by Molly Ivors
I've generally been pretty serious here--depressing, even, leaving the snark to my better half--partly because I already have a blog to be stupid and goofy upon, and partly because, apparently, I'm not very good at it. Dunno. Plenty of people seemed to get the line I was shooting for, the shimmering field where the bitterly ironic becomes offensive, but others didn't, and for that I'm sorry.
As I write, the New York Times is announcing that the "Myanmar Monks’ Protest [Has Been] Contained by Junta’s Forces," as though the protests--a beautifully austere refusal of the alms upon which the monks depend--were something like an oil spill which needed to be boxed in before it could be cleaned up. The civilians carry on, in ever smaller groups, the Times tells us, partly because huge numbers of them have been shipped away, who knows where. But crowd estimates at the peak of the protests were estimated at about 100,000 in Rangoon (Yangon) alone.
As it happens, I know quite a bit about Burma and its history, something of a fluke in my educational trajectory which led me, for several years, into a deep study of Southeast Asia. And the story of Burma is heartbreaking, just heartbreaking. They suffered under the British (Orwell, anyone?) and then under the Japanese, and then, for most of their independent life, under military juntas so fierce and repressive that we don't know--no one really does, who isn't there--what happens there. I can talk about Aung San and Ma Ma Lay and the increasingly collusive Thai government (they had a military coup last year, remember) which has begun punishing the Karen and other border peoples, who used to be able to slip across the mountainous, elusive border when Ne Win's troops came looking for them, but who, increasingly, are facing a Thai government more interested in making nice with the junta than protecting innocent ethnic minorities.
So Burma, too horrifying to really face head on, becomes a joke. In About a Boy, Nick Hornby's not-quite-funny tale about the dangers of the endless extension of adolescence, The hapless Will attempts to give some meaning to his life by volunteering for Amnesty International, where he meets a superannuated hippie obsessed with Burma, and specifically, the imprisoning of a Burmese comedian. It becomes a throwaway line in a Monty Python sketch. (Granted, both these sources are British, and the humor may be an attempt to deal with a deep institutionalized guilt about their own collusion in the destruction of the Burmese people, but it's more complex than that: someday Thers or I will regale you with our theories concerning The Life of Brian and Bobby Sands.) Humor, then, becomes a defense, a way of pointing to the horror without saying "Gee, that's horrible." Because saying that is not only unnecessary, but also a reminder of just how horrible it is.
One of my regular tirades involves the representation of events in the non-Western world as interesting or influential only because of how they affect Westerners: The Killing Fields springs to mind (although the journey of the photographer through the Khmer Rouge Reeducation Camp does redeem the movie somewhat); The Year of Living Dangerously (another Asian photographer there); and HBO's appalling Tsunami: The Aftermath (Yet another photographer, the Teh Hott Thai fellow. One wonders if this is intentional: Southeast Asians aren't allowed to express themselves in words,just images, or to speak their experiences to anyone except the One Exceptional Westerner they befriend.). Indeed, my snarky invocation of Burma Shave was intended to point to the general ignorance of Westerners generally about Burmese history and issues. After all, Burmese Days was a long time ago, and even then the focus was primarily on Western attitudes. Beyond Rangoon, as I note in the post linked above, was something of an anomaly in the sense that the protagonist was female, but it still shared in this general drift. Still, it's not a bad film for what it is, and it probably taught more Americans more about Burma and Aung San Suu Kyi than they would have known otherwise.
I weep for the Buddhist monks and nuns of Burma, now imprisoned in their monasteries. I hope that they will not be cowed by the strength of the reaction to the assertion of their daunting moral authority and will continue to militate for justice. And I hope Aung San Suu Kyi, wherever she is, is still alive and well. I hope the Burmese people will be supported in their movement toward justice and democracy by the world -- and most importantly by China, one of Burma's few trading partners, but as such one of the few nations with any potential leverage over the junta (though Matthew Yglesias notes a useful skepticism on this point). I hope Burmese nationals in other nations, outside of Ne Win's influence, will keep up the pressure on their homeland. And I hope someday we will know what really happened there.
Without a trace of snark.
