The Horror...the Horror.

Phnom Penh Cambodia!! While I love S. Thailand, and Kuala Lumpur is special to me, and Bangkok full of great memories and hideous traffic, I think Phnom Penh is my favorite city yet. The only regret I have is flying into it instead of cycling. I'm now laughing at my earlier inexperience when I wrote about the chaos of Singaporian traffic. If chaos means no predictable order of patterns then Phnom Phen traffic is the epitome of chaos. Cars seem to go in any direction they please, red lights are loosely interpreted as stop or slow down a bit, and merging is a total random event. The only rules I can discern are... never actually stop moving, and size matters i.e. get the hell out of the way of anything bigger than you. So you can see why I would want to cycle this city so badly as I could flaunt any traffic laws and any laws of self preservation. But somehow it all works and the liquid flow moves slowly along the path of least resistance. Waiting for this flow to stop to cross a street would be foolhearty as it would never come. So while chanting my new Thai mantra of "They don't want to hit me, they don't want to hit me" I look straight ahead (never look into the eyes of a driver here it only confuses them and and that is not good when you are a potential speed bump) and begin the journey. The flowing machines and steel somehow part, and without quite knowing how you did it, you're on the other side of the street except with a big shaky adrenalin rush. In simply crossing the street, Elliott has found a sport more exciting and cheaper than skateboarding!
But I write through the eyes of an ex-cyclist who misses his frequent brushes with death or pain. Phnom Penh is so much more than insane roads of course. It is the beauty of fading french colonial architecture glowing warmly in the setting sunlight. Or a filthy night market smelling of fish and feces (a good name for a string quartet by the way), next to a woman cutting the heads off of live fish next to my nephew begging Samantha to video the gore. It is the amazing and genuine smiles of the people who, even though harrassing you endlessly to ride tuk-tuks or buy photocopied versions of lonely planet books, quickly lose the sales pitch and engage in warm conversations after you say "no" for the millionth time. As we chat, there is physical contact with an arm on the shoulder or elbow. Even the monks are touchy feely (but not in a creepy way so get your mind out of the gutter) as they instruct me in the 5 basic laws of Buddhism (like the 10 commandments only less filling). For a people who have had such a painful, horrible and recent history of genocide it is amazing! When people ask where we are from I say "America!" and (after the obligatory disclaimer that we have a horrible president) they almost always say what a great country it is. I have never considered lying about my nationality here even if this is the one place where I should have to!
The United States of America...what is it about our country? Since travelling in SE Asia and loving almost all of it (OK so Bangkok mostly sucks) I have come to appreciate things about my own county that I always took for granted. Things like toilet paper, traffic patterns, seat belts, the lack of constant harrassment, and emissions laws. Although I have to admit the toilet paper thing is over-rated as I've given up on it and prefer the pressure-wash of the wall bidet. I feel cleaner and fresher and god knows it feels like a fire hose after some of these flaming stools (also a good name for a band by the way) one has to suffer over here. So, while I do love home and my friends and family, The more I learn about our history the less respect I have for the U.S. OK, here we go...an angry rant.
In 1970, during the height of another pointless and unwinable major war (no not Iraq) my country began "secretly" bombing a soveriegn nation that was officially neutral in the area. Secret... unless you were Cambodian! North Vietnamese troops were using Cambodia as a way to get to south Viet Nam and also transporting weapons to be sure. Our response? Carpet bomb the country side in Cambodia hoping to stop the enemy. Hundreds of miles from the Viet Namese border, the United States was killing hudreds of thousands of innocent Cambodian farmers and villagers. Hmm, bombing soveriegn nations and thousands of dead innocent civilians...at least we won't make that mistake again! All this isn't new information to me of course, but what is new is just how that insane decision in that insane war set the stage for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pots genocidal rampage. In a very direct way we are responsible for the deaths of between 2 and 3 million people. People either executed, starved or worked to death. That figure (besides its unimaginable size) is freaky. How can these estimates be off by 1,000,000 peope? The Khmer Rouge were nothing if not meticulous record keepers and S-21, the Phnom Penh museum that was once a high school before being converted into a prison and torture center has thousands of organized, numbered photographs of prisoners that stare at you from a very recent and gruesome death. So where is the one-million-person-question-mark? In a country with a population of 7 million in 1975 we are talking about 40% of the population! Were they lost in the carpet bombs? Blown up in a landmine field ( as an aside...seven people died the other day trying to diffuse a few of the 4 million estimated landmines still buried here. And landmines have move down to #3 on the list of causes of death for Cambodians. By the way a warm round of applause for Bill Clinton who refused to sign an international treaty banning the use of landmines after almost every other nation in the world already signed it. But I'm OK with it because the national security of the United States is dependent on having small explosive devices under other countries' soil... kind of like oil Speaking of Bill Clinton, he just happened to be here in Phnom Penh last month. I wonder if he could look into the eyes or dropped a few Rial into the cups of the one legged beggars that are prevalent here)? Or is the million person question mark from the destroyed records of the psychopatically paranoid and insane Khmer Rouge? These inhuman people, who were just like you and me in any other situation, turned the clock back to the date "zero" to begin the great agrarian utopia. A utopia with a national anthem that goes something like..."Oh Kampuchea, with fields and roads awash in blood, let this blood of the peasant martyrs fuel the hatred..."etc. but with a lot more references to blood. Now here's a utopia I could party in! With anyone educated or tainted by the west now dead in a mass grave, we could invite Mao Tse Tung over for some old school ethnic cleansing. Oh crap, he died a state hero didn't he? Let's see...scratch Hitler off the list-suicide. Saddam...dead. Osama RSVP'd that he's still hooked up to dialysis and can't make it. Noriega-doing time in Florida. Nixon, who started this whole mess...died a crook. That leaves a bunch more on the long list but for the short list I'll just speed dial George Bush (OK both of them) and we can party among the pieces of clothing and bones that continue to poke up from the soil of the not yet totally exhumed mass graves just 12 kilometers from the capitol of Cambodia. Here, in just one of the 65 or so killing fields spread throughout the country, there are over 60 large mass grave pits that pot-hole the land. Every year the rainy season exhumes more bones that are left in the ground for us to walk over and on. Eight thousand skulls are on display here in a stupa built 13 stories high. Over half of the victims remain in the ground. It is sobering and sad and horrible. The horror of the Khmer Rouge...killing their victims with shovels etc. to save on the cost of bullets and turning up the music on the loud speakers to drown out the screams. The Khmer Rouge who, in the height of their paranoia attacked Viet Nam in 1979. Since they were anti-Viet Nam they were funded by...yeah, the U.S. government!! After the atrocities had been known to the world!! Am I angry? Hell yes! How can I not be angry and disgusted by the atrocities of war, of pointless bombings of civilians, of genocide and know that it was due to, in large part, my own government?!
Thank god that part of history for Cambodia is over and that Cambodians have the most amazing capacity for forgiveness on the planet. The old Cambodia that bordered Nazi Germany, Iraq and Crawford, Texas is gone and the new one is bustling and vibrant. We all owe it, literally, to come here and visit this amazing place and spend tons of our American dollars here. It's easy as it is the currency of choice here.