This land

Flat blue skies dotted with white clouds. Skies flaming at dusk. Water as clear as white diamonds or the color of jade or so blue it pains the heart. It really depends where you are. Glittering black volcanic sand. Blinding white powder. Waves that roll and seethe. Palm trees swinging in the wind. Cascades of wet rice fields they say you can see from space. Young wind blowing through old houses and the endless line of rolling trucks delivering cane. Bodies everywhere, some rippling with honest labor, some greased with the fat of the land. A few tall cities, more and more every year, some bustling, some suffocating, almost all of them curved around a patch of sea.  Corruption so deep, it feels like cancer in the bone or fat enveloping the heart. Despair so encompassing it chokes the hope. People so high they live, even love, beyond good and evil. People so low they divide their belongings in the dust.

This land. This beautiful vicious land.

Malls, those seductive pleasure palaces, stamping modernity in the most unlikely of places and encroaching on any bit of fallow land. A national weakness for shiny things and shiny people even if it is their gold-tipped shoes pressing down on one’s neck. A talent for winning beauty pageants but no luck with contests of territorial will. Rebels, real ones, not those you see in American movies wearing leather jackets and leaning against cars, but honest to goodness fighters though, nevertheless, just the same, without a clue. Shiny new sports cars roaring down brand new highways and darting through traffic. People living on the literal edge, of oily black rivers and treacherous oceans, so easily swept away by the rising tides. And every year, as predictable as the nation’s favorite son’s dazzling foreign fights, a bout with Mother Nature, though this year we lost and lost badly.

This land. This beautiful vicious land.

A dearth of true leaders — no Mandelas here but none of his caliber anyway anywhere else in the world, but no small number of the self-interested and the absolutely morally bereft. This is no country for great men or principled living. A befuddling ability to grin and bear it and then, without warning, the stab in the back, the bullet in the face, the unexpected death meted in the night.  Here, justice is elusive, often much too late in the coming, toothless on arrival. Quick-fire protests, not frightening enough to move the powers that be, but useful for letting off steam. Humor tinged with despair or is it the reverse? Senatorial games of smoke and mirrors played for public entertainment and intended to exhaust its audience into submission. Here everyone is immediately guilty in the court of public opinion but no one truly important goes to jail. Everyone is feeding from the trough.

This land.

Underwater cemeteries and sleeping volcanoes. Rolling yellow-green hills, ancient churches and the one remaining practicing witch doctor on his windswept island handing out potions for love and for forgetting. Tribes in the mountains, patterned whales gliding in the gloom, a thousand ways to while away a warm and sunny day. Pathological cheerfulness and the drone of a hundred thousand Catholic sermons, the reasons behind, perhaps, an inexplicable ability to forgive, endlessly, even the most grievous of harms.  An infinite variety of feminine beauty, shades of green, ways of getting over, by and around but no taste for the meticulous and arduous task of building strong and building true. And yet, still, the sense, that with time it will all come together if only inevitably to fall apart again.

This land. This beautiful vicious land.  

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