Rangoon, June 2009: Erratic downpours of monsoon silence a city that long ago gave itself up to a slow, spectacular creep of mold. Green, blue, yellow, black—the baroque formations bleed down colonial edifices, telling a mute tale of a four-decade-old neglect by successive military rulers whose world runs parallel and entirely without connection from the average inhabitant, unless of course they stand up and riot with mouths a-foam. In 2005, Sen. Gen. Than Shwe et al. uprooted the capital and removed to the searing flatlands in the center of the country. In its wake, former government buildings are a study in abandonment. Window panes are shattered. Lone security guards roam the streets like the mangy strays that slink by bracing for a beating. Barriers pin back sidewalks crammed with vendors, a haunting legacy of the failed demonstrations that punctuate Burma's fraught recent history when thousands choked the streets calling for democracy. The low-slung buildings everywhere appear not so much choked with tropical vegetation as forcing their way, like Rodin’s stone beings, half-formed, out of the jungle’s midst.
Ah, but the roof-scape! If one could measure humanity's thirst for at least some minimal barebones freedom, find it in the primordial sprout of satellite dishes tumbling across Rangoon. Far removed from the rough and tumble of the streets and their omnipresent stench of fried samosas, a black, tangled forest of dishes radiates to the Hlaung River, to golden Shwedagon's peak, to the hills north and east, each dish a bold, round embrace that warmly welcomes into living rooms already cluttered with laundry, dusty shortwave radios and dishes of steaming rice, unceasing floods of global expression, from soap operas to daylong C-span Congressional hearings. Alain Finkelkraut -- French philospher -- once dismissed the internet as "the sewers of the world." But Finkelkraut wrote in France, thus granted the luxury of choice, absolute and unhindered. When you have no choice, when free expression is subject to prison sentences or secreted into oblique analogies that grind their way through dull-eyed censorship boards, then electing to spend one's entire day beaming in the dregs of entertainment amounts to a vote for freedom.
So seek no further than a clamber up to the roof for a register of dissatisfaction and total disrespect for authority. The proliferation of satellite dishes are, in sum, a collective, wired poke in the eye.
Am prompted to this by stumbling on this snippet, about the 167-fold increase in price in a satellite dish, from January last year.
Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association condemn the 167-fold increase in the price of a satellite dish licence - from 6,000 to 1 million kyats (5 to 800 dollars) - that has just been introduced by the military government. Reuters quoted a Myanmar Post and Telecom official as saying: "We were just ordered by the higher authorities. Even I was shocked when I heard about it."
Khin Maung Win, the deputy director of Democratic Voice of Burma TV (DVB TV), an Oslo-based station run by Burmese exiles, said: "We are about to launch a new formula with updated programmes every day and now the government has targeted us with this increase in the price of licences. Who can afford 700 euros just to install a dish?"
He added: "The military government is aware of the power of the image and they are not going to allow DVB TV and the international TV channels to become the main sources of news in Burma. Even if 90 per cent of dish owners do not have licences, this decision may be the first step in a crackdown."
International TV stations, especially Al-Jazeera International and DVB TV (the only independent Burmese-run TV station), have become very popular in Burma since September's protests. Some journalists estimate that Burma has at least a million satellite dishes, used mainly for watching football matches and films, although only 60,000 are officially licenced.
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