Thursday, Jan. 31st 2008: Siem Reap, Cambodia

Well, I am going to start again. The last little bit got erased, so here goes.

This trip has been a mind altering one to say the least. I have read the"Killing Fields"about Dith Pran and Sydney Schanberg from the New York Times; and "The Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields"edited by Dith Pran, a Cambodian survivor of the Killing Fields. It is hard for me to understand the absurd devotion they had for their enterprise which was an attempt to restructure the Cambodian society along some fancied imaginary lines of the make-believe society. I have said it before and I will say it again, I think it was an orgy in the true sense of the word. Once they started, they did not want to stop. It was the Vietamese who made them stop in 1979. I imagine that genocides all over the world are fairly similar in their brutality. This Cambodian genocide was different in its intensity and belief that the world would just leave them alone to do their thing, so to speak. They did not count on geo-politics being able to deal with the situation at all.

So, when I return to Kathmandu, I will look at the situation there in a different way. They have a Maoist situation also that, so far, has remained in the rural areas and has not invaded Kathmandu. There are numerous UN people all over and they do have a certain authority over the situation, which is what it takes. Will the Nepalese Maoist challenge the UN order like the Cambodian Khymer Rouge did? At the moment, I do not think they will; but the American Ambassador is not so convinced. She has been witness to a number of intimidations of Americans living in the Kathmandu area and so have informed us to take this under consideration. I have spent a good deal of time thinking about it myself while being here in Cambodia. I think after I pack my place up and put it in storage, I am going to Sarawak, where I was a Peace Corps Volunteer.

So now, my duality is Kathmandu-Kuching.

And, of course, I am for Hillary Clinton winning the USA Presidential race because I think she has the best chance to deal with the economy, in particular. Of course, Barak Obama thinks only he can deal with the situation which seems to me to be a stretch given that he missed most of the votes when he was in the Senate. But, nobody is listening; people are only fantasizing what they want it to be. Most Americans think the credit crisis only pertains to the people who could not keep up their mortgage payments and we know who that is; they do not think it is symptomatic of some larger credit crisis in the global economy. This is the legacy of G. H. W. Bush.

These are my thoughts for today.