Fringe Views: The Amazon Rainforest

Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:

A lot happened while I was ensconced in serene jungle, most notably the first attempted assassination of an American president in a quarter century. 

Trump paid the price with a piece of his ear, but what he got out of the deal was:

a.) maybe the most iconic photo of this century, and;

b.) a virtual guaranteed victory in November unless something dramatic between now and then changes the landscape (like an actually successful assassination ploy). There are only so many real Trump votes the Deep State can make up for with its various fraudulent machinations.

But others have delved deep into the plot and its implications, so I’ll leave that alone for now.

While that transpired, far far from D.C.…

After a hard rain in Iquitos, Peru — the embarkment point for the Peruvian Amazon and the largest city in the world only accessible by plane and river — I smelled for the first time in a long while raw sewage in the streets, which brought on a wave of nostalgia for bygone times elsewhere in the Third World.

After getting into the jungle via an hourlong boat ride down the Amazon from Iquitos, like the gentlemen on this boat somewhere off the New England coast, I saw of lot of strange items of interest that I “ain’t never seen before.”

(If you enjoy extreme Boston accents and/or adventures on the high seas, I highly recommend this gem.)

https://youtu.be/IYUgduOeXuA?si=HW_GV1NznFzRhd2R

As a young boy in Kansas bouncing on my Midwestern Irish-Catholic grandmammy’s knee, I heard a lot from about how the neighbors built their fence six inches across her property line (her favorite complaint) and how prune juice is a godsent laxative and how Charles Darwin was an agent of Satan — but not much of anything at all about what happens in the Amazon rainforest.

Some of the animals we saw in the wild included:

• Giant monkey frog (more on that in an upcoming article)
• Crocodile or alligator (I don’t know which)
• Various monkeys and a sloth, which as far as I’m concerned is a lazy monkey with claws  
• Chinese tourists

The last of these, the Chinese tourists, I was not anticipating at all, having seen none in Iquitos and assuming the coast was clear. Imagine my shock when, lo and behold, a whole family of them were already seated in the canteen where lunch was served!

They descended on the buffet Lord-of-the-Flies-style, gobbling up all of the fish in multiple goes before I ever had a chance to finish my first serving and go back for more.

If you have ever beheld the spectacle that is mainland Chinese eating, it leaves the disturbing impression that the Great Leap Forward never ended, like they’re afraid another inmate in the work camp is going to finish it for them if they don’t get to it first. It’s all chomping and slurping and grunting for shorthand communication in a race to stuff themselves.

https://youtu.be/935mYMR2a7Y?si=VU6vyWqspuoDiskH

Fortunately, they left shortly thereafter to, I suppose, return to the Middle Kingdom or whatever.

While on a piranha fishing expedition with our local liaison, I was taken — and my wife was horrified in equal measure — by the brazen disregard with which he treated all the fish we caught that weren’t piranhas and were therefore useless.

He cut one’s eyeball out with a pocket knife for some reason he explained but I don’t remember; another he raised up above his head and smashed on the wooden dock so hard that the tiny little thing made a thud that I felt reverberate in my feet; another that he carelessly tossed away landed not in the water but in some brush next to the water to suffocate and die in the sun.

Some other gringo tourists on the peer form another group looked visibly uncomfortable with the slaughterfest.

All of this meant nothing to him. Life, I suppose, is cheap and abundant on the fertile banks of the Amazon.

Coming up, I’ll cover what transpired in my weeklong séance with the shaman, who reportedly trained for her career by spending five years alone in the jungle beginning at the age of eleven — an account which, after seeing her in action, I believe happened.

An astute observation relayed to me once by an expat in Thailand was that, while it’s fashionable and low-hanging fruit for cosmopolitan city-dwellers from the West to fancy themselves superior to the unenlightened villagers of the Third World, it is wise to remind oneself that, if the former were dropped off in a jungle, he would likely be dead in a couple weeks’ time from malnutrition. The latter, on the other hand — your standard Thai grandma — would be right as rain in the jungle, humming folk tunes to herself and picking various fruits off of trees to sustain herself.

So who’s the joke really on?

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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