What follows is a (mostly) unedited excerpt from my critically acclaimed, gold-standard expat travel memoir/existentialist treatise, Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile:
During Bangkok rush hour, blind indigents sing songs into PA systems in front of public transportation hubs, like the BTS Skytrain or the MRT underground subway stations, or bus stops.
Some play guitars, which, given their visual impairment, is impressive.
Passersby, people on their way home from work or wherever, clink coin donations into tin trays at their feet.
Sometimes the blind indigents hear the clink and smile in gratitude. Maybe that's why they go with the tin, for the dopamine-releasing tinny tink of thudding coins.
The indigents stare off into space, lights out, and sing. Through the sound of music, they breathe their voices into the world. It's usually some Thai-language number, and it usually sounds pretty off-key. These are not Grammy-caliber performers, for the most part.
But people still give them money because they're blind, and because they're trying.
Tourists, less experienced, might wonder: how did blind performance art come to dominate the Bangkok subway hustle game? God only knows — asking why, pointless exercise, etc.
I thought once or twice about stealing some property that didn’t belong to me right out of the hand of one of those blind subway singers, just to know how it felt.
The one time the urge to indulge that impulse struck the hardest, the blind indigent mark was a heavyset lady, squatting on a stressed upside-down milk crate stool — the way the Mexican immigrant farmhands used to on their lunch breaks at the pepper plant in South Georgia where I worked one summer — just nibbling on her ice cream cone, apparently on her break, PA system switched off on the ground at her side, gazing vacant-eyed at the air.
It would've been so easy to nab that cone and hit the exits, candy-from-a-baby-style.
I didn’t really think this poor woman deserved to be victimized — it was more of a fleshly Chimpanzee impulse left over from the State of Nature days, just to take something in broad daylight from a blind streetlady.
In a real seductive and unspeakable way, the disabled beg to be victimized, Darwinian-survival-of-the-fittest-style. Some might even say they deserve it. I'm not really one of those who would say that, but I get it.
Robbing the disabled is a wholly natural impulse.
Morally reprehensible? Probably.
But natural? I think so.
A paradox for ethicists for sure.
I’ve watched enough wildlife documentaries to know what natural is. The apex top-of-the-pyramid predators — orca whales, wolves, lions, et al. — always pick off the juiciest, easiest targets first.
Maximum return, minimal investment, etc.
Not to be flippant or dismiss human rights.
Why work harder than you have to? Why buy ice cream when you can take it?
I get it.
By now, I've seen enough of seedy Bangkok streetlife to know that the laws of civilization — for all their glories and achievements — have never fully transcended the inexorable laws of the jungle.
In any case, the civilization-upending-natural-selection problem may soon be remedied through nuclear war or some other human-induced self-extinction calamity. And then, once the dust has settled, it will be back to full-on state of nature minus the conceit of morality.
In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty carpool lane of some abandoned superhighways.
-Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
