alberto fujimori, wikipedia, and the glass of water.

There was some news on Alberto Fujimori that I was reading for japanese practice, when I realized that I don't know enough about the back story. So I looked him up at wikipedia. His rise to power had a lot to do with tough talkin' about the Shining Path. Well, you gotta find out who they were (surprisingly not "no-wave dance-punk", or MIA-like musicians!). So you wikipedia them too: Maoist guerillas; Peru; leader captured 1992; gotcha.
But what does that mean to be maoist outside of china? Go, go wiki-maoism!

The thing is, I don't know if now understand more or less about what's going on. It seems like it would take a million days in front of the wikipedia just to have an intelligent conversation. Which reminds me how much I want to read more Saul Bellow.

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little water." You were lucky even then to make yourself understood.... You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or to be understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well. The fathers were no fathers and the sons no sons.

--(from Seize the Day)


(also fuji-cola)