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Chapter 5 The Veneer of Modernity At a time when the mother land Union was on the brink of being burnt down to ashes by hellfires in the 1988 disturbances, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (Tatmadaw) saved it in the nick of time. It then endeavoured to avert the terrible fate in store for the nation and build it up into a mountain of gold. —New Light of Myanmar Disneyland for Dictators It is only a one-hour flight from the modern Thai capital of Bangkok to Rangoon, but the difference is extraordinary. There is perhaps no other country in the world that has closed its tertiary institutions for most of the last decade; where a lost generation of youth turn to heroin if they’re wealthy, and prostitution and smuggling if they’re impoverished; no other country where the border areas are frenzied frontier posts of enormous hundred-room brothels, exit gates for Burmese slaves, sites for amphetamine factories and heroin refineries, and river crossing posts for weapons, teak, tigers, bears, rubies, Buddha images, and other items of Burma’s dwindling natural and cultural heritage. This frenetic trading and smuggling of every imaginable trade good has been occurring for many years and contrasts with the scarcity of western trade goods allowed in Burma’s legal economy since Ne Win’s military coup in 1962. Not too many years ago, 555 cigarettes, whisky, lipstick, or ballpoint pens were all you needed for an extended stay in Burma. But after the 1988 Strike, the military junta selectively encouraged the flow of global capital into the country, reincarnating Burma as a giant fascist wonderland, a Disneyland for Dictators (Ryle 1999: 8). The incipient fascist imagination that seeks to build the country up into a ‘‘Mountain of Gold’’ does so of course through a betrayal of the 80 Chapter 5 masses. This process was described last century by Ernst Bloch as a ‘‘swindle of fulfillment’’ (Rabinach 1977), a process that has caused enormous confusion in Rangoon since 1990 when the economy was selectively liberalized . In the cavernous marble monstrosity known as the Tatmadaw Museum, the top floor is dedicated to what can only be described as an orgy of kitsch that the regime calls its vision of modernity. It consists of exhibits that show how the military will continue to control the Burmese economy in perpetuity. Nowhere more clearly than here can the envisaged utopia be glimpsed, and it is a frightening vision. Purple and khaki army boots with heels and sequins for the army of the future and plastic dummies covered in fake blood depicting the regime’s pacification of minority groups are typical of the exhibits whose subject matter fills the nightmares of Burmese people, who understand little of the transnational dimensions of the regime’s finances and feel helpless to prevent this orgy of kitsch from dominating their waking reality. The practical consequences of instituting this nightmare of centralized control is a dual process of transforming the city into a form of mass culture that I describe in this chapter as the thin veneer of modernity. The other half of the process is the transformation of the city’s residents into ‘‘mass ornaments’’ (to borrow from Kraceaur 1975), the forced implementation of which I describe in Chapter 6. A veneer is a covering of a finer substance, and mass culture now swathes the capital cities—a landscape of gilded pagodas and gold paint that tarts up the wizened pagodas and moldering downtown terraces for the sensual pleasure and seduction of foreign companies with hard currency. In this chapter I use the narratives of young male heroin addicts to peel the veneer of imitation gold leaf from the modern city and expose the mountain of suffering below. The Veneer of Modernity In 1994 there were twelve hotels licensed to take foreigners in Rangoon. A year later the international business media were working themselves into a lather about Burma as the next recipient of massive amounts of global capital. The air of optimism is summarized by Philp and Mercer (1999: 30), who note that investors seeking the next Asian ‘‘tiger’’ economy have set their sights upon Burma, ‘‘a country Catley (1996) has referred to as ‘the next frontier.’’’ A far cry from the twelve guest hotels in 1994, by the beginning of 1996 there were 8,000 hotel rooms to be found in Burma (EIU 1996) and the regime had created 946 licenses for private tour...

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