corundum, Burma.12, gems

From a distance life is simple, every hand the same. Hold yours out and take a look. Highs and lows, ridges and whorls, the maker's strokes, we all have them. Our lives, our intellectual development are just like our fingerprints. Begin from a tiny point and spin gently outward, drip-dreary accumulation. Birth, death and what happens in between. Here I sit, contemplating my hands. Yes, I see the spirals. But also other lines that follow no maker's mold, bold strokes that leap directly from ridge to distant ridge, bypassing the mundane maze of daily drudgery. These raw, wrong-way gashes exist not by grand design, but are unique to me alone. You could call them self-inflicted. Yes, self-inflicted. In particular, I remember two such slashes. The first was 1973, my sophomore year in high school. The event the Saturday Night Massacre" – a political throat slitting – when President Richard Nixon fired Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski. Intellectually riding this thunderbolt to ground shattered the façade so carefully erected by my parents, teachers, preachers and political leaders. From that point on, nothing was the same. Childhood was gone. The final severing of innocence, though, did not occur until some five years later. I found myself in a small hostelry in the northern Thai opium town of Fang, where a book lurked quietly on the lobby table. It was Alfred McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. Its premise – the US government's war on drugs was a sham. While Washington piously lectured the world on the evils of narcotics and used the hammer of foreign aid to blackmail other governments into doing the same, US intelligence agencies were simultaneously engaged in and supporting countless individuals and groups whose major business was – to paint it black – running dope. The book was not completely new. I had come across a reference in a magazine a few months earlier, and had actually located a copy in a university library. But seeing it on that table in northern Thailand lent a certain legitimacy. Just a day later, as I walked the jungle paths of nearby opium-growing hill tribe villages, my ex-CIA Shan guide confirmed many of McCoy's statements. This was a terrorist bombing of my middle-American psyche, exploding my final illusions about official behavior. Slash. I entered adulthood."