Journeys

Love on the Gringo Trail

~ John ~ Leave a comment
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A dust-mote among all the personal rearrangements we’re are all having to suck up, given the bigger things going on right now, is that today Beret and I were scheduled to embark on a seven-week pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, walking 500 miles across northern Spain. 

I’m not Catholic, or even much of a Christian, but pilgrimage has always held a romantic appeal for me.  Beret and I met in college in a literature class on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  The class was tedious; we spent almost the entire semester laboriously dissecting small piece of the text.  But I remember fondly Chaucer’s Middle English wit and cadence, chronicling the ancient ritual of travelers taking to the road as March turns to April, seeking the “holy blissful martyr” who “holpen them when they were seeke.”  And along the way, they rested at inns, passing the time by telling each other tales.

Few of us are on any physical roads at present, but we are nevertheless on a kind of journey.  So to pass the time, I’ll tell you a tale of Mexico, the place I first learned to love.

In 1982, upon graduating into the Colorado oil recession, I headed down to El Paso and walked across the border.  I arrived a brittle young man, spouting Marx and Joyce but underneath it all afraid of my own shadow.  Mexico broke me open.  I first found my way to Tulum, in those days an empty stretch of beach with a few thatched huts clustered around a soapy communal well, next to a Mayan village just beginning to cater to the trickle of tourists arriving by bus from the barely-opened new resort of Cancún, a hundred miles up the coast.  I stayed there two weeks, sleeping in a hammock.  Once a Mexican policeman patrolling the beach caught my friend sunbathing nude – he had to pay a $7 bribe from a wallet he’d buried in the sand.  Only then would the cop let him put his swimsuit back on.  But otherwise we felt utterly safe.  I spent the next four months wandering the ruins in Yucatán and Chiapas, knocking around bookstores and cafes in Mexico City, taking an ancient Pullman train from Mazatlán to the border, and sleeping in the desert south of Mexicali before crossing back at Calexico.  I’d spent less than $1000, learned basic Spanish, kept parental expectations at bay, and let Mexico work its medicine on my gringo soul.

But the next year was when the charm truly took hold, when Beret and I were first in Guadalajara together.   Of course falling in love is intoxicating.  But Mexico smelled of everything my world did not.  Cinnamon and tortillas, diesel smoke and newspaper, shoeshine and forgiveness.  You could walk all evening on the cobbled and cloistered streets until the rats gorged on your footsteps.  And the city’s great public buildings featured, not the old cloistered portraits of Catholicism, but the towering murals of Orozco.    

Mexico has always celebrated “mixture” — of food, of races, of cultures, of ideas – but that word does no justice to the actual process.  To truly “mix” the heart is to break apart, to surrender one’s self to the stone and slab of greater forces, and to emerge as someone else.   Mexico has been ground, like a good chocolate mole, from indigenous, Spanish, French, and gringo influences for hundreds of years, into one of the world’s richest cultures.   We who disrespect – even fear – Mexico have no concept of our loss.  

Still, when you’re in in love like I was, that March in Guadalajara 36 years ago, you don’t really grind.  You burn.  Every time I looked out my balcony window overlooking the old square and saw Beret come around the corner in her sky blue blouse, watched her cross the cobbled street, heard her voice echo in the stone entryway below, I burned.  Like Orozco’s “Man on Fire”, below.  I burned.   

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Calmly to Armageddon

~ John ~ 1 Comment

With the assassination of Iranian General Qassim Soleimani, people are anxiously debating whether the situation will spin out of control. It already has.

We talk about “spiraling conflict” and “escalation” as though, at a certain point, leaders simply lose their minds and start blindly pushing buttons. But that’s a false view: history offers a pageant of men marching calmly and rationally on to Armageddon. All it takes is the failure to think five, or ten, or fifteen moves ahead. If your decisions are too near-field, you will consider only the options visibly before you. Choosing one – in today’s world, usually the least bad one – will immediately present a new set of options, like the turns of a maze. If you proceed rationally choice-by-choice, or worse, on the belief that you must always turn one direction, you will soon hit a place where your choices narrow to none – the wall that forces you to turn around. And if the maze in question is a corridor down which your enemies are pursuing you, and you have been running with the confidence inspired by a grenade in your pocket, then when you hit that wall you will have no choice but to throw it, even if the shrapnel is likely to kill you too. 

The most famous example is World War I. A Serbian radical assassinated an Austrian Archduke, causing Austria to declare war on Serbia. Russia was obliged by treaty to defend Serbia and thus declared war on Austria. This provoked Germany to declare war on Russia and its ally, France. Germany invaded Belgium as part of its attack on France, obliging Britain to enter the war in defense of Belgium. In due course, Bulgaria, Romania, Japan, British colonies as far flung as Australia, and the US entered the war as well. In four years, 19 million people lost their lives, 21 million were wounded, and a worldwide influenza epidemic was killing millions more – results intended, surely, by nobody. Nor were the leaders war-mongering madmen or even, by contemporary accounts, particularly cheesed off. They were mostly just incompetent, bungling their way into global catastrophe.

Fast forward 102 years. After a time of ratcheting tensions, Iranian militia killed an American contractor in Iraq. So we ordered airstrikes against those Iranian militia and killed a bunch of them. Pro-Iranian militants then attacked our embassy in Baghdad. And Trump, according to reporting in today’s New York Times, chose the most extreme menu option his generals presented – and not the one they realistically wanted – assassinating the second most powerful man in Iran.

While everyone ponders what Iran will do next, here’s how this act has already transformed our strategic landscape. Soleimani’s work in fostering alliances with Shiite groups from Afghanistan to Yemen has put American troops and civilians at risk everywhere across the region. Since the killing, there have been major protests in Baghdad, with renewed efforts to approach the embassy. The State Department has ordered civilians to evacuate Iraq as a result of these tensions. Thousands of Shiites also demonstrated today in Islamabad, Pakistan, making an unsuccessful run at the US embassy, putting more American civilians at risk. The Sunni terrorist group al-Shabaab launched an attack on US troops in Kenya, killing three Americans. Although the timing may be coincidental given that Sunnis did not love Soleimani, it’s also possible that the assassination may be creating opportunistic alignments that bridge the most enduring chasm in the Middle East, between Sunni and Shiite, as they unite against a common enemy, the United States. 

This is in fact happening in Iraq, its government until last week deeply divided and unpopular, now riding a wave of universal anti-Americanism that has led to a parliamentary vote, supported by both sects, to expel US forces from the country. Recall that we had to rely on our military presence in Iraq to stabilize the situation on the Turkish-Syrian border after Trump’s surprise withdrawal of troops there. Were it not for our Iraqi bases, our military commanders would not have been able to salvage that presidential fiasco. If we are ordered out of Iraq, the Kurds, once betrayed by our withdrawal in Syria, will be fully and finally abandoned. They will have no choice but to ally with Russia and Assad against Turkey. Meanwhile, any efforts to combat the resurgence of ISIS in the region will likewise be abandoned, if they have not been already – the Defense Department announced today that it is “pausing” all operations against ISIS in Iraq and focusing solely on protection of US forces.

If the outgoing Iraqi Prime Minister approves Parliament’s withdrawal request — which he publicly supports – the US will have the choice of allowing all of these short-term consequences to become permanent. Iraq will then likely become a terrorist haven controlled by Iran-backed militias, as well as a haven for a resurgent ISIS in the north. Or, the US can defy Iraq’s expulsion, in which case we become an occupier in violation of international law. Did I mention that there are US battlefield nuclear weapons stationed just 50 miles from the Turkish-Syrian border, where ISIS fighters were allowed to escape from their prisons following the US Syrian pullout?

All of this is the best-case scenario, involving only a few known, self-inflicted consequences of our actions thus far, with Iran taking no retaliatory steps at all. If, as is virtually inevitable, Iran and/or its proxies retaliate and react through their interlocking series of alliances and rivalries, each following long-and short-term objectives that align and collide like little cluster bombs, then any policy-making decision-tree exercise explodes into a horrifying fireworks display.

And in charge of it all is Donald Trump. Not only is he incapable of the kind of long-range thinking required for survival in these times – he’s actively hostile to it. He tweets, and perhaps even believes, that no matter what blind alley he drags us down, we’ll be fine because he’s got nukes in his pocket.

I wrote after the Syria debacle that he needed to go. It is more urgently true today.

Epilepsy and My New Car

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Five years ago last month, I woke up in the ER to a new world of epilepsy.  This spring, I bought a new car.

That night of my first diagnosed seizure – I’d had others but didn’t know what they were – a cranky ER doc shrugged, “It’s probably idiopathic,” and kicked us out the door.  My spouse and I, scared and confused, resented his flippancy, and do still.  But he was right.   Two years of intensive diagnostics were unable to identify a cause for my seizures.  This is actually common.  Epilepsy is sometimes undetectable on an MRI, and seizures can flash across the temporal lobe like summer sheet lightning without a raindrop in sight.  A puzzle as old as Galen, epilepsy is still fundamentally defined the way the Greeks did: by what it does, rather than what it is.  Unless there is a brain lesion, injury, or tumor that the docs can see, or some other illness of which seizures are a side-effect, then you’re basically dealing with a ghost.

What medicine offers now, if you’re fortunate, is the means to keep it at bay.  For that I thank Zeus, in his forbearing thunder, and every god since.  Not that finding effective treatment was easy.  During those same two years of fruitless diagnosis, I took drug after draining drug.  The seizures lessened, and I never again had one that blacked me out.  But the ghost did not go away.  Finally, I had a small joy-buzzer implanted in my chest that delivers a small shock to my vagus nerve where it crosses my larynx, every 2.5 minutes.  I found a drug cocktail I could tolerate with efficacy at least north of placebo.  And I took my diet to full-on paleo.  So, for the past three years, this triple therapy of implant, drugs, and ketogens has gotten enough of a collar on Casper the Unfriendly that I am returned to the ranks of the outwardly able-bodied.

I say outwardly, because for many people who have it, epilepsy is also defined by the things we are not permitted to do.  Two generations ago it was immeasurably worse: we were castrated and sterilized, locked in segregated wards of asylums lest we infect the insane.  Now we are mostly prevented from getting conveniently around town.  I couldn’t drive for those first two years, and it was an enormous education.  A trip that takes 12 minutes by car takes 45 by foot and bus.  A 45-minute trip across town drags to over 2 hours.  That wasn’t the real learning, though.  A local bus in a western city, stopping every two blocks through a working-class neighborhood, affords views you don’t get from the highway.  And when you ride that bus for a year, watching the guys in winter bundled up for a workday they will spend outside, savoring the ride because it is the warmest they will be all day — when you watch underdressed moms and kids get on that bus after frigid waits in the blowing snow when the bus is 20 minutes late — when you you spend one of those waits yourself, after walking half an hour in dress shoes on an unplowed sidewalk, contemplating how you would have been able to get through those snowdrifts if you’d been in a wheelchair — then you come to think of driving, even walking, as indeed a privilege.

I’m not complaining — far from it.  My time out of the driver’s seat turned out to be only a field trip.  I’ve been released from driving restrictions for some time now, and because my job takes me to five counties every week, and because I can, I just bought a new hybrid sedan.  I chose it for the mileage and the semi-autonomous safety gadgets.  But what I guiltily love is the quiet.  The world outside, that on a sidewalk or bus felt so fulsome to the senses, is now muted to a simulator.  My music gently croons.  The temperature hovers at an amniotic 70 degrees.   Scenery – and thoughts – that used to linger and penetrate now barely register.

What remains is a sharpened sense of the contingency of living that epilepsy shocked me into five years ago.  It suits my current work as a family court mediator: I move from one half-day block after another through successive worlds of domestic sorrow, as though between rocking compartments of a fast-moving train.  The job is to be intensely present in each room, and then just as intensely to exhale in the corridor between.  And pulling out the courthouse parking lot I pause to notice the guy sitting at the bus shelter where I used to wait, sometimes five minutes, sometimes an hour, for the local bus whose driver will spout off about libertarian politics to anyone who’ll listen, or just to the rearview mirror if nobody will.   And I thank Zeus, and all the gods.