To all those, head in the cloud, caught up in all the bad news, might I suggest a deeply therapeutic trip to Cambodia, Kompong Kampot, and a visit to the ‘Rhinoceros Head Cave’? There, a Neolithic tribe, 3000 to 5000 years ago lived in a cave the interior of which could abstractly be compared to a Rhinoceros’s head. One can get lost in this cave, so do be careful. One can also be easily found, so be courageous. Primordial recourse awaits you there. Exquisite and fantastical accreted formations, stalactites, stalagmites, bats, and to our point, a ruined Hindu temples made of ancient brick, that the Khmer Rouge destroyed when they hid there in 1979.
There’s an allegory here (as there is with all caves) beyond ‘you can run, but you can’t hide.’ All tyrants and their sympathizers are eventually brought down, always, to recall some famous words of Gandi-Ji. Or, this old Eastern European and K’mai chestnut, first they came after my uncle, then his employees. (In America, the alleged ‘illegals’, an invalid qualifier used by illiterates for ‘a person,’ according to the liberal, Kantian, principles that informed the writing of the US Constitution.) Then they came after demonstrating university students, then you, me, and eventually even themselves—their own elite cadre—in an eventual atrocious, auto-genocidal blood lust inspired by Pol Pot’s readings of the French Revolution. You can bet anybody at the time—as in this time—who didn’t speak out later wished they had.
A half dozen years after President Reagan fired all the professional air traffic controllers striking in demands for higher pay, shorter work weeks, and better working conditions, I worked on a movie called Matewan, written and directed by John Sayles. It was about striking coal miners in the Northwest coal fields of West Virginia, having to fight off government hired Pinkerton thugs in their attempt to unionize. In a particularly poignant scene, Will Odam playing a child prodigy preacher (ironically he later became a kind of roots music icon), delivers a sermon that messages the faithful to arm themselves and stand up against the government’s strike breakers. After preaching his ‘through a glass darkly’ sermon, he prompts the faithful to “read between the lines,” a paean to both the interpretive dimension of the New Testament and the time honored Christian call to social activism.
Not only did this film contain a labor history filled with socioeconomic contradictions, but the circumstances under which it was made did as well. As an independent ‘art film,’ the actors were hired on a Screen Actors Guild dispensation similar to a nonunion contract. So was the crew. But a few of us in the film workers’ union partially organized it before shooting. I did two categories, uncommonly allowed by our New York local, and made-out particularly well financially. But others who weren’t organized felt they were being exploited on a movie about labor exploitation. Since I was providing hair and makeup services virtually all by myself—where there might normally be several other high paid professionals working with me—I was endeared to both the director and his girlfriend, who was one of the executive producers. To my surprise, at filming’s end, I heard how ‘the other half’ had painfully endured and was a little shocked. This is the elite’s ‘siloed’ experience par excellence, and had I known more fully the truth of that exploitation, I certainly hope I would’ve used what influence I had to do something about it. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but the quotient of one’s moral good must always be tested in ‘real life’ to be known.
So it’s time, especially for all you Rhino Heads siloed in Congress, ignoring Khmer-Rouge like evils in policies foreign, and now, domestic, to heed the bodhisattvas’ imperative—observing within the theaters of duty, both transcendent and mundane—to transform all this lawless tyranny.
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