Beacon, Flies and Poop Maps

As published at SubStack, 9/3/23:

[Pakse, 9/2/23]

Two copulating flies have just landed on my laptop. I leave them alone. Though immobile, they’ve been going at it for nine minutes now. Most men can’t last that long, at anything. Maybe they’re dead. Is this the ideal way of exiting this perplexing realm? Maybe it’s an illustration of hell. At eleven minutes, they’re still frozen. Maybe they’re embarrassed at having been watched all this time by some fly pervert.

Getting up before 3AM, I watched some YouTube videos to see what’s happening beyond my tranquil city. No one shouts or gets publicly angry here. Teenage boys don’t try to prove they’re homicidal gangstas. Unharried men shoot billiards. Everyone’s facial muscles relax.

[Pakse, 8/31/23]

There’s a 9/1/23 video by Victor Davis Hanson, “The De-Civilization of America.” Showing scenes of rampant homelessness, flash robs, cars being broken into and a poop map, Hanson explains that businesses and residents are fleeing this once gorgeous city, because it’s no longer safe to live or do business in. With cops demonized, violence glamorized, laws eviscerated and meritocracy mocked, San Francisco and other Democratic strongholds are becoming Detroit, Hanson concludes.

Just going to your office downtown, you may step on human excrement or a drug needle, “Is that what you want? Everybody says no, I don’t need that, not with 13.3 income tax rate in California. What’s very funny about these people is they created all this, and they made a desert, as I said, and they called it civilization, and now they don’t want to live in it […] They’ve created a Frankensteinian monster that’s devouring them.”

I have a brother in Cupertino and a half sister in San Francisco. My freshman year in high school, I spent in San Jose. I bought my first jeans with my own cash at the Gap in Eastridge Mall. Sweating over woks, I made so-so Chinese-American grub in my father’s kitchens in Redwood City and Santa Clara. I gave poetry readings in SF, Berkeley and San Jose, and I was a writer-in-residence at UC Berkeley. Too zonked out to trudge further, I curled up on someone’s porch swing in El Cerrito. At Candlestick, I witnessed Hideo Nomo’s first MLB game. I roamed through Oakland’s worst neighborhoods, hung out in Fremont and took a ferry to Sausalito.

[San Francisco, 5/9/13]

Having observed the Bay Area over decades, I was no stranger to its seedier and sadder aspects, but what I’m seeing now from afar exceeds anything I encountered, and that’s true, too, of Philadelphia, a city I knew well.

With its nodding or knocked out zombies, Philly’s Kensington has become internationally famous, so YouTubers have been rushing there to document the horrors. Just two blocks from each other, Allegheny Station and McPherson Square are always shown. Having walked by each a hundred times, I always saw messed up people, but never so many as now, on YouTube.

In Kensington, I’d hang out in Bentley’s Place or Jack’s. Once, I sat next to some old broad who chugged an empty beer mug for over an hour. It beat going home. On the street, I ran into a shirtless guy who was not shy about displaying his grotesquely burnt body and face. He called himself Jesse James. Showing me his miserable property, a landlord grinned, “I’ve had people die in every single room of this house.”

When a Bentley’s Place bartender collapsed after downing too many shots, an ambulance had to be called, but she promptly woke up as it rolled into the hospital. Jumping out, she managed to walk back to the bar, to bartend, and liquor up some more. If a customer hadn’t shown up in a while, she simply assumed he had overdosed or been shot. When an old regular reappeared, she nearly screamed because she thought he was a ghost. Bentley’s Place is permanently closed.

This morning, I also watched a video of San Jose by Metal Leo. Heart of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area’s largest city, it’s also losing population, with its desolate downtown now filled with empty stores. When I lived there in 1978-79, San Jose had no major league sport. After the Earthquakes then Sharks appeared, even the San Francisco 49ers moved south, an indication of the shift in wealth and prestige in the Bay Area.

Though San Jose has its roving homeless and tent cities, it still doesn’t look as bad as San Francisco, but I suspect it will soon surpass its northern cousin. Warmer, it’s more amendable to sleeping outside. Plus, its industrial parks and corporate campuses are perfect for post-collapse Americans. Apple’s circular headquarters already looks like a massive Hakka group home. Its size, though, may require more than one warlord. Each night, there will be skirmishes among zombies in the hallways.

Since too many blacks and Hispanics couldn’t pass algebra in 8th grade, San Francisco decided to only teach it a year later, thus retarding the entire math curriculum. In the name of equality, idiocy is ushered in. A New York Times headline from 10/25/22, “California Students Have Dismally Low Math and Reading Test Scores.” Though worst in dumps like SF, it’s a nationwide problem.

In his video, Victor Davis Hanson blames America’s unraveling on Democrats and the left, so there’s a backlash that includes support for Trump. It’ll be interesting, he says, to see how Democrats who have fled to red states vote in the next election, so, again, we’re stuck in this Democratic, Republican bullshit.

Nothing will be solved until Americans realize these blue and red puppets all serve those that want to divide, bankrupt or even kill them. After triumphantly launching Jewjabs, Trump has never reflected on their evil consequences, so there’s no remorse, he did his job. Nearly three years into this horror, Biden still pushes boosters.

With the media hinting at the return of Covid mask mandate, lockdown, travel restrictions and vaccine requirements, many Americans are uneasy, so protest videos have been posted online. Compiling a bunch, Del BigTree has this message, “‘There’s only one way we stop this. There’s only one way we prove them wrong, and that’s by making everyone we know stand up with us. It’s time to stage, side by side, not to say by ourselves, ‘Oh, hell no,’ but a cacophonous, resounding, gigantic, screaming roar, ‘Hell, no!’ We will not do this again! We’re the citizens of the United States of America. We’re the beacons of light and hope and freedom and liberty for the entire world. If we go down, the world goes down.”

It’s a rousing call, but the jingoism at the end does jar. Increasingly, the world sees America only as a beacon for endless war, financial swindles, Jewjabs, Satanic music, sick movies, child mutilation and cross dressing freaks, and that’s why it’s moving away from the belligerent pervert.

Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have just joined BRICS, but these countries also applied: Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, Indonesia, Kazahstan, Kuwait, Nigeria, Palestine, Senegal, Thailand, Venezuela and Vietnam. That’s a lot of oil, natural gas, gold, minerals, food and human capital realigning.

After the US-engineered coup in Ukraine, John McCain paid that doomed nation a visit, then quipped that its supposed enemy, Russia, was “just a gas station masquerading as a country.” Disdain, contempt or ignorance colors America’s view of every country, foe or ally.

To many Americans, the Third World is just a collection of “shitholes,” but consider Laos, one of the poorest Asian countries. Having spent time in Pakse, Vientiane, Luang Prabang and Phonsavan, I can definitely say these cities are cleaner and safer than most American ones, with much less squalor and no human shit visible. Although drugs are cheaper and more available here than in the US, I don’t see zombies staggering around. Although despair is hard to quantify, there must be less of it here.

For the longest time, violence in American cities was repackaged as grittiness or even glamor, so immature males over much of the world started to look and act like the worst American assholes. To be loud, obnoxious and always ready for a fight over nothing was hip or cool, the last an obvious oxymoron since there’s no composure or manliness in such behavior. Luckily, this American contagion has not spread to Laos or Muslim countries I’ve visited.

Playing to his navel gazing audience, BigTree has it wrong. If Uncle Sam collapses, much of the world will only cheer.

I began this article with two flies, so let’s end with one more, William Blake’s:

The Fly

Little fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength and breath,
And the want
Of thought is death,

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

If the absence of thinking is death, then some places are clearly ahead of the rest. From sea to toxic sea, poop maps spread. The beacon is long dead, and the lighthouse has become a pestilent toilet. As language and math die, flies pester all your senses. Impotently, you swat.

 

[Vietnamese boys in Pakse, Laos on 8/31/23]

[Pakse, 8/31/23]

[San Jose, CA on 5/29/15]