The Loathsomeness of Mankind

This drawing works out pretty good in terms of the comment stream text aligning philosophically with the bible text. Flouncy points out how the priorities of tourism requires a government to selectively serve its people and suggests that the Moken Nomads have achieved "gypsy" status, thus they are second class to the income generating class of tourists. This is quite ironic as the tourism causes the Moken to shift their lifestyle in order to entertain tourists and buy into tourist dollars. The bible text has God talking to Noah about how clear it is that mankind is just so loathsome!

Human Zoo

This phenomenon of the "Human Zoo" is a complex condition of the advanced industrial world. In short, when modern life out paces traditional life, we become nostalgic and wish to re-visit the old ways. The Moken Nomads are fascinating to us: they have adapted physically to an aquatic life in that they can hold their breadth for a long time and see better, under water in order to search for food to feed their families and survive. They essentially live as nomads on "Kabangs", which are their house boats. But according to this article, a search through the undeveloped Islands of Myanmar found only one family still living on a Kabang. All the rest of these traditional people have "settled" and, as can be expected from the clash of the modern against the traditional, suffer varying degrees of the ills of a lost culture. It begs the question: can these people be saved, return to their traditions, without their current existence being turned into a Human Zoo-like existence? The story of Noah and the flood conjures up the mythical "final" solution to the problem of decadent modernity: drown everybody! In this scenario, the Moken would fare quite well!

Noah

This is drawing #1 of what I'm calculating will be about 400 drawings for this project, series or whatever. It begins as a short article from Yahoo News, about the vanishing Moken Nomads of Thailand and continues with a lengthy comment stream. I've overlaid this text with the bible account of Noah's Ark, in which I circle and arrow the bible text from the the news story/comment stream as in a word search puzzle. For this, the very first drawing I liked how the name "Noah" seemed close to the name "Moken" and "nomad" and actually started a little further into the story of Noah's Ark in order to "find" the word Noah.