G
gilliam
Guest
On that most exotic of all exotic global destinations, America, “the nation that never stops giving.”
By Jules Crittenden
I grew up in the Third World. Elephants by the road, cobras in the back yard. Priests performing strange rites to bring luck or drive out evil. There was bad luck and evil everywhere. Corruption and brutality. Unspeakable poverty. Blind beggars, leprous beggars, beggars with goiters, beggars with stumps. I was 8 years old when I first saw a man without a nose.
My old man was an engineer, building power plants to bring Third World countries into the 20th century. Construction sites employed human labor in the manner of the Pharaohs; wretched men in loincloths shifting baskets of dirt in ungodly heat. Walls around every house of any substance, with broken glass embedded on top and watchmen, to keep that Dante’s inferno of a world outside from coming over the top.
I loved it, was high on it, living in other people’s sprawling cities where tin-roofed squalor spread out behind the highrises, markets and ancient temples; speaking their languages; eating their food at roadside stalls; hitching rides on trucks or travelling by train and leaky boat to remote and beautiful places.
pajamasmedia.com/2007/03/get_your_third_world_right_her.php
By Jules Crittenden
I grew up in the Third World. Elephants by the road, cobras in the back yard. Priests performing strange rites to bring luck or drive out evil. There was bad luck and evil everywhere. Corruption and brutality. Unspeakable poverty. Blind beggars, leprous beggars, beggars with goiters, beggars with stumps. I was 8 years old when I first saw a man without a nose.
My old man was an engineer, building power plants to bring Third World countries into the 20th century. Construction sites employed human labor in the manner of the Pharaohs; wretched men in loincloths shifting baskets of dirt in ungodly heat. Walls around every house of any substance, with broken glass embedded on top and watchmen, to keep that Dante’s inferno of a world outside from coming over the top.
I loved it, was high on it, living in other people’s sprawling cities where tin-roofed squalor spread out behind the highrises, markets and ancient temples; speaking their languages; eating their food at roadside stalls; hitching rides on trucks or travelling by train and leaky boat to remote and beautiful places.
pajamasmedia.com/2007/03/get_your_third_world_right_her.php