While waiting for my pizza at the Durbar Marg Pizza Hut, I was contemplating this situation: How a Nepali woman would feel, dressed conservatively in sari and heavily bangled, and having to remove all that glass jewellery as well as her sandals, and then either 1) get scanned with a machine that shows her entire body to a TSA employee (and possibly all on the internet), or 2) get a “pat down” from a TSA employee where her genitals are touched, just in case she had hidden a bomb there.
But then I glanced over at the newspaper with this headline: North Korea Attacks South Korea - Again! This was enough to derail my brain from porno scanners and groping security guards to a slightly more serious subject, World War III.
I don’t know about you, but I grew up watching all 256 episodes of M*A*S*H over and over again on late night television. For those that missed the show, it was a sitcom about a US Army surgical unit during the Korean War, complete with Alan Alda and a laugh track. Its how most Americans born after 1950 learned about the conflict between N. Korea and the United States – a conflict that’s still not resolved to this day.
My favourite episode is titled “Hawkeye,” where Hawkeye (played by Alan Alda) suffers from a head contusion after his jeep takes a tumble while traveling outside of the camp. The entire episode ensues with him being taken in by a Korean family, and he has to constantly talk to keep himself awake and from possibly collapsing into a coma from the head bump. The irony of this episode is that Alda delivers a 24-minute monologue to a family that can’t understand a single word that he is saying.
But what Alda went on to say during his monologue, is pretty much what I’ve been talking about since moving to Nepal. A lot of (perhaps) undecipherable rantings about my growing up in America, about the nuttiness of living there, and about how different my new surroundings are here, as compared to “there”. I’ve even blown up a surgical glove and given that to a Nepali child as toy, just as Alda did during the episode of which I speak. Alda also talks to the native family’s ox and dog, which I have been known to do on many occasions while visiting villages here in Nepal.
Looking back, the similarities are uncanny, and make me wonder about the mistake made years ago when the US Immigration Service printed Seoul S Korea down as my place of birth when I had my passport last renewed (I was born in NYC by the way).
Coincidence? Perhaps. But as one revered Rinpoche once told me, “There are none.”
But what is perhaps more important then anything I’ve said so far in the above Alda-like monologue is this: Artillery shells can rain down on a small village in S Korea, and the world-at-large (including the villagers themselves) take this as common place, and nothing to get one’s knickers in an twist about.
The pundits say N Korea is just “crying like a baby to get attention”. One inhabitant of Yeonpyeong Island is quoted as saying “What do you expect, it happens all the time.” Cable news analysts are noting that a war with N Korea would be a good thing right now, as a renewed conflict on the Korean peninsula would boost the US economy up a needed notch or two.
Even if the latest incident over the Korean DMZ were to fade from the headlines as fast as these skirmishes usually do, our complacency as a global society over such behaviour is appalling.
If any TV war drama needed a good laugh track, this would be the one – to include the episodes folding up in Iraq/Afghanistan, as well as the one unfolding in Korea right now. Even if the latest incident over the Korean DMZ were to fade from the headlines as fast as these skirmishes usually do, (remember the S Korean warship destroyed just a few months back?) our complacency as a global society over such behaviour is appalling. Just as is our complacency over being bombarded by who-knows-what-rays at any given international airport, or being groped by airport security guards, all in the name of “Post 9/11 Security Theatre.”
So I wonder, is there a connection between our lack of united willpower to stop artillery from raining down on children going to school, and in our lack of imagination when thwarting terrorism by checking the inside of baby diapers before the tots board planes? In the words of Rinpoche, “Everything is connected.”
And if that’s true, that our loss of personal freedom and privacy is connected to the human race’s inability to act as a global peacekeeping force, then perhaps there is one more connection to consider: Why is my Pizza Hut bill for a “small pizza with extra cheese” well over Nrs.1000? [Queue theme from “The Twilight Zone,” then fade to black]
Writer is quirky kinda expat happily living in the Kathmandu valley with Nepali family, friends and a very large dog – and is worried that the price of pizza could start World War III
herojig@gmail.com
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