The party...
It was barely 2 p.m. and most of the crowd was already wasted. Bodies crammed into the bleachers, some on top of other bodies, always with room for one more. Drink a Taquina, smash the can, toss it over the side, crack open another. The crowd sways deliriously to queasy, flat blasts of trumpet and tuba. Most definitely a fire hazard.
The smell of thirty thousand armpits, maybe more. All baking in the sun, which I’m closer to than I’ve ever been. My skin is burnt within fifteen minutes. The parade marches on into its fifth hour. All kinds of intricate costumes, each more terrifying and bizarre than the next, with misshapen noses and exploding eyes, Picasso characters escaped from their portraits. They dance on for hours under the dry heat of the Andean sun, so close it barely weaves its way through the mountaintops. On the top row I’m a fountain of sweat. Inside the costumes after hours of dancing and hours more to go, somehow, a living human persists.
The women have it easier. They have the highest concentration of sparkles packed into the tiniest amount of clothing I’ve ever seen. Grizzled men slouch out on the pavement for the good view.
I’m sitting with all the other gringos. Every one of us has our cameras aimed at the parade, but the real spectacle is behind us. I look down over the side of the bleachers. A man urinates shamelessly on the sidewalk. An old woman collects smashed beer cans. Green mohawks and Spider Man masks. Argentinians with dreadlocks selling grass and coke. Children offering bags of water balloon for a peso, about 14 cents US$. For the first time in Bolivia I can’t spot a street dog anywhere. There’s no space.
Something hard smacks me in the back of the head and I notice I’m covered in water. The war has begun. During lulls in the parade, after the devils and angels and warriors and showgirls and brass bands have passed, water balloons and shaving cream fill the sky. I head out front with a friend to get a good position and buy a bag of balloons from a cute little girl. I spot my target across the street, a blonde-haired white woman in a blue parka with an oversized pair of sunglasses. She looks jaded. I hurl a lopsided, pair-shaped balloon in her general direction but hit some bro with a popped collar and seashell necklace instead. He lets out a yelp. Excellent. Him and his bro brigade spot me and we wage war for the next five minutes. My friend Cameron spots an elegant-looking bourgeois type in the third row. He lobs out a bulky, phallic balloon. The woman sees it coming. She uses her infant as a shield. This goes on all day and most of the night.
Out in the market the war is more brutal. Rag-tag children pop out from corners equipped with super-soakers. Balloons fly out of car windows in drive-bys. Every block is full of vendors selling water balloons, water guns, water assault rifles, and what appears to be shaving cream. I’ve equipped myself with two cans of the shaving cream. The rest of my team has balloons. We don’t have to look hard for a good fight. Gringos are prime targets, right up there with the elderly. We chase children all around the block. One boy tries to hide in his mother’s meat-on-a-stick stand. “No cerca la comida, por favor,” she says. “Yeah, no problem.” I pull the kid out into the street and spray an X across his face.
Walking back towards the hotel, I squeeze my way through the pulsating crowd. Suddenly my face is covered in shaving cream. I can’t see anything. “Viva Carneval!” someone shouts. I respond with a laugh. Then comes another spray. “No mas, por favor!” I say, waving my arms. I wipe the cream out my eyes. It stings a bit. Who knows what’s in this stuff. Later, too late, I check my pockets and realize my cell phone is gone. Awesome. Those guys are slick.
Says some dude in my textbook: “The function of Carnaval is to reaffirm, at regular intervals, the truth and presence of myths in everyday life.” That’s bullshit. The function of Carneval, at least what I saw of it, was to get drunk and make a loud mess surrounded by the rest of your country. That’s not to say the costumes and music weren’t stunning, because they were, but the “refined cultural tradition” is only one aspect of the mayhem that is Carneval in Oruro.
Oruro is the second craziest Carneval city in Latin America, next to Rio de Janeiro. Its population triples for the weekend. Carneval literally translates to carne (meat) vaal (good-bye). It comes just before the month of Lent when good Catholics are supposed to give up meat for a month. Basically it is a God-sanctioned excuse to party hard before being forced to behave. Not that Bolivians give up meat anyway.
...And the hung-over clean-up
Like all parties, there is a downside to Carneval. When this many humans get together and drink beer, a mess is inevitably made. I saw absolutely no trashcans whatsoever on the streets of Oruro, and afterward the results were evident. While I take no credit for more than my two beer cans, a fair share of water balloon shreds were definitely my doing.
Cochabamba, where I live, is not too different. The norm in Bolivia when finishing beer or candy bar is to toss the can or wrapper on the street. At Carneval, a team is paid to clean up over night. They don’t get everything, but they do an impressive job. In most cities though at most times of the year, trash builds up and up and up. Bolivia is a place of extreme beauty and extreme filth, often in the same scene.
The same is true of the water balloons we were all hurling with such glee. The plastic was a container for water, nothing more. Once the balloon popped, the water absorbed easily into the earth or evaporated into the air. But the plastic remains and will remain for millions of years or until burned and transformed into toxic gas.
In places like Bolivia, so-called “Third World” or “developing” countries, not much emphasis is placed on cleaning up garbage. As the poorest nation in Latin America next to Haiti, Bolivia is busy trying to pull its populace out of poverty. Trash is not a priority. Under every bridge is an ever-growing pile of junk, and floating down every stream is a collection of evidence for the downside of consumption.
“What a dirty place,” we from the First World say when we see places like this. But just because Bolivia’s filth is out in the open does not make it any more polluted than the rest of us. In the United States we produce much more waste per capita, but it is shipped away, out of sight. It’s like when my mom used to ask me to clean my room, and I just shoved everything under my bed or in an empty drawer. Just because our waste is in a landfill somewhere and not in our streets does not make us any cleaner, it just makes us in denial. I wonder how our mentality would change if we were more like Bolivia, if instead of throwing things in the trash we threw them in our front yard or on the floors of our kitchen, if we were forced to confront our trash every day and it didn’t just magically disappear at the curbside. Maybe someone should do a Supersize Me-style documentary where they keep all their trash in their house for a year to see just how much builds up.
But like I said, I was throwing just as many water balloons as everyone else. Probably more in fact. And what became of the pieces of plastic that used to be balloons but are now just kibble? Did I really need to condemn the Earth to eons of extra trash just so I could nail some booger-faced kid in one glorious, fleeting moment?
More and more I feel there is a disconnect between my theory and practice. I’m vegan and I don’t buy clothes from sweatshops any more. I voted for Barack. Great. But isn’t there always another step to take? Should I stop driving a car? Should I stop using electricity? Should I cancel my flight back to the United States? Really, how can one person justify using all that fossil fuel? Just for the sake of adventure, self-discovery, character building, yada yada yada. All of these phrases become ironic when juxtaposed with the amount of pollution emitted into the air on my account.
When is it enough?
I’m told there is a whirlpool of plastic twice the size of Texas in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s only a matter of time before we’re all sucked in.
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes that we have no obligation to help anybody else. If one wants to be a hermit and never speak to another human being, they are entitled to do so. But, Thoreau writes, we do have an obligation to make sure we are not actively hurting anyone, and that is much more difficult than helping. For this reason Thoreau stopped paying taxes, because he realized that just by being a citizen of the United States, he was contributing to the Mexican-American War.
Thoreau obviously went to jail for his actions. Isn’t that ridiculous? That society is set up so that to be what one considers to be a truly good person, one ends up in jail? Shouldn’t it be the opposite? I think people like Jesus, perhaps Gandhi too, were people who lived their lives according to their theories, their consciences, and it was because they had no fear of what the repercussions would be. They realized that nothing was as important as purifying themselves, for only then could they help others.
In The World is as You Dream It, John Perkins paints a more optimistic picture than I have so far. He writes about the importance placed on dreaming in small-scale societies in the Amazon and Andes. In the industrialized world, we use doctors to solve our health problems. In many non-industrialized societies shaman are used to intervene in a spiritual rather than biological realm. Shaman have healed tumors, phobias, migraines, all kinds of ailments that are usually left for specialized doctors because shaman recognize that so much relies on how we think. Call it the placebo effect if you want, but does it not take great skill to harness the power of that effect? Everything we do and feel in our lives is a result of the vision we have for ourselves and the dream we have for our people. If we change that dream, we change the outcome. It is true for our bodies and it is true for entire societies.
As Perkins points out, at the basis of our current dream is the ego. We each see ourselves as separate entities rather than a unity. We think we can hurt plants, animals, and other humans without hurting ourselves. That’s like a mitochondria attacking the nucleus, or an arm tearing off a leg without realizing they are the same body.
A result of this loss of unity and the creation of the ego is a fear of death. Because we see ourselves as separate and because we prize our individual lives over all else, we fear what will happen when we “die.” We build massive skyscrapers and film ourselves and record our music on plastic discs. We measure progress on how long a material lasts, how many years can be added to our lives even if most of those years are spent in a hospital, how many pixels we can churn out on a computer screen that will take eons to biodegrade. Somehow, we think, if our stuff lives on, we will too. But is there not a limit for the amount of stuff one planet can hold? I mean think about it, all of these CDs and DVDs and knick-knacks and what-nots and computer monitors and clothes hangers and microwaves and shampoo bottles and desk lamps and everything else... it’s not going to go anywhere when we die, but a new generation of CDs and DVDs and knick-knacks and what-nots and computer monitors, etc. etc. will keep coming out. The amount of kibble will only increase. Where is there space left for humans? Are we becoming subservient to our stuff?
When a thing is processed, it is by definition separate from its origin. High fructose corn syrup, double-quarter-pounder with cheese, MTV, antibiotics, SlimFast, four-wheel drive, $3.15 a gallon, Nike sneakers, four bathroom house, Labor Day sales, buy one get one free, paper or plastic, HDTV, Blu-ray, gigabytes, bobble head Jesus, Marlboro, 30 day warranty, Red Delicious, SAT, ACT, IQ, megachurch, Fox News, CNN, talking heads, shopping lines, supermarkets, high fructose fucking corn syrup!
We are processed human beings living packaged, plastic-wrapped lives.
It doesn’t have to be this way. While we prize concepts such as durability and longevity in our products, in some cultures in the Andes and Amazon, houses are built specifically to crumble back into the earth in just a few years. Then a new one is built and it survives for a while before crumbling itself. Durability is not the ideal, because these cultures do not see anything wrong with dying. These people do not see themselves as technologies destined to become obsolete. They are not fighting to stay in existence in any form whatsoever, constantly seeking to add more years and megahertz and horsepower and efficiency and all those other worthless numbers, because there are worse things than crumbling back into the earth.
The good news is that these people, are, well, people. These kinds of beliefs are possible within human nature. It is just a matter of a change of vision, of dreaming a new world.
For the record, here is my dream: a world where a thing can be used but not useless, where life is not a race, where a group of people can get together to have a good time and not make a mess.
Two things:
A passage from The World is as You Dream it:
I remembered a story I had heard about an Apache warrior who was captured by Comanches. He was stripped and his limbs were stretched out and tied to stakes in the ground. His entire body was painted with honey. The Comanches then left him to the mercy of the ants.
At first their bites infuriated him. He struggled desperately to free himself. But once he understood that there was no way for him to break loose, he decided to look at the world from the ants’ perspective. He projected himself into them. As they ate away at him, he visualized himself turning into an ant. Things he had taken for granted – pebbles, dewdrops, his own skin – took on new meaning. Suddenly he was overwhelmed with a feeling of ecstasy, for he felt himself becoming reunited, through the ants, with his mother, the Earth.
And lyric from Radiohead’s “Optimistic”: You can try the best you can, you can try the best you can, the best you can is good enough
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On Sunday I head to La Paz and then I'm off to a rural indigenous village for five days. If I have a chance to update my blog in La Paz I will, but if not, you'll hear from me in two weeks.
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