Chilean miners’ ordeal is just beginning
16October 2010
It came as no surprise to hear that the Chilean miners, trapped 600 metres underground for 69 days, were debating who will have the honour of being the last person to return to the surface. They understand that, however desperate their entrapment has been, life back at the surface will be infinitely more complicated.
I imagine each miner entering the small capsule with the nervousness of an actor stepping on stage or a defendant rising to the court room. They ascend through layers of living rock that should have been their tomb and emerge, blinking and reborn, into the harsh Atacama sunlight to find themselves the stars of a circus.
A thousand journalists from across the globe have gathered at the mine head and their presence, more than the drama of the miners, has attracted politicians and celebrities, sniffing an opportunity to burnish their public profiles in the glow of a good story. Even if the miners regime for the past 69 days has included daily media training most of them will still find life at the surface more bizarre and terrifying than the warm darkness and camaraderie underground.
They are now public property and the public will demand a return on its investment. The politicians, celebrities and media have not camped outside this mine for two months just to turn away quietly after the first – or even the final – trapped miner emerges. Our heroes may have anticipated the embraces, tears and handshakes that will greet them as they step out of the cage but are they prepared for months and years in the limelight?
Family and friends will pressure them to cash in on their unique fate. Media agents will hover at the back of the scrum to sign exclusive deals for their stories. Like the All Blacks the miners will quickly be sorted into various price categories according to their physical prowess and ability to manage public life. A few individuals (the youngest, the oldest, the leaders) will command the highest fees.
Initially most will enjoy their fame and the public will not begrudge their fortune. After all, these men have suffered terribly and, by all accounts, they have no job to return to and no other means of supporting their families.
One or two will discover a talent for public life. They will appear on talk shows and gala events, with a local beauty draped on their arms. They will open shopping malls and endorse political campaigns. They may become politicians themselves, assuming the mayoralties of small rural towns in dusty corners of Chile where they will live out their days as idle figureheads, stoking petty jealousies and factionalism.
Most, however, will quickly tire of their celebrity status, yearning for life as it used to be and will never be again. Like Rip Van Winkle they will find that those 69 days underground have changed them even in the eyes of their families. Secrets have come to light. A few wives have met a few girlfriends while their men languished in the darkness and some of these relationships will go bust. In the end a few of our heroes will suffer more on the surface than they did below.
Their greatest loss will be the camaraderie. For 69 days they have proven themselves a stunningly successful team. Like soldiers returning from a battlefield they possess a unique bond forged in the heat of adversity. The means of their rescue, each man hauled out individually, breaks that bond with almost cruel abruptness. They deserved to come out together, emerging with arms around each other through the smoke and dust of a gaping hole. What a picture that would have given the world’s press! What a moment to bring closure to the tale, to frame and hang on the wall.
As it is they will be scrubbed clean, dressed in their Sunday best and posed for a picture with their rescuers. Then all will scatter to the four winds, the mine head will revert to desert and far below the chamber will crumble like Tutankhamen’s tomb.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Thursday, October 07, 2010
A late night at Auckland’s Sky City
2nd October 2010
A small boy sits on the floor in the foyer of Auckland’s Sky City hotel. He wears a green back pack and carefully eats a banana. He is oblivious to both the tide of humanity flowing around him and to the leaping architecture that dwarfs his small frame.
Sky City is not just a hotel; it is shops, restaurants, a casino, convention centre, theatre and, of course, the iconic Sky Tower.
It is not so much a building as an enormous creature sprawled across downtown Auckland. Watching the small boy I see that he and I and all the many people flowing through this place are like hapless victims of a sci-fi experiment where we have been shrunk to microbes and released into the body of a large beast.
The vastness of the organism is beyond our comprehension so we experience it as a series of disconnected but intense episodes filled with light, colour and sound. We flow through its veins and tubes, swept along on a tide of conversation, laughter, food, drink and money.
Money is, above all else, the life force of this huge creature. It gushes from ranks of ATM machines and attaches momentarily to our wallets and hip pockets like oxygen molecules to red blood cells before vanishing into cash registers, bar tabs and room service. Most of the money ends up in the casino, an enormous heart that endlessly pumps huge volumes of cash through its many intricate transactions.
I leave the boy with his banana and drift towards the casino. As I near the entrance a beautiful young woman approaches me, wearing a dress with a short silver skirt and bodice so tight it could be sprayed on. “Will you be here at 7?” she asks. I could as easily turn back the tide as say no to this woman. I nod and she attaches a small yellow band to my wrist with the tenderness of a mother bandaging a child’s grazed knee. The wristband informs me that I could win $50,000.
The casino gaming floor is a circus of flashing lights, sudden bursts of music and a deep sense of urgency like a muscle cramp. It is a largely male environment and is overwhelmingly Asian. Croupiers stand at their gaming tables like priests, intoning their various litanies. There is roulette, black jack, baccarat and games that I can make no sense of, with oriental names like wai tai and sow mai.
I watch a solitary Chinese man playing roulette. The croupier, a young Asian woman, deftly stacks up piles of grey chips and slides them over to the man. He spreads them across the numbers embossed in the felt playing surface, half a dozen on this number, ten on another. The young woman flicks a white marble into the running track over the spinning roulette wheel as the man continues to place his chips.
As the marble slows she makes a spreading motion with both hands, a silent benediction that closes the bets. The marble drops, she places a small glass talisman on the winning number and sweeps the unlucky gambler’s chips into a round hole where they vanish with the smallest clatter. The Chinese man shows no reaction. She produces several more stacks of chips and slides them across the table to him.
All around the room, at every table and slot machine, I see the same curt efficiency and lack of emotion. This looks more like work than entertainment. Nobody laughs or even speaks much. Nobody appears to notice when a troupe of stunningly beautiful women parades through the room wearing feathered head pieces and not much else.
I lose myself in a maze of poker machines and emerge later onto a balcony overlooking the gaming floor. Above me the room vanishes towards a distant ceiling lit like a constellation. I recall Coleridge’s poem about Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. From where I stand Sky City is a pleasure dome and these are indeed caverns measureless to man.
Far below me the Chinese gambler sits at the roulette wheel, his grey chips flowing into the hole in the table. Does he know how that poem ends? In this great pleasure dome does he “suck the milk of paradise?”
2nd October 2010
A small boy sits on the floor in the foyer of Auckland’s Sky City hotel. He wears a green back pack and carefully eats a banana. He is oblivious to both the tide of humanity flowing around him and to the leaping architecture that dwarfs his small frame.
Sky City is not just a hotel; it is shops, restaurants, a casino, convention centre, theatre and, of course, the iconic Sky Tower.
It is not so much a building as an enormous creature sprawled across downtown Auckland. Watching the small boy I see that he and I and all the many people flowing through this place are like hapless victims of a sci-fi experiment where we have been shrunk to microbes and released into the body of a large beast.
The vastness of the organism is beyond our comprehension so we experience it as a series of disconnected but intense episodes filled with light, colour and sound. We flow through its veins and tubes, swept along on a tide of conversation, laughter, food, drink and money.
Money is, above all else, the life force of this huge creature. It gushes from ranks of ATM machines and attaches momentarily to our wallets and hip pockets like oxygen molecules to red blood cells before vanishing into cash registers, bar tabs and room service. Most of the money ends up in the casino, an enormous heart that endlessly pumps huge volumes of cash through its many intricate transactions.
I leave the boy with his banana and drift towards the casino. As I near the entrance a beautiful young woman approaches me, wearing a dress with a short silver skirt and bodice so tight it could be sprayed on. “Will you be here at 7?” she asks. I could as easily turn back the tide as say no to this woman. I nod and she attaches a small yellow band to my wrist with the tenderness of a mother bandaging a child’s grazed knee. The wristband informs me that I could win $50,000.
The casino gaming floor is a circus of flashing lights, sudden bursts of music and a deep sense of urgency like a muscle cramp. It is a largely male environment and is overwhelmingly Asian. Croupiers stand at their gaming tables like priests, intoning their various litanies. There is roulette, black jack, baccarat and games that I can make no sense of, with oriental names like wai tai and sow mai.
I watch a solitary Chinese man playing roulette. The croupier, a young Asian woman, deftly stacks up piles of grey chips and slides them over to the man. He spreads them across the numbers embossed in the felt playing surface, half a dozen on this number, ten on another. The young woman flicks a white marble into the running track over the spinning roulette wheel as the man continues to place his chips.
As the marble slows she makes a spreading motion with both hands, a silent benediction that closes the bets. The marble drops, she places a small glass talisman on the winning number and sweeps the unlucky gambler’s chips into a round hole where they vanish with the smallest clatter. The Chinese man shows no reaction. She produces several more stacks of chips and slides them across the table to him.
All around the room, at every table and slot machine, I see the same curt efficiency and lack of emotion. This looks more like work than entertainment. Nobody laughs or even speaks much. Nobody appears to notice when a troupe of stunningly beautiful women parades through the room wearing feathered head pieces and not much else.
I lose myself in a maze of poker machines and emerge later onto a balcony overlooking the gaming floor. Above me the room vanishes towards a distant ceiling lit like a constellation. I recall Coleridge’s poem about Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. From where I stand Sky City is a pleasure dome and these are indeed caverns measureless to man.
Far below me the Chinese gambler sits at the roulette wheel, his grey chips flowing into the hole in the table. Does he know how that poem ends? In this great pleasure dome does he “suck the milk of paradise?”
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