Beggar mayhem: don't try this away from home

A friend and I stopped for a drink on a recent afternoon in one of the small streets of Siem Reap, Cambodia. We were exploring the town, where we had stopped on our way traveling overland from Bangkok to Phnom Penh. I have a story to do in Cambodia, and she is on holiday.

Incidentally, this is my third visit to Cambodia this year. I can't visit any more countries on this trip, or else I might need to get a new passport. I only have one or two pages left free for stamps, and I am thinking about Indonesia.

We were sitting at a table outside, sweating in the shade, when several boys selling postcards approached us. The postcard boys aren't so much different from beggars. They are basically street children who have evolved certain skill sets aimed at separating you from your money. To be fair, the photography on their postcards is quite nice, but I already am lugging around several packs of them, none of which I am likely to send.

I don't think my friend has had much experience with these kids. She engaged them in conversation, took a look at their postcards, and soon we were surrounded by more than a dozen of them, all clamoring for us to by their wares. But neither of us intended to buy anything.

It got worse in a hurry when she tired of talking to them and tried an experiment. She told them she was going to give them each 2,000 riel (50 cents, roughly) if they went away and didn't come back. Word spread quickly, and the group's number swelled. We were surrounded.

She handed a $20 bill to the restaurant server to break into ones. It would have been simpler if she had gotten it back in riel; she told the kids to pair off, handing one of each pair a dollar and telling them to go get it changed and to share it. It worked initially, because the kid with the dollar would sprint off with the other trailing him. But then kids started coming back, saying their buddy had fought them off and kept the whole dollar. Now they were displaying the bruises from the fights, and they wanted their own dollar.

God, what a madhouse. The narrow street was packed by now. Adult beggars started showing up. We had to get really tough with them before they finally left. This was probably my least satisfying Angkor ever.

At last, only two kids were left, a boy with lesions all over his neck and a girl who had shown up late to the party. I am pretty sure the boy had already received his 2,000 riel, but he wasn't belligerent or pushy, just stood with his postcards about five feet away and watched us. Like all of the kids, he was very small and thin.

This was the disturbing part. The girl seemed a little older than the boy, and spoke English better than most of her comrades. While most of the kids would banter and joke back and forth with us, trying for more money, she seemed to possess a fierce, almost evil sort of cleverness. Some of the things that came out of her mouth reminded me of Regan in The Exorcist, honestly.

Now that most of the kids were gone, my friend felt more comfortable talking to these two once again. She asked about the lesions on the boy's neck. He didn't speak English at all, it seemed. The girl said something in Khmer, and the boy hung his head. I know she wanted him to go away, because she wanted a dollar, and he was competition. Leaning against the side of my friend's wicker chair, the girl answered for the boy.

"He has HIV. He die," she said with a smirk.

I was so shocked. I don't know what she said to him in Khmer, but he looked so ashamed and so sad. My friend reprimanded the girl for being so mean, but she was unrepentant. What we should have done was probably to have given the boy another dollar and explain to the girl that it was for how mean she was being to him. But I didn't think of it until later. I just wanted to leave.

Riots in Bangkok

Today went without incident. Got some OK photos, nothing special. But tomorrow is supposed to be really crazy with demonstrations, maybe riots. I have a cool guy named Ta who volunteered to guide me through the town though. He is half Thai and half Japanese, and knows Bangkok inside and out. He was here for the last two or three series of riots/coups.

Tonight we had some beers and went out through the city on foot, scouting it out the night before all the action is supposed to happen. Place is full of both Red Shirts and riot cops, even late at night. The cops have leaned their plexiglass shields against the metal barricades, some are snoozing in metal chairs, but all are in their riot gear.

The Red Shirts are sleeping in a series of vacant lots. They've pitched tents and pavilions throughout the city, and most of them are sleeping in the open air on mats. Dispersed amongst them are kabob and liquor vendors. Some people are selling machetes, but I don't think they are necessarily targeting the Red Shirts; they look kind of touristy. I suspect the Red Shirts probably brought their own machetes if they are to be used.

People are estimating that between 100,000 and 1 million people have been bused in from the hinterlands to voice their displeasure. They have been given free food and transportation, so the whole thing, at least tonight, seemed to have a sort of festival atmosphere. Men hunkered on their haunches in the sand, watching their political leaders on projections screens as they railed on the current administration.

Ta says he can get me to the best vantage points for photos, and, again, he survived the last few series of riots. So he knows the streets inside and out, and knows the hiding places and ways to get to different places quickly; he clearly does from the way he took us through the town tonight.

Here is the link to a gallery I am working on filling with photos from the demonstrations. Let me know if you can see it.

Hurt Locker a pain in my ass

I watched Hurt Locker in Bangkok. I haven't read any reviews on it, so I don't know, and also don't care what anyone thinks about it.

Here's what I think.

First, the good: It had a lot of action.

Ok, now for the rest. It's the most blatant bit of pro-George W. Bush propaganda since FOX's 24. There should have been a disclaimer at the end, "This Program Bought and Paid for By the RNC." It doesn't even bother with policy apologetics. In Hurt Locker, the big picture doesn't matter, because it doesn't exist.

If you haven't seen the film, it has all the elements of your old-timey Western, complete with the natives, who range from obtuse to villainous, and the cowboys, who are, well, cowboys, sauntering through the dust-blown streets, cavalier in the face of IEDs (I always confuse that acronym with IUDs, never a good mistake to make), rescuing the innocents (or trying) and killing the bad guys.

I don't know the exact mix of Thais to ex-pats in the theater in Bangkok, but I think it was at least 1/3 to 1/2 expats, and there's no way of knowing how many were Americans. I don't run into too many Americans in South Asia. But it was disturbing to hear everyone in the audience cheer whenever an Iraqi died. There was no parsing of which side he was on. In this film, the only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi.

The hero of the story is William James, played by Jeremy Renner, who for this role has been nominated for an Oscar. The acting isn't terrible, given the one-dimensional roles each character is given. James at the onset takes the position of team leader of a bomb-removal squad in Iraq and immediately starts outcowboying the cowboys, refusing to communicate with the rest of his team and defying death and common sense to defuse what is said in the film to be a record-breaking 837 improvised explosive devices.

And so it goes, with the evil Iraqis killing innocent civilians, even at one point gutting a young boy and filling his abdomen with explosives, presumably to hit the heroic James in a rare vulnerable spot: he had befriended the boy in the process of purchasing mass quantities of bootleg DVDs from him (I assumed they were pornographic, but now that I think of it, it may not explicitly say this).

At the end of the film, James returns to the States to his girlfriend and infant son, whom he admonishes in a touching soliloquy,

"You love Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don't ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older... some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you'll realize it's just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And then you forget the few things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it's only one or two things. With me, I think it's one."

And, of course, the one thing James loves is revealed at the close, as he swaggers out into the setting sun to defuse yet another bomb at the start of another tour for which he had volunteered. It was implied his girlfriend might leave him if he returned to Iraq, so it makes him all the more heroic.

Give it some goddamn context! I cannot believe this film is on the short list for an Academy Award! You can't tell the story of one man in a war without giving the context of how America decided to start the war itself. It is immoral to portray Iraqis as treacherous, murderous snakes in the grass without making any effort to explain why they are fighting an occupying force.

What is sickeningly ironic is that the film itself, and its director, Kathryn Bigelow, is being portrayed as an underdog as they go up against Avatar, the film of Bigelow's ex-husband, James Cameron, a movie I may or may not go to see.

In case you missed my point, it is ironic that this, a film portraying the world's most powerful country, invading another, much less powerful country, could be seen as an underdog in any sense. An underdog is a contender that has some merit but has been underrated. Hurt Locker is merely a shitty movie.

How the movie was received in Thailand is irrelevant. But I can just imagine how it played in the States, with all of the chest-thumping 'support the troops (but forget the (false) premise of the war)' folks latching onto it. It's really discouraging to think that after what, nearly 10 years in Iraq, someone can produce a film that is such blatant cheerleading for one of the biggest bait-and-switch jobs of the century and get so much critical acclaim.

After this, I had better not to hear anything more about the 'liberal media' or 'liberal Hollywood.' It's just too much.

Thailand sidetrack

Really, if I never see the inside of another South Asian emergency room, I wouldn't complain. I don't need to make this a habit.

I am on pain meds right now for some gashes in my wrist, so I apologize if this gets too rambly, etc.

My Thailand visa was set to expire, so I had to leave the country and return. The Red Shirts, supporters of ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, decided it would somehow give them the moral high ground if they postponed their big demonstrations until March 12, rather than Feb. 26, the date of a court ruling that enabled the government to seize $2.2 billion of Shinawatra's money. The Yellow Shirts, their bitter rivals, shut down Bangkok's airport for a month a year or so ago and pissed off a lot of people, so the Red Shirts are trying to voice their displeasure in a circumspect manner.

Regardless, if I am to be in Bangkok for the action on March 12, I have to renew my visa by leaving the country and returning. I thought about Cambodia, but my flight leaves out of there, so that would mean I'd have visited the same country four times in a few months. I hadn't been to Malaysia yet, so I got on a train south.

It was a full moon and a lovely sunset, so I went to the rear of the train to grab some food and to photograph the landscape as we rumbled along. You can sit on the steps in between cars or on the platform of the caboose in the night air.

On my way back, however, I again ran into this aging guy from Massachusetts who earlier had been snuggling with his Thai boy-toy at one table, then came over to mine and tried to convert me to Christianity as I ate. He's also a Republican, he said. Guess he's sort of an elderly, traveling Ted Haggard. Well, I had already made my escape from his rants earlier, but he collared me as I went past and told me he thought that they were about to decouple the rear section of the train and send it off to some Burmese border town while the front end, my end, went on to Kuala Lumpur. He invited me to come along to Burma. It's much cheaper there, he said, and closer. Beer is cheap there. Sex, also. Although he said he had no personal knowledge of this. Anyway, I declined his gracious offer and made my way toward my own car.

Well, the guy was plenty kooky, but it wasn't the time to second-guess. I was heading up to my car anyway, but I did not really want to end up in Bumfuq, Burma, at least not when I hadn't had a chance to research the place. I skipped over all the people sleeping on the floor in the aisles in the cheaper cars, but came to a sudden halt at the start of the air-conditioned ones. I was standing between cars, outdoors, when I encountered a train car that some asshole had locked. Why would you do this? I don't know. I was basically locked out of the train, or at least my portion of it.

I couldn't open the door, couldn't pick the lock with my State of Maine drivers license, so I just started pounding on it, trying to get someone's attention. On about the third pound, the train lurched to the right, and I lurched to the left, and my fist landed on the plate glass, rather than the door.

For an instant, I stared through the shattering glass at my hand, inside the train car while I stood outside. Then it was just blood, blood, blood and flying shards. At first, I stood there, stunned at how much blood was coming out, and how quickly. Then I turned and went back into the car behind me. One Thai man was snoozing in the front row, but woke up in a hurry when he saw me bleeding all over the floor. He gave me a handkerchief or some sort of white cloth, and I fashioned it into a tourniquet around my wrist. But it wouldn't stop bleeding. I remember thinking I was going to die. There was just too much blood. And then I wondered why I hadn't fainted. I am the biggest candyass when it comes to blood. I actually fainted during an interview in which a cardiac surgeon was merely DESCRIBING a heart surgery to me.

They stopped the train in some little backwater Thai town called Mamrit or something. Somebody at the station fired up his little moped and I got on the back, holding my wrist above my head. I was getting pretty woozy at this point, and was afraid I'd fall off the back. But we made it there, and the nurses stitched me up.

I had this feeling of elation in the emergency room. At first, I didn't want to let go of the tourniquet for the nurse, but I did and the bleeding stopped once she stitched it (without local anesthesia). I really thought I was going to die, and I had accepted it on the train. I just couldn't believe it. When no one speaks English, I feel like it's OK to say whatever I am thinking sometimes. I just kept saying, I'm alive, I'm alive. I was pretty happy about it. But maybe that was just the big shot of morphine she'd just put in my shoulder.

However, there was one moment on the train, when I thought, you know, if this is how and when I have to go, it's not the worst situation. It didn't even really hurt, initially. It must have done some nerve damage, because the side of my right hand is numb, but I can feel a little bit, and, in my experience, nerves grow back if you can feel a little bit. I think they gave me nine or 10 stitches. I'm not sure. I'm a little nervous about taking off this bandage.

The great thing was how sweet the Thai people were in this little village. One girl, apparently the only one who spoke English, came to my guesthouse on a moped to translate. She went to the station and got me train times and offered to give me a ride there. I ended up taking a bus. Then this guy who was the brother of the woman who owned the guesthouse bought me breakfast, took me to buy some new pants (Dumbass: I took only one pair of pants, and after all the bleeding, they basically became one giant scab that could stand on its own), and then to the bus station. I really like Thai people.