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Chapter 2 Bombs, Barricades, and the Urban Battlefield Benjamin shared with us other émigrés the error that spirit and cunning can possibly accomplish something against a force which no longer recognizes spirit as something autonomous, but only as a means to its own ends, and therefore no longer fears a confrontation with it. —Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics Our brothers in the past sacrificed to topple this military dictatorship but their demands were only met with violence, bullets, and killing. —Min Ko Naing Scorpions In the fiercest heat of the year, I ride a boat and then a pony cart to a small town not far from Rangoon, in the lower Burma delta. It takes two hours and I am lulled by the soft lap, lap, lapping of the brown waves against the eroded banks, and the graceful arc made by the fishing nets from the boatmen hugging the banks in their small canoes. The boat and pony cart route, though illegal, is preferable to the bone-breaking, spine-jolting ride in a covered pick-up truck on roads whose bitumen is largely washed away by the yearly monsoon, leaving potholes the size of small pagodas all over the road. The village is a typical dusty market area with dirt lanes peeling off among banyan trees and an overgrown village lifestyle that began at the river when the British created the Twante canal to create easier sea access from the port of Rangoon. Twante is a village of potters. The water pots from all over Burma come from their pottery sheds, but I am more interested in the Shwesandaw Pagoda. Bombs, Barricades, and the Urban Battlefield 13 The Shwesandaw Pagoda lies 100 yards behind the last row of thatched wooden houses, and one needs first to traverse the rubbish midden that fills the entire area between the houses and the pagoda. I am pleased to have finally left behind me the smell of the midden, and the pigs, dogs, children, and the sight of the poorest Twante women rooting through the food scraps and mounds of plastic bags, as I slog through sand half a foot deep on the path to the pagoda. As I place my foot on the ground I see a shadow from the corner of my eye, and I try to stop the downward motion of my leg a few inches from the ground. As I raise my foot I see an enormous black scorpion, known as a Burmese Giant Forest Scorpion, or Asian Forest Scorpion. At its maturity, a fullgrown Burmese Giant Forest Scorpion is only supposed to be four or five inches in length, but this one seems at least five inches, and possible six. It is more aggressive than the Asian Emperor Scorpion and at the moment my foot is only two inches away from it, its two front pincers like giant crab claws are open and slightly raised, and its segmented tail is holding high in the air the venomous stinger on the end. I’d read that Burmese Forest Scorpion venom can prove fatal and the mode of death is usually respiratory or heart failure. I think the scorpions can achieve this just by their menacing countenance. The greenish-black monster is a fitting guardian for the impressive pagoda that rises up out of the sand only a few meters away. Pagoda steps are lined with other such deadly guardians, like the winged lions, or chinthe (chin dhei), and the ogres, or belu (ba lu:), converted to Buddhism and so powerful as to prevent apparitions from non-Buddhist worlds or Buddhist hells from despoiling the sacred space of the pagoda grounds. When I returned to Rangoon from my visit to the Shwesandaw Pagoda, I recounted my journey to a middle-aged female friend. I talked about the tranquility of the pagoda, the musical sounds carried on the wind, and the cool marble of the pagoda platform shaded from the ravages of the April midday sun. She turned to me and, with a smile, chanted a short verse about the soft twinkling sound of the bells attached to the hti on the top of the pagoda, the coolness of the marble underfoot, and the soothing whiteness of the lime washed walls to pilgrims who have been squinting painfully through the fierce brightness of the tropical sun. My friend had summed up what in all my years of wandering through Southeast Asian Buddhist spaces I had been unable to...

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