The Mask of the Red Death

As an American abroad, it's again one of those times when I'm expected to explain my countrymen.

This usually isn't asked out of any genuine concern, but out of bemusement. After all, it's understandable why there's a certain schadenfreude in seeing the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world suddenly brought to its knees. But as someone who is at the end of the day an American, what it means is greater immiseration for those with whom I share a passport and a flat accent, and after the bodies are swept away, as a man more perceptive than I once said, “everything stays the same, but worse.”

I try to stay off social media, but I couldn't help but notice the ongoing arguments over masks that are apparently the topic du jour back home. Given the social stratum of which I am a part, the opinions I see are naturally far more pro-mask. I will say up front, that this is a complex issue, and I don't see one side or the other as explicitly, 100 percent right – rather, it's dependent on a lot of material-world questions, all revolving around what mask you use, how you use it, and what other measures you're taking – but that kind of nuance doesn't translate online. What seems worth interrogating as a layman, rather, is the social climate surrounding the issue, which can be as interesting as the scientific and epidemiological reality.

When I see pro-mask Facebook posts and memes, the touchstones are the standards of liberal discourse – the importance of looking out for one's neighbor, “believing science,” a nod towards success stories in other countries, and a palpable disgust at those for whom convenience = freedom. Now, those are basically good sentiments. I, too, like being kind and educated and cosmopolitan, and I, too, dislike puerile American conservatism.

The reason shit like this drives me absolutely nuts is that it is – yet again – the American reduction of what should be a cold-blooded and scientific issue to yet another goddamn, motherfucking culture war.

Like all culture wars, it is predicated upon individual and ultimately consumer action (paired, of course, with plenty of online scolding) rather than any kind of collective effort. As far as I'm concerned, if you think that consumption choices can function as a form of activism, you're as big a fucking rube as the upper middle class cunt who goes to a protest so he can take his wife to The Cheesecake Factory again – the difference being is that the plastic straw-eschewer and the mask-reminder don't do active harm.

I can empathize. You're probably stuck at home, either laid off or working from the living room, stuck with your family members who grate on you, or stuck alone, trying desperately to stay positive, trying to not feel helpless, trying not to feel like you're on a rocket to the sun, and no one is offering any valid solutions. Whether you're aware of it or not, the complete neoliberal evisceration of public services has probably fucked you, and the political and executive classes as a whole don't give a shit about you. So you click a button in the vague hope that something, anything will happen, and it feels like a measure of taking control.

The desire to act, even if your actions are purely performative, is of course not limited to American soil. At my neighborhood market in Bangkok, staff were diligently requiring masks and temperature checks. Never mind that people were rubbing their mitts all over their faces, that the cheap thermometers were likely unreliable (and irrelevant for incubating cases), that there wasn't even a semblance of social distance, and that people were, y'know, eating. The performance was to be followed.

For what it's worth, given that it's a social norm in this part of the world, I've been wearing a mask in enclosed spaces, even though I know that given the way that the humidity accumulates and the fact that it's an ordinary cloth mask, it's probably more of a risk than wearing nothing, and even though I'll probably have to remove it to communicate with a cashier (you try speaking your third language through a thick cloth mask, my dudes). I follow the performative role, simply to reduce friction. Which is why we do a lot of things, really.

The sudden spike in popularity of Contagion points to the fact that in trying times, people need metaphor systems and structures in order to not feel like their clawing at the padded walls. I haven't watched it, and I don't particularly care to.

However, I did watch Roger Corman's 1964 masterpiece, The Masque of the Red Death, with gorgeous cinematography by Nicholas Roeg (who would later go on to direct, fucking my mind with the one-two punch of The Man Who Fell to Earth and Don't Look Now), and starring Vincent Price as the leader of a coterie of wealthy perverts who try to lock themselves behind palace walls doing shits-and-giggles Satanism and having weirdly joyless orgies, trying to hide from the plague ravaging the countryside. Villagers seeking refuge are shot, plots are made, survivors are few, and the Red Death comes for everyone.

This is the metaphor I prefer. Death stalks us all – you are fundamentally powerless as an individual in an impassive universe, and to deny the existence of death is to make yourself a grotesque. The illusion of control is a great lie, and the courtiers, merrily letting the people die, concerned with saving their own skin, suffer the same fate. Salvation is a fool's errand, whether from God or Satan, and heavens and hells are human creations.

Granted, this is pretty much textbook existentialism – something conspicuously absent from contemporary film, when you come to think of it – but it was somehow comforting to feel a bit less insane. Which, in turn, means that this was my own balm, my own narrative comfort. As was writing this.

On Rewatching Mad Men

And you thought you were binge-watching before.

I've been, too, but I've been focused on re-watching Mad Men, a show I've held pretty close to my heart since I was introduced to it by a remarkably shitty ex-roommate. I watched it, episode-by-episode, week-by-week, as we always used to, and finally got around to watching the whole thing again, the first time I've re-watched a drama in full (which like binging in general, is something the general populace as a whole does that I've never been very good at).

So I was treated to a dual experience, both the standard experience of revisiting a work from a previous stage of one's life, as well as the experience of viewing something in a completely new way, in this case in a condensed version, where the themes that Matthew Weiner and Co. chose to underline were starker, more obvious.

Spoiler alert, and all that.

Some things, of course, remained wonderful – the richness and depth of the characters and the very specific ways in which they change and evolve, the gorgeous cinematography informed by 1950s and 1960s American cinema, the dreamy montages presenting the characters' mundane lives in counterpoint, the occasional streaks of dark humor, and perhaps best of all, the slips into the surreal – dead characters reappearing, a suddenly empty elevator shaft.

(That's right, I used a gif from a popular TV show in its own right instead of using it as a pointless throwaway gag)

And simultaneously, I cringe even more at the glibly self-congratulatory moments were we the audience are reminded how much better the present day is than the past – the arrogant tobacco execs, the scene where a young Sally Draper wears a plastic dry-cleaning bag to play astronauts, and her mother stops her, only to tell her the laundry better not be on the floor, the way the camera lingers over trash left behind by the Draper Family after a picnic.

I can't speak to the historical accuracy of the show. I obviously wasn't in a New York office space between 1959 and 1970, and increasingly few people were. And since art trades in vibes more than facts, I hesitate to apply any kind of data-based analysis to what the show is or isn't, what it does or doesn't portray. What interests me is not the era itself, but the lens the showrunners chose to examine that era through.

One can be forgiven for thinking of the show as possessing a fundamentally progressive worldview. The script champions women taking a more assertive role within the office, and all of the major characters seem to be more or less on board with the Civil Rights Movement. By the end, they've all become sickened by the Vietnam War, and the struggles of the show's few gay characters are treated with real empathy.

But yet upon second watching, it all seemed like window-dressing.

The version of feminism that is proffered is the Lean In variety, one in which, being a girl-boss is seen as the transcendental goal, and the status quo is in no way meaningfully questioned. The characters often find themselves shattered by the contradictions in their own life, but those are problems resulting not from any kind of structural failings in the society in which they live, but by their interior psychodramas. And when each major character resolves those contradictions in the end – Peggy Olson finally opening her heart up to love with the dopey artist down the hall, Joan Harris starting her own company, Roger Sterling finally settling down with a woman his own age instead of chasing 20 year-old secretaries, Pete Campbell accepting a gilded corporate gig and returning to his family – they do so with a full commitment to the machine.

In probably the most noxious version of all, our hero, Don Draper, a man whose entire life is built on lies, finds salvation at a commune presumably modeled on the Esalen Institute (look it up, it was a major force for the boomer generation but has largely been forgotten), it is by saluting the sun on a cliff over the Pacific. The final scene closes. He smiles as he chants an Om, and the scene cuts to the famous 1971 Coke ad with the teenagers singing on the hilltop in Italy, the presumed message being that he returned to work at McCann-Erickson and thought it up.

“I did hear rumblings of people talking about the ad being corny. It's a little bit disturbing to me, that cynicism. I'm not saying advertising's not corny, but I'm saying that the people who find that ad corny, they're probably experiencing a lot of life that way, and they're missing out on something.” – Matthew Weiner, in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter

Nah, fuck that.

The end message is further evidence that only the worst parts of the '60s survived – the half-baked spirituality and Westernized version of Eastern religion, the mask of inclusivity covering up rapacious capitalism, a Whiggish faith in the inevitability of human progress, and the reduction of all human endeavor to individual choice and self-expression.

A sort of mediocre liberal centrism, the kind long since de rigueur in Oscar-noms, has become the standard perspective of American scripted television, at least in its “prestige” sector (reactionary programming now being confined to reality television and the sorts of fucking dumb “SALUTES TO OUR ARMED FORCES” that I skip over whenever I torrent an NFL game). Few are the shows – The Wire and Deadwood being two magnificent examples – that take an honest look behind the curtain.

With the first episode, featuring lots of idiotic old boys' club joking designed for the audience to be horrified by, I was afraid that Mad Men would become another thing, like so many others, that was ruined for me. I may have liked The Breakfast Club when I was 16, but it's fucking unwatchable now. I've been told not to re-watch Dead Poets' Society, and I have no intention of doing so.

But here's the thing – regardless of the many eye rolls, Mad Men is still a joy to watch. Each character is treated with real empathy, even at their worst, and I'm rooting for them, dammit! Certain sequences still took my breath away as much as they did when I first watch them. I take far more umbrage at the notion that art must contain a correct perspective (I'm listening to Wagner right now, for the-Christ-I-don't-believe-in's sake), than the various sins of the showrunners

 

The Flight of the Black Swan

Chances are that when you hear the word “tropical breeze,” you think of the rustle of palm fronds, the billow of a floral-printed skirt, white sand, a sun-dappled sea, distant laughter.

You're not likely to think of a Saturday night on Sukhumvit Road, an abnormally strong wind thick with tropical humidity, doing nothing to ameliorate the heat, nothing to refresh. It's a couple of hours before all malls, restaurants, and bars are ordered to close, and quite a few places are still open, trying to get a last bit of trade before the tough times begin.

The staff at the malls are dejected, trying to shutter their shops. The escalator stirs to life as I place my foot at the base.

In August, the katabatic wind known as the Foehn blasts out of the Alps, turning people – according to legend, at least – to migraines, wifebeating, suicide, murder, a phenomenon known as the Foehnkrankenheit. It is a meteorological brother to the Santa Ana winds of Southern California, shown to lead to the dispersion of the spores of the fungus Coccidoides, which grows in the lungs, primarily asymptomatically, but causing pneumonia in those with weakened immune systems.

The trains have emptied, traffic is reduced, the Chinese tourists are gone, and if it wasn't so damn ominous, you'd say, on this Saturday night, that Bangkok had never been more livable.

A go-go bar plays pounding music, neon lights flashing for no one, a woman in a gold lame and pancaked skin whitener pouting desperately for me to come in.

I step into an izakaya around the corner where the staff are mostly milling around, a handful of customers remaining. Sitting next to me, a chubby Japanese man shares a mackerel and a beer with a transsexual hooker, the two attempting to banter in equally broken English, each dropping a few lines of the other's native tongue in. She gets a bit frustrated as the price negotiations begin. She manages to get him to agree to 7,000 baht, and then gives him her bank account number for him to transfer money to.

Camgirls must be making a fortune right now.

The nice woman in my bed turns over under the duvet and puts a Taylor Swift song on her phone, and threatens to cough on me if I change it. “It was fun,” she says, and gives me a perfunctory kiss on the way out the door. I still drink the last of the bourbon she wanted in her morning coffee that she'd left in the mug on the patio table.

I was going to go to China to see my sister, tuck into Sichuan hotpots, climb holy mountains. That obviously got canceled. I was going to go to Sri Lanka to explore tea plantations and colonial alleyways. That got canceled too.

“War, war, war. This war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this Spring, I get so bored I could scream!” – Scarlet O'Hara

I hunker down. I'm supplied with gin, frozen duck breasts, dried lentils, and jasmine tea. My Internet connection is good, and there's relatively little work to do from home – something that will change in a few months as every company in the world will be passing liabilities around like a hot potato. In the hot season my pool is cool in the depths and warm at the surface.

At night, every light in the Banyan Tree Hotel is off. It stands there like the black monolith from 2001 at the end of the bed.

I shut my laptop and collapse into a restless sleep, only to wake up the next day, my sheets twisted, my heart pounding, to the chirps of the orioles.

On Losing Friends

Years ago, I heard a comedian – no memory of who it was, for years I thought it was Bill Burr, but I couldn't find a record of Bill Burr saying it – that aging was like a program that ran behind Windows that you didn't notice.

It's something I've been thinking about as it becomes increasingly difficult to justify myself as a “young person” in any meaningful way. Not that I ever found youth all it was cracked up to be, but it was at least a reassurance, a reassurance that something could change, that no matter how shit things were right now, they could somehow be better.

And the cult of youth is, of course, one of the major myths of late capitalism, the idea that no matter how old you are, you have the ability to feel young. Ask your doctor if Cialis is right for you.

Everyone knows, intellectually if not intuitively, about the downsides of getting older. About the wrinkles, the expanding waistlines and sagging cheeks and breasts and ballsacks, the introspection, the hangovers, the sense of failure and unhappiness with one's own success, the realization – another quote I can't attribute – that one will never play the Prince of Denmark.

But what I wasn't told was how many people you'd wind up no longer talking to, and the odd realization, one night when you're at home, alone, and you hear a certain song from five, ten, fifteen years ago, and you thought about a party you'd gone to, a camping trip you'd gone on, a dumb thing you said in class in high school and their response, and the first thing that comes to mind in your internal monologue is “what the hell happened to them?”

You lose friends to marriages and kids, to the difficulties of trying to make two lives into one, to the need to keep those kids clothed and fed.

You lose friends to addiction, whether they've OD'd and departed this planet or simply disappeared into the ether, last heard talking about their new demo tape somewhere in Portland.

You lose friends to mental illness, because maybe they disappeared into their parents' basement in Kansas City, only emerging to pick up a pack of Pall Malls at the Kum and Go, or an eighth from a guy they knew in community college, or maybe you just lose them to a garage filled with monoxide fumes.

You lose friends because you were an asshole to them and still think you're in the right, at least to the extent that you don't forgive them, and you can tell your current friends when you show up to the same party that “it's a little awkward.” The two of you had both had too much Bushmills that night when you'd fallen out, and neither of you were on your best behavior.

You lose friends to ideologies and religions, to their newfound faith in the Pentecostal Christ or anarcho-primitivism, and their Facebook wall is suddenly filled with oddly interpreted scripture quotes or something about how a keto diet saved their life.

You lose friends to careers as financial analysts and psychiatric nurses, their 14-hour days eating through their free time, and you wonder if they're happy with these arrangements, and maybe they are and maybe they're not, but on the rare occasions you see them, you realize that the two of you have nothing left to talk about, and you see in their eyes that they know it too.

You lose friends, probably not many, to fame and/or fortune, and you realize that you represent a past step in their life, a step on the way to somewhere else.

You lose friends to what you call “drifting apart,” but which is you really just being bored with or pissed off at one another, and neither of you being able to expend the energy to call the other out on it, both of you ultimately subject to your own inertia.

You lose friends to their moving back to Idaho Falls to take care of their aging father, all of their social connections drying up as they pay more attention to long calls on hold with insurance companies and the arrangements of feeding tubes.

You lose friends to a boyfriend you consider to be abusive, but she says he's just insecure and that deep down, he 's really a good guy. You didn't want anything to do with him after the last time you saw him, his last post-midnight blowup at an Uber driver.

You lose friends to an eyeroll from your wife after you say you're going over to his house to play video games and smoke weed, and however that judgment plays out in terms of your self-loathing, your love for your wife, your occasional contempt for your friend.

You lose friends to not being able to face another night out, and looking in the mirror at the lines that will eventually become the crow's feet around your eyes.

You lose friends to the look the snide look they gave you when you said you'd done too much coke last weekend.

You lose friends because of the fucking werewolf they turned into when they'd done too much coke last weekend. Or the vodka-soaked mess you left them in the last time you saw them, and the apologies you had to make to the waitress. Or the way you saw them after they'd had a vodka-soaked mess, hungover and having a cigarette on the corner outside a cafe with $4 Bloody Marys at brunch, and their incomprehensible rant about every fucking asshole in this town.

You lose friends to suddenly realizing they've deleted their Facebook account and you didn't have another means of reaching them, even though you have enough mutual friends that it wouldn't be too much effort to find another means of contact.

You lose friends because the only reason the two of you were friends in the first place was because you were stuck in the same shitty little town and roughly the same age, so fuck it, might as well hang out.

You lose friends to the 50 bucks they promised to pay you back, and the fact that the next time you saw them they were ordering 15 dollar cocktails.

You lose friends to the fourth lie you caught them in.

You lose friends to the way they tried to kiss you that one night. Or the way you tried to kiss them. Or the way you kissed, and then fucked, and then went for brunch, and that was it, and you don't know what to make of it.

You lose friends to prison, and the military, and the way they are when they come back from prison or the military.

You lose friends even when they're still in contact, and you wonder if it would be awkward to contact them out of the blue.

You lose friends because they picked up rugby or homebrewing or samba dancing, and that's all they do now, and all their friends do the same, and their Instagram is only rugby or homebrewing or samba dancing.

You lose friends because they went back to school, and their life now consists of long nights working on their night-school undergraduate degree or their dissertation and the vague hope that all of this might someday be worth it, when they have to somehow have to help the kids with their homework and do their own homework.

You lose friends because they messaged you too much and you internalized the Will Rogers line about how you'd never want to be part of a club that'd have you as a member.

And, perhaps most of all, you lose friends because you were never really friends to begin with, and the thinnest of barriers was enough to separate you.

***

And then you're back to those memories of them, of the things that separated you, almost as much as what connected you to begin with, maybe more.

This of course supposes that this was an act of agency on your part, when it quite likely wasn't. You only know your perceptions. You only see an unanswered message, only hear an unflattering remark. And you wonder how many boxes on the list of rationales for distance you tick, and for how many people.

A quick glance through social media reveals the ghosts of your past, transfixed in present time.

I should point out that I'm generally terrible at keeping up with people over electronic means, which at the end of the day seem all too ephemeral to form anything other than a tenuous connection, even if I know that if I was to see a certain person face-to-face, five years after we'd seen each other, that within half an hour it would be as if no time had passed at all.

And I know that if I was to see other people, it would be like the two of you looking at distorted versions of one another. We slowly change, until, like photocopies of photocopies, we are no longer recognizable as such. We could be in the same room, invisible to one another.

But at the end of the day, I mostly feel like the same person, even as the rest of the world blurs and shifts.

And so I have to wonder will I ever become unrecognizable to myself?

Global South

It's hard when traveling through those parts of the world loosely described by optimists as developing, by less-than-optimists as underdeveloped, by cold-warriors as the Third World, by the vaguely left academy as the Global South, not to feel as if one is in the human zoo. Sure, people, travel to learn, but it's really not that different than an updated version of Victorian slum tourism as was practiced in the East End of London and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And I mean that on multiple levels. Not only were those well-heeled inhabitants of Belgravia and Central Park East interested in seeing how the other half lived – the poor dears! – there was also a libidinal aspect to it. Given the staid, conformist restrictions of late Victorian mores (notwithstanding the spiritualist-rituals and erotic-spanking underbelly), they wanted an antidote to bourgeois dullness, an environment of real risk and sexual frankness, some kind of transcendental link to a supposed core of human experience and earthy humanity that had been obscured by arguments over the proper way to instruct one's maids to fold the napkins.

So it is with backpackers today, and I regrettably have to include myself in their ranks, despite my protestations to the contrary at the time. It was what I was doing. When I first went to Cambodia, for example, it was largely because it was about as dissimilar a place from my middle-class, middlebrow, Middle-American hometown as I could imagine. I wanted to go someplace where the veil would be lifted.

I was in Satun Province, in the far south of Thailand, where I was to spend time with the Sakai, the indigenous forest pygmies of the Malayan Peninsula. Looking nothing like the surrounding peoples – ebony-skinned, with tightly curled hair, closer in appearance to New Guineans than East Asians, they lived in a somewhat fugitive state, trying, with limited success, to preserve the lifeways of their ancestors.

Giggling Thai schoolchildren whispered and took photos. Which was gross, but not nearly as gross as the fact that the village was filled with our shit. Plastic 7-Eleven bags, the butts of cheap Thai Tobacco Monopoly-branded cigarettes, crumpled toilet paper.

Repeat for Myanmar, Cambodia, the Philippines, Mexico.

This is the pattern of the Global South, as seen time and time again. Despite the vast differences in geography and religion, a certain typology emerges.

Barking dogs and roosters pecking at the ground, young men squatting close to the dirt, pausing in the day's work, tossed-aside cups of instant noodles, adorable children with dark eyes and skinny legs laughing and playing and running around in broken rubber sandals, flickering TVs playing the sort of broad-stroke entertainment beloved throughout the less irony-damaged parts of the world (the soap operas and variety shows that Americans have long-since eschewed in favor of pre-hated reality shows), men with bruised faces wearing t-shirts advertising Harley-Davidson dealerships in San Antonio, old women chewing something mysterious, plastic bottles filled with local hooch, the cinder-block homes of wealthier residents, and the universal smell of burning waste on a hot day, bamboo and coconut shells and firewood mingled with polystyrene.

Critics of globalization like to claim that late capitalism engenders a monoculture, a Shake Shack on every continent, what the French like to call “coca-colonization.” I've always been rather skeptical of that argument – while every local pattern of life is going to be inevitably altered, it's not necessarily going to mean that everything is going to look like a third-ring suburb of Chicago. Rather, if there is a monoculture resulting from globalization, this is what it looks like.

As rates of profit tend to fall, the forces of capital inevitably need to seek markets deeper and deeper into the Global South, and ideally add a few hundred million to the reserve army of labor. This isn't development along the Japanese or Korean model, where rural regions were developed with intelligent, long-term planning. This is the vulgarity of rent-seeking, regulatory capture, predatory lending from both institutions in the Western world as well as local loan sharks, the hand-greasing and wholesale buyout of local politicians, hell, whole states. Of ceaseless exploitation of natural and human resources with absolutely no consideration given as to who that affects and in what way.

If birthrates and economic patterns are anything to go by, then this will be a truer representation of our planetary future, by and large, than anything else: an empty sachet of Nescafe on a burning fire in the steamy tropical dawn.

In the Islands

This is how it went.

I arrived in Manila early in the morning, sleepless, with an upbeat taxi driver, vaguely Latin-sounding radio in Tagalog announcing NBA games (“Kyrie Irving, wowwww!!!”), before segue'ing into what I have long-known in Bangkok as “Filipino karaoke music,” those cheesy '80s power ballads that have been completely forgotten in the rest of the world, but remain close to the hearts of the 100 million-odd inhabitants of this benighted archipelago. The sun is rising, and Starship's 1987 number 1, “Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now” is playing. The kick drums come in, and Grace Slick starts to sing.

“Let 'em say we're crazy, I don't care about that

Put your hand in my hand, baby don't ever look back”

We come down off the freeway into a tangle of shacks and machine shops and freeway exits and railway sidings, and as we pull into our first stoplight, a gang of street urchins surround the taxi on all sides.

“Let the world around us fall apart”

“Lock the door! Lock the door!” the cab driver screams. I'm slamming the manual locks down, reaching over my luggage.

“Baby we can make it if we're heart to heart!”

The American-style street signs with Spanish names are smeared with smog, nine-story high slum towers spiral above us, tiny shops on their ground floors, young men of questionable mental capacity squatting on the curb, staring into the distance with vacant expressions.

“And we can build this dream together, standing strong forever, nothing's gonna stop us now!”

That is what set the tone for Manila. Mabuhay, motherfucker.

It is a city of greasy noodles and traffic-choked streets, Diego Rivera-type murals and hand-painted signs alternating with gorgeous mid-century graphics on the billboards, screaming transsexual hookers on Adriatico Street, cheery groups of youths harmonizing Taylor Swift songs and playing guitars at early morning coffee stands, jeepneys painted in peacock tones announcing “CHRIST IS KING!,” solitary teen mothers on park benches, the only other Westerners being beer-gutted American expats sweating through their tucked-in polo shirts, a cathedral full of schoolboys screaming English-language hymns with the lyrics on video screens, and ruin after ruin after ruin, dating from the Golden Age of Spanish exploration to just last week.

But the Philippines in general are an assault on the senses, and I say this who has spent years in Southeast Asia. It is a riot of color, a sublimely beautiful landscape subjected to every form of destruction known to man – earthquakes and volcanoes, typhoons and tsunamis, mudslides, insurrections both Maoist and Islamist, countered by even more horrifying state violence, most recently in Rodridgo Duterte's death squads sent for small-time drug offenders, political clan wars, petty street crime, far less petty mass-scale exploitation by the insulated, grotesque ruling classes (safely ensonced in the freakishly clean, heavily policed, Singapore-aping streets of Makati and Bonifacio) with the quiet backing of countless Chinese- and American-based multinationals, a vicious Spanish colonial regime, the suppression of Emilio Aguinaldo's revolt by the American “commonwealth,” the corrupt dictat of Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe-collecting wife, the naval assault on Corregidor, the largest naval battle history in the Leyte Gulf, the soldiers left by the wayside on the Bataan Peninsula, and in the case of Manila, wholesale destruction, a city savaged, bombed, and gang-raped into oblivion by both the retreating Japanese army and the American bombers at the end of World War II, leaving a city of smoldering craters and cordite-scarred marble Virgins Mary wondering what became of their shrines.

The Catholics came in the Spanish colonial quest for gold and soul, and they imprinted the ideals of Spain at the height of the Inquisition on the populace, bringing with them the icons of Medieval Catholicism, the eerie-eyed doll that would become the Santo Niño of Cebu, and the dark-faced Christ figure that would become the Nazareno Negro of Manila, and the combination of religious zeal and bodily mortification that continues to play out in the processions of penitentes flogging themselves, in the men who crucify themselves each year during Holy Week on the high plains of Pampanga, blood and sweat hitting the volcanic-ash soil in the height of the hot season.

Then came the Americans, winning the islands in William Randolph Hearst's manufactured war, Rooseveltian men with bushy mustaches in broad-brimmed cavalrymen's hats suddenly filling the islands, occupying the country for a few decades with all the brashness of a newly ascendant empire, leaving a city plan for Manila modeled on Chicago – subbing Manila Bay for Lake Michigan, and Roxas Boulevard for Lake Shore Drive, along with streets named Taft and McKinley, Forbes and Lawton, Babbittian institutions like the Rotary Club and the Jaycees, diners and art deco hotels and billboards taken straight from Humphrey Bogart film noir, archaic English-language first names left as if preserved in amber from the Coolidge administration, men named Archie and Gilbert, women named Edith and Daisy, along with odd constructions that sound like English names but which aren't, “Marzee” and the like, along with a taste for Hormel corned beef and Del Monte canned pineapple, the Jackie Gleason diet still going strong.

And so the whole country becomes a whirlwind tour of the 20th Century in all of its disastrous unfoldings.

Yet as soon as you get out of Manila, the country reveals itself to be a marvel. I ran into relatively few international tourists. Most of those that come stick to the beach towns of the South, Coron and El Nido, Puerto Princesa and Boracay. I was alone as I walked along the rim of the volcanic caldera in Tagaytay, overlooking the island on a lake on an island on a lake on an island. I was alone as I walked through the streets of Taal lined with ancient, earthquake-proof houses with oyster-shell windows and whitewashed arcades, the belfries of its Spanish basilica crumbling, ancient women in dresses with leg-of-mutton sleeves fanning themselves in the doorways. I ran into few other tourists in the rice terraces of the Cordillera that tumble down the sides of the deliriously high mountains like giants' stairwells, or in Sagada, where coffins are perched on piney cliffs, or in cozy Baguio, another town planned by the Americans and heavily bombed during the war, where I sat in the appropriately named “Cafe by the Ruins,” where elderly Filipino bohemians drank coffee brewed with cardamom and listened to Joan Baez, where I ate freshly made sweet potato rolls and local buffalo cheese and chocolate rice porridge to stave off the evening chill.

In 1884, a graduate of the local merchant marine academy from the Ilocos region in the Northern Philippines named Juan Luna de San Pedro y Novacio Ancheta went to Madrid to show his painting Spoliarium. He followed the old Spanish style of bloody and aquiline saints, of chiaroscuro and martyrdom, as pioneered by El Greco, Velazquez, and Goya, and painted the dead gladiators of the Roman Colosseum being stripped of their armor and dragged through the sand.

It hangs on the first floor of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rizal Park, near where the park's namesake was executed for his resistance against the sclerotic Spanish regime, where it stands as a metaphor for a long-suffering people struggling for freedom.

And yet when I looked at it on that sweltering day it still seemed hopelessly modern. The incomparably sweet, wonderful people with whom I drank shots of gin and San Miguel beers, the betel-chewing guitarists who bade me to sing Merle Haggard songs with them, the balut vendors who chuckled as I tried to suck down a half-formed duck fetus in the shell on the streets of Ermita, I saw them all in the painting.

I don't put much stock in the Bible, but it comes to mind when I'm in a Catholic country, and I'm always struck by Ecclesiastes 1:9.

“The thing that has been, it is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.”

And it says something that in 2019, I see the greatest of truths in a 140 year old painting of a dead gladiator and the weeping Christians in the catacombs beneath Rome.

Pictures of Vietnam

To write about Vietnam seems, at first, to be an impossibility. They've said it all, haven't they? A million travel blogs, novels, war correspondents? Every metaphor is exhausted, every photograph is taken, whether that was napalmed children running along a road in Tay Ninh Province in 1972, or a British Instagrammer posing in front of the setting sun over the spires of Ha Long Bay in 2019. #wanderlust.

And so, before I went to Vietnam, I had in my mind a set of images, the ones everyone who travels a lot has – the rice farmers in conical hats, the Haussmannized boulevards lined with little cafes serving syrupy sweet coffee, along with the older photos, the burning monks and the choppers on Saigon rooftops.

And yet what was most conspicuous was the prioritization of those more recent photos over the older ones, the absence of the history that has etched the name “Vietnam” in the American imagination. There are traces everywhere – the memorials to the fact that this was once the village of My Lai, that this was where the French came a cropper at Dien Bien Phu, the prison cells at Hanoi's Hoa Lo, with captions about the “serenity” of downed American fighter pilots who were held there (including photos of a visit by the late douchebag John McCain), a concrete bunker in the middle of a rice paddy somewhere near Da Nang, the gaps in the French-built cantilevers of the Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi, the occasional dusty case in an old museum captioned with the Politburo verbiage of another era (“The poison of reactionary culture of US-Quisling troops”), the mention that a temple had been a Viet Cong Hospital, the sight of an occasional Agent Orange victim.

But ultimately these are vague traces, hidden behind the present, like a painting painted over.

One goes to the imperial citadel of Hue, or rather, what's left of it after the bombing of the city as part of the Tet Offensive, and most of what you see are reconstructions resembling a Disney version of the Nguyen Dynasty, with barely a word as to their destruction. Or to the fact that to a generation of Westerners, their main knowledge of Hue came from the last scene of Full Metal Jacket, Matthew Modine belting out the Mickey Mouse Club theme as he marches through the burning city.

And when the remnants are made apparent, they are transformed into other tourist attractions, more things to see, more moments of sublimity for the shutter-happy traveler. You go to the Hanoi Hilton as part of the standard things-to-do-in-Hanoi list. Whole tourist shops are dedicated to propaganda posters.

So I spent a bare minimum of time encountering the recent past. What was presented to me was the mythic past, the trading city of Hoi An, old Confucian temples, the self-conscious romance ingrained in the French colonial architecture, the folkways of Hmong villagers on display in Sa Pa. The past that is presented with enough distance that the present can approach it without apprehension.

And as for the present, I can't hate. I can think of few better ways to enjoy the dusk than to sit by the Hoan Kiem Lake with a glass of bia hoi and a plate of sauteed clams.

Or any of the other moments of loveliness and transcendence – the rainfall on ancient cedars, plates of pigeons nested in fresh herbs, an old cannon fort on top of an island, crumbling concrete overlooking a crumbling limestone landscape, eating at by the relentless interaction of acid and base, whispering palms on beachsides, the delight of local hooch served in a reused water bottle, sliced green figs and starfruit, the pattern of the sun through the brise-soleil, the crusty old waiter who only addressed me in French – “l'addition, monsieur” – and the woman singing a Vietnamese-language cover of France Gall's “Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son,” the almost certainly false presumption that a gorgeous Vietnamese woman getting into a taxi on a Friday night in Hanoi was smiling at me.

I travel for two reasons: the first is the understanding.

There's the Gauguin painting of Tahitian natives that I always keep in mind, undoubtedly in my mind my favorite Gauguin, possibly the strangest of his paintings, with the cryptic phrase, equally cryptically capitalized and punctuated, written in the upper left-hand corner:

D'où Venons Nous

Que Sommes Nous

Où Allons Nous

Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

To travel is to position oneself in the grand arc of history, geological, biological, anthropological, sociological, psychological. Not to answer the question, but to extend one's understanding of the question itself.

But the second reason is also embedded in the painting, in the sheer sensuous delight of it.

That second reason is what I found in Vietnam, as cliché as it might be. And the knowledge that memory, as cursed as it can be, is the one thing the bastards can't take from me. I can always spend my time among the arabesques of my past, point to point, city to city, mountain to mountain, sea to sea. In 20 years' time, I might be keeping out the acid rain, three months' behind on my rent, holes in my shoes in a city threatened by the rising tide. But I'll have that bia hoi and those clams.

On one of my last days in the country, I climbed to the top of a hill on Cat Ba Island, only to find my intended location, an old cannon fort, closed. “Hey,” some French tourists called at me, “go up that path instead.”

I climbed up a rough trail, past the graves of the workmen who built it, to a new transmitter station embedded in the concrete of part of the old fort, a relic of the colonial era, with a view to the hundreds of tiny limestone spires below, the boats. I sat alone with the dust and the sun, amid the ruins for nearly an hour, not wanting to leave for anything in the world.

The two pictures intersected, old and new. And somewhere in my mind I knew it.