Oh, the [Queen of] Humanity! 👑🕊️ (R.I.P.)

Ft: Run-in with potential death-squad member, Requiem for a Pigeon, misc. Dogshit

Last post, I talked about a couple of cool things I had seen while out and about. You can check out that post here. It includes some photos sent to me by a superfan I met down in Cape Town who happens to be a pilot; he was nice enough to actually take my book with him on one of his flights around the Cape peninsula!

Hello from a published, best-selling author

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Anyway, I had a few more field notes I didn’t get to add last post (it was mainly just a memo that I had finally released my book). A couple of weeks ago I went on a documentary binge. One of them was “The Act of Killing.” To documentary buffs this one will be familiar. It came out about fifteen years ago or so, and it’s one of the most remarkable things I’ve seen.

I didn’t have much knowledge of Indonesia’s recent history beforehand. Which isn’t much of a surprise; in the US we have kind of an inverse relationship between how much we learn about a country versus how much we have involved ourselves in their affairs, specifically the CIA/FBI and other unelected bodies. Which naturally means we don’t get much on any countries at all, really, but definitely not anywhere in Latin America and other places across the middle east and Africa. Places that haven’t got the memo about getting in line as vassal states allies, and have made the grave mistake of electing leaders that are anywhere to the left of, like, Dick Cheney (rip 🙏🏼). But, because democracy is putatively one of our values, we can’t go in and bomb them into submission. Not officially. So we fund fringe political groups or terrorists or rebels who will. Then, once the region in question is nice and destabilized, that’s where we come in to help “liberate” everyone and get them back on their feet, which usually involves instating a leader/government we know we can trust.

Anyway, that’s what happened in Indonesia; basically, in the 1960s, in the height of the cold war, and with ‘Nam already giving us a pretty big headache, we funded Indonesia’s far right-wing paramilitary death squads, whose goal was to eradicate every last communist in the country. Which of course required millions of people to be killed, since you also have to eliminate anyone who could also be a communist sympathizer, or related to one, or just look like someone who could be either of those things. There’s a bunch of great books about this; among them The Jakarta Method, which came out a few years ago.

In the documentary, the director, Joshua Oppenheimer goes back 50 years on to interview these men, who are heroes in their community, and not only do they gleefully recount their extermination efforts, preferred method of killing/torturing, etc., but they have a flair for the dramatic, and decide that they want to make their own documentary, a sort of hagiography, where they reenact some of their more memorable killing sprees so that their legend won’t be forgotten.

Anyway, I was walking to my office and stopped to get a coffee at a little café. There was a Southeast Asian man in front of me in line. He was quite short¹ and somewhat pudgy, and was wearing a high-vis vest. I think he was helping do some maintenance work for the church next door; weeding their garden or something, and had come inside for a break.

But as he took a sip of the coffee, his eyes got wide, and he exclaimed, in his strong accent, “Wow, how delicious. Is that a Robusta? It has a beautiful smoky note to it.”

“I think it’s an arabica.”

“Oh my. I have not tasted an Arabica this good in years,” then, turning to me, “Have you?”

I pretended to ponder it, as if I hadn’t been under the impression until that moment that the two types of coffee were “regular” and “decaf”. “No, I don’t think so,” I said.

“This reminds me of a certain bean from Brazil,” he continued, “Very rare, impossible to find in Europe. We have some like this in my country, it reminds me of home.”

“Where is home?” The barista asked.

“Indonesia.” This was my chance. I’d never met someone from Indonesia before. What are the chances that I’d just seen the documentary the night before? The stars had aligned. It was written.

“No way — I just watched a documentary about Indonesia,” I said, “I’m sure you’ve heard of it, it came out a few years ago, I think it won an Oscar.”

I had been hoping he would know it immediately. There are not many critically acclaimed documentaries about Indonesia. I had also been hoping I’d get some insight from a local as to what it was like to live under a government that had committed such atrocities against its own people. But he only gave a quizzical look. He was not aware of any documentaries: “You did? What was it about?”

“Yeah, it was really good. It was about everything that happened in the 60s with the government.”

His look didn’t get any less quizzical. “Name?”

“The, uhh, the ‘Act of Killing’, I think. It was about how the gangsters went around and exterminate their enemies. Seems like it was a scary time. They really hated the communists.”

He now broke into a wide smile, perhaps even wider than the one he’d had when extolling the smoky undertones of the Arabica. There was a twinkle in his eye, as if looking back fondly on the good ol’ days. “Ah, the communists! Yes, we hate them.”

Based on the documentary, people were forced to live in such terror during the inquisition that they ended up having to swear allegiance to the cause, disavowing/snitching on those around them if necessary, and even this wasn’t enough to ensure their safety in many cases—by the looks of things, this climate of fear continues today. Point being, it wasn’t clear if this guy was a genuine supporter of the regime, or if this was his well-honed response to dispel any possible suspicions around his loyalty. Either way, I scuttled out of there without trying to dig any deeper. On the off chance he did have connections to those death squads, I’d prefer not to put myself on anyone’s radar. I have a silent yoga/matcha retreat coming up in Bali next month (it’s exclusively for bestselling authors, so don’t bother) and I don’t want there to be any complications.

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Part two (seemingly unrelated, but you never know): a couple of days later, as I was walking home, I saw a woman who’d gone into the road to tend to an injured bird. Luckily no cars were coming. But it was clear that one had at some point, and it hadn’t let the fact that a bird was in its way slow it down too much.

Oh, that’s sweet, I thought, she’s going to pick it up, like it’s a tiny hatchling or squirrel that fell out of the nest or had been found after its mother had died; she’ll to take it home and put it in a matchbox or shoebox filled with straw or little twigs, and feed it warm milk as she nurses it back to health. And then we’ll get a video in a few years where she’s out in the wild and they reunite and it’s heartwarming, like the videos of the guys with the lions/tigers.

But as I got closer I saw that it was not an injured bird. Well, not anymore. It may, technically, have been an injured bird at one point, i.e., for the split second on initial contact with the car bumper right before its delicate little body was crushed, its wings ripped from its body from the violence of the impact.

Indeed, at this point, it was merely the shredded remains of a [once-injured] bird. Nevertheless, she tenderly picked up what was left of it, which amounted to a few tattered feathers held together by a bit of sinewy flesh. (The rest of the carcass had either been ground into the cement as it had been dragged along under the front bumper of the Fiat 500 or whatever, and then what was left of that had been picked apart by the local foxes overnight.)

She carried the “wings” over to the safety of the sidewalk and laid them to rest at the base of a small tree. Out of respect, I stopped for a moment and observed a few moments of silence with her. But this somber moment was undercut slightly by the fact that the remains were not alone at the base of the tree. . .

Which brings me to another, decidedly not-cool thing that I have noticed a lot lately: the amount of dog shit being left on the sidewalks and roads and every other public space.

What’s fascinating are the amount of these piles, some of them just look like someone’s puked up a half gallon of tikka masala—like seriously hunting-gear orange, very impressive—and I guess I sympathize with the dog owner in those cases, although you have to wonder if it isn’t some sort of negligence to persist with a diet that clearly isn’t working. But what fascinates me is the number of these piles that are bagged. Like, people are doing the more “responsible” thing by bringing and going to the effort of bagging the shit. They’ve done the hard part; they’ve done the dirty work. And then they’ll leave it with a pile of other bags instead of carrying it for one more block to a public trash bin. Something something about how “the west is in decline,” “good men create soft times,” etc.

It does make you wonder if it wouldn’t be useful to have an Indonesia-style paramilitary death squad or two just for stuff like this, in terms of social cohesion, just to scare people straight a little bit.

My mood was lifted as I got closer to home; I took a different route than usual to clear my head, and boy was I rewarded, when I noticed this touching tribute in the front window of a dilapidated little one-story house:

This was their only window, by the way, their only source of light for their entire ground floor. Note the plastic binder sheath to keep it protected — good thinking.

I’ve blown that text up in case you can’t make it out:

It’s always cool to be reminded that these people exist. When English people make fun of us for Trump, we’ve got to keep in mind that they don’t have a leg to stand on. They’ve been licking boot longer than the US has existed. Their whole culture is based on being servile to an unelected group of inbred psychos.

But anyway, in this instance, maybe the grieving resident had a point: I don’t remember seeing nearly as much dogshit on the street while The Queen of Humanity was around. Can’t help but wonder if she was the thread keeping this whole thing together…

Thanks for tuning in. More soon. Remember to subscribe/share.

1. not even 5’11”… even shorter!!