THREE

A Tavern on the Lower East Side 

The ‘dry run’ was on December 21^st, 2012 and main main event took place two months later on February 19^{th, 2013}. It was actually the world’s most impressive recorded bank heist to that date, but the culprits never even used guns or masks, never threatened anyone or even ever set foot inside a single bank vault. In two massive precision operations that mobilized hundreds of cells in more than two dozen countries acting in close coordination and with near surgical precision, thieves in law stole $45 million from thousands of A.T.M.’s in a matter of hours. In Newyorkgrad alone, the Dominikani clean out crews responsible for A.T.M. withdrawals struck 2,904 machines over 10 hours starting on Feb. 19, withdrawing $2.4 million. But, $45 million dollars really isn’t that much money, so for something that big to have happened with such widespread international collaboration, well something else must have been going on.

The world and the social media didn’t see it because they were not paying attention to any of the right things. All the money stolen was not even real money, it was all insured. But the unlimited operation job did have an objective much larger than the heist of course.

               In Gregorian calendar year 1999, because of technical glitch in computerized monetary systems sensationally depicted on proletarian media as Y2K, many system analysts were worried then about a system wide failure of the internet. Electronic military defense complex systems more specifically were to experience temporary shut down on New Year’s Eve’ December 31st, 1999 leaving anyone and everyone wide open. In order to protect critical defense and money changing infrastructure, major digitized commerce, and all sorts of civilian surveillance databases; governments and major corporations had begun scrambling to back up data on fixed servers. Secure from the effects of this Y2K glitch which many big brained computer engineers believed would wipe out digital control of commerce via internet and for a brief movement allow any country with nuclear missiles first strike capability on the New Year. Enter the ‘Perchevney Bratva’.

‘The Big Job’ took ten years to orchestrate. Planned in its grandiose entirety in a Bulgarian tavern on Lower East Side of the Isle of Man, the central most affluent borough of Newyorkgrad. A little tucked away place the called the ‘Mehanata Social Club’. The man who planned the greatest theft in history was a Bulgarian dentist named Alexander Dmitrievich Perchevney, called “Sasho” by his closest confederates. In Slavic countries ‘Sasha’ is a nickname for ‘Alex’. Sasho and his wife Tanya were enthusiastic co-equal villains. At time of the plot, their human resources really just consisted of newly immigrated Alexander Perchevney and his scheming, but quiet brother strong man Slavi, a Krepki Mushik and serious tough guy. Along with his wife Tanya Magda and also three shady grinning characters named “James White”, “James Brown”, and “Justin Toomey O’Azzello” who all worked part time at “Bulgarian Cultural Center” on Canal and Broadway established in 1998. At first it was a cultural front for a “cash for marriage agency”, an extralegal dental coverage program, and also planning center for a highly lucrative racket called “no-fault-insurance”. Also a highly premium place to drink underage and dance naked, do cocaine; no questions asked. 

You had to have at least two teeth, a sign said. On the same wall was another sign, “Get naked get a shot, fuck on the bar, get a bottle.”

       Sasho and Slavi, alongside several hundred thousand of the newly admitted “Soviet Ivory” began immigration to Breuklyn immediately after the Berlin wall came down in 1989 and United States of America “defensively” began the total pillage of former Soviet Union in a Post-Cold War victory orgy of expropriation , naked theft and non-stop ultra-violence. They arrived on the coast of Fun City Breuklyn with advanced degrees, speaking multiple languages, and instilled with a profound skill in extralegal entrepreneurship; cultivated in a Communist society where graft and bribes were way of life. When informed by Amerikansky immigration officers that these degrees not worth the paper they were printed on, well perhaps this is how it all began. In former Soviet Union, Alexander Perchevney was a dentist, which there was really more like doctor specializing in dentistry. His wife, Tanya was ‘an engineer’. That really could mean almost anything in former Soviet Union where almost everyone was some kind of ‘engineer’. But specifically, Tanya was computer engineer. Designing early algorithms for demographic counting, for deportations and for fuel prices, for self automated missile systems. Slavi, well Slavi was good with various machines and breaking man’s faces also with fists. This was a now non-existent empire where 53% of the population had a bachelors degree of higher education level. Alexander, Tanya, Slavi and infant progeny of Tanya and Alex, their four year old daughter Yelizaveta all moved from Brighton coastal ghetto to the higher ground of Williamsburg shortly after their arrival in the cold dark winter of 1991.

          It did not take Alex and Tanya long to realize that not only would they be treated like fourth class citizens of vanquished enemy nation, but that as immigrants their own people would arrive not just with advanced degrees and “dubious moral code”, but accompanied by violent thieves and Voorhees with links to privatization under way transforming the K.G.B., into a large and ruthless transcontinental  mafia, or in Russian parlance’ a Bratva’.

            It was shortly after his first brutal run in with a New Russian Voorhi seeking an overtly grand percentage slice for protection of black market dentistry clinic run out of Alex’s basement in Brighton, that Alex realized that one; his daughter would be raised outside the clutches of the new Russian ghetto, so called Little Odessa of Brighton. Second, to operate anything lucrative in this new soft country he’d need the help of the natives at least a few.

          Alex embraced a latent never practiced Orthodox Ivoryism and made friends with some ambitious Fenian tough guys, he got some cops on his payroll. This was how Alex met first met young Misha Kishbivalli. A young Bulgarian pretend Ivory like himself though much wealthier having gotten to America three years earlier and begun actively trafficking in uncut conflict diamonds traffic out of the failed state called Liberia. Over a round of Astika beers Misha and Alexander envisioned an establishment “where criminality and philanthropy, stealing and borrowing, culture and crime could all intertwine, voluptuously and thus ‘the Mehanata Social Club’ was born. By Winter of 1998 Alex and Slavi had rented out second floor loft space on the corner of Canal and Broadway and registered it as “Bulgarian Cultural Center”. Despite having no liquor license or paying any taxes to internal revenue service Alex hired a large menagerie of former Soviet women to work as “cultural hostesses”, and bartenders and “cultural attaches”. Also to dance the mother fucking go-go. Underground lap dance parties, the girl friend experience, whip its before they all went mainstream. Easy to make coke. Easy to import cigarettes in contain ships from their Albanian suppliers.

In the entire sixteen year run of Mehanata at its Canal Street location much was exchanged, culturally and financially. The enterprise itself was a careful gamble that under guise of “multiculturalism and diversity”, just about anything could follow. Keep everyone dancing in big fucking circle! Keep everyone entertained.

Alexander used the Russian language internet to recruit a wide range of medical professionals of former Soviet extraction to offer black market health care to other new arrivals, and long stayed arrivals without paper work. Next, Misha and Alex worked out a technicality called “no fault” where by accidents could be staged arranged all over Breuklyn and insurance companies could be divested of millions upon millions. They reached out directly to the Jamaican mob to help them. Later and alongside all of that they began importing cigarettes in container ships through the Albanians. They were recruiting a veritable Gypsy underground army all fueled by self interest, the music of Balkans, New York’s sanctuary city status, as well as home brewed Vodka-apple cider and Astika beer. They would forge an awkward ethnic alliance under the initial auspices of drinking, dining and dancing. They would rely on heavily the Post Soviet talent pool, particularly the warlike Albanians. They would set up the necessary conditions to achieve oligarch status in the Americas. The greatest expropriation was yet to come.

The $45 million was just the starting ante. Small bullshit score really. A sort of right of passage operationally, but Sasho Perecheveney wasn’t after petty cash. He was after premium antiquities, he was was after really old scrolls covered in math codes and anyone he could hire from that ancient tribe that survived just about everything world history had thrown at them. The Egypt Job, the First Temple destruction and the Babylonian exile, the Esther Job, the Maccabean Revolt, the Second Temple destruction, and the Roman Wars,  the Crusades 1 through 9, “the Spanish Inquisition” and “the purge in Germany”, the Arab Wars, the destruction of the Third Commonwealth and of course they also then knew exactly where the latest New Jerusalem was really hidden.  Deep under the sands of the desert? In a submarine deep under the sea. Thinly hidden in some mountain fort on some island protected by natives with spears?

Sasho was in the end, after the key codes. After the activation rites to entire Systema Ziggurat. An ancient method of of human organization and tribute linked to deliberately forgotten Gods and perpetual masters. As far as he was aware only the Ivory had been there when the first one was built way back when in Ur. The very first Earth Man City, where the very first Ziggurat had been built up. Sasho needed to borrow trade craft to get in. To get up into the highest towers of the control room. Pull levers and press the buttons. Read the silver wrapped scrolls in the very first language. Thus, with the right circles, one could interpret the Gamatria codes, grok the protocols and drink the very recipes needed to live for ever and ever. But really, after the second great holocaust, the hidden Shoah of the Cold War Times, not that many of the real Ivory were even left to bribe, barter, interrogate, intermarry with or mobilize with the pussy. So he would have to find them. Find the very last hiding ones. His daughters could help.

TWO

A Funeral in the Bronks

Somewhere in that vast and hideous sprawling red brick barrio called ‘the Boogie Down’, anxiety is high and some are truly miserable. The story continues. A sea of low rise six story tenements and failed experiments in brutalist brick affordable housing run alongside highway beds. Then eventually that barrio sprawl, that cramped dead place of Spanish speaking poverty becomes a green and hilly oasis. Populated by the Albanians actually. This juxtaposition is striking. South of the Cross Bronks Expressway, the place is a fourth or fifth world country. To the north, something manageable takes shape. An Albanian suburb that mostly sat out the class war.

The friends of Sebastian Adonaev, known by many here as ‘Kawa Zivistan’ came from all five boroughs. They find their way north along those endless highway systems. Some too on trains. Some on buses or motor cycles or Guyanese modified muscle cars. The friends of the dead end up eventually in a place called the Wakefield Commune. Like most places in the Bronks, it has way too many people living there and no elevators. The vast labor reserve ghetto south of the expressway for the mostly Spanish speaking working class, it ends abruptly. The Albanians keep everything in their districts clean of the dirt they do everywhere else. The bleak and miserable looking South Bronks with it’s third world mentality and fourth world life span becomes almost a physical reminder of the culture and differences of the races religions. Or, more specifically perhaps how they are treated by the ruling order and secret police.

Viktoria Christiana Contreras is dressed in all black, a lace vale covering a pretty albeit heavily make upped face and contacts which turn her eyes feline brown blue. Her husband, Rafael Contreras is in denim jeans and black shirt as he owns no funeral appropriate suit. He has only sobered himself up long enough to attend the two funerals. Raffa is unshaven. His baby face is markedly hard for the first time in many years. The weather is poorly, really it seems in the Bronx hot or cold, the weather is always poorly. It is nearly the end of summer, but it had refused to snow this year. The weather machines were in real anarchy or Newyokgrad’s oligarchy is slipping. They are in a crowd of several hundred mourners.

The first Funeral is for Kawa Zivistan, the infamous partisan known by those who really know him as Sebastian Vasilivich Adonaev. It is very well attended considering all the bridges he has burned this year. Very few people believe he is really dead. Everyone is speaking of “not seeing it coming.” Also of his ‘incredible potential’ now buried just as many had suspected before his 30^th year. It is rather like a sad circus actually. There are way too many people speechifying, justifying and explaining, and there is an overabundance of booze flask flowing. Who will lead the tribe? Many of the mourners are Negs. Many are wearing blue ambulance Class A dress event uniforms. His parents are kind and bourgeoisie. They don’t break down or cry. They just quietly hold court and whisper on the sidelines. His mother in particular conspiring with select old friends paying their respects.

It is a closed casket affair. Kawa had allegedly shot himself twice in the head with small caliber pistol and then toppled seventeen stories off a roof. Or he was executed. With two bullets to the head. Then thrown off the roof. Either one could have been true if you really knew him. Which to be fair a lot of these people did. Some had served with him in the emergency medical services. Some were from ‘the organization’. A few had fucked him. Others had made love with him for his poems or his hyper-colorful, somewhat naughty little drawings. Most are family. Most are comrades. There is very little left of his face. Seemed possibly the work of the secret police. Or his own work, hard to really say. Similar to how Rahula Today the famous martyr from Detroit had died in 2068. A little too similar. How do you shoot yourself twice?

Theoretically, it is an Ivory funeral. But the only thing Yiddish about it was that it is done on the tasteful but cheap, and scheduled to go on for seven days. There was liquor and also warm fresh bagels and various kinds of smoked fish. He was to go in the ground less than 24 hours after his alleged suicide. There not being a note was the most unnerving aspect of the whole thing. Kawa was amongst other things a very prolific writer. Not leaving a suicide note was highly suspect, completely anticlimactic. Out of character. The inner circle knew exactly why he’d gone and done what he did, kept it to themselves. What he thought he had to do. Whether he died by his own hand, or got snuffed; well it all had to do with that Maccluskey broad.

“Over a woman that didn’t even love him!” explains his oldest friend Nikholai Trickovitch. Then he spits on the floor and does a shot, “That dumb little Suka set him up! Blat.”

“I want to see the fucking body,” demands a woman named Anya Drovtich with thick black dreads and the blue F.D.N.Y. Emergency Medical Service uniform that many are wearing out of respect for the fact that Kawa had once been an E.M.T. with that prestigious organization. For four years until the Bureau of Trials and Interrogations had forced him out after various plots and labor agitations centered around the island nation of Ayiti. As well as a controversial subversive newspaper. Many core members of the resistance are of course E.M.T.s, Paramedics and also some Fire Fighters with the organization Kawa built during the long dark lost years. Anya just says what many are thinking, but few other than the parents, Trickovitch or Mickhi Dbrisk had the familiarity with the dead to outright declare.

Plain Viktoria and wild Rafael stand quietly drinking vodka in the background. They recognize many of Kawa’s associates. From dinner parties. From late night salons on revolution. Comrades and former lovers. Also the fair weather comrades who mostly drank his wine and ate his food. Who do so even in his time of death. Many, if not all are from the from the Z.O.B. His gang, clique, club, party and ‘cult’, which many have and did still call it. Whatever it had been, or still secretly was it wasn’t over with the death of Kawa Zivistan. After decades of clandestine organizing, theirs was a durable Otriad, the realization of an American guerrilla movement.   

Viktoria knows the female faces slightly better than the male ones. Dinner parties and long nights at Mehanata, where Kawa would hold court up on the Mezzanine. Making deals and handing out homework assignments. She’s mostly stayed out of the Z.O.B. club affairs, despite his many attempts to rope her in. Rafael however is absolutely more involved. Inside the internal club politics, he knows almost everyone here. Since despite the blur of the drink, he’s a Kadro.

 “The casket stays closed, sister,” declares Mickhi Dbrisk, a tall Jamaican gangster in a black pea coat. His gray armband and the small silver lion pin on his left lapel indicating him as a person of authority here. Openly marked as member of the ‘People’s Defense Forces’. The bulge of a pistol can be seen if you known where to look.

“I won’t believe he’s dead until I see the body,” Anya repeats.

The mob of comrades and family mills about in the brick-house cold. The mother of the dead man nods to Mickhi Dbrisk. Kawa’s mother has strange circular, red wizard spectacles. His father is portly and normally jovial, albeit not really such as his first son’s latest funeral. Dbrisk opens the casket. There lies a body. A body with no head. In theory it is the body of a prolific poet. A dedicated paramedic, partisan and hooligan named Kawa Zivistan. His head is severed, completely missing. His gray multiform is still very crisp. The Ayitian flag of Palmares is tucked in his left breast pocket. Red and blue with the tree of life. Cannons and spears defending hard won and bloody liberty.

“Where’s his fucking head?” mutters Anya in Arabic.

Rafael Ernesto and his wife Viktoria take a black town car hired out from the Mexican Express. Kawa’s funeral was in the North Bronx but Dasha’s is in Little Odessa, Southern Breuklyn.

Four hours in traffic, three shots of vicious Rakia, two Baltika 9s and a steady flow of Stolichnaya Premium and a pretty long car service ride later, they make it to Breuklyn a bit after sun down. Through way too many different factional check points. Inter-borough transit is getting prohibitively expensive. On the southern coast of Breuklyn they arrive at a pretty bleak gathering. This second funeral is quite small, but rather fancy. ‘The bitch didn’t die on the cheap’, thinks Viktoria. It’s on the very other side of of the grad.

There are fewer than two dozen people there. No speaks anything but Russian and no one cries except the mom. Dasha looks as beautiful dead as she ever did alive. Like a gently sleeping doll. The funeral is nominally ‘Russian Orthodox’, as that was her patron’s religion is.  Although Daria was allegedly some part Ivoryish. Probably a deception. The patron has spared no expense. Her mother had been flown in from Penza. Based on the patron’s insistence she was to be buried here and not sent back to Russia.

  There are a couple lady friends of the night that Viktoria recognizes from the tavern. Dumb foreign gold digging whores, she thinks. There is an assortment of men. All looking suspiciously at each other. Daria had a fan club and none of them are amateur. Rafael’s Russian is much stronger than Viktoria’s. Being American native, she speaks middle English and low English. Though it is his fourth language, he can follow the mood. He makes out vaguely hushed interactions. Scene size ups and accusations.

Viktoria knows actually very little about the nightlife of Daria, outside of the Bulgarian Tavern ‘Mehanata’. She can fill some blanks though. Even though virtually anything the girl said was a total lie. There was a paper work husband named Maccluskey. There was a ‘boyfriend’ named Serge paying for an apartment in Brighton. There was a corporate lawyer named Dmitry, who was her patron and was paying for her school and credit cards. She had a best friend named Tanya, a funny looking little emaciated tramp. Viktoria can basically only guess at who everyone else is besides the patron. Holding court on his failed investment. Allegedly, Daria’s black heart had stopped roughly 48 hours ago. The medical examiner inconclusively blamed a hazardous midnight cocktail of Red bulls, Vodka shots, Cocaine, and something else they couldn’t really identify. Daria was known to play with all that stuff, pretty often.

Some homies found her body at the Stillwell elevated rail station. She was pronounced dead shortly after a work up at Coney Island Hospital. She had in her purse a small book of poems written to her by one ‘Kawa Zivistan’. Who, allegedly killed himself just one day after confirming she was gone.

“Allegedly, blat” was the only word in English being bandied about this funeral.

“Who to blame for the death of daughter?” her mother asks Viktoria in real broken English when no one seems to be paying attention, “which one of these men?”

“I’m sorry I just don’t know.”

“My Dasha told us there was a crazy poet in love with her. Want rescue her from, this kept life. Life of shit in non-glamours Amerika. She say-tell me, this poet man. Trying steal her away. For about one year. Who kill my daughter really?”

“I just don’t know, I’m so sorry” repeats Viktoria.

“Is man here now? This fucking shit, this Kawa Zivistan Suka?”

“No. Kawa is dead too. He shot himself. Twice. After identifying your daughter’s corpse. We just came from his funeral,” says Rafael quietly knowing there are lots of bad man killers here.  Rafael, drunk again, looks like he might cry looking down at Daria’s body. Buried in hyper-expensive completely out of season Peony flowers in fancy white casket with gold trim. He had loved her. While still partly loving his paper work wife Viktoria in sad way too of course. Everyone had loved Daria Andreavna. She had dark magic and ‘tits galore’. She had style, cunning and class. Without knowing very much about her, many men had tried to have her. Because she was young and free and exotic and beautiful and impossible to tame. She was a true collectors item. 

Many men here had tried to own her. Her husband, boyfriends and patron included. Many of which are now here.

“Who to blame for this total catastrophe?” asks the mother again.

Nobody really knew. Allegedly, a lot of fucking things had happened over the course of the year, in the wilderness of Newyorkgrad, the third most powerful city on earth. The ziggurat of many, many lights and towers. 

“A senseless tragedy blat. A senseless goddamn waste of…,” the very well-dressed man in the custom cut black silver blue suit whose name is Dmitry Khulushin, had almost said ‘talent’ aloud, but instead, says “…of perfection.”

Daria’s mother begins to sob hysterically which is permissible for a woman and mother to do at a Russian funeral. Skinny little Tanya tries to comfort her but starts crying too. Her daughter had come a very long way to die obscurely, for absolutely nothing. Viktoria grabs Rafael by the arm, “It’s time to leave. Now. Her browns eyes say she means it. Rafael looks like shit. Real poorly. The sometimes hard defenses of his machismo crumpled on the ride over, any minute now he could get in a bad fight. They Fenian exit.

They wait in the terrible cold outside. The funeral was held at ‘The National’ on Neptune Avenue.  Another Mexican Express cab is coming to take them home to District Greenpoint. Rafael begins to weep heavily. Sobbing for Dasha, whom he very much loves, loved, no, loves. And for Sebastian too who was one of his closest real friends in this bleak city. He had introduced them and thus feels now, more than any other moment in the year prior, responsible for what has happened. Since in truth only he knows the full story of it. In both Peruvian as well as Russian culture, ‘real men’ do not by any stretch of fucking imagination cry. Specially in front of women. Paper work wives included. But, cry now he does. Wiping away the tears as they form. Hitting a brick wall until his hand bleeds, then breaks. Viktoria tries to stop him from boxing the wall. He slaps her. She is an American. The child of Fenian Catholics. They work hard and blue collar.They drink pretty heavily. They have lots of kids and cry in front of whomever they want. The ice cold wind blows deathly freeze upon them. The Mexican Express is nowhere in sight. Viktoria can’t believe he even hit her.

Brighton Beach is a bleak eastern oblivion. The endless ugly crumbling boardwalk goes past dilapidated public housing towers out a no where place, to drop out of time or sight. Drown yourself on the end of the Steeple Chase pier. The sun has finally set on this once plump and happy empire, a short lived Pax-American. But will it end in a pathetic whimper, or a vile gang bang? The vultures are circling the ‘grad. Have at it! Have at it! The Haan hordes and the Russian spy machine are ready. 

ACT I:

S T R A S T

“THE PASSION OF DARIA MACCLUSKEY”

ONE

A hanging garden in Isle of Man

‘We were scattered, atrocities were happening all over the country, all over the world. We didn’t know who was alive, who was dead, who was in the camps! All we knew those of us that were left was that we had to stay alive, keep moving keep organizing and take the message back to the people. Keep the motivation strong enough for the partisans to keep up the fight.’  

In Newyorkgrad it gets so evil hot in the late of August. The citadel of shrill billionaires and unwashed foreign masses longing to wear designer sneakers becomes a swelter box. Most people of any means flee to their dachas in Strong Island to avoid it. Dawn is now rising on a roof garden. Five friends up and out all night sit atop a seventeen story print house converted to a housing cooperative, one of lowest lying structures left in the Financial District. Sebastian Vasilivich Adonaev, over a bottle of Basque wine, tells old danger tales to those who will and can still listen. It is the second to last weekend of August and soon summer will end. Bottle uncorked the debacle of his oratory unfolds. A fake gold watch dangles off his left wrist as he enunciates his wild tale with his hands. Covering his dark brown hair cut short for summer is a brown leather beret newsy cap, called a skally cap.

On the roof garden of the old converted print house on 140 Nassau Street, slim and enthusiastic Europeans Amelia Monteleone and Viktoria Christiana Lynch Contreras snap off photos and clink glasses bantering on intoxicated. Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras, a wild Peruvian, is baby faced with flowing black hair. A couple salt and pepper streaks show hes aging poorly thanks to war and alcoholism. He is, at least on green card the husband of Viktoria. Raphael sits with his dear friend Sebastian and a beautiful Russian dvotchka named Daria Andreavna. Raphael attempts a boozy mediation. Sebastian and Daria evil eye each other viciously across a low wooden table. She has big blue crazy person eyes with sleep deprivation progressing. She has an unnerving look, a cross between a size up and seductive stare, a dismissive dart of her eyes to cut men down.

An affectionate rendering in Russian of Daria is ‘Dasha’, and this is what Sebastian has been calling her all night. They had been introduced several months before, but both had been way too drunk to remember. They both are regulars at the ‘Mehanata Social Club’, but he more on Thursdays and she more on Saturdays. They had rarely crossed paths before. Sebastian is telling a dangerously insensitive story. Daria is beyond appalled. Sebastian removes his skally cap and says,  “The job, and operation; call it as you want, involves calling on high end prostitutes whose numbers one acquires in the association of banker men and or your those of Post or former Soviet back ground, mostly at the Banya. Focusing, but not generalizing on the evil Albanians.”

Banya is Russian for bathhouse. Sebastian loves the way everything sounds in Russian. Fucking, fighting, or songs. Though he knows under three dozen phrases and cannot even read Cyrillic, he’s an enthusiast of wanting things he cannot possibly have.

“So shortly after the girls arrive and give you some fictitious cover. You take a coat and as they walk in and settle on a price that will involve no bit of touching at all. Then, you tell them that they’re being filmed and recorded, but that you’re not a cop. Not some rich pervert or a Mossadnik. Or who-ever else weird and dangerous. You’re not there to entrap them for absolutely anything. You can tell them you’re an abolitionist, or keep it real apolitical.”

Puff, puff passes along this ill-conceived venture.

“You tell them to call down to the driver and say your John is layered out like Charlie Sheen.”

 “Tiger-blooded,” notes Raphael Ernesto. 

“Then you make tea. You tell them a little storah. A personal tale about why you are not a dog or a pig. Intermixed with questions you plan to answer. How you came to hate this line of work. Because maybe you had loved someone forced into it. You convince them to take and perhaps disseminate to other persons a number to arrest traffickers and pimps. Also, how to get such trafficked and victimized people the resources they need to escape such work. They get the job cash for nothing. We’re in an era of creating digital money and printing convincing hundos. What’s fucking money? We can print it easily these days faster than they can secure it. A number, a simple number which is a real way out of the night life. They get that number on a card. You ask them to put it in their phone. Eventually, the poor unfortunate soul either will pass the number along or report it directly to the pimps. But, inevitably you force a violent hand and spread the knowledge that there is in fact a networked way to escape such slavery, were they so inclined. It’s cheaper and more effective than lobbying or useless political routes. All the cops are on the take anyway. We must go directly to the slaves and assure them there is safe way out. The next stage then is to get our various operatives into brothels to feign cardiac arrest and call in ambulances and firemen in as reinforcements. Then burn them down.”

Her jaw basically drops.

“They would kill you just for that nonsense,” she spits out.

“For such bullshit man! For a lot less than bull shit. A number! I spit on your American number. For insulting low grade bullshit that changes nothing. You would die. They would kill those dear to you too. Nothing at all will be fixed about anything, not one woman will walk free. It is bourgeois liberal thinking,” retorts Daria.

All the regality of being born all Slavic, but outside the great dividing highway that loops the Moscow capital separating the have everything’s from the have nothings or have only little somethings. Being born so radiantly beautiful and tough and Russian after the alleged triumph of Capitalist Modernity has left her charming and capable of fight. She is quite far ‘from Russia with love’, rootless and floating in glittery fairy tales that don’t expel the daily hardships of her newly adopted country. Though her card was not green yet.

“I am not afraid to die for a thing I believe in sweetness. At the cost of all my American privileges. They say anyway that I’m hard man to make disappear,” Sebastian flatly retorts.

“He has such dumb American beliefs blat!” she mocks, “I guess you’ve never had to work for anything. Or work to keep something you fought hard for blat. So you would give away most easily. Your life seems so easily offered. To take, if you ask me,” she snaps at his bait.

“Hey, lady, you are insulting to my dear friend and our gracious host,” sternly interjects Raphael, “This man, you have no idea what he’s been through to back up these words. This man is a real hero!”

Daria could care less about the Peruvian definition of so-called ‘heroism’. She is appalled by Sebastian’s cynical little story about call girls passing, itself off as incompetent activism. So she offers to kill him. He obliges her. Thinks she’s bluffing, but doesn’t care if she’s not not.

‘I’ll kill this over privileged American hypocrite,’ she thinks. A civic duty to my new mother land and the old country too blat! ‘This shit head knows not with whom he plays,’ she thinks. Mostly, she maintains a mighty level of the not giving of a single shit. Not one fuck of a fuck, of a shit. She’s an off day. She’s totally blacked out. She won’t remember anything. She only remembers every other night out when she drinks. The rest of them form an intractable blur. A black haze punctuated with irregular black and blue marks. “From falling down stairs.” If she really kills him, the tragedy, as far as a memory, will really belong to no one.

Rafael implores her to be more, “Suave, Suave!” To be more calm and “Tranquillo.” The once infamous Peruvian revolutionist, now moonlighting as a Newyorkgrad low key digital disk jockey and designer jeans mender. He cannot even barely modulate Sebastian’s posturing ego and Dasha’s swaggerous, murderous taunting. Now they’re waving invisible pistols at each others’ faces like wild Middle Easterners.

“You think like a nigger!” she yells at him.

The job of any and all men as far as she is concerned is please her by makings sure her drink is never empty and that life is a series of taken care of attractions, to make her life easier. He has failed at both in his utter self-serving arrogance.

“So you’re gonna kill me? Or just fucking threaten on about it?” says Sebastian in her face.“Absofuckinglutely,” she replies, “your life is bullshit, thus your death is certain blat.” 

Before Rafael can talk them down they’re going up a ladder. Up to the 18^th level deck. It’s more of an easterly platform atop the roof garden with the massive blue glass Geary Building towering just an alley ways distance away. Thousands of expensive little cubicles for the lower upper class. Sports players, fancy pied a terres to stuff a mistress and city homes for the lower ranks of the financial class. But all the lights are out. A great setting for a hastily arranged assisted suicide.

Now, they’re fucking boxing. Daria is in a boxing school in Brighton. She strikes at him hard. But it isn’t his first rodeo. 

“Die you shit! You fucking Amerikansky! You wasted one blat,” she spits at him.

Rafael is actually too drunk to get up the ladder to intervene. Amelia and Victoria have stopped their camera phone art making over white wine and look up with moderate concern, moderate care. Actually, only Rafael knows Daria and Sebastian intimately enough to really care. As he is in love with both of them. Rafael knows a lot about Sebastian’s other life aboard as ‘Kawa Zivistan’, a wanted rebel throughout the peripheral colonies. A  partisan leader in the American guerrilla. Not spooks nor the police forces had taken him so far, or gotten very close to making him die. A beautiful woman might now get close enough. They are boxing pretty close to the ledge. But to be honest, Amelia fucked him twice and it was mediocre. Viktoria only uses him for hints about Rafael’s infidelity. Rafael, has drank too much. His brain is just too wet to get him up that ladder.  

“You don’t want to live here forever?!” Daria taunts him.

Their boxing and taunting has them perilously near the edge of the roof. She is striking hits and he is just taking her hits and then, then it comes. Thwack. She cracks his jaw hard. He grins at her with a little blood on the lip.

“Hit me to kill me! Just knock me into that fucking pit! Make a good inglorious end to it. It’s all bullshit you know. I’ll just come back,” Sebastian declares.

The most beautiful woman he has ever seen is just a side story in his own mind. His own much larger tragedy propels him to make questionable life choices, such as this one. “Kill me blat!” he beckons. Then, she tries to really kill him. She’s moves so fucking fast, like she’s basically trained in the ‘School of Alcoholism’. Daria cocks back and doesn’t even blink. She hits him in the throat with the right and then with the left, crack! He topples backwards off the roof. As Sebastian plummets back, he grabs out instinctively. Yanks her with him. They tumble together off the ledge. They plummet to the alley way below. The flesh snaps apart. Two souls leave their bodies from a pile of bloody pointless death.

P r e l u d e

A Safehouse in Central Moscow

The year is unknowable.

Two partisans hide in a safehouse in central Moscow near the Arbat second inner ring. The room is lit only with eerie glow of soft blue light from electrical candles. A man with strange gray eyes is seated with a tidy bale of manuscript papers working on a small primitive lap top device on a red desk. Also on this desk is a large silver scroll, opened to reveal an ancient manuscript. A woman with blonde hair is seated on a bed taking apart a futuristic pistol and putting it back together.

In the background, the Russian song Oy Moruz plays.

The sound of a record skipping and it becomes a dancehall song. Then abruptly turns off. Sebastian Adonaev, a 29 year old American is seated at the red desk going through a lengthy manuscript, copying out the scroll. Intermittently he is also typing. The words appear holographically projected about the walls of the room. Daria Andreavna, a 25 year old Russian with bleached blond hair is meticulously assembling a pistol while smoking a banned Newport cigarette.

SEBASTIAN:

I strangely recall that I’ve had many and multiple lives. Some past. Some future. Some even running concurrently! I feel as though I have visited the top inner most quarters of the Ziggurat! Had powder blown into my eyes! And then I awoke again here. In your begrudging arms. My head is spinning!

DARIA:

You must keep those mad notions to yourself for now. Your eyes are so sad. It seems you have lost the muscle memory to even smile. I would go so far as to say, it’s time to stop fighting. Stop using your brazen words in English, when you do not fully comprehend what they mean.

SEBASTIAN:

Reading from the Silver Dressed Manuscript

‘The snow fall was exceptional. It was as if my god had pulled a vast white blanket upon us to tuck America to bed. Then the devil and a host of petty bureaucrats did not take the time to keep the power running. This winter was the winter that tens of thousands across the empire were tucked in without heat into a long kiss goodnight. That was the winter the Chornay finally fought back. Remembering also where they came from.’

DARIA:

Where did you find that? English! Stupid fucking English. I don’t think they say ‘blacks’ anymore over there. It’s so dated. It think its ‘Negs’, or ‘Noires’ maybe. In the raps they call everyone their niggers!

SEBASTIAN: 

Reading from the Silver Dressed Manuscript

‘In a well-fortified safe house buried in the heart of the Russian capital. I lock eyes with a woman who in another life broke me down and sold me as a slave!’

DARIA:

‘Indeed’, as you like to often say.

SEBASTIAN:

Reading from the Silver Dressed Manuscript

‘Her eyes, her eyes! Even the bluest day on the Caspian contains no such expansive shimmer! There is no comparison for this level of captivation. All things we have done, or did or may even still have to do are only so that we might never have to bear again the painful agony of our tumultuous separation.’

DARIA:

My, my, Oh my the fuck my! The stories you tell yourself, and others. Read then my little bleak one. My American Mayakovsky. Read and you can torture yourself once again.

SEBASTIAN:

Reading from the Silver Dressed Manuscript

‘Poem #38: The Millennium Hostage Crisis. Part One.’

DARIA:

Dedicated to heroic little me! Dasha Andreavna! A true Russian patriot!

SEBASTIAN:

Are you blushing yet woman?

DARIA:

We Russians know not how!

Reciting the Poem:

‘Life of the slave show. Let me remove you from your castle and let you observe how we live, in the wilderness below.’

SEBASTIAN:

I take it you liked it a little bit? To remember even a line. A very great flattery.

DARIA:

I like very much it when you try and talk so emotionally dirty to me in such poetry. This is for sure.

SEBASTIAN:

I am capable of just about anything when you believe in our work!

DARIA:

Our work!? The history books will again say you wrote it all yourself.

SEBASTIAN:

Our work! Important work! Giving the working class some actual hope. Giving the people in the streets and trenches of America’s greatest uprising something to believe in. Art in service of revolution and of course a brilliant kind of code. Code to make sure the communication lines don’t crumble as the material conditions worsen. When they turn the internet off. Code to signal and trigger events!

DARIA:

Ha! I believe, that you still believe in your very own lies. Your own strange delusionals about the so-called ‘Brooklyn Soviet’. Blat! Believe the bullshit stories we fabricated together. You still seem to find it a useful propaganda. Publishing these, Je ne sais; conspiracy theories and varying alternative realities. These delusions of grandeur the underground is still apparently circulating. Written in antiquated prose of a dying language!  Just I think it’s dated. Using plays and poetry to rile up the mobs to blood shed.

SEBASTIAN:

Poetry and Martyrs are immortal!

DARIA:

I think all your dead friends have very little use for any poetry.

SEBASTIAN:

Such overwhelming blackness! Such hopelessness embedded in all our mad man ideations! You have a very deep amnesia. You always whisper always of such treacherous things, and remember nothing that was useful and good about out work, our short happy times together. 

DARIA:

An amnesia you say! Perhaps knowing you is very traumatic?

SEBASTIAN:

You don’t ever remember the good times! You forget all the possibilities we unleashed together. You forget, that we have played a part that absolves us now of any further responsibility to any higher cause. We don’t have to get involved ever again. We don’t have to come back to life, we can just live this one out.

DARIA:

Remind me! Story time Tovarish lover. I challenge you right fucking now Blat. The Ministry wants to know how our poems are coded. The Department of Homeland Security accuses you of course of treason, thus to your country of origin you will probably never return. Worse places to be exiled to than Russian though. The proles still need something to believe in! Your Millennium Hostage Crisis, it cost the Oligarchy dearly.

SEBASTIAN:

The poem or the siege?

DARIA:

Of course the mother-fuck siege! No one care about the poetry anymore, if ever. That which you cannot see with your own eyes, is just some kind of pornograph or propaganda being distilled to you! Tell me your best tales! like you used to on the boardwalk. Remind, me again what we’re worth on the market. Why is it that I assume such a huge risk for you? It sure isn’t love.

SEBASTIAN:

It is a kind of love though. Between two people fully unaccustomed to having it. The trouble sweetness, with your tales, is that not a single one of them are ever true, ever. Frankly, they’re all just bleak.

DARIA:

The greatest fun with your war stories is that so many of them are trying to be real. You give everyone away. You reveal your entire naked plot points! You expose yourself to serious liability. Your voice is so fucking loud, even the bed bugs can inform on you!

SEBASTIAN:

What will be the prize for the partizan with the premium story tonight?

DARIA:

The usual my daring! Only the base usual. As, at this juncture nothing is real and anything is possible. We suffered badly in New York. I won’t get again raped and you won’t get tortured for weeks on end. With blades, beatings, gas, current, water fire boards and sodomy. The people you love most won’t have to get killed this time. Maybe they can even sit the great war out. Maybe you’ll get to bring your city and homeland back from the ashes. Your people come back from the dead. Fuck, maybe I’ll date you for a while. Have summer fling in Moscow, take a train to China. Like you always said you wanted to.

SEBASTIAN:

Your amusement and our perpetual survival have gotten us in quite a lot of danger so far. You’re worth every bullet though, I stand by that. You will draw on Russian fairy tales but I will spin from the ghosts of my dead friends and the overwhelming darkness inside me.

DARIA:

Ladies always go first, for this is the ‘Code of the Haitian Gentleman’. Let both the high and low minded mind games begin! If I am woman, and he attempts to be man, then we are easy prey.

For the gods, the spirits, lesser demons and also human devils! Sin and general winter are historically undefeated. That’s a fact. Above all those forces seeking to make us base slaves, we are bound most to our own wild passions! I am creature ruled almost selfishly by my passion, and so is he. Inevitable really that so much did burn. I do not make any remembering when we had this conversation. Only that it once occurred. It was sometime after our very first meeting.

Sometime before I found myself handcuffed to a chandelier fixture in the Millennium Hotel awaiting my deadly snuff and torture! Sometime after blue moons of their Bohemian festival moved reality about. Sometime before that ultra murderous uprising called “the Great Disorder”. Sometime after the far more bloody “Great Revolt”. Which was its more articulate, yet ultimately more homicidal older sibling. Before I sold our souls to a devil without making ask of questions! Certainly after I realize I loved you as I have never loved a man before in this life or the next, or one after that. But, it was a dark and unusual love.

I realized that I had loved you several times before. And that we are both so dangerous when in love. To each other. Also the world at large. And that Russian love, and American love have very different expectations that come with them.

I will now make careful choice of my words.

Speaking your American language with my Russian thoughts is to attempt placement of entire Caspian Sea into a shitty hip flask. My English when spoken without any intoxication hints that I will speak more clearly with my actions.  Were you sober then when we found each other on that roof top, instead of passion punch drunk you’d not have ignored the threat our lusty adventures soon presented. We would have walked away. Despite his fascination with me. Despite my overwhelming beauty. But that is not how the story was to write itself!

He could deny me nothing. But no one dare should point the finger to me that I did not give warning! Perhaps we were blinded by the vodka lullabies, the bright lights of the towers and the good night moon.

She then pauses.

I’m going to use you. I announced as much on the roof of the district back when. And I know you don’t care. Completely and utterly so that I may get from point A to point B. Did I say that to him, or did he say that to me?

SEBASTIAN:

I consented to such use, use the fuck away. We will see how far in the alphabet we can climb with you on my shoulders!

DARIA:

The Russian alphabet, it has more letters. More strategic depth. The letters also can take different subtle meaning based on where they are placed. The sounds, they will completely change. Some very hard, some soft.

SEBASTIAN:

Place yourself besides me, for now. You know me to never surrender. Not a hair on your head, not one inch of the turf.

DARIA:

I shall, but tomorrow this will have to be finished. How long can you make more of your favorite poetic noises, your rhymes in American English as you devote your life to something hopeless that cannot ever be? You want crazed impossible things, which of course all know is the road to tremendous suffering. You believe in a revolution, that frankly kills all it touches and scorches the earth with fire. You concurrently believe in a love, that when examined is not love it is you own need to anchor yourself in the impossible again, perusing me of all people. A cold, self absorbed debutante, to put it nicely.

SEBASTIAN:

I like the way that all sounds. I like way the way the word hopeless rolls off your lips. I am an Amerikansky, as you accuse me. Hopeless, is just a call to arms. Hopeless, impossible to me those words are exciting. The kind of words to separate boys from men, cowards form heroes.

DARIA:

What can I say in the face of such mad idealism! Your passion did then and does still touch me. In some weird way. I’m going to devastate you though again, you know. This is my effect on men, you are still a man. No angel. Or Devil. Or Ghost. I know I am a human woman of Penza and I know that you can certainly bleed. And, also cry. But sadly, you are not a normal man. Your of very different stuff.

SEBASTIAN:

Well we shall not later claim I wasn’t given a very fair warning. Had we met in another time, were I a different person wearing a different life; I would still know you. I cannot put my emotions to bed as easily as you.

DARIA:

Your emotions and your memories, are not real. In the darkness of the district night, in the wilderness of North America I repeatedly told you nothing but enormous destructive white, black and blue lies.

SEBASTIAN:

It was, what it all was.

DARIA:

I did what needed to be done. As Absofuckinglutely usual.

SEBASTIAN:

He quotes her.

‘It is sad that it all has to end.’

DARIA:

These were the first words uttered in acceptance of a risk and a warning between myself Daria Andreavna and the mad idealist named Sebastian Adonaev living under his various code names. Our love and the totality of our affair will be thing of Post-Soviet lore and Amerikansky voyeuristic fascination. There have been many doomed loves before. Captured artistically in bright theatre lights of both empires. There have been tales of hard hearts which remain unbreakable. Wild bohemian longings that conquered heroically the conventions of their day. I needed to get you to Moscow.

SEBASTIAN:

Is the story of our love to be more like Russian literature or more like Amerikansky cinema? Mere flickering Paramount Pictures? Or, was it all just a job t you? Work that needed to get done. For your pocket? For your mother?

DARIA:

General Winter has never been defeated, not once ever. So we will have to perform still more wine soaked miracles in the wilderness to remain together. A variety of strange longings took shape and bore most irregular if not unnatural fruit.

SEBASTIAN:

That much is now clear.

DARIA:

The first miraculous act will be turning your tragic tears into Vodka.

This is my happy gift to you. To turn an unusual and storied past into a heroic song and dance. To make your long dead mechanical heart beat like a war drum as the waves of the uprising crashed upon the nation we shared or really I should say, strategically co-inhabited.

The second miracle will be the theft of the moon itself. Such a task is just a starting point for you to please me, also pay my ransom.  Take to heart that the materialism of a Russian woman is but an ante up to play a high stakes game of loyalty. As for my freedom, Dmitry asked for that moon. I can have Oleg introduce you to her.

The third miracle will be for us to put some bullets in the devils collective. In retaliation for crimes of the past committed against us, and our love, and humanity in general. We’re gonna kill some oligarchs, at the very least.

The fourth miracle act will be that I can truly come to love you, maybe one day. To forgive you for what you had to do in my name, the easy part I suppose. In the name really of your long dead wife, bless her martyred soul. For the freedom of long abused inhabitants of Hispaniola too. More on all that later. But, to even consider loving you of course you must secure me. It will take several lives and a solid contact between us to accomplish these four miraculous acts. They will make wild tales and epic songs. And some poems, 

when we must.

SEBASTIAN:

It seems you remember the entire bloody manuscript before me! I would prefer it if we keep my alleged tragedy, the story of me dearest intended, my dead and violated martyr wife out of this all, completely.

DARIA:

Whatever we need to compel you to vengeance, my friend. Save me now and avenge your fallen tortured soul too! Via my company and our illicit secret series of kisses we made war on those oligarchical devils and their sickly entourage. We painted together a portrait. That in the end makes Russian literature look like tame romantic comedy, and Amerikansky Cinema, just flickering Soma on telescreens. Wakanda is real!  To beat back brutal hunger and or feed those dependent upon us. To meet the benchmark called survival, the human body and mind is capable of any number of enormous sins. At times grossly unpalatable to human soul. If you believe in such things!

SEBASTIAN:

It is not just a question of what we all must to do to preserve our own selves. The shifting of alliances in pursuit of securing our deliverance from the wilds of worldly living is exhausting. Strange bed fellows make and break even the strongest of hearts. The wilderness at night is vast and treacherous place that to some is source of fearful moral panic. To others, a sheer bevy of potential opportunity!

DARIA:

In darkness of night fallen angels appear as demons at times. Most treacherous are our human misjudgments. The nuances of intention are lost to perceptions of trickery. Violations of trust. Devils can look angelic for a time and humans with host of mixed motives can see best kept secrets revealed like so much dirty laundry blowing in the cold winds of night.

But, I’m not here to talk to you about night! Or about all the devils that thrive in its long shadow. This just story about when feeling returns to the heart when the body has been dead for many days. So many that the world of the living is but a restored memory. Also about the selling of souls and the banding together of destinies.  

SEBASTIAN:

Also about whether poems can feed anything more than hope in the face of hopelessness!

DARIA:

They certainly do not!

SEBASTIAN:

And whether more reckless and brazen hope, is indeed the only cure something so called hopelessness invites.  

DARIA:

IT ISN’T!

SEBASTIAN:

So it’s Haitian love story, but also a Vodka Lullaby staring brave Russian angel from Penza! And of a daring American paramedic.A friend of the people fighting under a Kurdish name. An adventurer born in New York City! Or as it was later called; Newyorkgrad!  

DARIA:

It’s also about trying to steal away another man’s wife. Which is whole category of crime and punishment onto itself.

SEBASTIAN:

It’s really about old souls coming back for each other, even if just for a fall.

DARIA:

Based on a mostly true Brooklyn Noire, circulated by the underground in 2012. Based on some wide range of prophesied events which we set in motion via of our high impact knowing of each other. Maybe like in a biblical sense. But with more carnality! And gun play.

SEBASTIAN:

Set in the Holy Land of Brooklyn and the Wilderness of the Financial District in the City of New York, mostly to glow of blue moon light at night and structure fires by day. In Moscow! In Haiti! In Kurdistan! In Arabia! In the heart of twisted dystopia called Brooklyn Soviet! In places that were and also soon could be!

DARIA:

Set in your occupied and homeland called Israel. It is also a tale of forbidden impossible love in the age of anarchist trials. Of great train robberies in the former Soviet Union and of a tavern in the wilderness where lost souls find short but wholly tumultuous company in post Capitalist America on the eve of a global human rights revolution. Or, something. Something hopefully both ludicrous and profound.

SEBASTIAN:

So begins again the tale of Daria called Dasha and Sebastian called Kawa. A Russian she and a most irregular Amerikansky me and the partisans we led into a grim losing battle. Star crossed lovers with the moon as our witness, fuck and vodka as our means of cross interrogation and higher ground beyond the waves of hopelessness and fate as our primary objective.

DARIA:

You use a lot of fucking words. You begin tales often with strange memories of a foreign murder and a liberation war. I however chose to begin with my winning smile. With my chest pressed against you. Also with a warning. This courtship cannot ever end well. A promise of deliverance via passionate love, once adequately demonstrated.

This is not ever to be that tale.  I begin instead with a double funeral!

SEBASTIAN:

You my dear old friend. My Tovarish. You are a genius artist. A most thrilling propagandist. A temptress. A siren. To destroy a mighty fleet. I remember when you took me in after the hospital camps and all their torture. When you took long walks with me down the Brighton Coney boardwalk. Allowing me to re-compose my inner thoughts. Restoring my will to fight.  I am honored, truly honored to be your front man. If only as you proclaim, for another life of night. I am your fall guy, your dagger man. Your sword. You are my comrade and my everlasting droog.  What have I done to me, in the name of you? A lot of terror.

DARIA:

You have too many fucking names! When the history is finally written, they’ll make you a lunatic. A fanatical zealot. A real mad man. A terrorist. And me, just some whore.

And at best a hapless muse!

And then, she blows a powder into his face and the story begins again. To the sounds of trumpets and gun fire.

HaOlam HaBa, or “the world to come”, is an important part of Jewish eschatology, although Judaism concentrates on the importance of HaOlam HaZeh (“this world”). The afterlife is known as Olam haBa, Gan Eden (the Heavenly Garden of Eden) and Gehinom.^[4][5][6] According to the Talmud, any non-Jew who lives according to the Seven Laws of Noah is regarded as a Ger toshav (righteous gentile), and is assured of a place in the world to come, the final reward of the righteous.^[7][8]

Legends[edit]

In the 19th century book Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg compiled Jewish legends found in rabbinic literature. Among the legends are ones about the world to come and the two Gardens of Eden. The world to come is called Paradise, and it is said to have a double gate made of carbuncle that is guarded by 600,000 shining angels.^[9] Seven clouds of glory overshadow Paradise, and under them, in the center of Paradise, stands the tree of life. ^[10] The tree of life overshadows Paradise too, and it has fifteen thousand different tastes and aromas that winds blow all across Paradise.^[11] Under the tree of life are many pairs of canopies, one of stars and the other of sun and moon, while a cloud of glory separates the two. In each pair of canopies sits a rabbinic scholar who explains the Torah to one.^[12] When one enters Paradise one is proffered by Michael (archangel) to God on the altar of the temple of the heavenly Jerusalem,^[13] whereupon one is transfigured into an angel (the ugliest person becomes as beautiful and shining as “the grains of a silver pomegranate upon which fall the rays of the sun”).^[14] The angels that guard Paradise’s gate adorn one in seven clouds of glory, crown one with gems and pearls and gold, place eight myrtles in one’s hand, and praise one for being righteous while leading one to a garden of eight hundred roses and myrtles that is watered by many rivers.^[15] In the garden is one’s canopy, its beauty according to one’s merit, but each canopy has four rivers – milk, honey, wine, and balsam^[16] – flowing out from it, and has a golden vine and thirty shining pearls hanging from it.^[17] Under each canopy is a table of gems and pearls attended to by sixty angels.^[18] The light of Paradise is the light of the righteous people therein.^[19] Each day in Paradise one wakes up a child and goes to bed an elder to enjoy the pleasures of childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age.^[20] In each corner of Paradise is a forest of 800,000 trees, the least among the trees greater than the best herbs and spices,^[21] attended to by 800,000 sweetly singing angels.^[22] Paradise is divided into seven paradises, each one 120,000 miles long and wide.^[23] Depending on one’s merit, one joins one of the paradises: the first is made of glass and cedar and is for converts to Judaism; the second is of silver and cedar and is for penitents; the third is of silver and gold, gems and pearls, and is for the patriarchs, Moses and Aaron, the Israelites that left Egypt and lived in the wilderness, and the kings of Israel; the fourth is of rubies and olive wood and is for the holy and steadfast in faith; the fifth is like the third, except a river flows through it and its bed was woven by Eve and angels, and it is for the Messiah and Elijah; and the sixth and seventh divisions are not described, except that they are respectively for those who died doing a pious act and for those who died from an illness in expiation for Israel’s sins.^[24]

Beyond Paradise, according to Legends of the Jews, is the higher Gan Eden, where God is enthroned and explains the Torah to its inhabitants.^[25] The higher Gan Eden contains three hundred ten worlds and is divided into seven compartments.^[26] The compartments are not described, though it is implied that each compartment is greater than the previous one and is joined based on one’s merit.^[27] The first compartment is for Jewish martyrs, the second for those who drowned, the third for “Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai and his disciples,” the fourth for those whom the cloud of glory carried off, the fifth for penitents, the sixth for youths who have never sinned; and the seventh for the poor who lived decently and studied the Torah.^[28]

Zoroastrian eschatology[edit]

In Zoroastrian eschatology, the world to come is the frashokereti, where the saoshyant will bring about a resurrection of the dead in the bodies they had before they died. This is followed by a last judgment. The yazatas Airyaman and Atar will melt the metal in the hills and mountains, and the molten metal will then flow across the earth like a river. All humankind—both the living and the resurrected dead—will be required to wade through that river, but for the righteous (ashavan) it will seem to be a river of warm milk, while the wicked will be burned. The river will then flow down to hell, where it will annihilate Angra Mainyu and the last vestiges of wickedness in the universe.

• 

PART I: 

THEORY OF CHANGE 

What is Emancipatory Development

We would like to take this opportunity to summarize the primary tactical and philosophical lessons being drawn from our study of Social Movement Organizations (SMO). 

It is vital to us as Development Practitioners who view the Universal Human Rights as a mere baseline and hold the desire for real change coupled with full emancipation in our hearts; that we help dispel some mythologies and embrace a program fully in line with “emancipatory development”.  

Emancipatory Development (ED) is the collective tactical blueprint by which the masses render the sources of their dependency obsolete, the violence of their oppressors is neutralized and they emerge with full human capability as well as the agency to uplift their fellow humans. There are four primary tactical sets of ED framework for resistance. First are the Development Technologies; the aspects and technocracy of infrastructure to both sustain life in austere environments but more importantly to achieve baseline control of the Maslow hierarchy of Needs. Post survival comes Mass Capacity Modules; this is didactic/practical expansion on life saving humanitarianism to begin cultivating vocation skills and livelihoods with dignity out of a recently oppressed, traumatized and impoverished populace. The third aspect is Militant Nonviolence or Peacefare; the 198+ tactics codified by the Albert Einstein intuition coupled with every advance in non-lethal warfare coupled strategically to dislodge the iron heel of the oligarchy off our collective neck. 

That is to say, active and passive resistance maneuvers that refuse to take human life. Finally, the Parallel State the subject of this pamphlet; the ongoing effort to break apart the global plantation system into communities of choice and free association. Not by smashing the existing state architecture or engaging the agents of repression in the forests, hills and streets, instead by taking responsibility for our own development. We will achieve self-determination by dispelling the fallacy that we must pay government taxes to survive or that these governments act in our interest.

We will prove the legitimacy of solidarity, mutual aid and human agency.

The most nefarious victory of the “global elites” over the human masses was to remove the legitimacy of our vocabulary to speak of real change. To keep billions on the precipice of survival (3 billion plus living under $2.50 a family a day) requires a vast campaign of delegitimization and historical revisionism as well as vile and periodic atrocity. “Neoliberalism” and globalization itself are an exploitative construct to force an intellectual and tactical break between those fighting for freedom and those attending to the immediate Maslowian needs of billions of our poor. As if to disconnect acceptable from unacceptable change and sanitize the strategic action field of actors with a means to provide as they engage to resist. The poor are poor because of overt political decisions made to pre-determine their non-development. Hiding behind the veil of Human Rights is their open and acknowledged widespread violation. Behind the wool; the smoke screen of development is but a complex, vaguely sanitized version of colonialism. But neo-liberalism is only one school of thought in development. There are dozens of both drivel of crude reductive economists or utopian fallacies hiding the purpose of the architecture. 

The purpose of the global Westphalian state system is not mere extractive servitude from periphery to center. It is also not purely about economics. It is not just about an elite group of ‘capitalists’ and ‘robber barons’ raping the earth and its people for a profit. It is not just about control over finite resources. Or some imagined a clash of civilizations.

It has everything to do with psychology.

Three billion poor are victims of an organized structural violence perpetrated by the economic elites of the traditional hegemon powers and each nation’s cabal of local oligarchs. But, as we prepare to wage wide scale peacefare; as we prepare to organize and train for our total liberation we must attempt to articulate a Social Movement “ideology” that incorporates the lessons of the historic freedom struggle with the most cutting edge arsenal of anti-poverty development capabilities. But, that wouldn’t be enough to get “free”. 

It would likely only unleash further holocaust.

    “Emancipatory Development” is both an ideology and a tactical framework in the service and liberation of the poor. Those of us who are fighting for baseline Universal Human Rights and speak of real socio-political freedom must now embrace the tools of development cautiously as a supplemental mechanism to the tactics of nonviolent resistance. 

    Development means nothing unless it is emancipatory, egalitarian, and led by the people it serves. It must also rely on and invest in the capacity of the masses to be their own agents of delivery, progress, and victory over oppression. We must fully break from neo-colonialist controls, “poverty entrepreneurship”, and measure all our work by its value in national struggles for human liberation. 

    We have to question our own evolution. Our own awareness of the so-called “human condition”. Because we cannot see the soul in a normative sense and perhaps should call to question a deity that has so many prophets and so few deliverables; that is why development itself becomes for a now an issue of psychology; of waking up the dying and asleep.

The poor are so poor because they are victims of a global economic system. A system which breeds technocratic dependency on “aid”, whose structural adjustments gut social systems and place control of national resources in the hands of multinational corporations. It is easy to identify our primary targets. There is not a government on earth without some varying degree of culpability. “Development” however means absolutely nothing unless it is completely rooted in tangible victories of the poor over the sources of their poverty, the external and internal. We stake our legitimacy as a social movement on our ability to wed resistance fully with development. 

To hit the nail on the head; we must utilize tactics that model the world we see in our hearts as well as the conduct. The parallel state is not built on the ashes of a burned out revolution. It is the piece meal adaptation of a new world’s values into incremental liberation. Territory has been shown to be worth far less than opened minds.

It should be a radical notion in light of thousands of years of carnage that we are actually capable of being rewired to collective care. That we are capable of achieving the rights and beyond without implementation form above. 

Any overview of social movements begins with theory. Why they form and theories on their success or failure. Drawing from this I bring attention to the “Resource Mobilization Theory” which states that movements take preexisting organizations able to marshal resources of various types and their synergy yields movement success. Charles Tilly said that Social Movements are “sustained campaigns that make collective claims aimed at authorities” Sidney Tarrow called them: “collective challenges based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities.” What is clear from the recent mobilizations of Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Brazil, Bulgaria, Thailand and the Ukraine is that mass mobilizations are most successful at resisting government repression when they can a) clearly articulate demands and b) mobilize the resources of pre-organized associations to sustain the movements operations and c) supplant the corrupt government as the primary agent of delivery of services ie; DEVELOPMENT. That failure of all of these movements so far, even ones that have brought down highly repressive governments in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Ukraine is to have incorporated any development component that makes their confederation of SMOs, viable alternatives to the states they dismantle or assail.

The main reason the Black Panther Party and Nation Islam were the two greatest recent threats to the oligarchy of the United States was that they embraced bootstrap social services. Occupy did to some extent but they were suppressed in less than three months.

Referring to Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach; Mass Capacity is a social movement led development methodology that declares “human capability” most liberated via education on the skills and technologies human’s need to survive.

In Theory of Fields we read that “defection of economic elites is one of the most critical aspects to the success or failure of a social movement to seize power” They cite the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1986 and the Somoza Regime in Nicaragua in 1979. There is a correlation between expanded social movement activity and expansion of state strategic action fields. Modern states are stronger by separating from economic and social bases, then forming alliances with the vital players of the major non-state fields. “Development” via the third (NGO) Sector and government aid is itself a strategic field to conquer. Social Movements for Emancipatory Development must in fact make mastery of development and delivery of services more of priority than resistance to regimes they oppose.

In fact we can clearly see that every single group of partisans that have taken up arms and challenged a violation of rights is either crushed in time; unleashes such carnage that their claims to be liberating anyone are suspect; and or take power and become exactly the as their oppressor. As has been the case is most of the existing parallel state.

In our case studies, we learn the obvious moral strength of non-violent resistance, economic boycott, and mobilization out of intuitions of cultural relevance. In both the cases of the American Civil Rights Movement and the Indian Independence Movement, we see the moral superiority and tactical relevance of non-violence. We read in these cases the necessity of harnessing economic buying power away from assets owned by your oppressors. We see that militarily it would have been disastrous for the Indian people to take up arms against England or the American Negro to fight the Federal government with arms (as the Black Panthers learned in 1968). Instead, both movements achieved considerable constitutional victory without arms. Yet looks at the millions of oppressed Dalit (untouchables) in India or the state of blacks in America. In modern day Syria we can see just how quickly a non-violent pro-democracy movement can devolve into a protracted war with nearly 200,000+ dead and a new Caliphate (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria systematically raping and exterminating all non-believers on their territory; a perversion of parallel state theory as we shall examine later in the pamphlet, albeit a type of one.

Never underestimate the violence unleashed combing greed, grievance and imagined identity. Never forget how many generations are later affected by the traumas of war.

In our studies of Liberation Theology, we examined the power of subverting traditional mechanism of reaction and repression into new social gospels for change. We identify the power seen in Latin America via the “little Church” and in Political Islam in the recent 2011 uprisings across the Middle East. Clearly, Zionism is profound example of utilizing a religious framework coupled with development technology for geo-political ends. As was the Islamic Revolution in Tehran in 1979; Revolutionary Shi’ism, and Hezbollah. It was used to topple the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. We fully advocate that the Movement continue to embrace the universal messages of justice found in the world’s religions as long as no aspect of the movement will seek to impose a singular religious norm over communities not of that religion.  Liberation Theology is so subversive because it conquers one of the elites’ traditional main fields of social control. In the case studies a large chunk of the parallel state was liberated via various liberation theologian movements.

In our examination of Paulo Freire we analyze humanization/ dehumanization; internalization of oppression; and understanding of the elite as divided, uncompleted human beings. Isolation of the mind, disempowerment, and mental slavery was his diagnosis of the oppressed. He spoke of the “false generosity” of philanthropy. And of how the poor live in an “ahistorical world”; a completely deterministic world that they cannot escape of total resignation about their plight. He states that “liberation is painful like childbirth” and that only via the direct empowerment of the people can we achieve political rights or social freedom. In agreement with this philosophy and that of Amartya Sen in “Development as Freedom” Mass Capacity is different from “State Capacity”. The most vital tool of a movement for Emancipatory Development is direct investment in the education and technical training of the masses to develop their own communities as they collectively determine. The concept of mass capacity is vital to the success of our movement because only by achieving self-determination can a people enjoy rights, development or freedom.

In our readings on the anti-caste movement, we see the emancipatory power of abandoning imposed identity. We read about mass conversion for Hinduism to Buddhism.  Forced to “act out one’s oppression” via the caste rituals millions are enslaved. Stopping the belief that you are inherently a slave goes back to Paulo Freire. Breaking ones “psychological isolation in an ahistorical world.” It would not be a strategic social movement position to oppose Hinduism, which is the foundation of the Indian State. The conversion of millions to Buddhism is profound example to the rejection of outsider imposed identities that allow class and ethnic exploitations. There is no cultural relativism to be respect to universal human rights, simply cultural paradigms that either can be understood and adopted (liberation theology) or rejected out of hand as the invention of an oppressor (Hutu/Tutsi). 

 In our cases on land reform of course we go back to the most fundamental question of movement; what is your turf? What is your territory? What is yours as people? To what extent do 206 governments built nearly all by historic rapes and expropriations have legitimacy to declare some land yours? I would argue that not one nation-state on earth has a legitimacy the masses should respect. This movement cannot be defeated if it is universal in demands and universal in expectations. It cannot regard one last repressive regime standing to be acceptable. It cannot abide one single person living in starvation as an acceptable norm. It cannot have national aims. The reality of nation state experiment is that in the guise of security, it usurped control and it build a global system where most of the species would be subjugated to the minority.  

In our cases on resistance to Apartheid, we see that just because a social movement can take state power does not in any way make it able to wield political power to the end of economic empowerment for its poor. We think it should be clear to us that violent revolutions and non-violent revolutions do not improve the economic situation of countries poorest citizens, in fact protracted widespread violence via civil war comes after every violent revolution. The aim is not to improve the existing state system. We would argue that the primary aim of emancipatory development is to completely circumvent the state system and place tools directly in the hands of the people. It is historically clear that taking control of an instrument of mass coercion, i.e. the state; is not a successful means to use its power on the behalf of its citizens. It has historically only fostered a new predatory elite.

We are often confronted with the “apolitical  northern generation” raised post-Cold War that do not have an “ideological” paradigm to view world events. It is quite likely that due to historical revisionism and the previously discussed sanitization of political vocabulary for change many young people in the West may actually believe that globalization is the face of progress. I would say frankly that little has changed since the days of colonialism except that direct rule has been replaced with proxy rule. I would go so far as to say that 3 billion poor and extreme poor, also means 3 or 4 million more pliable workers that can be utilized in the global supply chain. Except right now it is not necessary to mobilize 6 or 7 billion workers, half will suffice and the other may hover on the brink or ruin as a reserve. This is not about economics as much as it is about control because even in the hegemon and metropol nations there are percentages starving, percentages working nearly cradle to grave, and a tiny controlling elite. The fallacy of our entire “Development Enterprise” thus so far is to pretend, to trick ourselves in that the governments were acting in good faith. If Development is not an instrument of political power then it is simple charity. The poor do not need our manipulative carrots and their governments’ sticks. They are not empowered via your charity. We reject that dichotomy that aid is either politics or charity. It’s always politics. It’s got to stop being charity. We have to divest our development from states and put it squarely into people. 

The slogan of our entire movement is simply to “teach a person to fish.” 

With one arm of the movement we strike back at the violators of human rights and with the other we build up the global capacity, the ‘Mass Capacity’ of the people to secure their universal rights and more. This will not come from mobs in streets, from civil disobedience or rifles.  We will bring our oppressors to their knees by illustrating their functional irrelevance. A free people can teach their children to read, tend to their people’s health, and operate the means of development needed by a community. Let it be clear. The liberation of a people comes not from the barrel of a gun but in via control of the means of development; the schools, the hospitals, the civil service, sanitation, and all other trades that by their nature promote self-determination and the public good. And any development practitioner that is not working to build that mass capacity; they are “poverty profiteer”, a “bright eyed idiot”, or worse a “dirty collaborator” perpetuating the system that keeps so many destitute.

We came here to unite a movement hiding in the shadows and fighting for survival in the streets. We know that in every slum, in every city, in the mountains, deserts, woods and rural interior are partisans holding out, fighting disconnected in the darkness. We know in every NGO and CBO, even in elected office are those who still believe in real change but are shackled by politics. We must connect the underground, to the partisans to the sympathizers; to the change makers in the halls of power. 

Above all we will rely on indigenous knowledge and empower the people. It is our goal to open the lines of communication. You are not fighting alone.

January 4^th, 2012

It has been two years since I first arrived in Port-Au-Prince. It is remarkable how short it feels, the eyes close just for a second and flashes of the dream on fire emerge in a slew of most visceral memories; as if they were the lips of a lover parted with just one moment before. Yelizaveta, how I miss her already; and if the last two years has erupted now in snap shots, bombastic escapades and grind; well in just eight hours I miss her as if it were a month, then a year, a forever passing in rapid cycle. Time is relative, memory subjective but for the past two years, really two human moments, there has really been only the desire to possess Yelizaveta juxtaposed with my total solidarity with the Haitians. The moral empathy, endless struggle to know them as a people so that I might wed my trade and toil and talent to the cause of their inevitable liberation.

    The attainment of human rights long deferred and structurally denied.

    I am now on a plane. It is Continental Flight 1647 and Victor Emile Cange, my stalwart comrade and partner in this operation slumbers silently, Christianly even. Next to me. We have succeeded in moving 840 kilograms of Basic Life Support medical equipment past U.S. customs and home land security. Long boards have become surf boards, bags loaded with stethoscopes, sphygmometers, training manuals, wound care supplies, are all just our non-declared tourist items. The second anniversary of the quake is eight days away, it is 4th January, 2012, by body is tried still from the ethanol athletics of New Years. Yelizaveta is still on my very lips, I can still feel where she grabbed the blue collar of my uniform and pulled me in.

    Victor and I are wearing the unmarked blue battle dress uniform fatigues of the movement we are affiliated to; the Banshee underground, and the z.o.b. We suspect these uniforms will allow us more scrutiny going into country while lending less scrutiny to our bags. There is an embargo on all bulk items entering the country not coming in as declared and taxes humanitarian cargo until January 15^th. 

    Like most Blan initiatives pre/post-quake; the dynamics of doing any so-called good are maddening and inexplicable; and have many factions to blame themselves on. Principally always the tiny 5% of the Neg, Mulatto and Arab bourgeoisie, followed by the MINUSTAH UN authorities, the cartels, and the Republic of NGO technocrats. And also the heat, and also history and illiteracy, and famine and rampaging Nepalese Cholera too. 

    Once again, we are flying into a hell. Flying into the city of lost children and shattered dreams; the land of many mountains. Ayiti Cherie! We are the third wave of the reinforcements from New York. We will meet Tiputti Capois, our oldest associate and brother at Toussaint L’Ouvature International Airport. And re-supply the Gwoup Ayisyen pou Ijans, the Haitian Emergency Group. We will meet their members and prepare them rigorously. EMT practical drills and negotiations on their future, and plans. We will ready them to stand before the archangel Michael Mastroianni who arrives 21^st January to administer a witnessed practical and written EMT exam. For whatever good it will do I pray we find them stalwart and reasonably well organized.

    I pray too that the city isn’t exactly as I left it two years ago.

    Around us on the plane are the faces of Haiti; noire, mulat, blan and representing all things. Things tragic, things ineffective, things self-serving, self-dealing, against and for human dignity, faces of perseverance, of calm of nervousness of taking and of giving. There is also the hard face of Haitian pride, indomitable. 

    So many trying with the mandate of science, God, and reason to remake the face of Haiti; save her somehow in some small way.

    So many never even asked the Haitian people. Too many are simply short sighted interventionists. Or cowered by the ten million masses shackled in the modes of survival. Today we will ask the GAI and their members where to from here? Victor, myself, Michael, all of us in Banshee and LAHAF; all the supporters of the movement; all the veterans of the first and second waves; one and all are fighting for a small dream too.

    But thankfully none have died for it, yet. I remember so many faces from the first time; from 15 January, 2010 to 28 January, 2010; the first wave. The Bed Stuy-AMHE Detachment. Our tumultuous landing in the 6^th day of relief, before the bodies were buried or the smoke had cleared. Indomitable will; fearlessness and selflessness and all of that faith we had in our humanity. The cooperative solidarity of a Kombit Medikal. That two weeks, that slaughter of so many Haitians; who knows whether it was 1, 2, 3,000,000 people; no one knows at all. That laid the basis of my dream, the dream I sold to Victor, to Cassidy, to Dominich, to Lou Auguste Jr and LAHAF, to Jenn Slitter, to all of the Banshee underground, well I’d sold the dream even to myself convincingly. We dreamed that the Haitians would have the training, will and organization to save lives.

    I must always remember the steams of the bathhouse, where me and my first partner, my first co-conspirator beautiful Yelizaveta Kotlyarova gave me true support and true unflinching council. Must also keep my parents in mind, or in a heartbeat I would lose myself in the people of Haiti and never return to America at all. Go big or go home, banshee-motherfucka-if-ya-ain’t-running-with-it-run-from-it.

    Victor knows this well.

    We were both there in the blood and rubble of the trembling earth. Our tears and their lack of tears our blood and their blood, mixed into the casement and cracks on the pavement. I may have the face of a blan, but my heart is that of a Haitian. My constitution to take the struggle to where it must logically go, all the way up the great mountain, to secure this people, my adopted people from vicious exploitation, mismanaged sympathy, foreign rape and plunder. For two whole years we organized volunteers, we supplied the GAI with trainers and gear. And reinforced the shared dream. Not EMS in Haiti! Not mere ambulances! The power to respond to human and natural disaster on their own, the ability to rescue their own people. Liberty through control of their own social services, full human rights would come later, full reclamation of sovereignty. Realization of emancipation and the conclusion of the revolution. Haiti, finally in the hands of Haitian people. 

How am I such now a major patriot for a foreign people? In their eyes I see my own people, maybe I see myself in another life. That is what the earthquake showed me about myself and my destiny. I see my reflection as a human in them. I see a way to reclaim my own humanity, restore my own life through something much more important than mere me.

And I have lost so much on this battle already, they think, some think I am a mad man possessed by the spirits. Which spirit I do not even bother to guess. Something had entered me in those grisly days of the first wave. I saw the world to come.

I saw that were I to show ineffable might, like a Haitian; I would live to see the liberation. I would live to see our victory over that oligarchy.

    The Haitian oligarchy first and then the tyrants in my own nation and all of the other plantations too. For it was in this country, this was the beginning of the Great Revolt, it was the very first time a rebel alliance took on European hegemony, slavery and colonialism; and for a time won.

    There was no only Yelizaveta and the slaughter I saw from the quake. Both opened my eyes to hating and to loving, to despair and to a possible freedom. With my eyes opened now they can never close until I am cold and dead. Haitian and foreigner, blan, mulat, neg; l’union fait la force! We are here to keeping laying a base.

The ability to heal and help is not the ability to save. Wounds and sickness across a body politico cannot be helped with small cosmetic Band-Aids. The blame for what happened here is a shared blame. There are so many people black and white and in between that have conspired to ruin Haiti. To keep her people backwards and maldeveloped as lesson to all those who would join the revolt.

Haiti hemorrhages now for 200 plus years and they kick her when she is down, they steal whatever there is to steal, they plunder and they rape and they abuse her while she lies long vanquished. 97% of the fucking trees are gone! 84% of the people live below $2 a day. No one even knows how many died in that quake because there was no census since 2004! When US marines kidnapped the first and only elected President Aristede and dragged him off to house arrest in the Central African Republic. 

But Haitians will never be exterminated. Or long brought to their knees. They are capable of incredible resistance. Résistance to both foreign and domestic enemies. A year ago Jean Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc the last dictator) returned to a city of barricades and a populace demanding his arrest. Aristede returned to be celebrated though his party Lavalas is banned an illegal still. Resistance to and beyond death. In one generation or two in diaspora Haitians have become doctors, lawyers, nurses, lawyers and business men. More millionaires than any other Caribbean diaspora. They make up 1/5 of the Greater New York healthcare work force. Who knows if these statistics are true, they reflect a fact on the ground.

In Haiti, despite the best efforts of 10,800 non-governmental organizations (Klass ONG), charities and missionaries unleashed in the 1980’s after the fall of Duvalier in 1986; things have gotten as bad as sub-Saharan Africa. A UN garrison of roughly ten thousand Brazilian and Argentine soldiers occupies the only UN peacekeeping mission in a nation with no declared ceasefire between combatants; neo-Duvalierist oligarchs and the Famni Lavlas party. 

Here everyone is dying.

Of cholera, of being a restovik child slave, of preventable disease, of Cholera, of road accidents, of child birth, or exposure and tropical storms, of hunger. Life expectancy is below 58. There are over 46,000 mostly white development technocrats here, they live well. On the top of the hills with servants and drivers. Parts of Kenscoff and Petionville look like high society France. With chipping paint. There is an opera house at the top of the mountain called Tara’s. You can see plays there or famous international musicians. There are so many Haiti’s except the one that most of its citizens live in; one of early death and great squalor.

If you are blind to that then you have not really been to this place. Or you are part to blame for it.

Many but few, have made Haiti what she is. The iron heel is elusive and complex. The violators are of all colors and creeds. NGO imperialists, human and drug traffickers, Dominican businessmen, the local oligarchy. But before we can know our enemies we must know our friends. Tiputti and his sister Tipudine Capois do not talk politics. They are not affiliated with Lavalas or any faction we are aware of.  They met us during the quake and have told our grand alliance; Alliance 01 that they will organize their people.

We began with 68 EMT trainees and I am told we now have only 25 or 26 that are ready to test out, a year later. The other possible 100 members of GAI dropped the course Paramedic Instructor Howard carried out for 6 months, but they hang around the club and see what will be offered. Their motives are as diverse as our own collection of idealisms, but they want jobs in the medical sector. They want to leave the island some. They have varying degrees of patriotism, none speak English except Tiputti and his sister Tipudine. Many were original responders like Tiputti Capois who met Victor and I two years ago during the first wave in “unit C” when we enlisted several hundred to secure the General Hospital. Many are new. Most of the serious opportunists are gone allegedly. The GAI has held out with no pay for nearly two years, we sent a scout Wilkinson Francois to assess them three months ago, he reported enthusiasm but virtually no command structure of program for the future. He reported 25-30 possible EMTs and 40-100 first aiders, Haitians despise making rosters and lists of names, so they don’t do it. 

These 25 potential EMT trainees, and 100 some odd responders, their family and friends are what we are here to properly assess the operational capability of.

Are they young bold visionaries seeking change in Haiti? Or are they opportunists as so many warned. Do they want real change, or do they just want jobs and livelihood? Well only Wilkinson had asked. Paramedic Instructor Howard has disappeared. Wilkinson as a Haitian and speaker of Haitian Creole had reported to us that they were sincere. And also a bunch of disorganized civilians in their early 20’s.

His report was what got authorization for Victor and I to proceed with a third Wave.

All the experts and much of the diaspora had told our Alliance that EMS in Port Au Prince is simply impossible. They told us our volunteers would be kidnapped, our supplies stolen or killed. They told us Haitians don’t do anything without being paid. Thinly guarded racism, a lot of it.

Victor has faith. I have zeal. And Michael Mastroianni has a great deal of expertise and we all wish to see if two years of effort had a result. Hundreds of other members and volunteers are waiting for our unit to validate or invalidate a lot of sacrifice. They came from Atlanta, from New York, from Miami, from Las Vegas, from Seattle and Chicago; 104 in the first wave, 28 medical and communications volunteers in the second wave. Now, just 3 in the third. Civilian volunteers all, mostly EMS, fire, and communications backgrounds kept this going for two years. GAI survived without pay or resources cut off from LAHAF and BANSHEE in the states except phone calls and email, periodically. They and we are fighting to give the people here and abroad something to believe in.

Hope floats? Maybe.

Soon people will testify. Haske & Mapfre, Greenlee, Denby, Marriana, Fishman and Resnick who shot a lot of film and took a lot of pictures. Hundreds of hours of never gonna be seen footage. How this occurred was wrongly held faith in the power of the media. No film was ever made. Thomas later made a short one.

Victor and I are emergency medical professionals, I’m an EMT, and he’s a paramedic. We have to determine alongside paramedic Mastroianni; was this all for nothing or is the GAI real. Can GAI pass BLS exams, take multiple choice tests and pass? They never even had power points or text books. Can they complete the eight stations of basic life support practical skills, can they hold up as real EMTs? Are they school kids or potential heroes and avenger of their people? We have to testify in less than 20 days.

Testify about the birth of Haitian EMS, and if a clandestine Haitian human rights movement can grow from that or not. In an hour we land at Toussaint L’Ouvature.

This time I bet they stamp my passport.

Thank god this is all finally happening. Despite all the struggle and all of the loss and hardship I feel as though we are close to the edge as well as the tipping point too. Real change. I pray I will never forget Yelizaveta’s face, how could I? More I pray I never fail to separate FACT from EMOTION, as all too many do in Haiti coming from the outside. I must make sure I sleep more, a little more. We have a lot of work cut out for us. Making the GAI ready for Michael, the 22 January test, the 26 January Consortium on EMS in Haiti, a lot must be done in just 22 days. 

If you ain’t running with it, run from it. That’s what my life coach Lil Wayne told Yelizaveta and that’s what she told me.

The man was beleived to be an informant and so we seized him off the street and put a bag on his head. Which was overall uncomplicated except that he was Austailian. It is of course customary to clean your own house before you attempt to deal with the oppression of others. In this particualr case, we had to confirm a suspicion that a. Kirkuk was being auctioned to the Iraqi Army, and b. The foreign fighters database was actually legit. This man knew the answer to at keast one and a half if those questions. Perhaps, after we filed off his right knuckels, and put out an eye, hed talk like he talked to the Australian intelligence.
The idea that you can induce confidence by offering things is rarely as effextice as torture. But you have to be judicious with torture, since people will sometimes say anything to not be tortured anymore. We are hardly amateur at both being tortured, and when push comes to shove torturing our enemies.

The Kurdish word Josh quite literally cones from the word Donkey, but its more vile. Its origin qas during the Al Anfal genocide when our own people sold us out to the murder of the Saddam regime. Its very much a know and universally rule of the guerrilla, taught to us by the Palestinians that before you take in the enemy, you liquidate the traitors in your midst.

Now this man is a Westerner, a YPG veteran whi did 9 months in Rojava mostly in Mambij. But, a man has got to do what his leadership twlls him, there is no life with out a leader and this cones from the top of the Party. People who sell us to the Turkish intelligence, or anyones intwlligence are marked to die.

People say that the PKK is a terorist organization. The European nations do not allow us our flag or the flag of the YPG YPJ, SDF or of Serok Apo. But I say only this Heval, who is the biggest terorist. Us, or Turkish fascist state who emptied 5,000 villages and killed 40,000 civilians? Us, or the Iraqi military and Saddam who killed 800,000 of us in death camps. Us or the butcher Assad who has tortured 1 in 18 of all Syrians and wioed out 500,000 and growing in this war? Us, or the howling Shiites of Iran who hang our leadrers one a month. Us, or vicious Daesh with their sick perversion of Islam. Us, or the U.S. lead forces and CIA that set in motion the rise of Daesh? Perhaps we are terrorists only of vatying gradients. I will say this heval, if the Australian intelligence know about the list, and the Slovaks have a copy, then everyone already knows. This man took the list while infiltrating YPG at mambij.

This list of 5,700 foreign fighters, with photo with real names and more is a proof. A proof that Turkey, Saudi, Pakistan and the UAE cultivated ISIS with full knowledge of the CIA. It confirms in essence the word on the street, that leading Daesh at the highest rank, perhaps Baghdafi himself took money from U.S. allies, intermediaries.

I use so something like a file to grind the cartilage off his left hand. This goes on a bit and is messy. I then put out his left eye.

The situation was such that Turkish artillary and airstikes pummeled our primative defenses around the clock, not even bringing the enemy in rifle range.

The Party had over estimated the local preparations for defense, the ideological commitment of the population as well both Russia and Americas failure to intervene and reign in the Turkish state.

Soon, after just a week of combat, Afrin City was fully encircled, many small towns had been take by the FSA irregualrs, and little pockets of resistance were fighting fir survival.

Heval Ana’s tabor was trying to reenforce the positions in Afrin but most of the fighters didnt even get to fire a single shot. War planes killed almost everyone on the roadway to the city, charring the ground and pulverizing out forces in firey deluge.

The Kurdish revolutionary jangles, played on until the very very end. A series of heavy airstrikes rip apart the convot. The grisled survivors taking firing positions at the road side. Most of the tabor was simply anniellated in the death from above. It happens very quickly. In several loud rapid rumbling bursts. About thirty people die immediately, about thirty died later from terrible wounds. A few survived, ingloriously maimed at least on the inside.

A Policy Recommendation for Urban Revitalization in the Age of Sustainable 

Development 

First Draft

12/18/2019

The ultimate objective of this legislative measure by bundle would be to take aim squarely at housing, education, infrastructure and healthcare for the middle class and working class people of New York City  in order to fund long term redevelopment of our regressive welfare institutions. 

These measures would propose a complete reprioritization of public spending aimed at achieving a greater equality of the fundamental social services. 

Side by side incredible wealth and poverty exist in our city. Some 57,000 Manhattanites worth 37 million and up living alongside the neighborhoods of Central Brooklyn and South Bronx which appear to depend entirely on a regressive welfare state and multi-generational poverty to furnish Manhattan with the lowest paid castes of wage slaves, welfare dependants, and ongoing quality of life blights.

This analysis approaches this non ideologically. Though its recommendations are based on Democratic Confederalism/ Municipal Confederalism. There is no blame cast here on demographics, i.e. specific underserved ethnic groups, new immigrants and the extremely poor, only on public policy. To allow a continuation of such poverty on our door steps is actually a betrayal and embarrassment of the American dream. 

We will in 10 stepwise points address underdevelopment causality, and immediately prescribe broad radical policy for solution oriented approaches. Of course we invite criticism and encourage public dialogue in the solution process.

1. On Language, there is no valid reason to have large bodies of people with no ability to integrate to culture and economy. 

The inability of immigrants to speak English directly degrades their prospects for successful integration to our society.

Recommended: All new immigrants must be sent to language immersion programs immediately on their arrival. All existing and Recommended service programs must be contingent and encouraging of language acquisition. Encouraging undocumented people to live lawfully and provide a way to build a new life is more desirable than a permanent victimized under class.

2. On Social Service Apartheid, as all hospitals, public schools, and public housing in these neighborhoods are sub-standard, barely fit for dignified habitation; an active program must made to aggressively demolish and replace existing stock.

Recommended: This will require new taxes on the Middle and Upper classes to fund better hospitals and schools, as well as a systematic destruction of all decrepit city public housing.

A. Funding for Jacobi, Lincoln, Woodhull and Kings County should be tripled. The city should municipalize (i.e. reverse privatization of vital services) Interfaith and Bronxcare. New monitoring and evaluation standards will be placed on city health services alongside a Cuban style system of proactive community paramedicine and public health work.

B. Funding for Public High schools, all Public High schools in these neighborhoods will be triple funded, salary structures for all teachers will be increased with differentials to bring new talent to this intuitive. All private schools will be partnered with public schools to reanimate curriculum and pedagogical training. All private, charter and religious schools will be funded by the city to absorb larger scholarship cohorts. More magnet schools and city as school internships will be established. 

PUBLIC SCHOOLS

To triple the current funding levels of all public schools and triple the wages of all teachers, a partnership tax will be placed on all private schools for development of a public institution. 

All private schools will accept a percentage of high scoring public students at a rate triple what is offered now.

PUBLIC HOSPITALS 

Triple funding and the establishment of citywide a single payer system charged in relation to annual income will be based on the flat tax.

C. A systematic policy of public housing demolition will begin with a transfer of the elderly and disbaled last to acceptable housing outside the 5 boroughs. The wealthiest most expensive city in America will  no longer indefinitely subsidize rent. In a stepwise pattern all able bodied persons will be sent to vocational training centers or paid labor battalions. All elderly and disabled persons will be transferred to external sites complaint with best norms and standards befitting improvement in their living conditions. All existing public housing will be demolished. Affordable middle class and working poor stock will be erected in its place. 

All women’s shelters will be replaced with dormitory style centers with vocational training, child care and temp work placement programs. 

All homeless shelters will be systematically demolished and replaced with dormitory screening sites that will transfer these people, suffering from mental illness and long term drug use to special detox facilities set up peripheral to New York.

3. On EBT Cards, The electronic benefit system is wrife with fraud and a key element of regressive welfare. It will be eliminated in its present form.

Recommendation: EBT, WIC and Varying EBT schemes will be replaced with meal voucher cards for cafeterias. You will no longer be able to use the EBT as an ATM card, where fraud is occurring at the Bodegas. You will be able to obtain varying essential rationed goods, and 3 meals a day but no longer will the EBT payments be applied as tender.

Elderly persons and disabled persons must be screened from those capable of paid work. In cases of the elderly a new type of EBT Medicare will be issued insuring basic needs are met. Those with physical and mental disabilities will be considered for a type of Medicaid EBT but greater controls will be placed on them. People are entitled to clean bedding, clothing, water. Not flat screen TVs, pets, motorcycles and luxury sneakers. 

A new policing initiative on welfare fraud must police the spending habits of all recipients.

5. On Dignified Work and Labor Battalions, the South Bronx/ Central Brooklyn has become a festering labor ghetto, a reserve for the worst lowest paid jobs and exploitation of undocumented workers.

Recommended: The formation of new temp centers, vocational schools and paid labor battalions to provide work for unskilled workers while they transition to high paid, higher skilled jobs. We must fund this effort to show that everyone willing to work, is working and everyone able to go back to school has a system to accommodate that.

6. On the Toxic Environment.The daily trucking operations, widespread use of cars and the emissions from this have created an asthma epidemic. The streets are covered in trash and the neighborhoods look like blighted slums. Fast food, liquor stores, and bodegas have proliferated in a food desert, i.e. green fresh food depots.

Recommended: trucking will move to Yonkers and Pelham based depots where it will load goods on new supply trains. Public transit citywide will he triple funded. Single occupant vehicle use will completely restricted. New taxes will be placed on all personal vehicles. Labor battalions will focus on enhanced trash collection, public mural painting and neighborhood clean up. City run green market projects will be enhanced.

7. On Criminal Justice, despite widespread citywide gentrification these areas remain wrife with violent crime and illegal activity.

Recommended: Membership in gangs, mafias and drug dealership groups, as well as all manner of violent crime will lead to municipal deportation post incarceration. 

We will close Rykers island and replace it with 5 smaller detention/rehabilitation centers. Non violent offenses will lead to unpaid labor battalion sentences and heavier fines. 

Violent crime will lead to citywide deportation. Membership in any organization of criminal conspiracy will be grounds to revoke municipal citizenship. In some regards the prison population will be greatly reduced and persons of criminal inclination expelled from the city.

8. On Incentivizing the Working Class,

Approximately half of population does in fact work currently for minimum wage or off the books for less if undocumented. We must understand that rewarding labor and creating further pathways to economic security are integral to this revitalization program. 

We are triaging those who cannot work, from those that will not work from a small minority of outright criminals. Then we are eliminating structural impediments to progress, i.e. healthcare, education and infrastructure funding. But crucially we must show a return on investment to our working and middle classes, not unsustainably displace our underclass. 

Recommended:

A. Rent Control/Stabilization & Subsidy/ Zone, Control and Freeze. See attached rent scheme.

1. Luxury developments should by law help fund off site affordable housing developments and or public infrastructure in adjacent districts concurrent with construction of future hugh rise and luxury rentals.
2. Higher property taxes, especially for people with multiple properties, and a special tax on pied a terres and vacant properties 
3. A system of preferential longevity where native New Yorkers and ten year or more residents are entitled to differentiated sets of prices for ownership called Rent Ceiling renting. 
4. Rent ceilings, capped every four years to the median net income in a city district, all rental  properties must be zoned 2/5 rent ceiling apartments, 1/5 rent controlled, 2/5 market rent. Existing housing stock must switch to this modality on death or vacancy of residents under older rent regime.
5. Setting up a system of 5 income tiers that very clearly indicate what an individual or family is entitled to, which can be upgraded each year. Rent ceiling, rent stabilized, rent controlled or market zones units must give preference to the teir an applicant falls in. This someone above 250K income is not entitled to lease a rent controlled apt. This tier is linked to your after tax income. 
6. Rent depreciation  after 5 years of consistent leasing, your rent will go down not up to stay put. 
7. More mixed zones large scale residencies like Waterside Plaza or Coop city, market rental, rent control, rent stabilize and coops or condos in the same development. 
8. The ideology here is not social equality or home ownership. This is a city of extremes and a city of constant newcomers. But there is extreme wealth here that should pay for the right to have luxury goods and services by assisting in the elevation of the bottom 1/5 that are in public housing on regressive welfare payrolls. This is about squeezing the wealthy to subsidize a bigger welfare state. It is based on the idea that affordable housing should be considered a right earned by working. 
9. Linking the ideas that mixed zoning, denser development and privileging working residents I link this housing policy with a City Service policy where we have youth ages 18 to 21 joining the city services similar to the Israeli modal in exchange for access to rent controlled housing. We would also like to make students eligible for that as well.

1. Dissagrigation By Income

In order to establish legislation that is actually beneficial to working class and middle class taxpayers payers, as well as capable of uplifting the working poor and welfare dependent class we must arrive at some agreement on the illusion of their being a middle class in this country. 

As the average American worker does not make a much higher income than the people on public assistance and the jump into the 4% of high income earners is approximately 40x the so called middle class, disaggregating and taxing by after tax take home allows a much more equitable redistribution to the public services by taxation.

Thus this legislation focuses on designated income classes and positions within an improved tax bracket system accordingly.

Persons on Public Assistance 

No taxable income. Must demonstrate physical or mental disability, be beyond working age 65, and or be pregnant with no clear means to be self-sustaining.

I.e. (Recurrent Welfare Mothers, Mentally ill and the physically disabled)

Person who are Working Poor T1

Persons earning at or below 50K. 

I.e. (retail workers, EMTs, bartenders, delivery staff, unskilled workers.)

Person who are Working Poor T2

Persons earning at or below 50K, with up to 100 K in bank or assets. I.e. savings, property or a car.

I.e. 

Persons who are Working Class T1

Persons who are earning between 50 to 90K.

I.e. (Semi-skilled workers, truck and livery drivers, not for profit staff, dental hygienists, paramedics)

Persons who are Working Class T2

Persons earning between 50 to 90K with up to 200 K in bank or assets. I.e. savings, property or a car. I.e. (cops , fire fighters, nurses, 

Persons who are Middle Class T1

Persons in range 90 to 110K.

Persons who are Middle Class T2

Persons in range 90 to 110K, 

with up to 300 K in the bank or in assets. I.e. savings, property or a car.

Persons of High Net Worth T1

Annually earning 110 to 400 K with between 100 to 500k in bank or assets.

Persons of High Net Worth T2

400K to 1 Million with between 500 to 5 million in bank or assets.

Persons of High Net Worth T3

Between 1 and 5 million in annual earnings or revenue with any amount above 5 million in a bank or in assets.

Persons of High Net Worth T4

5 to 50 million and up in annual earnings or revenue with any amount above 100 million in a bank or in assets.

Persons of High Net Worth T4

1 billion and up in annual earnings or revenue with any amount above 10 billions in a bank or in assets.

B. Municipal Participation/ Campaign Finance Transparency 

All candidates must list by total percentages where their campaign was specifically funded by in order to determine conflicts of interest and access buying. 

Public Financing of Campaigns 

Setting matching funds for all candidates that achieve a certain number of electoral endorsements. 

Housing  

Rents would be annually set to the median after tax income of the district electorate based on five tiers. In essence what a community actually earns will establish a rent ceiling which holds the duration of a lease. This would disaggregated by incomes at or below 30k, 60k,100k, 250k, and all high net worth incomes above. 

Rent control, where ones rent decreases every 5 years. Ensuring a percentage of the market is kept stabilized at all times. Forcing luxury development to be taxed at a higher percent and demonstrate all projects have social return on investment. 

B. City Citizenship a program of incentives, protections and subsidies for new arrivals and long term multi genrational New Yorkers.

C. City Years: an Israeli style program of uniformed municipal service ensuring 17 to 21 year olds health and education subsidies. 

CITY SERVICE

All public service departments will set aside a large percentage of new hire seats for young men and women take a three year national service track later entitling them to major subsidies of their future health and education.

9. Restructuring of Municipal Services: i.e With augmentation of paid and unpaid labor battalions and city years corps, we will be halving the size of paid Fire Suppression, tripling the size of the teaching services, doubling the EMS services with new role of community paramedicine, enlarging sanitation services, and expanding city health services. At the same time wages of city council workers will be decreased, the social work fields will be radically reimagined, corrections cut by 3/4s. All existing NYPD precincts will be partnered with new community appointed policing units and arrest quotas will be eliminated.

10. New York City will reduce its Federal and State tax contributions and increase its Citywide taxes. 

Taxes will involve a flat tax where by payment ensures your vote in city elections and a wealth tax with gradients that move sharply upward at annual wealth and income calculations. See attached taxation scheme.

It was nearly winter in the Wilderness of North America, but this time the machines had been running for so long that it was neither cold nor impassible, nor even vaguely uncomfortable. It was still leather Jacket season just a week before the Christ Mass. And Sebastian Adon, this time in his own body and grounded in reality was humming and strolling with his hands in the brown leather jacket he’d owned for fifteen years. It sowed as much.

Alkaline, the Jamaican philosopher says ‘Everything in life just takes time,’ and that was the song in his head and that song sustained him. It was the water to parched lips and limbs and it was the kiss before jumping out a plane into the black sky of night.

    In Hebrew, ‘he’ means ‘she’ and ‘who’ means him. And right now though, for the first time in a while since he became a civilian again; he; was Sebastian Adon and wasn’t using any fake papers, faces or nationalities. And she was Valentina Stanovova, aloof and whimsical and strangely interested in checking up on him.    

He hadn’t heard from her in four and some months. 

After the scary episode of fourth dimensional travel, her accusations in the Air Bathhouse, the wearing of the German suit for the first time. He was shook up, and even deleted her social security number and cell phone too. He knew he was gonna get out gunned, out spent, out classed and quick too. She was so real and so powerful, he had not been near magic like that since, and well dare he even say.

Curiously the next time Valentina Stanavova popped into his life; it was via an email inviting him to go ice skating in the globally jeans and t shirt warm late December in Bryant Park; filled with those who skate fast and those who dash their booties hard on the ice for all to see. And Sebastian Adon remembered that he used to roller blade when he was young which could not be conceptually much different. He hoped.

It was only her smile and little hand clasping his that prevented him from becoming a casualty of the ice and hoypaloyik mobs flying by all around them. She was so patient, she let him take her hand and slow her down and they spun by, several times he almost toppled them both. This was nothing like sky diving, nothing like gun play, nothing like painting, nothing like giving public speeches, nothing like evasive driving, nothing like hard fucking; nothing at all like several of things he believed he was good for. This was so pleasant. And it wasn’t very cold at all, and he genuinely felt that Ms. Stanavova didn’t judge him. Didn’t have man expectations at all.

Around they went. He was happiest holding her hand though she pushed him to find balance on his own, as many women ultimately did. There seemed like hundreds of people watching them, pointing waiting for people to wipe out. He’d give them a run for their money.

    I’ll tell you what the strangest part was. She couldn’t read his mind so she didn’t see him scanning the crowd for a suicide bomber to blow apart all these happy people. She didn’t hear him ask himself were they being watched, all the paranoia of all his other work.

She couldn’t hear him being crazy, basically. Because this was the temple mount, this was the top of the citadel. There weren’t gonna be any bombings here. This wasn’t a backwater colony on the edge of the empire, like say Tel Aviv. This was a hard an monitored place.

“You know” she says, “you can buy a pair of skates on Amazon, we can make a little habit out of all this,” and she smiles at him. And he breaks his mental train of thought about wondering what year it was.

“I should, I mean I like it,” he replies.

The skate on and then she heads to the center of the rink to practice her precision amid some little cones. He mostly watches. The war is so far away, it was maybe like; there was no war?

“I love skating so much, I love all winter sports; do you ski or snow board, maybe we can make a trip later on, when I come back.” 

 She was always coming or going this little architect. She was supposed to have been visiting family in Russia, but had ended up in Hong Kong. She was soon to be off for Brazil, but who knew it was all so effortless her various movements. She had changed her architecture firm about four times since they met, maybe that was normal. She was an artful dodger, filled with wanderlust like him, but perhaps with more means to act on it casually. She was either wealthy herself or had a patron, like everyone else in this city.

A massive airship was moving directly above the city New Jersey bound, these ‘floating fortresses’ were massive cold fusion powered leviathans. They could wipe out whole cities, they housed vast drone fleets and terra drone soldiers for mop ups. Actually no one could see it seemed, but him. He’d seen on brought down over Strong Island two years before in the Battle of Brooklyn Soviet.

“Stop day dreaming droog, look at me, look at my moves!” she says and executes a little spin twist, twirl.

“How now!” he smiles.

Was it real? The airship and the Battle of Brooklyn? Can his soul be loaded like a wetware microchip into a German businessman’s flesh suit? Was that real, did that happen? Did the map that he had seen in the bunker on avenue J indicate that the elevation of Manhattan, therefore the entirety of the Isle of Man citadel was actually almost 40,000 kilometers above sea level; therefore like a veritable mountain above the mostly flat Brooklyn Soviet? Was it disguised by hologram?

“You’re doing it again Sebastian,” she laughs, “you’re spacing away when you should be here with me. Are you having fun with me?”

“I’m having more fun than I’ve had in a year,” he says, which is true as this is very fun and you cannot line up tantric sex and ice skating, because they are not even the same category of fun. His last couple ex-girlfriends were not that ‘fun’. 

“I’m happy too, this is great,” Valentina says and they return into the fray of clockwise movement, dashing, darting, moving fast and slow.

Had he ever been ice skating in this decade? No, he doubted it. This memory pops into his head suddenly; of the ice cracking, or shattering and his falling into a frozen lake and then, black.

“We could try more places too,” she says. She notices he’s taken her hand again even though maybe he doesn’t need to, she lets it go, and he is a sweetheart. A beautiful minded Amerikanski, so rare.

The Bryant Park rink closes and they’re sitting in his battered white Civic sipping tea.

There are these rules the Resistance codified called the ‘Security Culture’ it’s an understanding that you can be recorded almost anywhere, but cars, homes and public places are always recorded. Cell phone microphones are always on, even though most think it wipes out your battery quickly to real time record. Sending anything electronically is all recorded. Searching for anything unorthodox is flagged. Public libraries are all flagged. You basically can’t have a secure conversation except on a hike, with no phone, in a bathhouse, except the ones already wired up, you can have one by passing had written notes. Was he going to pass her the note that he wrote, not this time. 

    All smiles and tea, all free loving and also quick to block him out for months on end with no explanation other than she was busy, or a family emergency. What were they going to do with each other.

    He offered to drive her home, and she said simply, “I’m not sleeping at my home tonight.” And that broke his heart a little that that was so overt. 

    Boyfriends and husbands never stopped him much before, but it was 2016 soon, it was time to have a higher opinion of oneself. He’s never even thought to try and kiss her, it just hadn’t been appropriate, and wasn’t now. They sipped more tea.

    Waited to part company soon, the white bent up, economical Honda Civic faced East on 42^nd street, parked next to the Grand Library where he used to study medicine with Ariel Elmallay. Just several clicks ahead was the United Nations building whose big white tower could be hit by almost any errant rocket fired from the coast of Breuklyn Soviet, visually speaking but in reality to hit that tower would require Iranian fire power, not made in Brooklyn basements; because it was an illusion that the World Trade Center, the UN Building and Empire State building could be seen from places like Dumbo or Williamsburg; an illusion! Rockets couldn’t easily hit these edifices because they were high above, higher than third dimensional perception allowed. He knew that to be true, like he knows he is a lefty.

    Maybe he’s drifting so far away because he knows there isn’t anyone to center him back, no one who cares to take the risk to do that work. Certainly not her.

    “I wonder what you’re doing with me,” he says.

    “I enjoy your mind a lot.”

    “What if I didn’t want to see you again?”

    “I would discourage that, we have fun don’t we. Don’t cheat me out of clean fun.”

    “You make me feel marginal you know, you’re real busy. I for the very first time have too much time to know what to do with. But I don’t have anything to offer you, I have dirty job, a shitty car. No money.”

    “You have a lot more than most. Your mind is exciting and I would never encourage you to not see me, but you need to respect my time and my; shall we say circumstances.”

    “I think I will develop feelings for you and ruin the little magic you might feel.”

    “Take whatever risk you must.”

    “What am I good for?”

    “Remains to be seen.”

    “Do you remember the last time we were together?” he asks her.

    “Live in the moment Sebastian, droog, wake up, this is all real. I go to Brazil in 5 days, there will be no time to see you before I go, it’s not personal. I’m working on a complex structure at work, something like was always talked of; a hanging garden above central park! Exciting right, as we always talked about.”

    They had been on four or five or six dates, some were not really dates some were just sweet palavers, maybe they all were since she had a boyfriend or a husband or a patron or a keeper and they’d not even done more than barely hold hands on ice.

    The second date he told her an idea of building a floating pleasure garden above central park and it stuck in her head and now she had done it; she had found the backers to erect such a thing and political will bought to uphold that plan.

    “You’re so impressive,” he tells her.

    As long as he’s known her he’s though so.

    “Wonderful that you think so, I think so too, about us both.”

    “Well what now?” he asks, “when again will I see you?

    She hands him a little envelope and inside it is a picture of her looking blonde and ravishing shot by a professional photographer. There is a red lip stick kiss on it. Some numbers are written on the back. There’s a lot of reason to believe he shouldn’t call those numbers. But he will.

    “I’m worth so much to so many, just go slowly,” she says.

    “I don’t know when you’ll see me again, but I know you won’t forget me,” she says. 

    “You’re sweet,” he says.

    “Don’t get a cavity,” she replies.

    A great Rabbi once said ‘in love don’t ever come empty handed’, but he did. He didn’t have anything to give her before she left, just a letter he wrote in the glove compartment, but he wasn’t gonna open it now. It wasn’t even sentimental like her photo, although a few guys probably had that photo for Christmas, whoever she was going to Brazil with something better still. Maybe, but maybe that was all a story in his head. Maybe she was sweet. Honestly, who knew?

    The things I might do, he thinks.

    “The things you might do, is why I keep coming back to you,” she says.

    “Can I take you on a real date after Brazil?”

    “You can try.”

    “I’m going to think about you a lot when you’re gone,” he says.

    “Not too much,” she says, “just enough so a smile forms on your lips and then it passes. Not like your other girls, not like anything before. Think about me until it hurts, and stop there. Think about your future.”

“When you come back from Brazil, it will be the future.”

    “That’s true. I must go, please know that I have never had any intention of hurting you.”

    “Good bye, have fun in Brazil.”

“I will. Have fun wherever you are.”

    And they kiss professionally on the cheek only one time, and she get out of the car and takes of briskly into the streets and the night.

    And he is sure he will never see her again. But he’s thought that before. The Civic takes off down 42^nd street heading to the FDR where a bridge, an illusionary bridge between two words or a tunnel, a paid tunnel will take him back to the tiny Brooklyn safe house he is staying on Avenue J and Coney Island Ave. His body hurts, he’s uncomfortable in his own skin. 

The New Ground Rules: Ending the politics of international doublure

Haitian Development Authority Plan 2020-2030

Policy Briefing for the Office of the President

Walter Adler, Ministry of Planning   

Republic of Haiti

“The NGO sector in Haiti is best described as an uncoordinated mass of organizations de facto unaccountable to any governing or regulatory institution, i.e. no accountants, no auditors, no reviews, and no publication of poor or dishonest performance.”-Schwartz Report

Introduction and Background 

We submit a policy package designed to restore our national sovereignty, assert control over our resources, ports and airspace, and forge a pathway whereby the citizens of our nation will know dignity, human rights, hope and opportunity.  The aim of our proposed policies are to dismantle the ‘Republic of NGOs’ and restore in its place an empowered, socially, environmentally and economically sustainable Republic of Haiti.

A series of human and environmental catastrophes have befallen the Republic of Haiti since the moment of her independence. It has repeatedly been stated that Haiti bears a certain ‘uniqueness’. We assert that this ‘uniqueness’ is artificially enforced to the detriment of all our citizens and must be corrected by political action. We are the most disaster casualty prone nation in the Americas (UNOHA, 2014). We are the absolute poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and second only to India the highest perceived ratio of NGOs/to population on earth (Clinton Global, 2012). Perhaps more striking is that our income inequality is seventh most unequal on earth (2012 GINI is 0.61). We are also the only nation on earth with a peacekeeping operation presiding over our military jurisdiction without a ceasefire in place between warring factions. 

There are now 10.32 million citizens now living in our Republic and they are living with daily existential threats to their welfare. Currently our HDI is 168 (0.417). Haiti has an adult life expectancy of 63.1. A full 50.16 % of our population is living in multidimensional poverty (UNDP 2014). A 2012 World Bank survey places 6 million Haitians (59%) living below $2 (90 HTG) a day while 2.5 million (24%) are living below $1(45 HTG). Therefore 83% are below our own domestic poverty line. Adult literacy is at 48.7% (UNDP 2014). Only 5% of the population can functionally comprehend our language of education and administration (MIT, 2014).

This proposal will recommend policies in the following strategic arenas; State Capacity, NGO Regulation and Investment.

Literature Review 

On State Capacity: Only 10% of the population are employed in a taxable sector (WB, 2014). Our state does not currently have the capacity to exert full sovereignty (Farmer & Schwartz, 2014). This is derived from a combination of stressors; a) having no substantial tax revenue base; b) donor circumvention of state structure in delivery of aid via NGOS; c) the sensitive nature of our domestic politics; c) ongoing MINUSTAH presence; e) our lack of an armed forces and underdeveloped police force; d) and NGO proliferation (Schwartz, 2014)(CFPS, 2014). If we examine USAID development policies ranging from HAVA to subsequent newer incarnations, we observe not only several generations of clusters that paid only lip service to the authority of the state, but also demonstrated non-coordination facilitated by USAID subcontracting to both NGOs & Beltway contractors (Schuller, 2012).

A range of capacity building priorities will require both management training and eventually take over of NGO facilitated services (NORD, 2014). MINUSTAH policies which once urged ‘clusters’ now suggest a firmer hand in regulation of NGO actors in Haitian soil. On either end of this extreme are polices of India v. NGO policies of Sudan (Oxfam, 2012). UN OCHA 2014 policy recommendations involve development of command and control over NGOS, public-private partnerships, extension of microfinance sector; new tax identity cards, direct taxation of remittances and transfers, as well as extension of sales taxes on items in the large informal economy (World Bank, 2014). According to the GAO Congressional policy studies in the US; of $631 million allocated to our post-2010 reconstruction: 0.7% went to our government, businesses or organizations; 43% was routed to NGOs and a full 56% was reinvested via contractors. 55% of obligated pledge has evens been delivered (GAO, 2013)

On NGO regulation Policy: The NGO sector remains unaccountable. As of March 31, 2013, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has obligated $293 million (45 percent) and disbursed $204 million (31 percent) of $651 million in funding for Haiti from the Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2010: less that 1% has gone to our government (USIP, 2010).

  While officially, there are 560 registered NGOs, there may be at any given time upwards of 5,000 formations (missionary, humanitarian, and domestic) dispensing services illegally in our territory. Perhaps not with malice, but with total disregard we have been reduced to predatory dependency, regulating them will be highly complicated (Chafetz, 2006)(Schuller, 2012 )(USIP, 2010). Reduction of duplication and overlap most coincide with thorough monitoring and evaluation.

On Investment Policy: ‘Open for Business’ legislation has allowed a degree of exploitation of our labor force and further destruction of our environment (Johnston, 2013). Investment policy should shift away from garment assemblage (Titus, 2012). It should absolutely enforce state ownership of resources especially in light of the recent discovery of gold (HGW, 2014). Note the Dominican Ministry of Tourism’s Dual Track; segregated all-inclusive hotels on the coast and islands used to pay to more culturally sensitive development open to all within the interior. Investment garment assemblage at Sai Ah Industrial & export-processing zones is not a proven model for development (NY Times, 2014). Through U.S. legislation such as HOPE I & II as well as the Help Economic Lift Program (HELP) Acts we retain duty free access to the US. (Chandler/ Clinton Global Initiative).  Capital inflows from the diaspora are estimated to be $1.5-1.9 billion a year (23-30%) of our 2010 GDP Most of the existing policies in place to empower the diaspora to reinvest financial and human capital are only proving partially effective (Titus, 2012). Allowing dual citizenship (Maretlly, 2011) was critical but needs to be expanded (Zéphir, 2004). Dual citizenship in the information age should facilitate the ability to monitor, evaluate and participate not only invest (Stepick, 2001). This investment is not just a question of capital; reengaging Haitian youth in diaspora through a type of Birthright program was invaluable to Israeli policy and would be valuable to us. Studies of diaspora migration yield a durable pattern of either reclamation or interference (Newland, 2004) According to the CFIC briefing, we must shore up our massive brain drain (80% of degree holding Haitians living abroad). Critical studies of diaspora mobilization policy convince us of the critical need not empower, not simply extract remittance support (Newland, 2004). 

Policy Recommendation: 

    Parcel 1: (State Capacity) Increase federalization by sub-dividing governance to the departmental (10), arrondissement (42) and commune (140) levels in a similar scheme as the United States to allow participatory involvement in development. Not all at once, two departments at a time beginning with Grand’Anse & Artibonite. The President’s office will maintain control over MSPP, HNP, and key ministries, which will remain centralized along with an executive veto of department senate proposals. Power will be divested from the existing Senate/CoD and into the new department units.  We thereby allow greater federal autonomy as each sub-federal will establish its own department senate, arrondissement house of deputies, and commune council in pattern similar to post-genocide Rwanda. All NGO/ missionary activity will revolve around meeting policy objectives set by Department Senates and the office of the Presidency. This new state architecture composed of elected party officials will submit all service provision, public safety, and development plans to the President’s office. Fiscal centralization with more operational incentive going to sub-units. 

Lifting bans on all political parties will be contingent on participation in the Haitian Development Plan. Pursue confidence-building measures that realistically address concerns of G184/Lavalas. Politically enfranchise the Diaspora by giving them administrative, voting and business incentivization via supra-territorial departments. Formally enfranchise the Middle Eastern community, NGO class & diaspora with varying political representation. 

Progressively Tax anyone residing in Haiti for over 3 month. Issue tax ID/ driver licenses to population. Encourage use of the ID for virtually all civic functions. Require digital monetization via cell phones to procure social services from licensed state providers or NGO. Utilize ID for benefit and social services dispersal. Increase professionalization of Civil Service on all levels via mass capacity trainings. No Development Aid or foreign assistance can be routed to an NGO operating in Haiti without reporting the amount to our Development Authority. Registered and Compliant NGOs such as PIH-ZL with be given high levels of autonomy as long as they operate within the sector goals of the government. All procurement activities, HR and contracted services must prove there was an adequate domestic bid where applicable. The effect of the policy will be regaining state control.

Parcel 2: (NGO Regulation) NGO Proliferation Control must begin with a rigorous census and designation. NGO Registration will be followed by NGO taxation. Waiver of taxation will be granted by voluntary enrolment in a newly constituted Haitian Development Authority and subsequent enlistment in a corresponding governmental sector. All foreign NGOs must follow standardized design, monitoring and evaluation of projects. All foreign NGOs will form strategic partnerships with Haitian CBO/NGO/ government agencies. NGO fines will be levied for noncompliance of regulations. Harmonization of all NGO work to fulfil government strategies will begin Department-by-Department beginning with Ouest. The effect of the policy package will be to couple regulation & harmonization with purge. NGOs that will not enable the state to accomplish development goals have no place operating inside Haiti.

Parcel 3: (Investment) Concentration of high-end tourist development on Ile a Vache and Southern coast. Focus on Ile Gonave for all inclusive tourist development coupled with deep-water port along lined of LGDA/ICA master plans. Focus all-inclusive development of North Coast. Expand international airports to Cap Haitian, Jacmel, and La Caye to enable direct airport to resort passage. Prohibit foreign land ownership including natural resources and beaches. Make export processing zones/ industrial zones buy into vocational training schemes. Pursue 51% state ownership in overall ventures, preferential access to Haitian diaspora.

Restore high import tariffs on foodstuffs produced outside of Hispaniola to discourage agricultural dumping.
Critical Synthesis:   

Newmont and Eurasian Corporations have invested $30 million in exploratory digging. The Sai-Ah Industrial park received $224 million of the funds earmarked for reconstruction. We have not signed the international Safety and Health in Mines convention or the voluntary Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, both of which offer some protection to our citizens. We have no good record of observing textile assembly trickle down or anywhere else. It is time we make an investment in our human resources. To do so we require the funds to implement the health, educational, and vocational restoration needed to secure our future. Ending Doublure, the long accepted politic of rule through proxy and reclamation of our social service sector capacity is the beginning of that process.

References:

Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) (2012) Evaluation of Donor Response to Haiti Earthquake Shows “Building Back Better” Nothing But a Sloganhttp://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/evaluation-of-donor-response-to-haiti-earthquake-shows-building-back-better-nothing-but-a-slogan(Accessed on May 16, 2013).

Chafetz, M. E. (1996). The Tyranny Of Experts: Blowing The Whistle On The Cult Of Expertise Author: Morris E. Chafetz, Publisher: Madison Books.

Chandler, A. (2014). The Role of the Haitian Diaspora in Haiti Building Back Better. Center for Strategic International Studies-CSIS (2014). Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.

Dolisca, F., McDaniel, J. M., Teeter, L. D., & Jolly, C. M. (2007). Land tenure, population pressure, and deforestation in Haiti: the case of Forêt des Pins Reserve. Journal of Forest Economics, 13(4), 277-289.

Feinsilver, J. M. (2010). Fifty years of Cuba’s medical diplomacy: from idealism to pragmatism. Cuban studies, 41(1), 85-104.

Farmer, P. (1994). The Uses of Haiti (Vol. 3). Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.

Farmer, P. (2001). Infections and inequalities: The modern plagues. University of California Press.

Heinzelman, J., & Waters, C. (2010). Crowdsourcing crisis information in disaster-affected Haiti. US 

Jenson, D. & Szabo, V. (2011) Cholera in Haiti and Other Caribbean Regions, 19th Century. Duke FHI Haiti Humanities. Laboratory Student Research Team1. 2130 Emerging Infectious Diseases. http://www.cdc.gov/eid • Vol. 17, No. 11, November 2011

Johnston, J. & Main, A. (2013). Research Breaking Open the Black Box: Increasing Aid Transparency and Accountability in Haiti. Center for Economic and Policy. April 2013. Retrieved from:  http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/haiti-aid-accountability-2013-04.pdf

Katz, J. M. (2013). The big truck that went by: how the world came to save Haiti and left behind a disaster. New York: Palgrave. Macmillan.

Kristoff, M., & Panarelli, L. (2010). Haiti: A Republic of NGOs?. In Peace Brief(Vol. 23). United States Institute of Peace.

Morton, A. (1997). Haiti: NGO sector study. Washington, DC: World Bank, 52.

Newland, K., & Patrick, E. (2004). Beyond remittances: the role of Diaspora in poverty reduction in their countries of origin, a scoping study by the Migration Policy Institute for the Department of International Development. Migration Policy Institute.

Palma, G. (2003). National Inequality in the Era of Globalization: What Do Recent Data 

Tell Us? in Johnathan Michie, Handbook of Globalization, Cheltenham, UK and 

Northampton MA: Edward Elgar, 2003. 

Pan American Health Organization: Epidemiological Update on Cholera (27 June 2014) Situation summary of cholera in the Americas

Ramachandran, V. & Walz, J. (2012). Haiti: Where Has All the Money Gone?”  Centre for Global Development (CGD) Policy Paper 004 May 2012,

Schuller, M.  (2012). Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid and NGOs

Schwartz, T. (2014). History of NGOs and Disaster in Haiti. Retrieved from: http://open.salon.com/blog/timotuck/2013/02/09/ngos_and_disaster_in_haiti

Shamsie, Y., & Thompson, A. S. (Eds.). (2006). Haiti: hope for a fragile state. Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press.

Stepick, A., Stepick, C. D., & Kretsedemas, P. (2001). Civic engagement of Haitian immigrants and Haitian Americans in Miami-Dade County. Haiti–Immigration and Ethnicity Institute of South Florida Retrieved November 16, 2006.

Titus, R. F. (2012). Roadmap to Haiti’s Next Revolution: A Plan for Diaspora Haitians to Contribute to a Peaceful Turnaround. iUniverse.

Zéphir, F. (2004). The Haitian Americans. Greenwood Publishing Group.

Motherfuckin’ Desert Person

    I’m a motherfuckin desert person. And I like to wander as long as it’s on a strict timeframe. Because when you’re out in the desert you lose track of how long you’ve been walking and if you don’t budget your water right this can be a serious problem. The desert is place to go to lose yourself in exile but it is a better place to be hardened for a future purpose. You move with as little as possible and what you carry is calculated; (weight) vs. (necessity towards your survival). Like a water canteen, like a pistol, like a blanket or a law degree. You grab and go, you move by night, and you think long and hard about the path that got there in the wasteland.

    It’s a misconception that everything in the desert is dead. At night time it is always quite alive. At night you hear rabbits or small dear scurrying across the dunes, and there are snakes and birds; kill the birds and eat them and leave those snakes alone. All manner of the toughest creatures alive thrive out in the wasteland. At night its freezing cold and the wind rips dust across the wilderness. It’s best to wrap yourself a white sheet underneath and black cloak on top. And cover your face. The moon is very bright, bright like you’ve never seen before. Overwhelming is good word to describe it. It is better to move at night for obvious reasons but you have to careful not to lose your path, losing your sense of direction can be quite fatal out there. You have to cover as much ground as possible in fridget conditions and you have to calculate destination such that you can end up in a wadi or a spring to pitch your tent come the break of dawn. The freezing cold rips right to the bones and you wonder what is worse the blazing heat or the frozen nights. You’re stuck with both. You will never see stars like this; there are no city lights or suburban sprawl in a thousand miles to dull their brilliance. You’ll see your first shooting star and then someone will tell you it was an air force exercise; until you see your first shooting star you won’t know the difference. 

    And you’ve already got your notions about desert by day. When you are in the desert your eyes play tricks on you. It is like sensory bombardment resulting from subsistence deprivation. You’re running on a near empty tank at all times. Out there in that desert; it’s you, and whatever name you call your god, and the freezing cold nights, and the dead by dusk heat that makes you sweat even when you aren’t building pyramids. People have the wrong conception of a mirage. It’s not so much that you think you see a lake or some body of water elusively situated upon the horizon. It’s a twinkle of salvation that stays just as far away each time you move towards it. The mirage represents some supposed place of destination generally always off the path. You could tell yourself it looks like water because water begins to occupy most of your waking consciousness out there; but it’s not water; it’s just another stretch of land you halfway died to get to that yielded oh so little in return. If the cold will end this life by night then yes; it will be the heat that does you in by day. But the reason you let it do so, the reason you wasted all that water; was chasing some mirage that wasn’t on your path at all. And no, this is not a metaphor. I’m just telling you common sense to uphold when you’re out there.

    The desert is also a place of extremes and it breeds extremists. It’s not just the night’s cold and burning hot days and animals or mirages or bandits and death. It is that when you take away all those creature comforts, those flashing neon signs, those places to buy some so called happiness; you begin to see. The Misson, the Cause, the Struggle, (the idealized purpose of ones life) become a little more focused; your role in it all becomes more defined. And the profit margins, the cost benefit analysis, your sophomoric, college influenced conception of human nature; none of those things come out here with you. Your family is across an ocean, your friends don’t know where you are, and the cute ethnic Albanian girl in Law class can’t send you adorable text message smiles. When that’s all gone. When the water runs out. When you go off path following a mirage. When you’re out there without anyway to reach your destination, when you have been stripped of all distractions; you learn absolutes, you learn extremes, and you universalize our condition.

    When the water runs out you have to think quickly about what matters. You have to conserve your strength, even conserve your thought process. You have to focus on getting out of the desert alive, but this is secondary on ascertaining what you came into the desert to learn. Desert people quicken their process. Time is never on their side. The absolutes are the lessons we’ve learned that translated into righteous action. The extremes are idealized conceptions of your beliefs brought into focus so one might take a stand. And the final realization of a desert person is that out there in the wasteland no matter what nation, what religion, what race, or what people; without water everyone in the desert on a long enough timeline is going to die.  

    Desert people are out there for a whole lot of reasons. There are whispers in that desert that might give a person a semblance of a plan. We didn’t go out to that desert to fuck a whore in a casino, build a golden calf, or take ecstasy and watch a fifty foot man shaped idol burn. Desert people do not engage in those activities. Not when they want to be right with whatever they call god. It’s place to go when you have to make a decision, it’s a beginning point or an end based on what path you follow; it’s not a weekend retreat or a three hour tour. 

    I’m proud to be a desert person. It has made my people very strong. I learned things out there that one doesn’t see when restricted to a temple or a mosque. Out there in that desert when the water runs out you and whatever you call your god can take the precious time left to calculate what you’ve been doing with your life.