A memory of my Papua New Guinea days. The day I met Mr Sh*t (sic) who ran for office and lost because the authorities wouldn't allow him to run on his nickname, by which he was very popular. Nobody knew who the fudge Abba Bina was. Important lessons about politics here -- and the loamy loam of life. Mention also of the trials and tribulations of Iranian refugee, Behrouz Boochani.

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By John Kendall Hawkins

Straining in the new-fangled Roman outhouse, Titus was sitting there with a sh*t-eating grin, drawing conclusions on the wall:

Nero was here.

Nietzsche is peachy.

For a good time call Viagara on DCI-MMI-CCCV.

Trombones featured in the third movement of his bowel symphony, a turgid presto, and he was complaining about the new toilet tax levied by his father, the emperor Vespasian. His dad, just back from slaying all the usurers, had quipped, index finger skyward like Socrates, "Pecunia non olet," which is to say Money Doesn't Stink. To which Titus, after taking a whiff of a bronze unto-him-rendered Caesar, had rechortled, "And yet it comes from poo." Thus, giving a taste of the world's very first toilet humor.

Or as Bobby Dylan might say, Money doesn't just talk it swears. Phew!

I was drawing my own conclusions about money the other day, sitting on the toilet, releasing a crocodile back into the wild, and thinking about my days spent, a quarter-century ago in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a place that Time forgot to forget, and where, in some quarters, the Mighty Whitey hadn't been seen until 1970s.

Among other things, it was a GodsMustBeCrazy kind of place, almost hallucinogenic in some ways, driven over the edge by colonial introjection; you found yourself doing double-takes a lot. It was a place filled with colorful characters and doings, which could be summed up by a blurb for a book of short stories, Port Moresby Mixed Doubles by Michael Challenger: "The local inhabitants are often relegated to roles as domestic servants, subordinates at work, or as partners in brief sexual flings. Among the expatriates themselves, relations are complicated by boredom, jealousy and self-importance." So true.

In keeping with our current theme, out of all the colorful characters I came across there nobody brought out the crazy melange of Das Kapital, prehistoric literality, missionary pilgrims-progressivism, and the kind of good old ingenuity that kept the chains moving on the evolutionary track than Abba Bina, aka Mr. Sh*t. I remember him fondly for his proud moral motto: "Chicken sh*t, horse sh*t, cow sh*t, but no bullsh*t." He ran for office with that slogan, and lost, because, as we all know, at the end of the day, once the charm of such populism wears off, we all want the bullshit back, the loamy loam of idealistic illusion. Anyway, Mr. Sh*t knew how to make a buck and would have perfectly understood Titus' toilet humor about money.

Mr. Sh*t, in turn, had me thinking about another character from PNG I reviewed a book about awhile back: Behrouz Boochani. He's an Iranian Kurd who was chased out of Tehran, the religious regime there wanting to bust his balls (literally) for his dreaming of a future Kurdistan. Some "friend" sent him in the direction of Australia in search of expressive freedom, apparently as some kind of practical joke, as Oz, for all its virtues, has no real protections for journalists, and struggles, occasionally, to justify its lack of. Boochani managed to find a way to smuggle not one but three mobile phones into the Manus Island prison, which, because I'm twisted, made me think of the scene in Pulp Fiction when young Butch is delivered a family heirloom.

Anyway, Boochani's book, No Friend But the Mountains, which some ex-guards have called sh*t, features several episodes when the pump didn't work and nobody knew if it was because vandals took the handles or hwat. Detainees had to slosh and smell through ankle-deep turds in "cremation" hot heat that Boochani rightly described as torture. Well, Boochani would never be able to get into Australia after that sh*t reportage, even if they had found him to be a valid "refugee." (When he arrived by boat, such a determination became moot.) And there, on Manus Island, he languished for a few years.

However, it wasn't all bad news for our Behrouz. He wrote his book with WhatsApp and won Australian lefty literary prizes for his criticism of righty Australian policy, and he still writes for the Guardian and gets absentee lecturer money from a university and shekels up with each new interview, recently signed a movie deal, and is now, when all the chips are counted, the richest homeless guy in the world, with, by my estimate, as much as $500,000 to his account. If he hadn't escaped Manus, then he might have started a cargo cult ( ten hut) there, where Margaret Mead got her early start in cultural anthropology, and drew her conclusions about Americans.

That's a lot to take in right there, but it goes on and on, like bowel symphonies sometimes do. In the course of research, I wondered about the local scene, how Australia had contracted with PNG to set up the detention and later "residential" facilities for the asylum-seekers. Apparently, the asylum-seekers had plenty of sympathy from the locals when they first arrived in 2013 (I've seen happy-faced testaments) and the good missionary work of a charitable heart seemed on full display. But then I discovered ka-ching was a factor and that other kinds of missionary work was going on, probably at reasonable rates for the refugees, but at great cost to the local colonized community: Brothels to service the asylum-seekers.

Well, the argument for brothels was not so much a matter of providing comfort to the stateless prisoners, but rather seemed, if I read right, to be along the lines of providing a good wage for the island girls and, apparently, wives. But the idea was rejected because, being a community that has absorbed the invader ethos, locals can't open up a shop referred to as a "brothel", but instead provide the same services in facilities called "massage parlors, bars, strip clubs, body rub parlors, and studios or by some other description". Wham. And then it comes at you, the colonial corruption at work and play, Big Mammonâ?¢ spreading its seed. You can see it in the way they dress, the crossover, and it reminds you of "horrors" you've seen elsewhere.

And the sh*t keeps coming, overflowing really, like Boochani's depicted toilet room, and you find yourself looking among the turds for a grand eye-opening epoophany, or some sage conclusion drawn on the wall, but it never arrives. Australia has spent more than $10 billion on the "offshore processing" of asylum-seekers, according to a Unicef report, from 2013-2017.

After the detention center closed and detainees were moved into other encampments on the island, Australia hired, without a bid, a shady mercenary company called Paladin who were handed $423 million dollars to service the asylum-seekers, but accountant giant KPMG, in a report through the Australian Financial Review, can't seem to figure out what the company is actually paid for: "One issue is the sheer amount of money being spent - $1600 a day for each refugee, not including food or medical care, when comparable mining camps in PNG provide far more services for around $100 a day." Where does this money go? Many refugees have since been relocated to Port Moresby.

But back to the locals, who are the neglected lot in this sordid tale. It turns out, the brothel idea may be a kind of control valve to help contain some 'hyper-active refugees'. Because there has been a pregnancy problem in the community; refugees hooking up with local women and having kids together. When father refugees are removed from PNG, they leave behind women who will bear children who will be seen as second-class citizens in the local patrilineal culture. In effect, the refugee fathers could leave these women -- and children -- homeless. That takes awhile to settle in.

Further, children of these mixed-couple liaisons are eligible, under Aussie rules, for medevac care, meaning they could be flown to Australia for medical treatment. And, strangely enough, now that Scott Morrison is the Prime Minister (and the architect of the offshore-processing solution), pregnant Manusians with complications could be flown to Australia and a baby delivered there would become Australians on birth. That is, one could argue so: Morrison is a born-again Christian who believes in personhood on conception. Boochani couldn't get into Australia, but he might have potentially wreaked his revenge by knocking up a local girl and who might have given birth to a -- citizen -- in Australia. Named, let's say, Behrouz.

The Manusians have no say on these state-to-state issues: Australian politicians meet with PNG politicians, talk cash payments, and essentially set the agenda for things that will happen on Manus Island (and elsewhere in PNG). Now that Americans have decided to challenge the Chinese in the region in a war of doctrines, Project for a New American Century (see John Bolton) versus the Asian Century, a new naval base will be needed -- on Manus Island -- to stop the spread of the Red Menace in the South Pacific, the Commies tweaking the noses of the Cappies. The base will cost billions of dollars. Those brothels -- er, massage parlors -- will come in handy.

Then you learn that Manus Island is to be declared a Tax-Free Haven. More money pouring into Manus Island. The locals living on short pay, like servants looking for tips. Or as The Big Smoke has it, "To prove that irony is dead, and perhaps pointing to the fact that we're living in a dystopia, the Papuan government has this morning announced that Manus Island is set to become a corporate tax-free zone." Again, no local input.

Yup. Now Titus is writing one last thing on the stall wall: manus manum lavat (one hand washes the other). This is the way it has always been with money -- all the way up to Mr. Sh*t and beyond. The crocodile released back into the wilds of the world. Slide trombone. And flush with cash.

(*Note: Behrouz Boochani has now been relocated to New Zealand, and technically is still stateless, but rich. He could probably buy citizenship in any number of countries, probably even Oz, if he hadn't arrived by boat. But then there's a-been no book and no riches, Never mind. It's that kind of world Down Under.)

(Article changed on August 30, 2020 at 04:19)

Authors Website: https://tantricdispositionmatrix.substack.com/

Authors Bio:

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.