What Weapons will be used at the Battle of Armageddon?

In my mother's garden in the state of Virginia is a Rose arbor. The arbor is framed by wooden four by fours and was constructed by the carpenter. Helping the rose to grow gracefully through the arbor is not the task of the carpenter, it is the task of the gardener. There are different sorts of gardeners. Some prune with steel blades, to shape the plant, and make the blooms fewer but more vigorous—others use chemical sprays and pellets, to fight "infestations." But black spot and aphids are part of a natural system which chemicals may throw further out of balance. Aphids may also be fought by restoring the balance—and one way to do that is to make sure that there are predators for the aphids, instead of using chemical compounds which destroy the entire predator-prey interaction. In the wake of the Great War, Radclyffe Hall wrote "the pruning knife has been laid to the tree and the urge to grow throbs through its mutilated branches."

The Hindus saw humanity as made up of various castes. Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, was a member of the brahman, or priestly caste. Many priests work their rituals undisturbed, in the sacrosanct areas of their temples, the way scientists work in their laboratories. Physicists like Einstein, and chemists like Louis Feiser draw on similar parts of the brain as a brahman priest. There are other castes: for instance Vaisyas, businessmen, who make money from cafes and hotels. And there are those who imagine an ideal society composed of only these two castes: who believe having the right attitude towards others can solve everything: an attitude which could be called the doctrine of justification by sentiment. But the wisdom of the sub-continent recognized another caste, which people who revere the brahman often disparage—the Ksatriyas, the warriors.

Warriors can do many things. Here in China the army was sent to Sichuan in the wake of the earthquake, to aid in clean-up and rescue operations. I saw TV footage of men wearing the uniform of the People's Liberation Army climbing through a rockslide to remove obstructions the tremor left in its wake. Their training for fighting an enemy in battle prepared them to respond to a hostile act by the Earth's crust. Warriors have existed in almost all cultures, and historically have met their enemies face to face, with wooden taiahas, or blades of bronze or steel. The twentieth century saw a technological pandora's box of new weapons: machine guns, bomber planes, atomic missles, depleted uranium, and napalm. These were designed in a laboratory, through the priestly rituals of science. And many were used by people who, like Skyhawk pilots, in the normal scheme of things, would never see their enemies face-to-face. These weapons made no attempt to account for combat status, killing not just non-combatant humans, but the subjects of the animal and plant kingdoms as well.

It is simplistic to say killing is disorder. Death is a part of nature, and a part of the cycle of life. Wolves eat caribou for instance. But the number of caribou they kill is usually limited by the hunger of their stomach. When the men in black helicopters show up to kill the wolves, the death they inflict is not limited by any natural appetite. And the men in black helicopters represent a group with its own plans for the lives of the caribou. A shepherd and a wolf both kill and eat sheep. But to say a shepherd's knife is the moral equivalent of a wolf's tooth is an insult to the perspective of both the wolf and the shepherd. The shepherd's killing of an individual sheep is part of a system which ideally insures the long-term health of the flock. Pruning an individual branch from the rose can redirect the vitality of the bush as a wholeAnd because it has different objectives, a wolf may notice things about a flock which a shepherd would never realize. Some analysis concentrates on numbers: during the Vietnam conflict, both the Pentagon and its domestic enemies focused on body counts: numbers of dead. But sometimes things are most effectively described not with numbers, but patterns. Sheep may die from disease, or because chemicals have poisoned the well. They may be killed by a wolf, or to feed a traveller enjoying the shepherd's hospitality. All these deaths resonate differently within the community—or rather resonate differently within the different communities concerned. Some interpreters find one type of death most offensive, others recoil from another.

I have just finished reading John Keegan's book the Face of Battle. He talks about how machine-guns, like so many twentieth-century machines, have rendered human beings clumsy. Soldiers are no longer told to conserve their lead, but to use as much of it as possible. Writing in the 1970s, he noted that only the British army operating in Northern Ireland still valued marksmanship. The presence of civilians in the religious conflict in that province of the former British empire forced the soldiers to regulate their weapons with human consciousness, rather than using their gun as automatically as a machine drill. Fighting in that environment also forced their captains to think harder about rules of engagement. Teaching a course about the English speaking world, I had to do some research on the plantation of Ireland. Most people describe the conflict as being Catholic versus Protestant. But the other side in the Northern Ireland conflict was also a particular version of the worldview which was brought into being by the man who made the Christian holy book part of German literature. Taking advantage of the space opened up by Martin Luther, John Knox and his followers from still-tribal Scotland did not content themselves with studying their scriptures, they remade the culture of those rugged mountains, and smashed the images of the faith worshipped in those mountains previously.

For people like John Knox, whose words are backed by enforcers, a word triggers a system which makes certain actions impossible, just as mass could no longer be celebrated where his followers had desecrated the altars. Orwell also compared words to weapons, talking about people responding in conversation as automatically as a machine gun spraying bullets. And there are those who attempt to use their words like napalm, to defoliate entire fields of human experience. Phrases like sneers about military intelligence. Ksatriyas in military uniforms may be able to offer advice about rechanneling the forces of iconoclasm. Iconoclasm destroys life and community for potentially limitless ideological goals rather than quantifiable personal advantage like natural hunger. There are many acts which fracture good order, and many voices needed to channel the awakening consciousness onto a fruitful path.

It is better for the rest of my mother's garden, especially the insect kingdom, if the gardener uses steel than if he uses chemical sprays. It will be better for the rest of Creation if the battle of armageddon is fought with assault rifles, than if it is fought with atom bombs or napalm.

Image: the Buddhas of Bamyan, dynamited by the students

Postcard from the Mystic

I follow my old landlady to the edge of the culvert. She points down to the murky water below. "Several years ago this was a dump. Plastic bags and shopping submerged in a water covered with oil slicks. Then the city came and tried to clean it up. They pumped the water out, planted reeds along the stream and put up a fence to keep people out. It looked really good for a few months. Now after all that work, the water is as dark and murky as it was before."


When I lived at her house, I used to come jogging through the Mystic River Reservation—seeing the reeds, the vista of the river, the graffiti carved into the wooden observation tower, the cracks on the asphalt path. But, as we walk through the park she points out elements and changes which I, at a jogger's pace, never had time or reason to notice. Just as at a jogger's pace I notice things about the city which are invisible to driver of an automobile. At a curve on the asphalt path, we follow a trace where the grass has been worn down—into the brush where we come upon the thickets of blackberries, the objective which was brought her, as it has for years, to walk slowly along the edge of the Mystic River, watching how its banks have changed through the years.


I was a transportation planner, I designed traffic intersections based on a bunch of numbers from a single days observation, and occasionally got shouted at by people who had to wait at the stop light every day. And it is sad to think that the professionals brought in to reclaim the stream in a manic burst, may not understand the factors affecting it. And of course so much of our system is designed from the perspective of the automobile, not the bicyclist or the walker, let alone the blackberry forager.


This is a good year for blackberries, and we easily fill our containers—discussing, as we have before, whether money is a fundamentally corrosive influence on society, and parting ways on the issue of whether it is a compliment to say of some one that they can run a business at a profit.


Years ago in Los Angeles, I was walking with a friend from college who works for the Long Beach Fire Department. As we walk through the city, he points out the roofs, what they imply for the way fire will spread through a building. He talks about how he was trained to analyze them, through books, and instruction, and the way his colleagues sometimes hide on the roof of the fire station, pouring water on recruits who haven't learned to Always look up, before entering a building. Later, at home, he shows me snapshots from fighting a wildfire. All of these objectives: fighting fires, picking blackberries, driving motorcars shape what we do notice about our surroundings, and what we should notice about them. A deer hunter walking through the woods will be attuned to different elements among the tree bark, or the trail floor than a forester or a fire fighter


In 1984 Winston Smith encounters an old workingman in a bar, and attempts to find out the definitive reality the propaganda people like himself are employed to write. "Has the Revolution made your life better...yes or no?" The old man, quite sensibly for some one talking to a stranger in a police state, never gives a straight answer to any of his questions—though he does offer an unsolicited opinion on the difficulties of drinking litres instead of pints (and then forgoes his principles for the sake of free beer).


Years ago I stayed with a family in a shantytown in Managua: plastic sheeting for walls, but lots of stuffed animals, and a TV where they could watch the wrestling. The father had fought for the Sandinista Government against US proxies. But now his comment was "You know, Somoza, the Sandinistas, Aleman—the price of tomatoes just keeps going up." As some one who grew up with a reverence for the Sandinistas and their revolution, it was a disheartening comment to hear.


"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." Maybe there is no objective perspective, no universally apparent conditions of life, just the comments about the metric system we can make based on years of working at our trade, or picking blackberries along the Mystic.

Reflections on the Counter-Revolution in China

Having lived in both Guatemala and China one thing which interests me is comparing the prices. The Guatemalan Quetzal fluctuates between 7 and 8 to the dollar, which is also the range of the Renminbi. So the value of the currency internationally is somewhat similar. A Quetzal (Q) and the Renminbi are very close to equivalent value. On the other wages are somewhat different. Median income in Canton province is much higher than Guatemala. But base wages for a security guard in Guatemala city are about 2,000 Quetzals, whereas baseline wages for say a housecleaner are 1,000 RMB. I don't know the situation for equal types of employment.


What is interesting in light of this is how much less expensive things are here than in Guatemala. Taxis here start at 7 RMB. In Guatemala City a taxi ride is minimum 3 times as much 25Q, 40 after dark. You can eat a meal with variety off of stainless steel plates in a restaurant for 5 RMB, and off styrofoam in the street for 1-2. A restaurant meal in Guatemala starts at twice as much (10-12 Q) and variety, cleanliness, and the attitude of the staff are generally lower. The restaurant I eat at in China offers a buffet including vegetables, mushrooms, fish, chicken, for 5RMB ($0.75) In Guatemala City 10Q restaurants have very little variety, no vegetables, and handmade tortillas are the only culinary artistry. Chinese street food includes dumplings, porridge, stir-fried tofu, sugar cane often sold from the back of three-wheeled bicycles owned by the vendors. And you can eat fairly well for 1-4 RMB. You can eat for 1-4 Q in some Guatemalan villages, but in Guatemala City street food is usually large bulky taco stands where people work on contract and most of the revenue goes to the company which provides the equipment. Consequently prices are higher (10Q), but less of that money ends up in the hand of the person working. Even fried corn, which in Guatemala City costs 3-5 Q is only 1 RMB here. Again prices are lower in Guatemalan villages, but Foshan, and Guatemala City both have about 2 million people, so it is interesting how much more pleasant and affordable things like taxis, restaurants, and beer are here.


Unlike Guatemala I don't speak the language, so with a lot of people here my interaction consists mainly of smiles and laughter. So I don't know much about the economics: rent, supplies, take-home. But the street vendors generally seem happier than those in Guatemala city—and the vibe and friendliness seem to suggest an town much smaller and more intimate.


Another noticeable fact is the absence of guns. In Guatemala City many stores have an armed security guard, and police patrols are a common sight in markets, or on city buses. Buses and taxis are often held up in Guatemala City. My relatives introduced me to a couple who run a successful Chinese restaurant in Guatemala City. They have two armed guards patrolling their parking lot, and usually are driven around by a chauffeur with a gun. My cousin here in China has over the past 8 years built a successful steel business and just finished building a modern 4 story house with antique furniture and flat screen televisions in each room. It isn't as nice as the house in Guatemala City, but he drives by himself and never uses a bodyguard. A student of mine also commented on the lack of guns, saying that while youth gangs exist here, they do their fighting with knives, not guns—which greatly reduces the problem of innocent bystanders dying in drive-by shootings.


Nightlife is variable. Guatemala has a big distillery and beers in restaurants start at 12 Q, though sometimes you may have to pay up to 40Q. Here you can drink on the street for 3 RMB. When I go out with my cousin he may drop 1000s of Renminbi for a fancy karaoke nightclub full of elegantly dressed wait staff and fancy decoration—or I may sit on plastic stools on the sidewalk with my friends and spend 10 RMB. There are lots of people with jobs in fancy nightclubs which would not exist without the disposable income of people like my cousin. In old China probably less than 1% of the people could enjoy the aristocratic pleasures of Chinese cooking in elegant surroundings. In the current economic system perhaps 5-10% of people can enjoy aristocratic pleasures regularly and higher percentage can enjoy them on special occasions. I worked three years in fancy restaurants—it's not a bad job, and more soothing surroundings than a factory—and once the paying customers went home we help sometimes got to pretend like we owned the place.


Compared to Guatemala China seems to be a better place to be on the bottom of the economic ladder: you can eat cheap, sell things from the back of bicycles. It is more conceivable that you will occasionally be able to splurge on a taxi ride or a cellphone. Also being held up, accidentally shot, or dying in a boss crash seems to be less of a problem—though that may also be because there are no tabloid newspapers to drum up those fears. It also seems like a better place to be rich—my cousin doesn't have to pay for bodyguards. In Guatemala City, there are many security guards, and many people from the provinces make a basic living standing around holding a shotgun. But it strikes me that it might be better for the economy if the system demanded jobs which might give them more marketable skills afterward.


Many people forget that the foundation of Bolshevik Communism was contrary to Marx's theory of history. Marx believed that capitalism would first become a world-wide system encompassing all the nations of the world—so that bourgeois management would create the wealth and technology which could be used for the common good after the revolution. "Communist" revolutions have never actually occurred in countries with large proletariats, but rather places like Russia, China, and Cuba, which were agrarian, feudal and pre-capitalist. The Bolshevik idea was that it was possible to bypass capitalism and go from peasants to socialism, whereas Marx did not necessarily see the two as mutually exclusive. Socialism is something which builds on capitalism—not which suppresses capitalism.


Many people now believe that Marxism is a dead end. Neo-Liberals have designed capitalist economies in Russia and Guatemala, and the Chinese Communist party has designed a capitalist economy in China. Asked about the "change" Deng Xiaoping said "It does not matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice." But it is interesting to compare how the different-colored cats do at catching mice. The capitalism imposed by the neo-Liberals in Russia is dominated by mafiosi, alcoholism, and a fall in life-expectancy of ten years. Crime and violence are also endemic in Guatemala. It strikes me as interesting that in China rich people ride around without bodyguards and poor people can make a living selling things off the back of bicycles. There are many other factors involved—some of the violence in Guatemala is a side-effect of the civil war, and in China most of the new millionaires were on the same level as the poor people 20 years ago, whereas rich people in Guatemala are often the same families who have been ruling the country for centuries. But I think there is some evidence that the Chinese Communist party has designed a better capitalist system for the Chinese people than Neo-Liberals from the US have in Central America and the former Soviet Union.

Happy May Day!

Drinking from a Guacal in Foshan

I am sitting in a movie theater watching a black and white animated girl march around her living room. The theater is in Tacheles, a much-graffiti'd old warehouse that used to be an anarchist hangout in East Berlin. Thanks to the effort of millions of people, the building is no longer in East Berlin, but the little girl is still shouting in German "Weg mit dem Shah!" In the English version of the movie Persepolis which has been redubbed she shouted "Down with the Shah!" The book upon which it was based was written in French. And of course when Marjane Satrapi was marching around a real living room she was shouting in Persian But though the sounds are different in the different language, the cri de coeur is the same. Persepolis is an intense story; mixing revolution and exile and puberty. When the teenage Satrapi plays air guitar to a bootleg Iron Maiden album, what is the "objective" meaning of her actions, is it: ordinary teenage rebellion, a blow for freedom against authority, Western decadence tempting pure Islamic youth? And while I identify with her, there is also a lesson about the limits of my contemporaneous search for an alternative identity in record bins in the 1980s. In Tehran Michael Jackson and Kim Wilde are just as subversive as Black Flag or the Dead Kennedy's—and top-40 hits are much more subversive than anything shaven head anarchists can get up to in a Vienna prep school.


I am drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon discussing Good Will Hunting with an Irishman. We are sitting on plastic stools in a small restaurant off a street where people sell sugar cane and oranges from the back of bicycles. The image on the label is the same, but the rest of the words are in Chinese. The beer costs $0.40 and the Irishman is from Melbourne Australia. He talks about guys he used to weld with before he got a chance to go to University in his mid-twenties, and how much they liked the scene where Matt Damon harangues the Harvard Student for paying tens of thousands of dollars for "an education you could have gotten for a buck fifty in late fees at the local library." It helped them to find more value in the life they lived and take ownership of it in the face of people who might look down on them. Of course Matt and Ben were seeking the goodwill of a different tribe of Irishmen on the other side of the world in South Boston—hoping that the community would be known for something other than riots over busing. Some one else I knew, a working class Italian, saw the story as a sham because Matt and Ben came from educated backgrounds, and contrary to the attitude the janitor has in the movie, the real Matt Damon paid for to go to Harvard (only two years, so he got it for half price). His cynical attitude made his life harder, but the attitude of the Melbourne welders helped them keep their self-respect.


I am in a Karaoke Bar—a medium sized room with a large TV. There are dozens of these rooms in the night club. people like to sing Karaoke here—but each clique of friends has a room to sing to each other, rather than getting on stage for an audience of strangers. I catch a familiar tune and look at the Chinese characters. I read very little Chinese, but I know that 巴比伦 means Babylon. I sing along: Chinese characters, English words, Jamaican tune and rhythm. But the sentiments come from 25 centuries ago. Although China is my ancestral homeland, the language and songs of this land have not been part of my life. Like Marjane or a Melbourne welder my heart stirs to something crafted by people no blood kin to me. The ones crying in captivity would find only meaningless babble in my song, even those who translated their words into English would probably find it unrecognizable. Only the Jamaicans who translated their words into song might find what I am doing in the Karaoke bar comprehensible. All of us remember different Zions in contrast to a different Babylons. But it is what happens within our hearts, rather than the sounds from our mouths, which creates the continuity across the centuries.


In the dusty Guatemalan town of Rabinal I like to drink Atol in the marketplace. The hot corn mush is served in a guacal: a hollowed out half gourd painted with red and yellow and black designs. I learned enough of the local Achi language to be able to ask for white atol with Chili: "hooch saq ruuk ik" I brought a guacal with me to China to use as bowls: to store hot peppers and garlic. The guacal is yet another cultural element: handmade, specific, and a centuries old local tradition I have carried across the globe.


Here in Southern China I see so many mechanically reproduced items which are elements of a shared global vocabulary: DVDs, flat screen TVs, jeans, cellphones, cars. I have a visual dictionary listing their names in Spanish, English, and Chinese. Will the circulation of these commodities sweep us into a single engulfing cultural matrix of Franchises and Freeway Exits—will they be repeated elements in millions of local and independent matrices governed by idiosyncratic rules like a neighborhood full of one-way streets?


I am teaching English and think sometimes about what makes a language: vocabulary of course, but also grammar, the system for how we put these elements together. You could make a visual dictionary for all the globalized elements in this essay: "Michael Jackson pin, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Karaoke." But language is more than vocabulary, and culture is more than these elements—there are also the rules which tell you how to put the elements together so that a group of people can find shared meaning in it. Like many of the sentences I grade, the warning "When people aware, the damages has been done," contains meaning. But even without consciously referring to the rules, I want to change it. There is something uncomfortable about the sentence. Where does our sense of grammar come from?


In Rabinal I drank atol from my Guacal—a hot beverage made from corn, with deep resonance for the Maya. Here in Foshan I fill it with tea, a hot beverage with deep cultural significance for the Chinese. I raise the guacal to my lips. The hot liquid passes my lips and warms my heart.

My first semester teaching in Foshan

I am sitting in a chair of burnished steel looking at a black and white photograph of Paris. I am drinking tea while soft music full of uplifting major chords plays in the background. I have sat in many similar cafes with black and white photos of Paris. The last one was in Guatemala, in Santa Cruz de Quiche where I ate granola. It was the Maya heart of Central America, but the town was named for a religion brought five centuries ago from Andalucia. This cafe is in the Cantonese part of China, in a City called Foshan. This is a Chinese word, but it means Mountain of Buddha, named for a foreign religion brought eighteen centuries ago by missionaries from India.

My first week here, I went for a health check up. Doctors in white coats sitting behind grey desks looked at clipboards, had me close one eye and observe E's in various positions on a wall chart, tapped my knee, and gave me a plastic specimen cup. Everything seemed very familiar in all respects except the language. The words out of their mouth and the things written on the clipboard were Chinese, which I hardly understand. But the objects and the motions were almost instantly recognizable.

The writing is the obvious marker here. Western Europe, the Americas, and Australia all use the alphabet developed 20 centuries ago by the Roman Empire. The regular lines and curves of the letters are visible here as well—all the city trash cans are labeled in English and Chinese, as are many bus stops. But while not difficult to find, the English letters are smaller, and uncommon. Stores, soft drinks, and ingredients are labeled in the older writing system developed even earlier here in China.

I am trying to teach students here at Foshan University to speak English—which they do.  Of course, to make their words, they often string together the sounds they are familiar with from Chinese. This is why their diction seems imprecise on words like "because" or "work". Like anyone speaking a new language, their first instinct is to build the new words out of the sounds they are already familiar with. When I try to describe my surroundings, I also string together images familiar with from other places I have been. So perhaps my attempts to reproduce and describe what I see are a little distorted by the accent of my previous cultural environments, an accent I hope I will lose.

Foshan is a very large town, 2 million people: larger than any city in Central America, but it is only a suburb of Guangzhou. The area I live in is on the edge of downtown, full of skyscrapers, and wide boulevards traveled by cars, motorcycles, bicycles. Children shop for clothes and ipods in fashionable boutiques conducting themselves much like Southern California kids in malls. But not everything has been brought over. Among the kids browsing the endless malls, there are no skateboarders or long-haired hippies. I bought a guitar at a music store featuring large black flags with Anarchy symbols and pictures of Che Guevara, but everyone working there looked clean-cut and semi-preppy. Occasionally I see beggars, often with very visible disabilities. And I am sure there are parts of town where people ar every unhappy. Much of Western culture has been imported, but in Foshan at least, one significant part of Western culture has not been imported: the Western sub-culture of Rebellion against the mainstream: there are none of the signs of middle class angst in urban zones, or working class gang-membership I saw in Guatemala.  In High School when we went to pep rallies—I was always a little uncomfortable.  And in college I met people who actively made fun of them.  But here in China, everyone seems like the type ready to cheer for the home team, despite how similar the hallways and lockers and class schedules seem.

Postcard from the Achisphere

The computer screen shows the sharp green peaks of a sound file, with five seconds highlighted. The man in front of the screen turns to the man in front of the microphone. "Ronohey?" he asks. The first man nods. We have been recording excerpts from the Rabinal Achi, an epic poem passed down orally from more than 3 centuries before Columbus, older than the Canterbury tales. The poem is in the Maya language Achi, as is the word "Ronohey" all of it. In addition to the green sound squiggle, the display contains a controller with universal recording icons ("Red Triangle, Black Square") familiar from tape and CD players. The computer operator occasionally uses pull-down menus written in Spanish, but mostly uses icons and wave highlighting, which are independent of language. Much of what he does could be done by some one illiterate, or illiterate in Spanish. And when the two men discuss operating the computer, many of their words are in the same language as the 800 year-old poem we are recording.

Another day I travel in the back of a pickup with a friend to a rural village forty-five minutes from town, where he teaches first grade. All but three of the students speak only Achi and he teaches them in that language: teaches the alphabet, simple words and a few nursery rhymes "Katzenoj we lik katkikotik, ha ha ha!" It occurs to me that although the words are foreign, much of the non-verbal content of the class: the pictures, the activity, even the tune of the song ("if you're happy and you know it") would be recognizable to a teacher in the United States. Like the computerized recordings, these social technologies can be transplanted into all sorts of cultures without separating children from the voices of their grandparents. Of course the classroom is much more basic than anything in the United States and the morning refreshment (a cup of atol cooled over an open fire and served in cups students store and wash themselves) reflects a school system where there was a telethon a few years ago so students would have pencils.

The question of bilingual education in this valley is reminiscent of the issue in the United States. In the US the question is to what extent it is necessary for brown people who speak Spanish to master English, the language which dominates culture and business. In Guatemala the question is to what extent it is necessary for brown people who speak Achi, or other Maya languages, to master Spanish, the language which dominates culture and business. And my friend says, most of the peasant farmers recognize the importance of Spanish for life beyond their valley and want their children to be fluent. Much of the pressure for bilingual education comes from more urbanized people who live very differently from their parents and for whom language is one of the few things connecting different generations. But in places like this, theories about bilingual education matter less than teaching staff. Although most students start off with no Spanish, the fourth grade teacher only speaks Spanish, so all the class takes place in Spanish. Some time is set aside for learning Achi names of plants, but she cannot direct or inspire them having anything beyond a third-grade conversation in the language of their ancestors.

The Rabinal Achi drama is still performed, by people wearing masks and elaborate feathered costumes, and the man we recorded is one of the ones who helped keep the oral tradition alive. During January a few dozen people watched the drama in any single performance, one morning it seemed half the people watching were foreign. At the same festival the mayor sponsored another "Dance" with a huge sound system, roped off and a dozen or so people in Halloween style masks and Costumes moving to booming techno beats. Thousands of people pressed against the ropes to see that performance, without quite so much traditional significance. Of course that is much more in line with modern ideas of spectacle, and in the US as well more people watch the spectacle of WWF and Monster Truck rallies than Shakespeare or recitations of the Canterbury Tales. And even in Shakespeare's time the loudest applause was probably not for the things people study in literature classes.

Throughout the Rabinal Achi, both peoples speak often of nuhuyubal, nutaqahal: my mountain, my valley, to denote where they are from. The play tells the story of how the Achi people won their independence from the much larger K'iche people of several western valleys, who had dominated them for several centuries. The story focuses on a single symbolic event in that battle: the capture of a K'iche warrior by a local warrior, the Rabinal Achi, and the K'iche Achi's execution as a prisoner of War. This is a reminder that war and conquest were not European invention—and would have played a role in the last five centuries of history on this continent even if Columbus had stayed home. But it is significant to compare how different peoples speak of war and battle. The K'iche prisoner of war who dies at the end has many more lines than the Achi characters... as if Beowulf had been devoted more to the words of Grendel and his mother, rather than the eponymous hero, or the Song of Roland had talked about the glory and faith of the Muslims rather than caricaturing them as vicious idolaters. Here the captured prisoner speaks, is killed, and his words are recorded by those who kill him. Unlike European War stories, those who preserve the words of the foreign warrior do not need to describe their enemy as a sub-human monster in order to assuage their guilt about killing him.

The way in which the traditional languages and folkways have survived despite the influx of globalized technology is visible throughout the valley. There is a new supermarket, owned by the Walmart Chain, well-integrated into the streetscape, a metal-roofed two story yellow building between older one-story tile roofed buildings housing a doctor's office and an internet cafe. No sea of parking, just a mass of bicycle and motor cycle taxis (tuc tucs) in front of the entrance. Inside you see women in traditional clothing and headgear looking at the plastic-wrapped frozen foods in the freezers and tall shelves, the way other women examine salted fish in wicker baskets in the centuries old market two blocks away. I take a minibus out to one of the outlying communities, and listen to people chattering in Achi as the Korean-made minibus speeds the dirt roads past adobe houses and cattle pastures with too many plastic bags. Many items from beyond Guatemala make it into this valley, the market is full of CDs from Mexico, t-shirts with WWF figures like John Cena, the Marine, even the Argentinian Che Guevara. But to the people who make a livelihood selling these things, like the minibus drivers, or the man who runs the internet cafe, these items by themselves are not necessarily evidence of cultural erosion. I am sure that when the Rabinal Achi first celebrated the defeat of the K'iche army the markets of this valley were filled with trade goods such as weavings, cooking pots, maybe even songs, from the many valleys of the K'iche nation. Some of these no doubt out-competed the products of this valley, but a Rabinal musician playing a K'iche song is still a Rabinal musician. A Rabinal vendor selling CDs from Mexico or cellphones from Norway is still a Rabinal vendor. The products come from many valleys: some Achi, some K'iche, some Yankee. Some patterns of commerce enrich the residents of this valley, others do not. I suspect some one driving a minivan earns more than some one working for Walmart, some one selling internet time more some one than selling John Cena t-shirts. And if I am wrong in those specifics, it is questions like that which matter more for the economic health of the valley than the origins.

Postcard from San Antonio Aguascalientes

I climb the dusty road uphill from town with a man named Candido. Among the tin roofs below he points out a well-built house with a swimming pool for daytrippers from the capital. As the road reaches the mountain, he points out a few plants. One is square stemmed and when thrown sideways, makes a hissing sound. Another has a broad leaf with a forked stem. He cuts a stalk off and makes a slit, showing me how to use it as a trumpet. Our destination is two hours away and these lessons give us something to do when he stops to allow me to rest. The third plant is Tunay, with a hollow cane divided into compartments every nine inches. He shows me how to cut it to extract the water within. It is slightly bitter, no match for a nalgene, but good for emergencies hydration. Along the way, he points out other plants: trees which are good for firewood, house posts, herbal remedies.
It makes me think about literacy. I have been taught how to work with words and ideas, to read Chaucer, census charts, and electric bills, to use a library or the internet to search for a solution to a problem. But here in these woods, I am the illiterate, the one who doesn't notice the obvious, the one who could in hours would never realize things they Candido would notice immediately. There is a huge richness of experience, both practical like firewood, and diversionary like the trumpets—which is only accessible to me through my guide's explanation.
After two hours we reach Candido's plot. We walk for a few minutes through larger area which belonged to his father-some of it has since been sold-to a man he describes as a millionaire. It is wooded, but there are several piles of large logs piled at various intervals-hundreds of dollars of firewood which the millionaire has left-perhaps to rot, perhaps because he hasn't looked into paying some one to haul them market.
Candido's destination is a broad meadow, a half acre filled with a plant with wide leaves, 16 incehes by 6, sort of like a lily. Once a week he comes to harvest the leaves in a half-acre filled with these plants. He collects several bundles of 100 leaves and sells the bundles for $2. The thick, waterproof leaves are used for various purposes, chiefly to wrap and cook tamales.
Today I help pick the leaves, ripping them from the stalk. Later he uses a knife to make a clean cut and trim the stalks. At lunch he descends to a stream running through the center of the plot. He uses his knife to harvest vero, a cress-like plant growing in a pool. He puts the harvested vero on a plate with lemon and salt. We wrap the salad in tortillas. It tastes slightly sharp, crunchy, and complements the slightly bland taste of the tortillas well. We sit in the shade of an avocado tree, eating lunch, surrounded by thousands of Cacayus plants.
Candido is about 60 years old-most of the younger men no longer work in agriculture. Many commute 2 hours to the capital to work in factories. Instead of harvesting Cacayus leaves, they may work for a Korean company whose factories make candy or tools. One man about my age talked of working for 12 years making plastic bags. It is interesting to contrast the two experiences of working in packaging materials. Candido works for himself, providing product tied into traditional food and culture—both the product and its production involve 0 pollution. Cesar works in a factory with environmental costs in transporting and transforming the raw materials, to make a product which litters hundreds of roadsides and clog drainage ditches. People have discovered how to make money selling useful plastic bags, but there is no money to be had collecting the used ones. The plastic that people wrap food in now is different from the leaves people used before, but in much of Guatemala it all gets thrown on the ground: unsightly at a minimum and sometimes contributing to flooding and poisoned soils.
Picking the leaves is not hard work, though I suspect there was work involved in creating a field full of the species. But now that the field exists, harvesting it is actually much easier than the "commute" of walking to the field in the first place. Candido probably earns as much per hour as some one working in a factory, however unless he buys more land, he can only work a few hours a week—that is all the leaves he can pick without damaging his long-term production. And land is one difficulty: prices for land, especially agricultural land are often several thousand dollars per acre, comparable to prices in the US, for people who earn 15 times less. Candido may earn a comparable wage per hour, but Cesar in the plastic bag factory almost certainly earned more per week. And riding two hours in a bus may be preferred to walking two hours down a solitary road.
The shift from cacayus to plastic is understandable for the worker, and the people who buy them from the factory as well. Vendors at bus stops sell drinks and coconut juice wrapped in cheap plastic bags. And in small villages a family with a refrigerator can sell frozen juice treats, if they price them right they can earn more than when they sell mass-produced packets of chips in foil packets. Once in a market I bought a cacayus packet of fish and tomatoes. The leakage when I got home reminded me the functionality of plastic.
After 12 years making plastic bags Cesar is taking a vacation. I worked with him on his father's bean harvest, and sat on the hillside with the other workers at lunch, eating tomatoes, greens, and local vegetables, and sharing a bit of whiskey as a respite from the dusty work. Other afternoons I see him on the porch of his concrete block house, one of the few Guatemalan men who learned how to weave in the backstrap style usually done by women. One of the things he did during his vacation was weave his wife the traditional "corte" blouse women usually weave for themselves.
His father worked a salaried job for the town for many years in order to build the two story concrete house, without having to sell off the half-dozen small widely scattered plots he uses to grow corn, beans and bananas. San Antonio has a big variety of houses—shacks with cornstalks for walls right next to four story houses with expensive tiles and satellite dishes. In rural Guatemalan villages concrete houses usually mean there are relatives in the US sending money. Here in this town in commuting distance of Antigua and Guatemala city there are lots of people who have managed to earn the money to build their houses while living in them.
This is another difference from the US. Here people with enough money for a larger house often improve the complex they have, putting up a new wing with a two new bedrooms, building a second story, or improving the walls and floors. Their house changes but their neighbors and neighbourhood remain the same. In the US people do remodel, but seldom enough to change the amount and quality of living space as drastically as in Guatemala. When people want a different house, they often change neighbors and neighborhoods—just as they do for a different job.

I cannot argue with the economics of manufacturing plastic bags, or people with half an acre who do not rely on it for monetary income. But there was something about sitting under the avocado tree, eating cress—or similar lunches I have had when working in the fields with others. And while plastic beats cacayus for many uses, even people with automobiles, TVs and refrigerators still use them to make Tamales, something I can't imagine eating from plastic. I think this would be a poorer world if no one kept on doing what Candido does, and am glad that Cesar and his father, despite their salaried jobs, are still keeping some traditions alive.