There are mobs of lepers, blind people, the
maimed and the crippled. In addition to
whiffs of burning, a close approximation to whatever brimstone smells like, the
sharp stink of festering shit and stale urine hangs over these slums of gobbed
and spittled pavements and knotted, sooty, noisy, honking traffic, drought,
then flooding, disease then hopelessness.
Confronted
by a gruesome, thrusting, leprous stump, a nightmarishly eroded face, pleading,
streaming eyes, we shake off the beggar children clinging like tenacious burrs,
their filthy fingers in our pockets. The only sanctuary for meditation is a
stinking latrine, the noises outside coming from the traffic of whores and
soldiers and dogs fighting in the dusty street, and the grinding wheels of the
carts, piled high with swaying people and baggage and dirty bedrolls and
lolling children, pulled by desperate, frightened, wide-eyed, wild horses and donkeys
with toast-rack ribs, the flies swarming over the sores in their hides made by
the constant rubbing of the harness, all fleeing for their lives.
We
are having documentaries instead of dreams. Each night the same images: people
weeping, others bleeding, eruptions of cruelty and savagery, enduring
injustices and callousness, bewilderment, shame, sorrow and pointlessness.
A
man was arrested for riding a train without a ticket. He spent the next thirty years in jail
awaiting trial because his case papers had been misplaced.
There
are thousands of refugees pouring into the city in advance of the invading
army. Armed squatters are stealing other people’s homes. A new and more
malevolent breed of gunmen is emerging onto the streets. Hundreds of civilians
are dying in the bombing raids, more than half of them women and children who
are not, and can not be, criminals or terrorists or any other kind of enemy.
Reporters
speak from their hotel balconies, the smoke from the burning slums nicely
framed against the clear blue sky in the background.
“As
political alternatives have been eliminated,” they say, “the difficulty of
deciding has been compounded by the difficulty of living with what has already
been decided. The stagnation of the state has given rise to an alienated
politics which oppresses rather than liberates.”
Thus
the stage is set for an epic catastrophe. All the elements of farce and
tragedy, from hubris and delusion to final calamity are in place. Officers dine
at high table in their ambassador’s ruined residence, their red wine served by
liveried waiters, their table graced by attractive women.
A
glad-handing politician in the face of a full-scale legitimacy crisis passes
through a hostile crowd followed by a camera. People can smell his sweat.
“This
is your land. These are your houses, your meadows and gardens, your memories,”
he tells them. “The nation is glorious, its people steadfast.”
From
which direction will death explode in on him? Will it be a smiling,
handshaking, garlanded suicide bomber like with Rajiv? Chopped down by rifle
fire from her bodyguards, like Rajiv’s mom? A cool sniper, with or without a
conspiracy, as with JFK and King? Strung up in the marketplace like Najibula? Cut
down in a cold rain of hot angry lead like Mr. and Mrs. Ceausescu? Bazooka-ed
in exile in his Mercedes, like Somoza? Loneliness and pneumonia in a filthy,
freezing, concrete cell like Liu Shao Chi?
Whichever, there’s anticipation that unpredictably, one day the crowd
will turn like a pack of dogs.
The
photographs show severed heads and dismembered corpses, amid the rubble of
ruined villages, each a Golgotha, a To be continued...
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