Yangoon Show

When The Sea Comes Up Like Thunder
And  the flying fishes play
O'er the landscape underwater
On the road to Mandalay
Stop reading Goddam  Kipling
There's a cyclone on the way

Burma's  PR  campaign marched on  as  Kipling's original rhyme became a tragic reality. Flying fishes  ruled  Myanmar's highways last week as Cyclone Nargis sucked in a dome of Andaman seawater five meters high and forty kilometers across, and bore it , flying fish and all, a hundred kilometers inland , dissolving half the  Irawaddy  delta into a flowing mudscape that is still running out to sea into a broad diagonal swath that literally extends  to the road  to Mandalay running north from Yangon.

With over  25,000 square kilometers under water, the death toll from this perfect cyclone may come  within a factor of two of the  2004  Boxing Day tsunami. The storm surge obliterated most of the coast  and Irrawaddy  delta reclaimed by ricefield  poldiering and levee construction  under the British Empire ,and in the two generations since.

I suspect Kipling had jumping Asian carp glimpsed from a  Mississippi-style steamboat of the Irawaddy Flotilla in mind, but there is no report  as to whether The  Old Moulmein Pagoda weathered the storm.

If the Goon Show in Yangoon goes on holding up foreign aid, the Burmese may  come up like thunder, before too many dawns have passed.

Before & after satellite photos of Burma.

Comments

[B. Heart]

Kipling seems a nice pairing with satellite photos. Though the context be awful.