The Ecuador letters, part 9

Poverty the new Prosperity


There's a story about a Buddhist monk who was passing through a village with his disciple and needed a place to stay for the night. A humble farmer approached him and offered his home. "I don't have much," said the humble farmer, "but you are welcome to partake of some milk and cheese from my cow." The monk gladly accepted the offer. The next morning, he arose at dawn, while the farmer was still sleeping; he then crept quietly out of the house, with his disciple, untethered the cow, and led it to a cliff. With one mighty shove he pushed the cow over the cliff. It bounced down the rocks and lay bloody and lifeless at the bottom of the scree.


"Why did you do that?" asked the disciple in astonishment.


"I dunno," said the Buddhist monk, "I suppose I just wanted to see what a cow falling from a cliff looks like. Quite funny, yes?" And with that, he wandered off in that way Buddhist monks have of just wandering off after they've delivered themselves of something profoundly incoherent.


There is surely a lesson to be learned here for all of us. No matter how little we have, even if we only have a cow, or even if we only have a plastic cow with a reversible head, we are all in danger of having even less. Jobs can be lost; cars can be reduced to wreckage in an accident; cows can be pushed off cliffs by Buddhist monks; plastic cows with reversible heads can be accidentally burned in the microwave oven; nice long fingernails can be broken in late-night fights in obscure inner-city alleys filled with a thick green phosphorescent glow; geckoes can just bugger off. In this sense, we are all poor: whatever we have we could easily lose. This is why I live in Ecuador.


Some say: "Ecuador is a Third World country. It is underdeveloped. It is behind the times. (I'm a martyr to my italics)". I disagree because this implies that the future is somehow prosperous. In reality, Ecuador is not behind the march of history, but well ahead of it, since the march of history can be shown to be roughly in this direction, in the direction of losing things, of having LESS AND LESS. Do you doubt it? Oil, of which is built the entire present tense with its gameshows, feminism, high-speed rail links and Big Macs, is due to run calamitously out in less than fifty years. There is no similiar world-obviating technology in place to take over - not on the required scale, or anything close. The horsemen are waiting in the wings, and this time they are far better prepared even than they were in 1347. Let me, then, detail you the future - the future, as already revealed unto us here in Ecuador, where your unborn great-grandchildren now live.






First the good news:










The Liar, the Wench and the Warthog


Chapter 1


In which Edmund meets the Wench in a wardrobe while trying on a sequin-studded bikini, and learns not to judge people.