Time for a Toothpick

Most of the current touchstones of Cambodiana were written in the late 1990s, when the situation was spectacularly screwed up, partly due to the mixed legacy of the UN mission, and mostly owing to the challenges of completely rebuilding a society after years of genocide, civil war, and isolation.

If contemporary accounts are to be believed Phnom Penh was without a doubt one of the most chaotic, unrestrained hearts of darkness on earth at the time. Stray gunfire was a regularity, barely worth noting--in fact, it was an acceptable method of calling for a fire truck. Drug use and prostitution were not only acknowledged, but openly solicited on the streets and critiqued in the cafes. (It still goes on) Spectacular decadence and unparalleled suffering went hand in hand on the unpaved streets of the city. And from the perspective of authors on the ground at the time, there didn't seem to be any end in sight. Henry Kamm's Cambodia:Report from a Stricken Land, for instance, contains a rather damning forward that details the state of affairs at the time of writing, before launching into the book's main purpose, telling the story of how they got there over the past 30 years. Amit Gilboa's Off the Rails in Phnom Penh is a semi-journalistic, nonfiction collection of the most sensational, unbelievable, and probably true stories about a group of people who, thanks to the vagaries of international finance and local poverty, led more or less sustainable sex-and-drug-fueled lives that most people do not and should not attempt, whether for reasons of economics, morality, or health.

What a difference ten years makes. Almost all of the sensational things Gilboa wrote about Phnom Penh of the mid 1990s are on their way out. The seas of brothels have been cut to a quarter of what they were a year ago, due to the government's emphatic enforcement of a new anti-trafficking law...which, as it turns out, has all the anti-AIDS and sex workers' support groups angry, because it's left their highly successful brothel-focused education and heath projects in shambles. Most of the brothels weren't even involved in trafficking, and the police aren't well trained enough not to conduct the crackdown in a safe or healthy manner. It's a pretty ugly situation, but this is after all Phnom Penh, and there are few happy endings.

In terms of the rampant gunfire, I haven't heard anything in the week and a half I've been here. And just yesterday, I saw a notice that two soldiers were arrested for "Anarchistic gunfire" (firing in the air). Ten years ago, arresting someone for firing in the air would be like, in the words of Martin Sheen's character from Apocalypse Now, "giving out speeding tickets at the Indianapolis 500."

And that seems to be pretty representative. People still do these things, but they do with the possibility they might get caught; there's maybe a sense of consequences about it now. If I wanted marijuana pizza nowadays, I would have to do some serious digging and sub rosa questioning. It's possible that I've just been hanging out with the wrong/right sort of people, but I don't think you can underestimate the combination of (relative) stability and growth, especially tourism growth, in changing how a society operates.

Of course, some things still haven't changed. It costs quite a bit more now, but if I want to I can go out to the shooting range outside of town. Like many of its equivalents in the states, you can pay money to fire off ridiculously powerful automatic weapons. Except here, you can pay to have live poultry as targets, or throw hand grenades (once the preferred tool of political violence here) at clay pots. If you really want to break the bank, you can actually fire a B-40 rocket launcher, the same kind as the NVA used in the Vietnam War. Some people may protest at this half-insane version of a tourist attraction, but there are a lot worse ways those weapons could be being used right now. Chalk one up for small comforts.