The strike is on today, and the streets are nervy-quiet. A good time and space to read a non right-wing analysis of what is going on politically in Bolivia at the moment. You should do it too if you’re interested, and especially if you’re reading news of Bolivia and getting the impression that Evo Morales’ government is a Murderous Dictatorship and The People are rising up against him. Because of course … things are more invested, more complicated, than that.
In response to the (most tasty) Melissa’s comment on the post below: surreal is indeed the word for how it feels to be so far from home and reading news of this shift in governmental power in Australia after 11 years of a fascistic federal administration. It’s a window of hope that the parliamentary process might now be able to deliver the occasional modicum of justice, maybe even that Australians voted beyond their hip pockets this time. It’s particularly surreal as this news comes to me while I’m in Bolivia, where state politics are currently playing out in an overtly life-threatening environment. Compare and contrast:
1.Front page of Bolivian national daily,
2.Front page of Australian national daily.
I’m thrilled that Howard no longer has any formal power over anyone else. His personal contribution to stoking the fires of fear has had a muted, deadly violence of its own; the kind that can hide behind the global economic and race privilege that any Australian government and social majority enjoys (the same goes for Brough. And likewise Ruddock, Abbott, Vanstone, Costello and Nelson - but they kept their seats). I hope someone looks closely into the contribution of GetUp! to this result - a stellar one I think; with their relentless, grassroots, non-partisan electr(on)ic energy for realising Change in the order of environmental and social justice. Oh, and it’s surreal to see young women from my Adelaide age-political peer group elected, and this one in particular who, if she isn’t elected, has achieved a rather brilliant result against ‘SA’s real eastern suburbs princess’ (further, I would bet on her capacity to be a much better politician than this one, who, if I recall rightly, ran on the Labor Right ticket in university student elections - back in the day when there was a student’s association at our alma mater - with the claim that we should vote for her “because she didn’t know anything about politics”. Genius.). It’s surreal to see Nick Xenophon elected to a parliament once again largely on the strength of his own (rather lovely, in my experience) charisma and autonomous-if-not-populist-but-still-refreshing-in-a-world-of-beige take on policymaking.
At any rate, over the next month till I come home I’ll be watching and hoping that the new government will pull the troops out of Iraq, scrap the NT intervention legislation, sign Kyoto (for pete’s sake!) and re-evaluate immigration policy to ensure that the likes of this, this, this, this, and this never happen again at, and in the name of, the borders of the Nation.
Australians are a tough people, a people of mateship, who can handle anything but Change. CHANGE WILL RUIN US ALL! Especially a Change as drastic as going from this:
To this unknown, untried, offbeat, off the freakin’ planet option:
I’m marking time this hot afternoon in a Piura internet booth, recalling the drive here from Loja, Ecuador and hoping for some of the same en route to Lima tonight. Some - not all - of the same; onto the elimination pile goes the speed at which the drivers take the narrow streets at high, high altitude. In the first few hours out of Loja I was having trouble prising my hand out of the Jesus grip on the armrest. I thought the nice old man next to me might have been having similar concerns due to the number of times he had crossed himself since we had left town, so I smiled weakly at him and said “ah …. pretty fast hey!”. He replied “Yes … very.” Heartened that at least there did not appear to be a difference in cultural definition here, I added breathily, “ah … isn’t it a bit dangerous?”, to which the man laughed and said “no, only the best choffers drive fast!” and gestured to our very own choffer’s hawklike vigilance over the wheel. Of course, said vigilance took place while exchanging obscenities with the other driver, listening to rapid beat salsa at top volume - all night - and occasionally glancing up at a plastic statue of La Virgen del Cisne (above) who sat above the dashboard and seemed to light up according to certain speeds (take note, s.c.a.m-mers - the catholic merch here is beyond our wildest dreams). I eventually realised that the instances of the man crossing himself corresponded to our encountering of Virgen shrines (bigger plastic statues of said Virgen encased in elevated plastic boxes filled with flowers and ornate crucifixes) along the road. Before he got off the bus he turned to me and said “very fast!!!” to me about every twenty minutes and looked at my white knuckles with an avuncular chuckle. Something tells me that scaredy-cat-anglo-restraint gringos are the butt of more than a few jokes in these parts.
What I would repeat is the beautiful, mountainous Andean landscape - dwarfing hills, verdant valleys, orange and brown scrub with startingly green-trunked trees in flower, small plantations of maize and sugarcane, ambling donkeys, pigs, and chickens. I swear, if country towns and I didn’t suspect each other of so much, I’d live in one tomorrow.
Fig 1: front page (’Gringa teacher seduced a boy’).
Fig 2: back page (Dita von Teese, top left).
Fig 3: Page 48 (yes, the Queen is considered one of ‘the most sexy and erotic’, if fashion sense is any indication).
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