Hellacommunications

I love this Grass Roots comic from today's paper. One of the few constants of popular culture in PNG is Bob Brown and his fabulous strip. I measure the cavernous distance between PNG as I first knew it and today by the difference between today's strip and a Grass Roots calendar I had in 1989 I think, where I saw my first cartoon of Port Moresby yuppies, a bizarre tableau at the time (like the first time I ever saw Hageners coming home from Brisbane with jerry curls, running shoes and sony walkmans). I've found the image, thank god, and included it. Today's cartoon is so spot on, it tells you what's happend to that 1989 family, and that their brand of modernity has caught up to all of us in the hinterland now, where no one has just one mobile phone, we now have double pouch carriers for digical and B-mbile both, always charged, always at hand. We do live to feed the mobile phone with the kind of compuls ive happiness of a kid with her first Gameboy. In a place without broadband, with very iffy landlines, where I could buy a car with the money I've spent dowloading at 28 Kbps, and where it still sends chills down my spine when I realise I've left my computer on-line while I ran errands, the mobile phone is our Blackberry, our passport to the global ecumene. You pay somthing like $1000 US/year for internet hook up, then a monthly fee, then a surcharge for extra downloads, and the coup de grace is an exorbitant long distance bill because you can never get through on the local number.  The very idea of buying a K20 card and talking until it's empty is so much saner and kinder these days. With Digicel we suddenly had cheap working mobile phones and could call very remote places (like Australia) for real world rates. Everyone got a digicel phone, and the company threw in things like backpacks, clocks, cute red battery radios, wind up torches, even solar recharge strips.   It was glorious. C apitalism: they knew what we needed before we did.  I'd never known how much I needed to call Woodlark Island. It was like the the wall coming down for East Germans: suddenly we were consumers.   Then they wanted to buy Telikom's international gateway and PNG freaked out, understandably. The story was that Digicel got a World Bank loan to enable their sabotage of the national telecommunications system. It was like the fairytale in rewind. Like playing the White Album backwards to find Paul was dead--suddenly seeing the fabled hand of the global market for its long yellow Manichean fingernails.  Our redemption had become our curse. At the same time, some very funny coincidences kept occurring. I was calling in to the Telikom-sponsored 100 FM talkback radio show one morning when this very subject was being debated and the DJ couldn't get any of the phone lines to work.  'Sorry, we'll have to miss that caller, seems our lines are out today, sorry but do keep trying, it's an important topic and I know you all want to have yuor say,' Roger Ha'ofa kept saying. You could almost hear a collective groan of 'switch to Digicel! from the radio public.' Then today I was asked by a friend at WBAI in New York to weigh in on the nature-nurture debate over homosexuality---they were going to tape me to include an anthropological perspective on a panel with Peter Tatchell of the UK 'Out-Rage' and Erc Vilian, a geneticist.  Apparently there's a new Christian argument that 'God made you gay' (as opposed to Satan?) and it's rerunning all the old saws, so they planned to call at noon precisely. Noon came and wen, and I waited and waited and then sent of a quick email ('What's happened?') and got an email back: 'we've been dialing the number and it keeps ringing and ringing ' (referring to the phone sitting silently on my desk). This went on for two hours or so, with help from international operators, until finally a connection came through, one of those old trunk call connections  with echoes and warbling speech. No question-answers could be organized because of the echo, so I had to just launch into a monologue they'll cut up and re-play somehow. But I yakked on and on about riutal homosexuality and Gil Herdt, and told them to call Don Kulick, and more articulate anthropologists on the subject, about how sexual identity and biology are separate variables, and   winding down like a helium  gasp until the DJ said, "Ok thanks so much Nancy' and it was over. So much for Telikom and our link to the world of ideas. A brief contact was accomplished and I fell back to the Medieval South Pacific again. Back to the most expnesive mobile phones in the world, and the slowest  internet connections. To those anachronistic fits and starts of development like the sight of Hari Gotaha in the 1980's, once the walthiest man in PNG, a former house boy with a coffee and trucking business, walking through the Goroka market in arse grass and bare feet, shouting into the biggest satellite phone anyone had ever seen.   

Finally, in closing, I'd like to offer images of flying people, great  dogs, the smallest teenager in the world, and (lest  we forget) Kristy McNichol.