Krap. It was a word you heard on average about every 15 seconds in Thailand. In its longer form, kop khun krap, it meant thank you. The shorter krap meant please. It popped up at the end of nearly every sentence uttered by anyone with any manners here. People even said it when answering the phone, as a hello.
Cell phone etiquette hadn’t really caught on yet in Thailand, so people still tended to yell into them, as if the fact that the thing had no wire coming out of it meant you had to shout harder to be heard on the other end. Their phone would ring (a deafening Casio-tone blast of the latest pop song) and they’d grab it and scream, "Krap?"
"Yes!" he always wanted to shout back,. "Krap!!"
Back in the States they spelled crap with a C, and crap was what had driven him away from America in the first place: the crap on the TV, the crap that came in though the mail slot and out of the radio, the infotainment crap that passed for news. The billboards bombarded you with crap. People sold you crap online and down the phone. Countless catalogs and magazines were devoted to the stuff. People were simply mad about it. The sky over every exit on every freeway across America glowed with signs boasting the miraculous choice of crap on offer there. The fast food chains sold crap in all its varied and irresistible flavors. Every supermarket, mall, convenience store and discount chain was chock-a-block with it. And the armies of the obese, grown dull and thick on a steady diet of all this crap, spewed yet more crap into the air from their ridiculous, bloated SUV’s.
And just when you thought you had taken all the crap you could possibly stand, that’s when you were mistaken. Because late into the night, think tanks were hard at work envisioning new crap, better crap: The Crap of the Future! Though still in the conceptual stages, this theoretical new crap would be developed by designers, tested on focus groups, revised and refined by engineers, marketed by PR firms, and finally unveiled -- shiny, seductive and soon obsolete -- to a public ever hungry for ever more crap.
Yes, in America crap was king. Our schools were crap. Our health care system was crap. The President was full of it. In America, crap flowed seamlessly from manufacturer to distributor to consumer, passed quickly from tongue to anus, drained swiftly from toilet to sewer to river to sea. And the oceans were filling up with it. So much crap had been produced, in fact, that the sea level was actually rising. Soon all America would be awash with it, swimming in it, drowning in our own crap. Krap. He always half-thought of it as a misspelling of "crap," the way American businesses, in their pathetic attempts to be cute, would deliberately misspell their names: Kiddy Korner or Toys R Us or All U Can Eat Bar-B-Q. For some unknown reason the worst offenders of all seemed to be beauty salons. Every town in America had at least one. And all the names were despicable, running the gamut from dopey spelling to dopier puns: Klassy Kuts, A Cut Above, Hairs to You, and his own personal favorite, The Curl Up and Dye. He imagined women named Debbi and Krystal congratulating themselves on their Wildean wit.
More pathetic still was the linguistic butchery perpetrated on the language by hip hop acts with dumb-ass names like Fabolous and Masta Killa, Kurupt and 50 Cent. But this bugged him for a different reason. The "gangtas" did it as a fuck you to the system, which was fine. The problem was, it accomplished just the opposite. The product of a lousy public school system and worse neighborhoods, the rappers were flaunting their ignorance. "Look at me," they were saying. "I can’t spell fo’ shit, but look how many gold chains I got." Well, good for you, clown, but what about all your cousins back in the ‘hood for whom becoming a Hip Hop Impresario will probably never be a viable career option? Instead of using their big mouths to change -- or even challenge -- the system that had cheated them, they reveled in their ignorance, wore it as a badge of honor. It was all bitches and ho’s and fancy clothes. It was depressing. America was a country in which for most kids the only two roads out of the ghetto were to deal drugs or join the army.
The thing that bugged him more than the general acceptance of this shitty state of affairs was that these working class zeroes were getting rich while propagating the idea that staying uneducated was a really smart thing to do. Lucky for them, their fans were too ignorant to realize that they were being lied to. Maybe it didn’t really matter how you spelled the word Nigger; but not knowing how to spell it was a good way to make sure you stayed one. By glamorizing ignorance hip hop "artists" were ultimately only serving the interests of the government and the rich by perpetuating the cycle that kept poor people stupid, and kept niggas down. Just like the niggas back in Bushwick.
There were no two ways about it, living in Bushwick sucked, bigtime. Some people would have said that it was because he was white and privileged and middle class and he just didn’t belong there. They might have been right. But if one accepted this logic, it would have meant that anyone who happened to have been born poor was somehow genetically better suited to living in a shithole, and the evidence didn’t seem to bear this out. Nobody he had ever met in Bushwick seemed particularly smitten with the place. In fact, he got the distinct impression that they would rather have been anywhere else, would have left at the drop of a hat, given half a chance. This didn’t mean that they hadn’t in some way adapted to their environment; they had, but that didn’t make it any easier a place to survive.
In Bushwick, the first thing that struck you was the noise, the sheer volume of the sound that pervaded the place. The noise was the main thing that ground you down: the maddening, grating, ever present, soul-crushing roar of cars and busses, the clatter and shriek of the elevated trains, the speakers in front of the 99 Cent stores blasting hip hop, the trucks with their growling engines, their blaring horns and tortured brakes, the jeeps endlessly roaming the streets with bass bins bombing, the jets on the path to La Guardia rumbling across the sky with the false promise of somewhere else to go, somewhere else to be (please, God, anywhere but here!).
But for these people there was nowhere to go, no way out, and no escape from the noise. They could only try to ignore it, outstrip it, or blot it out. No one ever spoke in Bushwick -- they would never have been heard above the din. Instead, they screamed on the streets, they barked in the bodegas, they shouted on the subway, they bellowed into cellphones, they hollered in the hallways of the hospitals and the jails and the schools.
In Bushwick the schools were jails and the jails schools. He had seen the inside of both and they worked hand in hand. The schools were overcrowded, hot, violent holding cells for prisoners in training. The schools taught you that there was no hope without crime. The jails were training centers for young criminals: it was here that the kids made their real connections, where they networked, where they learned a viable trade. The only problem was this: the schools spit you out and the jails wouldn’t let you go.
It was all crap and he wanted no part of it anymore.
Jake,
What I'm ranting on about here is not free trade. I'm not anti-globalisation. C'mon, I read the bloody Economist, don't I? Socialist? Not sure. If you're talking about being in favor of socialized medicine or nationalized education, then yes, I am a socialist. If you're talking about lulling people into a grey assembly-line system of production and consumption with the illusion of choice, leading them ever forward toward a bland and more-productive future, I would call that 21st century capitalism.
What sickens me in this age of corporate sovereignty is the fast-encroaching homogenization of all products, places, and people. Sure, you are free to eat at McDonald's. You are also free to eat at Burger King, KFC or at whatever purveyor of mediocre, mass-produced meals that you want. The only problem is that, more and more, that's about ALL you've got to choose from. And it's all the same crap. I've witnessed the death of the "mom and pop" establishment, from diners in DesMoines to clothing stalls in Calcutta.
When I first started touring the US playing music about 20 years ago, you could still tell one place from another. Now you can drive clean across the country and see the same 20 logos hovering over every rest stop from sea to shining sea. And not content with the 'blandification' (if you'll permit my coinage) of our own country, we are rapidly exporting it to the rest of the world. Thousands of shopping malls, complete with Pizza Huts and Starbucks, are even now being constructed all across India. You can now buy a Big Mac in Bangkok or see Shrek 3 in Saigon. Hooray for the USA!
Soon there will be no point in traveling at all, except to see the ten or 20 pre-packaged tourist attractions that survive - all of them sterilized, mass-marketed, logo-spattered and crammed down your throat. Maybe we could save people the effort of traveling at all - I mean, it's dangerous out there! The world is full of terrorists who hate our guts! We could just make the whole thing into a ride, like at Disneyland, maybe call it something cute and catchy like Foreign World. If tourists can just cram their corpulent carcasses into some kind of "ride", then the whole world - along with its quaint people and their weird habits and strange ideas and extinct animals - can simply float past the consumers as they suck down supersized slurpies in air-conditioned comfort.
The white people I mean. Everyone else will be working behind the counter selling those slurpies, because their government couldn't be bothered to provide them with a decent education. People are much easier to control when kept ignorant; ask any dictator: bread and circuses. But why should I care, as long as I don't have to get my leg blown off fighting a war for the oil companies, or work on the corner selling cheeseburgers or crack cocaine? That's how it's supposed to be, right? The natural order of things?
Posted by: Tod A | November 17, 2007 at 09:53 AM
Great writing! I don't know that i have the hatred for the portions of our fascist system that are actually fairly close to free trade that you do, though. You have to understand that people gravitate towards the crap, but even so, if I am free to buy a McDonald's hamburger, I am also free to buy resveratrol and well-made baigan bharta. Not so, under socialism (as perhaps both the economist and your recent trip to the kibbutz might indicate). All told though, you could make the worst philosophy in the world into art that a die-hard pro-free-trade capitalist can enjoy. So while I have another beer with FEAR, I hope you can enjoy the other side of the world.
Posted by: Jake Witmer | November 17, 2007 at 06:21 AM
Wow. 0145 and I have heaps to do tomorrow, but only a power cut will stop me reading everything you have posted here, just like only circumstance will stop me from collecting as much of you music as i can find. Started that book yet? Snap snap.
Posted by: Mark Lomas | February 01, 2006 at 10:55 PM