Another indicator that the Catholic Church is completely out of touch with reality

So yes, they do celebrate Halloween here, and yes, the Church hates it. Peruvians celebrate Halloween much like we do: kids dress up and collect candy door-to-door, and young adults drink copious amounts of alcohol. But check out this introductory paragraph from a pamphlet I found in the street:

Do you like the celebration of Halloween? It seems very amusing, no? But you don't know where this celebration comes from. I'll tell you. Halloween is a very important day for Satanists, those that adore the Devil. It is a celebration of death, fear and badness, and for that reason there are the symbols of ghosts, skeletons, witches and devils. The King of Darkness is Satan and on this day you surrender to him, and not the cultur of God, you do not think that you must do this (OK, I'm having a hard time translating that last part). The problem is that we have an enemy who does this to us, and you have not thought much about it, but it is the truth that is their enemy. It is the same devil, Satan. It hates all the good ones and wants to condemn your soul to the terrible Hell!

The pamphlet goes on to talk about the origins of Halloween

The old druid pagans of Europe celebrated October 31 with sacrafices of animals and humans to please Satan. They obtained these sacrafices going house to house. Those houses that gave them victems recieved promises of prosperity and those houses which denied them received curses. People left food offerings outside so that spirits with hunger did not bother them - this is the orign of the tradition to go house to house requesting sweets and making tricks on those which deny to give them. To give caramels is a symbol of offering to Satan. You think it is good to do this?

Now we all know that any non-Christian is composed of Pure Satanic Evil, including the Druids. But first, there is no historical indication that Druids sacraficed people on halloween. October 31 (at least after the introduction of the Gregorian calendar) DID mark the end of summer, which meant it was time to slaughter animals to preserve as food for the coming winter. But even supposing the Church's version of the origin of Halloween were true, does that make celebrating it Satanic? Let me tell you, I've collected a lot of candy, and drunk a lot of beer, on October 31, and not only is it at least the 2nd most exciting day of the year for kids (neck and neck with xmas maybe? I think it's better because there's no time wasted on stupid family), It's never made me sacrafice anything, human or otherwise, or pray to Satan, or watch porn, or whatever else Catholics suppose Satanists do with their time. What I can tell you is that there are a lot of people living on the streets of Cusco and Arequipa, and the money spent on these stupid glossy pamphlets probably could have fed a lot of them. Not that I expect the Catholic Church as an institute to actually be in the business of helping people. OK, enough vitriol against the Church. They're not all bad people, it's just a bad institution.

So I've arrived safely in Cusco, although I had my doubts. I took an overnight bus here, which has two advantages: bus rides are damn boring (this one was about 10 hours), and you can sleep on a night bus; also night buses double as your hotel for the night, saving a bit of cash. But night buses in Peru have a distinct disadvantage: they can be dangerous! That's why they videotape everyone as they get on, so if someone robs everyone blind they can hopefully ID them later. Apparently bus hijacking and robbery is fairly common, so bus companies have responded by videotaping or fingerprinting passengers, or both. When my bus stopped for 45 minutes while the driver got in a shouting match with a potential passenger (who apparently wanted to go somewhere our bus wasn't going), it made me tense, especially when cars would drive by us. We were in some teeny, unfinished-looking town in the middle of rural Peru, and it didn't help me sleep. Not that the shouting allowed for that anyways. I've learned now that 'direct' bus means 'you won't have to get off the first bus and onto a second one.' Slightly different than what I envisioned in the ticket office.

Anyways, Cusco is a claustraphobic town of gringo-pullers and pollution. The streets of the old city are all (barely) one-lane wide, with sidewalks ranging from 12-20 inches. There's lots of traffic, so basically you have to step into it at times to get by. The buildings are taller than in Arequipa, magnifying the effect of car exhaust. For the first time in Peru I feel like a walking dollar sign; everyone wants to sell you something and no one takes no for an answer. If you were selling cigarettes in the street, and you offered them to someone, and they smiled and told you, in Spanish, that they don't smoke, do you a) press the sale or b) move on to the next person? In Cusco, the answer is an emphatic (a), press the sale. Tell them what brands you have, show them that the packages are unopened! They want to start smoking, they just don't know it! It's infuriating, until I feel like a dick, because it must be such a shit life to be out on the streets hoping someone buys your paintings for a sole (33 cents), or sitting out all day with a little basket of strawberries hoping someone will buy enough for you to be able to eat something else that day, or in Arequipa I saw a guy out all day on the street, just selling hair barrets. I mean how awful is that, just hoping enough people come by that need barrets that day? So I guess all those people who won't let me alone give me a good chance to practice compassion. But I'm still practicing. I mean do that many young men buy dangly earrings? Or get their hiking boots shined?

So I was in a restaurant for lunch today, eating soup that tasted like buttered popcorn (fortunately the rest of the meal was pretty good), when that song Happy Together came on. Remember that song? By that one band? (It's the Turtles, but I know virtually none of you knew that). That song is the perfect pop song, perfectly suited for advertisments, because it's good for exactly one verse. Mostly because it's just the same verse over and over for 3 minutes, and by the end you want to drill out the part of your brains responsible for hearing, but those first 30 seconds are gold! And commercials are 30 seconds... VH1 was playing 80's music (of course, because Peruvians love 80's music), so I got to see the themesong to that shitty movie Mannequin by Starship (remember that movie? They made like THREE of those!), and Milli Vanilli, and so much big hair, and pointy guitars, and shoulder pads! Then an ad played for a documentary about the Taliban's destruction of giant Buddhas in Afghanistan. Does anyone remember when that happened, just before 9/11? I remember being so mad, and seeing other people mad, and it was all in the news... and then I saw a Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon that totally changed my mind: when Godman, the Omnipotent superhero, flies down to Afghanistan to stop Sheik Oman from destrying a copy of the first issue of 'Godman' the comicbook, explaining that it's a mint condition Godman #1, it's worth so much to the world, you can't destroy it! The sheik sees the error of his ways, but then a woman in a veil comes running into the scene, screaming about how women are denied education, and health care, and they're stoned to death, etc. And the sheik bludgeons her skull in and says something like "women aren't allowed out of the house unescorted!" And in that moment all of my Western selfishness and hypocrasy was laid bare. Of COURSE we're outraged over the destruction of the Buddha! Buddhism is a religion in vogue in our country, plus when we go to spend our abundant tourist dollars, we could concievably visit the giant Buddhas, giving us a nice photo to show our friends at home! But women in veils, being stoned... I'd rather just not think about that. Shame on us, on our press, and on our country. The same goes for anyone who supports the Iraq war because they want to save the Iraqi's from themselves and know nothing about the four million dead in 10 years in Democratic Republic of Congo or the child soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda (especially shame on our president, and Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Snow, Paul Wolfowitz, the whole gang of crooks). Because we all know that people so dark can't really be helped anyways. Better to just let AIDS overrun the continent so we don't have to worry about them anymore, right? And we'll just put razor-wire over the boarders and mine the seas so the other 95% of the world can't have what we have. Because that's what Jesus wanted - for us to buy $40 rocks from Bed Bath and Beyond with the word "peace" engraved into it so we can put it on the front porch of our McMansion.

Well, I don't have anything else to ad right now, other than Peru has a strange shortage of toilet seats. It's all just bare porcelain. Which isn't super-comfy. Maybe we could make this a no-bid US-contractor foreign-aid program. Like with condoms.

I hope you have found this new, hyperlink version of my blog both fun and informative. I'm working on setting up Spanish classes and trekking to Maccu Picchu (which means Old Mountain or Old Penis, depending on how you pronounce it. At least according to a woman on this travel site)