Silky smartass. BUY IT

[by Stacy Borah]

Millennia ago when the word "empire” still held great weight in the everyday lives of the world, the Silk Road wielded serious influence.  It offered direct links between the East and West, whether you're talking trade, culture or economy. And silk was not the only commodity traded along the route but also a must-have luxury item for the decadent, opulent Roman Empire. Buddhism first made its entry into China from India through the northern passes of the Silk Road, and Genghis Khan himself used the it as a conduit between the eastern and western parts of his empire.

But these days, the grottos, oases, and religious sites that sprouted along the Silk are being buried by the shifting sands of earth and time. Western scholarly interest in the region only recently blossomed enough to keep it in the backs of minds all over the America.  But with new methods of terraforming earth from shifting sand into terra firma, a burgeoning industrialization around the route -- as well as the discovery of extremely large oil reserves beneath it -- has rekindled interest in the Silk Road. Especially the interest of those in the boardrooms of oil companies worldwide.

Which is where Ted Rall's Silk Road To Ruin comes in. Nowadays, the Silk runs through a region of countries known as The Stans: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan. Most of these resided in the belly of the USSR but were split upon that empire's collapse in the early ‘90s. Countries like theirs sprung up overnight -- born into chaos, fueled by starved populations and corrupt politicos. 

This area of Central Asia -- and central concern -- captivated Rall as a child. He read about it in National Geographic, and jumped at the chance to visit on a men's mag dime in the late ‘90s. Once there, what he found chilled him. He witnessed the area's volatility, and its obscurity. Our need for it to be written about, exposed before the world was taken by surprise.

As such, Silk Road To Ruin reads like a travelogue of the damned, and in each chapter, he presents a new horror.  In one entitled “Good Eats," he and a friend try to eat food dogs living at death's door run away from.  In another entitled “High Anxiety," he treks across a treacherous high road where still-electrified power lines lay across tombstones engraved with crescent moons. Think Dante's “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” and your have your Christian parallel. 

In the most disturbing chapter, “A Good Day To Die”, the sporting life of the Silk Road goes hunting with eagles, or partakes in a courting sport called Kyzku (roughly translated to “Kiss the girl”) in which women fend off male advances, with lethal force if they choose. There's the wrestling-on-horseback sport called Audaryspak, in which contestants “beat the crap out of each other until one of them falls off of their mount."

But the most rugged is Buzkashi, which makes rugby look lighthearted in comparison. In fact, Genghis Khan introduced it during his reign. A gutted and eviscerated goat, sheep or calf carcass of a goat -- Khan used prisoners , and it is rumored that the Taliban did as well -- is thrown onto a field as hordes of contestants grab for it while on horseback and carry it through a boundary formed by spectators. Those are the only rules, as whoever nabs the carcass must endure whips, sticks, punches, guns, and other weaponry other horsemen have at their disposal. Prizes include carpets, goats (more valuable than carpets), even houses and cars. Regularly scheduled tournaments of Buzkashi are held; twenty-two players died during the last season's semis.

Add the fact that many of the former Soviet Union's nuclear warheads have gone missing from these rogue republics, throw in some unchecked pollution threatenening to collapse the regional ecosystem, and you get a sense of inevitable apocalypse looming over Silk Road.  Factor in also a massive pipeline has to get out the oil, then answer its even more disturbing question: Who will control it? Rall's book argues the the most logical route goes through Afghanistan, Iran, and northern Iraq. And since two out of three of those countries are close to being Western policy-compliant, with the third being scouted as of now, it seems like only a matter of time before Russia and China use their clout to step in and derail any designs the West might have on that area. 

Vital and compelling, Ted Rall's Silk Road to Ruin has offered a definitive chronicle of Central Asia's imminent rise on the West's radar, and he's kept it entertaining and accessible. Chapters for each country are given concise histories and timelines, as well as explanation how everyone screwed it up. If only more journalists had Rall's heart, we wouldn't need an “alternative media” to get the news out.  We'd be able to trust what we saw on the main feed.

December 31, 2006

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