The Globe: Burma Update

So, true to form, the "Myanmar" government has seized aid shipments, refused international help, killed 36 rioting prisoners, and focused on its laughable constitutional referendum to the neglect of the general unraveling that's taking place as people run out of food and water and the thousands of rotting corpses begin contaminating water supplies. One international humanitarian official says the real effects of this cyclone are yet to be felt, and will undoubtedly spread beyond Burma's borders.

But hey, at least now nobody can say the country didn't vote for its constitution, right?

My friend Tun Tun, who is from Rangoon but is now living just across the border in Thailand (and who was once temporarily "disappeared" and interrogated for a month) has been in touch with family members in the cyclone-affected area. He sent me photographs which I will not post here -- suffice it to say that there are bodies everywhere. He reports that there is no electricity and that people are out of rice and water; the price of rice has doubled, that of water tripled. Instead of delivering aid, members of the SPDC (the government's Orwellian name for its army: State Peace and Development Council) stood in the streets intimidating people to vote -- and vote Yes! 

When I was a child, I believed in evil as something inherent; as a young man I ceased to believe in it at all; now I believe it is a contagion that passes from person to person, that comes and goes and snowballs and multiplies itself and then fades. Sometimes it concentrates heavily in certain people and places, but it is impermanent and seldom absolute. A cloud of it seems to have settled over Burma. I am speaking metaphorically, but not by much.