Post 622 - June 26, 2024
From ten thousand miles away, life back at home seems ever more surreal.
I am aware of things happening, of course. Headlines pop up on my phone. People post news stories on social media. Events are unfolding, some important, some trivial, but they all seem distant and blurred together.
Michael and I make a point of trying to FaceTime every day. There’s a fourteen-hour time difference between Australia and New York, so my evening is his morning, and his morning is my end of day. We are relatively successful about checking in with each other regularly, but life on either side of the planet has a way of getting away from you.
What seems important is relative. I am Down Under doing a job. That’s my focus. For the moment, it needs to be, that’s what I am being paid to do. While there are occasionally mornings off, like this one now, every day of this two-week trip is either a workday or a travel day. We are having fun, don’t get me wrong, but there are things to do that require my undivided attention. The news that pops up usually makes me roll my eyes and then I just scroll past it onto the next story while I’m on my way to the theatre.
From the scattered posts I’ve seen, the presumptive Republican nominee for President seems to be trying to tantalize us with who he is going to choose as his vice president. On some level, it doesn’t matter at all who he picks. People who are going to vote for him will vote for him even if he decides to run with a goat. Given his physical state, however, should he win, there’s a very good chance that the goat could become the Leader of the Free World at some point during his term.
During his time in office before the 2020 elections, when I was traveling overseas, cab drivers and local crew members all seemed eager to talk about our political situation and constantly asked us about our thoughts on it. Everyone outside the country had an opinion. They all thought we were losing our minds, but they were entertained by the chaos. On this trip, however, nobody has volunteered a thing. Our politics at home have simply not come up. When we have tried to broach the subject ourselves, everybody here seems to clam up.
It isn’t funny or entertaining anymore.
If East Timor decides to do something, the ripples from that decision might reach the shore of some nearby Indonesian Islands, but rarely does it affect anyone else in the world. When the United States decides to do something, however, we can create a tsunami in countries many of us may never have even heard of.
One of the things our former president tried to do during his term in office was to pull us out of long-standing international agreements. One of the few coherent policies he had was the idea of putting America first. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with the policy, I’m just saying that it was something he consistently tried to do – sever us from the international federation of countries we have so long been part of.
The problem with this policy is that we have meddled so much in world affairs that to pull out now is irresponsible and dangerous. It’s also not nearly as easy to do as it sounds. When we left Afghanistan the way we did, for instance, we left a power vacuum that the Taliban immediately filled.
Our occupation of the region, following that of the Russians, as it did, created widespread dissatisfaction among Afghanis. They looked for a way to get rid of us and that led them to support a repressive terrorist organization. The Taliban seemed strong enough to do the job. If the repression weren’t so pervasive, the response to it would never have needed to be so violent.
The same thing, arguably, has given rise to Hamas in Palestine. If there wasn’t a reason for all that anger, it wouldn’t have been generated. Like the situation in Afghanistan, European meddling was one of the starting points for much of the conflict we are now seeing in that part of the globe.
When America occupies a place, we tend to support puppet leaders we think we can control. We aren’t alone in doing that, any power that colonizes a weaker power does the same thing. We want our allies to be led by people we feel we can work with. Those people are not always the best people to lead their respective countries, but they serve our own selfish needs. When we decide to abandon a place, therefore, we leave these leaders behind that nobody there likes. That leaves an opening for an authoritarian regime to move in and push the puppet out. The local people are so desperate to govern themselves by that point, that they embrace the strongest, loudest, and most vitriolic amongst them to lead, thinking they are choosing leaders of strength.
Repressive regimes are all eventually overthrown. Historically, none of them have ever lasted. Authoritarian governments, however, have sometimes taken centuries to head off into that good night.
The Philippines were first occupied by the Chinese, then by the Spanish who controlled them for over three hundred years, then by the Americans, and then by the Japanese. As soon as they were well and truly independent, though, they couldn’t really govern themselves by themselves. They didn’t know how. They remained reliant on America. Countless generations of Filipino people had lived their lives never imagining that they would ever be able to lead themselves. Those few who believed that they could, who tried to make a noise over the years, were perceived as a threat and were imprisoned or worse by whoever was in charge at the time.
When the Spanish arrived in the Philippines, the islands were largely Islamic because of the trading ports that were already there. The Spanish were ruthless in their spreading of Catholicism throughout the islands. That they were largely successful in their doing of it is maybe why the Muslim holdouts to the south on Mindanao have embraced ISIS and other radical terrorist groups. They want to reclaim what they believe in their rightful control. It is yet another example of how European interference has led to the rise of violent radicalization in a former colony.
Australia is British. There is a strong Asian influence here, and diverse cultures populate the streets of the major cities, but it is predominantly a British outpost. People here sound British. Like the United States, you would never know that there was a sizeable indigenous population unless you went looking for it. So successfully have Europeans colonized both Australia and the United States that most everyone in either place forgets that these are places that were invaded and conquered, not places White people from Europe have any birthright to.
For untold millennia on the Australian continent, what are called the Songlines were passed down from generation to generation among the people living here. While they are ostensibly stories of Aboriginal mythology, they are far more than that. They are family histories, maps, hunting guides, and how-to information. They are the collective lore of the Aboriginal people.
Some years ago, I visited Cave Hill which is a drive of several hours from Uluru, the monolithic red rock that sits in the heart of Australia. Within the cave are 10,000 years of paintings that are part of the Songlines. The story that these images tell is basically that of the Seven Sisters. The Seven Sisters are stars in the sky that we know as the Pleiades. I was only allowed to see part of the cave and had to be led there by a member of the community who are the caretakers of the place.
Cave Hill is but one section of the whole epic tale of the Seven Sisters. The story cycle, itself, stretches nationwide. In Cave Hill, it incorporates the images on the walls as well as the rocks and landscape in the surrounding terrain. Part of the story tells of a sister running away from an attacker and making her way to safety within the cave. She hunts for specific animals and finds water in places that exist in what we would call, “real life.” By learning that story, the people listening to it would know what animals were in the area, how to hunt them, where to find them, how to find the tools necessary to be able to make the clubs used to kill them, and so on. They would also have a guide on how to get to the cave as well as to other landmarks in the area.
The Songlines are an oral tradition that relies on painting, carving, dancing, and singing to be remembered. Different members of the community are responsible for their part of the story. They must learn it during their lifetimes and then they must pass it along. It can take forty years to learn your entire section of the Songlines.
In the last century, when the British took Aboriginal children away from their families and raised them to be “English” they began to break apart this cycle of learning.
Were the British to suddenly leave Australia, the Aboriginal people would have a nearly impossible time trying to reclaim what was once theirs. 65,000 years of culture, history, and learning are now in pieces. Huge swaths of the Aboriginal population have had their identities stripped from them as they were forced to conform to their invaders’ ways of life. So much collective learning has been lost. Our interference is responsible for that.
We have created a society that increasingly is becoming ever more dependent on the people who invaded them.
The same is true of the Native American populations back at home. Were Native Americans suddenly given their land back, how many of them would know what to do with it? We haven’t allowed them to learn how to live as they once did. Few of them are still living in the original environments they once were in.
It’s too late for us to just hand everything back. We must figure out another way for us to allow the forcibly marginalized populations of our planet to live their lives in the way that they choose. Part of that is our helping them to learn or re-learn how.
The big debate between the two U.S. Presidential candidates is in a couple of days. In the US it will be on Thursday night at 9 pm. In Australia that will be Friday morning at 11 am. I think I am going to be on a plane while it’s happening. We will have finished our final concert down here and I will be heading back to Sydney for a day or two before flying home.
If I were in New York these days, I would be fretting about the debate. From the other side of the world, however, I can only look at it and think, “How have we gotten to this point? How do we get past this?”
Human history is an endless chronicle of invaders and invade-ees. The first humans who left Africa ventured into land where our species had never lived before. Since then, however, we keep bumping into each other. We’ve ended up fighting over which of us has the right to occupy each little sliver of land we’ve moved into.
United States foreign policy is just one of the issues that will likely be discussed during the debate. Because I am out in the world these days, that’s the one I am thinking about.
While I was in the Philippines, I went to a small museum about an hour away from where I was staying in Manila. It was a shoe museum and had several hundred representative pairs of Imelda Marcos’s footwear on display.
The Marcos family fleeced hundreds of millions of dollars out of the Philippines treasury while they were in power. Imelda and Ferdinand were friends of the United States. They regularly met with the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations. It is unlikely that they could have remained in power without our support.
Right next door to the hotel I stayed in was the Coconut Palace. Imelda had it built for the Pope’s visit in the 1980s for a cost of about $34 million. The Pope refused to stay there given how poverty-stricken most of the rest of the country was. Coming from anyone other than the Pope, that might have been a noble sentiment, but the Vatican’s own ostentatiousness trumps anything Imelda could have come up with.
Bong Bong Marcos is the current President of the Philippines. Bong Bong is Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. Without the United States’ friendship with his parents, he probably would be in power now.
As nice as it is to be in this distant bubble, I am starting to be ready to head home. We have one more concert left to do in Brisbane and then we are done.
It’s interesting taking in the uncomfortable reactions people down here have when we bring up the election. They’re worried. Perhaps we should just stop talking about it and focus in on the work at hand.
As much as the future of the world might be at stake, I am going to need to work out the lighting for Thursday night. We are in a concert hall rather than a theatre. It should sound fantastic.