluntary Service Overseas, 2000.

Variety of Principled Actors In International Law: Comparing Human Rights and Environmental NGOs

Jake Thomas
5/15/02
Political Science 127: International Law
Professor Beth Simmons
GSI Ben Ansell
The Variety of Transnational Advocacy Networks

 

 

 

 

 

 

When political scientists speak of non-state actors, they often describe them as though they were all the same, rather than a diversity of groups having a variety of experiences due to differences in ideology, tactics and goals. In their book Activists Beyond Borders, Margeret Keck and Katheryn Sikkink undertake a more refined study than that of many social scientists by examining the impact of transnational advocacy networks of various social movements on world politics and conclude that most of them through practices that emphasize the importance of normative principles of state behavior have significantly influenced the discourse of states in relation to international law. Keck and Sikkink in grouping networked activists according to issue area fail to appreciate the diversity of principled actors within each issue area and measure how they have differential impact on the creation of state discourse, policy, and law.
While transnational advocacy networks of principled actors have overall had a positive social force in encouraging states, international organizations, and corporations to follow basic human values that most people share, they also have in recent years received increasingly criticism as many are extremely corrupt, unaccountable and almost neocolonial in the way they undermine state sovereignty by establishing their own control over local populations. To reclaim the public legitimacy of these non-state actors as a progressive democratic force, analysts must make efforts to understanding the variety of such non-state actors and how differences in their ideology, tactics, and goals have led to differential success in achieving progress within their respective movements both within and across issue areas. To help elucidate the importance of such differences in its effects upon international law, this paper will examine the differential success of widely different transnational advocacy networks Greenpeace (GP) and Earth Liberation Front (ELF) in the environment area and Amnesty International (AI) and the Maoist International Movement (MIM) in the human rights arena. The differences in their achievements stem from divergences in ideology, tactics and goals. Such s cross-issue and cross-group analysis suggests that environmental groups have a stronger impact on state practices in respect to international law than human rights group and moderate groups in both issue areas have a much greater affect upon states than more extreme groups. In conclusion, in assessing the potential effect of principled networks, analysts must understand different groups as having different rates of success due to how politicized both the group and issue area is.
The sanctity of the environment, as one such issue area that has become globalized, is a political subject that various actors in both the the developed and developing countries can take a variety of perspectives upon. Scholars such as David Bodansky have pointed out due to the need for state cooperation, environmental protection requires multilateral regulation, implying the need for international environmental law. Although environmental concerns may differ in the industrialized and the industrializing countries, the industrialized countries are a source of a wide range of groups have divergent ideologies, tactics, and goals in relation to their environmental activism and the promotion of international environmental law. The moderate group Greenpeace (GP), advocating more environmentally sustainable development through non-violent actions and lobbying efforts has campaigns against nuclear tests, excessive energy consumption, and unsustainable natural resource exploitation has been very successful in influencing the creation of much international law. The more extreme Earth Liberation Front in espousing the biocentric ideology of deep ecology and promoting the use of illegal monkey-wrenching to prevent the destruction of "wildlife" in the contemporary anthropocentric world has had miminal impact on state environmental law. While GP by working within rules of existing law is successfully able to influence international law, ELF by working outside the dominant order has failed again and again to achieve lasting victories for the environmental movement.
Greenpeace, established in 1971, has become an established political force in the global environmental movement. The corporate organization seeks to encourage states to adopt principles, policies and laws to protect the environment, reduce arms, and promote a sustainable economy, a mission broad enough to appeal to a variety of people. GP has had many successful campaigns such as ending many nuclear tests and waste dumping, encouraging the creation of the Stockholm Treaty that banned many of the world’s most dangerous chemicals, and campaigning for an eventual ban on commercial whaling, all of which did not pose a great danger to state security even while they may put some limits on economic growth and the militarization. Furthermore, they try to achieve these campaigns through non-violent direct action, boycotts, and lobbying at international conferences, all of which are legal activities. By framing their campaigns in terms of both peace and environment, GP campaigns have led to a International Whaling Commission moratorium in 1982, the UN’s 1996 adoption of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the 1996 adoption of the Kyoto Protocol for industrialized countries to set standards at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a 2000 treaty banning persistent organic pollutants, and the 2000 UN Chartagera Protocol on Biosafety establishing minimal rules for the international transport of GMOs.
Earth Liberation Front in contrast, is a non-hierarchical underground network of autonomous cells that formed in 1992 when a number of environmental advocates in Brighton, England, broke away from Earth First! after growing frustrated with the corporate environmental professionals and scientists who are indebted to states and industry and therefore take a reductionist, gradual and compromising approach to the environment. By embracing the biocentric philosophy Deep Ecology of respecting the ecological interconnection of all life and “the instrinsic right of all things” to live, the Earth Liberation Front believes that it can make no compromises in preserving all of the remaining wilderness and tries to prevent further expansion of people onto the “natural environment” and create vast areas of wilderness by closing down and destroying roads, developments, and dams by any means necessary. Their campaigns include old-growth forest protection, habitat protection, elimination of the damming of rivers, and the “re-wilding” of the East and West Coast states of the US, all of which embody very first world environmental priorities of conservation that oppose sort of even sustainable economic development. To achieve their goals, they engage in controversial tactic of monkeywrenching , which frequently brings short term media attention but often becomes sensationalized and distorted due to political interests. Due to their extreme ideology, tactics, and goals, while ELF has utterly failed to directly encourage states to adopt international law that would regulate environmental degradation in the long run, it has captured much more media attention than many more mainstream campaigns to not only the extremism of its actions, but also the perceived gravity of the long-term environmental crisis the world will eventually confront. 
Human rights groups also share widely different visions of what human rights means, making it a fragile issue. Amnesty International in efforts to fulfill the vision of international human rights documents tries to protect the human rights of individuals through individual appeals, education, and monitoring of abusive political and economic actors, focusing its campaigns on flagrant human rights abuses committed by states through incarceration of political prisoners, torture, and the death penalty. The Maoist Internationalist Movement, in contrast, which espouses the revolutionary communist ideology of Marxist-Leninism-Maoism, struggles to overthrow oppression of all gender, class, and national groups by socialist revolution of the global capitalist "imperialist" system through public protests, appeals, and education. Here two groups differ most in the political motives behind their discourse. While AI bases their mission on an internationally accepted resolution that all states must respect civil and political human rights no matter what their ideology or circumstances in relation to other states, the MIM by contrast understands human rights as economic and social rights inevitably under attack by the global capitalist system that exacerbates existing inequalities and the military which seeks to maintain this system of exploitation for the capitalist class. In the context of the post-Cold War world, when most believe that the ideology of Maoism-Leninism-Marxism embodied by democratic centralism has failed as a political-economic system to deliver prosperity and freedom, the MIM has had very few achievements or recognition in comparison to the 1978 Nobel prize-winning AI which does not explicitly challenge the hegemony of the global capitalist system and encourages states to simply respect the liberal and democratic rights of its citizens.
Amnesty International, established in 1961, is a movement that attempts to promote universal human rights around the world. It grounds its ideology firmly in the principles set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and related documents, providing a foundation for the legalization of human rights. Amnesty International has campaigns to free and ensure a fair and prompt trial for all political prisoners, and abolish the death penalty, torture and other cruel treatment of prisoners—all of which many citizens would expect their states to uphold. The tactics of AI involve public demonstrations, letter-writing, and human rights all of which operate within the existing legal systems of most wealthy, powerful and democratic states. Due to their ability to nest their ideology, campaigns and tactics within the existing global human rights meta-regime, AI has had remarkable success in encouraging states to adopt international law in its campaigns that helped not only lead to the release of hundreds a prisoner each year but also the creation of UN Resolution Against Torture in 1975, extradition of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and the adoption and ratification of the International Criminal Court respectively in 1998 and 2002.
Maoist Internationalist Movement is a group of international Maoist parties that fight against capitalist exploitation of the third world. It follows the revolutionary communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and claims to work to end oppression of all class, gender and national groups by seizing power through armed struggle and then establishing a system of worldwide democratic centralism. Their campaigns include achieving a global minimum wage, ending “sweatshops,” and maintaining solidarity with Filipinos, Palestinians, Iraqis and Puerto Ricans against “Amerikan” or “U$ imperialism.” Their tactics involve violent or nonviolent protests, divestment from institutions, and inciting peasant rebellions. They have had little success in their campaigns, often due to censorship of their literature, police repression, and lack of popular support for Chinese communism as an ideal for the world, which many of the more powerful, wealthy and democratic capitalist states and citizens see as a direct threat to their security.
Comparing Greenpeace, Earth Liberation Front, Amnesty International and the Maoist Internationalist Movement influence upon states to create and accept international human rights and environmental law, their relative achievements appear to be strongly determined by their issue area. States, within the constraints of how it will affect economic growth, are willing to implement environmental legislation and enforcement since many citizens believe that mitigating many global environmental problems is in their interest. Furthermore, epistemic communities of scientific experts that share a cognitive consensus provide an empirical basis for the necessity of dealing with such problems to ensure the survival of human life on the planet, a factual basis that is absent in the human rights area. States are much less likely to create and enforce international human rights legislation because often they believe that they must violate human rights to maintain their power and security. While many citizens of illiberal states that disrespect human rights endanger their lives by advocating humani rights, the interest in human rights among citizens in liberal-democratic states tends to focus upon those countries with which they have forged significant transnational ethnic networks. Consequently, while in encouraging states to internalize international law GP has had high success, AI and ELF limited success, and the MIM has had almost no success. The politicization of the issue area then is a significant factor in influencing how much a group will achieve.
As noted earlier though, while the issue area no doubt determines how much a campaign will accomplish, the ideology, tactics and goals of a group also highly influence how much they achieve. Future studies of transnational advocacy networks of principled non-state actors must then closely acknowledge these differences in assessing the effectiveness of their normative political actions. Domestic and international policy-makers have a strong interest in listening to more moderate transnational advoacy networks like GP and AI to lessen the rage that fuels more extremist groups like ELF and MIM and therefore endangers short-term state security.  More elaborate and thorough cross-group and cross-issue analyses will be necessary for policy-makers to fully appreciate the variety of transnational advocacy networks and their differential influence on state incorporation of international environmental and human rights law. This study can provide a basis for future research into these non-state actors that are likely to play increasingly important and controversial role in the future of world politics.

Global Governance of the Internet by ICANN and Its
Implications for the Future of Cyberspace

Legitimacy and Accountability of Global Internet Governance by ICANN
And
Its Implications For the Future of Cyberspace.
Jake Thomas
May 8, 2001
Political Science 138E: Governance of the E-conomy.
Professor John Zysman and John Cioffi, J.D.
GSI David Bach

 

 

 

 

 

 

            In the popular press, many cyber libertarians have proclaimed that cyberspace is a never-ending frontier and an ungovernable landscape due its highly decentralized and non-hierarchical nature. However, as Larry Lessig points out, such declarations are generally short-sighted and dangerous because behavior on the internet can be regulated by its fundamental architecture (Lessig, 5, 2000). One can broadly interpret one such architecture as the underlying centralized hierarchy built into the domain name system (DNS), which assigns readable top level domains (TLDs) to unreadable Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in an organized hierarchy. The need to enforce uniqueness, and prevent two people from attending or using the exact same domain name, requires a body to monitor or allocate naming. This entity, called ICANN, is formally a private nonprofit California-based corporation created in June 1998, by the US Department of Commerce (DoC) and an interagency task force headed by Presidential Senior Advisor Ira Magaziner with a "Statement of Policy on the Privatization of Internet Domain Name System," known by many as the DNS White Paper. The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) called for the creation of ICANN to take over the DNS and decide what new families of top level domain (TLD) names can be used, and how names and essential number will be assigned to websites and other Internet resources (Froomkin, 2000). While the US government privatized DNS management in order to quell international fears over the America's control of a critical element of global communication and commercial resource on which they foresaw their economies and societies becoming more dependent, ICANN's legitimacy, accountability and transparency has come increasingly under question in the past two years by the international community based on the fear that its policy decisions are a product of its ambiguous status as a non-profit private corporation influenced in secret by the U.S. government or guided to serve the interests of powerful private corporations (Froomkin, 2000). I argue that unless ICANN's policy making becomes more democratically responsive to the global demands of users concerned with how cyberspace is governed, ICANN's legitimacy, accountability, and transparency of its structure and processes will be continuously questioned and challenged because of public fears of the possibility that ICANN is crafting the architecture of the Internet to offer greater private freedoms to a few while enclosing the internet commons for the many.
While Andrew McLaughlin, ICANN's chief policy officer and chief financial officer claims that the purpose of the organization is only to set and coordinate technical standards as set out by the White Paper policies of privatization, Internet stability, increasing competition, and bottom-up coordination, the social and political implications of its particular decisions on how to set such standards has turned it into a policy making organization as well. Many are troubled by these decisions because they believe that ICANN lacks the accountability normally found in corporations and in nonprofits. Ordinary corporations have shareholders and competitors but ICANN is basically a monopoly with no shareholders. Many nonprofit organizations have members who can challenge misbehavior but ICANN has taken steps to ensure that its “members” have no such legal redress under California law. Furthermore, as Froomkim has noted, ICANN is a private corporation whose policies may be influenced by or dependent on the DoC directly or by review for funding, authority and existence, which would violate the Administration Procedures Act (APA), because ICANN has not been privatized at all and may serve U.S. government interests. And if ICANN is making policy decisions independently, then a transfer of DoC's policy making authority over the DNS violates the constitutional doctrine of prohibiting the delegation of public power to private groups (Froomkin, 2000).
ICANN is no longer constrained by the need to make money because it has now leveraged its control over the DNS into promises of contributions from the registrars of its lower domain names that have agreed to accept ICANN’s authority over them in exchange for the ability to sell registrations in .com, .org and .net. Only DoC currently has the power to hold ICANN accountable by canceling its contract, but DoC will not intervene as long ICANN is executing the instructions set out in the White Paper (Froomkin, 2000). According to Karl Auerbach, unlike most regulatory bodies, ICANN is a private corporation and is not obligated to undertake any of those troublesome constitutional due process burdens ordinarily imposed on governmental administrative bodies. (Auerbach, 2/14/01). Whether ICANN is influenced by the U.S. government or by private interests, its widely recognized role as a policy maker is illegal under the U.S. Constitution and law.
            However, pushing aside the fact that ICANN is illegal in the U.S.--which much of the international community might question as an appropriate criteria to judge the legality of global governance of the Internet--global citizenry can judge current ICANN's legitimacy simply based off what interests it serves, and whether this coincides with the interests of most internet users in the world. During its first two years, ICANN has made several decisions about its internal structure and procedures that give overwhelming weight to private corporate voice, such as its representation, privacy policies, intellectual property dispute resolutions, and decisions over whether to increase top level domains (Froomkin, 2000). With protests and criticism against ICANN's policies and its overall structure and operation from scholars, civil society groups, Internet experts, U.S. Congress, the European Union, Asian and American entrepreneurs, and even the Board's own members, the legitimacy, accountability, and transparency of ICANN is increasingly challenged.
            The most immediate concern many people have with ICANN is how well it represents the global internet community. The White and Green Papers issued by the DoC as instructions on how to run ICANN emphasized the role of internet users in providing input for the development of new policies, conceived of users as members joined in association, and foresaw direct board representation of users. According to Computer Professionals for Social Responsibilty (CPSR), currently 14 board members are appointed by corporate and technical councils while five new members are elected by a global At Large Membership, with one member representing the five major regions of the world (Africa/Middle East, Asia/Australia, Europe, North America, and Latin America) (CPSR, 7/5/00). While the 9 elected members once sat on the board, 18 of 19 directors recently voted for a proposed bylaws revision to reduce the user representation from 9 to 5 of 19 members (CPSR, 7/28/00). The White Paper proposed that 9 of the 19 members of the ICANN board would be selected with the participation of the general user community, "if feasible," which President Mike Roberts of ICANN believes would require protecting the "technical stability" of the internet by not leading the electorate, who knows nothing about the technical matters, to choose those who would be on the Board. Due to the "unfeasiablity" of this, ICANN decided that it had to downsize the elected membership in order that the "captured" directors would be outnumbered by the non-elected directors (Roberts, 2/14/01). ICANN, in its recent "clean sheet" study, has considered eliminating elected representatives altogether (ICANN, 1/26/01). Non-commercial groups including universities, consumer groups and political groups have limited representation in ICANN while first mover Internet businesses have much representation, constituting a majority that perpetuates their presence. Froomkin notes that instead of the self-appointed 9 original directors leaving office as they promised Congress and the public, 4 remained in office. Instead of allowing the 5 elected At Large members to participate in the selection of the new gTLDs, ICANN amended its by-laws to seat them at the close of the meeting, rather than at the start., limiting their influence. ICANN, because it sees its mission as global, meets four times a year on four different continents, making only interests wealthy enough to attend all the meetings able to achieve the continuity of participation required to influence ICANN's decisions in any sort of consistent manner (Froomkin, 2000.) Such informal and official protocol seem to work against the instructions set out in the White Paper and against democratic representation.
CPSR have expressed concerns that today's ICANN board are composed of directors who mostly have much more affiliation with the Internet supply industry, intellectual property advocates, and the R&D community and have little concern for the rights of Internet consumers, such as access, free speech, and privacy (CPSR, 7/28/00).Of the new elected board members, CPSR only deems Mueller-Maguhn (of Europe, the former Speaker of the Chaos Computer Club, an organization that promotes issues like privacy and freedom of information) and Karl Auerbach (of North America, co-founder of the Boston Working Group which played an important role in ICANN's creation and ensuring that there would be an At Large membership) as representative of civil society. Auerbach believes ICANN President Mike Roberts is full of hidden agendas, unstated definitiions, silent reservations and secret conditions. Mueller-Maguhn wants make ICANN's decisions and votes more open (McCullagh, 10/12/01).
However, how well the elected really represent the global Internet community is uncertain, as voter turnout and mobilization was uneven across regions, at its lowest in North America, where less than a third of registered voters actually voted, while Europe had 48% turn out and Asia/Pacific had 46% due to grassroots mobilization. (Associated Press, 10/11/00). Karl Auerbach claimed that the election of the fall of 1999 voters were denied the ability to register to vote, or if registered, were not given sufficient information and pass codes in order to cast their vote (Auerbach, 2/13/01). If true, such practices may further reduce ICANN's legitimacy and therefore democratic participation in the future.
In its internal operations, ICANN has received much public criticism both within and without. Paul Twomey (head of the U.S. Governmental Advisory Committee) and Christoper Wilkinson (the EU's lead official on ICANN) said recent bylaw amendments might invite government oversight of ICANN and end the privatization of ICANN. They suggested the majority of industry association representatives might result in a cartel. (CPSR, 8/8/00). Republican U.S. congressmen critics complain that ICANN was created in secret and its initial board members hand-picked by a process that had the blessing of the Clinton administration. Brian Cartmell of eNIC Inc. believes that the failure of the U.S. Congress to intervene in the management of the DNS will lead to a fracturing and destabalization of the DNS, increased regulation of the Internet by foreign sovereigns, and the further denigration of U.S. national, consumer, and business interests (Cartwell, 2/15/01). However, the most vociferous critic is Board Member Auerbach, who has testified in front of the Senate that ICANN kept its processes hidden, didn't justify its actions to anyone, didn't manage projects well, communicated badly to its staff and the public, delegated too much decision-making to staff, didn't reflect all its financial records in its annual statement, and was generally poorly run (Ward, 2/15/01). In his statement to the U.S. Senate, Auerbach concluded that ICANN has shown that governmental powers ought not to be delegated to private bodies unless it is obligated to have full public participation and accountability; that a public-benefit and tax-exempt corporation may be readily captured by those who think of the public as a body of consumers from whom a profit may be made; and that the role of the US DoC has shown that ICANN may be used as camouflage for national administrative agencies to expand their powers of global governance. He recommended that ICANN should return to focusing on technical coordination, leaving public policy decisions to institutions better designed to accommodate public policy debate (Auerbach, 2/14/01). Unless ICANN reforms its operations to become more democratic or reforms its organization and procedures to appease such critics, its past record will lead to further criticism.
Another controversial issue is ICANN's policy of requiring those who register a domain name to disclose their name, address, phone number, and email in a "Whois Database" so they can be contacted in the case of an intellectual property dispute (ICANN, 3/6/01). Many experts are worried that these plans will erode online privacy by making it easier for telemarketers and other interested entities to collect and pass along sensitive data about everyday Internet users. Fears are particularly high in Australia where customers are complaining that current practices have led to barrages of unsolicited messages as well as questionable business tactics by domain name renewal companies, and are asking for privacy protection from the Australian Competition and Commerce Commission (Wilson, 3/28/01). Recently, Mark Rotenberg and Andrew Shen of the Electronic Privacy Foundation wrote a letter to the U.S. Congress, in which they addressed the issue legally, "We believe that [such sales] violate[s] well established principles of U.S. law as well as international privacy standards, including privacy rules specifically developed to address concerns related to privacy in the context of domain name registration...In short, a First Amendment right to anonymous publication is currently invalidated by the procedures adopted by ICANN, which some have argued is a government actor, with respect to domain name registration and the Whois database"  (Rotenberg and Shen, 2/16/01). A month later, the domain registry giant Network Solutions, Inc. (a subsidiary of Verisign, which manages the popular TLDs .com, .org. and .net) admitted that it markets data about the owners of .com, .net and .org names. A NSI spokesperson confirmed that the corporation transfers information such as names, addresses and telephone numbers, because "[i]t is a way to earn revenue," although she claimed that the company did not disclose information about private individuals (Wilson, 3/28/01). Such transactions not only confirm the fears of privacy advocates, but also raise the question of whose interests is the Whois policy serving.
These revelations come after a special committee of ICANN recommended, among other things, that registrant data be made more readily available through standardized formatting. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has recently required registrants to offer their full name, postal address, email address, phone number, fax number and organization, and that if false data were given, the contract would be breached and registration canceled. WIPO argues such policies should supercede national policies concerning privacy rights (WIPO, 1/24/01). Other numerous witnesses from commercial interests argue in support of more massive Whois personal information databases, probably because they see it benefiting their companies. Faced with conflicting parties, ICANN has sided with WIPO and commercial interests in commercializing personal information.
Another policy of ICANN is its Uniform Dispute Resolution Panel (UDRP), which requires registrants in .com, org, or .net to agree to arbitration if any trademark holders feel aggrieved by a registration of a term similar to their trade mark or brand name, making registrants subject to a set of arbitration rules and procedures to resolve conflicts concerning intellectual property between domain names and trademarks. The UDRP is restricted to trademark cases and in order for it to apply 1) the domain name must be identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights, 2) the registrant must have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name, and 3) the registrant must have registered and used the domain name in "bad faith" (in order to damage the reputation of another). WIPO designed the UDRP with ICANN because it introduces a greater uniformity in domain name dispute resolution at the international level and therefore generates significant economies of scale, which they say benefits all parties, registration authorities and dispute resolution service providers. While the selection of the three people on the panel is not given in WIPO's document, it does stipulate that they can't belong to the same country as either party involve in the dispute (WIPO, 2/21/01). Many companies see this as a defense mechanism against cybersquatters, who will registrar domain names similar to a trademark and then try to gain a profit by selling it to that company. However, critics accuse ICANN of giving too much power to large corporate interests due to recent dispute resolution decisions where established domain names have been revoked on grounds of trademark infringement. CPSR and other groups argue that ICANN's rules are a form of free speech regulation through the provision of trademark protections in domain names that may exceed what is available under existing law (Civil Society Internet Project, 2/7/01).
Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University Law School argues that ICANN shouldn't have the role of making policy about trademarks for the world or protecting people from critical statements about specific corporations, such as those in recent cases (Cullen, 12/14/00). In contrast, ICANN candidate Harris Miller of the Information Technology Association of America says ICANN has a clearer set of objectives than its critics claim and in fact, is "doing a pretty good dogone job" at solving the dispute at very low cost (Donegan, 9/11/00). Others question the cosmopolitan value of the UDRP of reducing costs at the expense of legitimacy:  Kathryn Kleiman, former director of the Internet governance project for the Association for Computing Machinary (ACM) and one of the original authors of the UDRP, now says she believes these trademark arguments belong in "court," not in a supranational dispute panel.
However, since such disputes over internet intellectual property are typically global and involve clashes between countries with different systems for arbitrating conflict, the question of sovereignty is inevitably raised over which court to use. Last year, ICANN authorized four organizations—3 in the U.S. and 1 in Europe—to resolve disputes over international domain names. A China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) official stated: "If disputes arise, the cases must be fought overseas—this would require a great deal of physical and material effort. We believe that foreign institutions do not have a good understanding of the popularity level of Chinese trademarks or of China’s rules and regulations concerning trademark registration" (China Online, 10/10/00). The policy decisions of ICANN, like those of the World Trade Organization and other multilaterals, seem to inevitably lead to international political-economic tensions, as it sacrifices the sovereignty of national governments for a controversial form of transnational governance.
However, whatever way ICANN seeks to enforce intellectual property, it isn't likely to rely on U.S. government in the current neoliberal climate, as other countries might. While U.S. President Clinton signed The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act  in November of 1999, outlawing registration to intentionally gain a profit from another's trademark, damage another's reputation, or confuse or deceive consumers, a recent study issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office says that current laws provide sufficient protection to intellectual property holders against cybersquatting, and that Congress should not enact new legislation to further toughen these standards, leaving it to WIPO (MacMillan, 1/19/01). WIPO has exerted much influence over ICANN, given its commitment to enforce intellectual property, and ICANN has put up little protest. In fact, a recent article reported WIPO (not ICANN) as "unveiling new proposals to expand trademarks in domain names, specifically country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) (such as .uk for the United Kingdom, .fr for France, .cn for China and so on). Currently, global top-level domain names (gTLDs) like .com, .net, and .org are beholden to UDRP, but the the ccTLD names like .uk, .de, and .se can decide their own policy. 18 of the 80 codes have already signed up and now WIPO wants everyone else to because it argues the Internet is better off with one ubiquitous system. However, the Swedish, the British, and CENTR (Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries, representing two thirds of all European countries) argued that a single policy would unreasonably increase costs, impose an international regime where a national one would be more appropriate, and eliminate safeguards (WIPO, 1/20/01). Australia's au. Domain Name Authority may introduce its own arbitration system similar to UDRP (Sinclair, 3/19/01). The international repercussions of such national systems are so far uncertain.
A related controversial policy issue under the control of ICANN is its ability to expand the number of Top Level Domains (TLDs), which open up entirely new cyber-landscapes.. As the Internet's exponential growth has led to the politicalization of the DNS system as attractive domain names in popular TLDs began to become scarce and disputes over attractive names became increasingly intense, pressure mounted for the creation of new TLDs. In November, 2000 ICANN chose seven new domain names: .info, .biz, .name, .pro, .museum, .aero  and .co-op (ICANN, 11/00). Auerbach has criticized the organization for the way it ran the selection process and the companies it picked to administer the new domain names. Though easy to implement more new TLDs, this ran into intense counter pressure from intellectual property rights holders who already face problems with cybersquatters. Consequently ICANN rejected 35 other applications. The Board singled out protection for intellectual property rights as a consideration in selecting who would be awarded a new TLD (CPSR, 8/8/00).The domain names still must be ratified by the DoC.
However, officials from ICANN said in March 2001 at a public forum held in Melbourne, Australia, that it will take several more months to open all 7 new TLDs. At this point, only .biz and .info have opened up to registrants. Many groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, believe that ICANN is moving too slowly in creating new TLDs, and that these delays, combined with stringent intellectual property regimes that are being built into these new domains, will stifle Internet free speech, lead to less competition, and transform ICANN into an arbiter of free speech rights making content-based decisions about what domain names may exist (Taggart, 3/12/01)
According to Froomkin, ICANN introduced a low number of TLDs because the property rights holders community feared it might add risk to customer confusion and trademark dilution, though this would also increase supply and drive down prices. However, Micheal Froomkin has said that the number of TLDs that would be excessive for the internet is a very high number. Froomkin fears that the faction which controls ICANN will use the predictable speculative frenzy of cybersquatting as "evidence" that new gTLDs are a bad idea, and the number should be kept down in the future. During its choices of TLDs, Froomkin says ICANN favored established institutions and corporations, rather than those who wanted experience with a domain name (Froomkin, 2/21/01). However, Brian Cartwell of eNIC, the second largest registrar, said that no shortage of TLDs exists and most are vastly underutilitzed (Cartwell, 2/21/00).
People are also criticizing the high prices to both apply to establish new TLDs and to registrar new domain names. Critics were very upset when The Board set a non-refundable $50,000 fee for submission of an application to propose a new domain name, effectively excluding small and non-commercial groups from proposing new names who were not represented on the board and so could not voice their perspective. (CPSR. 7/28/00). ICANN has also considered raising registrar application fees to US $2500, and to charge registrar accreditation fees of $4000 for the first Top-Level Domain (such as .com) plus $500 for each additional TLD (such as .org or .net). It is unclear just how much of these costs will be passed on to individual end-users, or what impact these price hikes may have on developing countries (ICANN, 4/17/01). Such prices may further exclude non-business/commercial groups from registraring their own domain names, much less suggesting a possible new TLD, which Barry Steinhardt calls a "$50,000 lottery ticket." (Civil Society Internet Project, 2/7/01).
Mike Roberts of ICANN defended the high price by saying the process had to be self-funding; there simply was no other option, since "ICANN has no general source of funds." He also said it is highly unlikely that any individual or entity that could not afford the application fee would have the resources to be able to operate a successful and scalable TLD registry. He said it would have been impossible to accept any application which relied on the mere hope of obtaining funding if an application was accepted, and several of the applicants were not selected in the evaluation process at least in part for this reason. He said ICANN chose .biz and .info as alternatives to .com because the applicants seemed to have the necessary resources to effectively compete with .com after the latter's significant head start. In sum, ICANN's main reason for not introducing more TLDs was the risk of introducing "instability." (Roberts, 2/14/01)
However, critics still fail to see how such judgments are reflective of public opinion. In a recent letter to DoC Secretary Mineta, Barry Steinhardt, Associate Director of the ACLU, wrote "The combination of few artificial domain names, arbitrary rules and limits on domain name expansion present a continuing threat to freedom of expression online." The letter specifically cited ICANN's rejection of the ".union" proposal based on unfounded speculation that the international labor organizations that proposed this new top level domain name were somehow undemocratic. The procedures used by ICANN gave the proponents no opportunity to reply to this accusation (Steinhart, 1/16/01).
Nor is this just a story of free speech, but also a story about free communication. Charges and counter-charges continue to fly around efforts by several competing groups (including the China Internet Network Information Centre, Verisign and others) to allow domain names in languages other than English (Chinese, Japanese, etc.), thereby making the Web more accessible to non-English speakers. ICANN board member Amadeu Abril i Abril warned that multilingual designs will increase the chance that two domain names will be considered "confusingly similar," leading to more disputes, and questioned whether the infrastructure set up for the UDRP would be able to cope. John Klensin, chairman of the Internet Architecture Board decried these multi-lingual systems as overly "simplistic solutions" that he predicts will lead to further conflicts, in part because "[t]he business model for a registry sometimes does not require that the Internet work. Their needs are satisfied if they can simply register things and collect money for it." (Withers, 3/12/01).
ICANN asks people to wait for the emergence of a standard technology to translate Internet addresses and its appointing of central registries for the new multilingual domain names that are necessary to avoid muliple sites registering the same address and resulting in confusion for Internet surfers and Web-site owners. However, some such as Tan Tin Wee are creating his own network of registrars that log Internet addresses with the non-English equivalents of .com, .org. and .net and are frustrating ICANN by saying the domain names are up for grabs. This also angers Chinese Internet authorities who want to maintain control and have banned China-based address registrars from logging Chinese-character Web addresses. Singapore's S.H. Kyong, one of ICANN's board members and chairman of Singapore-based Multilingual Internet Names Consortium, says a multilingual DNS is necessary in order to include non-English countries, such as Korea, which doesn't speak much English but is 40% online and registers more domain names than any country outside Europe and the U.S. Wee, who tested the encoding of non-English equivalents of popular gTLDs, insists such bold action is needed to grab attention of the global Internet community and ICANN to serve the needs of those who may be left out of the Internet revolution (Wilhelm, 2/22/01).
In November the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) began trying to stake claims over Chinese encoded internet names by competing with the Chinese domain names of Verisign, which is the top Web registration company after having acquired Network Solutions Inc. in June of 2000. CNNIC officials accuse VeriSign of infringing on China's sovereignty and of introducing an inferior standard, and has begun selling its own version of Chinese registration with the ".cn" and Chinese letter extensions. Hong Kong's Chinese Domain Name Corporation, which handles CNNIC's overseas registration matters, says it makes no sense to have overseas bodies managing domain names (Chow, 12/14/00). The ability of other countries to design their own domain name managers may create competition for domain name management, spelling trouble for a global unified domain name system.
Such challenges also arise in the U.S. In March, 2001 United States based company, Walid, has apparently patented technology that allows people to access websites using non-English language domain names. It is unclear at this point whether Walid's patent would withstand a court challenge. IETF has been working on similar developments. ICANN and the world's country code operators agreed to wait until the IETF's development work is complete before supporting foreign-language domain names. (Marsan, 3/26/01). 
ICANN's simple typologizing of TLD forms into ccTLDs and gTLDs is also being challenged. Since the European Commission has proposed registry to run a ".eu" domain, European politicians have been patiently calling on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and others "to ensure that '.EU' is created as soon as possible." (EU Commission, 12/12/00; Targart, 3/8/01). The official domain name registry for the UK, Nominet, recently rejected an application from ScotNam for a second level domain name .scot to identify Scottish businesses, and ScotNam may seek assistance from ICANN (McAufille, 5/4/01). Apparently, both international and intranational regional bodies are not satisfied with only ccTLDs and gTLDs.
Also impatient with the slow implementation of only seven TLDs, a U.S. internet startup New.net plans to create its own 20 TLD names that would rely on the cooperation of individual Internet service providers or browser plug-ins that web surfers would download and install, going through New.net's site and therefore posing no threat to ICANN's global governance of the DNS. Vint Cerf said people have tried this before and that it only creates problems, opening up a gulf between browsers and ISPs equipped with the plug-in and those that aren't and creating problems for email or ISPs that aren't configured to recognize New.net. Meanwhile, control over the most popular old domain names remains in control of private registries (Whithers, 3/13/01)
The outsourcing of actual registration management of different domains to private companies by ICANN is also an area of controversey. Dr. John Postel, the founder of the DNS, said countries should have the discretion to handle domains in ways responsive to the culture of the country. However, ICANN now prohibits the ccDomain registrars from discriminating in assigning domains, favoring their own customers, or requiring the use of particular applications, protocols and patents (Sableman, 12/18/00). In October of 2000, ICANN tried to levy about $1.5 million per year from ccTLDs but many protested on grounds that they have no contract with ICANN and no obligation. Registries in some third world nations have complained that ICANN's levies were calculated arbitrarily, without notice or their participation, and that they discriminate against registries that choose to offer free domain names to their nationals (Froomkin, 2000). Mr. Louis Touton, ICANN's General Counsel, recently stated that foreign governments have no ownership interest in or rights to country code TLDs, but only to appoint a ccTLD private manager to operate it on behalf of the global internet community (Roberts, 2/14/01). Phillipine internet groups are infuriated that Joel Disini, the president of the registrar company for ".ph" domain names, is now marketing the ".ph" suffix as an all purpose phone domain for addresses ending in "ph" in order to make a profit (McFarland, 3/26/01). Such developments and WIPO's recent proposal to expand trademarks to ccTLD name systems are clearly a move toward their privitization by registrars. The inability of governments to manage their DNS raises the question of how representative of the internet community private ownership of the DNS will be.
If private registries are the owners of the domain names, then their status is important. As announced at the ICANN meeting this April in Melbourne, on May 10, VeriSign might divest its registrar business and become the registry operator in control of .com, .net. and .org until 2007, at which time, when it may still be the biggest registrary operator, it can seek renewal for all three. This agreement will limit VeriSign's obligations to follow ICANN's policies, and limits Verisigns fee contributions. When announced at the Melbourne ICANN Meeting, the responses from the floor were largely negative. Scot Austin notes that VeriSign accounts for 52% of .com, .org. and .net domains, and its near monopoly power threatens any business that wants to promote a unique brand on the Internet (Austin, 1/01). Vint Cerf, chair of ICANN, decided to defer the decision (Austin, 1/01). Registrar.com has begun registry outsourcing, said director of corporate communications Shonna Keogan, delegating management of the new .pro domain to RegistryPro, which says it will offer a pre-registration or "sunrise period" for trade mark holders (Marauess, 2/1/0). Many see such policies as private corporations using TLDs to translate their property rights from real space into cyberspace, and thereby avoid any competition for the territory.
            ICANN's policy choices concerning representation, privacy, the UDRP, and the choices about its expansion of TLDs have all sparked protest from critics who believe that ICANN should be more legitimate, accountable, and transparent. Clearly, its policy decisions have reflected private corporate interests of limiting democratic representation, commercializing private information about individuals, enforcing the intellectual property of trade marks as domain names, and limiting free speech and competition by only approving of only 7 TLDs. All such policies are not in the interests of individual internet users and could increasingly commercialize and enclose the Internet public domain for the benefits of a private corporate minority who will profit from ICANN's status as a non-profit private corporation susceptible to the influence of wealth interests. Larry Lessig, Yochai Benkler, and Pamela Samuelson have all warned against the dangers such developments, given that much user-driven innovation, free speech, and free flow of information and the consequent applications, communication, and choices it enables people to make are all precious dynamic values of the internet that movements toward privatization, intellectual property, and closed access would eliminate (Lessig, 2000; Benkler, 1999; Samuelson, 1996). Lessig has demonstrated that contrary to the rhetoric of the cyber-libertarians, the landscape of cyberspace is not inevitable or "natural" but will be determined by the choices of its architects, which will reflect and preserve certain values on the internet (Lessig, 218-220, 2000). Some people understand this, and will continually criticize and protest ICANN's organization and policies until it reforms to become more legitimate, accountable, and democratically representative. With changes in the organization's structures and procedures, ICANN representatives might fulfill the promises of the White Paper and represent the interests of most cyber-citizens, creating an internet with qualities of open access, free speech, and privacy, rather than qualities closed access, intellectual property, and commercialization. Otherwise, the internet's architecture will become increasingly enclosed to serve the interests of private corporations, rather than the global internet community.

 

Works Cited:

Associated Press, "ICANN Gets Five New Members," 10/11/00

Associated Press, "ICANN Complaints," 2/15/01.

Austin, Scot. "What Competition Among Registrars?," January, 2001, Palm Beach Daily Business Reader

Benkler, Yocahi. "Free As the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain," 74 New York University Law Review 354 (May 1999), pg 354-363, 394-412.

Cartmell, Brian R. "Testimony of Brian R. Cartmell, Chief Executive Officer of eNIC Corporation On The Governance of the Domain System by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications of the United States Senate Commerce Committee." 2/14/01.

China Online. "China Channel, CNNIC disagree over Chinese character international domain names." 10/10/00. China Online.

Chow, Chee-May, "The Battle for China, U.S., Chinese Companies Fight Over Domain Name Control," 12/4/00, Reuters.

Civil Society Internet Project, "Cyber Rights Groups Urge Congress To Protect Free Speech Rights in Determining Internet Domain Names," 2/7/01.

Computer Programmers For Social Responsiblity, "An Analysis of the ICANN-named Board Nominees," 8/8/00, Cyber Federalist 4.

Computer Programmers For Social Responsbility, "Register to Vote in ICANN Elections," 7/5/00, Cyber Federalist 1.

Computer Programmers For Social Responsiblity, "Why ICANN's Elections Matter," 7/28/00, Cyber Federalist 3.

Cullen, Drew. "WallmartCanada Goes On The Attack." 12/4/00, The Registrar.

Donegan, Michelle, "E-Commerce: Internet Governance-Internet elections face policy dispute." 9/11/00, Communications Week.

E-business and Law Bulletin. "Verio Barred From Using Registrar.com Data for Mass Marketing," Jan 2001, Andrews Publications Inc.

EU Commission, "EU Commision Proposes Registry To Run .Eu Domain." 12/12/00, EU Commission Reports.

Froomkin, Micheal, "ICANN Governance," Testimony to the U.S Senate, 2/14/01.

Froomkin, Micheal. "Wrong Turn In Cyberspace: Using ICANN To Route Around the APA and the Constitution. 10/17/00, Duke Law Journal.

ICANN, "Charter for the At Large Membership Study Committee," 1/22/01. http://www.icann.org/committees/at-large-study/charter-22jan01.htm

ICANN, "New TLD Program, 11/00, http://www.icann.org/tlds/).

ICANN, "Recommendations of the .com/.net./.org Whois Committee on Questions 1 and 2," 3/6/01. http://www.icann.org/committees/whois/committee-recommendations-06mar01.htm

ICANN, "Stockholm Meeting Topic: Registrar Application Fees and Annual Registrar Fixed Accredition Fees." 4/17/01. http://www.icann.org/stockholm/registrar-fee-topic.htm

MacMillan, Robert. "Congress Should Stay Out of Cybersquatting-Patent Office." 1/19/01, Newsbytes.

Lessig, Larry. "Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace." Basic Books, 2000.

Marauess, Kate. "ICANN turn.pro trademark bar supports new restricted domain on the Net." American Bar Assocation, February 2001.

Marsan, Carolyn Duffy. "Patent Flap Slows Multilingual Domain Name Plan." 3/26/01, Network World.

McCullagh, Declan. "ICANN Elects Iconoclasts." 10/12/01, Wired News.

McFarland, Sofia. "Plans to Sell Phillipines ".ph" suffix Irks Some Local Internet Pioneers." 3/2/01, WSJ.com.

Roberts, Mike. "Testimony of Mike Roberts Before the U.S. Senate," 2/14/01. http://www.icann.org/correspondence/roberts-testimony-14feb01.htm

Rotenberg, Mark and Andrew Shen. "Letter to Congressmen." 2/16/01, Electronic Privacy Foundation Center. http://www.epic.org/privacy/internet/

Sableman, Mark. "ICANN faces major challenge with country codes." 12/18/00. National Law Journal.

Samuelson, Pamela. "Intellectual Property Rights and the Global Information Economy," 39 Communications of the ACM, no. 1, pp. 23-28 (January, 1996).

Sinclair, Jenny. "Debate Rages About Future of Australian Net Names." 3/19/01, I.T.

Steinhart, Barry. "Letter to Secretary Norman Mineta." 1/16/01.

Taggart, Stewart. "ICANN Readies for Land Rush," 3/12/01.Wired.

Targart, Stewart. "ICANN: TLD Threat? What Threat?" 3/8/01. Wired.

Ward, Mark. "Net Governing Body Slammned From Within." 2/15/01 BBC.

Wilhelm, Kathy. "Tongue-Tied on The Net." 2/22/01 Far Eastern Economic Review.

WIPO, "ccTLDs Best Practices for the Prevention and Resolution of Intellectual Property," 2/20/01. http://ecommerce.wipo.int/domains/cctlds/bestpractices/index.html

WIPO, "Interim Report of the Second WIPO Internet Domain Name Process," 4/12/01. http://wipo2.wipo.int/process2/rfc/rfc3/index.html

Wilson, Eric. "Who's the Lord of Their Domain?" 3/28/01. I.T.

Withers, Stephen. "Warning issued on international domains." 3/12/01, ZDNet Australia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Though easy to implement new TLDs, this ran into intense counter pressure from intellectual property rights holders who already face problems with cybersquatters. Consequently ICANN only added 7 new TLDs, rejecting 35 other applications.

 

Businesses have come to view their Domain names as identifying their brand
ccTLDs sometimes have rules that make registration difficult or even next to impposible 40
DoC's control over the root is more in contract than in property 44Lanham Act requires commercial cuse before a court will find trademark infringement, it seems more than arguable that mere registration, without use, was legal. 60
*DoC can at any time terminate its relationship with ICANN and choose another body to preform all of ICANN's function, but this doesn't seem likely to happen as long as ICANN just continues to follow the instructiosn set out in the White Paper (Froomkin)
The first board members, selected for their lack of experience with the DNS wars, sought to impose fees on various participants in the DNS hierarchy and gutted the influence of non-croprate domain name registrants might have over the composition of subsequent boards 71
*NSI, when it needed to have its contract renewed with the U.S. government, used its intellectual property claim and threat of privatizing its domains, and its experience of managing the .com domain, as leverage to negotiate an extension of its contract on favorable terms, with the obligation that NSI allow other competing registrars to seell registrations that would be reflected in the DNS. 9/30.00, 81

*In 1999, ICANN negogiated unsecured laons on favorable interest rates from four large e-commerce companies with intersets in domain name policy, but ICANN's budget a year later hadn't paid and weren't included in its budget.
ICANN in October, 2000, tried to levy about $1.5 million per year from ccTLD but many protested on grounds that they have no contract with ICANN and no obligation. Registries in some third world nations have complained that ICANN's levies were calculated arbitrarily, without notice or their participation, and that they discriminate against registries that choose to offer free domain names to their nationals. 89

Cartwell,
No shortage of domains in general TLDS. 7
The failure of the U.S. Congress to intervene in the management of the DNS will lead to a fracturing and destabalization of the DNS, increased regulation of the Internet by foreign sovereigns, and the further denigration of U.S. national interests, consumers, and U.S. businesses.

Computer Programers For Social Responsibility of the Internet Democracy Project, concerned about the lack of representation of civil society in ICANN, recently asked the nominees to sign a "Civil Society Statement on ICANN Elections" written by individuals and organizations around the world. The guiding values, in short, are that 1) ICANN must be representative (Principle 4 of the White Paper), 2) ICANN must be transparent (Article III of Bylaws), 3) ICANN must use bottom-up processes (Article 3 of White Paper), 4) Intellectual property rights should not be privileged over other rights, 5) ICANN should strive at all times to minimize or avoid policy-making on non-technical topics, 6) the domain name space is a globally-shared public good with public and private functions, 7) Artificial scarcity in domain names and centralization in DNS administration should be avoided, 8) ICANN should respect privacy, and 9) Costs should be minimal and equitable (CivSoc of CPSR, 1-6)
  

Liberalization and Legitimization in German and Japanese Capitalism

 

          Jake Thomas
4/24/01
Political Science 138E: Varieties of Capitalism

Liberalization and Legitimization: Strategic Reform of German and Japanese Capitalism
Most sophisticated scholars of capitalism have by now recognized that different countries have developed different capitalist systems. Countries such as Germany and Japan have states that have historically formed systems that manage their labor-management and financial systems in very different ways from the more liberal British and American forms of capitalism. Recently though, as the growth of Japan and Germany has slowed, Japan and Germany have become more vulnerable to pressures by the European Union and the United States to liberalize. However, these capitalist systems are embedded in historically conditioned institutional context, which makes it difficult for the state to completely liberalize, lest they encounter resistance and possibly a backlash by both business and labor, and therefore a collapse of the system. Faced with this challenge, Germany and Japan have decided to liberalize less politicized aspects of their system, such as finance, rather than more politicized dimensions, such as labor. I argue that the state has made such choices in order to maintain the legitimacy of the capitalist system. Far from radically structurally adjusting their economy quickly and indiscriminately as many liberal economists would prescribe, Germany and Japan have tried to preserve their traditions of state-guided and -facilitated economic development through gradual, strategic liberalization.
To understand why liberalization has proceeded as it has in Germany and Japan, an understanding of how their capitalist systems function is necessary. As John Zysman observes, a country's institutions shape its political interests and conflicts (Zysman, 300). David Soskice refers to the German and Japanese forms of capitalism as coordinated market economies (CMEs), in contrast to liberal market economies (LMEs), because they tend to foster more long-term cooperative relationships between both firms and labor, firms and banks, and between different firms (Soskice, 304). Germany has less dense inter-firm networks than Japan, which has horizontally integrated industrial groups with supply and distribution chains called keiretsus that reciprocate business security and technological know-how in return for cost reduction, timely delivery, quality improvement and information feedback (Aoki, 29).  In Germany, firms, banks and unions tend to coordinate with each other on a sectoral level, while in Japan they coordinate inter-sectorally. In Germany the government facilitates private-sector coordination, while in Japan it has a more direct goal of organizing and guiding the private sector (Vogel, 1).
In Germany, unions and sectoral employers' associations equally negotiate collective bargains on wages and benefits on an industry-wide level, government guides technological standardization and diffusion throughout industry, and vocational training is through a dual (school and firm) vocational training system. In Japan unions are more company-based, standardized technology diffuses and develops within a group of companies, and training is on the company level (Vogel,  1). Linda Weiss notes that both Japan and Germany, in comparison to liberal economies, have a welfare state with strong redistributive capacities, though in Germany it is more present in law and in Japan it is more present in social norms (Weiss,152).  Both systems seem to moderate wage demands, increase employment security, and lead to less disputes than liberal economies.
Finally, both German and Japanese companies obtain long-term credit-based financing from their banks. Japanese firms obtains credit through government financial institutions and private banks, while the German government gives banks more freedom. Whereas Japanese banks exert influence more informally, in Germany banks monitor the firms' performance and rescue firms in crisis, and firms in return conduct a large stable share of borrowing from the main bank. Main banks influence their client firms through ownership stake, proxy votes, and direct representation on company boards (Vogel, 2).
                Despite the apparent coherence and strengths of these capitalist systems, which have yielded high productivity and efficiency in the past, they are vulnerable to economic pressures brought about by both the globalization of the world market and the U.S. government and international organizations such as the WTO and European Union which have pressured countries across the world to liberalize their economies. The increase in trade and capital flows between nations is slowly eroding the traditional structure of German and Japanese capitalism. Manufactures and financial institutions are less dependent on exclusive relationships with domestic business partners, pursuing opportunities in international markets. Foreign companies that come to domestic markets don't follow local norms, and domestic companies are exposed to new patterns of behavior as they move abroad. The increasing mobility of capital and corporate activity undermines national policy and encourages governments to reform their legislation in order to attract capital. Capital mobility affects labor relations too, because it means that firms can "exit" from long term relations with labor partners by shifting to foreign suppliers or moving production abroad, whereas labor lacks such an option. Other countries are closing the gap with the German and Japanese firms in manufacturing processes and quality control. Technological change increases the costs of their dualistic economic systems, in which a highly competitive export sector, mostly manufacturing, are combined with an uncompetitive sheltered sector, mostly in services. (Vogel, 6 ). Germany faces the daunting challenge of integration with the EU, which mandates market liberalization and regulatory harmonization and imposes austere fiscal policy requirements. In Japan, the weak leadership of Mori and the Liberal Democratic Party and their inability pull Japan out of financial crisis has led to their increasing unpopularity and the election of politicians promising to reduce spending and clean up public finances (The Economist, 1/13/01).   All this pressures Germany and Japan to liberalize their markets to sustain competitive growth in the global economy.
Political leaders and governments have consequently had to respond to slow economic growth and government budget constraints by promoting deregulation, privatization, and other reforms that will increase economic performance without increasing spending, yet they have done so with great caution. As Linda Weiss has shown, in the past Germany and Japan have tried to reform their system in the least politicized way, or "through the back door" methods that enable states to implement policies without the public knowing during the ideologically anti-state Cold War era (Weiss, 163).
                Likewise, today the Japanese and German governments, given their centrality to their economies, make careful state-led and negotiated decisions about what aspect of their capitalist systems to liberalize. Germany and Japan have formed tight relationships between firms, unions, banks, and interest groups based on trust and expectations, so each will be less likely to abandon these institutions. Therefore, a rationalistic neoliberal economic model cannot predict firms' behavior, because their decisions aren't based solely on cost-benefit analysis, but also institutional and social relations that constrains actors through mutual interdependence. However, the pressures to liberalize the economy are powerful exogenous shocks that force actors to re-adjust the current system (Vogel, 4). Obviously, firms will seek to adjust (use "voice") without abandoning their partners in the system. And if they do breech their social contracts (use "exit") they will first weigh efficiency gains against the possible costs of undermining these institutions. As Vogel concludes, Germany and Japan may not completely support liberal reform, and a compromise will be reached that will push it in this direction (Vogel, 5-6).
Both Germany and Japan try hard to reduce costs without laying off workers, because they don't want to lose their ability to mobilize their labor to increase productivity, recruit new workers, and project a positive image in the business community. German and Japanese firms also encounter substantial legal and regulatory barriers to laying off workers and the main bank may try to delay it by allowing firms to obtain more credit and reduce financial costs (Vogel, 7). However, transformations in labor-management relations differ between the countries. In explaining the differences, Zysman sees importance in the relative power of social groups in some countries as institutions and their organization reflect the political fights that established them: Japan, where labor is weak, has more state-led adjustment strategies, while in Germany, with a labor movement and social democratic party, support for negotiated change emerges (Zysman, 308).
In Germany, with the legitimacy of codetermined agreements with labor, companies were able to decrease labor costs by shortening work hours and offering early retirement. However, pressures to cut labor costs have rendered codetermination system ineffective as an increasing number of managers are not following such agreements by hiring more temporary workers, outsourcing work to other companies or defecting from the associations altogether (Vogel, 7). The New York Times recently reported that the German government was considering overhauling the system of codetermination in order to increase flexibility of the labor market (New York Times, 2/4/01). Not surprisingly, this has met much protest by German labor unions, making worker's rights a very politicized issue. And even German firms are reluctant to abandon codetermination and shift to pure flexible cost-based hiring because they may lose the cooperative relationships with workers and reduce firms' incentives to invest in workers. For this reason, some firms are more responsive to labor's needs than the government: When government allowed the reduction of sickpay allowances in 1996 from 100 to 90 of salary, unions became very upset, and so no firms made such changes (Vogel, 10). As Linda Weiss argues, such welfare standards increases social solidarity, industrial peace, and makes firms adaptable to positive change, which German states see as creating higher-quality, value-adding jobs and skills (Weiss, 152-154). Therefore, despite the above reforms, the German state has been relatively reluctant to implement radical liberal reform.
In Japan, corporations are cutting labor costs without firing workers by reducing new hires and offering early retirement, reducing management salaries and bonuses before cutting blue collar wages, and reducing workforces overseas more rapidly than at home. The firms create subsidiaries and affiliates that enable them to share the burden of excess workers through employment networks (Vogel, 8). As Aoki notes, in Japan layoffs can be socially disasterous, as a Japanese worker who is separated from the hierarchy of the firm mid-career will have low probability of finding other comparable jobs, so states have tried to prevent short term firing that could significantly devalue wages and status of many workers (Aoki, 17). Since Japanese labor-management relations maintain stability informally, liberalization doesn't become a very politicized issue until election time, when people oust the incumbent.
Due to the highly politicized and institutionally-normalized status of stable employment, Germany and Japan have responded to liberalization pressures by reforming their financial system. As German and Japanese firms try to reduce costs and maximize profits, they try to lower financing costs. In 1994, the German government reorganized the stock exchange, created a regulatory agency for securities, formed criminal penalties for insider trading and established a legal foundation for money market funds (Vogel, 11). Large German firms have decreased their reliance on loans by shifting to self-financing and equity-financing, disintermediating firm-main bank relationships with commercial banks, and making firms more dependent on foreign investors, while small and medium firms remain dependent on a close relationship with their main bank. However, most firms have not totally severed their long-term relationships with banks, and instead only demand lower costs and better service. Main banks still retain much influence over the corporations and will not sell off shares due to long-term relationships and regulatory constraints, nor abandon their role of bailing companies out. Banks now underwrite debt rather than provide loans to large corporations, allowing them to continue to meet their firm's financial needs. Furthermore, German companies have kept most of their shares in stable hands so they aren't dependent on the whim of international investors. (Vogel, 8). Such micro-economic activity has lessened the impact of the liberal macro-policies.
In Japan, the Big Bang reform in Japan has liberalized foreign exchange restrictions; opened up mutual funds, pension and trust markets; deregulated brokerage commissions; allowed banks, securities houses and insurance companies to enter each other's lines of business through holding companies; and delegated some of the Ministry of Finance's duties to new finance agency. The Ministry of Finance has recommended more consolidated reporting, accounting, and disclosure of balance sheets, but many firms have resisted such measures, fearing this might undermine long-term relations with firms and banks. Due to such worries, the ministry has implemented the restructuring process gradually. Large corporations are shifting from reliance on bank loans but they are also renegotiating their relationship with the banks rather than abandoning them. Japanese banks and their client firms have continued to renegotiate the terms of their relationship with prior consultation of their investment decisions and reciprocity of favors, lest they damage their long-term relationships with the ministry and other financial institutions. As the government allows banks to underwrite debt through subsidiaries, their favored clients increasingly pressure banks to offer terms, expertise, and financial instruments nearly comparable to the top securities firms. The larger banks are now trying to merge with securities houses, trust banks, long-term credit banks, and insurance companies, as the government won't let them offer equities. However, Vogel notes that while such tie-ups between domestic financial institutions and foreign banks have made headlines recently, financial authorities still view re-organization through existing inter-firm networks as the best mode of restructuring the sector (Vogel, 9). Here again, the government makes particular reforms which have an attenuated impact.
Yet many are concerned about the long-term impact of financial liberalization on Germany and Japanese capitalism. As Zysman argues, the structure of the financial system determines how international disturbances, such as liberalization, are translated into the domestic economy (Zysman, 298). David Soskice argues that if the different dimensions of the capitalist system are interdependent, pressures to liberalize the financial system may move Germany to a less coordinated market economy as it imposes short-term horizons on companies with high-risk taking, possibly leading to deregulated labor markets that discourage effective employee representation by labor unions; increased unilateral control by management, education and training systems that emphasize general education and discourage long-term vocational training; and highly competitive relations between firms, eliminating prospects for cooperation (Soskice, 110). German and Japanese firms fear that strict requirements of information disclosure won't enable them to hide profits and losses and may erode their long term relationship with their banks, leading to more short term investments. This explains why, when a new bill passed in November of 1997 introducing even greater financial liberalization measures in Germany, the German Economics Minister stressed that the legislation would not undermine the positive role of banks in providing capital to firms in crisis. Similarly, Aoki argues that the Japanese government is likely to be cautious in tampering with one element of the system for fear that this would negatively affect other parts (Aoki, 17). While such reforms have met less resistance than those with labor, banks have moderated demands for rapid reform because they recognized it could undermine their relationship with the ministry and break up their strong long-term working relationships with other financial institutions. Vogel argues that as German and Japanese financial institutions adjust to less domestic regulatory protection, more international regulatory standards and deeper ties with foreign institutions they are likely to become more disposed toward future financial reform. However, reforms such as those in finance must proceed gradually, so their overall impact on society won't harm society as much as the labor reforms (Vogel, 12-13).
                Faced with international pressures to liberalize, the German and Japanese governments have had to make very strategic decisions of which dimension of their system to loosen in order to preserve the state's legitimacy. While financial reform introduced political conflict and resistance, it was much less destabilizing than labor reform due to traditions of stable employment, and so the states chose to reform finance. In this respect, they followed John Zysman's caution that policies of economic management that propose to remove social protections must look at the political as well as technical ramifications (Zysman, 320). The experience of Germany and Japan demonstrates to other countries that the pace and procedure of their liberalization will have a critical influence on how successful it will be. Fast, unthoughtful, and total liberal reform recommended by neo-classical economists can endanger socially cherished institutions and norms upon which the proper functioning of the social system is dependent. With strategic reform, Germany and Japan have struggled to maintain legitimacy of their capitalist system, and therefore the stability of their societies.

Works Cited

Aoki, Masahiko and Robert Dore. The Japanese Firm: Sources of Competitive Strength.
Oxford University Press, 1994.

The Economist. 1/13/01, "The Air Goes Out" (74-75)

The New York Times. 2/4/01 "Germany Weighs Overhaul of 'Consensus Capitalism,'"
 
Soskice, David. "Divergent Production Regimes,"
From Kitschel, Herbert et al. Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism.
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
 
Vogel, Steven K. "The Reorganization of Organized Capitalism: How the German and Japanese Models Are Shaping Their Own Transformation." Draft chapter for Wolfgang Streeck and Kozo Yamamura, eds (forthcoming), Februrary 2000.

Weiss, Linda. The Myth of the Powerless State.
Cornell University Press, 1998.

Zysman, John. "Finance, Adjustment, and Political Crisis."
Governments, Markets, and Growth, Cornell University Press, 1983.

Diverging Transitions To Capitalism: Free Market Reform In Russia and China Compared

Sorry folks, this is another one I could not salvage from my computer, you will have to wait

Globalization and the Sustainability of Air Freight
Transportation

 

Research Project
Globalization
And
The Sustainability of Air-Freight Transport
Jake Thomas
December 14, 2001.
City Planning 119: Planning For Sustainability
Professor Stephen Wheeler

 

 

 

 

Globalization is a process that is very much dependent on the continual expansion of international air-freight transport, though the environmental sustainability of such expansion is questionable. In a globalizing economy that has allowed the free market to determine the flow of goods and services, distances between the initial points of production and the terminal point of consumption have greatly increased, requiring greater overseas air freight deliveries that have very high negative environmental costs. To the extent that local societies finds that these costs of these global networks of transport are unsustainable however, local planners and policy makers can alleviate these environmental costs and perhaps even decrease them with both local and global plans and polices that reduce the flow of international air freight. In this paper I will look at how policies can make the globalization of air freight transportation more sustainable by encouraging multilateral cooperation, providing economic incentives to firms to embrace sustainable business technologies and practices, internalizing the environmental costs into trade agreements, restructuring the spatial and logistical organization of production networks, reducing production and consumption, and providing possibilities for substitution.
Processes That Make Globalization Possible
To understand the importance of policies toward the global transport of air-freight, planners must comprehend why extensive webs of production and consumption have emerged. First, information technology has brought declining communication costs of data about economic demand and supply, increasing the velocity of economic exchanges across borders. The global diffusion of information technology has accelerated the velocity of money flows in the financial system, providing capital for production and consumption in economies across the world. Efforts by the GATT and WTO to promote trade liberalization have assisted this by lowering tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade that before had dampened international exchange. Average air transport prices have declined as the volume of traded materials increased, containerization and easier transfers between modes of transport have increased efficiency, and fuel oilprices have fallen much since the 1980s, not reflecting ecological costs of oil production and consumption (Sachs, 1-19).
Outsourcing and subcontracting of manufacturing by dominant firms to smaller firms or subsidiaries in other countries have formed networks of many firms in different countries producing different components that will all go into the assemblage of the finished product, increasing the overall circulation of materials in the production process and expanding the distances between production and consumption. The spread of just-in-time production systems that values minimum inventory and on-demand delivery favors the use of airline and road over rail and water freight (Transport Canada, 2000). The internet and its digital economy expands individualized at-home shopping and delivery, increasing the quantities of flows, and decreasing local production and consumption (Digital Futures Logistics, 2001). The recognition by consumers that particular products from other countries are both of higher quality and less expensive further increases the demand for long-distance economic exchanges.
Producers and consumers prefer the usage of airplanes to transport some freight because of the speed of delivery. Intense competition between producers under the dominant just-in-time production system of flexible accumulation pressures them all to adopt fast, direct, and flexible modes of delivery such as air and road to transport components between many producers and thereby maximize efficiency in production (Weaver. 1998). Speed of delivery is especially important with vegetables, seafood, and other foods with a short shelf life. Consumers, if they buy online, often see the time they wait for their purchase as a cost that firms try to minimize by ensuring a quick delivery. Consequently, air has become the dominant mode of international transport (Sachs, 17).
Gabel argues that liberalization within the transport sector itself will increase competition and lower the prices both for inputs relevant to the supply of transport services and charged by operators, and therefore lower transport costs. Liberalization within other formerly highly protected national sectors to transport intensive goods will also greatly expand trade. The source of trade gains for businesses in a given industry—comparative advantage—has resulted in geographical specialization of production, increasing average transport distances between different industries. Continual displacement of bulk freight deliveries by customized orders of lower sizes and higher value-to-weight ratios also has reduced the density of deliveries and increase the quantity of products transported. Gabel concludes that liberalization will probably increase transport output and may lead to a shift in the mode of transport to road and air (Gabel, 164, 169 and 170). Another econometric study by Roller predicts that elimination of non-tariff barriers will also likely increase aggregate trade volumes in all industries (CEPS  Mobility, 2000). The reduction of all these tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade eliminates restrictions on the spatial range of economic operations such as production and marketing. Both local and global policy makers and planners of air freight transport cannot afford to ignore how these factors of globalization have increased air-freight transport.
Evidence of Increased Use and Environmental Costs of Air Freight Transport
An overall examination of the evidence seems to vindicate this predicted causation between globalization and the increase in air-freight transport. The Center For European Policy Studies (CEPS) says that while European air-freight is less than road transport in absolute terms, it is growing much more rapidly in percentage terms (6% per annum, versus the 2-3% per annum for road freight) (CEPS, 2001). Worldwide, Wolfgang Sachs says air-freight was increasing 7-12% in the mid-1990s (Sachs, 18). According to Paul Weaver, most of the increases in freight volume are attributable to increases in the distance that goods are transported between points in the value added chain rather than to increases in the quantity of goods transported. Transport per capita also tends to increase (by volume and distance) as societies become more affluent. While transport intensity (measured per unit of GDP) is beginning to fall in the most affluent societies, the decrease is more than offset by increases in GDP per capita. Unfortunately, most developing countries assisted by Western advisers and consultants in international agencies and development banks have development strategies based on this unsustainable Western model that is transport intensive and fossil fuel dependent (Shachar, 1991).
The increase use of air-freight transport has many negative environmental costs. The burning of kerosene (airline fuel) emits carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide. Increased air transportation increases the global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, as 12% of global carbon dioxide is from aviation (European Federation For Transport and the Environment, 10). This increase in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere may lead to global warming, which can submerge and endanger poor coastal communities. The growth of the airline industry also increases toxins in the air, to which many people are particularly sensitive. The mixing of chemicals with rain may result in acid rain, which can heavily damage water and soil. Currently, in Europe air transport represents only 12% of all these emissions, but this will probably increase rapidly due to the high growth in air-freight transport (CEPS. 2000).
Large amounts of air-freight transport deplete limited non-renewable and renewable natural resources through the consumption of oil, electricity and water in transportation. The current dependence of such global transportation upon the continued politically unsustainable extraction and consumption of limited supplies of oil also reduces the future sustainability and security of the global economy. The containerization required to safely transport many products also uses up resources for packaging, which can be environmentally costly. The dependency upon such forms of transport for material livelihood can also endanger the economic security of local communities as they lose economic self-sufficiency in their reorientation of local resources toward production for global rather than local markets. Clearly, the benefits of a global economy are also accompanied with serious costs, which the fervor over globalization has often ignored.
Policies to Increase the Sustainability of Air Freight Transportation
Both national policy makers and local planners can make coordinated decisions that take into account the external costs of air-freight transport and create a more sustainable and secure global economy. First, a regional multilateral state orientation toward more sustainable transportation can motivate states to work cooperatively toward such goals. The European Union, for example, has agreed on the need to curb the growth in European road and air transport with policies suited to each state. Such regional bodies are often necessary before implementing environmental policy because the collective benefit of all countries following agreement is greater than the individual benefits to each country and can motivate them to take action.
Innovations in appropriate technology can increase the sustainability of air transport as well. Anthony Perl argues that such globalization will either lead to more sustainable transport either through demand overload as too much mobility forces an environmental crisis or through supply side innovation--cutting edge technology and management best practices (Perl, 2). For this reason, many industries are investing in more sustainable transport technologies and tighter logistic strategies that reduce the negative impact of air-freight transport. The development of such airliner technology necessary to meet high noise and emissions restrictions will require heavy investment in research and development from public and private sources (CEPS, 2000). Awards that reward industry for environmentally sustainable logistics can also encourage sustainable practices. Interchain in the UK, for example, has sponsored such an award that encourages reductions in packaging, research and development that results in reduced environmental impact, energy reduction techniques, and reduction in emissions (Logistics and Transport, 2001). Consumers of freight services can help by purchasing those designated with Best Environmental Performance status, which means they use green and environmentally sound aircraft. Increasing the load factor and plane size also can reduce air freight flights (European Federation For Transport and the Environment, 12). However, some critics such as Carceres and Richards say that simply improving the fuel efficiency of transport supply can induce additional transport demand (Carceres and Richards, 11).
            Even without technological innovations though, if local and national policy-makers encourage the reduction of air freight delivery by firms with economic incentives, then firms will embrace sustainable business practices, such as increasing the knowledge base of logistics, researching on the optimization of home based distribution, coordinating the locations of warehouses, sharing space in distribution facilities, and increasing the application of e-business to rail and sea shipping to increase efficiency (Digital Futures Logistics, 2001). Policies to encourage the localization of production and consumption can also reduce the need to transport so many materials by air and increase the security of local communities. In the spirit of Paul Hawken's restorative economics, states could use fiscal policy to internalize environmental costs (Hawken, 82-90). Policy makers could reform the tax structure to introduce value added taxes, eliminate tax and duty free sales at airports, and put a fuel tax on kerosene. All subsidies and tax benefits for aviation could be eliminated, reducing price distortions in the market. Others suggest a charge on calculated emissions in air space, a charge on fuel bunkered at airports, and a charge on passengers or freight moving at airports (Federation For Transportation and the Environment, 15). To reduce off-loading of warehousing and inventory costs, Zuckerman proposes the use of a tax based upon a combination of weight and distance measurements that would reduce reliance on distant suppliers and increase the attractiveness of local suppliers. A tax based upon weight and volume could address the packaging problem, discouraging manufacturers from inefficient, wasteful packaging (Zuckerman, p. 142). However, many taxes would have to be multilateral and involve harmonization of tax policies, so states share the tax burden (CEPS. 2001).
            Internalizing the environmental costs of international trade may be possible now that the WTO has accepted environmental protection as part of its agenda (Weaver). WTO can put pressures on states to harmonize differences in national fiscal policies such as subsidies and taxes within states that distort the economy from optimal pricing and resource allocation of transport and energy (Gabel, 1994). While many expect air-freight transport prices to fall within the world as a result of deregulation and the creation of the global market, Byrne anticipates freight prices could increase in the longer term if transport operators have to pay for environmental damage and bear the full costs of infrastructure use (Byrne, 1990). Policies will need to reconcile the wish for individual countries or blocs to act independently to tax resource use without jeopardizing the competitiveness of their own industry in either domestic markets (vis-à-vis imports) or in export markets (vis-à-vis competing exporters). Maintaining a level playing field for international competition depends upon taxing imports for entry and exempting exports from source taxes using rebates, based upon resource intensity. This will require independent, incremental action by rich countries and a reform of the GATT agreement (Weaver 1995).
            More fundamentally however, the simple voluntary or state-supported reduction in production or consumption can also greatly reduce the negative costs of air freight and many other costs. As Hermann Daly illustrates, a steady state economy that puts limits on physical economic growth and therefore the costs of consuming resources also reduces the costs of production externalities, as this reduces the through-put of resources (Daly, 149-157). Boge recommends labeling products with information about the transport intensity of different products so consumer can measure the negative costs of freight transport and make responsible decisions (Boge, 199). Authorities also need to take steps to ensure that information about aviation is available as the sector often wants to conceal this information--often biased in favor of the sector anyhow--from the public (European Federation For Transport and the Environment, 15).
Restructuring of the spatial organization of production is another way to reduce air freight transport. Weaver emphasizes the potential to reduce emissions by reducing the transport intensive components that embody products through a reform of the spatial division of labor. He suggests reducing the length of transport by in-sourcing the raw materials and components locally, serving local markets, simplifying complicated logistical relationships, and consolidating networks between contractors and subcontractors in the value added chain, thereby reducing the value added distance between components. The flexibility for such spatial shifting of sectors, even with fixed costs and market competition, is high in today's economy, but such eco-restructuring of the economy is only feasible if the geographical and logistics arrangements are also consistent with profit maximization motives. Policies that force the market to internalize the external social and environmental costs into environmental resource prices gradually, one sector at a time, are more politically feasible than targeting the entire economy.
Several possibilities for substitution also exist. Transport of intensive components (especially of food) will decrease with substitution and reliance on local and regional in-season produce. Telecommunications such as fax and email can also substitute for the unnecessary transport of much material such as newspapers and snail-mail by delivering the data through electronic media. Policies can encourage informational capital flows of direct foreign investment and local production of capital resources as a substitute to long-distance shipping and trade of material goods between regions, increasing the local level of competition in those non-standardized products, diversifying markets, and strengthening regional trading blocs. As Strutynski argues, by integrating regional economies, technology and markets among interactive sectors, policies can also reduce the number and spread of contractors and subcontractors in inter-firm supply networks that often exchange products over long distances (Strutynski, 1995, p. 39). Finally local planners can increase the sustainability of existing freight transport by shifting from the usage of air and road freight to water and rail freight. With a very ecologically sound transportation system, Europe has many programs in such as transition (European Federation For Transport and the Environment, 1-20). With such substitutions, local planner and policy makers can reduce their dependence on air-freight transport, and foster a more sustainable local and global economy.
Any realistic understanding and evaluation of globalization requires a critical examination of those processes upon which it is dependent. Globalization has increased both the complexity and scope of economic activity, leading to growth in consumer-producer and producer-producer transport of products. Such long-distance exchange of material often increases demands for the use of air transport, which both consumes limited environmental resources and produces negative externalities. Policy makers and planners must consider these costs in their decisions toward increased air-freight transport if globalization is to be sustainable. With alternative practices, policies, and technologies, local communities together can reduce excessive transport via air-freight and make a more sustainable interconnected world.

 

Works Cited

Boge, S., 1993,“The well-travelled yoghurt pot: Lessons for new freight transport policies and regional production.” World Transport Policy and Practice 1(1): 711.

Byrne, S., 1990, European Shippers Survey. London: G.E. Informations Systems

Carcares J. and D. Richards, 1995, “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Opportunities for the Freight Transportation Sector.” AgriTrade and Transport, David Suzuki Foundation.
http;//www.davidsuzuki.org/files/freight.pdf

Central European Policy Strategy (CEPS) Working Party, 2000, “Mobility In Europe: Forging a EU Sustainable Transport Policy, http://www.ceps.be/Pubs/2000/Pelkmans/mobility.htm

Daly, Herman E. 1973. "The Steady-State Economy: Toward a Political Economy of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral Growth." In Daly, Herman E. ed., Toward a Steady-State Economy. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Co.

Digital Futures Logistics, 2001, “Impacts of e-commerce on logistics and transport.” http://www.sustainit.org/news/news-digitalfutureslogistics.htm).

European Federation For Transport and the Environment, 1998, "Sustainable Avaiation: The Need For a European Enviornmental Aviation Charge." http://www.t-e.nu/Publications/1998%20pubs/T&E%2098-1.pdf

Gabel, H. L. 1994. “The environmental effects of trade in the transport sector,” in The Environmental Effects of Trade, pp. 153-170. Paris: OECD.

Hawken, Paul. 1993. "Pigou's Solution." From The Ecology of Commerce: A Decalration of Sustainability. New York: Harper Collins. Pages 75-90.

Logistics and Transports, 2001, “Annual Rewards.” (http://www.iolt.org.uk/news/press.htm).

Sector CERveillance, 2001, Mobility Sector, “Airlines: Flying Off To A Start,” http://www.tomorrow-web.com/mobility.html.

Perl, Anthony, “Can Globalization Contribute To Sustainable Transportation Policies? (http://www.ecoplan.org/vancouvr/sessions/rapp3a.htm).

Roller, L. H., and H. L Gabel 1993. “Trade liberalization, transportation, and the environment.” The Energy Journal 13 (3).

Sachs, Wolfgang. 2000, “Globalization and Sustainability.” http://www.boell.de/downloads/nachhaltigkeit/sachsglobal.pdf.

Sachar, A., 1991. “Notes On the Spatial Organization of Society and Sustainable Development.” Unpublished conference paper presented at the Abisko Workshop on Pragmatism and Effective Policy Making for Environment and Development, Abisko, Sweden, May.

Strutynski, P. 1995 “A new approach to reducing road freight transport.” World Transport Policy and Practice 1(1): 37-40.

Transport Canada, 2000, “Globalization and Sustainability, Session 3.” http://www.tc.gc.ca/en/millennium/TCMillenniumConference/summary_report/section6/session3.htm.

Weaver, Paul M. 1998, “The Restructuring of Transport, Logistics, Trade, and Industrial Space Use,” in Eco-restructuring: Implications For Sustainable Development. United Nations University. http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu24ee/uu24ee0s.thm#11.

Zuckerman, W., 1991. End of the Road. Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green.