Angkor Wat, January 1, 2000

Ten years ago I was in the middle of a transition. Today I am in the middle of a transition. I don't believe there is any necessary rhythm to decades, but this coincidence made me want to recall my personal antidote to fears no one was quite sure were unfounded about technological collapse as 1999 turned to 2000.

Traveling to someplace far away seemed like something I might not have much more time to do. So I decided New Year's Eve 1999 I would be at Angkor Wat. If the world's computer networks were going to stop working for a while, where better to be than someplace where reliable electricity was not a given?

Spending New Year in Southeast Asia was in some ways an odd choice. While every cyclical calendar has a new year's day, not all calendars begin on the same date. The Buddhist calendar used in Cambodia starts in April.

The reversal of the movement of the sun on the horizon that the winter solstice marks, and that the Gregorian New Year is tied to, is universal. So it might seem it would still be celebrated even by people who started their year after the spring equinox, when days start being longer than nights.

But Angkor Wat is tropical; close to the latitude of San Salvador, El Salvador. The closer you get to the equator, the less seasonal variation there is in the length of day and night. The drama that people living in northern latitudes experience when the unrelenting darkness finally is put to flight, and the promise of sunlight is renewed, is not inherent in life in the tropics. One of the things I lost every summer in Honduras was the long evenings I grew up with, as the sun continued to set before 7 PM even at the June solstice, and the sense of time passing that comes with visibly shortening days.

Yet there are scholars who argue that Angkor Wat was built to frame winter solstice sunset, so perhaps it was not so odd to spend the first days after solstice there. And it was beautiful: sprawling, almost every surface ornamented, buildings rising behind pools joined by bridges lined with sculptures of serpents and demons.

Even though 30,000 people reportedly were present at the midnight celebration, travel in Cambodia had only become possible in spring of that year. For most of our visit, we were not in crowds, certainly, not in crowds of Europeans or Americans.

The Buddhist religious stood out, in their orange and white robes. At some points in the site, Buddhist ceremonies were being held in buildings constructed by Hindu rulers who commemorated the mythic Churning of the Sea of Milk. Places like this never have simple stories to tell; their pasts reach like filaments to connect with the present.

For me, one of those filaments is the indelible image of sky lanterns, lit and released one at a time by Buddhist monks, 2000 of them to mark the 2000 years of the western millennium-- or 2000 prayers, or 2000 wishes carried away into the intense black sky over Siem Reap that night.

Seasons in different colors

When we moved to California, our friends in the northeast almost all at some point said something like, "won't you miss the seasons?".

As I said then, spending time in Central America I realized that the passage of time over the year always was evident, even when there was no time when the temperature dipped low and the leaves on trees turned red and orange like the maples that I still find breathtaking in New York and New England. In Honduras, the dry months of late spring were at first glance as green as the rainy months of September and October, but then, against that ever-green background I would note the tallest of the leafless tropical trees bursting into vivid flowering color, orange or pink or yellow.

For us now here, while the leaves are falling from trees, the sign of the season is less the baring of trunks than the first timid prospect of rain, and what follows from it: the greening of the hillsides that had turned steadily golden and then brown. Today I looked out and realized that a shrub I had last seen as a green vertical is now a solid purple mass entirely obscuring the foliage that still remains on the plant, while in the foreground, a camellia prepares to add a second wave of flowers to what already appears to be a solid dense layer of white over deep green.


It is with that understanding of seasons as less about some specific signal, more a sense of changing colors, including the way the blue of the sky shifts as rain clears the air, that I look at the two paintings here, one a winter scene in New Mexico, the other an impression of blossoming trees in spring. The lavender of the hills in winter gives way to the vivid blue sky of spring.

The onset of autumn in New York, now past, I know was red, and orange, and yellow; here, the ever-present flowers are again accompanied by a general green background. And in the hills of New Mexico, snow blanketing in the ground is lit pink and purple. And in each of these places, and others, as the colors change and the sun's light varies, seasons pass.

Strange times

I am feeling dislocated today. I literally was; the university-wide walkout/teach-in/general strike induced me to find an alternative for my once-a-week one hour seminar, now desperately off schedule. So I invited the participants, if they wished, to be my guests for lunch off campus.

Waiting for them at the coffee shop across from campus, I let the chanting of slogans fade into the background and began to read the pages of a dissertation about a Neolithic site in Taiwan, where groups of post holes signify the ghostly presence of houses long gone. Something about the task, the time, and the place made me realize how oddly we write about once-inhabited places. Because my student is not a native English speaker, I am editing as I go, not simply reading and commenting. And so I am thinking about every sentence and clause in a way I only ever do with my own writing (and far too rarely there, really).

The post holes, my student says, "are" dwellings. Which of course they are not, and never even were.

I have written about post holes myself; about the concept of them, using them as my example of a trace in contrast to a monument. I admire the work of two other colleagues, who also write about this most humble of traces of everyday life. But I have never quite had the reaction I had today: the post holes are not even holes, of course; they are color contrasts in soil (my contribution to this meditation); they are where there once was a post set in a pit (my colleagues' far more important contribution); and we take these long-vanished posts as structural beams that used to support walls and lintels and through these cross-beams, roofs. (I want to write rooves, it is what I say...)

Ghost houses. Not-dwellings. But what made me so self-conscious about this today was the comment I found myself writing, which was about post holes of different diameters: be sure, I said, to explain why there are post holes of different diameters-- the larger structural, the smaller to support walls, furniture, or other fixtures.

The post hole isn't even really a trace for me. It is an index that points towards something that once existed, but that left no physical trace: the rooves, the benches, the shelves and lofts I imagine were there. The dwellings.

And so ancient Taiwan was there with me today.

Back to School: What is a week?

The university changed our starting dates last year, so our first day of classes was on a Wednesday (instead of a Monday). My graduate seminar, held on Tuesday, has consequently met once; while the sophomore seminar has met twice.

In other words, I am facing week 2 in my graduate course and week 3 in my undergraduate course.

Weeks were already hard enough to keep straight as it is. I tend to prepare syllabi with one column that is labeled "week" and another with specific dates, but group readings by the week (not the day). In spring, I never know whether spring break should be a week or be like the 13th floor in buildings where superstition reigns. In fall, Thanksgiving "week" (when I can count on almost no class being full) seems like it should be labele demi-week.

Then there is the "this week" problem. When does "this week" start? For me, it is usually (maybe always) the week coming; for Rus, it is often (maybe always) the week that includes the current day. So sometimes his "this week" is my "last week" and sometimes it is my "next week" (which is usually-- perhaps always!-- "this week").

Weekends are when our weeks diverge the most. I appear to really be cutting the weekend out as a separate time/space, whereas Rus-- like a calendar-- includes the weekend in the week.

So on Saturday, I will talk about "this week" meaning the coming Monday through Friday, but he will think I mean the previous Monday through Friday since Saturday is still part of the week.

And it may be, although we cannot clarify this, that Sunday begins his week while it ends my weekend.

So. I have to live this entire semester in two weeks at once. My course plans are all framed in terms of weeks. But I am only about to do week 2 for the graduate seminar, while the undergrads on Thursday are already to week 3.

And that matters to me because I believe that week 3 is a conversion point, when we reach a situation of common purpose. Which I will now have to reach after Tuesday and on or before Thursday.

I suppose I could simply decide that my weeks now end on Wednesday. But that seems a bit extreme.

Oh, and then there is the end of the semester. When the powers that be decided to make the semester start on Wednesday, they compensated by ending the semester on a Wednesday. (Somehow that worked.)

But with no warning, the university decided to implement a three day "reading period" at the end of this semester. We are not allowed to lecture or indeed ask students to come to class at all now the last Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

(A colleague more on top of things than me had to have her daughter help black out those days on already-printed syllabi.)

But this means my final Tuesday seminar is actually gone. My graduate students will have one week less on both ends of the semester.

So what is a week? how much of this temporal distortion can I stand? I will see what happens as the week goes on: already, I panicked because my online folder for readings for week 3 is empty (this is week 2...)

Time to return to schedules and calendars

Less than two weeks are left before my first class meeting of the fall. As always, I find that I cannot quite account for all the unstructured time of the middle of summer.

Although more than most years, I think I have reason to find that whole period problematic in 2009, it is still hard to know what to think about how six weeks can slip away without leaving any traces. But of course, there are traces, all kinds.

I am compulsive about calendaring things, so I do have a variety of marked dates to serve as prompts. My iCal pages for June-July are packed, in all the colors I use to separate my life into threads (although the pink of teaching is most subdued) so obviously I didn't simply fall asleep waiting for something to break the spell in my summer castle.

But the iCal pages for July and August feel different than the calendar I am rapidly filling in as people send notices of meetings for the upcoming year, and as I enter class sessions for fall and spring. Concretely, the structures of the calendar I am building going forward require different actions: I can set most of these as "repeat" meetings, and then simply find the exceptions and delete them.

Summer is in this sense anti-structure. Everything on the schedule for the last weeks is an event, unique, each had to be entered on its own, even if the person I was meeting was someone I saw every so often.

I like the every-so-often-ness of summer. I used to feel that living that way was wasteful, or-- my old favorite term-- "self-indulgent". Which of course it literally is: in summer I can indulge my self, in the sense of realizing something that during the routinization of the rest of the year, all-too-easily gets buried.

So it turns out that it isn't really that I feel as if nothing happened this summer. Instead, all the things that happen stand out as individual events or self-contained sequences, and I can remember each of them but cannot subsume them in the kind of measured pattern that will inevitably take up the remaining days of the year once term begins.

Which leads me to realize one of the reasons I am so susceptible to invitations to go away during the academic term-- anywhere. I am happy to come and talk to any group about anything anytime. Because those are events, and cutting into the pattern of the academic year, they help me realize myself. They are intense bursts of experience and I treasure every one. I actually tell real time this way: it was before I went to Binghamton, it was while I was coming back from New Orleans, it was while I was in Barcelona...

All of the above was sparked by something quite different: along with calendaring, the other discipline that says I am on a transition to term-time is answering emails that are not from friends or related to existing academic commitments. Like most people, I get too much email to read. I figured it out one week and that was literal: I had over 200 messages in one day, so that if all I did for eight hours straight was read email, I would have been able to spend a whole two and a half minutes each and do nothing else.

But in this caesura of the year, I rapidly reply to some of the unsolicited email I feel no responsibility about. Today, that included pointing someone to podcasts of lectures from a course I teach every year.

The podcast experiment was forced on me in 2007 by a zealous graduate assistant (who was right, I know!). I usually say she persuaded me, or shamed me, into it. I have not found it necessary since then to try it again; we post the weblink for the 2007 lectures and students do listen to them, and I remain amused by the idea that me today may well be contradicting me then-- and I am not sure which of me a student now finds more convincing.

What interested me then, and what I was reminded of again when I checked that the resource still existed, was that the podcasters for the university could not actually accommodate what I do in a classroom.

(Hence the need to be persuaded: most of my class time is interactive discussion. I do what are called minilectures, but they tend to break out as if spontaneous, although I have the ideas all racked up like billiard balls waiting for my chance to break. Sometimes, as in pool, someone else runs out the table and I never get my chance. Which, unlike pool, is a good outcome; it means the students had enough to say that we filled up a class by dialogue.)

Anyway, the first day we used the "automatic" podcast production system, when my grad assistant went to listen to it, there was... nothing. Silence. Many minutes of it.

Turns out the system was not waiting for an audio signal, but simply turned on at the start of class and "recorded" the sound of silence, picked up by a microphone we left turned off while we discussed things for the first 60 minutes.

So my stubborn grad assistant changed the system, manually uploading lectures captured on her ipod. We still ran into problems because the webcast posting system assumed a lecture per class session, and we had many sessions without them. So the material trace of the spring 2007 course is a wonderful illustration of the failure of structured time in the face of the unique performative event.

On the webcast site, each podcast has a title, which we had to provide in advance to the webcast production staff. God knows whether the titles track with the actual content. I know when I teach naturally that as often as not, I say something like "you seem to actually be interested in something else, so I am going to set aside what I was planning to talk about...". I am intrigued, knowing how historical research works, at the notion that someone might think the course I taught was somehow delimited by these named podcasts. The real thing was something else. But because these artifacts exist and form an archive available for others, they can become the "record" used by others as if it were what I taught.

(You can find the podcasts here but don't blame me for them-- I just said the words, I never listened to them. Well, I suppose technically while I was saying them, but still, that is the linear production of speech where as we hear our own words we adjust what comes next in the hope of steering our ideas on to a conclusion. Not listening as such.)

Rainbows VISIBLY unfolding...

This post was supposed to be written around photos, but I have not managed the download/upload business yet so those will have to come later. [Which is now.]

On the way out to the Santa Fe Opera, just as the van we were riding in turned off the road, a rainbow began to appear. It stretched up from northeast of the Opera, and almost immediately, a second rainbow began to grow above it.


By the time we reached the top of the hill where the Opera house stands, the northern ends of the two rainbows were arching up across the sky. Meanwhile, to the southeast, matching paired rainbows were growing, reaching up to ultimately meet their counterparts above a sky melting gold with light dispersed through a fine rain shower.



Everyone moved to take photographs of the rainbow(s). As I also did so, not at all immune to this, I couldn't help thinking that the photographs would be the antithesis of the thing itself. The photos show bands of color, it is true, but they cannot show the way the whole thing grew from the ground up.

Nor can they show the final act of the performance of rainbowness: as the inner of the now fully-developed pair of rainbows visibly deepened in color intensity, the separate bands of color becoming differentiated so that for once I could see violet and indigo.



The whole thing was not what was visible at any moment, even if we were to ignore the partial perspectives that were always being blocked by other people. The rainbow as a whole was not even simply something I could have trapped with a video camera.

These rainbows were a process of being in place, and the tokens I captured are less than fragments of that being; rather, they serve to index my having been there along with the growth of the rainbow itself.

The rainbows, the photos, and the sense of common purpose they created among a group of strangers ("Look, take a picture from here", someone told me as I was looking at the final shimmering indigo band appear) are inseparable from the span of time that the rainbow took to develop and fade, and in turn from the place from which this unfolding was briefly visible.

Under the volcano

Arenal or "sand source": the most active volcano in Costa Rica. Where thousands of houses were destroyed by lava, today there are countless hotels and hot spring resorts for avid volcano watchers.

The discovery that volcanos fascinate me is one concrete outcome of my month- long stay here two years ago. Retracing my steps to the volcano was the one thing I wanted to do personally, since the volcano has become active since my last view of the cone from the pools at Tabacón.

Time has a way of expanding in the presence of running water. Two years ago, I spent three hours watching as fog moved up the slopes of the volcano, revealing the scars of lava, occasionally rising high enough that brown drifts of volcanic ash were visible above the mouth of the volcano.

But time also changes things. Since we were here last, an earthquake changed some of the other volcanos we visited. At Tabacón, the difference of time was most obvious in the growth of trees, making it harder than before to see the volcano itself. And the pool that I spent so much time in before is gone; replaced by two smaller pools placed almost as if purposely so that sight lines no longer allow glimpses of the volcano.

So I moved to a different pool, one I avoided last time because it was crowded with swimmers buying drinks at a pool-level bar, and children and some adults using a water slide. But from one corner, the volcano was visible, and I watched as drifts of clouds moved past, as the entire layer of clouds rose up, never quite revealing the peak of the cone.

As I waited there, I noticed another woman stationary in the middle of the same area of the pool. In the middle of a crowd unaware of the threat of eruption, only the two of us and our companions waited, and waited, hoping to see the red glow of lava.

The different tempos of what happens: on not being in Honduras

Continental Airlines, bless them, extended a no-fee rescheduling of existing reservations only through the end of July, so when I reluctantly accepted the fact that our June 11 reservation would have to be cancelled, I rescheduled one week later. Now, two days out, it is clear that will not happen either; while I have yet to consult Continental's website, I assume there has been no change that would expand the time to reschedule dramatically.

But time has literally run out for me. I was only able to plan this trip, proposed in late May, because I had left the first two weeks in July untouched. That in turn was the outcome of deferring a jury duty call from January to July, and hoping that the claim that the average trial was a few days would be true. Now, after next week, each week has events and duties to carry out, so there is no time to return until the end of this year.

The strands weave in and out; jury duty flows seven months into the future; Honduras could fit in at the end of one possible week of trial, optimistically predicated on possibly deferring yet again into mid-August; flying to Honduras receded one week, and now, like an ocean wave, I see it moving all the way back to December.

My sense of time has become distorted these last three weeks, but at different scales. I spend a few minutes reading news, and six hours later straighten up with a pain in my neck. I wake up at 5:30 feeling alert, despite having less than four hours sleep, and then realize in mid-afternoon that I overlooked the intervening hours entirely. The week goes by and feels like many weeks, dotted with incidents, but with nothing real (meaning here, immediate) that I can recall happening.

And the most extraordinary: I read mail sent by a friend in Honduras working in resistance to the authoritarian regime. I worry, because increasingly the things she is sending, written in Spanish by scholars and activitists, bitterly examine the failure of the US to act, dissect the silences in State Department briefings, and propose that maybe this coup was not unwelcome, maybe it was even planned.

But I don't feel it is my place to argue with her; I am not, after all, living through this, it is not, after all, my country or my history at stake.

So when another of those copied, a Honduran historian, replies with a reminder that his work argues against Honduran history being solely the outcome of US decisions, I feel I can respond.

And so begins a three way exchange between us and a second historian, also a friend of long standing, in which as emails come in, it is sometimes hard to tell who is being challenged or reassured. In Spanish: amiga, that one is for me, reassurance that the frustration does not mean a friendship broken. In English: love you, that one is for whom?

And each message time-stamped individually, to the second. A conversation, but in counterpoint, and I cannot say who is addressing which of us.

Being in Omoa

Yesterday I was supposed to return to Omoa, but with the situation there, I am instead still in California. I deferred the trip for a week and hope that by then I will be able to follow through.

But not being in Omoa has me thinking about what it was like throughout June. Omoa is small, so that we walked to the site every morning. Because of the earthquake, our original plan for where to stay was delayed. So for the first two weeks, we were in the only hotel in town that was not located directly on the Caribbean beach.

Instead of a beach-front view, our first hotel was on a dirt road that once was quiet, until around 2003. That was when a natural gas depot was built, illegally, at the end of the road. So every morning and far into the evening, parades of natural gas trucks went back and forth down the road.

The gas depot involved construction of breakwaters that have destroyed the beaches I remember from my first visit in 1977 to the Omoa coast. The speed of the damage is evident when you talk to people who own the businesses along the beach. Some of these are now half in the water-- restaurants that literally have one post offshore.

The place we moved for our last two weeks, after water service was restored in the wake of the earthquake, is a modern small bed and breakfast right on the beach. If there were beach. Instead, the owners have put in place a stone retaining wall to try to keep more erosion from happening. They pointed out that when they bought the property, there was a street in front of it and the beach on the other side. Now all this is gone.

But as we discovered, there is still a way to go into the ocean, down masonry steps the owner put in place. Once in the caribbean, the water is clear as glass, and small fish nibble at your toes. Floating is by far the best way to experience these waters.

On a clear day, you can see the distant point of Manabique, today over the Guatemala border. For us, the names along this coast are redolent of history: Manabique guards the bay of Amatique, and between Omoa and Manabique is the town of Masca. These are all places mentioned in colonial documents as pueblos de indios.

When I walk through Omoa's streets, I see histories glittering in the heat of the sun on concrete. The indigenous past comes through in naming; the colonial period asserts itself in the bulk of the 18th century fort, but also more subtly persists in the layout of the main streets.

More elusive is the nineteenth century, the early republican period. Reportedly graves enclosed within the walls of the original Spanish fort, El Real, built in the 1750s, commemorate people from that period, poorly documented in archives and almost ignored in contemporary presentations of the Fortaleza. But the fortress itself actually is a testament as much to that period as to the colonial one that gave it birth, as it was rebuilt to house prisoners of the new republic.

Most occluded today is the modern history, when banana companies thrived for fifty years. But much of this history persists in the memories of the people whose families came to Omoa then, or later, when the Fort became a notorious jail holding prisoners of a dictator.

Being in Omoa confounds the idea that time passes. Time persists. The traces of its accrual are everywhere, they have not gone away. The fort, built originally on the edge of the sea, today faces a soccer field, beyond which is the mangrove swamp that promotes the advance of the shore away from the fort itself. Between the mangrove and the walls of the fort time is literally sedimented.

Independence Day with fireworks

I have often been out of the country on July 4, so I have developed a mixed relationship toward the holiday. On the one hand, I would like to imagine being part of a crowd watching fireworks as the evening grows darker. On the other hand, I hate crowds.

So normally, if we are in the US, I think about going somewhere where I might be able to glimpse fireworks. Last year, on the spur of the moment, we tried to find somewhere high enough in the hills to look out over the bay and catch sight, perhaps, of fireworks from the east bay and San Francisco. My first thought turned out to be everyone else's destination, so eventually we ended up in a crowd of people waiting in a park with very poor lines of sight. But paradoxically, that made each thing we managed to spot seem somehow more of an event.

This year, I had thought we might go to the waterfront in town, since at worst all 20,000 residents might show up. Then earlier in the week we saw the signs up saying the fireworks had been cancelled. Not really a surprise; the fire danger is all-too-real.

So I probably should have expected it, when last night the sounds of fireworks started to be heard. Apparently, somewhere along the way, the cancellation was cancelled.

There is something very different about fireworks experienced as a series of sounds instead of light effects. (I know from experience that we cannot see anything from our yard; the hill blocks the view to the waterfront, even though there is some acoustic anomaly that makes sound carry across it perfectly.)

I imagined the sounds as green and gold firebursts. Happy Independence Day.

Summertime and the living is easy...

So, the reason we came back on Friday instead of being the last out of the field was music: on Saturday, we had tickets to the last performance of "Porgy and Bess" by the San Francisco Opera.

From the first chords of "Summertime" to the very end, there was a sense of familiarity and difference about this performance. Listening to the comments of people around me (why is it that people in public events think their conversations are private?), I was struck by how many people were uncomfortable with what they saw as the production's departure from the authentic version. I can only assume that these listeners were comparing the opera to the movie from 1959.

But of course, what we were watching was the original operatic version, which program notes told me had rapidly been reworked during the original run in 1935 and never performed intact again until 1976. As an opera, the story moved entirely through musical vocalization, interrupted only when the few white characters-- the police, the coroner-- entered the scene and spoke without song.

For me, beyond the beauty and power of this performance, the problem of authenticity and memory posed by "Porgy and Bess" might be exemplary of a broader cultural process. What is seen as legitimate and authentic is what we remember a work to have been. The version that reached the most people outweighed the original intentions of the creators, and made the revival of the full opera something that must struggle to replace the movie's iconography in the minds of viewers and listeners. Unusually for opera, at this performance, at each break I heard voices-- all women's voices-- singing well-remembered lyrics in cadences that clearly came from the movie, not the opera we were seeing. Summertime echoed and hummed throughout the building, but it was not, in the end, a single unified experience we shared, but instead the layering of what we heard and saw over what we each had seen, heard, and yes, sung before.

Come for the earthquake, stay for the revolution: Honduras, June 2009

That was supposed to be a joke, a line my husband came up with on Thursday as we walked back to our hotel after the last day of work in June, knowing the next day we would be out of the country. The day before we were slated to come down in May, the 7.3 earthquake hit, providentially sparing most people's lives. While some people questioned our decision to come down anyway, and we spent two weeks living with aftershocks and water problems, our field season was extremely productive and the collegial relations we established with universities and scholars throughout the country deepened in significant ways.

So it was with a sense of the surreal that we were confronting the developments happening as we prepared to leave. Wednesday night, at 10:30, the Honduran cell phone rang, several hours after we were asleep, and by the time I answered, was in voice mail. The message was disturbing: the civil conflict between the President and Congress over a proposed national poll to be held today had led to the dismissal of the Secretary of Defense and the head of the armed forces. But, my caller said, there was no need to accelerate leaving: just watch news, read the papers.

So for hours starting that evening, the next morning, and the last evening we did that. Of course, there was no coverage on international networks, what with the governor of South Carolina admitting to an Argentine affair, and then Michael Jackson's death eating up the airwaves.

Switching between multiple Honduran stations showed the President surrounded by union members, indigenous people, cab drivers, and oh yes, politicians and political activists from a number of Honduras many parties, holding almost a vigil in the Presidential Palace waiting for a military coup.

Which was averted; and so we left the country on Friday, with plans to return in two weeks, and again two weeks later. But the coup was merely delayed, rescheduled (as one online commentator said) until the country was quiet on the weekend, resulting early this morning in the kidnapping of the democratically elected Honduran president and his forcible removal to Costa Rica. Reportedly, his cabinet is under arrest or at least ordered arrested. The head of the Honduran Congress has been declared the interim president, and we are told the November presidential election will take place as scheduled.

What was the reason for this action? if you read US media, you will be told the vote today was to allow President Zelaya to remain in office. To be sure, I think in the long-term, the goal of his call for constitutional reform may have been to allow him or others in sympathy with him to serve more than a single four-year term. But in the short run, the poll would simply have registered how many people were in favor of constitutional reform. Even though Zelaya was elected in 2005 with less than 50% majority (Honduras has multiple viable parties); even though his popularity in April was at 25% and in May at 30% according to international polls; and thus even though one would not expect a groundswell of support, this was too threatening for the Honduran powers that be.

English language media also all qualify Zelaya as "leftist President". So let's be clear here as well: elected in 2005 as a neoliberal candidate from the centrist, pro-business Liberal party, Zelaya describes his own journey toward alliance with Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez, and Fidel Castro as one of realizing that the rich in Honduras would never support economic equity. His support now comes almost exclusively from union members, rural farmers, indigenous groups, and others who have been the focus of his more recent policy moves, including a huge percentage increase (60%) in the minimum wage-- bringing it all the way up to $289 a month.

God bless Honduras. Take care of my friends and colleagues. Please, if you read this, keep pressure on the US government to condemn this unlawful action. Argue with anyone who simplifies this into Hugo Chavez vs. the US. Read widely, read the European papers, learn Spanish, be a citizen of the world.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/users/profile/HondurasExpert?action=comments&display=news&sort=newest