mahiwaga

I have to ask you, Michelle:

Wala ka bang hiya? Kahit kaonti lang? Have you no shame? Even just a little?

Seriously, what do your parents think about all this?

Our illustrious sell-out re-ups her wingnut cred by bashing and stalking a middle class family that happens to have benefitted from SCHIP after being involved in a serious car accident that severely injured their two children, leaving one of them with irreversible brain injuries.

There is this punk on the Alibata Yahoo Group that I find myself arguing with whenever I participate in a discussion. Calling himself Malachi, he uses tactics that are reminiscent of the average troll. But for some reason, people never call him out for it.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s all about kasamasama, a trait that I despise which is ascribed to the stereotypical Filipino.

Kasamasama, if interpreted benignly, translates roughly to keeping harmony within a group. The stereotype of a Filipino is that he/she will never disagree with you to your face, and will never bring conflict out in the open. Of course, what this means is that every argument becomes passive-aggressive, hidden behind an infuriating protocol of smiles and kind words.

This behavior is not something that is confined to the colonized realm of the Philippines. It casts its pall upon Filipino Americans as well, and many people who attended college and participated in Filipino cultural groups are probably pretty damn familiar with the bullshit that I’m talking about.

One day, I just got fed up, called Malachi an asshole, and put him on my blacklist. With all the bullshit going on in the world, I didn’t need yet another source of aggravation. And yet I haven’t unsubscribed because sometimes someone actually posts something worthy of intelligent discussion. (Although, I have to say, it’s been a while.)

But the reason I bring Malachi up is because we once got embroiled in this discussion about how developing countries are riddled with corruption, and qualitatively speaking, developed countries aren’t. Or, realistically, they aren’t as corrupt, but it spells the difference between a prosperous, nominally democratic, capitalistic society and a semi-feudal state of oppression.

Now corruption isn’t limited to the Philippines. Look at any developing nation that was once a colony of a European power. You don’t really have to look that far—just 15 miles from where I sit is Mexico, which isn’t exactly known for being free of corruption.

While both Mexico and the Philippines were former colonies of Spain, you could just as well look at former British possessions and former French possessions. And it may look like I’m riding on nations that are run by people-of-color, but from my perspective, the only thing these disparate nations and cultures have are the fact that they were invaded and occupied by white people once upon a time. It can’t be a coincidence that this is the thing that all these countries have in common.

I have nebulous theories about why this would be, even after the imperial power has been driven out, and even after the nation has been taken over by Communists or fundamentalist Muslims.

You figure the folks who managed to survive the imperial invasion were people who either (1) had reasons for laying real low anyway during the invasion—like maybe they were murderers or thieves or slave traffickers or something else unsavory like that, or (2) they kissed the white man’s ass as hard as they could.

You figure anyone who resisted either ended up exiled or killed. (And suddenly I remember that it is Che Guevara’s death anniversary, but that is neither here nor there.)

I remember being dismayed when I realized why a huge number of 1st generation Filipino Americans are politically conservative, and in fact, why many of them backed Marcos’ fascist regime. It’s not just the fact that many Filipinos were able to immigrate because of the US Armed Forces, which tends to foster a conservative mind-set. Rather, we have a lot in common with the Cuban Americans who were decry Castro while they live out their exile in Florida: people left the Philippines in the ‘60’s because it was being destabilized by a lot of grassroots and proletariat forces, and it may have easily gone the way of Cuba or Vietnam if not for the interference of the CIA and their support of Marcos’ power grab. The folks who left the fastest were those who were afraid the Communists were going to win.

This divide is pretty stark whenever I go back to the Philippines. In some ways, Filipinos who were reasonably educated in the Philippines are far more progressive than Filipinos who fled to the U.S. It struck me that even mainstream Filipinos generally refer to the aftermath of the Spanish-American war as the Filipino-American war, something which even to this day, American textbooks call the Philippine Insurrection. Signs that proclaim “End U.S. Imperialism Now!” lined the streets of Manila long before W proved to the world that the U.S. is intent on world domination.

Filipinos knew what was up. Meanwhile, my relatives still can’t understand why the Americans got kicked out of Subic Bay.

So basically my point is that the survivors of imperial invasions are either criminals or Quislings, and many times they are both. This goes a long way to explain why developing nations are riddled with corruption.

The other factor is the fact that developing nations are poor. This is not to say that rich developing nations (I think of the oil-replete Middle East) are not corrupt, only that when there’s so little to fight over in the first place, you tend to play a lot dirtier. Oscar Zeta Acosta has a poetic description of this phenomenon in his book <p>Brown Buffalo</p> . White people have always been good at the whole divide-and-conquer thing, and this dirty tactic seem successful in continuing to keep developing nations from prospering.

The flip side of this is the assertion that developed nations are typically far less corrupt than their developing counterparts. I’m not ascribing some magical virtue to people of developed nations. For one thing, a lot of it has to do with prosperity. If it’s relatively easy to make some money without doing anything dirty, then people will make money above the table instead of under it. It’s just the laws of thermodynamics. Why risk going to jail when it’s almost just as easy to just pay your taxes.

I mean, clearly, there is some corruption going on in these nations. I mean, it’s not like the Mafia is a legitimate family-oriented organizatoin entirely dedicated to purely legal pursuits. But I guess it’s the whole rule of law thing. Americans may decry the fact that we’re a litigious society, but the fact that you can make a few million bucks by suing the crap out of a wealthy corporation helps keep even the big and powerful in check. No one is above the law (or at least no one was above the law until W pissed on the Constitution, but that’s another rant entirely.) The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they put in checks and balances, and I’m not entirely sure that their intent wasn’t to have the legislative and executive branches always at loggerheads and making sure that gridlock was the rule of the day.

This is the reason why the Roman Republic and early Empire was able to prosper so much. I remember reading how only trustworthy generals were sent to rule provinces, and this ensured that collected taxes actually came back to Rome instead of lining the pockets of the general and his cronies. Obviously, there’s no way the Senators or the Emperor could ensure that they weren’t getting screwed, but again, when it’s relatively easy to make bank, you might as well do it the right way rather than risk getting executed.

It’s only when the gold started to thin out and they couldn’t pay their mercenaries when the Western Empire started going to hell. (Mercenaries. Hmmm. Looks like America fails to learn yet another lesson from the fall of Rome a millenium and a half ago.)

So yeah, without throwing off the yoke of corruption, your little banana republic ain’t going nowhere. It’s going to take a lot of bloodshed to get your people in line, but sometimes a dictator’s gotta do what a dictator’s gotta do.

OK, I’m not talking about my drug problems. I’m talking about the terrible shape my body is in.

Now for the past year I’ve been suffering from either sciatica or piriformis syndrome (it makes no difference—either way, something is squishing my sciatic nerve.) Pain would suddenly get me, literally right in the ass, with some radiation down the leg, and even sometimes numbness and tingling. Nothing that some naproxen couldn’t take care of. Some weeks would be worse than others, but I didn’t really spend much time thinking about it.

In retrospect, I realize things have been slowly progressing for the worse.

Last week, I nearly fell down because of how much it hurt. I luckily was able to sit down in a controlled manner, but then I couldn’t get up again for several hours.

This is very bad.

I like to blame the fact that I bought a pair of shoes that were too big for me, and too damn heavy besides. This is roughly when I started having symptoms back in August of ‘06, and the symptoms got better once I dumped those shoes.

But most likely, this is just the end result of being way too sedentary, and being way too overweight. I mean way too overweight.

The sad irony is that now that I’m constantly in pain, I’m even less likely to want to exercise. I can’t even walk from one end of work to the other without having all the nerves in my right lower extremity feel like they’re shrieking in agony.

The slothful part of me just wants to get the decay and decline to get to the point. What’s the end point of all of this? Well, besides death. I mean, can you actually experience significant morbidity and even mortality from sciatica?

I mean, I guess I could just become even more and more unwilling to move. Eventually, my coronary arteries will narrow with cholesterol deposits, and then it’ll be the cath lab for me. Or v. fib arrest, dead on arrival, but I’m really trying to be more optimistic these days. I suppose this pain will encourage even worse body mechanics, making me prone to more injury.

I suppose I could become so sedentary that I end up with a DVT. Leading to a pulmonary embolism.

But as much as I whine about how sucky my life is, I really don’t want to undergo a steady, excruciatingly slow decline in function, only to be killed by something massive, sudden, and excruciatingly painful, like a heart attack or an embolism. (If I could choose my mechanism of death, it would be via respiratory arrest from morphine and/or benzodiazepine poisoning, preferrably in the setting of a hospital or even better, in the hands of hospice care, without having to get a plastic tube rammed down my throat, or getting my ribs cracked by overzealous interns, but I digress.)

So I’m actually looking into trying to get better. Literally one step at a time.

Sunday night, before I got on the freeway to drive back to San Diego, the pain was so distracting that I had to stop at a Ralphs and buy an ACE wrap. For some reason, wrapping it around my ankle really helped. (Although I suppose the 500 mg of naproxen and the 1250 mg of Tylenol probably played their part, too.)

I figured out that the pain in my right leg (if it isn’t a DVT) is probably a combination of things: the sciatic nerve pain and the sequelae of a couple of bad ankle sprains.

In high school my sophomore year (15 years ago!) I missed a little ledge and ended up twisting my ankle really bad. I mean, my leg and foot probably went at a 90° angle, except usually that part of the ankle doesn’t really move that way, or move at all, really. I was on crutches for a week. But I didn’t think about it again.

Then in July 2001, I sprained it again walking around NYC. I remember the pain being overwhelming. I almost blacked out (although a lot of that was probably because it was hot, I was dehydrated, and I was hypoglycemic or something.) That was probably one of the first times I remember being in so much pain that I wanted to throw up. But I managed to limp along. Again I didn’t think anything of it.

Most likely, I’ve seriously jacked up or even possibly completely torn my anterior talofibular ligament (ATFL), which happens to be the most common ligament injured in an ankle injury. Since I’m not athletic at all (although there was actually a very, very, very brief time in my life where I was actually running miles at a time), I never really noticed too much instability, although I did recognize that my ankle wasn’t as solid as it should be.

Well, apparently, it’s taken its toll. For the past few days, the area around my lateral malleolus (the outer knob of the ankle) has been aching, and getting worse with even just a little bit of walking, and I feel like I can’t put reliably put weight on this foot. My calf muscle is aching too, and I can feel my hamstrings atrophying.

I’ve heard quadriceps strengthening will help, but I can’t even imagine putting resistance on this leg at this point. Right now I’ve got both an ankle and a knee brace on. (While the ankle brace alone helped, the more I walked, the more I realized how weak my quads and my hamstrings are, and I felt pretty unsteady, and after a while, my knee started hurting too.)

Since I spend most of the time at work sitting down, I can barely tell if it’s helping. I’ve been having to park in the lot farthest from the clinic I’m rotating through right now, so the morning and the afternoon walk leave me aching and sweating. I guess the difference is that I can at least walk around the clinic without having to grit my teeth.

I’m being uncharacteristically optimistic. I’m hoping this is a sign that my limbs are starting to heal, and that as the days go by, it’ll get easier and easier to walk around like a normal person, and then I can start actually exercising.

It’s one thing to be fat and therefore unattractive to women. I’ve been dealing with this for a good decade or so now, so it doesn’t wound my psyche too badly. But it’s another level of awfulness to be fat and to be in physical pain because of being fat. Seriously. This sucks.

I mean, seriously, if I’m not going to get better, I wish someone would just put me down then, like a race horse that’s fit for the glue factory.