Thursday, March 11, 2010

The Grita

Here in Peace Corps DR we are fortunate to have ourselves a wonderful little Volunteer-run publication called the Gringo Grita. The Grita is made by volunteers, for volunteers and is an outlet for we vols to share our success stories, lack of success stories, poetry, campo recipes, witticisms and more. Each of the biannual issues features profiles of volunteers closing their service in which they share their experiences and words of wisdom. I can’t imagine that many other Peace Corps countries have such similar publications so it is something to aprovechar. Yet another perk of serving in the DR.

I recently decided to put some of my infinitesimal free time towards writing something to submit to the Grita. I have no idea whether what I wrote will be accepted and printed so I figured I could at least share it here.

Keep in mind that this is written for PC volunteers who are oftentimes out of the loop as to cultural and/or political happenings back in the States. It is also written towards an audience of Spanglish speakers, which explains the occasional italicized insertions of Spanish.


Teabagging is All the Rage

Upon applying to the Peace Corps, I had developed a romanticized vision of living high atop a mountain in the Andes. Or maybe in a mud hut on an African savannah. Perhaps in a Mongolian yurt. Asia’s tepee.

Wherever I ended up, I fully expected to forego all forms modern technology. Spend two years of my life unconnected. Offline. Completely off the proverbial grid. This expectation left me feeling equal parts liberated and terrified. Giving up the rat race, turning off the cell phone, shutting down the computer and leaving the 24 Hour News Cycle behind sounded like an incredibly cleansing experience. That being true, I have friends that gave up Facebook for Lent and suffered withdrawals over the course of just 40 days. Could I really make it 2 years?

As we all know, being placed in the DR doesn’t leave us wholly isolated from technology unless we put ourselves in self-imposed exile from all modern devices. We are given cell phones. Internet exists for many. While we live in the developing world, we can choose at our own discretion to cross that invisible threshold, log onto the internet and step, ever so briefly, into the developed world.

While I had that romanticized view of life offline, I have no complaints about occasional access to the glorious interweb. It suits me, as I am somewhat of a news junkie. I like knowing what Obama is doing. What congress is not. Where in the world Osama Bin Laden isn’t. Which movies I missed. Who is leading the medal count at the Winter Olympics and all else going down in the Great Wide World. But while sometimes it is nice to be informed, other times the information is just too much and makes me further embrace the relative simplicity of our lives aquí and being away from the insanity allá.

Case in point: Did you know the biggest current political fad in the States is Teabagging? You heard me. And this is not just happening in frat houses across the country but everywhere. In Red states and in Blue. White people all over the U.S. have gone crazy for Teabagging and have adopted Sarah Palin as their leader.

I am being serious in that there exist an ever-growing number of politically motivated groups referring to themselves as Tea Party Patriots. These Patriots have spawned an entire coalition of offshoot groups known as the Friends for Liberty. They are upset with the current political and economic situation in the US of A and are dead set on reclaiming their freedom by means of public rallies, the blogosphere and the airwaves of Fox News as Glenn Beck lends his voice and infinite wisdom to the cause when not too busy crying on national television. Some of them have even foreseen the possibility of “another civil war” on the horizon.

The name is derived from the “No Taxation Sin Representation” colonists of 1773 and their raucous Tea Party of the Century in Boston. Unfortunately, the modern day Teabaggers did not hire a youth consultant before adopting a name now synonymous with clandestinely inserting one’s testicles into an unsuspecting mouth. One simple Google search and the angry activist Teabaggers would have been led directly to Urban Dictionary and quickly learned why Americans under the age of 30 can’t help but snicker at their ill-monikered “movement”.

In all seriousness, and, scrotal humor aside for the moment, the Tea Party movement seems to be gaining traction. It was a driving force in the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat going to a relatively unknown former-nude-male-model-of-a-Republican and causing the Democrats to lose a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate and, along with that, any realistic chance of passing a meaningful piece of legislation relating to universal health care.

What once seemed to be a movement of bat-shit crazy right-wingers wielding firearms at Obama rallies is now catching on with independents and libertarians from coast to coast. The bat-shit crazies are still there and answering to the gruesome twosome of Beck and Palin but an ever-growing number of angry Americans are latching on in order to “reclaim America via the Patriot movement”. What began as some loonies questioning Obama’s citizenship and/or religious affiliation has spawned into something bigger, creepier and with potential political power in an election year.

And so goes my current relationship with technology and the internet. Sometimes I read about Olympic glory, discover new music and Skype good friends. Life is swell. And other times I read about rampant adult teabagging, Tiger Woods’ infidelities and other inanities driving the ever-evolving cultural zeitgeist. ¡QVMV! Sometimes I am upset and utterly perturbed by what it is I am reading and desire a return to my blissful island ignorance. I vow to resist, to lock my laptop away, to use restraint when passing the barrio internet café. But without fail, I inevitably crawl back, at 30 pesos/hour, like a junkie in need of a fix.

Could I have made it 2 years offline? I’ll never know. The Andean mountaintop, African savannah and Asian tepee are but distant, romantic daydreams. Hispaniola is home and technology exists in varying forms. I will never be sure if I could have stuck out two years without the wonderful World Wide Web. But I can be sure that I could have gone my entire life without knowing that grandparents across America are Teabagging en masse.